Final Flashcards
Radcliffe-Brown
Social functionalist
Followed Durkheim
The function of magic is to intensify social actions. society over the individual
Established anthropology as a science
Kinship and descent - determined the social structures and actions of a society
Social Anthropology - The British
Cultural anthro = US, Social Anthro = Brits
Sociality is the central point of study. The brits studied the social statuses and roles of groups, institutions, and relationships.
Joking Relationship vs Avoidance Relationship
Joking: an institutionalized form of interaction between certain pairs of people. Interaction.
Avoidance: familial relationship that is forbidden in some traditional societies. No or less interaction.
Structuralism
4 fathers
Basic assumptions:
all humans endowed with a reasoning, rational mind = culture = man
the mind actively structures a world - the mind is not simply a passive mirror reflecting its environment
meaning is underneath and hidden from the things of daily counsciousness - all forms of behavior are coded by unconscious structures
the code (meaning) is formed from dualistic nature of thought or binary oppositions in a field of binary opposites (signs), and these opposing signs are often mediated in a way to reconcile their difference or show how one is tranformation of the other
Ferdinand de Sausurre
Father of structuralism Language was key diachronic --> synchronic history --> structure philology --> system of communication Grammar and speech
Roman Jakobson
Structuralism
analysis of distinctive features in a total field of signs
speech sounds
total systems of binary features: i.e. voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated
How words are distinguished from one another
Vladimir Propp
Structuralism
study of folktales
“Morphology of the Folk Tale” - analysed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements
31 generic “narrateme” in all folk tales
Claude Levis-Strauss
Structuralism - mind (Durkheim was society, Tylor was culture)
French
studied kinship and mythology
The mind has its own emergent characteristics apart from behavior
“marry out or die out”
“The Savage Mind” (we are no different than savages, we are savages because we all have the same kind of reasoning - all nature turns into culture)
what makes the human family important
Post-structrualism
Postmodernism
There is an instability in human sciences because humans are so complex
Cultural Materialism
Marvin Harris
Practical reasoning as discerned by scientific observer.
Native (emic) and ideal , or real (etic) models
Culture is practical systemic decision-making for survival. systems of rational behavior
Leslie White
Culturology, Neo-Evolutionism (unilineal)
Brought back materialist evolutionary approach to cultural anth.
Student of E. Sapir
Symbolic nature of culture
Rejected Boasian concept of culture because of his relativism and unwillingness to theorize
Supported the works of morgan, spencer, and tylor
The universe is a natural, progressive process of increasing complexity measured in terms of the differential capacity to organize energy as measured in caloric heat. Humans take part in this process by means of culture.
Culture = human mode of adaptation (human evolution)
Sahlins was a student
Julian Steward
Cultural Ecology
multilineal evolution
Student of Kroeber, Marxian oriented. Focused on Great Basin and Shoshone
Cultural core - explains evolutionary levels of adaptation. Level of technology - food niche - population density - type of social organization
Looked for cause and effect relationships - something that boas was not interested in. Boas looked for patterns but not explanations.
Steward wanted to know how people made a living
Marvin Harris
Cultural Materialism
Marxist
“Why Nothing Works” - rejects Marx’s scheme of historical stages, believes in pure science.
People’s actions are direct results of physical forces in their environment.
Marxists view his work as “crude materialism” and more relatable to Darwin than Marx because he defines culture as practical and functional with no consideration of historical consciousness
Roy Rappaport
(from the web) Ecological anthropology
“Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People”
Looked at the roles of culture and ritual in the ecology of a people. He looked at populations and how they played a part in their land’s ecology
Learned that they needed to even the numbers between pigs and humans to supply enough pork to the community and prevent rapid land degradation
Rituals, religion, and the environment
World System Theory
US Marxism
International division of labor; Dependency theory
Western Marxism
Gramsci
Figuring out why marxism did not work where it was supposed to
5 kinds: Frankfurt School (Germany, reification/fetishism), Cultural Marxism (G.Britain, hegemony), Structural Marxism (france, ideology), World Systems Theory (US, international division of labor, dependency)
Feminist Marxism (Germany & US, why is women’s labor unproductive)
Oscar Lewis
Family studies, family approach in ethnographic research
“The Culture of Poverty”
“Living the Revolution”
Soviet Marxism
Stalin
Forcing marxism to work where it was not supposed to work
Phillipe Bourgois
Marxist
Studied poverty
Student of Eric Wolf
Examines how macro-power forces shape individual behavior and intimate relations
Critiques political economy in the US and gender relations
Eric Wolf
Marxist
Wrote Europe and the People without History
Tried to bring together the whole anthropological approach on what we should be doing
Vietnam War Vet
Antonio Gramsci
Marxist
Founder of the Italian Congress Party
Imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime.
theory on cultural hegemony - describes how states use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies, how they keep the status quo between classes.
Key in the development of Western Marxism
Encouraged education to the working class
Practice Theory
Pierre Bourdieu
people follow their cultural beliefs, make rational decisions, and follow their self-interests.
People use their economical capital and their cultural and social capital in political struggles to establish and maintain dominance and power.
how structures of inequality are reproduced
Applied Anthorpology
Began at the end of WWII
Applying anthropology to the real world
Public anthropology (working to educate the public, education)
Applied (working for another employer, government/military/corporation/NGO)
Action (working for “the people”)
Engaged Anthropology (working with “the people”)
Militant (working with “the people” against their oppressors)
Modernization Theory
Aimed to develop the underdevoloped parts of the world after WWII by inputs of money and technology. This lead to dependency on the US and other foreign aid from those looking to modernize
Attributed to Max Weber
Expansion of free market into the third world
Pierre Bourdieu
French, Practice theory
How do everyday social practices reproduce society, especially the structural inequalities of a society
Practice is structure in motion
Habitus: acquired bodily dispositions, orientations, and social habits that position our mindful bodies in relationships of domination. implies agency
Symbolic Violence
Bourdieu and practice theory
powerful people or groups impose a single choice
The internalized humiliations and legitimations of inequality and hierarchy ranging from sexism and racism to intimate expressions of class power.
Cultural capital
Bourdieu
the misrecognition of cultural objects for economic capital (diplomas for education vs for money)
Paul Willis
Cultural Production Theory
“Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs”
Counterculture
kids through their own activity and ideological development reproduce themselves as working class
agents are active
opposition to authority encourages social mobility
Cultural Production Theory
Paul Willis
A step beyond practice theory
agency of the disaffected and their capacity to produce culture through the way they consume
Deconstruction
Clifford Geertz
Hermeneutic methodology
Culture is text - a culture is a text. changed ethnography into literature
from social theory to hermeneutic philosophy - involving a complex interaction between the interpreting subject and interpreted object.
standard of validity/truth
fiction vs actuality / realistic / virtual
Renato Rosaldo
Postmodernism - Geertz
Wrote “Culture and Truth: the remaking of social analyses”
positioned subjectivity
we cannot play God in another culture
Vincent Crapanazano
Postmodernism - Geertz
wrote “Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan”
Deconstruction: destabilizes. it does not destroy literary works or their validity. makes sure that ethnography is based on supported truths
Foucault
French postmodernist
relationships between power and knowledge and how it relates to social control
episteme (the discourse that dominates a certain historical era) and discourse
I and You are disocurses
Discourses are forms of power that circulate in a social field and attach to strategies of domination as well as those of resistance
