Lecture 3: History and the Culture Concept

Question 1

What frameworks were early explorers and anthropologists working with?

Answer 1

• They experienced a binary, that is, if there is the modern man, then the other people must be savages. These myths were also a projection. What they knew about savage life was not based on ethnographies. So, anthropologists projected things about what they thought these people were like unto them.
• This was often done by inversions. For example, people tended to think that if we’re a society of individuals, then the savages must be a more collective society. They just turned the world they knew upside down and assigned these characteristics to these other people.
• There was also an idea of evolutionary stages, that savages were not people at all but living ancestors.
• The state of nature was also a narrative used to describe the savages because people figured that the state of nature is what’s the opposite of the stage of civilization.
• The idea that savages had no concept of property and no inequality. Again, anthropologists knew this not by means of investigation but by inversion.
• One of the things that was interesting about these projections was that they could switch either way. That is, people could hate the savages for their uncivilized ways, or they could think that the state of nature is a cool place and that the savages are virtuous because they have no inequality, are not obsessed with material things, etc. It could also be seen as a tragic wastefulness. These people have all of these resources, and yet they’re not using them. This lead to people thinking that they had a right to conquer. Because the natives were “wasting God’s bounty” due to their backwardness, the white people were entitled to take it over and “put it to good use.”
• In Australia, there was the idea of Terra Nullius, meaning there was no claims on the land. Since the savages did not even believe in the concept of property, it didn’t matter that they were living there.

Question 2

What kinds of thinking did Europeans use to legitimize their actions?

Answer 2

There was an idea that although the savages were backwards, they had something in them to be improved. On the other hand, you could believe that they’re hopeless and should be swept away. This idea was strongly accentuated at the beginning of the 19th century due to the concept of manifest destiny, or Social Darwinism. The father of this idea was Herbert Spencer, who said that the world is the survival of the fittest, and inferior races were destined to die out. Of course, the inferior races were all of the non-whites. Many people started to sharpen the racial boundaries and really think that some races are inferior to others. This translated into thinking that they could be wiped off the face of the earth, quite literally.

Question 3

Who was Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-81)?

Answer 3

Morgan could be considered one of the grandfathers of anthropology. There were a lot of things that he got wrong, but there were many important things he realized. For example, he recognized complex and diverse systems of social organization among natives. Some societies were more agrarian while others hunted, some were matrilineal and some were patrilineal, and so on. Especially important was this idea of systems because the idea of a “savage” as all-encompassing started breaking down once you looked at how these people differed from place to place. Another important thing he realized was that the elements cohered in a package and were not just random qualities. Their technology, mode of livelihood, kin structure, political organization, were all purposeful and, again, related in systems.

Question 4

What is the relationship between anthropology and colonialism?

Answer 4

After it was understood that these people were diverse and had systems, people began to study these societies as more of a science, the science of the colonized. (This later expanded into the study of the colonizer and grew to where we are now.) However, there were critiques that people were only doing these studies in order to better understand how to conquer the savage societies. Even so, many people wanted to learn more about these societies and how their social institutions work so that we won’t disrupt them and create disorder when we try to interact with their societies. They were trying to smooth the edges and do less harm to the societies. There were critiques of ethnocentrism, people saying that we shouldn’t judge these societies. The relationship between anthropology and colonialism is an awkward one. We have to recognize the role that anthropology played in the service of colonial conquest, both in the grotesque ways (i.e. judging them and thinking that we should take over their land) and the more subtle ways (i.e. smoothing the edges and trying to minimize the harm). Even nowadays, there’s an idea of “culturally appropriate” development, that there is a certain way societies should be progressing (e.g. embracing modern technology and medicine).

Question 5

What is the strong concept of culture?

Answer 5

• Unique or particular to a social group (Boas). This is a vast improvement from the colonial view, but it still lacks a historical element that recognizes that there are fuzzy edges and that culture is constantly shifting.
• Arbitrary in the sense that we call things the certain names that we do for no real reason. You could all a computer a frog and it wouldn’t make a difference at the beginning, because there’s nothing in the computer that intrinsically binds it to the word “computer.” Because language is arbitrary, culture is arbitrary. Our culture determines forms, not natural environment (Sahlins). That is, we don’t think that something is round because our environment gives us round things, we ascribe roundness to things.
• A bounded, whole entity that is hard at the edges like a billiard ball. That is, cultures are tight-knit and hold themselves together.
• Like a total web, where everything is integrated and all the parts add up. A good example comes from Evans-Pritchard: “All their beliefs hang together. In this web of belief, every strand depends on every other strand. The web is not an external structure, it is the texture of thought and they cannot think that their thoughts are wrong.”

Question 6

What is the weak concept of culture?

Answer 6

A weak concept of culture focusses on:

• How elements of a cultural system are related to one another and expressed in individual lives.
• Standards of value through which action is judged.
• Interpreting behaviour—what does it mean? What makes it sensible, not random?
• The unconscious, taken-for granted reality for people who share it.

Question 7

What are some critiques of the strong concept of culture?

Answer 7

• The strong concept of culture is lacking in that it results in rigidity, homogeneity and a lack of history. Political and economic processes have connected all of us for centuries. There is no such thing as “people without history,” hence no “cultures” and “peoples” exist as wholes (Eric Wolf).
• Cultures are not completely impenetrable like billiard balls because we’ve always been watching and observing one another. Whenever you talk about a group like the Yahi, you have to consider their neighbours and their history and the broader context. You can’t just assign a name like “Yshi” to the “Yahi culture” in a fixed one-to-one relationship. Take away the names and labels, and what you’re left with is people and their lives and all the things that affect them. To smooth out the edges into “X culture,” to only talk about “ethnographies of the particular” (Lila Abu-Lughod), we ignore the similarities between people.
• Finally, as we’ve said many times, cultural invention is continuous. As people adapt, adopt, reflect, and struggle (e.g. Trobriand Cricket, Ishi, Land’s End), they redefine what is accepted and what is not in their cultures.