Lecture 6: Our World and Their World, Human Universals and Cultural Particulars Flashcards
1
Q
Cultural and Moral Relativism
A
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cultural relativism: assumptions and behaviours mean different things in different cultures
- e.g. manners are something that’s culturally relative; there’s nothing absolute about manners
- we try to understand the Other without judging; but this isn’t to say that we shouldn’t or can’t judge them; (we should at least understand them before we judge); this also does not mean that we accept their behaviour
- recognize that our historical, social, and economic conditions strongly affect our behaviour
- Is democracy an absolute value?
- Should men and women be treated equally?
- our own behaviour, and that of others, is constructed by social and cultural factors
- moral relativism: there are no absolute values; what is good or evil depends on the culture
2
Q
Universal (Absolute) Moral Values
A
- believing that universal/absolute moral values exist is the opposite of moral relativism.
- this is not the opposite of cultural relativism.
- out of the list above, which would you think is morally condemnable all the time, some of the time, or none of the time?
- if we believe there are human rights, then we believe in universal values; we have the UN Declaration of Human Rights, but not everybody agrees on what a human right is
- it’s also hard to draw the line between cultural relativism and moral relativism
3
Q
Universals (and Particulars) of Language
A
- Noam Chomsky: there is an Innate, universal “language acquisition device”; that is, every human being is born with the ability to acquire a language (just as we’re able to acquire the ability to walk)
- i.e. language is an innate and universal ability
- (So, just like language, are absolute moral values also innate as well as universal?)
- we learn specific languages from other people in society, but the point is we all learn some language
Levi Strauss and Structural Anthropology
- Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)—culture has much the same structure as language (which is an old idea from the 60s)
- Levi Strauss (1829-1902)—invented jeans; don’t get them confused
4
Q
Universal Levels of Language
A
- texts; studied in discourse analysis
- e.g. website, speech, lecture, book, joke, someone shouting “fire!”
- it can be as short as an interjection or very long
- beyond linguistics, people call anything that can be interpreted a text; e.g. the layout of the classroom
- sentences; studied in syntax
- they are elements of text; the part of linguistics that study sentences is syntax
- it’s the relationship between elements in a text
- words; studied in morphology
- phonemes; studied in phonology
- the technical term for units of sounds in language
- it’s about how groups of different sounds are grouped together into units in different languages
- phones; studied in phonetics
5
Q
Phonemes
A
- they are not sounds but classes of sounds
- phonemes have variants
- the phoneme /p/ has two allophones in most English dialects: aspirated ph and unaspirated p=
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ph occurs at the beginning of stressed syllables
- e.g. pat, pin, repeat (position 1)
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p= occurs everywhere else (position 2)
- e.g. spin
- unlike in English, some languages ph and p= are distinct phonemes
- e.g. in Hindi, phal is “fruit” and p=al is “movement”
- in English, we don’t change the positions, but it doesn’t change the meaning, this is an allophone (when you replace a sound in the same position and it doesn’t change the meaning);
- in Hindi, you can change the position but it does change the meaning
- so, when sounds belong to different phonemes, then the meaning changes when you replace one with the other
- e.g. “bat” and “pat” are different things
- e.g. “heater” and “healer” are different; therefore, the “t” and “l” sound are phonemes
- two different phonemes can occur in the same position (but two allophones of the same phoneme cannot)
- two or more languages may have the same sounds, but they might not organize them the same way into phonemes
6
Q
Emic and Etic
A
- etic: as observed by the anthropological field worker
- emic: as categorized by the people observed
- i.e. how people see things; the insiders’ knowledge
- you must not project from your own language unto that of the other; you shouldn’t try to describe things you observe in terms of English, you want to know the structure of that language
- similarly, you shouldn’t project from your own culture onto others
7
Q
Case Study: Mother Love and Infant Death in Alto do Cruzeiro, Brazil
A
- Death Without Weeping, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a medic and anthropologist
- she noticed that some mothers left their own babies to die if they didn’t seem likely to survive
- the mothers believe that it’s wrong to “fight with death”; they thought they were doing the right thing
- not only that there isn’t anything to do, but that there shouldn’t be anything to do
- even in the Western world, abandoning babies is a popular practice
- the Italian surname “Esposito” means “exposed”; when someone found an abandoned baby, they gave them this surname
- another Italian surname was “Dei Innocenti”, which was also given to babies that were found on the doorsteps of churches
8
Q
The Political Economy of Emotions
A
- we believe that love is a constructed emotion; so loving, abandoning, or crying over your baby is connected to your social life; so, is mother’s love natural?
- it’s actually shaped by the political and economic environment
- the mother understands that under the political economy, she’s justified to give up her child
- and because of this, emotionally they have begun to accept the death of their babies; they think that their babies actually want to die
- so, we can understand why these women have constructed this feeling (cultural relativism), but it doesn’t mean we have to accept it (moral relativism); i.e. we don’t say that these mothers are bad people, but we shouldn’t leave babies to die
- how do we blame the act without blaming the actor?
