Lecture 6: Our World and Their World, Human Universals and Cultural Particulars Flashcards

1
Q

Cultural and Moral Relativism

A
  • 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
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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
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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
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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
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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=
  • ph occurs at the beginning of stressed syllables
    • e.g. pat, pin, repeat (position 1)
  • 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
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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
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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
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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?
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