Midterm 1 (Doing Anthropology to Bodies) Flashcards
Goal of Cultural Anthropology
To make the familiar strange and the strange familiar
How is anthropological writing like a mobius strip?
When reading anthropological writing, you experience a seamless back and forth movement between strangeness and familiarity or outside to inside.
Anthropologists as in-between figures
Anthropologists are in-between their own culture and the culture of a remote place, the fieldsite.
Anthropologist like a hinge
Like a breach and a joint, anthropological research involves a conjunction of two opposite ideas: familiarity and strangeness. Anthropologists are always in motion between home and the fieldsite.
Anthropologist like a storyteller
They travel far and return home to tell the story “ethnography” of other people.
Ethnography
Both describes and analyzes a particular culture and society
Anthropologist like a detective
Culture is a mystery that anthropologists investigate; see people they work with as informants. *Note: Anthropology has history with military complicity and colonialism
What do our cultural perspectives shape?
Perceptions and expectations
Fieldwork method
Firsthand participant-observation: assembling and interpreting one’s own data rather than relying on others
Armchair Anthropology
Anthropologists didn’t leave their homes and relied on the accounts of others e.g. missionaries.
Ethnographic research (fieldwork)
Most significant method of gleaning data; doing research in a fieldsite (usually small-scale society for at least 1 year)
Ultimate goal of ethnographic research
Malinowski: to grasp the native’s POV (learning local language), his relation to life, realize his vision of his world
Major techniques in ethnographic research
Participant-observation and interviewing
Culture
We have shared, taken-for-granted assumptions and predictable disagreements about proper behavior with people who we have never spoken to.
Culture is “griffbereit”
Ready-at-hand; we might notice something only when it goes wrong
Culture is “vorhanden”
Present-at-hand; when something loses its usefulness and soon must be fixed or replaced
Culture vs. Society
Culture is a distinctive way of life of a society. A society is a group of people who interact and cooperate with each other toward certain goals.
Anthropology
A holistic approach to the study of human behavior: what it means to be human
Subfields of Anthropology
Archaeology, Biological, Cultural, Linguistic, Applied
Archaeology
Study of human culture through excavation of human remains
Biological Anthropology
Study of human evolution, how we’re biologically different or similar to other animal species
Cultural Anthropology
Study of living communities, describes and analyzes their beliefs about their social and material worlds and how it affects their behavior through on-site fieldwork
Linguistic Anthropology
Study of language and other symbols as a means of communication
Applied Anthropology
Using data anthropologists to solve social/legal/business problems
Synchronic (vs. diachronic) method
Drawing up the rules and regularities (permanent and fixed) of tribal life
Scientific approach of ethnographic research
Against amateurism, finding commonalities/regularities but also deviations, being explicit about methods, organized and exhaustive presentation of data, framing questions (no pernicious preconceived ideas), systematic data collection
Ethnographic conversation
Avoiding abstract, sociological terms and getting at the experiential and emotive
Functionalism
All aspects of social life are designed to serve basic needs: biological needs are met indirectly through culture (“anatomy of culture”), are vital and interrelated
Ethical principles of human subject research
Principle of care and informed consent
Principle of care
Take care of the informants because investigators (ethnographers) generally gain more than they do
Informed consent
Process that reveals the nature and purpose of our studies for participants to make informed decisions
Ethical practices of human subject research
Anonymity, Deception (not done), Sex and Intimacy (best avoided), Doing good and compensation, Taking leave, Accurate portrayal
Cultural anthropology rejects reductionism
Doesn’t reduce complex ideas to simple ones, instead a substitution of a complexity that is more intelligible for one which is less
Social evolutionism
Describing the life practices of other people by reducing them to fantasized evolutionary schemes
Cultural anthropology problematizes rigid boundaries
Between nature and culture; looking for man internally instead of looking for Man beyond his customs is in danger of losing sight of him altogether
Uni-lineal evolution (armchair anthropologists)
Humans are located in one of three cultural stages: progresses from primitive state to advanced state
3 cultural stages of uni-lineal evolution
Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization
Problematizing the duality of nature and culture
Geertz: Culture is not a later-added addition. Humans are fundamentally cultural creatures. Nature and culture mutually co-construct one another, boundaries are porous.
Characteristics of bodies
Bodies are cultural, political, and economic
Cultural bodies
Cultural senses of our bodies vary across and within cultures, are reflected in and shaped by our perceptions of our bodies and our bodily practices
Political bodies
Female body symbolizes the nation (land mass and boundaries) while male bodies represent nations as heads of state and its defenders; shaped by regulations and metrics by state
Economic bodies
Bodies create economic capital and represent economic statuses.
Local biologies
There is no one universal, material body. The end of menstruation is a biosocial and biocultural process.
Nature vs. Technology
No clear boundary between natural and technological
Cyborg
Organism to which exogenous components have been added to adapt to new environments
Posthumanism
Critically questions the conventional conception of “human” as clearly separated from non-humans, including technological objects
Cyborg anthropology
Studies the human-technology interface
Cultural Imperialism
Values, practices, and meanings of a powerful foreign culture are imposed upon other cultures
Cultural Relativism
It is not our place to judge or interfere other cultures (too late not to), rather just try to understand (passive).
