Midterm 1 (Doing Anthropology to Bodies)

Question 1

Goal of Cultural Anthropology

Answer 1

To make the familiar strange and the strange familiar

Question 2

How is anthropological writing like a mobius strip?

Answer 2

When reading anthropological writing, you experience a seamless back and forth movement between strangeness and familiarity or outside to inside.

Question 3

Anthropologists as in-between figures

Answer 3

Anthropologists are in-between their own culture and the culture of a remote place, the fieldsite.

Question 4

Anthropologist like a hinge

Answer 4

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.

Question 5

Anthropologist like a storyteller

Answer 5

They travel far and return home to tell the story “ethnography” of other people.

Question 6

Ethnography

Answer 6

Both describes and analyzes a particular culture and society

Question 7

Anthropologist like a detective

Answer 7

Culture is a mystery that anthropologists investigate; see people they work with as informants. *Note: Anthropology has history with military complicity and colonialism

Question 8

What do our cultural perspectives shape?

Answer 8

Perceptions and expectations

Question 9

Fieldwork method

Answer 9

Firsthand participant-observation: assembling and interpreting one’s own data rather than relying on others

Question 10

Armchair Anthropology

Answer 10

Anthropologists didn’t leave their homes and relied on the accounts of others e.g. missionaries.

Question 11

Ethnographic research (fieldwork)

Answer 11

Most significant method of gleaning data; doing research in a fieldsite (usually small-scale society for at least 1 year)

Question 12

Ultimate goal of ethnographic research

Answer 12

Malinowski: to grasp the native’s POV (learning local language), his relation to life, realize his vision of his world

Question 13

Major techniques in ethnographic research

Answer 13

Participant-observation and interviewing

Question 14

Culture

Answer 14

We have shared, taken-for-granted assumptions and predictable disagreements about proper behavior with people who we have never spoken to.

Question 15

Culture is “griffbereit”

Answer 15

Ready-at-hand; we might notice something only when it goes wrong

Question 16

Culture is “vorhanden”

Answer 16

Present-at-hand; when something loses its usefulness and soon must be fixed or replaced

Question 17

Culture vs. Society

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

Anthropology

Answer 18

A holistic approach to the study of human behavior: what it means to be human

Question 19

Subfields of Anthropology

Answer 19

Archaeology, Biological, Cultural, Linguistic, Applied

Question 20

Archaeology

Answer 20

Study of human culture through excavation of human remains

Question 21

Biological Anthropology

Answer 21

Study of human evolution, how we’re biologically different or similar to other animal species

Question 22

Cultural Anthropology

Answer 22

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

Question 23

Linguistic Anthropology

Answer 23

Study of language and other symbols as a means of communication

Question 24

Applied Anthropology

Answer 24

Using data anthropologists to solve social/legal/business problems

Question 25

Synchronic (vs. diachronic) method

Answer 25

Drawing up the rules and regularities (permanent and fixed) of tribal life

Question 26

Scientific approach of ethnographic research

Answer 26

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

Question 27

Ethnographic conversation

Answer 27

Avoiding abstract, sociological terms and getting at the experiential and emotive

Question 28

Functionalism

Answer 28

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

Question 29

Ethical principles of human subject research

Answer 29

Principle of care and informed consent

Question 30

Principle of care

Answer 30

Take care of the informants because investigators (ethnographers) generally gain more than they do

Question 31

Informed consent

Answer 31

Process that reveals the nature and purpose of our studies for participants to make informed decisions

Question 32

Ethical practices of human subject research

Answer 32

Anonymity, Deception (not done), Sex and Intimacy (best avoided), Doing good and compensation, Taking leave, Accurate portrayal

Question 33

Cultural anthropology rejects reductionism

Answer 33

Doesn't reduce complex ideas to simple ones, instead a substitution of a complexity that is more intelligible for one which is less

Question 34

Social evolutionism

Answer 34

Describing the life practices of other people by reducing them to fantasized evolutionary schemes

Question 35

Cultural anthropology problematizes rigid boundaries

Answer 35

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

Question 36

Uni-lineal evolution (armchair anthropologists)

Answer 36

Humans are located in one of three cultural stages: progresses from primitive state to advanced state

Question 37

3 cultural stages of uni-lineal evolution

Answer 37

Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization

Question 38

Problematizing the duality of nature and culture

Answer 38

Geertz: Culture is not a later-added addition. Humans are fundamentally cultural creatures. Nature and culture mutually co-construct one another, boundaries are porous.

Question 39

Characteristics of bodies

Answer 39

Bodies are cultural, political, and economic

Question 40

Cultural bodies

Answer 40

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

Question 41

Political bodies

Answer 41

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

Question 42

Economic bodies

Answer 42

Bodies create economic capital and represent economic statuses.

Question 43

Local biologies

Answer 43

There is no one universal, material body. The end of menstruation is a biosocial and biocultural process.

Question 44

Nature vs. Technology

Answer 44

No clear boundary between natural and technological

Question 45

Cyborg

Answer 45

Organism to which exogenous components have been added to adapt to new environments

Question 46

Posthumanism

Answer 46

Critically questions the conventional conception of "human" as clearly separated from non-humans, including technological objects

Question 47

Cyborg anthropology

Answer 47

Studies the human-technology interface

Question 48

Cultural Imperialism

Answer 48

Values, practices, and meanings of a powerful foreign culture are imposed upon other cultures

Question 49

Cultural Relativism

Answer 49

It is not our place to judge or interfere other cultures (too late not to), rather just try to understand (passive).