The Growth of Anthropological Theory

Question 1

What is theory?

Answer 1

• Theories are ideas that explain something – frameworks or underlying principles
• Social theories explain social phenomena
• Theory helps anthropologists “make sense” of what they encounter – and helps readers of ethnographies understand how or why things happen as they do
  
  • Anthropological theories may be emic or etic or some combination of both
• So what does social theory look like more broadly? And how did it develop in the west?

Question 2

Ancient Greeks (or Romans)

Answer 2

• People are shaped by the customs that prevailed where they were born and raised
  
  • People from different places or groups have different values, tastes, preferences, etc.
• In general, people prefer their customs over others
  
  • And find other customs unappealing
• This is a theory!!!
• Xenophanes and social criticism
  
  • A model of the people in service of the city
  • He rebuked improper behaviour
• Plato’s Republic
• How should society be organized?
• How can it be made just?
  
  • Cooperation is better than competition
• In spite of these guys, most accepted that society was divinely ordained – it is what it is, folks

Question 3

Dark Ages

Answer 3

• During the “dark ages” people believed in a divinely given social life
  
  • One people under one God (the Christian God)
• Since they were divinely crafted, the social conventions of Europe were obviously the best

Question 4

Encountering the Other

Answer 4

• The stage gets set for the latter emergence of the “anthropological perspective”
• Developments appear in Europe starting from the 1500s
  
  • Voyages of discovery and later colonization, encounters with other Eurasian civilizations
  • Because European explorations and early settlements contributed to the development of anthropology, they brought Europeans who remained at home more or less accurate descriptions of other people.
• The Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment
  
  • The power of the Catholic church is challenged on two fronts. You have Martin Luther and the protestant reformation. And you have the enlightenment, running through the 17-19th centuries. The enlightenment is also called the age of reason, because knowledge, science and philosophy emerged as authoritative disciplines (we could say re-emerge, because lots of ancient civilizations had these).

Question 5

Utopian Literature

Answer 5

• Begins appearing in the early 1500s
  
  • By the 1900s dystopian literature emerges
• Stories about fictional places where life is better
  
  • Utopia is derived from Greek meaning “no place”, but also sounds like the English pronunciation of Eutopia, which means “good place”
• Given the influence and power of select groups, satire (fiction) was a safe way to be critical
• Thomas More Utopia (1516)

Question 6

Savages ——Brutal

Answer 6

• Encounters with small scale foraging and farming societies provides contrast with European society
• Hobbes in the Leviathan (1651)
  
  • In the state of nature, live is “nasty, brutish and short”
  • Humanity requires government to create order
  • This is the social contract – we accept to be ruled in exchange for peace and security

Question 7

Savages —— Noble

Answer 7

• Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) took the opposite position in The Social Contract (1762) (another take on what this contract is)
• The savages were the archetype of natural humanity
• There were things that civilized people could learn from the savages

Question 8

Immanuel Kant (1724-2804)

Answer 8

• Wrote Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason
• Enlightenment philosopher, humanist
• Arguably not an anthropologist, but did insist that humanity should be a subject of empirical, scientific inquiry

Question 9

Natural History

Answer 9

• Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet (chevalier de Lamarck) refuted the theory of the fixity of species and argued that species change as a result of their environment (Lamarkism)
• Charles Lyell used The Principles of Geology (1830) to show the Earth > 6000 years old
• Charles Darwin developed the theory of natural selection

Question 10

Spencerism/Social Darwinism

Answer 10

Spencerism

• Social Darwinism or Spencerism
  
  • Society is governed by natural laws that can be empirically known (positivism – Auguste Comte (1798-1857))
  • Unfettered 19th century capitalism provided all the “evidence” needed to support these ideas
• Like everything else in the universe, society is constantly evolving (progress)
  
  • From simplicity to complexity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity

Darwin cf. Spencer

Darwin’s ideas

• Threatened status quo
• Accepted by academics
• Emphasized heredity
• Organisms adapt to niches
• suggests that diversity is good

Spencer’s ideas

• Reinforced status quo
• Accepted by academics
• Emphasized heredity
• One superior society will eventually win out

Question 11

Marxism

Answer 11

• Societies progress through revolutions
• Societies have definitive structures
• Economic changes are the driving force in human progress

Question 12

Toward an Ethnological Science

Answer 12

• Anthropology emerged as a distinct discipline during a period of major change in the European world
  
  • End of Feudalism, beginnings of industrialization, urbanization
  • Colonialism and travel
  • Redefinition of the natural world and humanity’s place in the natural world
• Anthropology distinct from sociology
  
  • “They study the west, we study the rest”
  • But…maybe the distinction has more to do with holism and our biocultural understanding

Question 13

Accounting for Human Diversity

Answer 13

• The 19th century brought Europeans into even more immediate contact with societies throughout the world, mostly through colonization, but also through trade and travel
• The colonial enterprise required gathering information about the colonies in order to manage or govern them
• Faced with so many different groups and places, select scholars began looking for ways to account for differences and similarities between them
  
  • Evolutionism and diffusionism

Question 14

Evolutionism

Answer 14

• All cultures evolve through stages across time, and they all follow the same line of development
  
  • From savagery, to barbarianism, to civilization.
• L.H. Morgan
  
  • Savagery, barbarism, civilization
• E.B. Tylor
  
  • Animism, polytheism, monotheism
  • survivals were items of culture that has apparently ‘survived’ from an earlier time and now seemed out of place inc contemporary society.
    
    • deductive approach
• This theory places Euro-American cultures at the top of the evolutionary latter and ‘less-developed’ cultures on the lower rungs.

Question 15

Assumptions of Nineteenth Century Evolutionism

Answer 15

1. Like the natural world the cultural world is governed by laws that science can discover – Positivism (Comte)
2. These laws operated in the distant past as they do in the present – Uniformitarianism (also allows reconstruction from present)
3. The present grows out of the past in a continuous process - Developmentalism
   
   1. all cultures pass through the same developmental stages in the same order, from simple to complex
4. This growth is simple to complex – Hierarchy of cultures
5. All humans share a single psychic nature (Adolf Bastian)
   
   1. all people, when operating under similar circumstances, will think and behave in similar ways.
6. The moving force of cultural development is interaction with the environment
7. “Survivals” provide evidence for evolution
   
   1. Elements of culture that evolutionary anthropologists believed had survived from an earlier period.

Question 16

Diffusionism

Answer 16

• Humans are uninventive.
• Cultural differences can be explained by the diffusion of cultural traits from one society to another.
• Kulturkreis (culture circle)
  
  • Culture was invented once or perhaps a few times in a few places and then diffused everywhere else
  • groups of interrelated culture traits formed a culture complex that developed in a certain are and then diffused outward in a circular fashion, known as Kulturkreis.
• You can study the diffusion of culture and culture traits as if it were like ripples from tossing a stone into a pond
  
  • The closer societies were to each other the more similar they are to each other
• Of course, borrowing or diffusion does occur, but it doesn’t explain cultures in the way diffusionists thought it did
• culture-historical archaeology: a theory that separates societies or ethnic groups produce their own unique pattern of material culture that could be used to trace the diffusion of culture of the migration of people.

Question 17

Salvage Anthropology

Answer 17

• Term coined by Jacob Gruber in the 1970s
• Not a theory so much as a raison d’être for anthropology
• Even in the 1800s, modernization was encroaching on “traditional” ways of life
• Document variety before it was lost – languages, songs, myths
  
  • Film was later employed to capture these cultures before lost or irreversibly transformed
• But also collect a lot of stuff – archives are built and many still contentiously maintained full of artifacts gathered (gifted, purchased or stolen) during this period

Question 17

Armchair Anthropology

Answer 17

• The early ethnologists were occupied with finding universal patterns and creating universal theories
  
  • In general, they didn’t do fieldwork – they remained at home in their comfy armchairs and relied on information from other sources (firsthand, second hand, etc.)
• Note, throughout this history scholars use other societies as a means of understanding, critiquing, or aggrandizing their own society

Question 18

Colonialism and Anthropology

Answer 18

• British and French anthropologists often worked in British and French colonies, respectively
• Settler-colonial anthropologists often worked closer to home (among American Indian or Canadian First Nations)
• “An honest accounting of anthropology’s checkered history, must recognize the role of colonial subsidy. Without it, there would be no discipline of anthropology. Ethnology played an important role in the colonial administrative experience of many countries, [and the] British, in particular, made extensive use of anthropologists, most commonly as staff researchers…
• “There is little evidence that anthropologists served in positions with line authority or policy-making capacity”
  
  • Rylko-Bauer, Barbara, Merrill Singer and John van Willigen. 2006. “Reclaiming Applied Anthropology: Its Past Present and Future.” American Anthropologist 108, 1:178-90.

Question 19

Malinowski and Functionalism

Answer 19

• Participant-observation
• Durkheim and social institutions (formal and informal rules and norms) function to fulfill individual needs
  
  • Primary (physiological) needs
    
    • Survival requirements – biological, psychological, social
  • Secondary (instrumental) needs
    
    • Following dietary taboos
• We respond to our needs through cultural mechanisms in organized groups
  
  • mechanical solidarity: the idea that small-scale societies are integrated because its members believes and act similarly.
  • organic solidarity: the idea that complex societies are integrated by the dependence of its members on each other.
• Durkheim believed that society consisted of social facts: institutions, such as marriage, the family, kinship group, economics, religion, etc.,that transcends the individual and have a coercive influence such as that people follow the appropriate cultural norms.
  
  • The family has mother/wife as well as father/husband roles.
• This set the foundation for functionalism: the theory that social institutions are integrated and function to maintain or satisfy the biological needs of the individual.
• Malinowski drew upon Durkheim’s ideas and concentrated on exploring how contemporary cultures operates, or functioned.
• All aspects of a culture have a function, and are interrelated.
• doesnt account for change well.

Question 20

Boas and Historical Particularism

Answer 20

• Like Malinowski, Boas was a string advocate of fieldwork. Both men insisted on learning from an insider’s perspective.
• Boas was interested in the impact of the Arctic environment of the inhabitants’ culture.
• How cultural trait diffused between neighbouring groups and were changed to suit different social and environmental conditions.
• Historical particularism: insisted on the collected of ethnographic data (through direct fieldwork) before making cross-cultural generalizations.
• Boas had a inductive approach: start by collecting specific data, them move on to develop general theories.
• Language influences the way people see the world.
• Boas is the Father of American Anthropology.
• ethnographers should use a emic perspective.
• Any culture is aprtially compose of traits diffused from other cultures.
• Cultures are not superior or inferior to each other
• Differences between cultures are the result of different historical, geographical, and social contexts
• Cultures do not evolve along a single line of development

Question 21

Structural-Functionalism

Answer 21

• The dominant theoretical paradigm of the British school of social anthropology, 1930–1955
• A synchronic approach - comparative sociology
• The culture concept is hooha in the sense that it can’t be studied scientifically
• Malinowski functions of institutions mostly as meeting the needs of an individual, whereas Radcliffe-Brown saw them in terms of contributing to the well-being of society.
• universal function: every part of a culture has a function.
• Parts of a society function to maintain the whole
  
  • Radcliffe-Brown thought of society as an organism (organic model of society)
    
    1. Society is seen as an organically structured whole akin to a biological organism.
    2. Social structure - an ordered arrangement of parts.
    3. Structure is ideally integrated, unified, and exists in equilibrium.
    4. This structure is the object of analysis; culture is too abstract to study
    5. The function of social activities and institutions is ultimately interpreted in terms of maintaining the whole social structure of the society

Question 22

Culture and personality

Answer 22

• a theoretical school in anthropology that looks at the relationship between culture and personality, emotion, perception, cognition, and other psychological functions.
• Ruth Benedict suggests that each society produces its own personality characteristics.
• She claims that each society unconsciously chooses a limited number of cultural traits, and that individuals within a society internalize those traits through a wide range of enculturation practices.
• She studied Japanese behaviour patterns after Pearl Harbour, hired by the Office of war information.
  
  • argued Japanese society was adaptable, shame and honour culture. They respond better to externally imposed standard than the US.
  • convinced the occupying authorities to not eliminate the institution of the Emperor. he would be needed o build democratic institutions.
  • this was not based on participatory fieldwork, or using local language, so she was criticized.

Question 23

The anthropological crisis of the mid- 20th century

Answer 23

• Anthropologists had conceived of societies as fixed entities
• With more fieldwork in more places, their theories proved too simplistic
• Their findings were less a result of the empirical facts than they were a matter of analytic frameworks

Question 24

Multilinear Evolution

Answer 24

• Leslie White
  
  • Three subsystems – technological, sociological, ideological
  • ET=C - culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased — basic law of evolution.
    
    • C is culture, E is energy, T is technology
  • Culture is the extrasomatic means of adaptation
  • cultures evolve from simples to increasingly more complex forms, cultural evolution.
  • neo-evolutionism: similarities between cultures can be explained by arallel adaptations to similar natural environments.
• Julian Steward
  
  • Argues that similarities between cultures could be explained as similar solutions to the challenges of similar environments, such as finding enough food and shelter.
  • carrying capacity: the maximum population size an environment can susatin, given the food and water resources and technology available.
  • Founded cultural ecology – we adapt both culturally and biologically to the environment
  • Cultural core – the constellation of features most closely related to subsistence activities
    
    • given a particular environment and a certain level of technology, a cultural core of traits and strategies would emerge directly related to exploitation of the environment that would fulfil basic needs of a society.
  • Societies is similar situations would develop similar strategies and from what he called cultural type.
  • Evolution = a long-term process involving adaptation to the environment - change from simplicity to complexity
  • multilinear evolution: specific cultures evolve independently of all others but follow a similar evolutionary process.
  • cultural ecology: an approach that examines the interactions between people who reside in similar environments and their techniques, social structures, and political institutions.
    
    • concerned with the impact cultural activities have on the environment which affect human activities in turn.
  • cultures evolve in their direct capacity to harness energy.
• These are materialist theories because interaction with the material world (the environment) generates the ideological!

Question 25

Cultural materialism

Answer 25

• idealism: the position that reality is shaped or constructed by areas. culture is what we make of the world.
• materialism: the position that reality shapes or influences ideas. human biological nature and the environment, and how these influence people’s ideas and values.
• Marvin Harris’ idea of cultural materialism: cultural systems are most influences by such material things as natural resources, technology, and human biology. based on the concept that material conditions or modes of production determine human thoughts and behaviour.
• provide cause and effect explanations for the similarities and differences in thought and behaviour found among human groups.
• relies on etic methodology.
• de-emphasizes the role of ideas and values in determining conditions of social life.

Question 26

Lévi-Strauss and Structuralism

Answer 26

• Radcliffe-Brown focused on identifying how parts of a society functionas a systematic whole, Levi-Strauss concentrated in identifying the mental structures that underpin culture and social behaviour.
• Concerned with the structure of the mind, which is then imposed on the world.
• French structuralism: cultures are the product of unconscious processes of the human mind.
• There is a universal tendency for the human mind to think in terms of binary opposition
  
  • mode of thinking found in all cultures, based on opposites, such as old-young, nature-nurture, left-right.
• The structure of our minds is imposed on the world (shapes how we see/understand/interact with the world)
• These structures are reflected in material culture, behaviour, social organization, etc.
• We resolve binary oppositions with cultural institutions
  
  • The binaries held depend on cultural context
• Structuralism is a creativebricolagethat is more than the sum of its parts
• Cultural differences occur because these inherent mental cosed are altered by the environment and history.
• The content of a cultural element may vary from one society to another, but the structure of these elements is limited by the nature of the human mind.
• emphasizes repetitive structures rather than socio-cultural change.

Question 27

Symbolic anthropology

Answer 27

• symbolic anthropologyL views the goal of anthropology as the interpretation of symbols. How they are created, used and experiences.
• Does not focus as much on patterns of behaviour or adaptation tot the environment, or on what people do, as on what people think they are doing.
• culture is fundamentally a symbolic system.
• Symbols are involved in social processes such as rituals —— Victor Turner
• People behave according to the meaning of symbols. —— Mary Douglas. Symbols are used to structure society and provide a sense of solidatrity
• The meaning of a symbol requires the cultural context.

Question 28

Interpretive Anthropology

Answer 28

• Clifford Geertz. Rather than searching for general propositions of laws about human behaviour, Greetz took a more descriptive approach by examining how the people themselves (rather than the anthropologist) interpret their own behaviours.
• emic approach
• Interpretive anthropology: culture is a web of symbols and meaning, the job of anthropology is to interpret those meanings.
• Ethnographic research in Java
• Culture as systems of meaning
• Analyzing culture is like analyzing text
• Need thick descriptions: detailed description of behaviours in ethnographic context.
  
  • necessary in order to first grasp what was going on and then render intelligible to outsider.
• Behaviour is symbolic action
• Meaning is collective property – it is intersubjective
• This is an ideational theory – our ideas give meaning to the material world
  
  • There is a long history of opposition between theorists who emphasize material factors or ideations in generating cultural forms and change
• If anthropological knowledge is interpretive, then it can never be validated.

Question 29

Feminist Anthropology

Answer 29

• came about as a corrective to neglect, marginalization, and misrepresentation of women in anthropology.
• feminist anthropology: seeks to describe and explain cultural life from the perspective of women.
• all aspects of culture have a gender dimension.
• Represents a corrective to make bias in traditional ethnographies.
• promotes the interest of women.

Question 30

Political Economy/ Political Ecology

Answer 30

• political economy: at its core, examines the abstract issues of conflict, ideology, and power.
• explain the relationship between economic production and political processes.
• challenges capitalism for its inequality and the maginalizing effects it has on local peopple, ethnic minorities, the poor, and the disenfranchised.
• political economy helpful to examine the increasing presence of poverty, the limited access to education, healthcare, and growing unemployment
• An ethnographic approach to political economy tends to be descriptive.
• Based in Marxism (materialist theory!)
  
  • Interests that control the modes of production also control the relations of production
• Focus on conflict between social classes
• The text includes Pierre Bourdieu, but he’s much more interested in symbols and meaning than most PE
  
  • use the political economy framework to examine the production of cultural meaning and symbols.
  • For Bourdieu, a society’s cultural construction of meaning and symbols has political and economic implications, especially when there is conflict over the meanings or when they prove to be provocative in their interpretation.
• political ecology: examines how unequal relations in and among societies affect the use of the natural environment and its resources, especially in the context, of wide-ranging ecological settings, and subsequent economic, policy, and regulatory actions.
  
  • the study of power relations among groups and how they are linked to the biophysical environment at the local, state, national, and international levels.
• Differentiate how resources are used misused, and overused according to ethnicity, gender, and race or other factors.
• Political ecology is an off-shoot of P-E and C-E interested in how unequal relations relate to adaptation and environmental use and degradation
• political ecology did focus on marginalized conditions affecting the developing world, but today, incorporates political economy into its theoretical construct, and includes the environment along with political structure or economic systems.
• addresses the issue of power and recognizes the importance of explaining environmental impacts on cultural processes as part of the political and economic context.
• work focuses on sustainability, conservation, environmental conflict, environmental identities, marginalization, and social movements.
• sees environmental degradation as as a cause of social margiationation.

Question 31

The anthropological crisis of the late 20th century

Answer 31

• The nature of knowledge production: reflexivity
• Ethnographic accounts: science or rhetoric?
• Power relations

Question 32

Postmodernist anthropology

Answer 32

• Postmodernist anthropology: advocates the switch from cultural generalization and laws to description, interpretation, and the search for meaning.
• dispute the possibility that anthropology can construct a grand theory of human behaviour.

Question 33

Postmodernism and Fieldwork

Answer 33

• fieldwork, and the ethnography that results from it, is the primary means by which anthropologists gather and present their data.

Question 34

Two Postmodern Ethnographies

Answer 34

• Experiments in method and representation
• Eclecticism in general
• postmodernists question how ethnograohy was written

Question 35

Canadian Anthropology

Answer 35

• The Jesuits and Hudson’s Bay Company
• Sir Daniel Wilson (1816-1892)
• Thomas McIlwraith (1888-1964)
• A.G. Bailey (1905-1997)
  
  • “Biologically, geniuses don’t cluster, but socioculturally they do. It’s best where two cultures interact, mutually enriching each other, as in cities which are trade route crossings; in these you get the highest degree of innovation.”
• Flexible, integrated approach influenced by British, French and American anthropology
• “‘Militant’ anthropology did not develop here for a reason. Canadian anthropologists are rather nervous about adopting a Foucauldian activism to ‘speak truth to power’.” James Waldram 2010
  
  • Or were we just late to the game?

Question 36

What makes cultural anthropology possible – and necessary?(Marcus and Fischer)

Answer 36

• Marcus and Fischer argued that, fundamentally, anthropology is about documenting cultural diversity, and forging a cultural critique of the “home” societies of anthropologists

Question 37

Some post-1990 theorists (in somewhat chronological order)

Answer 37

• Pierre Bourdieu
• Margaret Lock
• Arjun Appadurai
• Ruth Behar
• Annemarie Mol
• Yael Navaro-Yashin
• Anna Tsing
• Didier Fassin

Question 38

Conclusion on Theory

Answer 38

• People have studied/written about other societies since the ancient Greeks – the explanations they propose are theories about how or why society is a particular way
• Unchecked ethnocentrism and a lack of accurate information were barriers to the development of anthropology
• Anthropology emerges in the early 20th century
• Crisis from grand theory to modern theory
• Another crisis in the latter 20th century marks the break from modernism to postmodernism
• Present day – tremendous variety in what counts as anthropological theory and who can say what about whom