Cultural Studies in Anthropology

Cultural Studies - Week 1

• Cultural Studies is a discipline that focuses on themes of diversity in contemporary culture, including power, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, race, the human body.
• Developed by British scholars in the 1960s.
• Leading figures associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Birmingham).
• Traditionally, Cultural Studies drew on semiotics, Marxism, poststructuralism, ethnography, and cultural anthropology.
• Courses often combine standard anthropological topics with contemporary world issues.

Anthropology: A Short Introduction

• Anthropology is the scientific study of humankind's past and present.
• It gradually developed in the 19th century.
• Key figures in the development include Tylor and Boas.
• Early anthropology was often dominated by male researchers, though figures like Benedict, Mead, and Bunzel made significant contributions.
• It was often carried out in colonial contexts, influencing the way anthropologists approached their research.
• An important approach is a four-field approach developed by Franz Boas and his students. This includes biological, linguistic, and cultural anthropology along with archaeological anthropology.

Structure of Anthropology

• Biological anthropology examines human evolution, variability, and adaptations.
• Linguistic anthropology explores language in particular cultures.
• Cultural anthropology investigates customs, beliefs, and behaviours within particular cultures.
• Archaeological anthropology explores past human societies.
• The study of each of these fields often incorporates fieldwork.

Cultural Specifics

• People solve similar problems, but use different solutions.
• Cultural universals are shared cultural similarities.
• The example of universals provided covers family, religion, magic, childbirth, death, etc.
• In each of these cultures, there is inter-culture comparison.
• A large database hosted by Yale University, known as the HRAF, exists to document many different cultures.

Cultural Studies - Week 2

• Culture is one of the most complicated concepts in social sciences and humanities.
• It's used across disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, media studies, psychology, literature, and musicology.
• There is a wide range of approaches to culture, including perspectives on culture as an activity, as an entity (anthropology), as a social/historical construct or as an ontology.
• One way is seeing culture via its values and practices, which is the axiological approach.
• Another approach, the anthropological perspective, sees culture as an identifiable "thing," a shared experience.
• Postmodernism sees culture as a concept created by human actions, not a fixed thing.
• Some consider culture via the lens of ontological approaches, the study of being. Culture affects human perceptions of reality and world views.

Cultural Studies - Week3

• Culture evolved as a non-biological adaptation.
• The way humans adapt to their environments through their culture is seen as a nonbiological way of adaptation.
• Key ideas within human adaptation include that humans developed various ways of living: hunting and gathering, pastoralism, cultivation, and industrial food production.
• An example from the study: Hunting and gathering is shown in the Kung San people; while pastoralism was studied in the Nuer people.

Cultural Studies - Week 4

• Language is a fundamental tool for communication. Includes grammar and vocabulary.
• Language evolved about half a million years ago.
• Language allows us to communicate via verbal and written means.
• The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues that language shapes a person's world view, because different languages can create different views of reality. 
• Different languages have different structures that cause differing perspectives of the world. 

Cultural Studies - Week 5: Sex and Gender

• Culture constructs differences between males and females.
• Distinctions in biological sex may contribute to differences in temperament and behaviour between sexes, though this distinction varies between cultures
• Cultural variations exist in how people view gender, gender roles, gender identity, and sexuality..
• Some cultures view masculinity and femininity as rigid categories that shape behaviour, while others view it as more flexible.
• Gender is often considered a social construct, meaning it is not inherent but rather learned through the process of enculturation.
• Some suggest that differences in male and female behaviour can be found in differences between their brains.

Cultural Studies - Week 6: Visual Documentation

• Visual representation can convey history and information about lives of different peoples including their customs, belief and practices.
• The study of art and visual documentation has been influenced by many cultures.
• Art has been recorded across a wide spectrum of cultures and societies and artists have represented these cultures.

Cultural Studies - Week 7: Language

• The development and role of photography in anthropology.
• The roles of visual documentation in the study of other cultures.
• The way photography and painting have been interpreted across cultures in different periods.

Cultural Studies - Week 8: Globalization and Culture

• Globalization causes a wider scale and scope of cross-cultural interactions.
• Increased movement of people, goods, and ideas occurs across the globe.
• Examining the connection between T-shirts and globalization.
• Multi-sited ethnography is a useful approach for studying phenomena across different places.
• Studying connections between places using cases from Papua New Guinea and California.
• Postcolonial studies look at the effects of colonialism on modern cultures, including colonialism-related effects on the interactions between dominant and subordinate groups.

Cultural Studies - Week 9: Globalization

• Core and periphery theory, a theory of global economics, looks at global inequalities.
• Culture change can be viewed as ongoing.
• Globalization relates to the ongoing development and/or modernization of new and existing cultural practices, behaviours and other forms of expressions.

Cultural Studies - Week 10: Who Owns Culture?

• The study and historical perspective on the ownership of cultural artifacts.
• Museums, as institutions, face ongoing arguments about repatriation of artifacts. 
• Museums historically, have held and displayed cultural artifacts representing various cultures.
• Issues of ownership, representation, power, and the relevance of these objects for modern cultures are relevant considerations in the study of cultural history.

Cultural Studies - Week 11: Repatriation of Artefacts

• Motivations for repatriation of cultural artifacts (e.g., cultural preservation, honoring customs and ensuring cultural integrity).
• Legal frameworks like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) aim to repatriate artifacts.
• Examples including "Buhl Woman" and "Minnesota Woman" highlight ethical and contextual issues related to repatriation.
• Issues relating to cultural artifacts can be complex.

Cultural Studies - Week 12: Orientalism

• How the West has viewed the East.
• Western perspective of the Orient: constructed and often prejudiced.
• The concept of Orientalism to understand how the West has presented ideas, people, culture, and views of the East.
• Important figures like Edward Said were critical of the East/West dichotomy used in these representations.

Test your knowledge on key themes in Cultural Studies and the foundational figures in anthropology. This quiz covers topics such as biological and linguistic anthropology, including methodologies established by Franz Boas. Dive deeper into the concepts that shape the study of culture and society.