Social vs Cultural Anthropology

Course Overview

• The course runs from Week 1 to Week 12, with additional focus weeks following the reading week.

Exam Information

• The exam is in MC 4045
• The exam takes place on April 10, from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM, lasting 2 hours.
• The exam accounts for 40% of the overall grade.
• Part I makes up 60% of the exam grade and consists of 20-40 multiple choice questions and fill in the blanks as well as true or false questions.
• Part II makes up 40% of the exam grade includes 2-4 short answer questions.

Social vs Cultural Anthropology

• Social Anthropology (UK) studies institutions and arrangements of people and their activities.
• The focus in social anthropology is on social and political organization and economic and political structures like kinship, politics, economy, and religion.
• Key figures in UK social anthropology: Edward Tylor, James Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Radcliffe-Brown.
• Cultural Anthropology (US) studies signifying, symbolic, or meaning systems.
• These meaning systems can include folklore, material arts, linguistics, and personality.
• Key figures in US cultural anthropology: Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, Alfred Kroeber, Clifford Geertz, David M. Schneider, and Levi-Strauss.

Culture and Power

• Cultural Anthropology focuses on culture-based analyses, cultural diversity, and cultural relativism.
• Social Anthropology focuses on power-based analyses and the workings of power.

Concepts and Frameworks

• Gift Economy, as conceptualized by Marcel Mauss, highlights the moral economy of sharing.
• Power and Structural Violence, according to Michel Foucault and Paul Farmer, involves (Bio)power and intimate apartheid (race, class, gender).
• Habitus, as described by Pierre Bourdieu, includes economic, social, symbolic, and cultural capital, as well as race, class, and gender distinctions.

Culture Q&A

• Culture encompasses values, attitudes, customs and beliefs.
• Culture is located within particular areas, can be studied ethnographically, and is bound by time and temporality.

Ethnocentrism

• Ethno- comes from the Greek word ethnos which relates to to race, culture, nation, class, or tribe.
• Ethnocentrism is the practice of interpreting and judging other cultures solely by the values and standards of one's own culture.

Principle of Cultural Relativism

• Cultural traits cannot be classified or interpreted based on universal categories appropriate to 'human nature'.
• Cultural traits must be understood within the context of their own culture.
• The appreciation of the 'native's point of view' is essential to cultural relativism.
• Cultural Relativism involves a suspension of moral judgement.

Culture's Limits

• Spatially, culture is not bounded in place due to trade, migration, cultural exchange, and globalization.
• Temporally, culture is not fixed in time, cultures and traditions change; modernity.
• Politically, culture is not coherent within or across traditions.

Cultural Critique

• The all-encompassing vagueness of anthropology’s culture concept tends to essentialize difference and to obscure causal forces and negative consequences.
• The term culture is often applied sloppily across power gradients, inadvertently masking structures of inequality and politically imposed social suffering.

On Cultural Relativism

• Cultural relativism has been anthropology's foundation for combatting ethnocentrism.
• Cultural relativism is a way to gain access to shocking realities of drugs, sex, crime, and violence.
• Learning requires to keep an open mind and suspend judgment.
• An acutely aware of coercive forces recognizes the practical impossibility of cultural relativism in the real world.

Bourgois and Schonberg on Cultural Relativism

• Ethnographies of gray zones such as homeless encampments reveal the limits of anthropology's notion of cultural relativism.
• There is an ethical stance that recognizes the consequences of power and inequality.
• A dignified representation avoids misrecognizing the effects of power.

Limits and Critiques

• There are questions about whether or not cultural relativism requires moral relativism.
• The questions to ask is whether or not cultures are isolated from each other and from power relations at the micro and macro level
• Limitations include reification/essentialization of cultural difference, cultural explanations overriding political and historical explanations, neglect of global interconnections and undermines the social and political responsibility of the anthropologist.

Abu-Lughod on Cultural Relativism

• Dealing with difference without accepting the passivity implied by cultural relativism is key.
• Cultural relativism requires non-interference and understanding.
• Cultural relativism is an improvement on ethnocentrism, cultural imperialism, and racism.
• The forms of lives found around the world are products of long histories of interactions.
• It does not preclude asking how, living in a privileged part of the world, and we might examine our responsibilities for the situations in which others in distant places have found themselves

Multiple Choice Question

• According to political anthropologists like Lila Abu-Lughod and Philippe Bourgois, cultural relativism risks reifying cultural differences, it prioritizes cultural explanations over political and historical contexts, and it neglects global interconnections.

Ethnocentrism and Spatial Terms

• Ethnocentrism shapes cultural practices and in the common associations of cultures with places.
• Power plays a role in these processes

Culture and Place

• Space and place are culturally relative, this includes urban planning, housing styles, materials infrastructures, organization of rooms and public places like porches vs backyards, and Marketplaces like malls, farmer's market and souks.

Power Operating Spatially

• Colonial expansion, conquest, occupation, and dispossession are all examples of spatiality.
• Other examples include spatial segregation.
• Power functions along class, gender, and race lines and also includes the ideologies of the 'West and the Rest'.

When is Culture?

• Time and temporality is culturally mediated
• Othering involves the temporal processes.
• The notions and transformations of our childhood are a part of the history of culture
• All this determines relationships history with our memories.

The Time and the Other

• Ethnocentrism exists in temporal terms,
• Denial of Coevalness is the failure of anthropologists' and their subjects to recognize that they share time.
• Allochronism is the practice of placing cultures in different temporal frames like social evolutionism.
• Temporal Distancing include observer and observed.
• 3 forms of time in anthropology include physical time, typological time, Intersubjective time.

Childhood

• Childhood is predominantly determined on the basis of chronological time such as age or date of birth.
• Children are viewed as different from adults and childhood is a completely different period of time away from adult life
• Children are viewed as innocent and vulnerable and in need of protection from the dangers of adult world as well as education to be able to enter into the adult world.

Childhood as a Social Construct

• Childhood is created and influenced by the attitude and actions, and interpretations of members of society.
• Key factors are historical transformations of the view of children and childhood, differences between the status and experience of children in the same Society, cross-cultural variation of the status, responsibilities, and treatment of children.

Temporalities of Childhood

• The idea of childhood as a separate phase of life is relatively modern development
• In medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist.
• In medieval art, children are rarely present, however, when they are, they are represented like miniature adults.
• In olde eras, children did work from a young age and were viewed as economic assets to bring in money and supporting the family.
• Also kids joined in similar leisure activities and could be punished for criminal offences.

Historical Transformations

• Advances of sanitation and medicine causes to decline the rate of of infant mortality .
• There also is a decline in birth rate amongst the working class
• In mid 19th century Factory/Mine acts the conditions of working children did began toward improvement.
• This shifted children above 9 no longer economic assets.
• In 1870 the Education Act ensured that children all need to be supported and educated.
• In this time the attitudes change towards children overall as all kids became appreciated as different from adults

Cross-Cultural Differences

• The Inuit of Canadian Artic view kids as lacking the qualities of reason, in known in Inuit as ihuma.
• Parents often treated them with a great deal of leniency.
• This is because kids they can't be reasoned with and don't understand,
• And it is only when they do get older, are parents known to attempt to set and teach some discipline

More Cross-Cultural Differences

• Other culture groups, for example a tribe in Tonga regularly beats children by relatives like parents as well as older siblings.
• This stems from a place they are seeing has been very mischievous, but more importantly lacking social competence
• This punishment is most severe at ages three to five
• Parents genuinely believe that Social competence is only to be achieve through the means of discipline and physical punishment

More Cross-Cultural Differences Continued

• The Beng in West Africa assume that very young children know and understand everything that is ever said to them.
• They believe in a spirit is the home that their youngsters live in before ever being born and where they are known to knowing speak all languages,
• They also understand, all cultures
• As part of the tradition the parents treat young ones with great care as well, with reference.

How to Study Culture?

• The main ethics and politics of ethnography includes, a focus of study, method of study, and a perspective.
• The focus of studies on the human condition.
• Methods include Fieldwork, participation/observation, face-to-face interviews/conversations, self-immersion over long periods of time and cross-cultural comparison.
• Perspective includes holistic aspects of human life.

Whose Perspective?

• The emic perspective includes local knowledge of how people from those areas think, perceive, categorize the world; what has meaning in their world-"the native's point of view".
• The etic perspective focuses from the native's point of view as the bigger picture beyond the here and now.

"Doing" Anthropology

• Culture and place, had to be observed in situ, were two sides of the same coin.
• The core of the research is Fieldwork Ethnography
• The fieldwork involves Participant observation
• The research includes Informal conversations
• Researchers are required to conduct interviews
• Including themselves in full immersion in the given time.

Collaborative Photo-Ethnography as Documentation

• Collaborative photo-ethnography also includes the politics of invisibility of the unhouse, and also real life and public conversations.
• The Edgewater Homeless did want to be treated with equality

Lissa: The Study

• This is mainly a form of Multimodal collaborative ethnography,
• It draws from ethnographic research and studies the setting
• It involves how they are very socially embedded

The Body and Embodiment

• A repeated, bodily practice with meaning, function, symbolic and collective dimensions defines a a kind of ritual
• Embodiment in lived experience of someone's body with its specific techniques means to have a kind of habitus

The Body Ritual Among the Nacirema

• Published in 1956 The Nacirema explores a developed Market economy, characterized by by how much of the subject's time is devoted to economic pursuit.
• Most Nacirema the culture see human body as a ugly, a view deeply intertwined that has its impact.

Mouth Cleansing Ritual...

• It involves, the most pathological condition that the Nacirema have is that they almost pathological horror of and fascination with mouth the condition of which is believed.
• This leads to linkages within the characteristics and oral moral characteristics
• The members all are subject to cleaning a small bundle in their mouth with ingredients to ensure the mouth is cleaned.

Latipso and its Vestal Maidens...

• The Latipso involves sick adults are not only willing but eager to undergo the protracted and intense ritual, IF they can afford to do so.
• Its more about the riches

Beauty Practice

• Special women have rites performed for them during the months and after lunar.
• They involve a lot of heat, baking, or binding.

What is a Ritual?

• A repeated and physical practice is the crux with a variety of elements.
• Framing/Framed that is in a setting as intended.

Why the Body?

• The body is a meeting pint where people get involved in sharing culture
• It serves a way for each to understand and engage in both society.

The Body in Sociocultural Anthropology

• The focus includes body as is, the symbolism
• and its artifact as a social and cultural control

The Body and Agency

• We can study whats done, with, or the things they do by their means to the body

The Body-Politic

• The control of society comes by with what body is
• That regulation occurs as body

Bio-Power

• The control of society is done through what
• the internalization of what body is perceived to, or how is considered normal

Bio-politics Dual Mechanism

• Includes acting on body
• And how has affected the social

Examples

• The historical issues that
• Were the actions of groups

BioPower Vs.

• It involved the process such as in treatment for the sick
• Includes a process the society was built around

Power Agency

• A few concepts explain this.
• A couple are agency it's self
• And how the theory are seen as means
• This affects power all throughout
• Due to customs

Bourgeois on Structure

• The groups with the power have affect on those and what
• they feel they can achieve.

Question

• The following can be examples relating to concepts

The powers purpose

• to take the descriptions in to account

The process for Theory

• And for getting to this with why! is shown

The understand

• This is how things take shape to get the right solutions.