World Anthropologies Perspective

The Origins of Cultural Anthropology

• The Persian Empire, like many ancient and modern empires, comprised diverse peoples and cultures.
• Herodotus recounted a story of Darius asking Greeks (who cremated their dead) and Callatians (who consumed their dead) about their burial practices.
• The Greeks were mortified at cannibalism, and the Callatians horrified at cremation.
• Herodotus concluded that people would choose the beliefs of their own country, considering them best, and only a madman would mock them.
• Humans differ in beliefs, values, and even bodies across space and time.
• Human diversity is obvious, but organizing a systematic study of it is a relatively recent development.
• Herodotus nearly created anthropology with his insights.
• People given a choice between customs will undergo no careful consideration as customs are deeply ingrained, acting as second nature.

What Makes Cultural Anthropology Possible – and Necessary

• Cultural anthropology is a new and improbable science.

• Until about 150 years ago, cultural anthropology didn't exist.

• It is unlikely because indifference, fear, hostility, judgment, condemnation, eradication efforts, and rejection often greeted human diversity.

• Viewing other societies as "savages," "barbarians," "infidels," or "evil" is not conducive to cultural anthropology.

• Xenophanes noted the relativity of religion across cultures. Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair Thracians have gods with gray eyes and red hair Animals portray gods as having bodies like their own

• Ancient Greeks saw people unlike themselves as “barbarian” and “uncivilized.”

• Non-Jews were considered idolaters, sinners, and evildoers in the Torah/Old Testament

• Medieval Christianity and Islam held to the same attitude.

• Two recurring obstacles for cultural anthropology: Absolute certainty in the truth and goodness of one's own culture or ethnocentrism. Lack of information or the existence of patently false information about other societies.

• Cultural certainty is a barrier to relativism and anthropology.

• Lack of information leads to assimilating others into one's own understanding.

• Saxo Grammaticus attributed stone edifices in Denmark to giants during the twelfth-century

• Ulisse Aldrovandi attributed Paleolithic and Neolithic artifacts to natural accretions while Conrad Gesner attributed them as thunderbolts

• The devoutly Muslim Taliban destroyed enormous Buddhist statues.

• Reports of “monstrous races” that persisted from ancient times were the tombstones of a stillborn anthropology.

• Pseudo-human races were described by travelers and scholars: Amazons that amputate one breast Astomi with no mouths Blemmyae with faces in their chests Sciopods with one large foot

• Describing pseudo-human races inhibited anthropology because they were not considered human.

• Fear and revulsion kept people away from them

• Anthropology requires a society that has lost cultural certainty and gathered accurate information about others.

• A new, sustained encounter with the Other is needed to engage in the anthropological perspective.

Encountering The Other

• Europe circa 1500 was the place and time where the conditions began to coalesce for anthropology: Awareness, curiosity, and appreciation of otherness.
• “Discovery” of new lands and peoples in the late medieval Europe opened their eyes to undreamed-of diversity.
• Encounter with Native Americans, Africans, Asians, also Australians by European explorers opened their eyes
• The Christian Bible did not mention these natives, giving rise to the following questions: Are they descendants of Adam and Eve, or are they animals, degraded humans, creations of Satan, or creations of some other god?
• Exploration in the late 1400s and early 1500s, brought new otherness and ideological issues to the attention of Europeans.
• Encounters with "advanced" civilizations from the 1300s, like China, the Islamic world, and India, presented a bigger problem
• Europe supposedly had the “true” religion and culture, yet civilizations were often more advanced.
• Foreigners were “devil-worshippers” yet possessed things that Europe valued and desired.
• Europe rediscovered its ancient texts and began to familiarize itself with its own ancestry leading to the thought that their ancestors were other to them.
• Facing the Other in one's own ancestry was deeply troubling
• Since the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of Rome, there had been only the Roman Catholic truth.
• Reform failed until Martin Luther claimed the Church was wrong and anti-Christian
• The Protestant Reformation introduced a schism into Christian Europe that would not go away
• There can be diversity in the long run despite everyone's best efforts towards complete homogeneous thought.
• The scientific revolution meant cross-examining authority and basing conclusions on observations. Tradition says there are dog-headed people, but science shows otherwise

Rethinking Society: Seventeenth- And Eighteenth-Century Social Theory

• By the mid and end of the seventeenth century, European scholarship and society were in ferment.
• One model appeared at that moment: all those “primitive societies” that had just been “discovered.”
• Those model views were "brutish savage" & the "noble savage"
• Thomas Hobbes used primitive societies as his example of a world without government.
• Hobbes said that primitives as living "in a state of nature", alone and in competition with conflict
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau authored "The Social Contract", compared “savages” favorably to his own countrymen and institutions.
• Rousseau’s view was more positive, there were things to learn about distant societies, there were things to admire from them.

Toward An Ethnological Science In The Nineteenth Century

• First, Europe challenged their certainty for a new phase of industrial colonialism and relations between Europe and the colonies
• Second, more and higher quality observational information about non-European societies.
• Ethnology developed in relation to colonial administration.
• Ethnology project: classify peoples based on social and cultural characteristics, and explain their distribution by movement, mixture, and diffusion of cultures.
• Early ethnologists asked historical and geographical questions about the relationships between cultures and their origins.
• Diffusionism is the idea that Culture (with a capital “C”) had originated once or at most a few times.
• German’s Kulturkreis expresses schools of thought which envisioned culture as ripples out from the source
• Evolutionism is the thought that observed cultures descended from ancestral cultures stages of cultural development.
• Cultures had a “history” that could/should be reconstructed.
• Ethnologists converted geography into chronology.
• In order of evolutionary progress, taking the various primitive peoples of the world today as representatives they could rebuild the histories of cultures with “primitive societies".
• Lewis Henry Morgan distilled stages of evolution: savagery barbarism civilization
• Progress based on technological achievement was important to Westerners
• Civilization was thought of as his own society, nineteenth-century Euro-American culture.

The Twentieth Century And The Founding Of Modern Anthropology

• Objections to an ethnocentric approach include the idea that observers took themselves as the "end" or "goal" of culture
• Two men reject the above vehemently, Franz Boas & Bronislaw Malinowski.
• Franz Boas (1858-1942) is the father of modern cultural anthropology.
• Deciding to not judge or evaluate the subject is to not observe or understand it adequately led to cultural relativism.
• One of Boas’ first statements about anthropology was his 1896 paper “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology".
• All judgments of cultures are relative to one's standards.
• Ranking of cultures is suspect
• Similiarities and differences are not as significant due to evironmental factors
• Boas emphasized holism.
• Malinowski determined that there were three general types of cultural data, each with its own collection technique
• Malinowski's results included his epic ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922.

The Anthropological Crisis Of The Mid-Twentieth Century And Beyond

• As maturity entails a life crisis and a rebellion
• Cultural anthropology suffered a disciplinary crisis/rebellion in mid-twentieth century
• A sign of maturation and breakthrough to a deeper level of understanding.
• One move was the announcement by Edmund Leach that societies overlapped each other without boundaries and politics varied over time.
• Conventional ethnography was inappropriate.
• Societies were academic fictions.
• J. S. Furnivall used the concept "plural society" to describe mixed locations with stratified economic interests.
• Meyer Fortes/E. E. Evans-Pritchard discovered tribes were blends with a lack of easy terms with each other.
• Max Gluckman named Custom and Conflict in Africa found conflict a social construct and an identity, not just disharmony.
• Cultural Anthropology became self-reflective
• 1. Neo-evolutionism, White and Julian Steward reintroduce sophisticated evolution.
• White thought the process to fix the amount/kind of exploitable energy
• Steward introduced “multilinear” instead of grand scale
• 2, Structuralism, Lévi-Strauss used linguistics as a new method for kinship and religion (myth).
• Focused less directly on cultures
• 3. Ethnoscience to expose mental classification systems used by locals
• Point was to bring to light the world and it’s models that humans organize with
• 4. Symbolic/Interpretive Anthropology uses symbols, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, and Cherry Ortner used “key symbols".
• Anthropological analysis then reads cultures
• 5,. Marxist, Critical Anthropology. Godelier, Bloch look for the influence of practical ideas
• 6. Cultural Materialism. Marvin Harris extends to the ecostructure of climate and terrain.
• 7, Feminist Anthropology and Gender. Focused on diversity more then gender
• Gender relations shape human development.

Lastly, there is the emergence of all of the world's anthropology to combine diverse methods of exploration.