This is a summary of the book Social & Cultural Anthropology, a very short introduction. Written by Monaghan & Just. It gives you a clear overview of the content of the book and it helps you to understand the course Anthropology an Introduction.
social cultural anthropology a very short introduction
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Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RuG)
Development Studies
Anthropology an Introduction
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Summary Monaghan & Just
Chapter 1: A Dispute In Donggo: Fieldwork and
Ethnography
What anthropologists do is ethnography.
Ethnography is ‘participant observation’.
Chapter 2: Bee Larvae and Onion Soup: Culture
What is it that separates man from all other species? It is our capacity to conceptualize the
world and to communicate those conceptions symbolically culture.
What is culture?
Culture has to do with those aspects of human cognition and activity that are derived from
what we learn as members of society. Our genetics to learn language and symbolic
communication and all of the complex social organization makes it possible for the human
race to achieve to cumulative knowledge from generation to generation.
Edward B. Tylor’s 1871 definition of culture: ‘Culture or civilization, taken in its wide
ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
custom and nay other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
This focus on knowledge and belief as acquired, learned, by members of a social group. In
this sense of the term ‘culture’ is something that a people or an individual might possess it to
a greater or less degree.
Franz Boas: Culture embraces all the manifestations of social behaviour of a community, the
reactions of the individual as affected by the habits of the group in which he lives, and the
product of human activities as determined by these habits.
What has this mutual disgust at each other’s eating habits got to do with culture? It shows
that both Americans and the Mixtec make a distinction between ‘food’ and ‘not-food’, in
ways that have to do with more than simple considerations of edibility.
Eating is something that is part of a complex system of ideas, perceptions, norms, values,
feelings and behaviours so that the act of eating is never just about satisfying hunger, but is
also an expression of how we have learned to see the world.
Bronislaw Malinowski, 1944: Culture is the integral whole consisting of implements and
consumers’ goods, of constitutional charters for the various social groupings, of human ideas
and crafts, beliefs and customs. Whether we consider a very simple or primitive culture or an
extremely complex and developed one, we are confronted by a vast apparatus, partly
material, partly human, and partly spiritual, by which man is able to cope with the concrete,
specific problems that face him.
, Emile Durkheim & Marcel Mauss: The human capacity for classification was an extension of
our social nature. “Society was not simply a model which classificatory thought followed; it
was its own divisions which served as divisions for the system of classification.
Levi-Strauss: If we look at all the intellectual undertakings of mankind… the common
denominator is always to introduce some kind of order. If this represents a basic need for
order in the human mind and since, after all, the human mind is only part of the universe,
the need probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the universe is not
chaos.
Yet there is no doubt that, between the instincts inherited from our genotype and the rules
inspired by reason, the mass of unconscious rules remains more important and more
effective; because reason itself… is a product rather than a cause of cultural evolution.
Michel Foucault: The ability to control the content of cultural classifications is a primary
source of power in society.
This leads to that when you categorize social classification, such as ‘male’ and ‘female’, a
primary mode of resistance to authority.
Renato Rosaldo, 1989: Culture lends significance to human experience by selecting from and
organizing it. It refers broadly to the forms throughout which people make sense of their
lives… It does not inhabit a set-aside domain, as does… politics or economies. From the
pirouettes of classical ballet to the most brute of brute facts, all human conduct is culturally
mediated. Culture encompasses the everyday and the esoteric, the mundane and the
elevated, the ridiculous and the sublime. Neither high nor low, culture is all-pervasive.
Human cultures seem to be infinitely variable, but in fact that variability takes place within
the boundaries produced by physical and mental capacities.
Where is culture?
Three points of debate:
1. A culture should be regarded as an integrated whole.
This idea is based upon the great modernist insight that underlying apparently
discrete bits of belief or behaviour rests a more fundamental reality. This reality was
for:
- Karl Marx: mode of production.
- Emile Durkheim: Society.
- Sigmund Freud: Unconscious
- Many anthropology, Boas: Culture itself.
Ruth Benedict: Benedict compared beliefs and institutions across several societies,
noting how differences between cultures were consistent within a single culture. She
felt that the practices, beliefs, and values of a given culture differed from other
cultures in a consistent and mutually reinforcing way.
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