Social Anthropology 1A: The Life Course (SCAN080132023)
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Social Anthropology 1A: Midterm Learning Journal
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Course
Social Anthropology 1A: The Life Course (SCAN080132023)
Institution
The University Of Edinburgh (ED)
An essay that responds to four set prompts in about 500 words each. Responses are written across weeks and involve well-rounded references to readings within set essential and recommended lists. Responses explore the necessity of initiation rituals, how perception shapes ethnographic research, the ...
Social Anthropology 1A: The Life Course (SCAN080132023)
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Why are initiation rituals necessary?
Initiation rituals serve two primary purposes across cultural lines. Firstly, they pass on cultural practices
and moral values to the next generation. Secondly, to allow cultures to process the passing of time and the
temporality necessitated by the human condition. Throughout this response I will be using “initiation
rituals” and “rites of passage” interchangeably. We will define these terms as events that mark the passage
of an initiate from one life stage to another.
As argued by Turner (1967, 5) in The Forest of Symbols, “Rites of passage are found in every society.”
Their prevalence in most cultures across the globe suggests that they are not only necessary but crucial to
the fabric of a society itself. This is partially because initiation rituals aid a society in propagating its
values and traditions.
Through initiation rituals, initiates gain greater understanding of the observable parts of their culture,
mostly activities like sacred flute playing and spirit dances (Bloch, 1991, 9). In addition to observable
culture, initiation rituals often also aim to instill deeper moral and cultural values in initiates. We can
observe this in Northeast Brazil where “A child, upon reaching the age of eight, would receive the present
of a hoe (enxada) from his father” (Mayblin, 2010, 34).
The hoe has both a moral and practical purpose in this case. Its practical purpose is to allow the child to
accompany his father to the fields and aid in crop cultivation. Through this labor, it is hoped the child will
develop “coragem,” the ability to work hard for the benefit of others, and therefore develop his moral
character. In this way, initiation rituals can aid societies in systematically instructing their initiates in ways
of living that best support their community while also preserving valuable cultural traditions.
Alongside cultural propagation, initiation rituals also allow human beings to wrestle with tremendous
existential problems in ways that are easier to digest. For thousands of years existential topics, particularly
death, have been interpreted differently through various cultural belief systems, often in ways that soften
the blows of existential problems. For example, the Beng people of Northern Africa believe that when an
infant dies, they are returning to their ancestral home called Wrugbe, a place the child longed to go.
(Gottlieb, 1998, 123).
This way of grappling with mortality and the reality of death contains parallels to the way initiation rituals
can help mark periods of transition. Whereas the Beng people’s belief in Wrugbe in relation to infant
morality somewhat eases the pain of death, initiation rituals ease the transition from one stage of the life
course to the next, allowing the human struggle with mortality to be embodied in the form of ritual. Bloch
reaffirms this idea in his analysis of the Orokaiva people of Papua New Guinea, in which he declares
“The symbolism of ritual is an attempt to solve problems intrinsic to the human condition,” (Bloch, 1991,
23).
Initiation rituals differ from culture to culture but are universally present and universally necessary.
Crucially, they help a society pass on its unique cultural traits and moral values to its next generation as
well as aiding the people of a society to address and interact with existential questions.
, …ethnography is thick description. What the ethnographer is in fact faced with -- except when (as,
of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection – is a
multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into
one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive
somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field
work levels of his activity: interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing
property lines, censusing households…writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read
(in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript -- foreign, faded, full of ellipses,
incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in
conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. (1973: 10)
What does Geertz mean when he describes ethnography as ‘thick description’? How do different
anthropologists’ understandings of ethnography shape their ethnographic arguments?
Geertz’s use of the term ‘thick description’ when explaining ethnography is an attempt to convey to the
reader the complexity of ethnography as an analytical tool. The word ‘thick’ furthers the readers’
understanding of how nothing about culture can be taken at face value. As Geertz goes on to explain, all
of an ethnographer’s knowledge must be interpreted qualitatively, through observation of cultural
practices, which, even then, can be full of inconsistencies. This means that while description is a building
block of ethnography, analysis is also a key component to the practice.
Different anthropologists’ understandings of ethnography shape their ethnographic arguments on a
fundamental level. Various approaches to ethnography can lead to drastically different research results,
even if ethnographers are considering the same culture. While Hammoudi and Borneman define
ethnography as “being there,” (cited in Cooper, 2023) and most modern anthropologists agree that
ethnography necessitates the presence of an anthropologist in the community they study, historical
approaches to ethnography varied in this regard.
An excellent example of this is Sir James Fraser. A notable armchair anthropologist, Fraser received all
his ethnographic information second-hand via the letters of missionaries or other colonially instituted
persons. By not visiting or living in the communities he wrote about, Fraser ended up with unsound
theories about non-western cultures as “living fossils” and with “Notions of ‘stages’ and ‘progress’ that
were artefacts of European imagination, not historical facts.” (2023, Course).
The flaws in Fraser’s historical and inherently colonial ethnographic approach, once revealed,
demonstrate the care ethnographers must take not only in their methods of data gathering but also in
addressing their own preconceived notions.
In modern times, a different approach to anthropology has emerged. That of specialization. It marks the
dated transition from the traditional wide scope “most complex whole” (E.B Tylor cited in Geertz, 1973)
approach to anthropology to a “Narrowed, specialized, and more powerful concept of culture,” (Geertz,
1973, 2).
This modern approach to anthropology and ethnography suits the field remarkably better than the
previous catch all approach. Bronislaw puts it best in ‘Argonauts of the Western Pacific,’ saying “In each
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