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Summary Conformity And Conflict (15th)
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This is a summary of the book "conformity and conflict", by James Spradley. The summary covers almost every chapter.
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Conformity and conflictChapter 1 James Spradley on ethnography and culture
In this piece Spradley explains that anthropology is a different science than others. In
anthropology one has to become part of a crowd to get insider information. Anthropologists
do ethnographic fieldwork: they become part of the population and not only ask questions,
but actually participate in activities. It can therefore be said that people are not studied, but
learned from them. It is very important to put aside your naive realism (the belief that
everyone experiences the world around them the same). When anthropologists study
cultures, they take into account the three fundamental aspects of the human experience:
Culture-determined behaviour: this can be anything, even reading is cultural behaviour
Cultural artefacts: literally everything that people have made with natural resources, think of
books or vehicles. The knowledge within a culture: this is how we do certain things. We read
a text from left to right, we use certain grammar rules. This is very important, that's why
Spradley will speak about culture from now on, instead of knowledge within a culture.
Spradley defines culture as: the required knowledge that people use to interpret experiences
and give themselves attitude. This knowledge can be explicit or tacit. This definition is of
course very similar to the movement of symbolic interactionism, where people colour the
world by interpreting other people's behaviour.
Chapter 2 Richard Borshay Lee about eating at Christmas
Borshay Lee was doing research in Kalahari. Here the inhabitants (Bushmans) celebrate
Christmas by slaughtering oxen and sharing them with each other. In the period that he was
doing research, he could not give the population food or tobacco. He did and the population
had a demand for it, but of course he had to keep the people in their natural habitat as much
as possible. To thank them anyway, after his research period he wanted to have a very large
ox slaughtered at Christmas and have all the tribes eat with it, to dance together and
celebrate Christmas. He searched for the biggest ox he could find and proudly told about it.
The population reacted disappointed. The ox was big, but much too thin, they said. They
would only eat bones and they couldn't even feed a tribe, let alone all seven. Borshay Lee
was stunned, the animal looked very fat. The locals persisted and even objective experts
told him the animal was too thin, but he couldn't find a new ox. He decided to have the
animal slaughtered anyway, and a lot of fat came out of it. The inhabitants feasted on it.
Afterwards he asked several people why they reacted this way. He got the explanation that
they always did this, to prevent arrogance among people. Borshay Lee sees in the end that
the people must have seen him as an arrogant outsider. After all, he had the means to feed
them, but he didn't give it to them. He sees that they did this to prevent cock behaviour and
that is also his conclusion.
Chapter 3 Claire Sterk about fieldwork in prostitution
Anthropology is a science where the researcher really enters into relationships with his test
subjects and experiences the culture intensely. It is also important that the researcher does
not act too much as an expert and has as few value judgements as possible. Strong has
done a long field research and emphasizes the things that whores have to deal with. Some
of her whores are whores to pay for her addiction, some are addicted because she is a
whore. They actually have a hard time because everyone judgets them and their working
,conditions are bad. And then you probably think, how did she find those whores? Well she
started talking to experts about where whores would be and then at some point she started
making ethnographic maps of them, of what the atmosphere was like in certain places and
what kind of people were walking around. Making real contact was difficult, people weren't
necessarily waiting for her. Yet she succeeded, sometimes she had really useful people to
deal with whom she had a lot, sometimes it was disappointing. For example, once she had a
chick she didn't like, which made it impossible for her to get new respondents, because she
was associated with the one chick she didn't like. Sometimes she was in dangerous
situations or the whores were in trouble and she couldn't help, because then you influence
them and you want them in their natural habitat. Sterk deals with six themes:
● Why the women work in prostitution
● The characterization of the different groups of whores:
○ Non-drug addicts
○ Whores who use drugs after they went to work as whores
○ Drug addicts who became whores to pay for that
○ Crack whores, who fuck in exchange for drugs
● The role of the pimps, whether it's good or whether the whores are treated like dirt
● The impact of the AIDS epidemic on the sex industry, for which whores are held
responsible. People often know the risks and so on, but find condoms an issue and
don't dare to be tested.
● Violence and abuse
● Escape from prostitution: whores still have to deal with the stigmas and in fact
resocialise themselves.
Chapter 4 George Gmelch about Rasta's
This piece is about an American girl doing an exchange with a school in a village in
Barbados. She doesn't really understand her naive realism and doesn't see that her sense of
equality may not be universal. A teacher tries to save the status of her student, named
Johanna. After she was with a Rasta named Joseph, people in the village shouted that she
was naked with him and had been smoking weed. This was really not done and nobody liked
her anymore, which made it impossible for her to do her fieldwork properly. Distraught the
teacher asked what she could do about this, to help the girl anyway, she even decided to
visit the Rasta's, but dropped out at the last moment. The conclusion of the whole thing is
that the girl didn't understand that in other cultures there can be a class difference and that
not everywhere there is absolute equality.
Chapter 5 Laura Bohannan about Shakespeare
Bohannan travelled to the African Tiv to show that some stories, such as Shakespeare's
Hamlet, are universally interpretable. After settling down, she starts talking to the people
there and starts reading from her translation of Hamlet. She's a bit nervous, as she doesn't
master the language optimally and isn't a very good storyteller, but decides to start anyway.
Soon it turns out that the population doesn't agree with her interpretation. A man, for
example, must have several wives, mustn't he? And ghosts, they don't exist. Bohannan also
thinks that the population doesn't like the story. They say they like it, but they think
Shakespeare meant it differently. At the end of the story one of the elders from the tribe says
that he understands that they have different values in the West, about marriage for example.
The older man says that Bohannan should tell more stories, so that they can correct some
mistakes, about ghosts for example. Because Bohannan's interpretation was wrong.
, Chapter 6 Sarah Boxer on names of military operations
This piece is really about exactly nothing. It's about the naming of military operations. Boxer
says that sometimes there are value judgments attached to those names. After 9/11, the
operation was first called "Infinite Justice", which translates as "infinite justice". According to
many people this sounded as if the Americans were trying to take over the role of God, so
the new name became "Enduring Freedom". After World War II, there was all this naming
hassle, and people agreed that a name shouldn't be funny or overly negative. So they
decided to start using colors and sometimes letters. The name of an operation shouldn't give
away anything about the location. The conclusion, I think, is that it is difficult to find words
without a strong meaning.
Chapter 7 Deborah Tannen on ways of converting
Everyone communicates differently and this depends on many factors, but a striking factor is
gender. Maybe this is because it is an absolute factor, someone is either woman or man.
Although there are exceptions, men and women do tend to communicate like the rest of their
gender. Tannen found this very interesting, so she wrote the book "You just don't
understand". There was a lot of response to this book, people wanted to learn from Tannen
what went wrong on for example the work floor, because women, for example, don't work
that long, it is especially adapted to men. Then the story is about Amy. Amy is a manager
and has to provide a piece written by a man with feedback. She is not that impressed, but
decides to bring the feedback in a positive way, by first mentioning positive things and
praising the man. When Amy then sees the second version, she is surprised: very little has
been changed. According to Tannen this is because the man thought he was doing fine,
because of the mild feedback, while Amy thought she had been professional. So there is a
misunderstanding regarding communication. No problem, but one has to be aware of it. The
same can be found in men who refuse to ask for directions, and women who ask a lot of
questions during their studies, and are found stupid because of this. These are all
assumptions, which are not necessarily correct and can get out of hand. For example, a pilot
can crash if he is too stubborn to ask for exact coordinates. The strange thing is that it is
always said that men focus more on gathering information and that women are more
sensitive, while women ask more questions and men don't do this to not seem stupid. Of
course this is very stereotypical and there are exceptions, but it clashes with another
stereotypical image we have of men and women.
Chapter 8 Richard Borshay Lee about hunter-gatherers in the present day
This text is about the !Kung in Botswana. They hunt and gather, because that is one of the
few means of survival. It is often very dry, so in times of drought the tribes move towards one
of the eight water wells, to set up their camp there. They don't grow their own food, but
outside the area they also don't grow flora or fauna. They especially eat the mongongo nut,
which is really abundant there. Moreover, they migrate from area to area in time, so that the
whole area is not emptied. So you would think that they eat all kinds of species not to be
exploited, the crazy thing is that their diet is actually very selective, they really choose what
they like best. There are 85 kinds of vegetables available, but 90% of their diet consists of 23
of those kinds. There are a number of standard assumptions about hunter-gatherers:
● Hunter-gatherers have to travel a long time to find their food and use a large area:
with the !Kung nothing could be further from the truth, they use a very small area to
find their food. They only move their camp a few times a year and this movement is
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