Summary study book Investigating Culture of Carol Delaney, Deborah Kaspin (CH1, 3, 4, 6, 7) - ISBN: 9781405154246, Edition: 1, Year of publication: december 2
Anthropology
Chapter 1: Disorientation and Orientation
Disorientation
Culture shock: A state of panic that is the result of losing all familiar cues. →
Disorientation.
Orientation
Initiation rituals can help smoothen the orientation process. They are part of
the rites de passage: Transitions from one life stage to another. They consist of
three stages:
1. Rites of separation: The person is separated from his/her group/family;
2. Liminal period: Transitional stage;
3. Rites of reaggregation: The transformed person is inserted back into
society.
Nature and culture
Alan Dundes: ‘Seeing is Believing’ → People make judgments not because of sight
but because of the meanings and values supplied by their cultures.
People cannot exist outside of a culture.
Culture
Williams: The word stems from the word ‘cultivation,’ a process of tending
something, crops or animals.
Johann Gottfried von Herder (18th century, Germany): Every people (Volk) have
their own values, language, and spirit (Geist).
Franz Boas (German founder of American anthropology): Nurture over nature,
introduction of Herder’s concepts.
Social and Cultural Anthropology
Culture: Signifying, symbolic, or meaning systems.
Social: Institutions and arrangements of people and their activities in the realm
of the concrete (alphabet, geometry, Stanford University, etc).
American anthropology (Herder, Boas) is more focussed on folklore, material arts,
linguistics and personality, while British anthropology (Hobbes, Locke) focusses
more on utilitarianism: everyone is a rational, self-interested actor pursuing
universal wants. Also Durkheim was important for the British with his ideas about
society, that it should be studied in its totality: sui generis: a thing of its own kind.
Culture and Power
Antonio Gramsci: cultural hegemony: The ability of small social groups to
dominate society not through coercion, but by spreading and naturalizing a
consensus worldview through mass media and other practices.
Michel Foucault: Institutional locations of power, such as prison and the church
aim to impose cultural conformity on captive subjects.
Subculture and boundless culture
Culture is associated with ethnicity and therefore, it is hard to say that there is
just one mainstream or hegemonic culture (although every group might share
this culture a little bit), but there is a multicultural society. Even though there
are many things that all Americans share, the views upon those things from
different cultures differ.
, Former definition of nation: People bound by language, religion and birth.
Culture is not bound to a specific place.
The Personal Is Political
Yanagisako’s main features of culture:
1. It is learned, not inherited (not biological);
2. It is shared, not idiosyncratic (not psychological);
3. It is particular and not universal (not a matter of philosophy).
Social differences are culturally constituted: they emerge in relation to
interlocking patterns of meaning that are constructed by and struggled over by
people who occupy different positions and with different levels of power.
Investigating
Why do other people do things the way they do?
Fieldwork and Ethnography
Ethnography: What anthropologists write up after their fieldwork, not just a
description of a culture, but also an analysis: why?
Shakespeare in the Bush (Laura Bohannan)
The people that Bohannan observed in Africa explained the story of Hamlet in a
totally different way than we would probably do.
Article 1: What is anthropology? (Kottak)
Anthropology studies the whole of the human condition: past, present, future and
language, society, biology and culture. It is comparative and holistic.
Culture: Traditions and customs, transmitted through learning (enculturation),
that govern the beliefs and behaviour of the people exposed to them.
General anthropology (four-field anthropology):
Sociocultural: The study of human society and culture; describing,
analysing, interpreting and explaining social and cultural similarities and
differences.
o Ethnograpy: Studying of a particular community, society or
culture;
o Ethnology: Examining, interpreting, analysing and comparing the
results of ethnography to make generalizations about society and
culture, to build theory about how social and cultural systems work.
Archaeological: Reconstructs, describes, interprets past human
behaviour and cultural patterns through material remains. Many
archeologists study paleology: The study of ecosystems (relations among
living things in an environment) of the past. Also excavating is used in this
field.
Biological (physical): The study of the human biological diversity in time
and space. The focus on biological variation, habits, customs and the life
styles of the ancestral humans who used them. It includes primatology:
The study of the biology, evolution, behaviour and social life of apes and
monkeys.
Linguistic: The study of language in its social and cultural context, across
space and over time. Sociolinguistics investigates relationships between
social and linguistic variation.
Key assumption in anthropology: Conclusions about human nature cannot be
derived by studying a single culture, society or nation. → Comparative, cross-
cultural approach.
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