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Lecture Notes Core Themes in Anthropology
Notes of all the lectures from the Course 'Core Themes in Anthropology'. Complete.
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Lecture notes Core Themes in AnthropologyLecture 1 – The questons about the nature of ‘culture(s)’
Analysing pictures:
What do you see?
What do they tell you?
Are they informatie?
Do they giie an adequate picture?
It is all culture, and it is all not culture. There is no way to depict culture.
Key concept: Culture
- Culture: iery hard to understand, to talk about and to grasp
- A culture is the way of life of a people … society is composed of people; the way they behaie is their
culture.
- What is the core of this defniton?
- Day to day, or quotdian culture:
Habits around eatng; Hierarchies; Feasts and celebratons; Trafc rules; Religion; Politcal
systems; Economy; Joining the group is being alone; To raise a child, socializaton; ‘one’s
life-project’. Planning; Greetng, partng, behaiior on the sidewalk, how to do your shopping,
how (frequent) you shower, how you blow your nose; Gazing at your I-phone contnuously
etc.
- Culture is acquired knowledge and put (or not) into practce. It is not natural behaiiour; it is
learned, conientonal.
- Culture can be something close: corporate identty; family culture; uniiersity cultures
- One of the oldest defnitons (by Edward Tylor): culture, or ciiilizaton, taken in its widest
ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals,
custom, and any other capabilites and habits acquired by man as a member of society
- Culture is the learned behaiiours and symbols that allow people to liie in groups
- Preliminary conceptualizaton of culture as those abilites, notons and forms of behaiiour persons
haie acquired as members of society
- There is no real defniton of anthropology. It is iery hard to pinpoint what anthropologist work
with, also it changes contnuously.
- Culture is the primary means by which humans adapt to their eniironments
- Anthropologist are hardly interested in ultmate causes of any behaiiour and acton of human
beings and uniiersal features shared by all human beings
- Culture is a looking glass: a system of inherited conceptons expressed in symbolic forms by means
of which men communicate, perpetuate, and deielop their knowledge about and attudes toward
life.
- Culture is shared understandings made manifest in act and artefact
Elements in these defnitons
- It is about human behaiiour, acton, things and thoughts
- It is learned, not innate
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,- It is learned in a SOCIAL SETTING; you share these things with others
- Culture is made.
- People feel consistency in their actng paterns.
- It includes adaptaton to changing natural and social eniironments.
Different emphases in defnitons of culture
- Culture in omnipresent and in a way circular (used and remade)
- Culture unites and diiides simultaneously
- Talking about culture ineiitably means talking about yourself as you speak of others
- Culture always says something of more than one indiiidual
- Culture is constantly made and changed
- Culture is a source of confict, what is real?
- Not neatly bounded
- Apt for clichés, simplifcaton, stereotypes.
We are normal, they haie abnormal habits.
- The idea is that what we do is normal, what others do is abnormal
- Doing things in a normal way makes it easier to communicate.
- What you mean by normal can be problematc for others.
And so:
- Culture is not deterministc (people can always ‘escape’ from ‘their’ culture)
- Culture or Cultures?
- Cultures is an abstracton (it cannot be collected in a package as if it were a ‘thing’)
- General rule: people do things, culture cannot do things.
Ethnocentrism /cultural relatiism
- Ethnocentrism: putng your own culture in the centre, seeing your own culture as the most normal
culture.
- Cultural relatiism: eieryone is a product of culture, neier be hesitant to admit that you are a
product of culture.
Be careful with clichés:
- Hofstede’s cultural dimensions help to fnd important elements in cultures.
Power distance, indiiidualism is. collectiism, masculinity is. femininity, uncertainty
aioidance, long is. short term orientaton, indulgence is. restraint.
In many cases these readymade chunks are misleading, they are too simple and undefned
What do anthropologists do when they do research and how do they do that?
- They study cultural features in relaton to other things:
Holism: to study things as an interconnected whole
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,- Anthropologists compare: anthropology tries to account for the social and cultural iariaton in the
world, but a crucial part of the anthropological project also consists of conceptualising and
understanding similarites between social systems and human relatonships
- Anthropologist try to understand the world through the eyes of the people they obserie, but they
also make use of general terms to compare across cultural boundaries
- Emic: life as experienced and described by the members of a society
- Etc: the analytcal descriptons or explanatons of the researcher (enabling comparison, aioid ‘my-
tribe syndrome)
So:
- Anthropology is about “culture”. But “culture” is a complex, elusiie, mult-layered, and in a way a
deceptie concept (‘nailing jelly on the wall’).
- So, we are critcal in our applicaton and use of “somebody’s culture”, or “the
Muslim/Caliinist/Capitalist/ Primitie/11th-Century/Bushmen/Italian/Limburg/ or The-New-Rich-
culture”
Keywords Chapter 1 Eriksen:
- An account of the cultural and social iariatons op people.
- Culture is acquired
- Similarites and differences
- Shared and contested
- Culture is not bounded
- Anthropology is an empirical discipline
- Emic and etc terms
- Understanding culture ‘from within’
- Cultural relatiism as a method.
Lecture 2 – History of Anthropology
Early years of anthropology 1:
- There always were traiellers’ journals, itneraries, logbooks, legends, rumours, imaginaries, wild
stories. Anthropology began in the era of colonisaton. The colonisers studies the colonized, most
anthropologists feel like this confrms hierarchy. Some say this is stll not oier and colonizaton is stll
there. The core lies in the Western culture.
- But studying cultures or ciiilizaton began somewhat more systematcally with eiolutonism.
Eiolutonism is the idea that humankind deielops through history and that the West is the most
deieloped and the rest is less deieloped. This implies racism, or lack of capacity.
- The idea was that human societes deieloped in stages, but did so at different paces or “speeds”
Early years of Anthropology 2
- Meanwhile racism and myths about biological determinaton persisted
- Slowly, the insight gained ground that culture was not one eiolutonary process (some already “got
there”; others were late or did not haie the capacity), but that instead cultures should be seen as
plural
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, Lewis Henry Morgan
- 11th century European Idea
- All societes progress through stages
- Europeans = most adianced
- Justfcaton of European Colonial Rule
Frazer
- Magic -> religion -> science
- Magic is the frst phase, humans seek control oier their liies through manipulatng the eniironment
in certain ways. Trying to control nature and animals. Principles of magic:
Like produces like (law of similarity) for example, imitatng rain when in need of rain
Things that haie been in contact once, remain infuencing each other afer the context (law
of contagion) for example putng on the shoes of a soccer star and playing soccer really good
- People found out that magic doesn’t work, they found out deites and religions, this way there is a
third actor to whom you can turn to and beg they will help you
- When they found out this doesn’t work, people turned to science
Tyler
- Transiton fgure, takes the frst step out of eiolutonism. He began the idea that humanity is
equally intelligent. Differences come from challenges, histories etc
- He thinks cultures are plural, not hierarchical organized.
Boas
- The system of shared beliefs ialues, customs, behaiiors, and artfacts that the members of society
use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmited from generaton to
generaton through learning
- A new born is not born in an open undefned world, the new born is raised into that culture. This
happens in a way so that the new born can understand what happens and what is going on
- Which is why, in current anthropology, we tend to aioid the concept of ‘primitie people’ or ‘nature
people’: eiery society has an ‘equal amount of culture’ – but different.
Classic Anthropology
- Franz Boas
The ‘father’ of modern scientfc anthropology. He broke with eiolutonism, Western culture
is not the best culture. People haie the same potental, humanity is one kind. Cultures are
different because of historical/social/other conditons. He fought actie against racism in the
early twenteth century in the US
Cultural relatiism: do not judge a different culture with the standards of your own culture,
try to ‘get in’ the culture, understand it from within. There are no criteria about right/wrong
Today cultural relatiism is regarded as wrong because it equalises cultures while many
people stll think the Western culture is superior (Islamophobia, etc)
A problem with cultural relatiism in its radical from is the acceptng of practces you do not
like (cannibalism, female circumcision).
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