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Summary Eriksen: Small places, Large issues (4th edition)

Name: Eriksen: Small places, Large issues (4th edition)
SKU: doc_595812
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Author: saskiakluiters

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Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)

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Small Places, Large Issues

This is my summary of the book 'Small places, Large issues, an introduction to social and cultural anthropology (4th edition)' by Thomas Hylland Eriksen. The summary covers the whole book (chapter 1-20).

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Geupload op 16 oktober 2019
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Geschreven in 2019/2020
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CORE THEMES IN ANTHROPOLOGY – BOOK

CHAPTER 1: COMPARISON AND CONTEXT

Anthropology
• Anthropology tries to account for the social and cultural variation in the world, but a crucial part
of the anthropological project also consists in conceptualising and understanding similarities
between social systems and human relationships
• Anthropology is about how different people can be, but it also tries to find out in what sense it
can be said that all humans have something in common
• The ways in which human lives are unique, but also similar

What do anthropologists do?
• Trying to understand both connections within societies and between societies
• Accounting for different aspects of human existence and investigating these interrelationships
taking as their point of departure a detailed study of local life in a particular society
• Asking large questions, while at the same time drawing most insights from small places

What is anthropology?
• Knowledge about humans
o Anthropos = human
o Logos = reason
• Social anthropology → knowledge about humans in societies
• Cultural anthropology → knowledge about cultivated humans
o Colere = to cultivate
o Knowledge about those aspects of humanity which are not natural, but which are related
to that which is acquired

Culture
• On the one hand, every human is equally cultural
o In this sense, the term 'culture' refers to a basic similarity within humanity distinguishing us
from other animals
• On the other hand, people have acquired different abilities, notions, etc.
o And are thereby different because of culture
• Geertz depicted a culture both as an integrated whole and as a system of meanings that was
largely shared by a population
• Culture thus appeared as integrated, shared within the group and bounded
o In many cases it should be said that a national or local culture is neither shared by all or
most of the inhabitants, nor bounded

The relationship between culture and society
• Culture = the acquired, cognitive and symbolic aspects of existence
• Society = the social organisation of human life, patterns of interaction and power relationships

Anthropology
= the comparative study of cultural and social life
• Most important method → participant observation, which consists in lengthy fieldwork in a
specific social setting
• Anthropology compares aspects of different societies and continuously searches for interesting
dimensions for comparison

1

,The universal and the particular
• The central problem of anthropology is the diversity of human social life
• Anthropology tries to strike a balance between similarities and differences
• Universality = to what extent do all humans, cultures or societies have something in common?
• Relativism = to what extent is each of them unique?
• Structural-functionalism = all societies operate according to the same general principles
• Structuralism = the human mind has a common architecture expressed through myth, kinship
and other cultural phenomena
• Transactionalism = the logic of human action is the same everywhere
• Materialist approaches = culture and society are determined by ecological and/or technological
factors

The problem of Ethnocentrism
• A society or a cultural world must be understood on its own terms. In saying this, we warn
against the application of a shared, universal scale to be used in the evaluation of every society
• In order to understand people's lives, it is therefore necessary to try to grasp the totality of their
experiential world; and in order to succeed at this project, it is adequate to look at selected,
isolated variables
• Ethnocentrism
= evaluating other people from one's own vantage-point and describing them in one's own terms
o One's own ethnos, including one's cultural values, is literally placed at the centre
o Fails to allow other peoples to be different from ourselves on their own terms, and can be
a serious obstacle to understanding
o Anthropology calls for an understanding of different societies as they appear from the
inside
• Cultural relativism
= Societies or cultures are qualitatively different and have their own unique inner logic, and it is
therefore scientifically absurd to rank them on a scale
o Sometimes posited as the opposite of ethnocentrism
o Indispensable and unquestionable theoretical premise
o Methodological rule-of-thumb in our attempts to understand other societies in an as
unprejudiced way as possible
o However, it is impossible in practice, since it seems to indicate that everything is as good
as everything else, provided it makes sense in a particular social context

2

, CHAPTER 2: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Periods in the history of Anthropology
• Proto-anthropology
o Roots in the ancient Greeks
o During the Renaissance in Europe
▪ Thinking about cultural variability and global cultural history
o 18th century
▪ Universalism vs relativism
▪ Ethnocentrism vs cultural relativism
▪ Humanity vs the animal kingdom
• Victorian anthropology
o 19th century
o Belief in social evolution
▪ The idea that human societies developed in a particular direction
▪ The notion that European societies were the end-product of development which
began with savagery
o Optimistic belief in technological progress and European colonialism
o Maine: difference between status and contract
o Bastian: all humans have the same pattern of thinking based on elementary ideas
• Boas and Cultural Relativism
o Four-field approach
▪ Cultural and social anthropology
▪ Physical anthropology
▪ Archaeology
▪ Anthropological linguistics
o Each culture had to be understood on its own terms and it would be misleading to judge
and rank other cultures according to a Western, ethnocentric typology gauging levels of
development
o Historical particularism = the view that all societies or cultures had their own unique
history that could not be reduced to a category in some universalist scheme of
development
o Sapir-Whorf hypothesis = language determines cognition, and the world's languages differ
profoundly in this respect
▪ Implies that different peoples perceive the world in a fundamentally different way,
due to differences in the structure of their languages
• The two British Schools
o Malinowski
o Radcliffe-Brown
• Mauss
o Maus's theoretical position → He believed strongly in systematic comparison and in the
existence of recurrent patterns in social life at all times and in all places
▪ Yet he often ends on a relativist note in his reasoning about similarities and
differences between societies
• The second half of the 20th century
o New specialisations
▪ Psychological anthropology
▪ Political anthropology
▪ Anthropology of ritual
• Structuralism
o First major theory to emerge after WW2
o Structuralism by Claude Lévi-Strauss

3

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