Introduction to Anthropology 1000
Promises and Perspectives in Anthropology
1. What is Social and Cultural Anthropology?
It is a social science that emerged out of the intersection of enlightenment science,
colonialism, and discovery.
Emerged through an attempt to understand and document the ways of life, or customs, of
people who had been influenced, often negatively, by European colonialism.
Its early practitioners were especially interested in small-scale societies, those which
suffered the greatest degree of change through colonial contact.
In the late twentieth century, anthropology has included a study of societies, social
groups and sub-cultures found in urban industrialized settings, such as ethnic minorities,
gender roles and identities, and youth sub-cultures. However, its perspective has
remained holistic, believing that all aspects of a culture or society should be understood,
since each part is influenced by the whole.
It has also become more of a humanistic discipline, interested in interpretation and
understanding, rather than a ‘natural science’ that collects data.
Anthropology is also divded into four sub-disciplines:
a. Social and cultural anthropology.
b. Archeology
c. Physical or Biological Anthropology
d. Linguistic anthropology
Social and cultural anthropology is the largest sub-discipline and the only one represented
by a separate department at this university. In the U.S., it has about 12,000 practitioners,
in Canada about 2500. Other important schools of anthropology are found in England,
France, and increasingly in Latin America, Japan and India.
2. Who am I?
Social and cultural anthropologist, with an emphasis on social anthropology.
PhD from University of Toronto in 1988.
Major research projects have focused on India:
Commercialization of agriculture and how that was affecting gender and caste relations
in rural areas.
Colonial imagery of gender relations in India.
Dam resettlement in western India.
Slum policy in Mumbai.
Next research will be on conservation policies and communities in the East Kootenays.
3. The Anthropological Imagination
Societies and cultures do exist; they do not totally determine individual behaviours,
values and choices, but can strongly influence them.
For example, if one individual is out of a job in a city of 80,000, then that can be a
personal problem. If the unemployment rate was 15-20%, then we would start thinking
about it as a social and cultural problem.
Of
if one individual violinist could not get a job in his/her field, we might consider this
a personal issue. But if 99% of violinists are not getting jobs, then this might tell us
about how a culture values computer engineering over classical music.
4. Ourselves and others
The Anthropological perspective is about showing how individual lives intersect with
wider social and cultural patterns.
In studying other cultures, it provides a unique perspective on our own.
Sometimes, we do not see the role that culture plays because of our own values.
Study other cultures shows anthropologists that we live in a culture that values
individualism and the individual. Individuals are seen as the centre of morality,
agency and intention.
This is reflected in
the concept of individual private property,
 value placed on the political and legal liberty of the individual
 in the protestant value placed on individual communion with god.
Individual liberty and freedom are generally placed in a higher plane than the
overall good of society.
 Autonomy, independence, freedom and rationality centred on the individual are
valued goals in our society.
Poverty is seen as due to individual and not social failures.
It is also reflected in our ideas about success in life; individual effort, intelligence
and talent are seen as the key factors leading to success or failure. We value
individual achievement, as shown by the way in which ‘successful’ individuals
are focused on in our media as role models for others, or in the ways in which we
are encouraged to work hard in both school and work and ‘do better’ than others.
History textbooks, at least in our pre-university school system, tend to be written
as due to the actions of great individuals shaping human destiny, as if their
background or culture had no impact on their actions and destinies. One could
say that social and cultural anthropology instills an awareness of the role that
society plays in individual lives, an awareness that is very present in many other
societies that do not place as strong a value on individualism as we do.
In its extreme form, individualism holds that there is no such thing as culture.
A culture is simply the collection of autonomous individuals, seeking to maximize
their life chances in the most rational manner possible.
Anthropology can show how our values of individualism are themselves culturally based
and how we are socialized in them. Just as it shows how other cultures may value society
over the individual.
Example: reporting about flood situations in Mumbai and New Orleans. News reports
in Mumbai stressed the ways that individuals went out of their way to help others in
distress. News reports on New Orleans stressed the essentially individualistic and even
selfish behaviour of people who ‘robbed’ and ‘looted’ shops.