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.
Anthropology and Fieldwork
What anthros do is ethnography. Ethnography is to the cultural or social anthro what lab
research is to the biologist, what archival research is to the historian, or what survey
research is to the sociology. Often called participant observation, ethnography is based
on the apparently simple idea that in order to understand what people are up to, it is best
to observe them by interacting with the m intimately over an extended period. This is
why anthropologists have tended traditionally to spend long periods, sometimes years at a
stretch, living in the communities they study, sharing the lives of the people to as great an
extent as they can.
ETHNOGRAPHY
–means “culture writing”
–provides a first-hand, detailed description of a living culture
–based on personal experience
–
ETHNOLOGY
Comparative
Cultural Relativism (1)
The idea that a culture must be understood in terms of its own values and beliefs and
not by the standards of another culture
–gained by exposure to “other” ways with a sympathetic eye and ear to appreciating
differences
Cultural Relativism (2)
Critical
–poses questions about cultural practices in terms of who is accepting them and why
–recognizes oppressors, winners, victims
–a critique
Absolute
–whatever goes on in a culture must not be questioned by outsiders
–Holocaust, Apartheid?