Anthro Notes
Immerwahr
○
○
○
Colony vs. territory - portrayal of how the US wants to hide the fact that it’s an Empire.
The smallest scale has a history to tell
No history is too remote
Future of Fallout
○
○
○
○
The social imaginary points to the ways we think of social life are distinct based on our
experiences.
The ways the social life is imagined are always multiple - social worlds include a variety of
perspectives with frequent overlap and divergence
Our 24/7 attention to social media plays a huge part in the idea that we are in a crisis of crises
The social imaginary is not necessarily fictional but certainly can be
Said & Immerwahr lightening draft
Said talked about Western domination of the East which directly relates to Immerwahr’s idea of how
modern empires are ‘hidden’. These empires do have an influence on Eastern culture
Orientalism Edward Said
○
○
○
○
○
○
○
○
○
○
East vs. West
There is a dismissal of knowledge with regard to what comes from the East to the West
Said talks about how people perceive one side of the world to be more modern while the other
(east) is backward
Empire: a political-military system bent on territorial conquest with an objective of resource
extraction, both human and non-human
These human & non-human effects are concerning given that we’re so exposed to crises today
including natural phenomena.
Conquest and violence are often justified through symbols and ideology: spreading “civilization”,
“progress”, “modernity”, a “natural” order/hierarchy
We have a race for hierarchy in our natural world, especially between nations.
A polity and economy where elites see material benefit from gross imbalance, hierarchy, and
social differentiation, often along racial, ethno-national, and class lines
Social hierarchy creates these levels of class that amplify the imbalances in society.
Contradictory position of social sciences, including anthropology: sometimes offer great
challenges to imperialism, other times providing support.
Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?
○
"Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?" is an article written by anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod
in 2002. The article critiques the idea that Muslim women need to be saved from their culture and
○
○
religion and argues that this notion is based on cultural relativism and Orientalism. Abu-Lughod
argues that these views are reductionist and ignore the agency of Muslim women. Instead, she
calls for a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of gender and cultural norms in the
Muslim world.
“The question is why knowing about the ‘culture’ of the region, and particularly its religious beliefs
and treatment of women, was more urgent than exploring the history of the development of
repressive regimes in the region and the US role in this history” (Abu-Lughod, 784)
“The questions were hopelessly general. Do Muslim women believe “x”? Are Muslim women “y”?
Does Islam allow “z” for women? (Abu-Lughod, 784)
Miner, Horace. 1956. “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.”
○
"Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" is an article written by anthropologist Horace Miner in 1956.
The article provides a satirical and critical analysis of American culture by presenting American
rituals and customs as if they were practices of a strange and exotic tribe. The tribe described in
the article, the Nacirema, are a thinly disguised version of American society and their rituals
revolve around their obsession with the human body and the daily rituals of hygiene and
beautification. The article sheds light on the absurdity of cultural practices and the tendency to
view one's own culture as normal and superior to others. The article was written to challenge
readers to think critically about their own cultural values and practices and to question the
assumptions they make about other cultures.
Community & culture
○
○
○
○
Old definition: bounded social groups with delineated characteristics - shared religion, language,
sartorial styles, shared value systems, worldviews, etc.
Nowadays: each abstraction has both stability and dynamism
○ Collective identity/ies
○ Anthropologists pay attention to how powerful commentators like politicians use the terms
○ Not bounded, but entangled in other value systems, histories, relations - “break with
language of alien cultures (Abu-Lughod 2002, 790)”
○ Imagined through communication forms
Often involves self-other distinction-making, often through different mediated means
In imperial and/or capitalist political economy often such forms of slavery and capitalism
Feb 9th
Classification:
● How do imperial or other powerful social imaginaries emerge that categorize human and
non-human social life in hierarchical ways? Not that this is a process with massive
political implications.
○ In the US there are deep historical connections between race and class given the
violent histories of racial capitalism and white supremacist ideology and practice.
○ As is the case elsewhere and have, classification (the often violent processes by
which social categories are hierarchically organized) may happen along the lines
of other social differences: ethnonationality, gender, the class itself, profession,
species distinction
○ Foregrounding “class” in social life highlights the unequal distribution of
resources, including along racial, gendered, or other lines
○ Despite claims to objectivity, western “science” has often participated in this
hierarchical imagination of the social world
Race/racialization
● Race refers to a social difference imagined here in biology or nature. Despite being
imagined, race is experienced in real, tangible ways
● Racialization describes the process whereby a person, event, or other things are
described in racial terms (i.e. in terms of social difference believed to be grounded in
nature)
● “Racecraft” according to Fields and Fields, is the mobilization of a belief in race to the
point when the category appears ‘as common sense’ (2012, 2015) rather than a product
of history and violence.
● Racisms enforce the double standard of race, which results in unequal treatment and
distribution of resources supposedly grounded in nature or in imaginations of “culture”.
How are hierarchies created by human institutions - how is racism structured?
The Nutmeg’s Curse
● He is able to talk about the culture of the bandanese people and how when the Dutch
East India Company came to establish their trade the Bandanese were met with
overwhelming force.
● He explains how their culture was not the same after the Dutch trade and how the
Bandanese, being exposed to such large forces, signed treating without them even
knowing how to read Dutch
● Media provides knowledge. If the media is biased, the knowledge passed down from that
media is also biased and has a trickle-down effect.
Masco Lightning Draft
● Focusses on a nationalist idea in the event of a crisis such as a nuclear one
● Us vs. Them mentality with regard to the Soviet Union
Group activity
● 1st pic is probably for tourists at the border of NM, 2nd pic is for people in the NM area
● 3rd pic shows the injustice done by the government highlighting the fact that NM is 1st in
poverty and 1st in nuclear weapon
● Again highlights injustice saying bringing to light the idea that we should do to others
what we want for ourselves, also has a pic of an airplane dropping bombs
● It's on the highway for max exposure
2/21
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
Power:
○ can take an extremely wide variety of social forms - e.g. controlling the
distribution of resources, enforcing language standards, enjoying greater mobility,
insisting on heteronormativity, possessing nuclear weapons, exerting control over
ecologies, commanding attention online, holding political office, etc.
Often unevenly distributed according to social category and/or identities
Politics often consist of contestation over power; resistance is a common
accompaniment
Powerful authorities often make claims to universal truths, morality, or definitions of
progress
Contemporary American, Chinese, Russian, etc. imperialisms are only a few of the
significant, historical forms of exerting social power
Certain forms of power are durable, whereas others may be more fluid
Capitalism + political economy
○ Political economy
■ Relates to the distribution of resources and wealth in society
■ The Intersection of the Economy and Politics
■ Ties to diverse systems of value, including in exchange
○ Capitalism
■ Marked by division of historical, more globalized stages dating back at
least to the 15th century
○ A “revolutionary force” according to Marx - is highly dynamic and productive,
including often violent hierarchy
○ Emphasis on market development, resource extraction (“petrochemical”), wealth
accumulation, private property
○ Fosters particular relationships to labor and nature(s)
Ahearn language reading
● Different types of accents and dialects might lead to discrimination
● Social worlds are filled with many ways of speaking: languages, dialects, sociolects,
raciolects, gendered ways of speaking, professional jargon, slang, etc. The social world
is filled with heteroglossia = many tongues/ways of speaking, not just standard
languages!
● Each way of speaking derives much of its meaning in practice and in juxtaposition to
other possibilities for linguistic communication
● You’re making a choice on which sentence structure to adopt whether you’re gonna
speak with an accent. A choice among a field of different possibilities.
● How and why have we socialized and been raised to speak differently? Systems of value
are often both implicit and explicit in language forms.
● Registers are ways of speaking that come to be associated with particular social groups
(through language ideology, our experiences, and “indexicality”; not the abstract terms,
including in Agha 1999, which you can skim for main ideas…)
●
●
Ongoing question: How do the politics of language and communication more broadly
relate to histories and politics of gross social imbalance, including the violence of
empire?
Language Ideology:
○ Language ideology refers to beliefs about language and linguistic registers that
associate them with value (e.g. “good/bad, proper/improper, beautiful/sloppy,”
etc)
○ Language ideologies are also cultural ideas about language that associate
certain social groups with specific ways of speaking, reading, and writing (e.g.
“these young people can barely write without emojis!”; “French is the language of
lovers…”; “Those people talk like X”; These people write like Y”)
○ Such beliefs, stereotypes and value systems are often specific to certain
communities (often with somewhat fluid boundaries; see Morgan 1999)
○ Linguistic anthropology sees the concept of “ideology” as not necessarily
accurate or inaccurate - it refers to a worldview; some ideologies are violent,
some are relatively benign
Linguistic reading before Thanksgiving
● Multiple dimensions of difference and inequality can shape, and be shaped by, language
use. Gender (discussed in the previous chapter), socioeconomic class, age, regional
identity, caste, and profession are just a few of the many types of social variation that
can intersect with linguistic practice – often in complex, overlapping ways
● Jane Hill, a well-known linguistic anthropologist and the former President of the
American Anthropological Association, maintains that most white Americans share a
largely inaccurate “folk theory” of race and racism, one of the main components of which
is a belief in “race” as a basic category of human biological variation, combined with a
belief that each human being can be assigned to a race, or some-times to a mixture of
races (Hill 2008:6–7). Hill argues that this folk theory is widespread and taken for
granted – but mistaken in most respects, according to the vast majority of
anthropologists and other social scientists.
● race is different in different countries, no such thing as black vs white like in the US.
Instead there are castes
● reading dove deep into small words that might look insignificant but change the entire
method of speaking
● linguistic profiling - got less callbacks from landlords because of AAE accent & when diff
student groups were shown the same video half said white woman half said asian
3/7
Proposal writing guidelines:
● Research questions
○ Method
○ Background: anthropology/empire, classification
● Annotation 1
● Annotation 2
●
●
●
3/14
●
Annotation tips:
○ Identify 1-3 big takeaway arguments or insights
■ You may use 1-3 or slightly more bullet points here, parenthetical citations
are needed, include page numbers if possible, a single quote, if apt, can
work well
○ Then in 1-2 bullet points, tell me how the secondary source is relevant to your
project
○ Begin crafting a strong paragraph with your bullet points
Lightning draft:
○ The readings for today described language registers and how linguistics play a
part in our community. A linguistic register can vary through the different types of
communities where these communities use different languages
○ Different languages might be associated with more or less power. For example, if
we compare two people who speak English and Urdu, the person who speaks
fluent English might be considered higher in the social hierarchy
Gender and Embodiment:
○ As the term LGBTQIA+ implies, social worlds are filled with many gendered and
otherwise embodied ways of being beyond the dichotomous sec categorization
that often accompanies official documents at birth. How can one study gender
anthropologically? How does gender give meaning to perceived or actual
biological differences (Ahearn 2021, 216)?
○ Gender emerges in part through collaboration and interaction; e.g., gendered
ways of speaking are learned, ascribed values (hierarchy!), and emerge as
stereotypes, even in supposedly “scientific” research that argues that “girl talk is
more gossipy/cooperative”
○ Thinking beyond sexual or gender identity as something we “have and instead
seeing such as something we “do or perform”
○ Sexual identity is not based on biology alone, but instead also on the perception
of biology and the cultural meanings ascribed to anatomy, chromosomes, and
hormones - no single criteria to determine sex; estimates vary as to intersexed
births.
○ Ongoing questions: how do the politics of gender relate to histories of gross
social imbalance, including the violence of empire? How can we otherwise see
culture or belonging as something we embody?
○ Paragraph interpretation:
Lightning draft:
○ How is communication political:
■ There is a power hierarchy when it comes to the government or a
business etc. where instructions are passed down from the top all the way
to the bottom
■ Resources are also distributed accordingly where people higher up the
chain would have access to more resources
●
●
●
The state:
○ An administrative, legislative, and political entity characteristic of the modern
world order; made up of institutions and their practices
○ Depending on size can contain a massive number of bureaucracies and
individuals, often with overlapping but also divergent purposes and ideologies
(e.g. Congress, the Supreme Court, the Executive Branch, the EPA vs.
Department of Defense)
○ Often gives legal and practical structure to major events like elections and wars,
but ALSO has a major influence over everyday life and experiences like trash
collection, traffic protocols, and language standardization
○ Institutions of the State are actively recruiting in high schools and colleges
○ Anthropology: What are the cultural specificities of different states and the effects
of their policies (e.g. 2009 Bolivia’s according to Pachamama or Mother Earth
with legal rights; 2010 corporations in the US begin to be protected like
individuals with rights to free speech)
○ The imagined and practically experienced “prestige” according to standard
language competence is often a result of state decision-making about language
policy, education, signage, and health/good labeling among countries
Identity/Identities:
○ Like culture and community, “identity” is never fully bounded or singular, despite
the imaginary and practices of states
○ Often they exist in the intersectional, overlapping plural: class, gender, race,
religious affiliation, ethnonational, etc., but also pseudonyms, noms de plume,
akas, per names, etc.
○ Powerful authorities - including imperial ones - often insist on defining and
classifying identities to exert greater control over subjects and territory
○ Many social identities are durable and sometimes even get framed as “natural”;
others are more obviously malleable (think former USSR; fickle fan identities that
abandon an artist; or even one’s affiliation to a school after graduation; keep
attuned to Masco’s critiques of US nuclear nationalism)
The Future of Fallout reading talks about how our data is being collected by the
government and how it's become so normal that it’s a part of our daily life. It also talks
about how we’re being influenced by social media and how people spread their ideas
through social media. The second reading goes on to talk more about identity and how
names of different buildings, people, etc. can hold a certain significance.
4/11
Lightning Draft
● Heterogenous:
○ relative/experiential
○ Emotional
○ Phased
○ ruin/artifact
●
●
●
The Imperial Imaginary reading talked about how media, literature, etc. influence our
everyday lives by giving us a perception of this sort of imaginary.
How does the Dawdy film lead to a heterogenous time?
○ It reinforces the concept that time is indeed linear and doesn’t stop for anyone. It
only moves forward, in a straight line. All we can do is learn to accept it just like
the people in the film had to accept the fact that lives do eventually end.
Time is linear
4/13 De Leon
● Lightning draft:
○ He talks about the lower strata of society where people in that class do jobs that
normal Americans don’t want to do such as gardening or plumbing. The
prevention through deterrence program aims to prevent illegal immigration
through means other than border violence: “a strategy that largely relies on
rugged and desolate terrain to impede the flow of people from the south. I
also present stories of survival, failure, and heartbreak that happen on la linea
and beyond from the perspective of those who directly experience this unique
security apparatus. Documenting these largely undocumented stories and
giving the reader an up-close look at faces and bodies can perhaps help us
remember tomorrow that people lived and died in this desert today (de León
2015, 3-5).”
● Lightning draft:
○ Nationalism is the idea of loving your country and being willing to go above
and beyond for it. It is the feeling of belonging to a community in specifically,
your country.
○ Patriotism vs Nationalism where nationalism is just a more extreme version
of patriotism.
○ Many nationalistic movements are intertwined with imperialism
● Notes on Nationalism
○ 1-to-1 equations/isomorphic logics: one nation, one land, one language, one
folkloric costume, one anthem, one faith… complicated by multiethnic
imperial legacies and lived realities
○ Often contrasted with empires despite bearing strong resemblance in terms
of policies, hierarchies; legacies downplayed
○ Management of diversity through ambivalent strategies of autonomy, control,
cooptation - force alone bound to fail…
○ 18th and 19th century amplifications - American, French, Haitian Revolutions;
Meiji Restoration; Indian Independence Movement; Taiping/Boxer Rebellions;
Revolutions in China
○ USSR: Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War, collectivization, Stalinist Purges, Nazi
invasion - paradoxes of experimental utopianism marked by paranoid, brutal
statecraft in Europe and Asia
○ Nationa as increasingly ubiquitous geopolitical framework after WW1 Wilsonian vs. Leninist self-determination - and WWII
4/20
● Materiality
○ How do social groups relate to material objects? How do material objects
exert their own influences over social life?
○ How does access to material resources relate to social hierarchy and political
economy (e.g. wages, capital, loans; global commodity chains vs. local forms
of production)?
○ What can be learned from the archaeology of the contemporary? How about
the material remains of the past 120,000 years of homo sapiens' existence?
○ Relatedly, what in particular can be learned from garbology about social life in
particular places and particular times (at a private liberal arts college in the
contemporary US, for example)?
○ What are the social lives of things themselves? That is, how do they intersect
with different value systems and human biographies in ways that shape their
cultural meanings
● Lightning Draft
○ Different people value everything differently
4/25
● De Leon reading:
○ Actants:
■ Time
■ Technologies
4/27
● Lightning Draft:
○ Social media plays a huge role in allowing people to meet and interact with
each other which then could have implications on human reproduction
○ Through anthropology, we learn about our identity through the four sub-fields.
More specifically, we can learn about our consumption patterns and what
implications these can have on whether or not we live a sustainable life.
5/2
● Are humans inherently violent?
○ Humans had to become violent to compete for resources
● Notes
○ An old but also simultaneously novel trend in the social sciences that
considers human embeddedness in broader ecologies (e.g. discipline of
political ecology; STS)
○ 6,000,000 years of human evolution is a longstanding topic for biological
anthropologists - alongside primatology, paleontology, environmental
adaptation, human variation
○ Considers how to write ethnography and cultural histories that are attentive to
the interconnectedness of nature-culture (e.g. Kosek on bees during GWOT;
Heise on stories of “charismatic megafauna”; Marshak and Sussman on
shifting representations of primate kin)
○ Can one imagine writing a cultural history of the past 2+ years without
reference to the microbiology of COVID? What are the shortcomings of such a
history? Points to a broader need not to make such clear separations between
abstractions like “nature” vs. “culture”
○ How will social life (need to) be reimagined in relation to the so-called
Anthropocene?... What are the problems with the “anthro designation in this
new geological age? Hint: Not everyone is equally responsible…
● 5 Keywords for Mini-Proposal: Imperialism, militarism, Gender in Afghanistan,
5/4
● Mini-Proposal:
○ Ethnographic interviews
○ Critical discourse analysis - (media sources)
● Livestock video:
○ Video shows the calls of herders trying to influence their animals
○ It shows the collective mindset of the herd and how they all act the same way
5/9
● TallBear and Fullwiley:
○ How are their analyses of the discourses surrounding genes examples of the
entanglements of so-called nature and culture:
■ People have a strong desire to know where they’re from
■ People are being re-ethnicized
■ Categories of ethnicities remove the histories of people
● A couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey:
○ More dimensions of potential analysis: institutional racism/classism, politics
of museums/exhibition/social sciences, “savage slots”, etc.
● Video talks about history of our ancestors and uses satire that might be considered
slightly controversial specifically by mentioning Christopher Columbus and what he
did.
5/11
● Overall, Ghosh argues that the framing of a large portion of humanity and all non-humans as
"brutes" has been a means of justifying and perpetuating systems of power and domination
throughout history, and that this framing continues to contribute to the current climate crisis.
● Ghosh was arguing about how humans use their idea of civilization to justify
colonialism which is also apparent in the reading where some humans were shown
to be superior to others
● Notes
○ Anthropology considers…broad geographies: from classic village profiles to
regional, national, transnational, transcontinental, and even interplanetary
scales
○ Deep temporalities: at least 5,000,000 years from earliest human evolution,
120,000 of homo-sapiens existence, and over 5,000 years of written history
(Mesopotamian cuneiform)
○ It’s the “most interdisciplinary” of all social sciences, and maybe the most
humanistic: literature, linguistics, biology, history, economics, sociology,
geography, medicine, psychology, political ecology, and far beyond
○ Demands a critical examination of ethics (not always successful, mind you)
given:
■ Its disciplinary marginality
■ The radical challenges and juxtapositions of ethnography
■ The discipline’s early history in the history and violence of 19th and
20th-century empires (not unique in this regard - think other
disciplines, telecommunications, modern capitalism, etc. - but crucial
to grapple with)
● The four fields notes:
○ No community, social phenomenon, tradition, or institution is considered too
remote, proximate, small, or large for anthropological inquiries (a bit like novel
writing or filmmaking in this way)