ANTH0013 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES IN
SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND MATERIAL
CULTUREs
General Notes
1. Make sure you answer 3 questions. 3 averagely answered questions ALWAYS scores higher
than two brilliant answers (e.g. 60 + 60 + 60 averages at 60; 75 + 75 + 0 averages at 50)
2. You don’t need exact dates but it does pay to know more or less when theorists, writers,
anthropologists etc lived and wrote (e.g. ‘first part of the 20th century’)
3. In a theory course, ethnographic and historical examples are not necessary but they can be
valuable. If you do use them to illustrate a concept or clarify the difference between
perspectives, you may well pick up marks. Don’t make your examples/case-studies over-long
as you might do for an ethnography course.
4. Don’t see themes & topics as existing in the separate boxes that we put them in to make sure
that the lectures didn’t overlap. In your answers, you can cross-fertilise weekly topics to
produce the insights that otherwise might be impossible to produce
5. You always score higher by (a) saying what you think and (b) saying why you think it, in
addition to summarising and critiquing other readings. First Class answers synthesise in
original ways
INTRODUCTION
1. INTRODUCTION & IS ANTHROPOLOGY A SCIENCE?
How have different authors in the social sciences generally and Anthropology in particular
conceptualised the scientificity of social inquiry? Positivism: its theoretical basis (i.e. what
does positivism presume about reality and about how knowledge can truly capture it in
thought). In what ways has Durkheimian positivism been critiqued?
Generally, proponents of a Science of Society think that positively true understandings OR
even provisionally true understandings (e.g. Levi-Strauss) of realities are possible and that
generalizable laws governing relations between phenomena can be found. Also, that
processes can be modelled so that predictions can be made,
By contrast, generally, opponents of a Science of Society think that truth is an unhelpful
(diabolical?) category and that descriptions and analyses that claim to be truthful & correct
representations are self-deluding. Different kinds of anti-scientific or non-scientific
understandings will see scientific anthropology as being more the projection of one
society’s (or one gender’s or one ethnic groups) way of seeing, than a true representation of
any external reality, including other cultures or societies. Postmodern approaches spring to
mind here.
NOTES
Lecture notes:
A. Science/humanity
- Anthropology came into being in 19th c
- Well established in end of 19th, as a science (the laws of human society, evidence that exist)
-
Morgan, Boas, Malinowski, Firth, Levi-Strauss (but not Evan’s-Prichard), Leach:
Social Anthropology more a Science than not!
Evolutionism, functionalism, Marxism, structuralism, cultural ecology, economic
anthropology: more scientific than not
B. Enlightenment & Epistemology
-
The enlightenment – crucible of social philosophy (the idea of anthropology as science) –
Rousseau, Hagel, Marx, Smith, Engels,
o One strand of the enlightenment – in opposition to the idea of creation (not to God)
o Nature is the seed-bed of human (naturalist) – man make history through the force
of nature
o Methods required to study humans in a naturalistic way
o Science (natural knowledge) replace biblical knowledge to explain the force
 POSITIVE knowledge
 Make history a certainty
 Politically programme the improvement of Society
-
Evolutionary thought – establishing comparative science of human social evolution
o Technologically primitive ‘natural’ Societies were dominated by religious
o
Collect as much as evidence as possible from geologist, mythologist
establishing the different stages of human social evolution
Marx – primitive communication, feudalism, industrialisation, capitalism,
communism with higher technological development
o Societies that are technologically primitive, dominated by religion (seemingly)
 Evolutionist saw the seeds for evolution and will become more advanced
 Below the social surface, there were hidden relations that would drive it
towards higher stages – dual: social institutions + driven by objective,
natural forces
 Society is functioning individually of its natural force
o Science of human variation
o Science of human evolution
o Science of the force that drives the evolution
o Science of itself, the way that all societies are being driven into a society that
scientific consciousness would dominate
If the understand the laws of the forces and social evolution in addition to social institution,
better position to engineer society, to be a social reformer/conservative – basis of social
practice that could benefit the society
o
o
o
-
worldviews… but harboured the seeds of Science & Progress
Society would naturally evolve towards technologically sophisticated society
dominated by Science (i.e. modernity)
o
o
-
Take a moment to objectify humans, we can learn about what we do, the tectonic
forces of the society and reform it accordingly
Marx – critique of the utopian socialist, not in tune with the basis of human
evolution and the forces
Help museumologist to stock rooms in social evolutionist perspectives – changes in internal
architecture to support the evolutionary display
Durkheim 1895
THE RULES OF SOCIOLOGICAL METHODS
Achieve the aim of enlightenment
Five rules of sociological methods to achieve science
1. Establish the distinctive sphere of social facts to operate analytically – society
o Relative separation from everything around it
2. Explain social facts within the sphere in reference to other social facts
o Not reduce them to psychology or biology
o Eg the study of suicide, social aspects that influence the rate
o Collective phenomena
3. Establish social facts as general not unique phenomena: types of phenomena
o Not events or singularities
o E.g. types of suicide, types of solidarity
4. Treat social facts as though they are things – dissect them
o Social facts as being external to individual human actors
o Studiable natural objects without any special or protected status
o Human constantly creating things
o What we initiate socially is due to imprinting and influenced – socialisation
o What are the overarching forces
5. In order to have a science, be free of bias not a subjective mood
6. Determine natural & positive laws of human society
Epistemologically realist & methodologically positivist
1. collection of DATA AS FACTS (thing-like) from across the world
2. establishment of Laws of Social Progress and Development (Evolutionism)
 e.g. schemas of human social evolution
3. regularisation of comparison as an experimental procedure to discover binding
correlations (e.g. incest taboo is a universal)
4. ‘underlying process’ as against indigenous auto-explanation
5. By privileging the power of ‘material’ factors over the fictive weakness of ideas,
ideology, culture (functionalism; Marxism; structural functionalism; some structuralism)
6.By preserving intellectual relations with biological anthropology and socio-biology
7.By being quantitative as well as qualitative
Contemporary anthropology
3 Lines of epistemological development
1. Retention of scientific positivism (mainly in biological anthropology)
2. Abandonment of positivism for softer evidence-based scientific
criteria
-
e.g. Levi-Strauss & provisional models to be re-visited and changed where
evidence suggests) ; method is constant but analysis is provisional;
-
“the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the
humanities”
3. Abandonment of the idea that Anthropology be a Science
Critiques are:
o
o
o
o
o
Human society is too complex, too indeterminate, too much free will
Social facts are historically singular: cannot establish types and laws relating to types
Other social realities are too culturally singular to be known by any outsider
Anthropological knowledge is more a projection of Western categories onto other
societies than an objective account of other social realities
Knowledge of any kind) is less accurate than experience
CONCLUSION
a field of multiple theories
Can leave like that and be perspectival: declare your perspective and stick to it….but
don’t say that “It’s true or truer”
Or combine perspectives logically: “this illuminates more”
OR strengthen a preferred perspective with (a) more EVIDENCE; (b) more sensitive
theoretical models “this is truer for the moment”
Scientific in method, rigorous in analysis, persuasive in argument, ultimately uncertain
Further notes
●
Pure/ foundational theories
○ marxism and materialism
○ structuralism and semiotics
○ phenomenology
○ post-structuralism
●
Surge of theoretical perspectives in the 60s.
●
Came into being as ”science of man”.
●
Interested in laws of human society, and the ones that anti could disclose, and interested
in the evidence of these revealable laws.
●
Laws and evidence of human nature.
●
19th and 20th c. paradigms in anth were thought of as sciences.
○ evolutionism
○ functionalism
○ marxism
○ structuralism
○ cultural ecology
●
Unproblematic until about 1970, in which ‘science’ became problematised.
●
The Enlightenment was the crucible of anth, and social science, and social philosophy.
Prior to anth, sociology emerged as a science due to the enlightenment.
○ Thomas Hobbes
○ Emanuel Kant
○ George Friedrich Heigel
○ Karl Marx
■ Scientific approaches to humans and society.
●
Only one strand of enlightenment would guarantee it a science- the opposition to the
idea that god is the creator of human history.
○ Naturalistic crucible.
○ Objective force of nature that drives men to make history despite themselves.
■ Marx
●
Object of enlightenment thinking is the natural force that drives human history.
○ Replaced god- science.
●
Evolutionary anthropology was productive in establishing a comparative science of
human social evolution.
○ Collect as much evidence as possible from palaeontologists, archaeologists,
mythographers, in order to generate schemas of human social evolution.
○ Interested in establishing different stages.
■ Primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism,
communism (Marx and Engels).
●
All evolutionary anthropologists understood that technologically primitive societies
would still be found- seemingly have not progressed. BUT would contain within them the
seeds of further evolution, and that they would evolve towards modernity (capitalism or
socialism). Progressivism.
●
Finding within societies hidden social relationships that controlled society, despite itself.
●
Society behaving independently of its own conscious self.
●
Evolutionary anth was a science of social variation.
○ Echoed in progression of museums.
●
It was a science of itself. A science of the way in which society was evolving to a point
where scientific discovery was evident. The highest form of societal consciousness, self
awareness.
●
If you have this knowledge you’re in a much better position to be a social activist and
attempt to edit or drive society in a specified direction which could benefit society.
●
If we learn about forces that control trajectories of society, we can learn to be more in
tune with society, and implement programmes of reform that are more likely to flourish.
●
Émile Durkheim- The Rules of Sociological Method
○ If we have rules, we can establish a science of society (later he named it
sociology).
○ Methodological fundamentalist.
●
5 premises:
○ Establish a distinctive sphere of social facts
■ A field in which sociology could operate analytically. eg zoology- animals,
geology- rocks…
■ Science of society.
○ Explain social facts by reference to other social facts.
■ Mustn’t reduce social facts to psychological phenomena.
■ Can study psychological events within the field of society provided they
are referenced against other social facts- eg, what determines suicide
within society, and which aspect of suicide is studied as a part of a social
science- the rate of suicide.
■ Separation between individual phenomena, and social phenomena.
■ The study of the COLLECTIVE.
○ Need to treat social facts as things.
■ Dissect forms within society, like marriage for example, as if they are able
to be tangibly dissected.
○ Need to treat social facts as external to human actors. Influences on human
beings, but are privy to social rules outside of their own conscious direction
within everyday life.
■ Socialisation (Not his term, but he points towards it).
■ Objective and underlying forces which act upon human beings.
○ You have to be free of bias.
■ Separate yourself off apart from bias.
●
Anthropology that replaced evolutionism was heavily influenced by Durkheim’s thought.
○ Mauss was Durkheim’s nephew.
MARX AND MATERIALISM
NOTES
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Globalisation in terms of what we buy and what we sell.
○ Manifestation of a system of production, way of organising people, flows of
economies and ideas.
○ Marx was eager to analyse and critique capitalism, globalisation and related
understandings of commodity and space.
○ The beginnings of globalisation came along with colonisation.
●
Marx talks of the material conditions of life, and for him, those are what are influential to
understanding everything.
●
Marx theory develops out of a critique of what came before- he critiques idealist
philosophy of Hegel, Kant etc.
○ For idealists the most important thing is not material world or reality, but instead
ideas by which they understand it. For them, the most significant way to
understand the world was through conceptual structures of the mind.
○ Marx thought this was fundamentally a bad way of thinking. instead of mind he
was to think of material circumstances.
■ Relating to nature, resources we exploit, the way we produce things
(goods, how they’re circulated and exchanged and then consumed).
■ Marx primarily concerned with economic production.
■ In 19th century, mass production was all relevant, which influenced Marx’s
thinking.
●
For Example: In UK most of the economy is made up of services - knowledge, ideas,
skills. Part of that service sector would include higher education. We produce very little in
Britain today, most of what we consume is outsourced. Which is why in our country
communications technology becomes fundamentally important.
○ This is a good example of production and consumption creating relations
●
What is our relationship to the material world of things?
●
Fundamental to Marx, social being determines consciousness.
○ In other words, the way we relate to and think about the world as a material
place, it is necessarily limited and constrained, it’s impossible to think of the
world outside of our own boundaries.
○ The way we think is fundamentally influenced by the material character which we
come into contact with, defining consciousness.
○ Things matter- PHENOMENOLOGY.
●
Numerous contemporary material culture studies about us as consumers and the way we
understand things. This process of understanding things cannot be understood apart
from the character of the things themselves.
○ The outcome being, we are not free thinkers, we are materially constituted.
○ We are predisposed to think about the world in particular ways, because we all
share the same material world.
○ This is Marxism’s greatest contribution to anthropology - supporting material
approach to analysis
●
Take iPhone - technology that has changed the nature of the material world, we didn’t
have this technology 20 years ago etc.
○ Technology as a fundamental determinant, if technology changes then the way
we think, understand, and experience the world changes
○ Relating back to Marxism, Marx believed that technology is very important
because it allows for high capacity of production which will lead to changes in
society.
●
Marx’s understanding as abstract: layer cake model.
○ Economic base- if this changes so does the rest of society.
○ Social modes of production
○ Superstructure
■ All have to exist in equilibrium.
●
If you emphasise economy in material basis of life then you emphasise the influence of
things in our lives.
●
Marx produces analysis of thingness of things
○ Our relation is one of intrinsic alienation.
■ We no longer understand the character of things, because we are no
longer the producer, it’s all mass produced and we are consumers of
these things.
■ Knowledge of production is hidden from us as consumers, so we have
difficulty relating to these things.
■ Estranged relationship philosophically.
○ Can contrast this with small scale, non-industrial societies.
■ A notion of craft. Societies ‘studied by anthropologists’.
■ Intimate connection between person and thing.
■ Significance of net or string bags in Papua New Guinea.
■ The thing itself reflects the person who made them.
■ —> Our phone is not an intrinsic part of us, we have no
knowledge of who made it.
●
HOW DO WE OVERCOME THE DIVIDE BETWEEN PERSONS AND THINGS?
○ Personalise the alienated thing. (Zimmel) TRAGEDY OF CULTURE.
■ Establish a social relation with things, create uniqueness.
○ Shift from way things are made, to the way things are consumed.
○ Classification of poverty- absence of things is a marker for inequality.
■ Material analysis of poverty in society.
○ Stress on the way that things make people- from identity to understanding.
■
Memory as linked with personalisation of things.
■ Gift giving, remembered through the gifts we give. AGENTS of the
person that gives them.
■ They have social history, form relationships- a way of preserving time.
■ Gardens signifying relationships.
■ Getting rid of the thing as the way of cleansing self from
relationship associated with that thing.
■ “History is a kind of nightmare, it weighs down on the brain of the living.”Marx
■ The effect of time on human affect. We aren’t free, we are trapped
by relationships of the past.
■ The material connection of the past hangs down on us and weighs
us down.
●
Our lives are material lives, and it frames our entire existence. Never before have we lived
in a society with so many things.
○ Getting rid of things is a way of liberating ourselves from the social world.
●
Thing as a multidimensional object, has so many sensory qualities.
●
People often struggle to verbalise their understanding of things because of the extent to
which material things are intertwined with our lives.
○ Ford in Papua New Guinea, people saying nothing about the things they created.
■ Not about what they mean but what they do.
■ People relating to things acting unconsciously as part of routines, habits,
structures.
■ So important, no words.
○ Precisely because we don’t talk about things, indicates how essential and
fundamental they are to our lives. So embedded in who we are and how we think,
that it’s not necessary to talk about them at all.
○ Anthropologists job is to uncover what is routine, habitual, taken for granted.
■ Material culture critique is that you can’t understand social relations until
you understand material setting.
●
Marx’s theory of the dialect. Relationship between person and thing, in which the person
and thing can’t be understood apart from each other.
○ They form part of each other.
○ Entangled relationship between materiality of the thing world and sociality of the
person world.
○ Material culture instructs us on the nature of culture.
LECTURE 2
●
Historical materialism
○ Marx’s theory of historical change and development.
○ Suggests that various societies go through a series of distinct modes of
production.
○ Stressing the role of economic life in social change.
●
Dialectical materialism
○ New way of relating concepts to each other.
○ Development of abstract conceptual framework.
○ Then translation of those ideas into analysis on the ground.
○ Conflict theorist, stressed that societies were always in a fundamental state of
contradiction.
■ Feeds through on the ground into conflict between individual and groups.
●
Social theory
○ Perspective for understanding major components of society.
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Critical theory
○ Subbranch of marxism, 1930s onwards.
○ Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.
○ Wanted theoretical work to be put into practice, criticise society and change it for
the better.
●
Utopian thought
○ Good life where we can fully achieve our humanity.
○ Inequality is unacceptable.
○ Understand the reality of conditions of existence, and want to produce social
change.
●
Critique of Marx as a totalitarian thinker.
○ Need to build theory on local contexts and values, cant put umbrella theory upon
everyone.
■ Values are political, based on visions of our good life.
○ In his theoretical writings, individuals don’t matter. He’s concerned more with
what we share than with individual differences.
■ Since we’ve been socialised to think about our engagement with the
social world, we all tend to think in the same kind of way.
●
Two phases to Marx
○ Humanist (in moral sense) - saw inequality and poverty, and based work on idea
the that was fundamentally wrong.
■ BUT antihumanist in the philosophical sense in that he did not see
individual humans as rationally autonomous subjects, but rather focused
on society as a whole. Marx saw individual as product of society rather
than of self (Althusser).
■ At odds with phenomenological approaches which stress the
importance of individual subjective bodies and experiences of the
material world.
○ Scientific Marx- moves away from describing desperate world to developing his
grand view of society and working capital.
●
Anthropological theory has been focused on distinguishing between ‘dead wood’ and
‘living ideas’.
●
Materialism is the recognition of an external world, the existence of things outside the
independent of our mind. Idealists say we can only understand reality through our
consciousness of it based on experience.
●
Marxism emphasises that humans engage with that material reality through labour to
produce goods to satisfy needs.
●
Societies can be defined by a mode of production, this is how knowledge, social relations
and material reality interact to define a form of society.
○ How this is done defines a mode of production or the infrastructure of society.
●
Other religious, legal and ideological beliefs form the superstructure of society ie are not
directly involved in production.
●
Marx divided social systems into three parts. (Layer cake model).
○ Infrastructure or Economic base- forces and relations of production.
○ Superstructure 1- legal and political relations regulating society- usually in the
interest of those who are economically dominant.
○ Superstructure 2- religion, philosophy, cosmology that rationalises and explains
the economic system.
●
Hence, ideas do not shape history but history has to be understood in material terms- as
systems of production and struggles between people over the products of labour.
●
Modes of production:
○
○
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Can these be used outside of Europe?
●
Concepts of consumption and production as having an internal relationship.
○ Same dialectical relationship between subjects and objects, and facts and values.
○ Causality is not external but internal.
○ What we take to be facts depend on our values and beliefs.
●
How to capitalist societies manage to reproduce themselves?
○ Ideologies- the world turned upside down.
■ False consciousness of material conditions of life.
■ Misrepresent economy, and nature of power.
■ Represents the partial as the universal:
■ What is in the interest of a minority of society, as being in the
interests of every one of us.
■ Represents the contradictory as being coherent:
■ Social production of wealth on one hand and private
appropriation on the other.
■ Represents something that’s in flux as being permanent:
■ We should accept social change as the norm, and the world
shouldn’t have to be like this.
■ Notion that we have to accept inequality as having ‘always been
like that’.
■ Represents what is natural or necessary what is contingent- naturalisation.
■ Notions that social events are never going to change because they
are natural.
■ People accept the way that they are, so that nothing changes.
■ Eg advertising industry.
○ Think unclearly about society because we are subject to a series of ruling ideas.
●
Notion of value- use value and exchange value.
○ The value of the thing is the labour that goes into making it, and profit is unpaid
labour.
○ They never get the full value of their labour.
●
Marx believed that if we knew we could change, we would.
●
Bourdieu took up Marx’s ideas later on.
○ Concerned with both material reality in which we live, and in critiquing the notion
that the ruling ideas are dominant in society, and represent the fractured
influence of the ruling classes.
○ “Distinction” 1984- critique of notion of taste in French society.
■ What’s in good/ bad taste? Linked inherently to social class, and in power
of higher class to define these.
■ Who decides what good taste in art, culture or film is?
■ In relation to tastes for food, working classes learn to like what they can
afford- related to economic circumstances.
■ Analyses society in terms of habitus- way of thought.
■ Notion of good/bad is grounded in class divide, and ideological thoughtthings.
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Marxism forms a big part of material culture in anthropology
Globalisation as put by Marx 150 years ago
Capitalism and the globalisation through the bourgeoisie that Marx critiqued
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First globalisation came with colonisation
Material traditions of life that are fundamental to understanding everything
Marxist theory came out from a critique of idealist philosophers – for them the most
important thing is the ideas and concepts by which they understand the social world not the
material world
Material circumstances relate to the resources and the way we produce and circulate goods,
exchanged and consumed
Primarily concerned with economic structure, the making of things (19th c thinker)
o Newly created mass production and industrial processes
o Marx is always thinking about the way things are made
Modern day UK, most of the economy is made up of services
o We produce very little material good, outsource production and depend on a
knowledge economy
What is our relationship to this material world of things, where we get them how we use
them
Social beings determine consciousness, the way we think about the world has a material
base, so it is constraint and limited
o It is impossible for us to think about the way in any way we like, we are
fundamentally influenced by the material environment that we inhabit and consume
o Materials matter, they are fundamental to who we are and how we live
o Numerous contemporary studies about us as consumers and the way we
understand things
o The way we understand things cannot be separate from the characteristics of the
things we know
o Which is why Marx suggesting that people think very similarly, because we share a
lot of same materials, as we are predisposed to think in a certain way
The technology of smart phones has changed our world
o One of Marx’s key argument is that technology is one of the key elements that
determine the way we think, understand and interpret the world
o Technology determinist
Layer cake model
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Base – technology as the economic base, which can change the culture, judiciary and
politics (which are called superstructure)
o When the base changes, the superstructures will change to bring back equilibriums
Intrinsic alienation – our relationship with things, we no longer understand them as they
are all mass produced and consumed
o How they are produced, where do they come from, who designed them
o All this production and knowledge is hidden from consumer therefore we have
difficulties relating to things
Nations of craft where people know how things are made instead of mass produced, you
know the process and the people who made them – intimate connection to things
o the thing itself reflect the person who made it
personalise alienated things
o establish a social relation and create uniqueness
o consumer culture – focuses on the shift from the way things are made to the way
they are consumed and how people relate to mass produced things
classification of poverty – no things/few things, relative absence and presence is a mark of
poverty and inequality
o we can materially analyse the inequality in our society
o things make people, form part of our self-identity and understanding
idea of gift giving – a person who receives the gift will remember you through the object
they received
antiques or heirloom – inalienable, memory of family, social history
o object itself encapsulate feelings
o getting rid of things is always a way to get rid of memories
 garden and relationships – uprooted trees and removing flower to cleanse
oneself to get rid of bad memories
o history is like a nightmare and it weighs down on the living
 makes it difficult for us to think freely and differently, trapped by the
relationships of the past
 material weight of past weighs us down
o everything we do and our existence is framed by materials, material experiences
o modern days own more things than ever before
people find it difficult to verbalise about things
o Papua New Guinea – Ford went there and asked the people about the beautiful
things but no one would talk about them
o The things act in a different way, they might be so important and form a
fundamental part of your life; that does not need to be talk about
o The things are unconsciously part of everyday life – they are so embedded in our life
that we don’t talk about them
o Anthropologists realise how important our material culture is, all social, political
relations must happen in a material setting
o Relationships between people, society and things
o Dialectic relationship between person and things, cannot be thought of apart from
each other
How does the things a person use and the way they use it reflect on the person themselves,
gives a much clearer understanding of people, people and subject, things and object?
o Entangled materiality of the thing world and the sociality of the people world
o Material culture instruct us about the social culture itself
o
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Historical materialism – historical change and development (distinct modes of production)
- Abstract conceptual framework
- Society is always in a state of contradiction
- Leads through on the land into conflicts between groups
- Critical theory – the point is to change the world not just theories
o Critically analyse and suggest alternative – not just studying
- Utopian idea of the good life, where we fully achieve our humanity
- Typical of a totalitarian thinker, that everything has its place and must take its place
- Our theories are based on our values that are determined by prerequisites
- Anti-humanist – individuals don’t matter, more focused on what we share and think
similarly
- Two phases
1. Humanist Marx – seeing the inequality and problems of Victorian society
2. Scientific Marx - critical theory of society
- Dead wood v living ideas
Dialectical
- Consumption production
- People and objects have intimate and internal link and cannot be separated
- Facts and values
Materialism – existence of things that is not our mind
Idealism – understand through consciousness and experience of the material world
Marxism – people engage with the world through labour
Society can be divided by the modes of production, how knowledge, social relation are divided
to form society
Modes of production of a society – ‘not the consciousness of men that determines their
existence, their social existence determine the consciousness
Religion, ideological believes form superstructure, not directly involved in production
Infrastructure – economic base, made up of the forces and relations of production
- Legal and political relations regulating society
Ruling ideas are those of the ruling class
Sociology, religion art etc. are superstructure
Ideas do not through history, history must be understood in material terms, as struggles of
people in the process of labour
READINGS
The Mills of Inequality: A Marxian Approach - E.R Wolf, 'Social Inequality: Comparative
and Developmental Approaches', 41–57 (New York: Academic Press, 1981)
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The issue of equality and inequality has constituted the hidden Agenda of anthropology
since its beginning (Diamond, 1974)
●
Anthropology traditionally makes comparisons between societies or cultures using
theory from data
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Often synchronically, unless diachronic 'approach' - "development" "adaptation"
●
Objects this model of analysis: observations taken as realities (rather than results of
underlying processes operating at the time), no society or culture is an island
(interchanges and relationships between cultures and societies)
●
Interrelated 'cases' appeared after Europeans or Euro-Americans visited them propelled
by capitalism
●
Thus, what is observed by anthropologists in other groups of people stands in a specific
relationship to this process of expansion, which in turn responds to the workings out of a
particular structure or relational set
●
No society is pure anymore, exposed to anabolism, catabolism, organisation,
reorganisation
●
Questions whether it is possible to construct a theoretical model of the major
relationships that motivate capitalist expansion
●
Questions whether it is possible to develop theoretical constructs that would allow us to
grasp the significant elements organising populations not governed by capitalist
relationships but contacted, engulfed or re-organised by advancing capitalism
●
Difficulties with Marx's method is that it differs from what is now accepted as common
sense
●
Quantification eliminates human subjectivity
●
Marx's enquiries are by 'Wissenschaft' - a process of discovering knowledge by
beginning with what is regarded as the un-deniable aspects of human experience ( i.e.
the relation of human beings to one another and to nature)
●
Inquiry is driven by a formulation that tries to grasp the 'essence' of things toward the
explicaton of concrete phenomena "ascending from the abstract to the concrete"
●
First 2 steps in Approximation: labour process and the concept of the mode of
production
●
3rd step is to conceptualise social formation
●
4th step is the observation and interpretation of social interaction and the cultural forms
that mediate it
The Labour Process
●
Conceptualisation of the Labour process involved first the species of Homo sapiens as a
product of nature and as an actor engaged in transforming nature to our use
●
A relationship - humans are controlled by nature but control it back, asserted
(predicated) by somatic (bodily) and exosomatic (outer-bodily) characteristics of humans
●
Humans transform nature through the labour process (NOT work - labour process is a
social phenomenon)
●
Once it became possible to imaging labour as a whole, it was then possible to visualise
how human beings formed organised pluralities that assign labour to the technical
processes of work and apportion the products of social labour amongst themselves
●
The description and analysis of the social relations that govern the deployment of social
labour and the allocation of the social product that this labour creates
●
The labourer is always someone that stands in relationship to others, as kin, serf, slave
etc.
●
The controllers of social labour are not identical with the implementers of labour - they
are actors in a socially determined and implemented scheme
●
Labour is always social, so meaning and information is always social and carried in social
ideation
●
Ideations follows directionally along lines of force generated by the mode in the
movement of elements
●
Ideation encounters internal and external limits (it's 'horizon') - creates the phenomenon
of 'fetishism' and 'mystification'
●
Humans emerging from nature, humans transformation of nature through social labour
and its transformation of its own nature are historical processes in the sense of changing
relationships (have changed in the past, are changing and will change)
The Mode of Production
●
Each major way human beings organise their social relations of production as well as
processes of work constitutes a mode of production
●
Different modes of production: an original, primitive, communitarian mode; a Germanic
mode; a Slavonic mode; a peasant mode; a feudal mode; an Asiatic (relating to Asia)
mode; and a capitalist mode
●
Not all based on the same criteria, some may have never constituted primary modes in
their own right, only accessory modes
The Capitalist Mode
●
For Marx, this mode comes into being when monetary wealth is enabled to buy labour
power
●
Not an inherent attribute of wealth, develops historically and requires the installation of
certain prerequisites
●
Labour power is not a commodity to offered for sale, it is a form of human energy
●
For labour power to be offered for sale, the tie between producers and the means of
production have to be severed i.e. the holders of wealth must be able to acquire the
means of production and deny access to all who want to operate them
●
People who are denied access to the means of production must come to the holders of
wealth and beg for permission to operate these means of production, in return for wages
which is what they will need to sustain themselves
●
In the capitalist mode production determines distribution
●
Those who restrict the mode of production can also restrict the commodities produced
●
Those who labour to produce the commodities must buy them back from the owners,
means of production circulate only among those with capital to acquire them
●
The way in which the mode commits social labour to the transformation of nature also
governs the way the resources used and obtained are distributed among producers and
non-producers
●
The holders of wealth would have no need to employ people if they only worked enough
to cover their own subsistence, however, in a day they produce a surplus
●
The surplus belongs to the individual or corporation whose means of production the
workers have put into operation
●
The greater the surplus the greater the rate of profit
●
2 ways in which the surplus can be increased: low wages (lowest point that is
energetically or socially feasible) & to raise the output of workers, increases in
productivity requires improvement of technology
●
These produce relentless pressures, spurring capitalists to ever increased accumulation
of capital
●
Greater technological productivity allows to undersell and out-compete other
competitors who fail to invest in new technology or who try to compete by placing more
burden on labour
●
Capitalist mode shows 3 intertwined characteristics: capitalists control means of
production, labourers are denied independent access to means of production and must
sell their labour power to the capitalists & the process of maximising surplus entails
ceaseless accumulation - must be understood synchronically and historically
●
Wealth is not capital until it controls the means of production, buys labour power,
expands and begins to raise surpluses by intensifying productivity
●
To accomplish this capitalism must lay hold of production
●
One major inequality: those who hold the means of production and those who must seek
employment
●
Separates the working force into survivors and not
The Tributary Mode
●
The capitalist mode encountered other societies in the course of its expansion
●
Social labour is mobilised and committed to the transformation of nature through the
exercise of power and domination through politics
●
The development of social labour is, thus, a function of the position of political power
●
Different positions of power: one power firmly concentrated in the hands of a ruling elite
at the apex or power is held by a large local authority and the rule at the apex is weak,
power operates on a continuum of these
●
The rulers at the apex will be strongest when they control a strategic process of
production e.g. water, and an element of coercion e.g. military
●
Rulers will be able to deploy their own tribute gatherers without need of assitence of
local authorities, thus, weakening the grip of local son resources and on primary
producers of surplus
●
This will render them dependent on revenues tended by the rulers
●
The Rulers can also induce competition between locals for privileged positions at the
source of revenue
●
Conversely, central power holders will be weak where strategic elements of production
as well as means of coercion are in the hands of local surplus takers
●
Locals can intercept the flow of tribute to the centre, strengthen grip over land etc.
●
Can allow for local or regional alliances, yet these are often directed not only against the
centre but against other regions, therefore there are factional struggles that ramify
throughout the countryside, thus weakening power
●
These two situations correspond with the Marxian concepts of the 'Asiatic' and 'Feudal'
modes of production
●
However, has been re-named as the 'tributary mode of production' as they are
interlinked not separate, and creates an idea of Western freedom and Eastern despotism
(the exercise of absolute power, in a cruel and oppressive way)
●
The ideological mode that often parallels the tributary mode is often a hierarchical
representation of the cosmos, dominant supernatural order e.g. great chain of being
●
Problems of public power and then transformed into a problem of private morality
Kin- Ordered Mode
●
Kinship involves symbolic constructs that place actors into social relationships which
permit them to call on shares of social labour from others so as to affect the necessary
transformations of nature
●
Populations differ in the degree to which they rely on symbolic constructs of the
narrower sphere (e.g. marriage) in contrast to the wider sphere
●
Kinship defines who has access to whom, and involves distinctions among groups in
relation to some 'estate'
●
Define who has access to whose share of social labour against other possible claimants
●
Why descent rather than locality?
●
Where symbolic constructs of kinship are 'extended' - likely to find that the relations
between the producers of social labour and the transformers of nature are structured
monopolistically
●
'Networking' - turning marriages into alliances etc. is political
●
Symbolic aspects of kinship allow for the unequal distribution of managerial roles
●
Feed on external opposition in relation to other groups e.g. men & women and gender
roles and women's loss of status, elders & juniors and the percistence of Gerontocratic
tendencies, settlers & newcomers
●
The kin-ordered mode can only regenerate itself in the absence of any mechanism that
can mobilise social labour due to the chaos of oppositions apart from particulate
relationships
●
Societies in the kin-ordered mdoe are not egalitarian, they merely attempt to cope with
conflicts by atomising then, by generalising and displacing them onto the supernatural,
or by breakup and fission
●
They lack the means of holding society together by internal and external violence that
ensures the continuity of class domination and contradictions
These 3 modes do not operate separately, particular societies embody and combine these
modes in historically or geographically distinctive forms, they do so in interaction or conflict
with one another
STRUCTURALISM, SEMIOTICS AND
MATERIAL CULTURE
NOTES
De Sassure – Levi-Strauss
 Levi was anti-humanist – individuals do not matter
 Underlying principles of the world is more important – they explain the surface
complexity of everyday life
 Get rid of the contagion of individual diversity – focus on collectivity
 Came out of Sassure – most important/first structural linguist – theoretical
framework using the structure of language (limited perspective, what does language
have connection with materials
o Before: To look at language historically – look at the root of meanings of
words to explain the present





Sassure – in order to understand languages, get rid of history
o Look at the speech patterns of individuals
Why we have language – communication system – how does it work
o Two fundamental parts: langue (structure and pattern that permitted
individuals to communicate) + parole (everyday speech)
o Must focus on langue
Sassure claimed it is a sign system (signifiers + signified; word + the thing you think
of)
o There are material signified, or imagery, ideas and time etc.
o These signifiers are contingent, coincident
o Relational system of different – the reason why pig is pig is because it is not
horse, rat or cat – it can be anything, but due to historical coincidence we use
what we use
o These relational differences form a linguistic system
o Has to have certain structure and pattern – grammar also part of the system
of language
o Governed by a series of rules – we use words (signifiers) in certain order and
in certain relationships with each other
o Individuals cannot modify languages too much – risk becoming difficult to
understand
o Individual speech is governed by the underlying Structural systematic
difference
o We don’t understand because of sounds but through the system
Social relations viewed in turns of language – the way people interact are language
like
o Don’t occur on the surface, but the system determines what does occur on
the surface
People do not think about nouns, pronouns, verbs while they speak – it is an
unconscious process
o Language use is an unconscious system
o Structuralism – is the structural unconscious that underlies what we say/do




Levi – attempt to get out the ‘unconscious’ in culture, formulate structural principles
that governs our doings and actions and speech
o Profound philosophical – important is not what we see, but what we don’t
see
o Collectively shared – when we see regularities in kinship or material forms,
they are all governed by deep-seated structural system
Different to the imperialist thought of Durkheim who focuses on observation
o Humans in the material world is like a part of the jigsaw puzzle, and you fit
together it piece by piece
o Structuralist suggest there is no end to the pieces of the puzzle
Example: watching thousands of football games vs learning the rules and principles
Transfer the way Sassure studies language to Levi-Strauss’ study of people

Levi-Strauss: The Savage Mind – solve the problem of Totemism (a puzzle for
generations of anthropologists)

Australian Aboriginals take on an animal
- Early anthropologists saw it as primitive, people seeing themselves as animals
- Second wave anthropologists: animals are good to eat, some are important
economically, spiritually (good qualities) – relationship between people and
animals (practical reasoning)
- Problem: some totems have mosquitoes, functional logic does not work here

Levi Strauss: Clan A: eagle, Clan B: crow (relational system of difference)
o Clan A is related to the eagle, Clan B is related to the crow – signifiers of
social difference
o Has practical effects – You can marry someone of one clan not the other
o Signifies social structural differences
o Effect of this name system – signify social differences
o Visible: names differences, invisible: social rules
o An example of savage thought – eagle flies high in the sky, bird of prey; crow
hops on the ground eating dead
 It is related to different qualities, classifying the world, improvisation
o Gricoleur – do it yourself person
 Savage mind: make a tool of classification and rule with what they had
 Contrast that with the thought of the engineer in our own society,
what reigns in abstract thought not concrete thoughts, it governs the
way in which we think of the world
o Two ways of thinking of modern society and small-scale communities
 There isn’t absolute opposition, savage thought is a part of our own
culture: when you tell the time, you think of the face of the clock
 We think about things in human terms – tables have legs
 It colours the way we think about the world
 Example: up and down as feelings, language used to describe language
in anthropomorphic ways – human terms

Semiology: the science of science
o Influenced all social sciences – with analysis of particular types of sciences

System of taboo: always people you cannot marry, cross-cultural, global rules that
underlies the societal rules
●
Link between de Saussure/ Saussurian linguistics, and Lévi-Strauss structuralism.
●
Lévi-Strauss anti-humanist.
○ Believed that individuals and their doings didn’t matter- what mattered was
finding the underlying principles of the world.
○ These principles explained the complexities of everyday life.
○ Structuralism simplifies the world, gets rid of contagion of human diversity to
concentrate instead on collectivist practice.
●
Saussure:Most significant structural linguist. Saussure predicted that one day his mode of
linguistics would develop into a ‘science of signs’ - SEMIOLOGY.
○ Structuralism and semiotics is a theoretical framework that uses the analogy of
language so that we can understand society and culture by linguistic analogy.
○ Could be a limited perspective.
○ Course in General Linguistics- 1916.
■ Developed critique of old established way to understand language to look
at languages historically- looking at roots of meanings of words to
understand the present way people spoke. Etymology.
■ Saussure- in order to understand language you have to get rid of history.
Also can’t understand language by looking at speech patterns of
individuals.
●
Language is a system of a communication- and how does this system work?
○ Langue, and parole.
○ Parole is the speech, and langue is the system which structures the connection of
speech (parole) to meaning.
○ In order to understand language, we have to focus on langue.
○ Language is a sign system- relationship between signs.
■ Signifiers and signified- only thing which connects signifiers and signified
is history and culture.
■ Can have abstract signifiers like space and time and emotion.
■ Language is a “system of difference” based on the relational qualities of
the signs. It is a matter of reduction- pig is pig because it is not dog or
cat. Negative.
■ Grammatical structure also makes up the system.
■ This fitting together forms a linguistic system with we use in order to
communicate with each other.
■ Rule bound. But UNCONSCIOUS rules. Governed by underlying structure
of systematic difference.
■ Use of language therefore an unconscious process, understood in terms
of the underlying structure
○ If we translate the analogy of language into social relations, the important aspect
is not the focus on the material qualities of social relations, forms that we seebut instead what we can’t see, the underlying structure of social relations, why
people do what they do, not what they are doing.
■ Structuralism aims to look at the principles that govern. Attempt to get at
the unconscious culture.
■ Structuralism applies logic that structure of society is not descriptive (per
structural- functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown) but instead EXPLANATORY.
●
Structuralism believes that the empiricist school of thought is misguided in the sense
that there is no end to study- no set fact describing the puzzle of the universe.
Structuralism just looks at underlying rules helping build an ever changing picture of
society- doesn’t have to have an empirical end.
○ Football analogy- movements of players are trivial if you don’t understand the
rules of football. Can watch football manifestations forever, unless you
understand rules of football you will not come to conclusion.
●
Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind- tries to understand totemism.
○ Early Anthropologists- Took the statements literally, viewed totemism as a
misunderstanding.
○ Functionalists- practical relationship between people and animals- animals are
good to eat. This practical reasoning ran into lots of empirical problems.
■ E.g. mosquito as a totem - mosquitoes are not good to eat!
○ Structuralist solution- relational system of difference. Depends on notion of
intellectual determinism. Our minds all work in same ways.
■ Clan A: Eagle Clan B: Crow
■ They have similarities, but the animal kingdom provides ready
made signifiers of social difference. If the perceptible structure of
kinship groups is the same, the naming of groups provides
individuality.
■ Explanation by the visible (the animal) of the invisible (relationship
between signified)
■ Why do we get the opposition between Eagle and Crow.
■ Eagle flies high, bird of prey; Crow is a carrion-eater, hops along
the ground.
■ Savage thought is a way of classifying the world, depending on
improvisation and resulting abstractions to govern/place oneself
in the world despite limited conjectural toolsets = bricolage
○ Bricoleur
■ Do it yourself person. Making do with what you’ve got to create a system
to place yourself in the world.
■ Contrasts with the thought of the engineer in society.
■ 2 different kinds of human relation at work, both with the “savage world”
embedded in their structures.
■ Small-scale & indigenous
■ Modern & industrial
■ Isn’t an absolute opposition- modern culture can hold savage
thought as well, we just don’t recognise it.
○ For example, anthropomorphisation of things - “leg of
table”.
○ “Feeling down/up” linked to emotion.
○ rendering weather conditions with human qualities
○ Runs alongside our mode of thought.
●
The Elementary Structures of Kinship- understanding who relates to who etc.
○ Need to analyse systems of kinship in a structural way- ie principle of taboo.
■ In all societies there are always classes of people you should not marry.
Underlying system of kinship.
●
Animism: “Animals are not important because they are good to eat but because they are
good to think through.”
○ Essence of structuralist semiotic approach.
●
Myth and Mythology as an area for analysis because myths are fantastic stories- almost
anything can happen in a myth. Often about origins of people, the world, society. Have
the purpose of trying to explain the world as part of a cosmological and social system.
○ LS takes 800 myths which have been collected by ethnographers in south and
north America, and tries to subject these myths to a structural analysis. The way
he does this shows us clearly the nature of his thought.
○ If anything can happen in a myth, it seems like myth might be explained by the
ramifications of the uncontrolled human mind.
■ Underneath the chaos of all the different stories, however, there is an
underlying structure- the langue of myth.
■ Can contrast the grammar of myth with an individual mythic story- an act
of parole.
○ The fact that you can take myths across the entire N+S American continent
shows how cultural variability is unimportant, instead the notion that human
thought is digital/ binary thought across cultures.
■ Humans tend to think of the world in binary oppositions, and these
oppositions form part of underlying structure of a mythic story: up/down,
inside/outside, sun/moon etc.
■ For LS these binaries are part of human culture in general, and we can
start to understand human thought itself in this manner.
■ Claims that the human mind is like some enormous “potato chipper”- all
different shapes of potato in one end, and out the other end come
standardised pieces of potato. Shows over and over again how these
binaries structure stories, and myth.
■ Becomes completely irrelevant what story the myth is tellingcontent is unimportant.
■ Who is telling the myth is also unimportant.
■ Previously anthropologists (in Melanesia) claimed that content and
delivery is a mode of “lethal speech”, a way of telling how the
world works. In the spirit of structuralism, LS believed that myth is
not descriptive but explanatory.
■ Intellectual determinism.
○ Two binary structures to our thought- man/woman; nature/culture.
■ For example- cooking.
■ Transformation of the raw into the cooked- no human societies
that don’t cook/ transform raw food stuffs into food that is eaten
and ingested.
■ A process that has transformative capacity- to do with underlying
nature-culture opposition.
■ Developed in a booked called The Raw and the Cooked the
famous culinary triangle.
■ What these modes of cooking share in common are different ways
to culturally transform stuff, along different axis.
■ Mashed potato classic case of cultural transformation.
○ What LS tries to demonstrate in his books about myth is that they are indeed
structured.
○ Human being in fact, don’t think freely. We are constrained by the nature of
human mind itself.
■ Relies on form of biological reductionism- human brain has binary
structure in terms of left and right halves, so part of our DNA is to think in
binary.
●
LS as cultural universalist. Different to cultural relativists.
○ Critics of LS suggest there are indeed structure and rules to human principles, but
if we want to understand culture we shouldn’t expect these underlying grammars
to structure to be universal everywhere- as those will be culturally and historically
developed & vary according to time and population.
●
LS suggested another binary- of “hot” and “cold” societies. Hot where everything is
changing all the time, and cold where there is usually stasis. Furthermore- we can never
reach an understanding of a hot society, like our own.
○ Cold societies refer to small-scale, “primitive” societies; not much changes
○ LS suggested that as anthropologists, by decoding structure of society we can
understand the “other” as objective, scientific facts, but not ourselves. The “queen
of the sciences”.
○ Again, this depends on the binary being accepted, and also notion that ‘we’ have
history, and other societies do not.
●
CRITICISM from Mary Douglas. Rejects LS theory of universalism.
○ Agreed there are rules and principles that underlie social practices (just not
universal) that govern those practices in certain ways.
○ Touched on theory of cooking. Rules governing eating habits- but culturally
defined rules nonetheless.
■ What you eat depends on who you are eating with- different kinds of
food appropriate for different social locations.
■ Food relates intimately to the days of the week and times of the day.
■ Rules of combination- certain kinds of foods that can vary from one
culture to another are appropriate to combine with one another.
■ Succession of dishes, can have fewer or more courses to a meal, but there
will be a set order to those courses, and different kinds of food that are
appropriate to specific times during a meal.
○ Proves that there is structure and cultural code, food as a sign system that we can
decode for the messages that form part of it. Food part of our habit and routine.
●
What we want to do as social scientists is to find the underlying rules and principles, to
‘crack the cultural code’.
●
Another famous academic that took up LS’s ideas is Roland Barthes.
○ Writes series of books involving semiotic analysis of French culture.
○ Concerned with using langue and parole to examine French daily lives.
○ In concern with food- look at a restaurant menu.
■ Organised in terms of rules and principles of cultural combination, in a
temporal system.
■ Menu as not a list, but a communication system.
○ There is a furniture system in our culture.
■ Furniture in our homes in terms of rules and principles, ordering system
based on what is and isn’t acceptable- depending on rooms or such like.
○ Fashion system.
■ Distinguishes between how any individual may dress (parole) and the
underlying principles of fashion or clothing.
●
Following Barthes, notion of decoding society became incredibly popular in social
sciences.
○ Not only can we decode material world, but we can decode bodily gesture or
posture.
■ Famous article about Richard Nixon, lying about watergate. Semiotics of
lying. Strip of photos of Nixon’s face as he addresses room.
○ Fashionable style of analysis.
○ Has immense influence on how social sciences think about the world for a long
time. Semiotics is now so run of the mill, it’s become integral to the study of
anthropology.
●
Charles Pierce analysis of langue and parole that has become important.
○ Distinction between three types of signs.
■ Iconic
■ Things that look like what they portray. I.e. picture of a pig,
portrays a pig.
■ Indexical
■ Sign that is a true of something else. I.e. footsteps on the beach,
smoke as index of fire.
■ Symbolic
■ Arbitrary relationship between sign and signified I.e. Crown
signifying a King or Queen.
■ Could suggest that Saussure and LS are always talking of symbolic
signs.
○ Changes our study of sign systems, what sign are we deal thing with?
●
In our relation to material forms there have been two main ways to analyse culture
structurally.
○ Adrienne Kaeppler analysing dancing ceremony. Trying to deduce underlying
series of principles, the drinking of cava, dance steps, and music. Principles
governing society that link together to form a whole- one mode of analysis.
○ Second mode of analysis- trying to look in-depth at particular material
thoughts/culture. Formal analysis of design order--of pots, etc.--that help us
arrive at rules etc.
■ Problem with these notions is that they become very abstract and perhaps
ultimately meaningless.
●
Can suggest that LS ideas are just a research methodology. Can look at anything in terms
of binaries- rooms, houses, gardens etc, to find underlying rules.
○ Gardens- front and back, public and private, flowers and vegetables, male and
female.
○ At the end of the day do these binaries really tell us anything at all?
○ In one way of thinking they just ‘redescribe’ the world, in terms of binaries.
■ If you don’t understand something, then it is interesting to look at
binaries to clarify.
■ World doesn’t necessarily work in terms of binary- many shades in
between. BUT contrary to this, is that the world is so complex that it is
transparent to us, by placing the world in binaries is simplifying.
●
Something satisfying about being a structuralist- it always works, can always fit
something into a structural mode of thought and find a pattern.
○ PROBLEM with this: are the patterns and rules themselves, products of the
structuralist mode of thought? Do we force images that don’t exist by using
structuralism?
●
Before 1970s, it was about the function of aspects of culture etc… and post structuralism,
culture is a code to be searched for.
READINGS
Tilley, C. (1991) 'Locating a grammar' Material Culture and text: the art of ambiguity pp.
16-42 London: Routledge
●
Language is held to be the distinguishing feature of humanity
●
Material culture, speech and writing all share the same qualities, speech is more
direct
●
Material culture does not communicate meaning content in the same way as
speech or the phonetic script
●
Saussure (1966) [1916] introduces crucial distinction between language and
speech
●
'Langue' is collectively shared, social institution with a systemic quality, a set of
norms shared and participated in by individuals who can neither create nor
modify it by themselves, governed by rules
●
'Parole' individual act in which codes provided by language are used to express
something
●
Neither can exist without the other
●
Language has no concrete existence in an act of speech, exists in a community of
speakers, unconscious
●
Langue and Parole can be applied to understand non-verbal communicative
practices
●
Barthes - garment systems, food systems and furniture
●
Fashion - langue is the oppositions of pieces of garment e.g. shirt, trouser,
variations in which entail a large change in meaning and rules by which items of
clothing are associated on the body or in layers. Speech would involve different
details of individual fabrication of pieces, degree of cleanliness
●
Food - 'language' made up of exclusion or taboos, opposition of units
(sweet/savoury), simultaneous levels of association at the level of the dish
(sausages & potatoes rather than custard), temporal levels of association (fish
course, followed by meat course). 'Alimentary speech' consists of all the personal
or family variations of food preparation and association
●
Also menu - structure of food system on one item
●
Douglas (1975) developed this, 'heavy' & 'light' food, dishes, meals and snakcs
appropriate at certain times of day
●
Speech and Writing signify, material culture constitutes signification in the same
way
●
Saussure proposed that the linguistic sign relation between signifier and
signified, form a union in the sign
●
Material signs can be classified into gestural, iconic, graphic and in terms of their
relations to functional items
●
Levi-Strauss defined the methodology involved as: define the phenomenon
under study as a relation between two or more terms, real or supposed; construct
a table of possible permutations between these terms; take this table as general
object of analysis which at this level only, can yield necessary connections, the
empirical phenomenon considered at the beginning being only one possible
combination among others, the complete system of which must be reconstructed
beforehand
●
Metaphoric or paradigmatic relationships between signs we assert similarity
between a group of signs
●
Meaning is created by one part of the chain building on another in a definite
spacial order involving linearity
●
E.g. grave goods - paradigmatic series would be made up of variations in the
elements (types of pots, axes, beads etc.), Syntagmatic chain would consist of
sequences of these at the level of the grave.
●
Uses Namforsen carvings as a way of breaking down, translating and finding
grammar (i.e. the Langue and Parole)
AQCI Tilley (1990) Levi-Strauss: Structuralism and Beyond
QUOTATION
“In order to understand social relations, or any other aspect of human culture, it is necessary to probe beneath the
observable to a more fundamental ontological level which can be shown to generate what the anthropologist or
sociologist actually sees”
ARGUMENT
Tilly engages with Levi-Strauss’s thought on structuralism.Structuralism is explained as a non-empirical observation
method of analysis which focuses on human culture and social relations; used to give meaning to empirically
observable socio-cultural phenomena by observing its underlying system (structure).
Levi-Strauss has worked in three main areas: kinship, totemism, classificatory systems, and myth in small-scale and
non-industrial societies.
L-S also understands different structures as consisting of sets of binary oppositions (i.e. nature/nature,
man/woman, east/west, savage/civilized), which form the basic principle of (structural) organization.
Example of cooking as code which structures culture, analytical ‘culinary triangle’. As such, Levi-Strauss focuses on
overarching structures which do not take into account individual entities or cultural specificities. The individuals in
a society, or the signs (words) in a language, are therefore not relevant, it is the structure which ties them together
which is important.
L-S borrows de Sassure’s linguistic distinction between the ‘langue’ (system/structure which allows
communication) and ‘parole’ (realisation of langue, every day speach) to explain the structure of myth. Myths can
only have empirical existence in their ‘versions’: one unit in an overall mythic system is understood as an
incomplete fragment, but also a forming part the mythic system. An individual telling a myth is an act of parole,
whereas the myth itself is its langue. The mythic system forms the ‘language of the myth’, and every myth is either
a transformation of previous myth and/or a translation from a neighbouring foreign culture.
Social relations, like linguistics, are loaded with signification, symbolism and meaning - it is a ‘verbal, and nonverbal, communication system’.
Critiques include: Ethnocentrism - Separation of ‘savage thought’ and scientific rationality; claims objectivity and
truth, when knowledge cannot be separated from values (ie history).
Hermeneutics - critiqued for a lack of self-reflectivity, structuralism puts everything at a distance, and lacks
interpretation and engagement
Structuralism provides insights to better understand the ideological nature of material culture (ie: architecture)
Namforsen prehistory rock carvings - it is necessary to consider socioeconomic context; alliance relationships,
exchange, power and ideology in the context of this hunter gatherer society; and text and meaning creation
QUESTION
1) Levi-Strauss understands binaries as central to the understanding structuralism, and even claims that
having a binary way of seeing the world is ingrained in human biology. However, could this be considered
ethnocentric? Some cultures to not have this same binary understanding of the world (false dichotomies);
example: Nakaya tribe do not have a distinct separation between nature and culture; the Navajo in
Southwest US do not see a binary distinction of men and women
2) Does solely analysing the overarching structure of a society necessarily correctly represent it? Should we
also be looking at specificities, such as individuals who do not fit into the structure?
CONTEMPORARY CONNECTION
Rituals such as weddings or funerals may differ depending on the culture, but are all related by a same social
structure.
TEXTUAL CONNECTION
Radcliffe-Brown’s structural-functionalist view of kinship (kinship as a structure)
IMPLICATIONS
Structuralism can enable us visualise the underlying structures of cultures and society, which influence human
behaviours and interactions. It could provide us with the correct analytical focus on contemporary or historical
issues as to better understand why things are the way they are - and what we can do about them. Ie:
understanding social structures which influence systemic racial inequalities/ colonialism. With this perspective, we
are lead to better address such issues, rather than having an individualistic approach.
Structuralist, post-structuralist and semiotic archaeologies – Hodder, Hutson
Structuralist archaeology
Structuralism is not a coherent approach because it covers such a great variety of work
Some structuralist approaches in archaeology could fit within processual archaeology
Systems Theory and Structuralism
● Both concerned with ‘systemness’/inter-relationships between entities that allows us to
organise parts into a whole system
● Both claim to involve rigorous analysis of observable data
Levi-Strauss’ work perceived to be unscientific
Formal analysis: describes real world with scientific rigour rather than overall inner essences
● But the scientific rigour of formal analysis is an illusion, because interpretation of
symbols depends on subjective perception; one cannot be objective
Chomsky: ‘rule-governed creativity’
Structures are identified and compared in archaeology without enough consideration towards
meaning content
● Meaning does become important if the symbols cannot signify each other through their
differences
Structuralism assumes too much that there is relationship between symbols and worldviews
‘All structuralist analysis includes some imposition of meaning content’
‘Structures are the media for action in the world’ through the control and manipulation of
objects to alter the meaning they signify
People can change structure (Sassure and Levi-Strauss leave no room for this agency)
Structuralism has problematic ahistorical tendencies – not all signs are arbitrary, they can be
both arbitrary (ahistorical) and non-arbitrary (historical); Pierce’s index, icon, symbol
‘Semiotics contains a theory of how signs are related to material objects and the experience and
behaviour of sign users.’
Structuralism cannot continue to exist as a neat system of dichotomies – history and
interpretation change the meaning through time
Meaning has two temporalities – fleeting when embodied, long-lasting when inscribed
The meaning of structures in the past is unstable:
1. Meaning has an endless chain of signification
2. Actions have multiple interpretations
Structures need not be universal
Faris: material culture does not represent social relations, it represents a way of viewing social
relations
PHENOMENOLOGY
NOTES
Simore de Beauvior
 Looking at society through the prism of social relations, you can expand and understand the
larger picture of society



Tilley’s study of Swedish and English gardens and gardeners: gifting, social relations of
labour, gender, hierarchy, privacy or lack of privacy; compare Swedish and English gardens
and how differences reflect on the differences in society
o Average English house with a garden with enormous fences – privacy and secrecy
(highly individualistic society – capitalism)
o Swedish rarely had big garden fences – the neighbours will not think well of them as
if they do not want to be part of the wider society and antisocial
Take some small area of life and use it to reflect on the wider society and issues
You could argue all anthropologists are phenomenologists in essence
It is a descriptive science, the more faithfully you describe things, the better your understanding
will be – phenomenology
- There are many ways to describe even the simplest acts
- describing things is the way to understand the world
Description and analysis – anthropology sometimes sees description as a lower form of studying
(phenomenologists say that the analysis is in the description and it is a form of analysis)


Describe things as you experience them – emphasises the subjectivity of our understanding
of the world (we do not stand outside of the society when we describe and analyse it)
Participant observation – you are there and you gain knowledge from observing other
people
o Phenomenology is about a fusion of the self and the other, being part of the world
you are trying to understand
Phenomenology rises from a critique – Husserl
 Criticised the way knowledge was obtained in natural sciences
 Sociologists like to think that if they followed the method, they could be a social science
 Husserl opposed it, natural sciences are full of prejudices, look at the world in a limited way
– making whole series of assumptions about what is important and what is not
 Objective + subjective knowledge – what you want is objective, run away from subjective
(cutting yourself out of the search)
 Never cut yourself out, because you will not be able to be there, if you are not there, you can
never understand what is happening
 We cannot make this simplistic division of objective and subjective
 Meant certain types of knowledge were more valued than others
 Subjective qualities are as valuable – we need to escape the prejudicial view
 We need to return to the way we as human beings experience the world, our shared way of
perceiving the world that are fundamentally important
Husserl is a phenomenological idealist – there is experiences based on everything (race, age,
gender, sexuality – multiple ways of experiencing the world)
Sartre – existentialist – personal experience and perspective
Merlew Ponty – emphasises body not just the mind (human experience of the world stems from
our body, we are immersed in the world part of it)
- Our experience extends out from our body – embodiment (understanding the world from
our own body)
- How we see, hear, smell, taste the world from our embodiment perspective (all forms of
interaction)
- Must take into account all these human types of experience, through our situatedness of the
world
Kinaesthetic – our posture, bodily experience of the world
Require a certain degree of self-awareness – our presence affects how we are going to
understand, we are changing the social situation by participating in it
Ponty – a split between mind and body (Levi Strauss)
- Our mind in embodied
- Why I think as I do have a great deal to do with the kind of body we have, characteristically
human way of thinking
-
In one basic sense, we all share a similar body despite race and sex etc. (always things that
are behind and in front, far and near, up and down)
o Binary perception of the world – structuralism
o Affects our understanding
Computer’s experience is not embodied – disembodied mind of a primitive sort
- Philosophically impossible, they cannot think like us because they don’t have a body like us
Human perception – gain knowledge this way
- Some anthropologists say that certain cultures have one sense that is emphasised, such as
some claim vision is the most important in the contemporary
- You can only say that one sense is taken for granted more than the others
- We find it easier to describe one sense vision, over the others which we find harder because
of lack of vocabulary
What is the difference between anthropology and fiction – they are better at evoking the world
The five senses have an interesting relation with our body
- Visual – the most far-reaching
- Then sound
- Smell
- Touch
- And taste
 Increasing intimacy
 To touch things, you have to be in touch
 Synesthetic experience of the world – crossing over of our senses, we use all of them
●
Simone de Beauvoir, partner of Sartre who worked with Heidegger, who was a student of
Husserl, early pioneers of phenomenology.
●
Phenomenology- looking at society and culture through the small prism of social and
material relationships- and once you look at the small, you can understand the large
picture.
●
Tilley- Swedish and English gardens.
○ Can be regarded as a small prism where much larger issues of gender and
society, nature and culture, privacy or lack of, social division of labour, gifting, can
be seen going on in a small material sphere.
●
All good anthropology should use the small scale to reflect on broader issues.
○ So is all anthropology phenomenological in character?
●
Phenomenology as a descriptive science, a description of phenomena.
○ If you can describe things, the better your understanding will be.
○ Describing is re-describing. ????
○ Distinction made between description and analysis- often in social sciences
description is considered low level activity. Hierarchy of knowledge.
■ But phenomenologists deny that is the case. Description cannot be
separated from analysis, analysis is within rather than outside description.
○ How does this description start?
■ You describe things as you experience them.
■ Based on subjectivity of our world experience.
■ Arise from immersion of people in the world.
■ We are not some kind of god, we are part of the process of involving.
■ Example shown through anthropology: participant observation.
You cannot be separated from the world you study- both
participant and observer.
■ Fusion of self and other.
●
Phenomenology arises from a critique.
○ First person to develop this was Husserl. Criticised the way knowledge was
obtained in natural sciences, and how that was adopted by disciplines such as
sociology. Opposed the notion of scientific study. Natural sciences are full of
prejudices.
■ Limitation of thought- they make a series of assumptions of what is and
isn’t important. Difference between objective knowledge, and subjective
knowledge. Ideally you go beyond yourself- values beliefs etc- to cut
yourself out of the world in order to obtain objective truth. Big problem
for Husserl.
■ Difference between subjectivity and objectivity, meant that certain
types of definitions were favoured- ie height or width over senses,
or the knowledge obtained by thinking about people or
relationships.
■ Phenomenological position attempts to undermine opposition between
subject and object, self and other- in essence suggests that study is a
dialectic between subjective impressions and objective things.
■ Rather than starting off with prejudicial issues found in natural
science, we need to reconnect with the material world. Senses are
fundamental to understanding. What kind of description should
we prioritise? Husserl says that the social world of things is of
fundamental importance.
■ We need to return to the things themselves, and the way we as
human beings experience in human qualities and in human terms.
●
Husserl known as phenomenological idealist. What was important to him was the human
mind, the way we experience things mentally. Believed there were universal ways of
experiencing things (Universalist)- which don’t actually exist (ie experienced based on
age, class, race, sexuality).
○ As anthropologists, we want to capture rich variety of experiential relationships.
Particularist.
○ Split between mind and body (Cartesian dualism). Transcendental ego.
○ Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Heidegger all broke up the universalist notion.
■ Sartre- existentialist, personal perspective on experiencing the world.
Emphasises mind.
■ Merleau-Ponty- emphasises body, our human experience of the world
stems from our bodies. We are immersed in and part of what we try to
understand. Our experience in world extends out from our bodiesembodiment.
■ No split between mind and body- intrinsically intertwined.
■ Human modes of sensing- senses are the way we gain access to the
world.
■ 6th sense - kinaesthetic (muscular relationality) such as posture—
could be linked to Bourdieu habitus.
■ Conditions inside and outside body are always changing.
●
Phenomenological perspective stresses human perception.
○ Senses in order of their reach on others but in reverse order of their closeness to
us:
■ Vision
■ Sound
■ Smell
■ Touch
■ Taste
○ Senses emphasised in different cultures.
■ Vision emphasised in contemporary western culture- in another it’s sound.
○ However there is no hierarchy of senses- our vocabulary can be explanatory of
one sense more than another, some may be harder to talk about, but no one
sense is more important than another.
■ Our language can evoke the harder to describe senses through everyday
metaphorical meanings.
○ Senses being combined is a synaesthetic experience of the world.
●
In order to engage with world, you need to take on the limitations of your perspective.
○ Exploring sensory experience in relation to place and settings.
○ What is the true size of a thing?
■ True size is when its in reach- human perspective.
■ Stress on human experience of everything.
○ Need to look at it through our changing perceptual experience.
●
Phenomenology stresses that the world and people in which we try to describe are
similar to us.
●
When we perceive the world we are always perceiving it from a point of view, and our
research from that perspective is always going to be limited.
●
In relation to the world which we perceive, we can think about it in terms of ‘touching’
and ‘being touched’.
○ If hands placed together, neither hand is touching one other- they are both
simultaneously touching and being touched.
○ Same goes for other senses- ‘smell’ and ‘being smelled’…
○ Subject observers and people and things they are interacting with.
●
Merleau-Ponty and Paul Cezanne.
○ Cezanne wanted to get away with particular Renaissance way of viewing the
world. That suggested if you painted a landscape, you painted it by rules of
perspective- only the following of these rules made you a successful painter.
○ Thought this was an artificial way of trying to interpret the landscape. Wanted to
paint the way exactly he saw it.
■ Painted a mountain hundreds of times- could never capture on his canvas
the visual experience, thought there was something wrong with his eyes.
■ Every time he attempted to capture it, it was different- according to
seasons, changing light.
■ Work is always changing and shifting, the nature of becoming.
Nothing is ever static.
■ Nevertheless, his paintings show a different way of thinking about the
outside world.
■ e.g. horizon lines, where do you draw it? It all depends on active
decision you make, any line is arbitrary.
■ We can generalise from that idea to say that things and people in
the world have agency and power, they have effects upon us.
●
Example of painter Klee.
○ Spend ages painting trees- in forest. He wanted to paint them as he saw them.
○ The longer he spent in the forest, he no longer though it was simply him looking
at the trees, but the trees were looking at him. They were having influences on his
perception.
■ Visual touch.
●
Alfred Gell- Art and Agency
○ Attempts to develop theory of power of artworks.
○ Normally when anthropologists try to understand works of art, they do this by
asking what does it mean? A question of semiotics or meaning.
○ Gell said the question we should ask is not what it means, but instead, what does
it do?
■ What impact does that artwork have on the person?
■ Split between semiotics of meaning and phenomenology of doing.
○ When he was doing fieldwork, one of the few books he took with him was
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. having a profound impact on his
ideas on the anthropology of art.
■ Leads to questions of impact that the material world can have on us.
■ Big cathedral- impacted by soaring space, making you feel
dwarfed or insignificant. Significant mental and physical impact.
Smells, like incense, reverberating sounds…
■ Small cave- viscerally impactful in a bodily kind of way. Damp
smell of cave, muffled sound…
●
Dayak Longhouse, Helliwell- like being in a terraced house. Division between private and
public space- structural analysis.
○ Contrasted with experience of living in the longhouse. Stresses deeply embedded
sensory experience. Partitions are flimsy, they let through light, smells sound.
Aware of neighbours. Public space.
○ Understanding of this is obtained through living and sensing within the space.
Involved with others in the sociality of the place.
○ Only participant analysis can draw us away from analysis of things based on
abstracted notion of space.
●
Colour- Maori have over 300 different words for colour. Our colour terms are highly
abstracted, Maori terms are related to the things themselves. Not an abstract category
for them- part of the essence of things.
○ People have never lived in such a colourful world as us. Becomes neutralised, no
longer impacts us in the way it did in the historic past.
○ Tilley research on pebbles in SW England- highly coloured material. In prehistory,
these would be the most colourful things around- first monuments made of
pebbles.
■ Pebbles transformed by the agency of water- more colourful where the
water is.
■ Pebbles have a kind of voice or sound. Interesting tactile qualities.
■ They ‘feel warm’ despite being cold stones- because they are round and
smooth. Synaesthetic experience.
■ When hit hard, they spark and smell like gunpowder.
■ Pebble decorations prevalent- associations and connotations within our
culture with happy times, beaches etc.
●
Papua New Guinea example that different situations can implore our senses to play a
different or greater role.
○ Dense forest, impaired visibility- rely on sounds.
●
Phenomenology of restaurant
○ Sounds, smells, decor of interior- can compare with different restaurants as
representative of different cultures or different contexts.
●
We can observe a street- changes in time or space, see how people use the space. How
streets come alive, and how they die.
○ Big theme in urban studies is gentrification. What are the material effects of
gentrification, what effect does it have on movements of people- what kind of
shops they go to etc.
■ Can be studied in a purely material way, a study of materiality of every
day life stressed by the phenomenological perspective.
○ Houses last longer than people, the material structure has greater longevity.
○ Character of street related to time. Antique furniture- can tell stuff is old by
structure, age of wood, patterns on surfaces etc.
●
Phenomenological study has to acknowledge time and historical change not just space
in order to understand the character of material world in relation to its inhabitants.
○ In principle the longer you spend, the better your study will be. But essentially,
you should just stop the you can’t think of anything better to say.
●
Phenomenology is democratic- we could all be phenomenologists.
●
Distinction between personal and subjective and phenomenological. They are not the
same things.
READINGS
Abram, D. (1997) 'The mindful life of the body' in D. Abram The Spell of the Sensuous
1.CENTRAL QUOTATION. “In this ceaseless dance between the carnal subject and its world, at
one moment the body leads, at another the things.” (p54)
2. ARGUMENT. Abram lays out the fundamental differences between Husserl’s notion of
phenomenology, and Merleau-Ponty’s developed version. Husserl believed that though the
body was a manifestation of the experiencing self, there was still a separate transcendental ego
(Cartesian dualism). Merleau-Ponty argued that without the body, there would be no possibility
of experience- it is not our soul but our body who is the subject of experience. Abram goes on
to talk about how the way we operate within the world is at the same level as all other acting
things- we are not above nature because we are human, for we are shaped by it. He calls this
notion of sameness the “flesh” of the world. He also emphasises the essential feature of
interplay between the self and object around us. Nothing is passive as it is experienced,
reciprocity is perception. Abram highlights how Merleau-Ponty utilised poetic language to help
us understand the surrounding world as active and animate- e.g. things as “entities” which are
able to “respond” or “beckon to us” (p55). Abram closes on how the divide between self and
surrounding world is not as pronounced in non-Western countries, and this is emphasised in the
spoken language. Indigenous communities often give recognition to the sensed world,
accentuating the affinity between humans and the earth, where we as the West often dissociate
ourselves from the abstract realm of sensory experience through our language.
3. QUESTION. He talks of senses and synaesthesia, not highlighting the importance of one
sense over the other, but not touching on what happens when as humans our senses are absent
or dysfunctional. I’d like to know how we can study phenomenology from a disabled
perspective, potentially being an interesting area for future study? To give us an insight into the
phenomenological world that some can’t understand.
4. EXPERIENTIAL CONNECTION. Abram talks in the section “The Recuperation of the Sensuous
is the Rediscovery of the Earth” about how if we stop and re-acquaint ourselves with our bodies
as members of the world around us, we can live a more fulfilling life. This reminded me of the
teachings of mindfulness in Buddhist tradition, where we become aware of our physical bodies
in the space that they occupy- taking more time to recognise ourselves as part of an ever
shifting flux within which we are shaped and reconnecting/ re-communicating with that space.
5. TEXTUAL CONNECTION. Abram talks about how we are eternally trying to connect with the
world by acquiring objects that stimulate us. This is an echo of a sentiment expressed by Marx
about the capitalist relation to the world as one of intrinsic alienation. We have no connection,
because as Abram says we aren’t thinking with our animal senses anymore- they’ve been stifled
by mass-production. Marx suggested that because we have no knowledge of the production
(natural form turning into man-made form) we are unable to relate to those things. Can also be
linked to Zimmel’s notion of the Tragedy of Culture. Abram noted that however, if we use our
animal senses we can still recover some essence of otherness which is not entirely human
controlled when looking at man-made objects by looking at their materials, like the grain of
wood, or the clay of bricks.
6. IMPLICATIONS. If we were to treat ourselves as members of nature, as is done in many
indigenous populations- especially Aborigines- would we learn to one day treat the world
better? If a phenomenological approach was applied politically to treating issues like climate
change or pollution, we may be able to better understand our place within the world, and
promote action.
Helliwell: Space and Sociality in the Dayak longhouse
Quotation
“The stress on discrete groups arising out of the opposition of individual and society and the visualist
focus on structure at the expense of process - both characteristic of Western thought - leads to a
tendency among anthropologists to overlook the fluidity and ambiguity which characterises much social
life. In the case of the Borneo Dayan ethnography, the tendency is exacerbated by the similarity of the
resulting representation of social relations to those found in the West; the Borneo ethnographer is quickly
in the familiar terrain of ‘private’ household and ‘public’ community. As a result, permeable and
ambiguous boundaries between apartments are read and represented as dense and rigid, the groups
which they enclose as discrete and isolated.”
Argument
According to Helliwell, too much of Anthropology and the Social Sciences has focussed on investigating
discrete groups and underlying structure. Deriving from that, a hegemony of vision and geometry in
Western science assign a higher factitiy to bounded social entities - that what you see is ‘more real’. In
her own ethnography of the Dayak in Borneo, she dismantles previous traditions of ethnographers
drawing up the ‘household’-esque structure consisting of a public and private realm in the Borneo
longhouse. In her own research, she finds that their categories of ‘us’ and ‘they’ are not the same - rather
of a ‘they, the community’ and ‘us, the longhouse community’ This exemplifies in the way people use
language and refer to things, e.g. ’Rumah’, the different apartments/‘’private’’ units within the longhouse,
mean both the apartment and occasionally the whole longhouse. Furthermore, there is a flow of inter
household sociality through the flimsy and permeable partitions between said units: of resources, light, of
smells, of sounds. One through using her senses in her fieldwork and participating in this flow of
associations was she able to reject the notion of the longhouse as an aggregate of apartments towards a
more open model where household and community flow into each other. Going on to talk about the
senses as such, part of her argument is that the gaze and its auditory equivalent ‘audit’ act as regulatory
systems of law in Dayak society: you are always seen or listened to - so that values such as fairness in
sharing but also overall sociality are upheld. That is why, while its generally seen as negative to be alone
in the Dayak community, the apartment is the only acceptable place to be alone - because you are always
connected to the community.
Questions
Halliwell talks about fluidity and lack of discrete categories - how, then, do replacement categories she
thinks of hold - such as ‘us, the community’? Is it possible to map out these social relations constituting
either? And also, can we think of any other ways than text to document these for an ethnography - for
visual-spatial there is the floorpan - but for sounds..?
Contemporary Connection
‘Dunbars Number’ (‘we only ever have community of 150 people’) - there is so many different ‘numbers’
with different levels of sociality - and those groups are fluid. Especially with Social Media and
interconnectedness to everywhere around the world, it becomes clear that our groups can only be much
less discreet and the boundaries more permeable than we might think (we are constantly watched!).
Textual Connection
Helliwells article connects in a way to other major readings on the nature of fieldwork (e.g. On the
Balinese Cock Fight by Clifford Geertz) - as Professor Tilley hinted at in the lecture, Phenomenological
practice is in its essence what fieldwork aims for: to immerse yourself and to obtain knowledge by being
there, by being in place. Certain elements of information thus just go missing if you weren’t present to
experience it - be it by experiencing a one-off chancy event such as talked about in the Balinese cockfight
or certain tapestries of voices in the longhouse community that would have gotten lost when relying on
the visual sense too much.
it also connects back to readings on Structuralism (e.g. Tilley’s Structuralism and Beyond) by criticising
the tendency to look for order and place boundaries where ‘’society’’ is much more seamless.
Furthermore it connects to the Abrams reading, in that the Dayak community rely heavily on different
senses as regulatory mechanisms, as opposed to Western Societal hegemony of the visual/the gaze - as
Halliwell argues. This suggests that the Dayak people are more connected to their senses and/or bodies.
Implications
If a phenomenological approach as presented would be taken more often in life - be it in the sciences or
even the everyday realm, we could gain a higher cross-cultural understanding. Even within out little
student spheres, going to different parts of the city and taking in sights, feels, smells and sounds can give
a picture of the lived experience of people different from us within our own city - and consequently of their
wants and needs. This could and should be applied more in fields such as city planning, development and
the administrative sector (councils and co.)
Becker, A. E. (1994) 'Nurturing and negligence: working on others' bodies in Fiji' in
Embodiment and Experience: the existential ground of culture and self, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press pp.100-115
●
Core cultural values are encoded in aesthetic or moral ideals of body shape
●
The body can be sculpted and adorned in many ways
●
The appreciation of a certain form refers to a complex set of culturally specific symbols
●
Widespread participation in the ethos of bodily cultivation in American popular culture
directed at approximating the recognised ideals of bodily perfection
●
There is a parallel consensus regarding the aesthetics of bodily form in Fijian society
●
Admiration for a physical feature corresponds to positive sentiments about the moral
and prestige symbols it evokes
●
What differentiates the Fijian from the American participant in popular culture, however,
is not the ability to construct and admire an ideal, nor the ability to identify what values
are reflected in it, but rather, the relative lack of interests and investment in attaining the
ideal by cultivating, nurturing and disciplining the body
●
Cultivation of the body is pursued by whoever is deemed responsible for the body e.g.
kin group, a mother, a husband, or th e self who occupies it
●
Exclusive right of the self to the body is protected by a cultural premium on autonomy
and independence
●
The use of the body to showcase the self also assumes the moral acceptability of
distinguishing and aggrandising the self
●
The portrayal of the self as an image
●
A key strategy of representing the self lies in a manipulation of cultural symbols
(Goffman, 1959)
●
The body is he site of enormous symbolic work and symbolic production (Turner, 1984)
●
The disciplined body has emerged as a popular culture ideal in American society
●
Social success is contingent on the belaboured (attack physically or verbally, or argue a
subject in excessive detail) construction of a particular image
●
Bodies have become conceptualised as a 'work in progress'
●
Body cultivation reached its extreme in the restrictive dieting and obsessive exercise
regimens which verge towards eatings-disordered behaviour
●
Exploitation of the representational capacities of the body is not restricted to women's
bodies
●
The experience of being in a body as one aspect of being-in-the-world can potentially
collapse into the more restricted experience of being in a body that is at once
individuated and objectified, personal and alienated
Semantics of body shape
●
Body as a malleable aesthetic form for signalling participation in or derived from cultural
norms
●
Virtually limitless parameters of manipulation e.g. surgery, make-up, jewellery, body
modification
●
The surfaces and symmetries of the human body may be understood to harmonize with
local cosmology
●
The chapter focuses on how the aesthetic manipulation of body shape and weight
reflects the nature of personhood and embodied experience
●
Aesthetic preferences are shaped by core social boundaries
●
In America, these seem refined by the media
●
Bodies are cultivated to effect the attributes imbued with culturally relevant values which
the self wishes to display
●
Fijians idealise certain features too: sturdy calves (bodi la), or a body which is wellformed and filled out (jubu vina) - associated with cultural virtues, in these examples the
ability to work hard
●
Fijian language of insults reveals a relative distaste for overly obese or thin persons and
there is a clear preference for a robust form
●
Most striking difference: Fijian absence of interest in attaining the ideal shape as a
personal goal
●
Do not cultivate their body to project a public image
●
The fundamental orientation of the Fijian is to the community
●
The conceptual introduction of the body to Melanesia challenged their sociomythic view
of persons as located primarily in relationships, thereby allowing 'individual
discrimination and a new view of the world
●
The tensions between the knowledge of having a body and the formulation that the
'human extends beyond a physical image forged the essence of Melanesian personhood
as a polarity of 'individuation and communion'
●
Experience of personhood as a plenitude
●
The changes and form of the Fijian body therefore is the social positioning of the person
- how he has been nurtured or neglected in his social milieu
●
Care is concretised in body shape
●
A body is the responsibility of the feeding and caring micro-community and
consequently its form shows the work of the community rather than of the self
●
Cultivation of the body is other-centeredness - immoral to cultivate own body
●
Body shape suggests personal abilities but marks connection to the social network and
reflects it powers to nourish
●
Children and guests are targeted for extraordinary efforts in care - weight gain will be
credited to the caretaker's social prowess
●
The devotion to cultivating the chief's body reflects their representation of the
community
'Going thin': the rhetoric of care and negligence
●
Care giving is central to life
●
Practically expressed through the moral imperative to share food resources
●
Trobriand Islands - most degrading comment to call someone is 'hungry (Malinowski,
1922)
●
Character judgement in Papua New Guinea related to the generosity in which people
share food (Kahn, 1986)
●
Sharing of food resources is axiomatic
●
People will bring food offerings to a guest as paying respect
●
Concern for wellbeing invoking a complex set of symbols
●
Obesity is not particularly appealing
●
Use of the idiomatic 'gone thing; evokes a certain social disconnectedness
●
Any sign of weight loss is assumed to reflect a disruption in the cohesiveness of the
social milieu or gross negligence on the part of the caretakers
The preoccupation with macake: the defence against an appetite disorder
●
Macake is a syndrome characterised by a variety of symptoms e.g. whiteish coating on
the tongue, sores in the mouth, change in urine colour
●
Most worrisome symptom - loss of appetite, therefore, loss of weight
●
Preference of administering medicine rather than withholding food
●
Feeding = nurturing
●
The practice of guarding and monitoring appetite is fundamentally integrating, since the
treatment of macake both practically and symbolically enmeshes the afflicted individual
in a network of care
●
Bodily states are accessible by the beholder
●
Monitoring of bodily saes is particularly intense when the integrity of the community is
threatened in some way by the social isolation of an individual e.g. being ill, having a
secret
●
Bodily experience transcending the individual occurs in the case of an undisclosed
pregnancy - socially disruptive
●
Legitimises social claim to bodies
●
Not only is secrecy intolerable antisocial offense, but in many ways the implied
autonomy is unfathomable, experience is neither private nor individual, fundamentally
social and diffuse
●
Fijian woman has no choice but to reveal her pregnancy, her body is unable to contain
the experience as a personal event
●
Anticipation of danger surrounding secrets
●
The information is readily available as the body inevitable releases its secrets through a
second body
●
The Fijian body cannot hide its secrets, the real threat of a secret is self-community
alienation - circumvented by monitoring bodies
●
Evidence of social connectedness manifest in their forms
AQCI
QUOTATION. Quote a sentence (or excerpts from linked sentences) from the text (or texts) that
you think is central to the author's (or authors') implicit or explicit argument(s). Always cite the
page.
“…exploration of how the self is situated in and related to a body is a crucial element in
understanding a culture’s relative preoccupation with or disinterest in the use of the body as a
medium of projecting the self, and ultimately in forging embodied experience.” (102)
ARGUMENT. Explain the author's argument in your own words. What is/are the main point(s)
of the author? Be sure to include both: what the author is arguing for, and what s/he is arguing
against. Situate that argument within the topic of the week.
Becker argues that the way people cultivate their body reflects their understandings of
personhood. That is, different perspectives of the self are encoded in the attitudes of people
dealing with their bodies. In America, where people value autonomy and independence of the
individuals, body represents self’s essence and personal accomplishments. Thus, Americans
highly engage in the individual cultivation of body shape. On the contrary, Fijians stress one’s
position in the society and their understanding of personhood is oriented towards the
community. They believe that the body embodies social connectivity and communal care.
Therefore, they constantly monitor their body shapes to prevent social alienation but are not
much interested in cultivating the body itself.
QUESTIONS. Raise questions on the text – either something that the author has not asked,
something her/his argument leaves out or provokes.
Is it really true that Fijians are indifferent to the cultivation of body shape? Shaping the body is
not pursued on an individual scale but it seems to be an important consideration of the whole
community whether or not it is the ultimate goal. That is, aren’t Fijians still interested in the
cultivation of body in order to reach their ultimate goal of achieving social care and
connectivity?
CONTEMPORARY CONNECTION. Find a contemporary example – from the news, politics, arts,
culture, recent history, or experience (in last resort) – through which you can discuss this
reading, apply its theory, or critique the argument.
Globalisation – how are the changing, globalised cultures reflected through the body?
TEXTUAL CONNECTION. Relation of this reading to other readings from this week?
It connects to the Abram’s reading as both either tell or imply that it is difficult to understand
the self in separation of the surrounding world.
IMPLICATIONS. SUPER IMPORTANT. Lay out what this argument implies for understanding or
improving society, relations between individuals, or groups (e.g., inter-ethnic, nations, etc.) or
any facet of social or cultural reality. What are the implications (xxx) of this reading to xxx aspect
of society / anthropology? In other words: “so what”?
Becker’s point of view seems to relate to the phenomenological idea that the description of the
bigger world or society must take individuals’ embodiment into account. After all, individual
pursuits and personhood reflect the values of the society. Therefore, it is significant to analyse
the embodiment of such values in order to make sense of the world. Here, body becomes the
primary research tool to understand the world.
POST-MODERNISM AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM
NOTES
Modernity
 Break with tradition – emancipation
- Break from feudal society
 Rise of modern capitalist industrial state
- Mass production
 Rise of nation state + competition between states
 Permanent revolution
- ‘All that is solid melts into air’ Marx
 objective science universal rationality
- empirical natural and social science
- stress of objectivity, rational thought, university
- find law of human behavioural
 space + time becoming increasingly fleeting
- time – space compression
- things becoming closer and closer together
 urban life
- mass movement of people into towns
Post-Modernity
 Baudrillard – society simulacrum (fake world, versions of something)
 plurality – diversity
 Production to consumption as the new all important
 Simulational world in which difference between reality and appearance gets defaced and
erased
- Image of TV and YouTube, what’s real and fake gets difficult to distinguish
 Depths replaced by surfaces
- Depths is replaced by flickering images of TV etc.
 Use value of things to sign value
- Semiotics
o
o
First used by architects to describe new styles of buildings
Characterisation of all things, intellectual thought, materials with a newness to it
Modernist architecture
 Large scale planning
- Sweep away the slumps to produced rational and efficient space
 new technologies of rationality and efficiently
 austerity – no colour, no decoration, no frills
 a stress on function over style – ‘house is a machine to be lived in’


o
factory model – mass production of units – standardisation
space to be for a social purpose
high rise tower blocks
- subject to vandalism + alienation
- effects of modern architecture
Postmodern Architecture
 a different kind of city – palimpsest of forms
 collage of styles/electrician
 space is playful – no longer austere
 postmodern building, but no postmodern housing estates
- associated with corporate culture
 no large scale planning
 individual buildings + changes in technology
- computer design
- produce buildings at cheap cost of different forms
- shard, gherkin, cheese grater
- no longer about social housing
 styles:
- pastiche – different material
- ornamentation – surfaces etc
- juxtaposition
- playfulness – attract attention + play around with style and space
o lifts and drainage pipes that used to be on the inside is outside
- heterogeneity
o shallow lacks depths
o draws on old styles to produce something new, no new creation of style
 Jameson: cultural logic of late capitalism – cultural manifestation of our contemporary
world
- Contrived deathlessness
- Ideological deflect criticism – so amazed at the building style and differenceness
- Masks the reality of corporate capitalism



Rise of consumer culture – increasing importance in our society
- Continuity going out of date
- About choice
- Ultimately linked to capitalist economy by money
- Consumer system allows us to choose our identity and promote individuality
Marxism – we are produced by the system, everything is reproduced never produced
Tourist industry, the biggest movement of people
- Disney world Paris / California
- Representation of something of a fantasy in a real material form, and we go around and
try to identify them
- Our culture is increasingly lacking in authenticity, shallowness
- Tourism is a form of consumption that is produced for us
- Escape into a faux fantasy world, in which the images and photos are the only important
things, lacking in depths – trivial
- Part of the postmodern culture

Postmodern art very different to traditional portrait
- It is about the idea not the material
- Difficult to define what art is
- Toilet in an art gallery, its meaning changes
- Moving away from judging art by aesthetics to a different way of thinking
- We no longer know what is art and what isn’t, the notion of art (something grand and
beautiful) is gone
- Only art if it is in a gallery
- Institutional power – anything go into Tate, it is decided by the curators that it is art
- Institutional theory of art, anything that goes into a gallery or is ratified by an institution
Postmodern novel/literature
 Plays around with reality
- There is always questioning the self
- Breaking down the boundary between the writer and reader – questioning the readers
should he kill the character
- There are multiple stories, not linear plot
 Traditional – a story with people, they go through a plot




Challenge modernity
New space of thought and meaning
Productive – freeing up, more democratic form of thought
Or is it just the same
Internet
 Be a version of yourself
 Different person, change gender or sexuality or identity
 Play around with reality
 Argument: is it productive (ultimate freedom of changing who we are and how we think) or
increase feeling of loneliness and isolation
Question:
Is it a totally different world as before
Post-structuralism
 Postmodern critique under the term post-structuralism
 Challenge to power and authority
 Challenge the idea of discipline
 Challenge to everything that comes before
 Challenge the notion of truth
- Is it merely a version of power?
- We don’t ask whether something is true
- We should ask why we think it is true
 Challenge traditional trends of philosophy
●
Saying something is post-modern doesn’t exempt it from modernity, and poststructuralist doesn’t mean it’s escaped from structuralism entirely.
●
Main features of modernity:
○ Post-enlightenment.
○ Break with tradition- emancipation.
○ Break from feudal society and rise of capitalist culture.
○ Characterised by mass production.
○ Rise of nation state and competition between states.
○ Permanent revolution.
○ “All that is solid melts into air” MARX
○ Objective science, universal rationality.
○ Space and time is fleeting, time-space compression.
○ Urban life.
●
Post-modernity:
○ Baudrillard- society of the simulacrum.
■ A copy of a copy of a copy of something that never really existed.
■ Fake world
○ Plurality, diversity of lifestyle.
○ Production —> consumption
○ Simulational world in which difference between reality and appearance erased or
defaced.
○ TV and YouTube become the world.
○ Depths replaced by surfaces.
○ Use value of thing replaced by sign value.
●
Post-modernism first used by architects to describe new styles of building. Then
described the world of culture.
●
Modernist architecture
○ Large scale planning. Attempt to sweep away slums.
○ New technologies of rationality and efficiency.
○ Austere- no frills.
○ Functional
■ Le Corbusier- “A house is a machine for living in”
○ Factory model-mass production of units. Standardisation
○ Space to be shaped for a social purpose.
○ High rise tower block.
●
Postmodern architecture
○ City as palimpsest of forms.
○ Collage of styles / eclecticism
○ Space shaped by aesthetic conditions
○ Social goals secondary- architecture of corporate capitalism
○ Individual buildings- new technologies, computer modelling.
○ No large scale panning
○ Styles:
■ Pastiche
■ Ornamentation
■ Juxtaposition
■ Playfulness
■ Heterogeneity
■ Lack of ‘depth’
○ Jamesson: cultural logic of late capitalism, contrived depthlessness, ideological
deflects criticism- masks reality of corporate capitalist culture- distracted by array
of styles.
●
As translated into social forms by which we live:
○ I.e. rise of consumer culture- we have to buy new stuff constantly, never before
have we had such a choice. Linked to capitalist economy- money enables access
to consumer system.
■ One could suggest it allows us to choose identities, signalling who we are
through the way we consume and use things.
■ Another could suggest we are dupes of the system- nothing new about
culture.
○ Huge tourist industry post WWII. Never before has there been such a mass
movement of people on a global basis.
■ Attractions: Disneyworld as simulacrum. Representation of fake fantasy in
real material form. Appearance vs reality.
■ Lacking authenticity. Escape through the brief period of the tourist
experience into fantasy world that’s been created for us. In which it’s
images that matter more than anything else- pictures on phones etc.
Lacking in DEPTH.
○ Post-modern art- less about the painting than the idea or the concept. No longer
becomes possible to define what art is. Something transformed from use value
into sign value. Judging things in terms of aesthetics.
■ What is constituted as art? Notion of aesthetic, interpretive and
institutional- Gell.
■ Art and context, institutional power.
○ Post-modern literature- breaking down boundaries between reader and writer,
person and book. Traditional way to read and write has been eroded.
■ E.g. Roland Barthes, S/Z (see below)
●
All calling different ways of thinking, create new spaces for thought and development.
○ Can be seen as more productive, a democratic form of society.
○ Age of internet as able to define identity.
○ Form of liberation or freedom.
●
Can be seen as exact opposite: increasing notion of individual, we are all unique, creates
isolation.
○ Link to neo-liberalist ideas of free man… individualises us and separates us.
●
Is this totally different than before or not?????
●
Notions of fragmentation, fragility, pastiche enter academia with a stress upon poststructuralism.
●
Development of post-modern critique of everything that happened before:
○ Challenge to notions of authority and power
○ Challenge on academic disciplines, what they do.
○ In anthropology, challenge on who and what came before.
○ Challenge to notion of truth
■ According to Foucault: just a notion of power.
■ Why should we think things are true? How are we being persuaded this is
true?
■ Are there other truths in the world?
●
Alienation of modernist architecture. Fitted in with culture of form, simplicity and
functionality.
●
Examples of modernist and postmodernist architecture.
○ Modular capsule building in Japan. Striking visual aesthetic.
○ BEST supermarket- bricks slide out of block to allow entrance. (Find image)
○ New Orleans: Piazza d’Italia
○ Paris suburbs
○ New York AT&T building
○ Offices, Lugano Switzerland.
●
Post- structuralism
○ Derrida, Barthes, Foucault- key theorists, all French and all now dead.
○ Derrida, developed deconstruction. Obsessed with texts, one of his principles is
that texts don’t say what they mean and they don’t mean what they say. Develops
technique for undoing the text. Needn’t be taken seriously as representation of
reality.
■ Said oppositions are not equal oppositions. They’re loaded. One side is
always considered to be primary and more important than the other.
(Fact-value, objectivity-subjectivity, nature-culture)
■ Nature coming before culture, culture derived from nature.
However, it’s through culture that we have a concept nature
altogether, produced by cultural means. Nature not a stable term,
continually reproduced in different contexts. We can reverse the
terms of the binary and reverse power structure. (IMO doesn’t that
mean there is no power structure????? if it can be reversed then it
cancels out notion that one is more important… ??)
■ Our values and interests guide what we think of as facts.
■ Subjectivity decides the rules of objectivity.
■ In our western culture, he names these logocentric oppositions. If we
think about it clearly, we know we create nature, but also in our daily lives
we really do think of nature as something outside of us.
■ Fall into trap on daily basis of one being primary. Locked, cannot escape
from this.
■ Derrida’s whole reconstructive activity is not an escape from structuralism
because binary don’t disappear, but is a form of undermining.
■ Philosophical texts are tricky things, we need not take them
seriously.
○ Barthes, S/Z, the analysis of a novel by Balzac. Undermining of unity of text.
Releasing text from author of its signification. There are numerous ways in which
we can understand this novel. There are many different readings.
■ For example, a psychological reading, a marxist reading, a hermeneutic
reading.
■ Novel has many many meanings. In principle applicable to everything.
Move from analysis of material forms or social relations to find out what it
means.
■ No end to meaning.
■ Can use general term polysemy- many meanings. Do we have to decide
whether a meaning is right or wrong? Any cultural practice has a
multiplicity of styles of meanings.
■ Moving to emphasis on signifiers rather than signified.
■ If we read a text, say we don’t know the meaning of the word
contradictory. Look up in dictionary and find six other meanings,
look up those words find six other meanings for each until we end
up back at contradictory. Meaning is a circle trapped in itself.
■ Writes about the death of the author. Producer in general.
■ Normally you would ask the producer of meaning. Want to try and
get back to the intentions of the producer in one way or another.
Barthes refutes this.
■ Reader, or interpreter can understanding meanings in ways in
which the author never intended themselves. Flowing, shifting
meaning. Fluid category.
■ Foucault elaborates upon this by example of painting by Magritte.
■ Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
■ Can think about it in 4 different ways.
■ This is not a pipe, but a drawing of a pipe.
■ This is not a pipe, but a sentence saying this is not a
pipe
■ The sentence this is not a pipe, is not a pipe.
■ In the sentence this is not a pipe this is not a pipe,
the drawing, the written sentence of all this is not a
pipe.
■ Radical gap between language and world. Language does
not represent the world, it transforms it.
■ Meaning through syntax does not have relation to reality.
■ Brings back to Barthes, writes on his book- he’s outside of the text!
Dismisses author as being significant at all. Just one element in a network
of elements. Not privileged.
■ Barthes then reviews the book in a journal. Roland Barthes, by Roland
Barthes, reviewed by Roland Barthes.
■ “After the death of the author, we have the birth of the reader”.
○ Foucault, Discipline and Punish- about French penal system over past 300 years.
Begins with killing of man who tried to kill king of France. Put in front of a crowd
and pulled apart limb by limb, a real spectacle. How you terrorise the population,
a naked brutal form of power.
■ We are never free, disciplinary society, takes place in a whole gamete of
social practices- schools, hospitals…
■ We are working in a ‘discipline’ of anthropology- have to conform to
certain rules and practices. All about institutional power. Can never be an
anthropologist unless you have the institutional sanction- from studying.
■ Links back to art and institution- conforming to power structures
involved. Power is everywhere.
■ For Marx, the most important form of power was the economic base,
where power in society came from. OR power invested in hands of
individuals- gun to head, threat of prison. Power located somewhere,
either in state or individual.
■ To Foucault, power is everywhere, it’s a fluid current in whole of society,
can’t pin down.
■ Where there’s power, there’s always resistance to that power.
■ Not just something negative- not always form of domination, can
be liberating in circumstances.
■ Forms into kind of nihilism like Derrida.
■ Never illustrates notion of good society, all power is just replaced
by another form of power.
■ In disciplinary society, we are constantly under surveillance. Bentham had
idea of panopticon. New form of prison, central watchtower in which you
could only have one guard, prison cells arranged in circle around tower. In
principle prisoners could be seen whole time. never knew when they were
being observed or not. Perfect form of power.
■ All institutions are gazing on us.
■ History of Sexuality- discusses in Victorian era, to even see the leg of table
was embarrassing, sexuality always hidden, considered dangerous. We like
to think we are liberated from these attitudes. Foucault says there is still a
discourse but operates of a different mode.
■ Society pervaded by images of sexualised perfect bodies- norms
to which we are supposed to conform. To achieve perfect body,
we have to discipline ourselves, in order to fit in. Perfect power,
everywhere, we even exercise it in relation to our own bodies.
●
All these general ideas enter into anthropology.
○ Notion of objectivity- third person narratives. Underlining academic credibility of
objective research. We should free ourselves. Bring in multiple voices, multiple
understandings. Nothing truthful about world.
○ Foucault says we should not ask of true or false, but instead why do people want
to believe this is true? Why do they want to represent it as true? Raises another
question of notion of objective truth, what do we end up with without it?
■ End of discipline, we are critiquing ourselves.
●
What’s the difference between a novel and an ethnography? What do they share?
READINGS
Levi-Strauss, C (1949) Nature and Culture. In: The Elementary Structures of Kinship.
●
Nature and culture divide was used by sociology in his time as a methodological tool.
Strauss wanted to bring this divide together in a ‘synthesis of a new order’
●
Wolf children and other children who were thought to be ‘wild’ and raised by animals
were considered by the victorians as a reflection of primitive humans.
Great apes cannot reflect the pre-cultural model of human beings because research on
them as concluded that they are definitely not the same as primitive humans. There are
too many irregularities in primate behavior to systematize.
Primates behavior such as polyandry and other behaviors were a stark contrast against
human behavior.
This lack of rules in nature is what distinguishes nature from culture
○ ‘Strictly speaking there is consistency and regularity
●
●
●
Clifford, J. (1988) 'On ethnographic authority' in The Predicament of Culture: TwentiethCentury Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press pp.
21-54
●
Chapter traces the formation and breakup of ethnographic authority in the 20th Century
Social Anthropology
●
Break-up and redistribution of colonial power in the decades after 1950
●
Questions have arisen as to the extent that human groups can be represented without
proposing new methods of observation
●
Ethnographic writing cannot entirely escape the reductionist use of dichotomies and
essences, it can at least struggle self-consciously to avoid portraying abstract, ahistorical
'others'
●
The Notion of theory as a toolkit
○ The theory to be constructed is not a system but an instrument, a logic of the
specificity of power relations and the struggles around them
○ That this investigation can only be carried out step by step on the basis of
reflection on given situations
●
Use of ethnographic fieldwork remains an unusually sensitive method
●
Participant observation requires practitioners to experience at a bodily as well as an
intellectual level the vicissitudes of translation
●
Western anthropology is not permanent, undergoing important metamorphoses
●
Ethnography is enmeshed in writing
●
Obsession with objectivity
●
Ethnographic experience can be seen as the building up of a common meaningful world,
drawing on intuitive styles of feeling, perception and guesswork
○ E.g. Mead vs Leenhardt
●
Translation of research experience into a textual corpus separate from its discursive
occasions of production has important consequences for ethnographic authority
●
A discursive model of ethnographic practice brings into prominence the intersubjectivity
of all speech, along with its immediate performative context
●
There are no neutral forms or words
●
Ethnography is an interpretation of a point of view - not a true representation
●
Ioan Lewis (1973) - Anthropology a form of plagiarism
●
Who is actually the author of field notes?
●
Indigenous control over knowledge gained in the field can be considerable
●
Malinowski published myths and material he admittedly did not understand himself leaves open to reinterpretation - open dialogue
●
Often groups of people are not interpreted in many voices
○ Only 1 (the ethnographers)
●
Informant is not an adequate description
●
Assumptions are made that an ethnographer can no longer ignore
●
Modes of authority:
○ Experiential
○ Interpretive
○ Dialogical
○ Polyphonic
●
Available to all - western and non-western
●
None is obsolete or pure - all modes of authority has room for invention
AQCI
1.CENTRAL QUOTATION. Quote a sentence (or excerpts from linked sentences) from the text
(or texts) that you think is central to the author's (or authors') implicit or explicit argument(s).
Always cite the page.
“The textual embodiment of authority is a recurring problem…in ethnography.” (Clifford 1988 p.
53)
“The modes of authority reviewed here—experimental, interpretive, dialogical,
polyphonic…[n]one is obsolete, none pure: there is room for invention within each paradigm.”
(Clifford 1988 p.53-4)
2. ARGUMENT. In no more than three sentences, state the author's explicit or implicit
argument. Be sure to include both: what the author is arguing for, and what s/he is arguing
against.
In this reading, the author—James Clifford—discusses the history of ethnography and its
adoption as a key methodology in the study of Anthropology, in addition to the developments
made in its development at status quo. By discussing the intents and scholarly tendency of the
Malinowskian school of thought—asserting the importance of scientific, objective observation
into the underlying processes of a social group, yet accepting the experience of individual
ethnographers, academically trained, as exactly such—Clifford first identifies the points for which
later academics have made critiques against—the question of objectivity, authority/power
dynamics of an ethnographer and the studied individuals, etc.—and describes the attempts
being made at status quo to address and mitigate such issues in ethnography.
3. QUESTION. Raise a question which you think is not fully, or satisfactorily, answered by the
text. The question should be a question of interpretation or of inquiry, not simply a question of
fact.
In his explanation of dialogical ethnography via Ricoeur’s theory of discourse, Clifford
mentions that the quality of such work depends on the ethnographer’s “ability fictionally to
maintain the strangeness of the other voice” (1988 p.44). I understand he is arguing against the
perception of ethnographic accounts as objective truth/observation, but only a textual
representation of the actual discourse that took place, how would this “strangeness of the other
voice” (1988 p.44) be accurately represented without either estranging or objectifying the
“subject” and his/her culture, in a matter that is conveyable to the audience of ethnography?
4. EXPERIENTIAL CONNECTION. Say, in a few lines only, how the argument confirms or
contradicts your own experience or common sense.
While I do agree with many of the points that are made in this reading—particularly the notion
of objectivity as a false construct in need of “deconstruction”—this idea also puts into my mind
the question of ontology, not in an Anthropological sense but according to the definition used
in Philosophy and wider Social Sciences. Especially given the recent turn of events as widespread disinformation—which, the term itself implies to be a misrepresentation of a “fact”—the
reading makes me wonder too what extent is there a factual/non-fluctuant idea or phenomenon
in the human world, whether it exists in a separable form from subjective ideas, and if so
whether anyone would be able to devise a way to properly identify that supposed clear divide. If
everything is subjective, for instance, should the contemporary and/or historical identity of
“Celt” be considered completely legitimate?
5. TEXTUAL CONNECTION. Connect the argument of this text to an argument or point you find
in another reading assignment we have done in this course. Present a quote from the other text
(citing it properly), and explain how the present text's argument contrasts with, confirms,
clarifies, or elaborates the other text's argument or point.
Ricoeur’s idea of textualisation of discourse, as described in the reading, reminded me of LeviStrauss and his notion of structure as inspired by Sassure, where he sees structure as related
“models based on empirical realities” (Tilley 1990 p.5). While both ideas seem to talk of the
notion of a representative model for a real-world phenomenon, Ricoeur’s outlook into such
seems to be more conservative and pessimistic in that he rejects the possibility of such
accurately describing the actual “discourse”, whereas Levi-Strauss seems to see it as
representative of a universal process, hence a key to understanding social relations.
6. IMPLICATIONS. Lay out what this argument (#2 above) implies for understanding or
improving society, relations between individuals, or groups (e.g., inter-ethnic, nations, etc.) or
any facet of social or cultural reality (a few sentences only).
According to the arguments—more of a description of contemporary ethnography—it is a
rather futile attempt to try to deduce the reality of a culture from an ethnography, or to
understand ethnography as a faithful, holistic representation of such. An ethnographer must, for
this reason, always be aware of the influence oneself casts upon his/her study and take account
for such when interpreting its results, as not only would it be a rather reductionist account of the
actual phenomenon in place, but also am inevitable by-product of his/her agency on the given
society/culture.
In addition, also due to the issue of authorship in ethnography, the reading implies that there
need be, and currently is, an attempt by anthropologists to fully recognise the devotion/amount
of agency exercised by the studied individuals in shaping an ethnography; this seems to be
alluding to the legitimacy & necessity for an Anthropologist to be involved in the empowering
of the individuals he/she studies, as such would unevidently allow for them to be better
represented in the authorship of study on themselves.
Hassan, I. (1993) 'Towards a concept of postmodernism' in Postmodernism: A reader
London: Harvester Wheatsheaf pp.146-156
Can we really perceive a phenomenon, in Western societies generally and in their literatures
particularly, that needs to be distinguished from modernism, needs to be named?
Will 'postmodernism' serve?
Can we construct of this phenomenon some probative scheme?
○ Both chronological and typological
The prevalence of postmodernism today, if indeed it prevails, does not suggest that ideas or
institutions of the past cease to shape the present
Traditions develop
Cultural assumptions made still pervade the Western mind
○ E.g. Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Nietzsche
In this perspective postmodernism may appear as a significant revision if not an original of 20th
century Western societies
Postmodernism - evokes a number of related cultural tendencies, a constellation of values, a
repertoire of procedures and attitudes
William James - novelties are first repudiated as nonsense, then declared obvious, then
appropriated by former adversaries as their own discoveries
In the question of post-modernism there is a will and a counter-will to intellectual power
Conceptual problems of postmodernism
○ The word - postmodernism sounds not only awkward, it evokes what wishes to
supress modernism. Denotes temporal linearity and connotes belatedness. 'Shall
we just live and let others live to call us what they may?'
○ Suffers from a semantic instability - no clear consensus about its meaning exists
among scholars. Some critics use postmodernism instead of avant-gardism and
some simply use modernism
○ Historical instability - beginning to slip and slide in time, threatening to make any
distinction between them desperate
○ Modernism and postmodernism are not separate - culture is permeable to time
past, time present and time future
○ Postmodernism means a period must be perceived in terms of both continuity
and discontinuity - the two perspectives being complementary and partial
■ By invoking two divinities at once, engages a double view
○ Refers to a period - but a period is generally both diachronic and synchronic
construction, requires both historical and theoretical definition
○ Any definition of postmodernism requires an embracing of continuity and
discontinuity, diachrony and synchrony - also dialectical vision as definign traist
are often antithetical and plural. Postmodernism is not just antiformal, anarchic or
decreative, it also contains the need to discover a unitary sensibility
○ The concept of post-modernism implies some theory of innovation, renovation,
novation or simply change - or is it a 'theory of change'?
○ Is it only an artistic tendency or also a social phenomenon, perhaps even a
mutation in Western humanism?
○ Is postmodernism a descriptive as wlel as evaluative or normative category of
literary thought?
If modernism appears heirarchic, hypotactical, and formalist - postmodernism appears by
contrast playful, paratactical and deconstructionist
●
Major tendency of postmodernism - immanences
○ Designate the capacity of mind to generalise itself in symbols, intervene more
and more into nature
Postmodernism veers toward open, playful, optative, provisional, disjunctive or interdeterminate
forms
○ Yet implies antithetical movement toward pervasive procedures, ubiquitous
interactions, immanent codes, media, languages.
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2
3
4
5
“Postmodernism veers toward open, playful, optative, provisional (open in time as well as in
structure or space), disjunctive or indeterminate forms, a discourse of ironies and
fragments, a ‘white ideology’ of absences and fragments, a desire of diffractions, an
invocation of complex, articulate silences.” (154)
Hassan is trying to distinguish whether there is a phenomenon of postmodernism that
should be distinguished from modernism. He does this by listing the conceptual problems
that constitute and obscure postmodernism and then lays out its tendencies of
indeterminacy and immanence. These conceptual problems and tendencies contrast with
modernism in-terms of being playful, paratactical and deconstructionist.
The end of the text asks what construction “lies beyond?” (154) within this new
construction of postmodernism. I think that this question in not applicable to
postmodernism, seeing as this phenomenon is more of a tendency and is radically
deconstructive, rather than being a construction within itself.
I feel that the argument of this paper is very much in line with my experiences and
understanding of things through the tendencies of this discourse including: breaking down
Western bias such as dialectics that do not hold up in other cultures e.g. nature/culture;
understanding abstractions and models to not be universal, but instead be more indefinite
e.g. language.
Tilley (1991) – “Locating a Grammar”: Nämforsen carvings reaching conclusion is middle
carving surface where “the totality of the grammatically possible relations between the
designs are brought together”.
Tilley’s argument for the rock carvings having a unifying centre-point and totality contrasts
with Hassan’s understanding of immanence in language, where language has “ambiguities”
6
“epistemic conundrums” (153). Meaning that a text cannot have a centre point and unified
meaning, conflicting with Tilley’s understanding of the rock carvings at Nämforsen.
I believe this perspective of language is useful for society, in understanding how any phrase
or sentence may not have one meaning, and is open to interpretation, hopefully giving
people a different perspective in everyday conversion. Also, this may be applicable when
speaking in another language or someone is speaking to you in their second language. You
may both at points seem blunt or rude to each other but not actually be intending it perhaps
aiding with cross-cultural and cross-national relations.
In addition, this can possibly help with the deconstruction of language of political officials
which may be divisive, or manipulative for political goals. And so better apprehend the
political climate.
Ethnography and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity – by Harri Englund and James Leach
● Postmodern world (time-space compression, deindustrialization, and identity
politics) is said to pose challenges to the practice of anthropological fieldwork,
thus obstructing the production of anthropological knowledge
● Anthropology’s quest for relevance
● Meta-narratives; Anthropology should be done and not attached to this metanarrative, we shouldn’t try to find bigger contexts, and we should look at our
studies as relative
● Ambivalence as a key theme in a discourse on modernity
● Personhood and commodification
● ‘Multiple modernities’ – modernity is sweeping the world but its being
reintegrated/localized everywhere
● Transition to ‘biosociality’ or a ‘cyberculture’
● Previous structuralist dichotomies fact collapse
● Anthropology must be self-reflexive; anthropologists shouldn’t go to the field
and claim they know the bigger picture – this is not self-reflexive, can’t be topdown
AQCI
● Argument Englund and Leach begin by setting out a general critique of the analytical
concept of modernity and how it is being used in Anthropology. Under disguise of a
cultural relativism and in an attempt to make anthropology ‘relevant’, concepts of
multiple modernities are said to still draw upon sociological abstractions (such as timespace compression, the notion of ruptures, deindustrialization, identity politics). The way
these so-called meta-narratives of modernity organise participant observation prohibits
valuable insight through reflexivity and the agency of the informants. Using their own
ethnographic experiences in two different places, they discuss ideas of scale - asserting
that jumping from the individual insight to a conception of ‘culturally specific response
to global processes’ is ethnocentric in itself. This shows i.e. in the practice of the Papua
New Guinean periphery area of the Rai Coast, where Leach discovers that interrogation
in fieldwork goes both ways - and understanding this gives a totally different context than
globalisation to questions about money - rather it is about the villagers making sense of
sociality and relations to white people etc. Similarly, in Malawi, shared cosmology in
healers and born-again christians (in pentecostalism) would be obscured by traditionmodernity dichotomies.
● Questions It seems to me that their critique is geared towards the misrepresentation of
the small scale insights in a light of modernity debates - thereby, however, leaving out a
comprehensive critique or opinion on other larger-context-theories such as world systems
theories (i.e. wallerstein etc etc: economically/socially etc the world is connected and
flow of materials ideas and people are effecting how each ‘smaller piece of the puzzle’
develops —> i.e. world systems as unit of analysis, rather than nation states, or anything
smaller). Surely this wasn't their focus as they are rather concerned about Anthropology
and the future of the ethnographic practice - and yet, I would love to know more about
alternative ways of conceptualising the interconnected world.
● Contemporary Connection In contemporary London, I have been witnessing a retreat to
Paganism and Witchcraft amongst many young people - particularly amongst queerartist-y communities. If framed in modernity debates, this could be seen as a) a form of
individualisation or even b) a form re-enchantment//a counter-movement to the
modernisation of the world - and with its its institutions, capitalist power hegemonies etc.
However, upon closer inspection and with knowledge of the backgrounds of many those
people, one may find that the movement can be interpreted in almost a similar way to the
Pentecostalism in Malawi: that it is characterised by cohesion and composite personhood.
Then, again differently, it can be seen as a collective empowering of a minority group which is rather concerned with itself that with a general, over- arching system - and thus
not really geared towards distinction and driving some cause forward. This goes to show
that ethnocentrism can also be limiting in research even within ones own
community(/horizon/cosmology).
● Textual Connection The article stand in direct opposition to Comaroff and Comaroffs
work on occultism we had to rad last year - in which occultism and the re-enchantment of
many developing countries is portrayed as a countermovement to disenchantment of
modernisation and the obscure and difficult to understand and almost magical flows of
capital through time and space. Similarly, Arjun Appadurai’s 5 scapes of global cultural
force are at the root of what England and Leach are criticising: an anthropological
conceptualisation of global forces in an attempt to regain validity/ approximate
sociological theorising.
● Implications If we consider what Englund and Leach criticise to be accurate,
Anthropology is losing the essence to its fieldwork: reflexivity and self-awareness.
Hence, academics need to not just erase modernity as a word from its scriptures, but
examine the underlying meta narratives that accompany it. However to do that, academia
and its lack of funding as well as its practice of
● Cara June Michel, Week 4, Theoretical Perspectives
●
● auditing is favouring a culture of ‘quantity over quality’ - and prohibits most from
conducting long term fieldwork abroad. Instead, fast results have to be obtained, thereby
a falling into the traps of theorising too heavily and losing reflexivity and insight. Hence,
an implication would have to be the direct addressing of these problems in academia and a radical restructuring. This restructuring should be geared towards lifting
beaurocratic load off of teaching and research staff as well as a change in auditing: as in a
change of number of ‘ref-able’ articles a year etc. etc.
SOCIETY, SOCIAL FACTS AND SOCIALITY
1. Society, Social Facts and Sociality – Durkheim’s Theory of Society and Recent
Anthropological Critiques
Durkheim’s theory of Society (what Society is; how it originated in pre-social natural
process; how it continues to reproduce itself through collective representations and
symbols). summarised what Durkheim took to be the role of symbols in (a) representing the
force that powers the formation of Society and (b) crystallising Society as a worshipped
sphere of solidarity.
How social processes as ‘social facts’ are collectively embraced and embedded (as opposed
to individually psychological states). But, also, how even individual processes are infiltrated
by the social process (e.g. suicide in its various forms).
two kinds of critique of the Durkheimian idea of society and social facts that seemed to
directly address Durkheimian ideas: (i) the Actor-Network framework of Bruno Latour and
(ii) a cosmological critique. There are other critiques of the Durkheimian theory of Society
(eg Marxism and phenomenology).
For ANT (Actor-Network-Theory), the key point turns upon the difference between Society
(according to Durkheim, completed through the spontaneous spread and dominance of
collective thought) and Network (formed through the interlinking of separate human and
non-human actors in which collective thought is collectively negotiated at all local points in
the network and so isn’t really all that ‘collective’)
The cosmological criticism, by contrast, tends to accept the existence and power of
collective representations in thought, practice and institutions. But, it sees the
cosmos/universe as the main unit of collective human being, not Society. Indeed, Society
may well be seen as a particular socio-cosmic state amongst many possible others.
Is the notion of society useful?
Suicide as a social phenomenon – Durkheim
Four types of suicide:
- Integral suicide – lack of integrity in society
o More suicide in protestants (more about individual relationships with god) than
Catholics
- Altruistic suicide – Japanese army when they fail a task
- Egoist + economic suicide - someone’s horizon is broadened beyond they can ensure
o Someone very poor who suddenly became rich and does not know how to spend all
that money
Functionalist – how people fit into the environment
- Focus on statistics – alternative to psychoanalysis (collective consciousness – more than
individual)
- Suicide shows how individuals relate to society, and when those relationship break down or
strengthen
- Generalises social facts, does not state anomalies
o Suicide is a victim of society
-
Normalising suicide, and it should not be criminalised, nothing to do with morality
o At the time, it is becoming more accepted by Christianity
-
Altruistic suicide is different yet discussed in a similar way – it shows control and a lot of
solidarity and strong relations with society (opposite to others)
Mechanical + organic solidarity – how society works together
- Mechanical: solidarity through similarity and situation (one factory production line,
workers union)
- Organic: solidarity through difference, and working together because they are different
(London, modern societies, tolerance, racial and social differences)
ANT
-
‘Render the social world as flat as possible, so any new links are visible’
o sociology of association – asociology (instead of sociology of social relationships)
Gabriel Tard: look at how the society is held together, not as a quick answer how
certain events happen
 Critiquing seeing society as an entity
How society hierarchises itself, how a flat society deem itself with social differences
o Bitcoin is a comparably flat – no bank or regulation
o Wikipedia + social media – flat social relationships (anomalies)
Critiques Durkheim and other sociologists of seeing society as it should be an entity and
answer to social questions
Changes the structure we approach ethnography – see it flat instead of aerial view of
hierarchical structure – changes where we look
o
-
-
-
Active Network Theory:
o classical sociology
 society is greater than the sum of the individual
 Durkheim is very Structuralist
o This is more Post-Structuralist
 No distinct thing called society: there is a social but you cannot pinpoint it
o Emphasises links between people
 E.g. You look at relationship between two people, you study the connection,
instead of studying the two individuals on their own
 Associations happens all the time
 Map of all links, and when a new one emerges, you study that
 People are not seen as inherently social things
o We are not self-bonded humans
 We are all hybrid – so are all entities
 Words are also bonded
o E.g. Hospital
 Durkheim: a part of social fact of public health, look at social solidarity
 ANT: the relationship between the virus and the person, and how that new
link changes and affects the social
o ‘dividuals’
 extension of association with other people and non-human beings
-
how to associate hierarchy in a flatness of association
o it gives agency to things that are not granted agency
o how to know where the network starts and where it ends (methodologically)
o e.g. hospital: flat relations but also priorities and chain of commands
o did not discuss the people who come in the network, get treated and leave the
network
Cosmic Food web – ethnographic
- Clan in northwest Amazon
- Unchanging invisible world of ancestral and animal spirit
- Everything in the real world is mirrored in the ancestral world
- A food-chain – the man-eater (jaguar) – food and eater (man) – eats others
o Human and animals can transcend into others – fluid
- All food need to be blessed before eating, to make sure the soul of the animal and plant does
not harm the human body, after being blessed the soul returns to the nature and be born as
another plant/animal
Shaman are needed when they kill a large quantity, excess food for rituals, more than
needed for food
o Shaman gives animal spirits spirit food to eat – negotiation with the ancestral and
spiritual world
- Cosmology itself is a collective consciousness
- Makuna – this ritual can be seen in other parts of the amazon
- Against ANT: link to hierarchy, the image of a godhead and naming children after
grandparents
- Materiality is intrinsic within the society, spirit food and ritual
But also not connected that the cosmology exists without materials
-
SOLIDARITY, COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION AND ‘SOCIETY’:
DURKHEIM’S THEORY OF SOCIETY AND ITS ANTHROPOLOGICAL
DESCENDANTS
SOCIETY
These days, we take ‘society’ for granted and take it to be…
 A collective mode of existence
 A realm of interaction, differentiation & inter-dependence
 A natural state
 A non-human animal as well as an animal-human state. BUT…
(a) what then is specific to human society?
(b) how did human society come about?
SOME CLASSIC SOCIAL THEORETICAL ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS
Techno-evolutionist theories
e.g. Marx & Engels (c.1850) Ape evolution of prehensile
thumb -> enhanced tool-use -> Cooperation as adaptive advantage -> language &
relatively complex subjectivity -> Society
Social Contract theories
e.g. Hobbes & Rousseau (1712-1778) Natural state of
‘brutish individualism’ -> Emergence of rationality in human nature -> ‘> Submission to
rules that repress pre-social instincts and drives
1778))
-> Social contract (Rousseau (1712-
The Leviathan State (Hobbes 1588-1679))
Vitalist theories (e.g. Schopenhauer; Nietzsche) Society not a rational self-perfecting
move within Nature, A vital “will to power” coursing through the universe/cosmos Crystallising as the powerful imposition of elements upon one another (powerfully
affective/emotive attraction of elements to one another)
- vital force in nature is not chaos but forces of attraction
EMILE DURKHEIM’S THEORY OF SOCIETY
a. borrowed elements of vitalist social-psychology
b. married to elements of social contract theory
c. rejected ‘monadic’ theories (e.g. Gabriel Le Tarde)
Look at three important books
The Division of Labour in Society (1893)
Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)
Essay on Suicide (1897)
The Division of Labour in Society (1893)
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Key concepts -> Mechanical and Organic Solidarity
As Human Society progresses, population is held together by forces of SOLIDARITY
Solidarity is sense of together-ness
Pre-linguistic ‘gut’ feeling (“sentiment”) of natural collective-ness
Mechanical solidarity Society with little technical differentiation Intense solidarity Born of
sense of complete one-ness of population ED thinks is typical of ‘primitive’ or ‘elementary’
society

Organic solidarity Developed technical division of labour Strong solidarity Born of sense of
need to cooperate & complement to exist Sense of inter-dependence of parts rather than
dissolution of parts in a whole
Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)
Religion is the collective worship of a god-head (deity; ancestor; totem; spirit; flag) (Magic is
not religious for ED)
People have ideas (“collective representations”) of the god, spirit etc BUT what drives them to
collectively worship - power of Society; the human will to Society; the profound desire for
solidarity. So…
The idea and material presences of the god-head are crystallisations of social power and….
The congregation is Society in microcosm….
On the surface e.g. the icon; the totem pole; the alter; the god-statue symbolise the gods;
Deep in peoples’ minds, they symbolise Society!!!
In & through religion, Society crystallises and worships itself
Therefore religion is a functionally powerful misrepresentation of what religion
really is
Essay on Suicide (1897)

Suicide appears to be an extremely individual act and a subject for scientific psychology
not social science

But ED makes a conceptual distinction between individual suicides and the suicide rate:
the latter is a ‘social fact’


…determined by other social facts NOT by individual factors.
Two types of analysis (a) between societies and (b) within modern 19th C society
DURKHEIM’S TYPOLOGY OF SUICIDES AND THEIR
CORRELATION WITH DIFFERENT KINDS OF SOLIDARITY
 Three main types of suicide whose statistical frequency….
 varies according to type of solidarity
 Altruistic suicide (e.g. heroic soldiery) correlates with mechanical solidarity; intense
worship of the Society is more than love of the self)

Egotistical suicide correlates with Society in which there is a strong cult of the individual
Bourgeois Society

Anomic suicide correlates with low levels of social solidarity High rates of social change
where solidarity never settles/crystallises Alienated consciousness
Suicide is shaped by its SOCIAL conditions of emergence
MAIN ELEMENTS OF DURKHEIM’S THEORY
1. Society is the result of a teleological programme within Nature
2. This programme is furthered by drives that move humans from ‘brutish’ animal egotism
to human desire for collective existence
3. The drive to collective existence becomes Society when it is crystallised in compelling
symbols of itself
4. Individuals are powerfully possessed by the collective consciousness
5. Social fields vary on a spectrum of normal to pathological according to how
strongly/weakly social facts/collective representations are internalised
6. Social forms can be divided into emergent structures (like the division of labour), vital
functions (like religion) and structural effects (like suicide rates & forms)
SOME KEY INFLUENCES OF DURKHEIM’S THEORY UPON THE
DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
1. The object of social and cultural anthropology is the collective field of social and cultural
relations (‘social facts’)
2. Individuals are important only insofar as they are collectively socialised OR are agents who
transform collective form
3. Ritual is a symptomatic stage in which key social values might be repeatedly symbolised
4. e.g. C. Levi-Strauss’s two essays on shamanism (in Structural Anthropology Vol 1):
a. Kwakiutl shaman in NW USA unmasks his own medical trick & goes public; BUT
THE PRESSURE OF TRIBAL BELIEF RE-CONVINCES HIM
-
Individual agency does not achieve social significance until it is collectively
vindicated (AA’s Fiji example)
5. Individual bodies are socialised (see M. Mauss’s “Techniques of the body”) via the collective
production of body-image & body-dynamic
Actor-Network Theory
a. REJECTS Underlying process of emergent solidarity that drives individuals
unconsciously to combine
b. FOR conscious motivations that establish connections & networks (e.g. a network of
doctors, patients, paramedics and administrators)
c. REJECTS Overarching and commanding god-heads, symbols, norms & binding
representation
d. FOR the local creation & authorisation of cultural facts by networks of individual or
institutional actors
e. REJECTS completely separate field of social facts: (e.g. the network of the hospital
includes the technology, the pathologies and the bugs!)
-
Society therefore is a social mythology that arises as a misrepresentation of itself
within networks of interactive thinking
There is no overriding collective culture, ideology or mood that determines a whole
field of relations
There are only different overlapping networks on both local and (today) global
scales
a.
b.
c.
Active agents who voluntarily converge and associate
d.
Society is actually an articulation of contiguous, overlapping, dissolving and reforming
networks
e.
Whose strength and effects have to be studied concretely in each instance
Or who have been forced into the network by other agents (not by Society)
Beliefs, symbolisations, norms are negotiated within the network and have only force within
it (e.g. reliability of experimental results & strength of a scientific theory are only really
strong and valid cultural facts within the individual lab or within networks associated with
it)
CONTRASTING DURKHEIM AND LATOUR’S
VISIONS OF THE SOCIAL
- Durkheimian Society is akin to a heavily scripted &
directed drama on a finite stage
- Latourian networks are akin to un-directed
improvisations incorporating ‘extras’ as required from
on, around and off the stage
Instead the dominant Melanesian idea is of….
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
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
Relations between persons and things being formed by flows of ancestral substance
Enhanced/facilitated by kinship, marriage and ritual: they channel, conjoin and
crystallise ancestral flows of vital substance OR…
Ritually separate flows that have been conjoined (e.g. in male and female initiation
where everyone is born androgynous)
e.g. Melanesian kinship relations maybe defined by common substance (e.g. blood;
semen) flowing through persons, things and spaces creating relationships as they
flow
e.g. kula flow of objects is a flow of personal ‘fame’ and name’: (possessors of objects
hold & embody a historical accumulation of famous names and stories)
B. THE COSMOLOGICAL VIEW OF THE SOCIAL
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Long history in Anthropology but now increasingly influential
Takes seriously and at face value peoples’ ideas about the universe which they
inhabit…
At how the human social realm is contained by the cosmos/universe…
Or in ritual, the human realm can contain the cosmos (as Inca political ritual
incorporated the sun and moon
Not Society but socio-cosmos or socio-cosmic continuum
e.g. too man-made climate change industrial pollution leads to warming of the
planet by the sun threats to future life changes behaviour in the present
i.e. people behave not as if they were in a Society but as if they are in the human
realm/part of the cosmos PTO
The Durkheimian theory of Society’s emergence is a particular modern cosmological
view….
of a social configuration that thinks of Society as a tightly enclosed enclave…
emerging out of earthly Nature and encapsulating exceptionally within it
within the universe at large but scarcely affected by cosmic forces at large (unlike e.g.
the Inca or modern thinking about climate change)
Durkheim: sacrificing oneself for the good of the society
Modern consciousness seems to contradict durkheim
3 perspectives: (role of excvhange in the structuring of social life)
1. transactionalism and methodological individualism
a. individual actor remains separate within a society
b. there are 2 primary units of the social life: society that brings people together and
individuals that are needed to complete social action and put it in motion
c. constant transactions and exchanges that create social life within a society
d. individuals have to transact to establish real social relations
e. basic unit of transaction is exchange
f. exchange of valuable things
g. issues: what are these things? are they commodities or kinds of things that circulate on the
market or gifts?
h. individuals have freedom in the society to transact their own relations to other people
i. the theory accepts the existence of society but not as an atmosphere or cloud that
penetrates the individuals' consciousness; doesn't possess invidivduals to the point that
htey need to do what the society wants
j. midway position between durkheim and actor-network theory
k. 2 classic examples:
i.
Barth - Political Leadership amongst Swat Pathens
1. militarised environment, highly individualist
2. no hereditary offices
3. no state - clans and tribes; family units key in social organization
4. groups formed around local leaders - khans
5. mafia-type structure based on exchange of protection; everybody needs
protection
6. Barth came up with an idea that it was through this kind of exchange that
certain individuals became khans
7. people would be proud to be obedient to a particular khan
8. he became it by being the best exchanger (the best capitalist)
ii.
Edmund Leach - Political Systems of Highland Butma
1.
Kachin people
2.
fundamentally egalitarian with a de-centralising ethos
3.
various political relationships and hierarchy develop through transactions - but
it's egalitarian?
4.
bride's fathers' families were more prestigious than groom's families
5.
the b's father ended up with more rank and influence
6.
over a period of time, a man with many daughters would accumulate a lot of
resources
7.
and would rent them out to men who were indebted -> helping them to marry
their daughters off
8.
the society was becoming more and more stratified because of the transactions
surrounding the marriages
9.
rebellions against the 'bankers'
10.
2types of Kachin societies: egalitarian and hierarchical - not different, but 50
years apart
11.
LEach was both transactionalist and kind of durkhaimian
l. some families find themselves on good land and some on bad land (Asad, Friedman)
i. the kind of land people are is a factor
m. another factor is violence
transactionalism is a generalisation of the capitalist market models to all the societies (as a universal
social process)
 in the realm of political processes
 in any other context
 commodity exchange is everyehwere universal; applied to the modern economy as well as every
politics
if we want to find out about social psychology of the actors who are exchanging competitively
a good theory of competitive exchange is needed - it's a valuable theory
BUT if it's saying that a society is primarily produced by competitive exchange, perhaps transactionalism
is going too far
transactionalism governs the ethnograpjy in a way that some aspects are marginalised
leach didnt see violent politics - bc he focused on excvhange
SO the focus of ethnographic observation is always theoretically govern
we often contrast ethnography against theory
usually people already have a theory that determines their focus
READINGS
RECIPROCITY, EXCHANGE AND
REPRODUCTION
2. The Significance and Meaning(s) of ‘The Gift’: Reciprocity, Exchange and
Reproduction
two attitudes to exchange and gift-giving & receiving.
a.
Firstly, ‘the gift’ as a specific general approach to the study of social relations and their
integration: i.e. where binding reciprocal exchange between individuals and groups replaces the
Durkheimian idea of the worship of symbolisations of the Society process. One need explore here
what it is that makes the return gift seemingly obligatory and inevitable. Are we talking here
about naturally mentalised structures (Levi-Strauss especially) OR gifts with sacred or semisacred properties (Mauss; Sahlins; Weiner; Godelier)?
b.
Secondly, studies that look into specific cases of (usually ceremonial) gift exchange that don’t
make any assumptions about (a) whether gifts are necessarily returned and (b) whether this is
because there is a sacred element or not involved in their giving as well as their reciprocation.
Cosmological approaches may well prove useful here… But also, more political analyses of giftgiving that may well stress the strategic element involved in distributing gifts to actors who
become indebted clients as a consequence (e.g. Barths; Leach; transactionalism generally;
Bourdieu). Bourdieu also focuses upon the time lag involved in the return of any true gift and the
importance of the uncertainty as to whether gifts will ever be returned.
Does the gift remain crucial in any way in modern contexts: Or does it become a ‘survival’,
given/received at Xmas, births, birthdays, weddings etc? (for which see.g. Mauss; Godelier; Miller
(ed)).
NOTES
DURKHEIM’S THEORY PROPOSES
A conical geometry in which population coheres around & incarnates powerfully
constituted symbols of Society (Gods; norms; values; totems; flags)
The moral sacrifice of instinctual egotism for the good of Society
The insignificance of horizontal relations & interactions between parts of the
population…..
IT CAN BE SEEN AS:
a theoretical distillation of popular ideas (i) of religious communion and congregation;
(ii) Nations and (iii) crowds
the common-sense view is that social life is composed of EXCHANGE at many levels…..
- much ‘give-and-take’ of value transferred between individuals & groups
we cannot theorise this exchange within the Durkheimian framework!
THREE PERSPECTIVES ON THE ROLE OF EXCHANGE IN THE
STRUCTURING OF SOCIAL LIFE
1. Transactionalism and Methodological Individualism
2. Reciprocity and the Gift: Alliance Theory
3. Cosmological perspectives on ‘The Gift’
A. METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM AND
TRANSACTIONALISM
-
Theories of social life that…
Accept the existence of Society as a naturally binding force but…
Presume the seperateness of individual actors and groups wthin Society
(methodological individualism)
Presume that constant transactions & exchanges between individuals and
separate groups are necessary to establish the real social relations of actors
(transactionalism)
i.e. Solidarity brings actors together into a Society ->Transactions & exchanges
develop the social standing of seperate actors
TRANSACTIONIALIST & EXCHANGE BASED THEORY…
Differs from Durkheimianism
(A) Society and dominant social symbols, norms, values are not all-powerfully defining
(B) Collective representations and other ‘social facts’ do not penetrate deeply into the
minds of individuals
Differs from Actor-Network Theory by…
(A) accepting the existence and power of Society as a unifying force
(B) privelidging human strategic consciousness over non-human agency
TWO CLASSIC EXAMPLES
Frederick Barth (1965)
Political Leadership Amongst Swat Pathan
- Highly individualist & militarised environment on Afghan-Pakistan border
- No hereditary offices
- No state
- Clan and family key units of social organisation and highest social values (‘Society’)
Pathan mafia-type structure of patron-clientship based on exchange of protection for
loyalty
- Family and supporters gave material support to the khan
- The khan organised military groups and gave lordly feasts
- The khan became a heroic and charismatic leader
Swat Society begins as a definite social organisation and a set of ethnic values but develops
into a socio-political hierarchy through the cumulative transactions of the most astute
transactors
Edmund Leach Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954)
Found similar processes in the Burmese highlands
Kachin people are fundamentally egalitarian with a de-centralising ethos
- But hierarchical relations do develop…transactionally with similar outcomes to that
observed in The Swat Valley by Barths but….
Marriage was a crucial institution, heavily regulated, high bride-price (buffalo; other
feast food)
- Wife-givers gained more prestige than wife-takers
- Families with more daughters accumulate bride-price, successfully translate into
higher rank
- By claiming closer genealogical links to the high Kachin gods or spirits (nats)
- Lend bride-price to poorer men of lower rank who become indebted
- Periodic rebellion prevent a fixed class-system
Two types of Kachin
gumlao Kachins are egalitarian and recognise no chiefs
gumsa Kachins have hierarchy and recognise chiefs
Leach theorised that:
(A) transactions generated gumsa hierarchy from inside gumlao society but that
(B) gumlao rebellions reversed the cycle because of a dominant social ethic of equality
These studies build on ethnographic observations
- But have been critiqued for underestimating other observable
factors
e.g. control of best land by khans and high-ranking Kachins
e.g. threat of violence by leaderly big-men in both societies
Talal Asad (1972) “Market Models, Class Structure and Consent: a Reconsideration of
Swat Political Organisation” (critique of Barth)
Jonathan Friedman (1975) “Tribes, States and Transformations” in M. Bloch (ed) Marxist
Analyses in Social Anthropology (critique of Leach)
Transactionalist theory of exchange often supposes
1.
2.
3.
Transaction & Exchange are at the heart of social process & are natural and universal
Persons converge, interact and establish social relations out of self-interest not because of a
will towards collective solidarity
Market-models can therefore be applied to all societies and all social action
Transaction is "the process which results where the parties in the course of their
interactions systematically try to assure that the value gained for them is greater or
equal to the value lost." (Barth)
When transactionalism is proposed as a theory of market types of exchange it
illuminates the socio-pyschological features of competitive exchange
BUT
When transactionalism is proposed as a universal theory of human social activity, it may
skew & bias ethnographic observation
B. RECIPROCITY AND ‘THE GIFT’
Marcel Mauss 1925
Exchange is at the heart of social life but NOT as transaction: not as competitive exchange
- AT THE HEART OF SOCIAL LIFE IS RECIPROCITY =
- The equal giving and receiving of values as gifts (i.e. profitless exchanges)
- ‘The gift’ and reciprocity are universal social forms, found everywhere but in different
forms
1. The Maussian gift is made-up of 3 parts
a gift -> a counter-gift -> a repeat gift
- In which the repeat gift re-establishes further indebtness
2. So the gift ‘ends’ NOT with a return gift BUT with a gift that has to be given again….
A gift -> a return gift -> a repeat gift -> a return gift -> a repeat gift -> a return
gift………………………………………………….ad infinitum
-
a continual cycle of RECIPROCITY - CONTINUINGLY BINDING PROCESS = A
STRUCTURE
-
OBLIGATORY. “There is no free gift”
STRUCTURE rather than STRATEGY
1. A process in which givers and receivers find themselves caught up in an underlying or
overriding process
2. More than, and prior to, the individuals who perform it
3. Heavily SACRED and cloaked in ceremony
4. A ‘total social fact’: binds/folds in the totality of Society (people, objects, gods)
Mauss’s theory conceptualises a gift that has the power to bind individuals together &
which becomes sacred
Has flipped Durkheim’s theory of religion-as-society onto a horizontal plane!
Alliance of persons & groups through the gift creates society
LEVI-STRAUSS’S THEORY OF ELEMENTARY KINSHIP
STRUCTURES
Proceeds from Mauss’s analysis of exchange as reciprocity as endlessly encompassing
DRIVE & PROCESS
However, the drive to exchange is not primary:
- a humanising rule that enforces EXTRAVERSION is primary
- “Marry out or die out”! (Edward Tylor) i.e. Without EXOGAMY, no Society!
 the incest taboo = a rule that emerges universally from Nature to enforce exogamous
sex: a universal rule
 Spreads to obligatory alienation, receipt and continuing alienation of economic values
 Society is made up of parallel levels of giving, receiving & continuing to give
1.Restricted Exchange
(A to B; B to A; A to B)
Two groups exchanging sisters &
goods
2.Generalised Exchange (A to B to C to D to….Z AND also B & C & D to A)
3.Elementary Structures (prescribe marriage with particular relatives e.g. cross-cousin
marriage; matrilateral cross-cousin marriage; parallel cousin marriage)
4.Complex Structures of (prohibits marriage with certain relatives)
All of these forms of kinship are elaborations of the consequence of the incest taboo
Society is created when cognitive hard-wiring forbidding incest – spontaneous bodily
instinct - BECOMES A RULE
Human socio-cultural consciousness begins with a natural rule against nature!!!
THE COSMOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE - INDIGENOUS
REPRESENTATIONS OF ‘THE GIFT’
1. The gift is not a thing. It objectifies a part of the giver (Mauss)
The hau (Maori)
Contains bodily substance e.g. bone, sperm, blood in M. Strathern’s Gender of the Gift
Contains fame of self and Others (e.g. Trobriand kula)
Contains “the thought that counts” (we moderns say)
2. The gift must be returned because it is a gift-person!!
When given, the gift-person demands return to itself!
The gift splits the person and then reunifies her/him!
Otherwise sickness & anxiety
3. The gift objectifies and channels inexhaustibly eternal powers, circulating them through the
human realm
Trobriand yams (circulate solidifying and shaping power of semen)
kula shell valuables (circulate eternal property of names and fame)
The hau of the Maori bird is the hau = fertility of the forest
4. Gifts must be returned to recharge & re-empower
e.g. the hau of the Maori bird must continually be returned to the forest in order that
he forest can re-vivify human population (Sahlins)
e.g. continuing gifts of tribute to kings & lords secure the life-sustaining powers of
the king
5. These gifts are cosmic gift whose flow amongst human beings is the flow of cyclical
cosmic powers through Society
Cosmic powers that pulse outwards and back to source
Ceremonial gift-giving locates/synchronises human beings with cosmic processes
Against processes of decay that distance them from the power source
A FAMILIAR CONFIRMATION THAT THE MODERN GIFT CAN
BE A SOCIOCOSMIC PHENOMENON
The Xmas gift
Two sorts (i) Gifts to adults and (ii) gifts to children

Gifts to adults are imagined as gifts from persons to persons: contain the ‘thought
that counts’

But gifts to children come from Santa and the North Pole
The gift to childhood is delivered magically, is attached to cosmos and is enchanted:
But the gift to adults is disenchanted
Placed under the tree to give them a semblance of cosmic quality and attachment



MODERNITY AND THE GIFT
1. As a calculated gift: (Bourdieu observes that gifts may not be reciprocated)
Always element of calculation and strategy in determining size and return or not!
 Gift infected by the commodity
 Deployed strategically in the formation of friendship groups
 Creating friends as those who would self-sacrifice for the sake of the Other –
and non-friends by the refusal to reciprocate!
2. As disinterested altruism
 e.g. As humanitarian feelings e.g. towards refugees
 e.g. As part of world religious charity
 as PHILANTHROPY
3. As a product of epic feats of ordinary persons
 e.g. sponsored runners, abseilers, parachute jumpers, trekkers…
 who work really hard to generate the gift
 and place themselves on ‘the edge’ to make it crystallise
SOME CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
In societies, not dominated by the market, where control over land is real, the gift TENDS
to be (a) cosmic and (b) un-strategically transactiona
In modern societies dominated by the market, the Maussian gift as a cosmic gift survives
only primarily in the world of children OR
it is converted into hard-earned unreciprocated altruism which signals the virtue of the
giver NOT the binding of social relations in structures of alliance
READINGS
Carrier, J. G. (2002) Exchange. Pp 218–221 in: Barnard, A. Encyclopedia of social and
cultural anthropology. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis Ltd
QUOTATION. Quote a sentence (or excerpts from linked sentences) from the text (or texts) that
you think is central to the author's (or authors') implicit or explicit argument(s). Always cite the
page.
Structural perspectives: “Taken in the aggregate, exchanges can exhibit structure, patterns and
regularities” (218).
Relational perspectives: “This approach is concerned with how exchanges reflect and shape the
identity of the social actors involved…” (219).
“how circumstance affects people’s thinking about exchange, identity and relationship, and what
are the practical consequences of these effects” (220).
ARGUMENT. Explain the author's argument in your own words. What is/are the main point(s)
of the author? Be sure to include both: what the author is arguing for, and what s/he is arguing
against. Situate that argument within the topic of the week.
Throughout the article, Carrier describes different perspectives on the act of exchange. First, he
introduces the structural perspective, which focuses on the structures, patterns, and regularities
that exchanges exhibit. Whether or not the actors involved are aware of it, exchange practices
have and create structures. He mentions Malinowski’s account of the kula trade in Trobriand
Island, which has a clear structure that is unintended by the participants. In this trade, armshells
and necklaces are strictly travelled in one direction. Carrier also talks about the spheres of
exchange, which are structures that pose restrictions on exchange: in Tiv, Nigeria, there are
different levels of spheres and actors cannot exchange across these. Moreover, he notes on LéviStrauss, who viewed that marriage is an exchange system of women that produces structures of
relationships and a larger social order.
Carrier also introduces relational perspective, which illustrates how exchanges represent and
create the identity of the actors involved as well as how actors are related to other, with the
thing exchanged, and with the act of exchange itself. He notes on Sahlins’s relational analysis of
the Big Man system in Melanesia. In this system, exchange marks allegiance and obligation
between leader and followers. At the same time, it creates boundaries between different groups.
He also talks about Mauss’s ideas about the exchange practice in Melanesia: the Maori hua—the
spirit of the gift—requires the recipient to return the gift to the original owner as it bears the
identity of that person. Moreover, according to Strathern, as mentioned by Carrier, Melanesians
acquire identity as part of the relationship with the exchanged gift.
However, Carrier problematise some aspects of such perspectives: they tend to neglect the
various ways that people actually act in different circumstances.
QUESTIONS. Raise questions on the text – either something that the author has not asked,
something her/his argument leaves out or provokes.
To what extent is relational perspective different from structural perspective? If people like LéviStrauss analyse the structures of relationships created by the act of exchange, is it a structural
perspective or a relational perspective? Even Sahlin’s perspective on the Melanesian Big Man
system seems ambivalent.
CONTEMPORARY CONNECTION. Find a contemporary example – from the news, politics, arts,
culture, recent history, or experience (in last resort) – through which you can discuss this
reading, apply its theory, or critique the argument.
Social approach (actors are linked and obligated to each other, things exchanged as bearers of
social identities and relationships) vs. Individualistic approach (actors are self-interested and
autonomous, concerned with equivalence/getting as good as they give)
Symbolic aspects of consumption.
TEXTUAL CONNECTION. Relation of this reading to other readings from this week?
It is linked to Sahlins reading as it elaborates on the Maori hua.
IMPLICATIONS. SUPER IMPORTANT. Lay out what this argument implies for understanding or
improving society, relations between individuals, or groups (e.g., inter-ethnic, nations, etc.) or
any facet of social or cultural reality. What are the implications (xxx) of this reading to xxx aspect
of society / anthropology? In other words: “so what”?
To think about the abstract and concrete dimensions of exchange. While the things and values
attached to them may be highly symbolic, the consequences seem to be more practical as
exchange elucidates social relationships and structures. This ambivalent nature is perhaps
associated with the nature of economy.
Radcliffe-Brown's Functionalism
'The concept of function as here defined thus involves the notion of a structure consisting
of a set of relations amongst unit entities, the continuity of the structure being
maintained by a life process made up of the activities of the constituent units.'
(Radcliffe-Brown, 'On the Concept of Function in Social Science', American Anthropologist,
37(1935):394-402), emphases in the original)
'The function of an institution, custom or belief, or of some regular social activity, such as
a funeral ceremony, or the trial and punishment of a criminal, lies in the effects it has in
the complex whole of social structure and the process of social life.
This theory of society in terms of structure and process, interconnected by function
has nothing in common with the theory of culture as derived from individual biological
needs.'
(Radcliffe-Brown, 'Functionalism: A Protest', American Anthropologist, 51(1949):320-323)
'"Function" has been a very useful technical term in physiology and by analogy with its
use in that science it would be a very convenient means of expressing an important
concept in social science. As I have been accustomed to use the word, following
Durkheim and others, I would define the social function of a socially standardised mode
of activity, or mode of thought, as its relation to the social structure to the existence and
continuity of which it makes some contribution. Analogously, in a living organism, the
physiological function of the beating of the heart, or the secretion of gastric juices, is it
relation to the organic structure to the existence or continuity of which it makes its
contribution. It is in this sense that I am interested in such things as the social function of
the totemic rites of Australian tribes, or of the funeral rites of the Andaman Islanders. But
it is not what Professor Malinowski or Professor Lowie mean by functional anthropology.'
(Radcliffe-Brown, 'On Social Structure', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 70(1940): 112.)
THE SPIRIT OF THE GIFT – SAHLINS – 1974
What is the principle of right and interest which, in societies of primitive or archaic type, requires that the gif
received must be repaid? What force is there in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return? –
Mauss
o The hau is that force – it gives the donor a mystic and dangerous hold over the recipient (Maori
society)
-
o Prototype principle of reciprocity in Melanesia, Polynesia and the American northwest coast
Taonga and all strictly personal property have a hau, a spiritual power
“la circulation obligatoire des richesses, tributs et dons » in Samoa and New Zealand
To accept something of someone is to accept something of his spiritual essence
To present something to someone is to present something of oneself
Levi Strauss accuses him of having let himself been mystified by the native
The word hau has a wide semantic field
o Hau simply mean “countergift”
One man’s gift cannot be another man’s capital
Delayed repayment among Maori are customarily larger than the initial gift
o Hau is a verb meaning to “exceed, be in excess”
Firth observed: the hau does not cause harm on its own initiative: the distinct procedure of witchcraft has to be
set in motion
For the Ranapiri – too be taught by the priest teacher, you have to accept the loss of a near relative
The gift is alliance, solidarity, communion, in brief, peace.
o The primitive analogue of social contract is not the state but the gift
Exchanges are peacefully resolved wars and wars are the result of unsuccessful transactions
All tee exchanges, that is to say, must bear in their material design some political burden of reconciliation
STRUCTURE, ACTION, AGENCY, PRACTICE
3.
Structure, Action, Agency, Practice: Questions of Creativity and Change
Looking at ‘action’ has usually meant in social anthropology looking at what actors are
doing rather than at what structures are theoretically or theologically dictating. From
here, it’s only a short theoretical step to arguing that actors have ‘agency’ = the capacity
to act out their own thoughts OR act in pursuit of their own interests OR act upon
structures, annulling their dictate OR transforming their message.
- Sherry Ortner: linking culture, structure, action and agency. She’s probably the most
nuanced and complete theorist of agency.
- Sabah Mahmood is another. Note that ‘action’ and ‘practice’ tend to be conflated in these
approaches.
Simpler models of agency come from methodological & possessive individualists (i.e.
theoreticians of natural choice and competition) who regard rational decision-making
actors as drivers of all social process (e.g. F. Barths).
Weber is usually considered to be the foremost theorist of ‘action’, though individual
action he observes is the result of tightly controlling ‘ethics’ and sensibilities (like the
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) which share many of the characteristics of
‘structure’. The same has been said of Bourdieu where action-as-practice is the field in
which social subjects are habituated to key social principles and schemas.
Foucault’s theory of the modern Subject is insightful too
NOTES
SOCIAL STRUCTURES….




Bind actors and groups to form societies, institutions & groups
Bind parts of specific languages together to promote sensible communication (not
nonsense) in that language
Bind different ideas together to form specific cosmologies/worldviews or theories
Bind different ideas, values, norms & imperatives to form a specific culture
Durkheimian social theory



makes it difficult or impossible to theorise ‘freedom’
individuals strongly socialised to celebrate affirm, conform, obey social norms, values,
laws & institutions
individuals unsocialised only in trivial & restricted ways
AGENCY, ACTION & CREATIVITY
FIVE ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORISATIONS
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
Agency & Transgression in Ritual
‘Simple’ Resistance to Structure
Structuralist approaches
Habitus & Practice theory
Historical Practice theory
F. ‘Agency into Structure’
A.Agency, Creativity & Liminality
Turner’s theory in The Ritual Process

Accepts Durkheim’s assumption that social facts burrow deep into people’s
unconsciousness & determine their behaviour
 But proposes the universality of liminal spaces that are ‘betwixt and between’
ordinary states of society
 Extraordinary spaces in which Society stages the reversal, inversion and
transgression of ordinary social relations
 Mock rebellion in Southern African kingship ritual; transvestism & clowning in
Pacific Island ritual; Carnival in Europe and Latin America; Purim in Jewish religion;
Halloween in Christian cultures
 Turner calls these transformations of the liminal state ‘anti-structure’
‘Agency’ in this theory of ritual seems to emerge out of staged escape from socialisation
Strengths:
1. Asks the question: how can there be agency, creativity & transgression within
structured social systems?
2. Finds a separate space where agency, creativity and transgression can regularly
appear
3. Makes agency, creativity & transgression extraordinary but normal
Weaknesses:
1.
Far from staging ‘anti-structure’, most ritual processes seem to be VERY heavily
structured !!! (eg Communion; Ramadan; Fijian chiefly drinking ritual). Scripted &
choreographed
- Inversions & transgressions assume particular form (have structural content not
just anti-structural intent)
2. The effects of agency, creativity and transgression are confined to the ritual: can’t
explain social transformation
3. In the theory, the freedoms of liminal space are autonomous but empirically the
evidence is that Society as whole impacts upon the degrees of freedom staged in
liminal space
B.Loosening the Grip: Tactical Resistance to Structure
e.g. Irving Goffman in Assylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and
Other Inmates (1961)
 A study of ‘total institutions’ that totally control the inmate’s time and space (e.g.
mental hospitals; concentration camps)


Little or no freedom
But Goffman found in a New York mental hospital that all inmates had ways of
resisting
 Some had elaborate scenarios of resistance – others though continually resisted
in trivial ways to build a resistent orientation to the institution
James Scott in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985)
 Observed that whilst peasants scarcely organised politically, they continually
used tactics against big landowners and police
 Says that ‘tactics’ (rather than political strategy) are ‘weapons of the weak’
 Resistance as saying No!, being uncompliant….
 Rather than aiming for coherent political transformation
 Is locating space away from the grip of structure
C.STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES



Theorised the structured nature of all social life
Many structures & much of this structuring is deeply unconscious
But structures are GENERATIVE not just constraining

In fact, they constrain in order to generate: to be creative demands rules!
Strengths of this approach
1. Goes beyond structure as pure constraint, agency as resistance
2. Establishes that agency can be a creative act not jut an act of transgression or
‘freedom from’
3. Establishes that agency can be structured
Weaknesses of the approach
1. Focuses upon voluntary acts, not on domination and hierarchy & avoids acts of
resistence
2. Equates the deep structure of cultural forms with the grammatical structure of
language. This may not be only partly useful
HABITUS & PRACTICE-THEORY- Pierre Bourdieu in Outline of a
Theory of Practice (1972)



Observed Kabyle Berber houses in N. Africa where…
Houses are gendered like people: have male and female sides
Male side is where all the prestigious activity occurs




Female side is polluting to men
People appeared to gravitate unthinkingly towards their respective gendered parts of the
house
Same with economic division of labour Men gravitated to the fields, women to the house
where agriculture was ranked higher than housework
But……
Bourdieu theorises that:
1. Social life is heavily governed by social hierarchies = systematic domination of one class
OR one gender OR one ethnicity over others
2. Hierarchies reproduced by socialisation in which states of dominance & subordination
are NATURALISED & NORMALISED
3. socialisation occurs primarily NOT through education BUT through the experience &
internalisation of SYMBOLIC SPACE (and time)
4. Actors embody these symbolic oppositions and the sense of where one must be in the
structure
5. As an unconscious disposition or HABITUS, These symbolic structuring of space (& time)
become EMBODIED as a 6th sense or instinct
6. Hierarchy seems to to emerge out of space not society
BUT…..
1. Because structure is transmitted non-verbally….
2. Actors are left to interpret and improvise as they elaborate behavioural practice
dictated by the structure
3. Can have STRATEGIES for promoting status (‘symbolic capital’) within their
assigned class
4. Structures determine what people do but not how they do it
5. E.g.aChristina Toren’s study of Fijian drinking ritual. Very structured seating and
order of drinking. But children represent the ritual in different ways
6. E.g.b a gift must be returned but how you return it can vary – slow or quickly – and
this can be crucial
HISTORICAL PRACTICE THEORY
e.g. Sherry Ortner High Religion 1989
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Nepalese Buddhist celibate monasteries in the Nepalese Himalayas in the 20th
century
Celibate monasteries are unprecedented & a sharp departure from prevailing ‘folk’
Buddhism BUT
Follows the pattern of a mythic SCENARIO: an antagonism & separation of
legendary siblings: One stays on the limited area of land, the other has to leave
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Each century, actors with the disposition of the mythical younger go off to
something different e.g. trade; wage-labour; but then monastery foundation
Structure takes the form of exemplarary SCENARIOS of precedented action that
become HABITUS
But how practice unfolds from the habitus is also determined by how actors
strategically take advantage of historical circumstances
Case 2 Janice Boddy Wombs and Alien Spirits (1989)
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Patrlineal & patriarchal society in N. Somalia Female genital operations
Women do sub-incise clitoris and sew up vaginas (FGM?) in the Zar cult
Women run this cult practice: is under their immediate control
BUT WHO ARE THEY DOING IT FOR? DOES THEIR AGENCY FREE WOMEN UP? OR DOES IT
SECURE CONSENT FOR THEIR OWN PHYSICAL SUBORDINATION?
CONCLUSION
Hence agency, action and creativity can be seen as being:
A.
B.
C.
D.
Juxtaposed to structure
Generated by structure
Differentially completing structure according to strategy and historical conjuncture
Bringing structure into being and intensifying it
Everyday lives are channelled, constrained and so given pattern and predictability by:
 language and worldviews
 laws and morals
 material culture & infrastructures
These are socialised and become take-for-granted
Structure:
 Pattern
 Configuration
 Order
 Non-randomness
 The opposite of chaos
 Specific combination
 Systems and processes
Social structures:
 Bind actors and groups to form societies, institutions & groups
 Bind parts of specific languages together to promote sensible communication (not
nonsense) in that language
 Bind different ideas together to form specific cosmologies/worldviews or theories
 Bind different ideas, values, norms & imperatives to form a specific culture
 Bind, bind, bind & endure over time
But how should we conceptualise freedom with respect to structure?
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Modern actors find much freedom in the world (revolutions, rebellion, heresy, criminality,
subcultural subversion, artistic innovation, play)
Does freedom fit into structure or oppose it?
Durkheim’s social theory makes it difficult or impossible to theorise ‘freedom’
Individuals are strongly socialised to celebrate, affirm, conform to, and obey social norms,
values, laws and institutions
Individuals are unsocialised only in trivial and restricted ways
6 anthropological theorisations of how freedom is achieved in social structure:
1. Agency & transgression in ritual
2. ‘Simple’ resistance to structure
3. Structuralist approaches
4. Habitus and practice theory
5. Historical practice theory
6. ‘Agency into structure’
Agency and transgression in ritual: staged escape from socialisation
 Victor Turner accepts Durkheim’s assumptions that social facts burrow deep into
people’s unconsciousness and determine their behaviour
 But proposes that there are universal liminal spaces ‘betwixt and between’ ordinary
states of society that enable agency and creativity
 In these spaces, society stages the reversal, inversion and transgression of ordinary social
relations
 The transformations of the liminal state are ‘anti-structure’
 Examples:
o Mock rebellion in Southern African kingship ritual
o Transvestism & clowning in Pacific Island ritual
o Carnival in Europe and Latin America
o Purim in Judaism
o Halloween in Christianity
 Strengths:
o It asks how there can be agency, creativity and transgression within structured
social system
o Finds a separate space where agency, creativity and transgression can regularly
appear
o Makes agency, creativity and transgression extraordinary but normal
 Weaknesses:
o Far from staging ‘anti-structure’, most ritual processes seem to be very heavily
structured, scripted and choreographed (e.g. Communion; Ramadan; Fijian chiefly
drinking ritual)
o Inversions & transgressions assume particular form (have structural content not
just anti-structural intent)
o
The effects of agency, creativity and transgression are confined to the ritual: can’t
explain social transformation
o
In the theory, the freedoms of liminal space are autonomous but empirically the
evidence is that Society as whole impacts upon the degrees of freedom staged in
liminal space
 Degree of freedom in ritual and other liminal space is structurally overdetermined
‘Simple’/tactical resistance to Structure
 Irving Goffman’s study of ‘total institutions’ that totally control the inmate’s time and
space (e.g. mental hospitals; concentration camps) and have little or no freedom
o However, in a New York mental hospital, the patients had ways of resisting
o Some had elaborate scarios of resistance
o Others continually resisted in trivial ways to build a resistant orientation to the
institution
 James Scott’s observation of peasants
o Peasants were scarcely organised politically, but continually used tactics against
big landowners and police
o Tactics (rather than political strategy) are ‘weapons of the weak’
 Resistant as non-compliance, rather than coherent political transformation
Structuralist approaches
 Levi Strauss: unconscious grammar is proof of unconscious structures
o Being socialised to a certain language helps us generate sentences that
make sense unconsciously
 Myths consciously composed and narrated but according to unconscious rules –
basic rules of composition and narrative flow, but many variants possible
o E.g. Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Jack and the Beanstalk
o Levi-Strauss suggests: all examples narrate a union of heaven and earth
that seems humanly possible, is sought of an act of disobedience, turns
out to be humanely possible, heaven and earth are separated, and humans
are forced to live on earth
 Agency can be the freedom to construct things, it is not just the freedom from
constraint
 Weaknesses of this:
o Levi Strauss’ anthropological work is limited to myths and does not
analyse large political structures (some propose that political structures are
mythical)
o Equating deep structural forms of culture to language may not be enough
to explain structures
Habitus & practice theory
 Pierre Bourdieu: Berber houses in N Africa are gendered (male and female sides)
o Male side: prestigious activity
o Female side: polluting to men
Outline of his theory:
a.
Social life is heavily governed by social hierarchies
b.
Hierarchies reproduced by socialisation, which naturalises states of dominance
and subordination
c.
Socialisation occurs primarily not through education but through the experience
and internalisation of symbolic space and time
d.
Actors embody these symbolic oppositions
e.
As an unconscious disposition or habitus
f.
Hierarchy seems to emerge out of space, not society
g.
BUT habitus directs your movement, but not your behaviour within the structure
– structure determines what people do but not how they do it (e.g. how you return a
gift, how children represent the order of a Fijian drinking ritual) the different ways can
be very strategic

Historical practice theory
 Sherry Ortner [High Religion]: establishment of Nepalese Buddhist celibate monasteries
in the Himalayas in the 20 Century
 Celibate monasteries are an unprecedented and sharp departure from prevailing ‘folk’
Buddhism
 Despite this, their establishment follows the pattern of a mythic scenario:
o Antagonism and separation of two legendary siblings
o One stays on the limited area of land à STRUCTURE
o The other has to leave: in Nepalese history, there is always half the society that
leaves and innovates (e.g. celibate monasteries) à AGENCY
‘Agency into Structure’
 Annette Weiner [The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea]
o Women have a positive role to play in society
o They have agency, they are not just passive recipients of patriarchy (e.g. their
contributions to kula and yam ceremonies)
o Women’s exchanges ritually make sure women’s role in birth, death, and rebirth is
reproduced
o Women haven’t escaped patriarchy with their agency, they just find an important
social role within it using their agency
 Janice Boddy [Wombs and Alien Spirits]
o Female genital operations/mutilation
o Women always carry out these operations
o Women make cults around these operations
o Women are complicit in the enforcement of patriarchy and control of female
sexuality
o AGENCY INTENSIFIES STRUCTURE
 Sabah Mahmood [Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival & the Feminist Subject]
o Women went out of their way to be more pious than men
o There were no women in official roles in the mosque, they were always in the
margins
th
o
Is this about the emancipation of women within a structure, or is this a labour by
women to make themselves more subordinate within the structure
Conclusion:
 Agency exists within society
 Agency can be generated by structure
 Differentially completing structure according to strategy and historical conjuncture
 Agency that seems to intensify structure
READINGS
Ortner, 1996
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Serious games:
¡ practice theory: seeing people as social actors who produce or transform their culture
through living and practices.
¡ Serious games build on the above
¡ Sees social life as a game that is played seriously with goals and projects and routines
and plans and practices.
¡ Especially intentionality and agency
¡ In this contexts, actors are subjectively complex and culturally variable
‘Agency’ just sounds western
Social actors are never free from their social relations/ they can never act outside of,
they only have the mirage that they are free individual however they are not.
The agent is always embedded in relationships that produce solidarity such as friends
and family etc. as well as relations of power and inequality etc.
Comaroffs argue that agency dates back to ethnocentrism because Western thought
believed that agents can break free of their contexts through intention + actions
Comaroffs also argued that agency was too focused on individuals which leads to a
oversimplification of the historical process. History is much more complex than an
individual’s intentionality. Meaning that agency is fundamentally individualistic analysis
which breaks from structuralism
Comaroffs also argued that analysing the individual will make people loose sight of
large scale social and cultural elements at play. Because agency and intentionality does
not necessarily equate to outcomes.
Ortner argues that yes Comaroffs have a point but their points can always been
carefully avoided by anthropologists, and that there is something transformative
between ‘real practices’ and structures
Agency does stand alone and it is part of a larger social and cultural process
Intentionality: includes all the ways in which action is cognitively and emotionally
pointed toward some purpose
In some definitions of agency, intentionality does even factor into it.
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Giddens does but he also emphasizes intentionality as process because he wants to
leave space for the Freudian unconscious as a theory of action and also most social
outcomes are actually unintended consequences
Hard definitions of agency puts intentionality forward as the basis of agency. Ortner
agrees because she believes that intentionality is the difference between routine and
agency.
Agency is both universal and culturally constructed. Every language has something to
represent agency but just like language every culture has their own kind of agency
Agency is related to power because under different power regimes, agency can be less
or more
Agency isn’t so much about resistance to power, it is more about the complexity of
human emotion in relations of power and inequality
Giddens argues that agency and power is logically linked especially if power is seen as
transformative. But this is only one dimension of power
There is always asymmetries of power and the idea of humans as agents rests on seeing
them as empowered by access to resources
In the Grimm’s tales the heroines are often little girls whose passivity is expressed
through their victim herohood. Their story is moved along by things happening to them
not them actively engaging in activities. They might take active actions early on in the
story but they are always punished for it
In these tales of passage, agentic boys are rewarded whereas agentic girls are punished
through either denial of growth – return to the natal home without marriage such as
Gretel or Red Riding Hood – whereas passive heroines; stories end in marriage. The
punishment for agentic bad characters are even worse
‘we can see these tales as cultural formations that construct and distribute agency in
particular ways, as part of the cultural politics of creating appropriately gendered
persons in that particular time and place’
The grimms tales show the cultural construction of people or social subjects as agents
or not.
Cultural authenticity in the shadow of culturally and physically hostile power such as
colonial powers.
Anthropologists has seen in the field that many post colonial countries lack cultural
authenticity and their culture are largely shaped by colonialism
In Comaroff and Comaroff’s worl between Methodist missionaries and Tswana subjects,
they found that Tswana consciousness has been shaped by missionary ideas.
There are two types of agency in this discourse, the one that’s closer to power and the
one that’s closer to intention and how people engage and interact with culturally
constituted projects,
Resistance is also a form of power-agency. The Tswana people’s form of resistance is
just an ambivalent acceptance of missionary practices and categories but constantly
appropriating them in their own times
Agency as the pursuit of cultural projects: people seeking to accomplish valued things
within their own value network
This type of agency is the most fundamental and important dimension of agency
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Agency as power is organized around domination and resistiance and it is defined by
the dominant power whereas agency as intention is defined by local value and logic and
how to pursue them.
Agency as projects is about people having desires and intentions that grow out of their
structures even if powerful parties are trying to destroy this sense of agency.
Agency is a property of social subjects but since subjects are always imbedded in a web
of relations what ever agency they may have is always interactively negotiated and they
are never free agents.
Even though it seems like a property it is more a tendency towards enactment of
projects
On one level agency can be defined as a form of power and agents are just empowered
subjects but in the field it is much more complex than that because there is agency as
power and agency as projects.
Argument:
Ortner understands practice theory as the dynamic relationship between social structure and human
agency. This is text, she focuses on the opposition between structure and agency to understand the way in
which an agent is situated in their social or cultural structure.
Actors (social individuals) are socially embedded, they have agency but nevertheless only act within the
structure; they are enmeshed within relations of power, inequality and competition.
Ortner addresses the problems with agency:
- Overemphasis on agency can be ethnocentric, due to western assumption that human beings
triumph over their contexts through force of will; that context is a product of individual
actions/intentions - cf. Comaroff & Comaroff (1992)
- Overemphasis on agency may result in an oversimplification of the process involved in history
(lacks understanding of structural complexity, as well as large-scale social and cultural forces at
play, and unpredictability); desires and motives are sometimes irrelevant to outcomes
→ Agency is never a thing in itself but always a part of process of structuration
While intentionality is understood as conscious aims, goals, ideals, desires, wants; agency has been
interpreted in different ways, more or less in line with intentionality. It is not necessarily conscious.
Ortner shares Sewell’s understanding of agency as the ability for a group or an individual to coordinate
their actions with or against others, ‘to force collective projects, to persuade, to coerce…’.She
differentiates agency from routine practices.
→ There is a general agreement amongst theorists that agency is universal, many ‘agent’ interchangeably
with person, self, human being. Similarly, there is a general agreement that agency is culturally and
historically constructed (like language, agency will have a universal structure but will vary depending on
the context)
→ Agency is closely tied with power, as it stems from idea of ‘resistance’; ‘concept of action is logically
tied with that of power’ which relates to the transformative capacity of agents. Agency itself can be
understood as a form of power
Questions: (1) Should we be having a ‘top down’ or a ‘bottom up’ perspective of practice theory? In
other words, is it more relevant to focus on the agent within a social structure, or should we be looking at
the structure and its influence on the agent?
(2) Is there such a thing as free will? If our agency is structured and culturally constructed, can we think
independently?
Textual connection: Bourdieu (1992) Structures, habitus, practices
Implications: Ortner’s study is a beneficial perspective in the study of anthropology, which can be
closely tied to studies of structuralism. An understanding of agents’ position within a social structure can
provide a better understanding of social transformations and how the anti-structure produced by agents
has influence of such phenomena
Bourdieu, P. (1901) Structures, habitus, practices' The logic of practice pp. 52-65
Cambridge: Polity Press
Objectivism (Marx,
among others)
Theory of practice (Bourdieu)
Mechanistic theory of practice
as mechanical reaction
social world as a
spectacle offered to an
observer
the objects of knowledge are constructed,
not passively recorded
presents the action and the
riposte as many steps in a
sequence of programmed
actions produced by a
mechanical apparatus
the observer takes up a
"point of view" on the
action and proceeds as
if all the interactions
within the world were
purely symbolic
exchanges
Habitus - a system of structured and
structuring dispositions, constituted in
practice and always oriented towards
practical functions (see below)
mechanical reactions are
directly determined by the
antecedent conditions and
entirely reducible to the
mechanical functioning of preestablished devices which
would have to be assumed to
exist in infinite number
the social world is seen practical relation to the world - the
positivist
as a representation or a preoccupied, active presence in the world
performance
through which the world imposes its
presence, with its urgencies, its things to be
done and said, things made to be said,
which directly govern words and deeds
without ever unfolding as a spectacle
practices - no more than
the acting-out of roles,
The unconscious is just the forgetting of
the playing of scores or history that has created our point of
the implementation of view
plans
necessarily leads to the
realism of the structure
- treating relations as
realities already
constituted outside of
the history of the group
practices cannot be deduced from the
present conditions which may seem to have
provoked them but from the past
conditions which have produced the
habitus
The homogeneity of habitus within social
classes is what makes practices foreseeable
and therefore taken for granted
Habitus - the system of structured and structuring dispositions; constituted in practice and always
oriented towards practical functions; principles which generate and organize practices and
representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious
aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them
● the dispositions durably inculcated by the possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and
necessities, opportunities and prohibitions inscribed in the objective conditions generate
dispositions objectively compatible with these conditions and in a sense pre-adapted to their
demands
● the most improbable practices are excluded as unthinkable
● it is a product of history
● it produces individual and collective practices
● makes possible the free production of all the thoughts, perceptions and actions inherent in the
particular conditions of its production - and only those
● aims to transcend the usual antinomies of determinism and freedom, conditioning and
creativity, consciousness and the unconscious, or the individual and society
● the habitus tends to generate all the reasonable behaviours which are likely to be positively
sanctioned because they are objectively adjusted to the logic characteristic of a particular field,
whose objective future they anticipate
● at the same time, it tends to exclude all the behaviors that would be negatively sanctioned
because they are incompatible with the objective conditions
● the habitus is a spontaneity without consciousness or will
● makes questions of intention superfluous
● Within social classes, individuals have very similar conditions of existence and therefore their
practices are objectively harmonized without a conscious reference to norms or explicit
coordination
● early experiences have particular weight because the habitus tends to reject new information if
it is incompatible with the conditions in which it was developed
●
even when they look like the realization of explicit ends, the strategies produced by the habitus
and enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and constantly changing situations are only
apparently determined by the future
HABITUS
class - the individual habitus in so far as it
expresses or reflects the class (or group)
● could be regarded as a subjective but
non-individual system of internalized
structures and common schemes of
perception
● the objective coordination of practices
and the sharing of a worldview
● the singular habitus of members of the
same class are united in a relationship of
homology (diversity within their social
conditions of production)
○ each individual system of
dispositions is a structural variant
of the others
individual
● inseparable from the organic individuality
that is socially designated and recognized
(name, legal identity etc.)
● the principle of the differences between
individual habitus lies in the singularity of
their social trajectories, to which there
correspond series of chronologically
ordered determinations that are mutually
irreducible to one another
● habitus tends to protect itself from crises
and critical challenges by providing itself
with a milieu to which it is as pre-adapted
as possible - a relatively constant universe
of situations tending to reinforce its
dispositions by offering the market most
favorable to its products (e.g. people tend
to talk about politics with those who have
the same opinions)
Latour: Introduction- How to resume the task of tracing associations ANTH0013 - AQCI
ARGUMENT.
Agency is culturally construed and materialises in culturally specific contexts and through
multiple pathways.
Part I: Agency Defined
The first part of Ortners article reflects on the interpretation of agency and its presence in past
anthropological works. Ortner suggests in the differing definitions of agency that a more ‘hard’
definition is taken.
She also explores the role of intentionality within concept of agency
Part 2: Agency of Power in 2
Two main pathways of agency outlined:
Agency of power: domination and resistance (Grimms)
Agency of projects: Ability to enact projects
However, agency of power does not feed into a stable social structure of active/ passive,
dominant/ submissive but in unstable social structures and that the two pathway are
interconnect and feed into one another.
Intesectionality of Agency within Power, gender and colonialism (Tswana)
CULTURE, CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND
HUMAN RIGHTS
The idea of ‘culture’ in Anthropology is conceptualised and deployed in two ways:
1. As ‘culture’, to distinguish humans from other species through:
 Tool use
 Acquisition of language & consciousness
 Production of oral and written communication,
 Elaboration of myth, ritual and art, technology (material culture)
 Cosmology/world-view
2. As ‘cultures’, to distinguish populations and societies from one another through their:
 Socialisation to….
 Different beliefs, languages, organisations, mode of livelihood
 Bunching of traits into specific ‘culture regions’
The way in which anthropologists conceptualise ‘culture’ influences the way they
conceptualise ‘cultural difference’
Two types of perspective:
NATURALISTIC PERSPECTIVES
RELATAVISTIC PERSPECTIVE
A.NATURALISTIC PERSPECTIVES
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‘Materialist’
Collective behaviour driven primarily by pre-cultural drives
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Ideas & idea-driven practices are important but either….
(i)
Driven and ‘over-determined’ by pre-cultural drives OR
(ii)
Driven by ideas but not driven very far!
Evolutionary Adaptationism
Cultural Materialism
Cognitive (Methodological) Individualism
Marxism
Phenomenology
EXAMPLES OF NATURALISTIC AND MATERIALISTIC APPROACHES
I.
Evolutionary Adaptionalism
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II.
Culture evolved as an ADVANTAGEOUS ADAPTATION of the brain
Language made cooperation possible
Superior hand-eye coordination made tool-use possible
Culture remain powerful only insofar as they remain adaptive
Human driven by Progress in Nature to become the most adaptive
organism because of CULTURE
Culture/technology continues to progress
Cultural materialism
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III.
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Culture - ecological adaptations
Help a society maximise production and distribution and be fittest
Sacredness or aesthetic value evolves to confer social power of an
adaptive practice
e.g. Rappaport and the Tsembaga Maring social system in Papua New
Guinea
 Pig-kill ritual consciously/culturally designed to make peace between
clans operates ‘actually’ to reduce pig population and prevent tippingpoint
Cognitive Materialism
Theories that stress the primacy of individual cognition over collective
worldview and habitus
Collective culture may be strong, but individual ways if interpreting the cultural
structure are stronger!
Humans hardwired to individually customise collective reprsentations
e.g. Christina Toren’s analysis of Fijian chiefly drinking ritual
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Highly structured ritual that places chiefs at ‘high’ end of space and
commoners at ‘low’ end and women outside the ritual
Deep-rooted and transmitted as habitus over many generations BUT…
Each individual has their own interpretation of the world and the ritual
Children’s drawings of the ritual are all very different
Same with Fijian cosmological views on heaven and hell: often vary from
dominant Christian orthodoxies
IV Marxism
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IV.
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e.g. “Religion is the opium of the people”
culture = ideology = false consciousness
Socio-economic class domination/subordination is the underlying reality
As socio-economic contradictions sharpen, class interest and point of view
prevails
Phenomenology
Pre-cultural, pre-linguistic experience of the world is primary
Cultural representation and culture-based practice secondary and alienation
B. CULTURAL RELATIVISM
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primary and socialisation to its categories is powerful, strong and deep-rooted
field of belief and belief-led practice
field of meaningful belief which assigns meaning
not only CONSTRUCT worlds but also PEOPLE as particular kinds of HUMAN
PERSONS
divided into CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS (Levi-Strauss & Bourdieu)
EXAMPLES
e.g. Trobriand belief in virgin birth is not wrong-headed biological understanding but
linked to Trobriand matrilineal kinship
e.g. The appeal of Balinese cockfights only makes sense in the context of beliefs about ideal
Balinese behaviour and the suppression of emotion, true thoughts and violence
THE ‘ONTOLOGICAL TURN’
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Many cultures are so different from one another that meanings can’t be properly
translated by outsiders
Because their fundamental categories are so radically different
Ethnography – prolonged and intimate - has the best chance of partially deciphering
the Other’s worldview & sense of being human
Return with imperfect grasp of the other’s culture to unsettle Western categories of
otherness and to….
Introduce new concepts to the West based upon the cognitive encounter with
alterity
Two hypothetical scenarios
I.
Honour-killing (e.g. A man originally from Central Asia appears in a UK criminal court
charged with harming his sister. Prosecution seeks a long custodial sentence. His defence is
that his sister dishonoured the family by being intimate with a young man outside of marriage.
Human rights campaigners offer expert testimony arguing that the girl’s kin are in heinous
breach of human rights and should be punished in the same way that all other violent offenders
are. Other expert testimony opines that honour retribution is normal in these communities and
that the family had no choice but to rescue their honour by punishing their daughter.)
II.
Female Genital Mutilation and Human Rights (e.g. A woman born in the Horn of
Africa turns up in court charged with arranging for the genital mutilation of her daughter. She
sees nothing wrong with what she’s done and indeed claims that not to have arranged for the
sub-incision of her daughter (as she herself had been sub-incised) would have rendered her
daughter subsequently unmarriable. Campaigners for human rights argue that FGM is a gross
abuse of human rights and that the mother and the surgeon should be punished under the law.
Other expert testimony says that the mother is right and had no choice culturally speaking.)
A.NATURALISTIC THEORIES….
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Generally, have no problem with the idea of Human Rights
Theorise that
o biological Human Nature determines universal drives & needs
o Society tends to satisfy these drives and needs
o particular cultural, economic systems and political regimes can be evaluated
according to whether they oppress and infringe universal human rights
The theoretical assumption is that societies tend to satisfy basic human needs BUT
are blocked from this task by inhuman practices
Human beings will resist & all humans will empathise
BUT CULTURAL RELATIVISM…
Argues for…
o the primacy of cultural construction of social worlds and human being over any precultural natural/biological drives
o the cultural construction of drives and needs
o totally different ways of being human
o the repression of entities like
o the impurity of women (explains female circumcision)
o disordered sex & love unions (explains honour killings)
o chaotic disorder, protest & freedom) the selfishness of individuals (explains political
oppression of individuals)
o low-caste contact & interaction
ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOLUTIONS AND NON-SOLUTIONS TO THE
RELATIVIST’S DILEMMA
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Suffer Observe oppressive human relations unfold in the field; don’t intervene; feel
bad; AA’s Fiji example
Support Counter-tendencies Is ‘radical alterity’ internally un-contested? Use
ethnography to look for counter-cultures that critique in indigenous terms
Support the critical activism of cosmopolitan insider-outsiders Do ethnography of
insider-outsiders
Do comparative ethnography of human rights activism How has universal human
rights agenda been taken up (and opposed) in particular cultural sites?
Examine how groups in other cultures deal with the aftermath of violence, apartheid
& genocide (e.g. Truth and Reconciliation Commissions; War-Crime Tribunals)
i.e. transform a theoretical dilemma into an ethnographic project
CONCLUSION
1. Different anthropological theories of culture have different moral orientations to
oppression & human rights
2.
Naturalistic theories – that premise human social behaviour upon pre-cultural
human nature – will predict RESISTANCE assuming universal form
3.
Relativistic theories – that premise human social behaviour upon ‘human cultural
nature’ – may predict RESISTANCE assuming radically particular counter-cultural
form
4.
ANIMALS! WHERE ARE ANIMALS IN THIS THEORETICAL ‘STORY’? Do human
naturalism and cultural relativism imply anything at all for animal welfare and
rights?
5.
Cultural relativism includes the possibility of different human worlds with radically
different relations to animals
e.g. where animals can be seen as humans as in Amazonia
e.g. where humans are seen as animals as increasingly is the case in the West
6.
ANT theorises that to comprehend how humans socially/collectively behave we
need to comprehend the agency of animals & things
7.
Where human agency seems less, the agency of things & animals will seem
relatively greater. Rights are given to animals!
Culture, Cultural Relativism and Human Rights
(i)
Identifying the major anthropological positions on ‘culture’. How has ‘culture’ been
conceptualised, especially in social and cultural anthropology? What are ‘cultures’
and, on what basis, have they been anthropologically distinguished from each other?
What is a cultural system? And how do some of the more complex ideas about
culture make its systematic character less certain (e.g. Geertz in the Balinese cockfight essay?) How have these understandings of culture differed from those
enunciated by ecologically-focused anthropologists (e.g. cultural materialists),
evolutionary psychologists and many biological anthropologists?
(ii)
You now need a coherent account of what ‘cultural relativism’ is (with respect to
meaning and morals) and how CR proceeds from many of the conceptualisations of
‘culture’ elaborated by cultural anthropologists. You may though want to show how
naturalistic (e.g. a socio-biological) conceptions of culture avoid cultural relativism
by positing the primacy of natural function over cultural meaning and practical
implication. Barth’s study of Melanesian cosmologies can help here as much as more
biological versions of naturalistic approaches to ‘culture’.
(iii)
why ‘human rights’ are a problem for cultural anthropologists: or, at least, for strong
versions of cultural relativism. ‘Human rights’ were formulated as moral and legal
universals, to be applied across the board (i.e. cross-culturally across the world)
whereas cultural relativism predicts that the meaning of ‘being human’ will vary
from culture to culture, as will ideas of what is moral and what is ‘right’. You should
be armed with examples of where these two frameworks are likely to come into
conflict.
(iv)
Finally, to show that you’ve really thought through this problem, you should ask
whether the two positions are reconcilable and suggest a synthesis (i.e. a way in
which they can both apply) OR show that one or both of these frameworks (Cultural
relativism & human rights) are theoretically flawed and invalid. For example, as
previously indicated, if you think that what people mean is less important than how
people’s customs and practices function within a system of adaptation or within a
system of ‘raw’ political domination, you may say that, of course, human rights are
universal.
NOTES
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The idea of culture in anthropology has been conceptualised and deployed in two ways:
○ As ‘culture’ to distinguish humans from other species through
■ Tool use; acquisition of language and consciousness; production of oral
and written communication; elaboration of myth, ritual and art,
technology; cosmology/ world-view.
■ Other animals may have language and culture but to lesser extents.
○ A cultures to distinguish populations and societies from one another through
their
■ Socialisation to
■ Different beliefs, languages, organisations, mode of livelihood
■ Bunching traits into specific ‘culture regions’ (e.g. cattle complex of
East Africa; South Asian caste-based society).
●
The way in which anthropologists conceptualise ‘culture’ influences the way they
conceptualise ‘cultural difference’.
●
Two types of perspective:
○ Naturalistic perspectives
○ Relativistic perspectives
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Naturalistic perspective:
○ ‘Materialist’
■ Collective behaviour driven primarily by pre-cultural drives.
■ Drives originated before or at the inception of culture within
history of human evolution.
■ Ideas & idea-driven practices are important but either
■ Driven and ‘overdetermined’ by pre-cultural drives
■ Driven by ideas but not driven very far.
○ Types of naturalistic and materialistic approaches:
■ Evolutionary Adaptationism
■ Culture evolved as an advantageous adaptation of the brain
■ Language made cooperation possible
■ Superior hand-eye coordination made tool use possible
■ Culture (e.g. myths, music, art, worldview, particular social
organisation) remain powerful only insofar as they remain
adaptive.
■ Human beings driven by progress in nature to become the most
adaptive organism because of culture.
■ Culture/technology continue to progress
■ Cultural materialism
■ Culture (e.g. customs, beliefs, rituals, social organisation) are
ecological adaptations
■ Help a society maximise production and distribution and be fittest
organism in a given environment
■ Sacredness or aesthetic value evolves to confer social power of an
adaptive practice.
■ i.e. Rappaport and the Tsembaga Maring social system in Papua
New Guinea
■ Pig kill ritual consciously or culturally designed to make
peace between clans operates ‘actually’ to reduce pig
population and prevent tipping-point.
■ Cognitive (Methodological) Materialism
■ Theories that stress the primacy of individual cognition over
collective worldview and habitus.
■ Collective culture may be strong, but individual ways of
interpreting the cultural structure are stronger.
■ Humans hardwired to individually customise collective
representations.
■ e.g. Christina Toren’s analysis of Fijian chiefly drinking ritual
■ Highly structured ritual that places chiefs at ‘high’
end of space and commoners at ‘low’ end and
women outside the ritual.
■ Deep-rooted and transmitted as habitus over many
generations but,
■ Each individual has their own interpretation of the
world and the ritual
■ Children’s drawings of the ritual are all very
different
■ Same with Fijian cosmological veins off heaven and
hell: often vary from dominant Christian
orthodoxies.
■ Marxism
■ e.g. “Religion is the opiate of the people”
■ Culture= ideology= false consciousness
■ Socioeconomic class domination/ subordination is the underlying
reality
■ As socioeconomic contradictions sharpen, class interest and point
of view prevails.
■ Phenomenology
■ Pre-cultural, pre-linguistic experience of the world is primary
■ Cultural representation and culture based practice secondary and
alienating
○ Big weakness of these approaches is that they place human nature above cultural
difference, but they have trouble EXPLAINING culture and cultural difference.
How does it come about?
●
Cultural Relativism
○ Culture is primary and socialisation to its categories is powerful strong, and deeprooted
○ Culture is a field of belief and belief led practice
○ Culture is a field of meaningful belief which assigns meaning: the meaning of
belief does not flow from the way things are pre-culturally
○ Cultures not only CONSTRUCT worlds but also PEOPLE as particular kinds of
HUMAN PERSONS (e.g. with specific anatomies, illnesses, logics of well-being).
■ Culture creates biological definition.
○ Cultures are divided into CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS (Levi-Strauss and
Bourdieu) .
○ Examples:
■ e.g. Trobriand belief in virgin birth is not wrong-headed biological
understanding but linked to Trobriand matrilineal kinship.
■ Matrilineal kinship nothing to do with ecological adaptation, but
everything to do with cultural expressions.
■ e.g. Christian belief in the virgin birth of Christ if one believes in God,
resurrection and miracles.
■ e.g. The appeal of Balinese cockfights only makes sense in the context of
beliefs about ideal Balinese behaviour and the suppression of emotion,
true thoughts and violence.
■ Could say the same thing about football.
○ The ‘ONTOLOGICAL’ Turn
■ Many cultures are so different from one another (excessive alterity) that
meanings can’t be properly translated by outsiders.
■ Because their fundamental categories (e.g. space, time, reality, being) are
so radically different that to try and grasp the most basic categories of the
other’s world ethnography just shows how inadequate your own cultural
categories are to understand cultural difference. We shouldn’t stop trying
to understand otherness, as grasping our inadequacy, we can learn the
best concepts to understand ourselves.
■ Martin Holbraad for more.
●
Human rights
○ Relevant sections of the UN declaration of human rights
■ 10 Dec 1948
■ Dignity, liberty, equality and brotherhood, right to life, freedom of speech,
healthcare, freedom of thought, opinion, religion and conscience,
standard of living
■ Basic rights for all
○ All anthropological theory of culture has certain relationships to the Human
Rights agenda
■ Naturalistic theories
■ Generally have not problems with the idea of human rights
■ Theorises that bio human nature determines universal drives and
needs and human society tends to satisfy them.
■ Cultural, economic, political systems can be evaluated according
to whether they oppress and infringe universal human rights
■ Societies tend to satisfy basic human needs BUT are blocked from
this task by inhuman practice.
■ Human beings resist, and all humans will empathise
■ Cultural relativist theories
■ Argues for:
■ Primacy of cultural construction of social worlds and
human beings over any pre-cultural natural/biological
drives
■ The cultural construction of drives and needs
■ Totally different ways of being human
■ E.g. human experience of pain is culturally specific.
■ The repression of entities like:
■ Impurity of women (FGM)
■ Disordered sex and love unions (honour killings)
■ Chaotic disorder, protest, freedom, selfishness of
individuals (explains political oppression of
individuals)
■ Low-caste contact and interaction
○ What is oppression in one social world may be a condition for human
reproduction in another
■ Levi-Strauss critique of AAA’s support for UNDHR
○ Anthropological solutions and non-solutions to the realtivists dilemma
■ Suffer: Observe oppressive human relations unfold in the field; don’t
intervene; feel bad.
■ Support counter tendencies: Is radical alterity internally uncontested? Use
ethnography to look for counter-cultures that critique in indigenous
terms
■ Support the critical activism of cosmopolitan insider-outsiders (i.e.
‘globalised’ indigenous people)
■ Do ethnography of insider-outsiders
■ Do comparative ethnography of human rights activism
■ How has universal human rights agenda been taken up (and
opposed) in particular cultural sites?
■ Examine how groups in other cultures deal with the aftermath of violence,
apartheid, and genocide (e.g. Rwandan Truth and Reconciliation
Commissions)
○ I.e. transform a theoretical dilemma into an ethnographic project
●
Different anthropological theories of culture have different moral orientations to
oppression and human rights
●
Naturalistic theories: that premise human social behaviour upon pre-cultural human
nature- will predict resistance assuming universal forms
●
Relativistic theories: premise human social behaviour upon ‘human cultural nature’- may
predict resistance assuming radically particular counter-cultural forms
●
Animals: do human naturalism and cultural relativism imply anything at all for animal
welfare and rights?
●
Cultural relativism includes the possibility of different human worlds with radically
different relations to animals
○ E.g. where animals can be seen as humans as in Amazonia
○ E.g. where humans are seen as animals as increasingly is the case in the West
●
ANT theorises that to comprehend how humans socially/ collectively behaves we need to
comprehend the agency of animals and things.
●
Where human agency seems less, the agency of things and animals will seem relatively
greater. Rights are given to animals. Are animals rights then given to humans? What
would that mean?
READINGS
Stocking, 1966
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Humanist culture: about creation and innovation, there is an inherent hierarchy
of value, singular
Anthropological culture: plural
The idea of culture and cultural process was developed slowly by
anthropologists, the germans
Slowly people realized that culture isn’t the same as tradition and began to really
define it
Boaz came on the scene and started to define and explore what culture really is
and he began his career with the humanist definietiont of culture
Boaz touched on it by saying that racial mental bias was a cultural thing
Torres-Straits: some psychologists went to compare the savages to the brits and
it was inconclusive e
By 1900s people still thought people of different races were mentally different
Differences in behavior etc. were attributed to race instead of culture because
the idea of cultures hasn’t been really defined yet
Boaz challenged the racial assumptions of diversity and proposed cultural
alternatives
Boaz argued that people of all races shared the same basic mental organization
Abstraction – language, inhibition – everyone has some sort of ethical standards,
and choice
Boaz argued that the behavior of all humans are determined by a traditional
body of habitual behavior patterns not race
· Folklore exists to maintain society
Boaz was the transition between the humanist idea of culture and
anthropological
‘Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective' - George W. Stocking,
Jr.
QUOTATION
“It has been argued that Franz Boas contributed little to the emergence of the
culture concept in anthropology…. But here it is argued that with Boas the
concept was in fact provided with much of the basis of its modern
anthropological meaning. In developing his argument against racial mental
differences, Boas proceeded by showing that the behaviour of all men,
regardless of race or cultural stage, was determined by a traditional body of
habitual behaviour patterns passed on through what we would now call
enculturative processes …. The behavioural significance of the older humanistevolutionist idea of culture was thus inverted, and the basis laid for the notion
of culture as a primary determinant of behaviour”
-“Offers an alternative explanation in cultural terms for every presumably “racial”
difference. Thus differences in pain thresholds might reflect a difference in the
“conception of pain” rather than in the “pain sense.” p 874
-“Boas maintained that the difference between our own and primitive mentality was
the “product of the diversity of the cultures that furnish the material with which
the mind operates” rather than a reflection of “fundamental difference in
mental organization” p 877 this quote shows that Boas still made the
difference between them and the Other
-“Tylor had seen folklore as originally rational in origin, but surviving as irrational
custom. Boas saw it as unconscious in origin, but central to the maintenance of
society through its rationalization of traditional forms of behaviour.” P 878 The
meaning of culture is INVERTED.
“Boas begun by maintaining that primitive men have all the characteristic human
mental powers. But this depended in turn on showing that these powers were
conditioned in all stages of cultural development-or in all cultures-by the body
of custom and traditional material that was transmitted from one generation to
the next”
ARGUMENT:
- science preferred over history
- Kroeber and Kluckhohn duality 1)humanist culture (value and agency of humans)
= absolutistic, perfectionist, progressive (developing), singular, not all equally
cultured, creating, innovating scientist 2)anthropologist culture = relativistic,
homeostatic (balance), plural, all equally cultured, “inherited names” that
condition the ordering of experience.
Understood that all culture wasn't just ascribed at birth, controlled by values that
already exist, but that through culture values are found cumulative human
creativity.
-“THE ESSENCE of the culture idea is that “learned behavior, socially transmitted
and cumulative in time, is paramount as a determinant of human behavior”
(Hallowell 1960).
- TYLER used hierarchical terms, and put puts ppl as unequally cultured, a lag
- SPENCER (similar ideas) progressive accumulation of the characteristic
manifestations of human creativity, freed man from control. Often associated
lack of control with a lower evolutionary status, frequently argued in racial
term, black people, the savage
-MCGEE "collection of all different ethnic types and how they are all at different
stages of progress/evolution"
-BRUNER and WOODWORTH inferior/superior races
-WISSLER differences in intelligence? “made it practically certain that racial
differences exist”
-BOAS change in relative probabilities mainly came from Boas having, in the
intervening years, greatly elaborated the alternative explanation of mental
differences in terms of cultural determinism
-BOAS importance of cultural plurality
1890s/1910s critique of evolutionism was, Boas developed a thorough critique of
the fundamental assumptions of evolutionist ethnology, he saw culture as
HOLISTIC (interconnected) AND HISTORISIST and so moved away from
scientific explanation
-BOAS 1) org of the mind = different perceptions of esthetical (taste) or ethical
(morals/values) standard; differences in development are not great enough to
allow for an evolutionary strategy 2) variety of experience = perceptions
depending on the logical interpretations especially with the continuity of
folklore
- Boas = customs and beliefs arise unconsciously out of the “general conditions of
life" - CUSTOMARY BEHAVIOURS
PARADOX of the EMOTIONAL VALUE
-BOAS behaviour of all men, regardless of race or cultural stage, was determined by
a traditional body of habitual behaviour patterns passed on generations
Argues that within Boas’s work (over the years) exists a critique of Tylor’s ‘idea
of culture’ which saw human groups in hierarchal terms and fitted into a
framework of social evolutionism framework, and a change in the
understanding of the ‘idea of culture’ to its current anthropological meaning.
They argue that although Boas didn’t explicitly offer a new definition of culture,
he ‘provided provide an important portion of the context in which the word
o
o
acquired its characteristic anthropological meaning’ throughout different
points of his research
“ He was a leader of a cultural revolution that, by changing the relation of
"culture" to the burden of tradition and the processes of human reason,
transformed the notion into a tool quite different from what it had been
before”
This was primarily done through Boas’ research into racial mental differences in
The Mind of Primitive Man
Focussed on three characteristic mental functions: abstraction, inhibition and
choice
“The existence of numerical and grammatical categories in all languages
showed that abstraction was common to all men. Similarly, all human groups
subjected their impulses to the inhibition of some type of customary control
and exercised choice among perceptions or actions in terms of some osrt of
aesthetic or ethical standards. Granting that these capacities must have evolved
in time, granting they might differ in development, Boas argues that the differ
nces were not great enough to allow living men to be placed on different
evolutionary stages” ( 1901 :2)
As a result, Boas then moved from looking at differences in the organisation of
the mind, to looking at human experience and custom concluding that the
‘racial differences was "product of the diversity of the cultures that furnish the
material with which the mind operates" rather than a reflec- tion of
"fundamental difference in mental organization" (1904:243).
A key separation in between Tylor and Boas is illustrated in their observations
to on folklore and custom
Tylor saw folklore as originally rational in origin, but surviving as an irrational
custom but Boas saw it as unconscious in origin, but central to the
maintenance of society through its rationalization of traditional forms of
behaviour.
Thus inverting the meaning of the idea of culture
Boas' argument was to show that the behavior of all men, regardless of race or
cul- tural stage, was determined by a traditional body of habitual behavior
patterns passed on through what we would now call the enculturative process
and buttressed by ethically tainted secondary rationalization
QUESTIONS. Raise questions on the text – either something that the author has not
asked, something her/his argument leaves out or provokes.
What is the real difference between customs/beliefs/traditions and culture? Aren’t
they all one in the same?
Talks about the Other even though he does all men as equals.
The inconsistencies are well explained by Stocking : “Boas was inconsistent because
he was a transitional figure” p 879
TEXTUAL CONNECTION.
Relates to the Statement on Human Rights by The Executive Board, American
Anthropological Association in the sense that they both acknowledge that all
individuals have rights and are equal. Idea of the individual as well as the group
context. Although Boas still retains certain old-fashioned ideologies, he is a
transitional actor and many of his works can be linked to this article.
The differentiations that were made between dark-skinned primitives and whiteskinned Europeans come up in the main aim of the ‘Relates to the Statement
on Human Rights’ article which is to proposed a Declaration that is applicable
to all human beings, and not a statement of rights conceived only in terms of
the values prevalent in the Western worlds.
IMPLICATIONS. SUPER IMPORTANT. Lay out what this argument implies for
understanding or improving society, relations between individuals, or groups
(e.g., inter-ethnic, nations, etc.) or any facet of social or cultural reality. What
are the implications (xxx) of this reading to xxx aspect of society /
anthropology? In other words: “so what”?
-tackles cultural relativism, but what about becoming too nihilistic??
-he gave anthropological meaning to the term culture by explaining that they have
context
-for Tyler and Spencer… folklore had been but no longer was rational in European
context, continual but not integrated (creates a separation between
anthropologist's own culture and that of which he was studying), this can
create hierarchies of race so we need to be careful about our understanding of
culture and cultures and how us anthropologists will portray them.
Sahlins, 1999
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Murdock, 1951 American and British anthropology has two different subjects,
culture and social systems. This shows that culture was still thought of as a
bounded, indivisible entity in anthropology at that time.
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White, 1949 the symbolic is the common denominator of all human interactions,
even technology was encompassed by symbolism. This view was different from
the structural-functionalists
Radcliffe-Brown etc. thought culture was the ideational content of social
structures and the system of social relations.
‘culture was the local customary idiom by means of which the social system was
expressed and maintained.’
The idea of culture was thought as a bit more abstract for British anthropologists
Douglas and Radcliffe Brow really rejected the idea of culture because it was too
abstract and not scientific, this really reflects the science aspect of anthropology
especially in the eyes of structural functionalists.
Despondency theory: cultures and customs will be lost through the force of
globalization and capitalism. A lot of populations such as the Papua New
Guineans invoked culture as a way of dealing with fluid and shifting identity in
post/modernity
Some inceptions of culture in the other was an inversion of culture in the west.
For example the ethnographies on the Inuits and the Fijians, their way of the land
and subsistence was a sharp contrast to the western ‘way of the money’ this
shows that the west was romanticising the other
During this time culture was thought of as coherent, bounded, timeless, united
entity.
Culture became a myth or fabrication ‘a collective misrepresentation of
someone’s particular interests. Culture was compared to tradition and the
temporal dimension of tradition meant that anthropologists thought that culture
was a product of the distant past. Whereas this is projection of the West’s idea of
culture since our culture is situated in history.
This invention of history and tradition helped to cement the idea that culture is
unchanging and bounded
‘Culture and traditions are invented in terms of the people who construct them’
anthropologist interpret and conceptualize culture in ways that we see fit.
Boas’ idea of culture as a determinant for behaviour seemed liberal at the time
because it was against racism and that was one of the many arguments for
cultural relativism
However this bounded, organic culture concept should perhaps be retired.
Clifford uses Foucault’s idea of discourse and discursive formations to argue that
maybe we could use that to be freed from the ideological restraints of ‘culture’
because at the time culture was still seen as ‘an organic, traditional continuity on
the enduring grounds of language and locale’
However, Sahlins argues that the discourse idea is just the same as the culture
idea. Because it emphasises too much on the expression and relations of power.
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Contemporary culture forms in a very paradoxical way, the world is becoming
more globalized but people are also asserting their cultural distinctiveness even
more.
‘similitude is a necessary condition of the differentiation’ meaning that since
culture is becoming more homogenous with globalization, the differences are
also more pronounced. Which is a very helpful way to resolve the paradox of
modernity.
Culture is hybrid and never self-contained or bounded. The modernist and
postmodernist paradigm likes to believe so? Why?
All cultures have more hybrid pasts such as inventing the foreign to seem more
domestic
Anthropology has always known culture to be largely foreign in origin but
distinctively local in practise
Merry Engle, S., 2003
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There is an assumption in human rights discourse that anthropologists viewed
culture as a coherent, static, and unchanging set of values
Anthropologists embrace human rights but they do so in the name of protection
of culture
Engle – a law professor – relativism is incompatible with making moral
judgements about other societies.
But this Engle argues that this all depends on how you conceptualise culture
because if culture is viewed as a bounded entity then it must be criticised as a
whole as well.
The AAA statement focused on the value of tolerance and a critique of
ethnocentrism but it also critiqued the very value of freedom. It basically said that
people cant be judged by others because all their choices are because of their
culture
The statement could be interpreted as asserting that the value of tolerance
should be up there with freedom as well
The problems that anthropology has with human rights would diminish if
cultures were viewed as fluid and hybrid
Many human rights see culture as an obstacle to women’s rights and believe
that customs and culture are being used as an excuse to oppress women
There is this idea that modernity is freeing women from oppression and culture
is whats holding people back
Culture is also demonized to mean the opposite from modernity.
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When culture is equated with tradition and customs it is easy to see why it is
juxtaposed against equality.
A more general tendency to culturalize issues. Because by blaming culture, it is
blaming the ‘other’ for all the problems that are wrecking havoc on modernity
and capitalism.
Therefore, developed countries have incentives to blame it all on culture
Popular conception of culture comes from older anthropological uses
Back when culture was just understood as believes and values, not practices, it
makes it difficult to judge an other culture since it was just believes and values.
Bourdieu and Ortner as argued for habitus and other cultural practices.
The German idea of culture was developed to challenge the idea of civilization –
growing colonial power – that was developed by France and England.
Culture was developed as a way of creating national pride and distinctiveness in
Germany
This conception that culture is a set of values and beliefs that make people
distinctive is still popular in jhuamn rights discourse
Anderson (1983), the modern nation is still a imagined community that shares
features of race, language, religion, and culture; shared culture is still a modern
nation building strategy.
Political leaders also resist human rights changes citing a potential threat to
culture.
In contemporary anthropology, our conception of culture is unbounded,
contested, and connected to relations of power. Now we view culture is more
historically influences than organically evolved. This understanding is more more
fluid agentic and historicized.
The goal of large human rights bodies are to review as many countries in a short
amount of time therefore they cannot take into account all the diversity. So they
go with conformity.
Example: Bulubulu
§ Ethnography shows that bulubulu emphasizes reconciliation and apology as a
way off dealing with conflict sucha s rape in the village.
§ This as a process undermines legal power
The understanding of culture juxtaposed against modernity which implicates
that it is also juxtaposed against civilization and even to reason. This idea of
culture was created by transnational elites such as the ones in the UN and not of
local activists.
Culture is important in shaping human rights discourse, thinking that culture is
local and unchanging implies that the other are the only ones who has culture
and that there is no culture in New York or Geneva
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Transnational modernity is also a culture, it is defined by collaborative decision
making, shared conception of global social justice and definitons of gender roles
The human rights lawyers in this context talk about culture being harmdul to
progress and modernity meanwhile positioning themselves as lawful, modern
and culture-free.
The legal documents that outline human rights are given life and power by
those human rights lawyers and NGOs etc. they are a critical feature of the
human rights system.
Global law is produced with these documents as they are disseminated and
understood locally.
The understanding of culture in human rights law was influenced by the
relativism/universalism debate that was contemporary to the birth of human
rights.
It is not difficult to understand why culture is being conceptualized in a
homogenous, bounded model because this was the model proposed by many
members of the AAA at the time.
This is reading of culture hinders the global spread and local appropriation of
human rights concepts because many world leaders will see human rights as a
threat to their culture. Instead of allowing human rights to build onto culture,
they will feel threatened and resist it.