Understanding Culture: Theoretical Perspectives
and Ethnographic Analysis
- Culture Theory
- Ethnographic Analyses
Understanding culture
• Culture as an analytical tool (… because of
culture …)
• Culture as a political tool ( …. it is our culture
…)
Ethnographic analysis
- Culture of development
Two main objectives
Bring out
• The influence of culture
• The power of ethnography
Understanding Culture: Theoretical Perspectives and Ethnographic Analysis
Part 1: Culture Theory
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In this part we take a closer look at how “culture” has developed both as an analytical tool, especially in the realm of identity but also how it has developed as political concept used by
activists, politicians and policymakers.
Links and electronic resources
Appadurai, Arjun. “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination, in Public Culture 12(1), 2000, pp, 1-19.
Barth, Fredrik. “Introduction”, in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. http://www.unigreifswald.de/~histor/~osteuropa/schorkowitz/Barth,%20Frederik.pdf
Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths”, in Writing Culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. University of California Press. 1986.
http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/soc/readings/Introduction%20Partial%20Truths.pdf
Dragojlovic, Ana, “Dutch Women and Balinese Men: Intimacies, Popular Discourses and Citizenship Rights”, in The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, vol9, no 4, December 2008, pp.
285-303.
Dragojlovic. Ana. “Reframing the nation”, in The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, vol9, no 4, December 2008, pp. 279-284.
Finlay, Andrew. “The persistence of the ‘old’ idea of culture and the peace process in Ireland”, in Critique of Anthropology, 2008; 28(3), pp 279-296.
Geertz, Clifford. “The impact of the concept of culture on the concept of man”, in The interpretation of culture. http://www.slgardiner.com/ERES/Geertz1973_Culture.pdf (1973).
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. “Beyond ‘culture’”: Space, identity and the Politics of Difference”, in Cultural Anthropology 7(1), 1992, pp 6-23.
Marcus, George. “The uses of complicity in the changing mis-en-scene of Anthropological field work”, Representations, no 59, summer 1997, pp, 85-108.
Michael M. J. Fischer. Culture and cultural analysis as experimental systems, in Cultural Anthropology, vol. 22, issue 1, pp. 1-65.
Sherry Ortner, “On Key Symbols”, in American Anthropologist 75(5):1338-46 (1973).
Stolcke, Verena. 1995. Talking Culture. Current Anthropology, vol 36(1).
Compendium
Abu-Lughood, Lila. “Guest and daughter”, in Veiled sentiments.
Abu-Lughood, Lila. “Writing against culture”, in Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard Fox.
Bauman, Gerd. “Culture: having, making, or both”, in The Multicultural riddle: rethinking national, ethnic and religious identities.
Boellstorff, Tom “Introduction”, in The Gay Archipelago: sexuality and nation in Indonesia.
Douglas, Mary. “The two bodies” in Natural symbols.
Geertz, “Person, time and conduct”, in The interpretation of culture.
Joel S. Kahn, “A world system of cultures?”, in Culture, Multiculture, Postculture.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Race and Culture”, in The view from afar (1971).
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Race and History”, in The race question in modern society (1952).
Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna. “Preface” and “Introduction”, in Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, 2005, Princeton Univ Press.
Mahmood, Sabah, “The subject of freedom”, in Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton Univ, 2005.
Ong, Aihwa. “Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems”, in Global Assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as Anthropological problems. (2005).
Ortner, Shelly. Excerpt from Sherpas through their rituals.
Rabinow, Paul and William M. Sullivan, “The interpretative Turn: A second look”, in Interpretative Social Science (1979).
Turner, Victor. “Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors”, in Dramas, fields and metahpors: symbolic action in human society.
Understanding Culture: Theoretical Perspectives and Ethnographic Analysis
Part 2: Ethnographic Analysis
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This part of the course will develop a particular theme – development/globalisation - as a subject of cultural/ethnographic analysis
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The course is organised in two parallel streams:
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An overview of anthropological analyses of development understood as a key aspect and driving force of the globalisation of modernity (particularly
in the South);
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Reviews of four anthropological monographs dedicated to the above theme; the aim is to understand how the different authors have used theory to
make sense of particular ethnographies of development/globalisation in different parts of the world
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Literature:
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Stream 1: compulsory for all:
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Edelman, M & Haugerud, A. (ed.) 2005, The anthropology of development and globalization: from classical political economy to contemporary
neoliberalism, Blackwell Publishing (OBS: Introduction: the anthropology of development and globalization)
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Escobar, A. 1995, Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World, Princeton University Press
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Scott, J. C. 1998, Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed, Yale University Press (pp 1-103; 181- 193;
262[223?]-359).
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Stream 2: Each group chooses one of the following monographs:
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Ferguson, J. 1990 (1994), The anti-politics machine: “development”, depolitization and bureaucratic power in Lesotho, Cambridge University Press
(University of Minnesota Press)
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Jonsson, H. 2005, Mien relations: mountain people and state control in Thailand, Cornell University Press
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Smith, J. H. 2008, Bewitching development: witchcraft and the reinvention of development in neoliberal Kenya, University of Chicago Press
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Tsing, A. L. 2005, Friction: an ethnography of global connection, Princeton University Press