Anthropology History and Beginnings Part II The belief and feeling that one s own culture is best Almost any individual who has acquired a repertoire of cultural behavior Na ve Realism Universalism Everybody is the same everywhere Process of discovering and describing a particular culture What is good What is bad relative and context specific Week 2 ANTH260 Important Key Terms Ethnocentrism Informant Ethnography Cultural Relativism Key People Franz Boas Late 1800s early 1900s American German born anthropologist Argued for cultural relativism Considered one of major founders of practice of present day anthropology o Four field o Cultural relativism o Rejection of biological race and cultural revolution Emile Durkheim French sociologist late 1800s early 1900s No field work Organic society Differed from American anthropological traditions Strongly influence British Anthropology o Merged culture with society o South to create universals in cultural function Not the tradition the US used uses Core Questions Why does the individual while becoming more autonomous depend more upon society How can he be at once more individual and more solidary What does this mean A theory of society Mechanical versus Organic If we can live on our own or survive in small groups why how do we maintain cohesion Emile Durkheim How societies function Mechanical solidarity live together work together but do not rely on each other lack of formal structure o Everyone shares same values o Rigidity of cultural practices bad versus good o religious Organic solidarity live together work together rely on each other as an organisms organ might function o Variability of values o Flexibility of cultural practices no right or wrong way o Not much importance on religion The Conscious Collective Ambiguous assimilation of the knowing instrument and the known thing of consciousness and culture into a single concept Boas and other American Anthropologists kept cultural knowledge separate and distinct from how it was learned and the larger culture Religion Religion is something eminently social Relgious representations are collective representations which express collective realities o Versus animism how individuals make sense of the unknown A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practives relative too sacred things that is to say things set apart and forbidden beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Chruch all those who adhere to them o What does this say about religion What is Culture Socially patterned or symbolic system Even monkeys have socially patterned culture Culture as a concept is both stabilizing and negotiable both about long run cultural values and systems and about lived daily practice and the determinations of the moment Schools of Thought Evolutionism Morgan and Tylor late 1800s Singular progression of human culture Functionalism Malinowski and Radcliffe Brown Culture organized according to organic functions Structural functionalism early 1900s Structuralism Lev Strauss Leach 1940 1970s Culture structure through binaries raw vs cooked Marxist Anthropology Eric Wolf late 1960s Link between economic structures capitalism and cultural production Tradition and Historical Particularism How historical processes of diffusion migration and invention produced a particular cultural patter Boas American tradition Look at small scale societies belief they are more simple Ethnography as a way of salvaging cultural diversity What is American Culture American society has its outline dynamic constantly changing fragmentary because we value individualism innovation and success