Week 3 ANTH260 Thinking and Doing Anthropology Part I Important Key Terms Religion The Conscious Collective Emile Durkheim Unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things Beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community The individual s conscious ideals religious practices shared with all other members of culture mechanical solidarity French sociologist late 1800s early 1900s o What is the cohesion that holds cultures together Mechanical Solidarity o Everyone shares same values o Rigidity of cultural practices bad vs good o Religious Organic solidarity o Variability of values o Flexibility of cultural practices no right or wrong way o Not much importance on religion Different Schools of Thought Evolutionism Morgan and Tylor late 1800s early 1900s o Singular progression of human culture Functionalism Malinowski and Radcliffe Brown structural functionalism early 1900s o Culture organized according to organic functions Structuralism Levi Strauss Leach 1940 1970s o Culture structured through binaries Marxist Anthropology French late 1960s o Link between economic structures capitalism and cultural production Clifford Geertz 1926 2006 The concept of culture I espouse is essentially a semiotic one Believing with Max weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning What is culture Culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action Anthropological writings are themselves interpretations o What is the relationship between the observer and observed Thick Description 1973 Semiotics o The study of signs and symbols The wink thick description Struggling with meaning o Culture as context o Unraveling and identifying those contexts and meanings requires Fieldwork in anthropology Hinges on participant observation which hinges on the dynamic and contradictory synthesis of subjective insider and objective outsider Historically fieldwork Distant Boas Mead Community based studies the Chicago School Living among the people Malinowski Fieldwork Where is the field o Can you have multiple sites o Every imaginable context Who is the field o As opposed to the lab o Long term extended participant observation Both and art and a science Fieldwork and the Anthropologist Ethics politics reflexivity collaboration and reciprocity Reflexivity and reciprocity Sounds smells feelings and the unconscious o Who is doing the research and who benefits o What is it we think we know o What are our own assumptions Boast into it didn t do much of it Malinowski into it believed in capturing the native s perspective Geertz Thick Description and Interpretation Abu Lughod Who gets to decide what is represented How do we do it Going Native Culture Shock Post Modern turn o Cultural construction o Auto ethnography inclusion of self o Multi vocality multiple voices o Narrative ethnography context and experience o Testimonia first person narrative account of marginalization and violence Public and Applied Anthropology Reciprocity collaboration and partnership o What kind of project are you doing and whom does it benefit How do you determine what is right or wrong o What is the most important element of anthropological inquiry Importance of rapport and meaningful and relationships How does anthropology create difference What is reflected in ethnographies Whose voice matters the most Feminist Anthropology Questions posed in public applied anthropology What happens when the other that the anthropologist is studying is simultaneously constructed as at least partially a self Elements of Good Fieldwork Informed consent Ethically grounded Participatory Active collaboration Reflexivity Lila Abu Lughod 1952 present The self vs the other Writing Against Culture 1991 Discourse and practice Points of engagement Connections Relationships Ethnographies of the Particular Avoiding generalizations Epistemology What can I know about the world How can I know about the world How do we know what we know What is it we think we know How much can be known