ANTH 1a

• • “4 big ideas” of the course
  • People are very different and basically the same.
  • Believing your specific way of doing things is the natural/good/moral/right/only way to do them, is a human universal.
  • Humans create the worlds they live in and are also created by them.
  • People’s most fundamental and important beliefs about the world show up in the tiniest everyday behaviors—often when they are not aware of it.
• The birth of the concept of culture is associated with E.B. Tylor:

  "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."
• Evolutionary progression from “Primitive” to “Civilized” is common among (mostly) white European ethnologists/anthropologists of this period.

  Assuming typology of human types and a “progression” from one stage of human development to another, they had different arguments for how this happened or could be measured


  Frequently with “race” as a scientific category, supported by measurement of skulls, weighing of brains, typologies of so-called racial characteristics
• The concept of culture links humans across the globe at all times and establishes a principle for an “evolutionary” history
• The concept of culture sometimes aligned with white/European ideas of evolutionism and sometimes departed from them
• • “anti-racist contributions”
  • Frederick Douglass (not an anthropologist)
  • commencement address, pushback against the question of if race and advancement are related
  • race is an environmental adaptation
  • Antenor Firmin (an anthropologist)
  • show evidence using comparisons of race that race doesn’t have anything to do with advancement
• • Franz Boas
  • against evolutionism (culture develops linearly)
  • argues that each group develops their own complex of ideas and practices in response to their particular historical circumstances that have to be studied on their own (cultural relativism)
  • Made important “anti-racist” interventions into politics, but also argued for encouraging assimilation through “lightening the Negro race”
• • Clifford Geertz
  • Are people all the same, with some extra decoration on top?
  • If you “removed” cultural particularities, would you find some “universal human species?”
  • What would humans be like without culture? 
  • culture is an essential condition for human life, without it behavior would be “ungovernable” and “chaos of pointless acts”
  • completed through culture
• • Michel-Rolph Trouillot
  • life of concept of culture
  • argues the concept is too generalizing and reifying
  • Human behavior is patterned. There exist within historically specific populations recurrences in both thought and behavior that…are structured and structuring (influencing)
  • Those patterns are learned. Not genetic or from inside/outside the body, comes from interaction with specific populations
• • how concept changed over 20th century
  • Boas - concept as lens to see world, pretend race, history don’t matter
  • culture as something “out there” and not a way of studying populations, stand in for race or other mechanisms of embodied discrimination
  • Brooks - blaming disaster on culture and definition of “progress”
• • culture - an approach to studying collective groups of humans, focusing on systems of meaning and action that are patterned; learned, shared, and contested
• Physical/biological anthropology


  The study of biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, their extinct hominin ancestors, and related non-human primates, particularly from an evolutionary perspective
• Linguistic anthropology


  The study of the social and cultural foundations of language itself, while exploring how social and cultural formations are grounded in linguistic practices
• Archaeology


  The study of the human past through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains
• Cultural/social anthropology


  The study of what it means to be human in contemporary societies and cultures, including topics such as technology and material culture, social organization, economies, political and legal systems, language, ideologies and religions, health and illness, and social change
• Comparative

  Cultural anthropology often presumes that particular practices and meanings are comparable across contexts, because they express the breadth of human potential
• Holistic


  Other social sciences often focus on one domain of human behavior, experience, and meaning, cultural anthropology often looks at how different domains are connected
• Characteristics of anthropology

  • Holistic
  • Comparative
  • Critical
  • Ethnographic
• Critical


  Cultural anthropologists often mobilize the knowledge gained in research to unsettle taken-for-granted assumptions and suggest alternative ways of thinking and acting
• Ethnographic


  Cultural anthropology is often based on long term research aimed at learning aspects of belief and behavior and the reasoning behind them that may not be immediately obvious or shown to outsiders
• Cultural anthropology methods

  Fieldwork, participant observation, fieldnotes and jottings
• Fieldwork


  Collection of firsthand observations in situ, long-term (1 yr +)
• Participant observation


  Learning about people’s lives by participating in their activities, observing, and asking questions, being open about your work
• Skills for participant observation

  • Patience, listening and observing, uncertainty, let other people take the lead, willingness to be treated like a child
• Thick description (Geertz)


  Include own interpretations, guessing at meanings, unspoken or hard to see/not fully conscious particularities
• Jottings


  Single words/phrases to jog memory/remember and extend later, in the moment/soon after experience
• Fieldnotes


  More detailed than jottings, thick description, questions, speculations, evaluate own reactions, line between them not fixed, voice memos, drawings etc. as long as it’s interactive
• • The AAA code of ethics - guidelines for making ethical choices in the conduct of anthropological work
  • 1.Do no Harm
  • 2.Be open and honest regarding your work
  • 3.Obtain informed consent and necessary permissions
  • 4.Weigh competing ethical obligations due to collaborators and affected parties
  • 5.Make your result accessible
  • 6.Protect and preserve your records
  • 7.Maintain respectful and ethical professional relationships
• • Ethical vs. cultural relativism
  • ethical relativism - morality relative to culture, no universal morality
  • cultural relativism - culture needs to be understood in context, can learn from other cultures 
  • focus on listening and working with, not for
  • challenge ethnocentrism and be mindful of power relations
  • free to make own judgements
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

  • Language is a shaping force which guides people’s thinking and behavior
  • does not mirror or reflect reality, but shapes it.
  • different languages influence our minds in different ways
  • We create the world, and the world helps to shape us (connects to big idea)
  • cultural collisions have emotional and cognitive effects - ppl have multiple cultures/languages
  • can’t take it too seriously bc of multiculturalism and also new words wouldn’t be created it language completely determines thought
• Semiotics is the basis of communication within a cultural context
• Semiotics


  The study of signs, their structures, and their interactions
• Signs are more or less arbitrary
• Signs are polysemic and can communicate many meanings at once
• Signs have no inherent meaning, but their meaning is historical, culturally and context contingent
• Signs are fairly consistent within a social-cultural group (however general or specific)
• Semiotics is a tool for the exertion, legitimation, and contestation of power
• Sign


  • Signifier (physical element)
  • Signified (mental image formed in mind/action/concept)
• Sign


  Any observable thing that carries meaning(s)
• • Resignification
  • assign new meanings or changed meanings to a sign due to time, place, proximity to other signs, etc
  • DeKalb County, Georgia, putting a plaque next to the Confederate monument resignifies it from honoring Confederate soldiers to showing how it stood for segregation and against the rights of Black people (a strategic move)
  • important because meanings of signs change over time and take on new meanings to reflect current time, connecting past and present
  • ex: reclamation of the term “queer” by the LGBTQ+ community that was used as an insult