Anthropology 111

• Chimamanda Adichie – a single-story notion. Importance of stories. How one story can affect the way people view an entire group of people (religion, race, ethnicity).
• The White Saviour Complex - missionaries and colonial occupations were put in place to civilize and save people who needed “saving.”
• Stereotype – only a fragment of the story, not that it is untrue, but it is not representative of the entire group.
• Anthropology – the study of human beings
• The 4 branches of anthropology:

  • Biological – study of evolution, function and health of the body.
  • Sociocultural – study of different societies and cultures (comparing them)
  • Linguistic – study of the relationship between language and culture
  • Archaeology – studying human history and artifacts
• Sociocultural Anthropology – the study of how societies are structured and how cultural meanings are created. Science and Humanities combined
• Malinowski – one of the first Western anthropologists
• Society – social structures and organization of a group comprised of people who share a territory or culture.
• Culture and Society are geographically linked.
• Multiculturalism – multiple groups of people from different parts of the world/origins in other cultures.
• Culture – a system of meanings about the nature of experience that are shared by people and passed from one generation to another, including the meanings that people give things.
• Wari People – cannibalism of their deceased relatives. They believed it was wrong to not eat the body because then their souls couldn’t be freed.
• Ethnocentric Fallacy – the tendency to believe your culture is more superior or correct (our values are true and others are wrong).
• Ethnocentrism – judging other cultures by our values (it is impossible to make moral judgements about beliefs and behaviours of other cultures).
• Relativistic Fallacy – thinking anything can be excused by explaining the culture behind it.
• Cultural Relativism – an effort to understand the beliefs and behaviours of other cultures
• Critical Cultural Relativism – posing questions about cultural beliefs, who believes them and why and who they are benefiting/ harming
• Virginity testing in Turkey – after being married the first time, having sex is on a white bed sheet to prove the bride’s virginity prior to that encounter.
• The seed and the soil metaphor – about virginity, fertility and childbearing.
• Nancy Scheper-Hughes – womanly-hearted anthropology in Brazil.
• Balinese Cock-Fights – an ethnography performed by Clifford Geertz where spurs were attached to chickens, and they fight each other. It is representative of a symbol of status dependant on whose chicken wins.
• Applied Anthropology – a sub-discipline of anthropology that specializes in putting anthropological theory, thought and perspective into real-world issues. (Examples include indigenous issues, political anthropology, environmental anthropology, medical anthropology, and corporate ethnography).
• Cultural Text – a way of thinking about culture as a text of significant symbols such as words, gestures, drawings and natural objects, all of which carry meaning. (Time is an example of this).
• Fieldwork – how cultural anthropologists answer questions in terms of what is culture.
• Fieldwork and ethnography is how anthropologists learn about culture.
• Malinowski and Boas – fathers of social and cultural anthropology.
• Malinowski was the first to abandon the armchair approach, stressing the importance of fieldwork, and the first to utilize and formalize participant observation and long-term fieldwork.
• Armchair Anthropology - founded by Edward Taylor, is the process of basing your anthropological findings on someone else’s already biased work. Based on etic interpretations.
• Multi Sited Fieldwork – developed by George Marcus and it is the process of connecting experiences of fieldwork with broader global processes.
• Culture Shock – the feeling of disorientation in the initial stages of fieldwork as the anthropologists adjust to a new language, beliefs, food and climate.
• Abelam Pig Hunt, an ethnography performed by Richard Scaglion in Papua New Guinea, is an example of culture shock.
• Rapport – the feeling of affinity, friendship, and relationship building.
• Margaret Mead – anthropology is a discipline that demands that we “look, listen and record.”
• Ethnography – the written description and analysis of a particular group of people is the product of fieldwork experience.
• Quantitative – involves statistical data (surveys, census).
• Qualitative – aim to explore rather than measure (forms of observation).
• Long-term Research – allows you to actually uncover who the person is and see how people really are, in opposition to short-term where people can pretend and put on a front for a short period of time.
• Salvage Anthropology – attempting to preserve indigenous peoples as they were scared the people and culture were going to disappear. Started as a good thing. It consisted of rapid documentation, songs, and histories of indigenous people before they disappeared to assimilation).
• Participant Observation – participating in daily tasks and observing daily interactions. This requires anthropologists to play 2 roles, the participant and an observer.
• Fieldwork Methods

  - Participant observation

  - Questionaries

  - Focus groups

  - Filming, Recording

  - Internet (zoom, skype)