Course Objectives:

1.  To examine the history and evolution of anthropological theory and to relate theory to the cultural, historical, and political contexts in which it has developed. That is, we will be engaging in a meta-anthropological investigation of anthropology .

2.  To understand the logic and the philosophical roots of particular theoretical strands in anthropology.

3.  To examine different theoretical approaches that have been utilized within anthropology  and analyze their implications for anthropological research and analysis.

4. To examine current theoretical debates within anthropology - including those centering around the critique of representations, the culture concept, globalization, gender, biology, post-modernism, and post-colonialism - and analyze their implication for how anthropologists today conduct their research.

Texts:

McGee, R. Jon and Richard L. Warms, eds,. 1996.  Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. Mountainview, CA, London: Mayfield. Third Edition

Alexander, Jeffery C., and Steven Seidman, eds. 1990. Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates.  Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bohannan, Paul and Mark Glazer, eds. 1988. High Points in Anthropology, 2nd ed.  New York: McGraw Hill

Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs, 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press

Urban, Greg. 2001. Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press 

Anthropology emerged in  the 1800's when intellectuals combined two pre-existing studies, those of culturally different societies and those of human biological origins. Advances in transportation and weaponry had previously encouraged global colonization.  During these forays into the world explorers contacted types of societies different than those of the "modern" world that they knew.

An explanation was needed for these differences.  The biblical view was degenerationism,  God created these differences as punishment. Progressivists purported the theory that societies begin in the primitive state and more toward the advance. (Locke 1632-1704) Of course, the Europeans viewed themselves to be in the advanced stage. What this line of thinking produced, academically, was a global history of mankind that moved from the primitive to the European nation.

Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer's studies on organisms and their environment led to the development of the theory of natural selection. The struggle for subsistence between individuals and groups would lead to the survival of the fittest.  The characteristic that would help them survive was "adaptability." Social Darwinists used this theory to justify the European domination of the "others." In other areas of the world the theory promoted free enterprise capitalism.

The unilineal evolutionists, Lewis Henry Morgan and Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, promoted the belief that there were stages in evolutionary development. Morgan imagined three stages in cultural development: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Morgan's work was focused on religious development, which began with animism and moved to monotheism.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels took the cultural evolutionists points of view and applied them to economic and political theory.  This social theory was an analysis of production within societies. The struggle for survival in this social explanation was between the proletariat (working class) and the bourgeoisie (capitalists). Social development therefore was a result of class struggle. The stages in this development were feudalism, capitalism, and communism.

Sigmund Freud applied these theories to psychological process.  Humans evolved through psychosexual phases or stages from the oral, anal, genital, latency, and genital primacy. He attempted to explain the origins of cultural institutions through these stages.

What studies have been done to test the hypotheses of these stages of development? How have these these stages refuted? Are there any societies that can be used as examples against these theories?

Stephen Jay Gould states that the era of the Cambrian, 500 million years ago, showed the greatest diversity.

Keywords:

material condition
modes of production
competition
division of labor
productive force

 

Karl Marx was the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the 19th century.

Born in Trier, Germany. He studied law at both Bonn and Berlin Universities. At Berlin University he studied under  Bruno Bauer,  Bauer introduced Marx to the writings of G. W. F. Hegel (concerned with the relationship of individual to the state) and his dialectic theory.  (The process of arriving at the truth by stating a thesis, developing a contradictory antithesis, and combining and resolving them into a coherent synthesis. ) Marx adopted Hegel's theory that a thing or thought could not be separated from its opposite and that unity would only be achieved by making the opposites equal. Marx became a member of the Young Hegelian movement.

Marx became a journalist in Cologne, Germany. There he met Moses Hess,  a radical who called himself a socialist.

Arriving in Paris at the end of 1843, Marx applied Hegel's dialectic theory to what he had observed. While in Paris he become a close friend of  Friedrich Engels. Engels helped to financially support Marx, and his family, throughout his life. Marx lived in extreme poverty for most of his life.

Ideas led to development of: Communism. Socialism.

Followers: Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao Tse-tung, Gramsci.

Major Works:

The German Ideology, 1845-46, developed his materialist conception of history, a theory of history in which human activity, rather than thought, plays the crucial role. The basic thesis was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production."
The Communist Manifesto. February, 1848. This work summarized the approaching revolution and the nature of the communist society that would be established by the proletariat, the class of industrial wage earners who, possessing neither capital nor production means, must earn their living by selling their labor.
Grundrisse (or Outlines), 1857, a gigantic 800 page manuscript on capital, landed property, wage labor, the state, foreign trade and the world market. The  was not published until 1941.
Das Kapital. 1867. This is a  detailed analysis of capitalism, dealing with important concepts such as:
1.   surplus value (the notion that a worker receives only the exchange-value, not the use-value, of his labor);
2.  division of labor (where workers become a "mere appendage of the machine")
3.  industrial reserve army (the theory that capitalism creates unemployment as a means of keeping the workers in check).
An attempt to use a materialist perspective to explain specific historical events.
The final part of Das Kapital  Marx deals with the issue of revolution.

"Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case."  from Friedrich Engels' eulogy to Marx on March 14, 1883.
 

Reading Notes:

Marx's theory, which he called "historical materialism" and which Engels called "scientific socialism" or "dialectical materialism", is based on Hegel's claim that history occurs through a dialectic, or clash, of opposing forces. Marx argued that it is the material world that is real, and that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world.

Forms of Ownership:- Property

1.  Tribal ownership - undeveloped stage of production, hunter/gatherer, small scale agriculture, family

2. Communal ownership - city, slavery, private property, development of class relationships, oppression of those who produce,

3. Feudal or Estates property - country, sparse populations, Germanic military constitution, nobility, property was the labor of the individual, oppression of those who produce,

Productive Force - A certain mode of production is always combined with a certain stage of cooperation, or social stage, this mode of cooperation is the "productive force".

Aspects of social activity - simultaneous

1.  the means to satisfy sustenance, the production of material life
2. satisfaction of basic needs leads to the development of new needs
3. family
4. history is created by people producing material goods needed for subsistence and by the social production of new needs.
5. consciousness  of need to associate with the individuals around oneself dependent on population and division of labor
6. language

The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof

A commodity satisfies human wants, is a product of human labor and has a social characteristic of transcedency.  The fetishism of a commodity lies in the social character of the labor by which the commodity was produced. The social character of the labor is visible through the act of exchange. The product becomes a commodity when it is in demand, it satisfies a want. It has value.

Money is a universal equivalent for exchange. By exchange we equate the value of the product and therefore the labor. The total product of the community is a social product.

The subsistence distribution of goods is determined by the labor time used to produce the goods.  Production then controls the value of the man who produces the goods.

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)

Born in 1820 in Barmen, Germany. As a young man his father sent him to England to help manage his cotton-factory in Manchester. Engels would meet Marx in 1842 in Cologne. He returned to  England later in his life to work in order to support Marx.

Ideas led to development of: Communism. Socialism.

Major Works:
 Communist Manifesto with K. Marx
 The Condition of the Working Class in England,1844. The proceeds from this book were used to support Marx.
 "Das Kapital" the remaining three volumes were put together posthumously by Engels from Marx's notes.
 A Critique of the German Ideology, with K. Marx, 1845-6.

Born in Erfurt, Prussia [Germany] he was the eldest son of a liberal politician whose family had become wealthy in the German linen industry.

Weber studied law at the University of Heidelberg and went on to do graduate work with a dissertation on medieval trading companies in Italy and Spain. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1898 and did not continue his academic work until 1904. From 1904 on he was a private scholar, mostly in Heidelberg.

He appeared as an opponent of socialism and Marxism in Germany even though he incorporated some Marxist thought into his theories.

His ideas led to the development of modern sociology. He found the beginnings of capitalism in the Protestant work ethic. He emphasized cultural and political factors as key influences on economic development and individual behavior.

Marx's idea that the "history of humanity"  must always be studied in relation to the history of industry and exchange ( production) is how anthropologists treat their methods of analysis. 

If specialization leads to alienation how can the society grow technologically?

Marx talks about one of the problems of society being the separation between men and what they produce, then later on he says that communistic regulation will destroy the alien relation between men and what they produce.  How will that be accomplished?

I don't understand the last paragraph in which he describes how this alienation could be abolished.  He refers to an "intolerable power" that would incite a revolution and renders humanity "propertyless".  A two-fold world of wealth and destitution. Communism is possible only  if all dominant peoples agree to it simultaneously.

Is this where the value of labor is determined?

Social Darwinism
survival of the fittest
superorganic

consanguine -  of the same lineage or origin; having a common ancestor.
 

   Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

Born in Derby, England. His father was a teacher and a Methodist "Dissenter." His education was informal but he did study to be an civil engineer with the railroad. From 1848 to 1853 he worked as a writer for a financial weekly, The Economist, where he met George Henry Lewes ,Thomas Carlyle, and T. H. Huxley. He received an inheritance when his uncle died in 1853 and from that point on he devoted himself to writing for himself.

His methodology was influenced by the positivism of August Comte. The purpose of investigation was to collect data and derive basic "laws" from that data.

His ideas led to the development of evolutionary theory and Social Darwinism. He based his understanding of the social realm on the biological model of the organism. His theory of evolution actually preceded Darwin's. He is the one who coined the term "survival of the fittest." His thought was that evolution is actually a progressive movement towards an "equilibrium" where individual beings change their characteristics and habits until they are perfectly adapted to circumstances and no more change is called for.

He coined the term "superorganic,"  which refers to ideas that supersede the individual, that Edward Sapir and Alfred Louis Kroeber used in their anthropological writings.

Spencer saw society as a system of structure and function. Spencer is also responsible for the development of structural functionalism. The more advanced a society was, the more diverse it was in its structure and function.

Major Works:

Social Statics, or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness. 1851
The Principals of Psychology. 1855
First Principles 1862
The System of Synthetic Philosophy. 1862-1893
The Study of Sociology. 1880

Influeced: John Stuart Mill, John Tyndall, Thorstein Veblen, William Graham Sumner, Simon Nelson Patten, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Julian Steward

Reading Notes:

The Evolution of Society

What is Society?

Society is an entity that can be discerned by the common ideals of its components. Like the parts of a cell that act as one unit, the parts of society act with a shared understanding.

Society as an Organism

A characteristic of both organisms and society is growth.  This growth continues until the cell, or society, explodes or divides and differentiates. This increase in size also implies an increase in structure. Differentiation of the structures is accompanied by differentiation in the function of the structures.

Evolution establishes mutual dependencies and these dependencies increase as the evolution advances.  The lungs need air brought in by the contractions of the diaphragm for example. A primitive society is self-sustaining, there is no specialization.  Every member fulfills all its own needs. Division of labor is seen in societies of higher evolution.  This is comparable to the mutual dependencies on the parts of an organism such as the body.  If one part of this body or entity ceases to function, the rest of the entity will cease to function as well. 

A society may be destroyed without destroying the lives of those in the society, however, if there is no catastrophic event, the life of the society far exceeds the lives of the members.

Language is the means by which parts of a society cooperate. This "internuncial function" is both emotional and intellectual. In an organism this communication is achieved through molecular signals.

Social Growth

The largest societies have developed out of small bands of people.  The crude implements by which these bands survived imply an absence of the technologies that make large societies possible. There continue to be examples of more primitive types of societies in the world.  The limitations of development can be: an inhospitable region, undeveloped technology, or adjacency to higher races.  Society grows when there is a surplus of food provided by developed agriculture.

The are two processes which facilitate growth.  One, the simple increase in numbers of the members.  The second process is grouping. The primitive social group is limited in size because of the amount of resources available for sustainability. The formation of larger societies is possible only by the joining together of smaller groups, without obliterating the previously determined divisions.

As the compound societies arise they become coherent groups.  These coherent groups repeat the compounding process to varying stages. The Egyptian tribes joined to form small independent states. The militarily stronger Greeks conquered weaker towns and brought them under subjugation.  Small feudal territories in Europe grew into kingdoms.

Lower-type societies are spread out over large areas of land.  Higher-type societies are more concentrated, more densely populated.  This is a fundamental trait of evolution. The compound society is both larger in mass and and more densely populated.

Social Structures

The first trait in the evolution of societies is the increase in mass is accompanied by an increase in structure.  Secondly, with the increase in structure comes differentiation.

The first stage of social differentiation is that of leadership or authority.  Single family groups have no form of leadership except temporary moments of a member showing strength, cunning or experience. When these families join to form simple groups they show evidence of some kind of head. As these small groups grow to sizes of a hundred or so, we can usually find some kind of ruling agency. 

The second stage of differentiation is a division between the sexes. The men primarily participate in warfare activities while the women provide sustenance.  As the groups grow by capturing and enslaving enemies a further differentiation arises.  In preparation for defense there becomes a chief of chiefs, resulting in third stage of differentiation, a division of classes such as king, local rulers,  and petty chiefs. 

 A fourth development in differentiation would be that of specialization of labor.  Using religion as an example, the simple tribe would have a sorcerer or shaman who played the role of priest, diviner, and doctor. More advanced societies show greater diversity in this area, dividing the religious offices up into popes, priests, sacrifices, diviners, singers, composers, and instructors.

The production of commodities also evolved from the simple to the complex.  In the beginning a worker would carry on his occupation alone and directly distribute the goods to the consumers.  The demands by society for product of the individual required the imposing of the occupation upon the children.  As the families grew and the number of the members of a family involved in a specific industry grew, guilds were born.  These guilds would add apprentices to their ranks and these apprentices grew into journeymen. By now, the master of the guild would no longer be producing the goods himself, but would become a distributor or merchant.  With the addition of mechanical power to production the factory arose. Once the factory system was ingrained into the societal mind it was possible for industry to arise without going through the evolutionary process from single worker to factory. 

Social Functions

Changes of function are implicit in changes of structure as has been illustrated by the aforementioned examples.  If separation occurs in primitive society there is not much consequences, the members of the tribe are already performing all the duties needed for survival.  If a high society is divided so that part of it is left without a controlling agency one will probably evolve, however not without a period of disorder and weakness. The life of the whole makes possible the life of the parts.  The higher the specialization of labor the more difficult it is for substitution between occupations to occur, especially in the arena of legislature, jurisprudence, and politics.

The Social Organism

Changes in society are the consequence of natural causes.  Social evolution is driven by the pressures of human demands. Competition among people leads to the "survival of the fittest." There is a powerful force that makes the members of a group act in a certain way,  "superorganic" ideas (Durkheim), a "collective consciousness" (Kroeber),.

Similarities between societies and organisms:
     1.  they increase in size
     2.  they develop from the simple to the complex (increased specialization of function)
     3.  they acquire a mutual dependency

Differences between societies and organisms:
     1. societies have no specific external form
     2.  the living elements which make up society to not form one continuous mass
     3.  social organisms are not fixed in a relative position, there is freedom of movement
     4.  all member of society are endowed with feeling, in an organism it only occurs in
           special tissues.

The evolution of a market economy

There must be a surplus of commodities for growth to begin.  The growth will occur in proportion to the surplus.  This surplus comes from an increase in work. The surplus needs to be distributed. An agency will develop to supervise the distribution of goods.

Society evolves, as does an organism, from the simple to the complex and the differentiation which occurs in the process of growth between structures and functions leads to mutual dependencies that when lost are difficult, if not impossible, to substitute.

His ideas were central to the development of social anthropology.

Whoa, races! Does he actually mean races, or higher technologies? What was the thinking on this subject during this time period?

The growth of the parts of the society do not continue at the same rate. Need further discussion on this point.

As the society grows it moves into more concentrated living quarters. The growth of cities.  The feudal village.

Spencer mentions in passing the movement between groups, or migration, but considers it such a small factor as to not have an impact except in primitive groups.  Wouldn't migration today play a major role in the differentiation within the group?  (Also consider the outsourcing of jobs and immigration policy.)

Spencer comments, " the women are made drudges who perform the less skilled parts of the process of sustentation."  I suppose that warfare was held to be a higher function than that of feeding the group. Wasn't agriculture what was thought to have been the impetus for civilized society?  And if so, how did it lose its status? 

Spencer views men as superior to women. He believed that the needs of reproduction arrested the mental evolution of females at an early age.

Can we use the situation currently existing in Iraq to demonstrate his transition period defined by disillusion and disorder?

kinship studies
 

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881)

Born in Aurora, New York He attended Cayuga Academy in Aurora and then attended Union College and graduated in 1840. He practices law in Rochester, New York.

Morgan's work was the foundation for the new world view of genetic explanation, cultural evolution or social Darwinism. He was one of the first people to systematically study kinship systems. He is considered by some to be the father of American anthropology. His ideas led to the development of kinship studies.

Morgan said that human societies "progressed" through 3 stages: savage, barbaric and civilized.

1. Savage - The lowest stage, subsistence on wild plants, no soil tilling or animal domestication.
2. Barbaric - Starting to use agriculture
3. Civilized - Begins with the art of writing, which binds together the past and the future.

He developed his theory based around (1) the growth of intelligence through inventions and discoveries; (2) the growth of the idea of government; (3) the growth of the idea of the family; and (4) the growth of the idea of property.

Major Works:

League of the Iroquois (1851) one of the earliest examples of ethnography
Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (1886)
Ancient Society (1877)
Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.(1881)

Influenced: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used his works on cultural evolution as support for their materialistic theory of history. He also influenced Gordon Childe, Leslie White, and Marvin Harris.

Reading Notes:

Ancient Society

Overview: In this article Morgan tries to understand society by its technology.  Every stage of development corresponds with a certain type of technology and subsistence. Though this theory has now been  proven to be wrong, he was was correct in his idea that technological inventions alter society in such a way as to make new adaptations to cultural traits.

The ideas used in the classification of ethnic periods were:

                        Subsistence, Government, Language, Family,
                                 Religion, Architecture, and Property

All forms of government fall into two categories, those based on society (societas) and those based on property (civitas). Societas governments revolve around the individual and their relationships, Civitas governments are founded on territory and property.

American anthropologist Franz Boas pointed out that Morgan's groupings were illogical. 

The technology that Morgan uses as examples in the different ethnic periods seems to concentrate on artifacts prior to the Civilized period, and to ideology in the Civilized period.

survivals
Animism
culture

Born on October 2, 1832 in London, England. Tylor was educated in a Quaker school but he never attended university as a student. Due to his failing health, by consumption, he had to leave his family's business and traveled to Mexico. His work on the mentality of primitive peoples, and especially on animism, made an important contribution to the study of primitive religion. He was a professor of anthropology at Oxford for 14 years. Tylor was a powerful advocate of the unity of all humankind. He was instrumental in establishing anthropology as an academic discipline.

Tylor developed his idea of cultural evolution by arguing that earlier stages of a society's state could be discovered by studying "primitive" cultures - cultures which he called "survivals" because they have survived while other cultures have progressed. Tylor defined “survivals" as fossilized forms of behavior carried over from earlier stages of development.

Major Works:

Anthropology (1881)
Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865)
Primitive Culture (1871)
Anahuac (1861).

Reading Notes:

The Science of Culture

Tylor believed that culture was a specific body of knowledge that different groups possessed differing quantities thereof. Society needed to be studied as a science and research done in light of the view that it developed as a sequence of cause and effects. In the study of culture it doesn't matter what time period is studied or what location, what matters is the comparisons of societies at the same stage of civilization. Tylor also stressed that races not be considered as different but rather viewed man as a homogeneous group placed in different stages of civilization.

The study needed to be undertaken as those of the naturalist, breaking down civilization into the details of it parts, for example; weapons, textiles, myths, rites and ceremonies. The details of these cultures are classified into ethnographic groups. Next it needed to be considered what role evolution played in distinguishing these groups from each other.

The evidence used in this research can be termed "survivals."  "These are processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved. " Keeping up ancient traditions is only one part of the transition from old to new societies.  Sometimes there may even be a revival of the old ways, such as in modern spiritualism. Degradation and modification are also means by which the old is "survived" into the new.

The French Sociological Tradition and Weber

Emile Durkheim's sociology stated that society is an entity in itself that needs maintenance.

Keywords:

sociology
work ethic

Max Weber (1864-1920)

Major Works:

Roman Agrarian History, 1891.
"Roscher and Knies and the Logical Problem of Historical Economics", 1903-5, Schmoller's Jahrbuch.
"The Objectivity of the Sociological and Social-Political Knowledge", 1904.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905.
Economy and Society, 1914.
"Politics as a Vocation", 1918.
General Economic History, 1923. 
The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 1949.

Reading Notes:

In Class, Status and Party, Max Weber formulated a three-part theory of social stratification.  The three elements are social class, status group, and politics (party).

Social Class - The Economic Order

Social class is based on economically determined relationship to the market (owner, renter, entrepreneur, employee etc.) Classes can be differentiated by property-owners vs. those who lack property, and further divided by type of property owned or service offered.  A class action is a communal action by member of a class in which class consciousness exists.  (They must also be aware of the nature of their oppression.) Communal action is structured to protect possession, distribution and means of production. Economic acquisition of status is responded to negatively by those who have acquired status through life-style. Classes are stratified by their relations to the production and acquisition of goods.

Status Group - The Social Order

Status class is based on non-economical qualities like honor, prestige and religion. Propertied and non-propertied people can belong to the same status group. Status honor is determined by what he calls "life-style". These are manners of speech, schooling, leisure habits, and other factors. This is the key factor in determining which social group one belongs to. The opportunities given any individual to pursue their interests varies according to their qualifications. Weber refers to these as "life-chances". Status groups are stratified according to their consumption of goods, represented by their life-style.

Party - The Power Order

Party class refers to factors having to do with affiliations in the political domain. To Weber, party any group using power to achieve a goal. Striving for power is also conditioned by the honor it entails.

Class Struggle

The three types of communal action that determine class situation are: the labor market, the commodities market, and capital enterprise. The effectiveness of these struggles has shifted from consumption credit toward struggles in the commodity market, to price wars in the labor market.

Segregation and Caste

A status group evolves into a "caste" when the consequences of stratification have been fully realized. These extreme consequences are viewed to be "ethnic" in origin. Rituals are used to remove the stigma associated with this level of stratification. These rituals are religious in nature. People in these groups usually acquire specific occupational traditions which helps to cultivate a belief in their ethnic community, or their own specific "honor" or "dignity".

What is the difference between communal action and societal action?

What is higgling? Hawking wares.

The effect of status order is the monopolization of goods and services that hinders the free development of the market.

Class situation is ultimately market situation.

Technical and economic changes are the impetus for changes in social stratification. 

Week Four
British Social Anthropology And Functionalism

Functionalists attempted to describe the various institutions that made up society, explain what they do, and show their contribution to the overall maintenance of society.

Functionalism was a European concept and was conceived of in the light of colonialism.

Anthropology was useful for colonial administration. Radcliffe-Brown trained officials to govern indigenous peoples in South Africa and Australia. The maintenance of social order was what colonial governments were most interested in.
Functionalists were only marginally interested in historical development. The functioning of the current systems were of primary importance.

After WWII functionalism lost its prominence and was replaced with theories of cultural change.

Malinowski - Psychological functionalism
cultural institutions function to serve the needs of the people
how individuals pursued their own interests within the constraints of society
culture existed to satisfy basic human needs - nutrition, reproduction, bodily comfort, safety, relaxation, movement, and growth.
cultural beliefs and practices contributed to the smooth functioning of society while providing individual benefits.
intensive fieldwork
The Essentials of the Kula illustrates his skill as an ethnographer.

Radcliffe-Brown - structural functionalism
how cultural institutions maintained social cohesion - searched for social laws
derived social laws governing behavior from comparative studies
used Spencer's organic analogy
anthropology was a science
culture was an abstract concept because values and norms cannot be observed
limited his studies to social structures which could be observed
Believed that the social system remained, not the individuals, therefore his studies focused on the social structures. Kinship systems.
The Mother's Brother In South Africa-focus on social structure as a means of making functionalist studies scientific and that universal laws could be formulated for human behavior through cross-cultural comparisons.

E.E. Evans-Pritchard
student of Malinowski's, but most affected by Radcliffe-Brown
structure of kinship systems regulates warfare and distribution of resources among the Nuer of Eastern Africa.
 

In the introduction to the chapter on Functionalism it states that the Functionalists examined societies as if they were timeless and thus were able to account for social change.  How does a society being timeless also allow for social change?

 time·less (tºm“l¹s) adj. 1. Independent of time; eternal. 2. Unaffected by time; ageless. 3. Archaic. Untimely or premature. --time“less·ly adv. --time“less·ness n.

change n. 1. The act, process, or result of altering or modifying. 2. The replacing of one thing for another; substitution. 3. A transformation or transition from one state, condition, or phase to another. 4. Something different; variety.

The function of ritual in primitive society is to express the social values of specific types of behavior.

(In this case that specific behavior is the relationship between the mother's brother and sister's son. The ritual is the Kula.)

Keywords:

Structural-Functionalist
Systemic View
Social Whole
Durkheimian
Inductive Generalization
Comparative method
Kinship and lineage systems

The individual is on no account and it is the social system alone that matters.

The use of organic analogy to make theoretical points.
 

Three vital concepts:
1. process - synchronic social activity
2. structure - organized arrangement of parts
3. function -the relationship between process and social structure

Malinowski started with the individual and RB started with system of human interactions.

Précis 1

The function of social structures can be studied scientifically by examining the morphology, physiology, and the development of the social system.

Précis 2

The function of a social structure is to contribute to the maintenance and continuity of the social system of which it is a part.

Précis

Social institutions, as modes of behavior, are the machinery by which social structure, a network of social relations, is maintained.

A. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955)

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was born in Birmingham, England in 1881 and died in 1955. With Malinowski, he initiated a "functionalist revolution" in British anthropology during the early years after the First World War, rejecting the "conjectural history" of the previous generations of evolutionist and diffusionist anthropology in favor of a synchronic, systemic view. Radcliffe-Brown, whose methodological contribution was minimal, was inspired by Durkheim to formulate a sophisticated structural functionalist theory, which focused on the needs of the social whole.

He did fieldwork in the Andaman Islands and in Australia. He pioneered the study of social relations as integrated systems. In 1906-1908 Radcliffe-Brown undertook his first field work in the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, research which led in 1922 to the publication of his classic monograph The Andaman Islanders. His other major field research was a survey of different kinship systems among the aboriginal groups of Western Australia, undertaken in 1910-1912.

Influence of the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim was evident. Like Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown thought that social institutions should be studied like any scientific object. The job of the social anthropologist was to describe the anatomy of interdependent social institutions--what he called social structure--and to define the functioning of all parts in relation to the whole. The aim of such analysis is to account for what holds a functioning society together.

In an early paper, "The Mother's Brother in South Africa," published in 1924, Radcliffe-Brown made sense of what had been thought to be isolated and peculiar customs observed in African societies whereby a boy has a special relationship with his maternal uncle (his mother's brother) that is distinct from his relationship with any other uncle or with his own father. By examining this relationship in light of the total abstract pattern of kinship relations and the pattern of relations between different social groups, Radcliffe-Brown was able to show the structural-functional "logic" of an apparently irrational custom.

In yet another illuminating analysis, Radcliffe-Brown provided the basis of a coherent explanation of "totemism"--the set of associations between social groups and species of plants or animals. Radcliffe-Brown argued that totemic beliefs create solidarity between nature and human society. Nature was, through totemism, domesticated. Furthermore, Radcliffe-Brown insisted that oppositions between natural species of animals or plants served to symbolize differences between one social group and another. This approach to totemism, once again stressing analyzing specific social institutions in relation to their total encompassing social context, was a major advance in the understanding of such beliefs and paved the way for the more modern work of structuralists such as Claude Levi-Strauss.

Major Works:

Three Tribes of Western Australia, 1913
The Andaman Islanders, 1922
Social Organization of Australian Tribes. 1931
Structure and Function in Primitive Society, 1952

Reading Notes:

The Mother's Brother in South Africa

Précis

The function of ritual in primitive society is to express the social values of specific types of behavior.

The relationship between the mother's brother and the sister's son is not a survival from a matrilinear orientation, but is an extension of the values and behaviors used in association with the mother.

( In this case that specific behavior is the relationship between the mother's brother and sister's son.)

Concerns the relationship between the mother's brother and sister's son. (maternal uncle and his nephew) Includes special right's of the nephew to his uncle's property. The use of Tylor's survivals is evident here in the supposition by Mr. Junod (whose data is being used for the study) that this custom is evidence of a past matrilinear society. It is is this supposition which RB in trying to refute.

1. The uncle takes special care of his sister's son.
2. The uncle sacrifices for his nephew.
3. The nephew takes liberty with his uncle's home and food.
4. The nephew claims some of his uncle's property
5. The nephew steals a portion of his uncle's sacrifices to his ancestors

Other cultures with this custom can be found in Tonga and in Fiji. RB 's study is comparative between the BaThonga of Portuguese East Africa, The Nama Hottentots of South Africa, and the Tongans of Polynesia.

In addition to the special relationship between the uncle and nephew that is also a special relationship of great respect between the same nephew and his father's sister (paternal aunt). These two relationships must not be looked at separately but as part of one system. There are definite patterns of behavior for each recognized kind of relationship (kinship) and these general tendencies are what social anthropologists are trying to explain.

Primitive societies arrive at definite patterns of behavior towards uncles , aunts and cousins based on a system of classification in which relatives are placed into categories stated as that of the equivalence of brothers.  The father's brother is treated as a father, and his son's are treated as brothers.  The mother's sister is treated as a mother, and her children are treated as brothers and sisters. This pattern does not explain the relationship behaviors for the father's sister or the mother's brother. These special relationships show a high degree of kinship development. The father's sister becomes a sort of female father and the mother's brother becomes a pseudo male mother.

To gain insight into these relationships RB suggests that we must first identify the patterns of behavior of the child in relation to the father and the mother. The father is feared and respected, he is the teacher who scolds and punishes.  The mother is loved and respected, but tends to spoil her children. In the mother-child relationship we find indulgence and tenderness. If we take these relationships and apply them to the mother's brother and the father's sister what we get is an aunt who must be treated with respect and uncle who takes care of and indulges his nephews.

Sex and age also play a role in determining behavior towards relatives.  Females relatives must be treated with more respect than male relatives and older relatives are more respected than those that are younger. The father's sister is the relative that is to be the most respected and obeyed, and the mother's brother is the one with whom we can take liberties.

RB suggests that a way to study these relationships is to first look at these same relationships in a matrilineal society but that there is hardly any information on this available.  ( I suppose he would not consider doing  this study himself.)  He goes on to talk about how all kinship systems are bilateral. Society then divides these into segments of local groups, lineages, and clans. It is simply a matter of choice as to whether membership in groups is patrilineal or matrilineal. He states that most primitive societies are neither but a combination of the two, or bilateral, in which kinship through the father is more important than kinship through the mother. The distinction between matriarchal and patriarchal societies is not absolute, but relative.

The hypothesis is this: The regulation of the relationships between individuals is based on kinship. This is associated with a segmentary organization of society. While kinship is bilateral, a choice has to be made oh how to decide lineage.  The same kind of behavior is extended to all maternal or all paternal relatives and their ancestors. This behavior is reflected in the groups' ritual customs.

In primitive society there is a strongly marked tendency to merge the individual in the group to which he or she belongs.  This relation to kinship is a tendency to extend to all the members of a group a certain type of behavior which has it origins in a relationship to one particular member of the group. 

To exemplify this theory, he explains in detail about bride price and ancestor worship and sacrifice.  In general then, the father and his relatives must be obeyed and respected, an so therefore his ancestors.  The father punishes children, and so may the ancestors on the father's side.  On the other hand, the mother is tender and indulgent to her child,  and her relatives are expected to be the same, and so also the maternal spirits.

Ceremonial and ritual customs express social values. The function of ritual is to fix and make permanent certain types of behavior.

On the Concept of Function in Social Science

Based on an analogy (Spencer's) between social life and organic life.  Durkheim's definition is that the "function" of a social institution is the correspondence between it and the needs of the social organism.  RB's definition is that the "function" of a social institution is the relationship between it and the necessary conditions of existence. These relationships can be studied with scientific inquiry.

An organism has structure, its set of relations.  The continuity of structure does not preserve the identity of its parts. The life of an organism is seen as the functioning of its structure. The function of its parts are the contributions they make to the organism as a whole. The parts have specific activities and those activities are the functions. '

Humans are connected through a definite set of social relations integrated into a whole society. The continuity of structure is maintained by the process of social life, which consists of the activities and interactions of individuals and the groups to which they belong. The social life is therefore the function of the social structure, the contribution it makes to the maintenance of the structural continuity.

Structure consists of a set of relations amongst the unit entities, the continuity of the structure being maintained by the life-process made up of the activities of the units.

Systematic investigation of the nature of human society involves the problems of morphology, what kinds of structures are there and how can they be classified?  Also, the problems of social physiology, how do the structures function? And, problems of development, how do new types of social structures come into being?

Features of social structure cannot be observed except in social activities. Social morphology, what the social structures are, cannot be viewed without considering the physiology, how they function. Societies do change their structural type without any breach of continuity. All parts of the social system work together without producing conflicts that cannot be resolved or regulated.

Greek terms - eunomia means good order, and dysnomia means disorder. Dysnomia does not lead to the death of a society. Eunomia is the harmonious working together of the parts. Dysnomic societies will struggle towards eunomia.

Whether or not change in a social structure is dependent on function can be studied in the development of the legal and political institutions, the economic systems, and the religions. One type of change that can be observed is the disintegration of the social structure.

Formulation of a working hypothesis requires the assumption that everything in life MAY have a function. It is necessary to consider the form of usage of an activity in addition to its function. Comparative studies of diverse types is required in addition to single society studies. To determine the nature of unity it is necessary to investigate the functional consistency of the social system.

The subject matter of social anthropology is the whole social life of a people in all its aspects. These need to be considered in relation to one another, the individual and the way in which he is molded or adjusted by social life.

One explanation of a social system will be its history. Another explanation is obtained by showing the special exemplification of laws of social physiology (function).

Functionalist theory is in conflict with previous theories of diffusion and the belief that there are no discoverable sociological laws.

On Social Structure

The functional school of social anthropology is a myth created by Malinowski and promoted by Boas. RB regards social anthropology as a branch of natural science called "comparative sociology." The study of culture and the study of human society are two different things. Anthropology is concerned only with the study of human beings, social anthropology is concerned with the relationships among human beings. We can observe acts of behavior but we cannot observe the abstraction of culture.

Humans are connected in a complex system of social relations. This network is called the social structure. The task of this branch of natural science is to discover the characteristics of the social structure. Social phenomena are connected to the social structure by either being implied by them or resulting from them.

Studying social structure is not the same as studying social relations. It is the network of the relations that needs to be studied. Technical terms need to be applied to the components that will be studied.  Part of the social structure are the social relations, a network of such relations can be established through genealogical connections.

RB is concerned only with the general characteristics of the relationships.  The actual relationships provide illustrations for the general. Variations of particular instances are taken into account.

Social life constantly renews the social structure.  While the social structure changes the general structural form may remain constant.

Social personality is the position occupied by the human being in a social structure. The human being is as a person is a complex of social relationships. Social personality changes during the person's life.

Single studies of societies provide materials for comparative studies. Study is no longer confined to primitive societies.

Morphological study requires the building of a classification system for types of structural systems. Physiological study requires research into how the mechanisms of society maintain the network of social relations. Social mechanisms are social phenomena of all types, including morals, laws, etiquette, religion, government, and education.

Features of linguistic studies can be applied to social structure. Language, like culture, is an abstraction from the social structure of the community in which it is spoken.  Language is a system that can be compared in order to discover commonalities.

The economic machinery of a society depends on, is the result of, and is a means of maintaining structure, the network of the relationships. The patterns of behavior associated with the reciprocity of the system is formulated in rules. The rules exist only by their recognition by the members of the society. The system of laws can only be understood if it is studied in relation to the social structure.

The study of social structure leads to the study of the interests of values as the determinants of social relations. When two or more personas have a common interest in an object, then that object can be said to have social value.  Law has social value.

Social institutions, as modes of behavior, are the machinery by which social structure, a network of social relations, is maintained. The social functions of these modes of activity are their relationships to the social structure are the contributions they make to continuity.

The interaction of individuals and groups within a social structure is itself a process of change. It is not an evolution, but a progress. Human beings achieve greater control of the physical environment through increases in knowledge and technology. Progress is not evolution, but it is connected to it. Social evolution has two features; a process by which a small number of forms of social structure becomes many forms, and secondly, a more complex form of structure have replaced simpler forms.  (bigger and more complex)

In what ways was the payment of bride-price significant  in this article?

Bride price was used as an example of the expected behavior towards the mother's brother.  The uncle holds the bride-price on behalf of his sister's children. This custom illustrates the importance of the interest that a mother's brother is supposed to take in his sister's son. (pg. 184)

The Native Appeals Court had recently decided that the payment of bride-price to the mother's brother was not a legal obligation but rather was one of moral obligation based on kinship.  This represents the practical purpose associated with this study. (On page 186, RB refers to its importance to missionaries, magistrates, and the native themselves.)

How did this study in kinship relations support RB's theory of inductive generalization? 

By examining this relationship in light of the abstract pattern of kinship relations (bilateralism) and the pattern of relations between different social groups, (comparative studies) Radcliffe-Brown was able to show the structural-functional "logic" of an apparently irrational custom.  From the specific study of this particular relationship he was able to generalize about kinship systems and the function of rituals.

In addition to lineage determinations of behavior, what impact did sex and age play in  kinship behavior ?

Page 180 - Sex plays a role in the respect paid to a relative.  A man must treat his female relatives with greater respect than his male relatives.  A father's sister gains more respect than the father. In the same way, age demands respect.  A man must treat his father's elder brother with more respect than his father. An elder sister would demand respect.  A man's mother's brother may be treated with a degree of familiarity.

Page 181-left column

RB here puts forth a hypothesis that he claims he cannot prove in this paper.  What he does is suggest a way in which this phenomena may be verified.

His paper is basically a request for more information in order to validate his hypothesis.

Page 183-bottom of left column to top of right.

The ethnographer describes in detail the structures of a society in order to identify the universal laws under which it functions.

Keywords:
Psychological functionalism
synchronic (rejection of history)
basic and derived needs
Durkheimian

15 pgs.

From the book notes:

Malinowski wove elements of Spencer, Durkheim, and Freud into his functionalism.

Functionalism was used to demonstrate how social institutions operated to fill the seven biological and physical needs.

Followed Spencer's analogy of the organic.

Concerned with behavior within the cultural context as opposed to RB's view the social structure existed independent of human beings.

Contributed to the development of economic anthropology.  Mauss saw the Kula economics as similar to that of the potlatch.

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942)

Bronislaw Malinowski was born in Krakow, Poland on April 7, 1884. Malinowski founded the field of Social Anthropology known as Functionalism, sharing the belief that all components of society interconnect to form a well-balanced system.

Malinowski’s first field study came in 1915-18 when he studied the Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea in the southwest Pacific. He used a holistic approach in studying the native’s social interactions.

Bronislaw Malinowski  set a high standard for field work and data collection. One of Malinowski's major achievements was the integration of cultural theory with psychological science. He contributed to a cross-cultural study of psychology through his observations of the relationships of kinship.

As an anthropologist, Malinowski goes from the bottom up, and from psyche to culture, whereas for Durkheim causality is top down or the social first (collective conscience) and the psychological aspects are effects more than cause, and basically details of social facts (see Rapport, Overing, 2000, 396).

advocated participant observation, learning the language--the modern methods of ethnography

societies are integrated wholes; one must study the interrelationships

stressed need to document the native's perspective - the emic perspective

focus on 3 main types of data:
    1. institutions and customs
    2. the imponderablia of everyday life
    3. narratives, folklore, myths

Themes:
    1. cultural aspects must be understood in their context (like Boas)
    2. "primitive" man just as reasonable as western man, given the cultural context
    3. have to look at behavior and beliefs: the two do not always mesh
    4. individual needs-functionalism

He suggested that in essence the primitive thinks like the modern

He sought out connections and these were for him the system (but not for others)

His analysis was not historical or political (until after Trobriand Islands)

His method was rich data - observed, participated, questioned

His method was multi-layered, to get to the very detail of people's actions and thoughts

He noted the difference between what people say they do and what they actually do

He noted the difference between formal culture and what people do within it

The seven biological and physical needs.

Major Works:

The Trobriand Islands (1915)
Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)
The Scientific Theory of Culture (1922)
Posthumous Books
Magic, Science, and Religion (1948)
The Dynamics of Culture Change (1961)

Further Reading:

http://www.change.freeuk.com/learning/socthink/malinowski.html#key\

Reading Notes:

The Essentials of the Kula

The Kula is a form of exchange. Every detail of the transactions are fixed and regulated by a set of traditional rules and conventions, and are accompanied by an elaborate magical ritual and public ceremonies.

A limited number of men take part in the Kula. No man ever keeps any of the articles for any length of time. The Kula provides a permanent and life-long relationship between men and between the articles of exchange.

It is an extremely big and complex institution that welds together a considerable number of tribes.  It is carried on by men who know only their own purpose and actions and the rules which apply to them.  They do not understand The Kula as an organized social construction.

The Ethnographer's task is to find out the meaning of certain activities, what the constants are, and the laws and rules that apply to the transactions The ethnographer has to construct the picture.  To do this he reversed the order of research, where generalized inferences are obtained from long and laborious inductions. 

The Kula is an economic institution, a form of trade as meant by any exchange of goods. It is an arrangement of securing goods with penalties incurred for non-compliance to the rules.  The Kula is rooted in myth and backed by traditional law and surrounded by magical rites.  It implies various mutual duties and privileges and is based on a form of credit.

The two main articles of exchange are ornamental and have no practical use, they are arm shells and spondylus shell necklaces.  The objects are not owned in order to be used. The analogy between these objects and the Crown Jewels is in sentimental associations or prestige.

The exchange sets up relationships between a man and his neighbors and with his overseas partners. It is a network of relationships. The relationships are of two categories, those who give him arm-shells, and those who give him necklaces. These are determined by geographical relationships. It is a circular exchange.  Temporary ownership allows the trader to draw a great deal of renown. This is the difference in the Crown Jewel analogy. The arm shells and necklaces are more like sporting cups, kept for a time by a winning party.

The social rules of exchange override any acquisitive tendencies. The important point is that to possess is to give, share, distribute.  The higher the rank, the greater the obligation to do these.  There is no haggling.  Kula is a gift repaid after an interval of time by a counter-gift, and not bartering.  The equivalent rests with the giver, and cannot be enforced. There are different types of gifts in these categories: opening gifts, intermediary gifts, clinching gifts, offerings, and solicitary gifts.

The secondary aspects of the Kula are preparations to carry out expeditions.  This includes building of canoes, fixing dates, and social organization. Secondary trade is also a part of the Kula to procure other goods.

The ceremonial nature of the Kula is apparent in the ceremonial feast held at the beginning, the final ceremony of reckoning and counting the spoils at the end, and the construction of the canoes. The ceremonial nature of the Kula is strictly bound up with another of its aspects - magic.

"But no abridged definition can give to the reader the full understanding  of a social institution. It is necessary for this, to explain its working concretely, to bring the reader into contact with the people, show how they proceed at each successive stage, and to describe all the actual manifestations of the general rules laid down in abstract."

Is this the reverse?  From general to specific, or specific to general?

Here, Malinowski talks about how he is not dealing with sociological matters, but is working in a pure ethnographic description in reference to his statement that the Kula impels the natives to sail and to trade.

This quote from the reading defines Malinowski's position on ethnographic writing.

The Nuer political system is defined by the relativity and opposition of its tribal segments and its clan and age-set systems.

Keywords:
Structural-functionalist
Cultural ecology

From the notes:

British structural functionalists attempted to create abstract analytic descriptions of society and formulate universal principles of social organization.

British structural functionalists recognized environment as an important factor in social organization.

British colonialism preferred to rule through already existing political structures.

Tribal identity is complex and situational rather than uniformly imposed.

EP was deeply influenced by RB though he was a student of M. M's work was based on ethnographic description, RB's work concentrated on abstract, analytical models of society.

Durkheim and Mauss influence - idea of social fact is implicit in goal of delineating social structures. Search for social facts and collective consciousness. Social structure as existing outside the individual. But EP here gives implicit importance to individual characters.

Consist with Spencer's organic analogy or societies functioning at equilibrium. Same as RB.

Fragmentary and situational nature of personal and group identity. Notions of overlapping and parallel identities resemble those of Weber.

His view is consistent with M's perception of the role of economics in primitive societies. Avoids application or capitalist or Marxist economics.

Like Mauss, believes kinship is a total social phenomena.

E.E. Evans-Pritchard was born in Sussex, England, in 1902. He did fieldwork among the Azande and Nuer tribes of southern Sudan.

He claimed that anthropologists rarely succeeded in entering the minds of the people they studied, and so ascribed to them motivations which more closely matched themselves and their own culture, not the one they are studying.

He famously disavowed the commonly-held view that anthropology was a natural science, arguing instead that it should be grouped amongst the humanities. He argued that the main issue facing anthropologists was one of translation - finding a way to translate one's own thoughts into the world of another culture and thus manage to come to understand it, and then to translate this understanding back so as to explain it to people of one's own culture.

Major Works:

Essays in Social Anthropology (1962)
Theories of Primitive Religion (1965)
 

Reading Notes:

The Nuer of the Southern Sudan

Distribution
anarchic, seasonal dichotomy, distribution determined by physical conditions and mode of life
lack of structural complexity and of great variations of types of social relations is that the social interrelations are mainly individual
 

Tribal System
territorial unity and exclusiveness, economically self-sufficient, sense of patriotism,
within a tribe there is law and moral obligation
social relations link members of different tribes
common language and common culture
no common political organization or central administration
a tribe is divided into territorial segments
a tribal section has a name, a sense of patriotism, a dominant lineage, territorial distinction, economic resources
tendency towards segmentation inherent in political structure itself

Lineage System
highly segmented genealogical structures
each village is associated with a lineage
relation between political structure and clan system
 

Age-set System
no educative or formal training
stratification is another example of segmentation
 

Feuds and Disputes
political system operates through the institution f the feud
feud has wider social connotation
maintains social order
a mechanism by which the political structure maintains itself
Nuer have no "law" , no authority, no power of enforcement only a system of compensatory payments
 

Summary
the Nuer political system is a relation between territorial segments and other social systems within the entire social structure.

The intertribal relationships and relationships between the tribal segments combined with the systems of clan kinship and age-set define the political structure.  This system is defined by the relativity and opposition of its segments.

The Nuer are highly individualistic and libertarian.

Continual reference to Nuer as inmates?????

Précis

Culture is not autonomous but includes subjective meaning, social structure constraints, codes, and a changing environment.

    Alexander, Jeffrey C. (1990)

Jeffrey C. Alexander got his PhD in 1978 from University of California, Berkeley. Prof. Alexander works in the areas of theory, culture, and politics and is one of the most eminent exponent of the "strong program" in cultural sociology; he has investigated the cultural codes and narratives that inform such diverse areas as computer technology, environmental politics, war-making, the Watergate crisis, and civil society.

As to the theory issues, he has recently moved "after" neofunctionalism to try to develop some new directions in contemporary theory, especially making connections with philosophy, literary studies, and political theory.

In cultural sociology, his work has been associated with what he calls the "late-Durkheimian" approach, or the "strong program" in cultural sociology (as compared to the "weak" program of the sociology of culture).

Reading Notes:

There are two theoretical poles in the scientific consideration of societies.

Dilthey - social phenomena should be studied from a cultural point of view. Emphasized the autonomy of culture. Hermeneutic study. Mechanistic.

Parsons - social action should be viewed from the subjective perspective. Institutionalization and the focus on values rather than on symbol systems.

Functionalist approach to meaning has undermined cultural autonomy.

Gramsci - praxis theory. Meaning is inseparable from human action. Culture is interrelated to mechanistic institutions. The social system gives culture meaning. Culture unfolds in a divided society, with class domination backed by political power. Culture becomes a process of domination by intellectuals. The masses adhere to the dominant ideas voluntarily. Dominant culture is eventually challenged by the working class when they become aware of their position by the aristocracy's articulations.

Cultural Marxism improves on functionalism by emphasizing the impact of culture on social change. Culture is the servant of power instead of cultural values exerting control and regulation of that power.

Saussure - semiotics. Language is an abstract code whose structure is determined by internal laws within itself rather than by the social system. Meaning is derived from the relationships between words, etc.. Structure exists independent from the individual.

Functionalism
Values are reduced to the social structures that their supposed autonomy allows them to regulate. Merton - scientific values conceived as generalizations from actual behavior rather than derivations from meaningful processes that constitute the behavior. 

Semiotics
Symbolic organization must be studied without reference to any other process or level. Action is bound by the structure of the culture rather than as on ongoing construction.

Dramaturgy
Carves out a special role for the individual. Individuals are constantly flooded with stimuli in addition to that which is their intention focus. The individual contributes to the cultural text. It is the actors that create the structure, not the structure that creates the event.

Weberianism
Conceptualize culture as an internally generated symbolic system that responds to metaphysical needs.  Currently this goes beyond issues of self-discipline and rational control. Walzer suggests that the Puritanical perspective created the critical activism that undergirds our very notion of modern citizenship.  Modern commitment to revolution. Pitt translates Weber's salvation theory into an historical account of cultural specificity of meaningful conduct, personal comportment, and status relations in secular life. Prowess, aristocratic values, slowed down business expansion and gave prestige to consumption rather than production.

Durkheimian
Focus on structure and process of meaningful systems taken to be universal regardless of historical time or place. Separates cultural systems into the sacred and the profane. Religious and symbolic classifications are reflections of social structure. Mary Douglas believes that the sacred and profane are not intracultural sources of symbolic classification, but sources of strong emotional and moral commitment.

Marxism
A less reductionist vision of the relationship between culture and economic life. References not only to classes but to codes and values. Artisanal codes developed into working class culture.

Poststructuralism
Shares Marxism's critical ideology but little of its faith that contemporary condition will be transformed. Adds semiotics and structuralism. Social links of symbolism to power and social class. Social structure, like classes or political authority, cannot be interpreted as acting against culture. Embedded cultural codes. Discourse is a form of power. The codes form the cultural wealth of any society. Families and schools are institutions specializing in the transmission of these codes. Social privilege is a reflection of individual gifts rather than the other way around.

Conclusion -
Meaning cannot be observed in social behavior, only as a pattern itself. 
1. Knowledge of an independently organized cultural system is enough
2. System must be understood as having been modeled upon processes that already exist in the social system itself.
3. Disagreement over what composes a cultural system.

We cannot understand culture without reference to subjective meaning or without reference to social structure constraints. It follows codes and creates a changing environment. Culture cannot be studied within the framework of a particular school. The differences taken together point to the need for a more general perspective that relates each dimension to the other.
 

Week Five
Americans Roots

Keywords:

Superorganic: This is a term coined by Herbert Spencer in 1867 and utilized by Kroeber to help explain his view of culture and culture change. He saw culture as an entity of itself and separate from the individual. He explained that culture, indeed ends where the individual ends.

Cultural Relativism: beliefs, customs, practices and rituals of an individual culture must be observed and evaluated from the perspective in which they originate and are manifested.

Culture and Personality: Ruth Benedict.  culture is like an individual in that it is a more-or-less consistent pattern of thoughts and behavior. These consistent patterns take on the emotional and intellectual characteristics of the individuals within the society.

Culture Configuration:  Ruth Benedict  A culture configuration is the expression of the personality of a particular society. A culture configuration is the sum of all the individual personalities of the society,

Method of research founded by Franz Boas which used a holistic approach that included the study of prehistory, linguistics, and physical anthropology. To explain cultural customs one must approach it from three perspectives: environment conditions, psychological factors, and historical connections. Anthropologists today do not identity with this approach.

Boas and his contemporaries could not swallow the grand models and theories of cultural development advocated by evolutionists and British and German diffusionists. They believed that so many different stimuli acted on the development of a culture that this development could only be understood by first examining the particulars of a specific culture so that these sources of stimuli could be identified. Only then may theories of cultural development be constructed which are themselves based on a multitude of synchronic studies which are pieced together to form a pattern of development, over time, that is unique and shaped by a set of stimuli that is also unique. Not only are theories derived from this type of historically grounded investigation more accurate than the older models of evolutionism and diffusionist historicism, but they are also demonstrable.

Historical Particularist Approach

Boas: Franz Boas viewed culture as a set of customs, social institutions and beliefs that characterize any particular society. He argued that cultural differences were not due to race, but rather to differing environmental conditions and other ‘accidents of history’ (Goodenough 1996:292). Further, cultures had to be viewed as fusion’s of differing culture traits which develop in different space and time (Durrenberger 1996:417)

Kroeber: Kroeber’s view of culture is best described by the term superorganic, that is, culture is sui generis and as such can only be explained in terms of itself. Culture is an entity that exists separate from the psychology and biology of the individual and obeys its own set of laws (Winthrop 1991:280-281).

Benedict: Ruth Benedict defined culture as basic ways of living and defined a particular culture in terms of a unique culture configuration or psychological type. The collective psychologies of a certain people make up their particular culture configuration, which is determined by the collective relationship, and nature of a culture’s parts (Goodenough 1996:139).

Sapir: Sapir placed more emphasis on the individual that either Boas of Kroeber. He argued that culture is not contained within a society itself. Culture consists of the many interactions between the individuals of the society (Barnard and Spencer 1996:139).

Historical particularists tended to treat culture as a chance association of disparate features. Boas' students tried to alleviate this problem by borrowing ideas from psychoanalysis and psychology. This insight influenced Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, who focused on psychological conditioning of personality. They examined the problem of acquiring culture and culture's relationship to the individual personality.

The three broad themes of this approach are: the relationship between culture and human nature, the relationship between culture and individual personality, and the relationship between culture and a society's typical personality type.

Sigmund Freud was a major influence on these anthropologists. Though they rejected his anthropological theories, they were interested in his analysis of the effects of culture on the individual.

Anthropologists associated with culture and personality all had close ties to Boas. Benedict and Mead assumed culture as a given and claimed that it determined personality.

World War II brought about the use of anthropologists to do national character studies on the enemies.  The results were inaccurate due to the methods used in collecting information. By the 1950's most anthropologists rejected the psychoanalytic approach.

The field of culture and personality draws on psychology and anthropology.  Born out of Freud's psychoanalysis, anthropologists began searching for common aspects that would characterize differing peoples by their cultures.  In an attempt to avoid racist, hierarchical culture models, a new breed of anthropologists sought to describe cultures based on the individuals within a society and the similarities that that shared.

Keywords:

Historical Particularism
Cultural Relativism
Comparative Linguistics
Inductive Reasoning
 

Boas coined the definition for "culture" in the sense that we use it today, the collection of a specific people characterized by their own societies and institutions (Goodenough 1996:292). 

co·e·val (k½-¶“v…l) adj. 1. Originating or existing during the same period; lasting through the same era. --co·e·val n. One of the same era or period; a contemporary. --co·e“val·ly adv.
 

he·gem·o·ny (h¹-jµm“…-n¶, hµj“…-m½”n¶) n., pl. he·gem·o·nies. The predominant influence of one state over others. --heg”e·mon“ic (hµj”…-m¼n“¹k) adj. --he·gem“o·nism n. --he·gem“o·nist adj. & n.

vis-à-vis (v¶”z…-v¶“) prep. 1. Face to face with; opposite to. 2. Compared with. 3. In relation to. --vis-à-vis adv. 1. Face to face. --vis-à-vis n., pl. vis-ä-vis (-v¶z“, -v¶“). 1. One that is face to face with or opposite to another. 2. A date or an escort, as at a party. 3. One that has the same functions and characteristics as another; a counterpart. --vis”-ä-vis“ adj.

Boas rejected evolutionary schemas, the degenerative bias, and Tylor's survivals.

(1858 - 1942)

Founder of Historical Particularism. He believed in the freedom, dignity, and fundamental equality of all peoples. Boas was a German Jew. His PhD was in geography, physics, and philosophy. His major works were among the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island. His first position in the US was at Clark University and eventually ended up at Columbia.

His training in physical sciences brought a rigorous approach to ethnographic research. He repudiated Social Darwinism and evolutionary speculation. He also rejected the comparative method.  He supported biological evolution, but thought that sweeping generalizations of the unilineal evolutionist were not scientifically valid. He attacked convergent and parallel evolution.  Similar cultural traits, to Boas, could originate due to different processes. His view was that similar cultural traits could develop from diffusion and trade, among other reasons. Environment and historical accident may produce similar cultural traits independent of any universal evolutionary process.

Three fundamental perspectives: environmental conditions, psychological factors, and historical connections.  The best explanation of cultural phenomena were to be found in historical development in the society in which they occurred.

Method  - Holistic approach.  prehistory, linguistics, and physical anthropology. Intensive study of specific culture through long term fieldwork. Learning the language was a key factor. Felt the immediate need to retrieve a vanishing past from the memories of those old enough to recall it.

Pioneered the concept of cultural relativism.  Societies were unique entities that could not be compared. Cultural traits were a result of historical and environmental evolution of that society and could only be understood in that context.

His effect on the development on anthropology was in his training of the first generation of American anthropologists. Anthropologist today rarely identify themselves as historical particularists, however, there are echoes of Boasian thought in ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology as well as in the symbolic and postmodern approaches.

Reading Notes:

The Limitation of the Comparative Method of Anthropology

Here are four major limitations to the comparative method according to Boas:

1. It is impossible to account for similarity in all the types of culture by claiming that they are so because of the unity of the human mind.
2. The existence like traits in different cultures is not as important as the comparative school claims.
3. Similar traits may have developed for very different purposed in differing cultures.
4. The view that cultural differences are of minor importance is baseless.

The differences between cultures are of major anthropological significance. Boas did not stop his critique of the comparative school at that point he also delineated a methodology to replace it.

His importance within the discipline is that anthropology should be objective and inductive science. In an age when the scientific method was important, this change in the discipline resulted in the establishment of anthropology in universities. Boas’ students were among the first to establish some of the most important anthropology programs on American campuses.

The Methods of Ethnology

Refutes the principals of evolutionists and diffusionists. Also disagrees with the idea of a psychic unity of mankind. Also opposes the idea of development from simple to complex.

Two directions of study in anthropology. One is that American scholars are primarily interested in the dynamic phenomena of cultural change, and try to elucidate cultural history by the application of the results of their studies. The other is that they relegate the solution of the ultimate question of the relative importance of parallelism of cultural development in distant areas, as against worldwide diffusion, and stability of cultural traits over long periods to a future time. 

Relation of the Individual to Society
The activities of the individual are determined to a great extent by his social environment, but in turn his own activities influence the society in which he lives, and may bring about modifications.

About Universal Laws
If we look for laws, the laws relate to the effects of physiological, psychological, and social conditions, not to sequences of cultural achievement.

The origins of social phenomena are historically determined.

Voices of Modernity. Bauman and Briggs. Franz Boas's cosmopolitan charter for anthropology.

Thinkers in Boas's time were concerned with the effects of modernity and industrial capitalism on contemporary society. They were on a quest for truth that would ideally free humanity from the shackles of  dogma. In Boas's New York cosmopolitanism was a dominant social fact and a central element of individual and collective imagination. Boas sought to identify what he saw as the universal resistance that cosmopolitanism encounters.

Boas identified evolutionism as a faux-science.  In championing the notion that cultural patterns acquired in childhood were capable of explaining differences he turned culture into a weapon for defeating evolutionism and for transforming public policy. His goal was to build a way of charting the future that could circumvent racism, fascism, and international conflict.

Culture, to Boas was an obstacle to achievement of his goal. His concept of culture was built on the way he constructed language and tradition and placed them in relation to modernity. Problems in anthropological conceptions of culture are tied to the problematic constructions of language and tradition which Boas embedded in culture, and this negative relationship between culture and cosmopolitanism.

Boas's View of Language

Boas adopted a negative critique of Indo-European categories. His commitment to the production of ethnographic texts were important in his anthropological program. He used language to demonstrate that human mental processes were fundamentally the same everywhere and that individual languages and cultures shaped thought in unique ways. From this he developed a universal model of culture.

Boas attempted to shape how language would be perceived, what role it would play, and how researches would study it and produce texts. Sapir was reluctant to adopt this blueprint due to his structural and humanistic view of linguistics. Boas did not accept the idea that linguistic categories determined culture, but constructions of language and linguistics shaped his imaginings of culture in a hybridized fashion.

Eight dimension of this hybridization follow:

1. Languages and cultures do not develop along simple, unilinear evolutionary sequences.

2. All humans have language and culture, but all languages and culture are unique.

3. Membership in linguistic and cultural communities involves the sharing of modes of classification.

4. The principle of selectivity in languages and culture.

5. The operation of categories is automatized and unconscious.

6. The constant danger of distortion in cross-cultural research.

7. Charting the vast spectrum of human possibility.

8. The need for a "purely analytic" method of description and analysis.

In sum, Boas constructed language and culture as separate domains calling for distinct methods, only to hybridize his construction of culture by deeply embedding language ideologies within it. This model leaves little room for interactive and social dimensions. He failed to come to terms with living in a linguistically and culturally complex society.

The notion of a universal linguistic framework is based on the idea that language can be separated from culture and society.

Tradition, anthropology, and the modern subject

Tradition played a role in Boas's notion of culture. He characterized tradition as a basic source of beliefs, practices, and social relations. Tradition limited progress towards enlightenment and rationality. He constructed culture as a force that limits individual freedom through pervasive influence of tradition. His highest priory was the production of native-language texts as a basis for cultural study.

To Boas, cultural patterns shape narratives.  Myths and tales shape everyday thought. Boas treated the form and content of narratives differently than he treated discussion of linguistic categories. Linguistic patterns were not susceptible to conscious thought. Narratives, on the other hand, are distorted attempts to explain customs. These secondary explanations legitimize cultural forms and processes. Tradition was therefore a means of documenting the social effects of secondary explanations.

Narratives become objects of consciousness as they are told and retold. The interpretation of each narrative reflects the cultural interests of the people telling it.

9. Boas viewed linguistics as the study of written texts. Fieldwork became a complex set of practices that had to be mastered through professional training. Texts could turn something unique into something public and permanent.

Texts were "the foundation of all future researches"

The collaborative production of Native American texts

Boas trained as many native American and persons of mixed ancestry in dictation. Hunt and Boas's relationship was characterized by the social and political-economic inequality between them. Boas erased important dimensions of the entextualizations. Boas was not interested in how Hunt obtained the information.  Boas retained absolute control over the processes and the distribution.

Boas stripped off many of the features that tied the texts to the contexts of their production and the social and political-economic relationships in which they were embedded. The authors do not suggest that Boas was unethical, the point is that he systematically decontextualized them.

American texts thus helped to define modernity in a purely negative fashion.  His practices constructed anthropology as a science of culture rather than of the colonial encounter, an historical mode of inquiry that rested on a principled effort to construct modernity in opposition to a pre-contact, romanticized past, thereby excluding the anthropologist and the constructed nature of anthropology's textual objects from purview. (Range of vision, comprehension, or experience)

Language, tradition, and the anthropological gaze

Native American texts are thus limited in theory and practice. For Boas, the notion of culture itself motivated a transfer of authority over the politics of differences to anthropologists. His rationale for this position were as follows:

1. Human beings lack a universal perspective that would enable them to understand critically the forces that shape their behavior and consider possible alternatives to their own culture. Selectivity principle, #4 above, and automaticity, #5 above, prevents non-anthropologists from grasping their failure to perceive a broader spectrum.

2. People lack awareness of human possibilities that constitutes their language and culture. #3 above, shared categories involves and unquestioned acceptance of behavior.

3. If people cannot grasp the broad range of human possibilities or their own linguistic and cultural systems, how can they grasp the relationship between the two?

Boas's theoretical move thus dehistoricizes and depoliticizes imperialism by reducing it to general effects of a universal process of reifying unconscious categories.

Boas distinguishes between the lay public, the average man and the educated sector. The educated group must teach others how to overcome cultural provincialism. This opinion helped to sustain the legitimacy of modern schemes for creating and naturalizing social inequality. 

Boas's theoretical and methodological basis:

1. Identifying the broader framework of human possibilities constituted a major anthropological endeavor.

2. A purely analytic approach to the study of particular languages and cultures enabled anthropologists to circumvent the natural tendency to project one's own categories onto others.

Anthropologists are uniquely qualified to compare systems and generalize about linguistics and cultural differences. Boas attempted to fashion anthropology into an obligatory passage point for academic and popular debates. Rather than providing laws or formulas, the anthropologist's duty was to watch and judge day by day what we are doing, to understand what is happening in light of what we have learned and to shape our steps accordingly.

Boas's work and that of his students had a role in shaping which cosmopolitanisms would get connected to modernity in the 20th century.

On the cultural limits to anthropological cosmopolitanism

Boas argued that nationalism was an abstraction. It was unevenly spread, and becomes a driving force only when there are states. Boas suggested that the whole history of mankind points in the direction of a human ideal as opposed to a national ideal. European and Us culture was, according to Boas, not a historical or cultural product but the unfolding of a universal tendency.   (domination)

The traditional character of culture was a second obstacle to cosmopolitanism.  Naturalizing these patterns as universal and morally superior, we project them on to others and react aggressively when members of other cultures do not meet our expectations.

To Boas though, there was a unique anthropological consciousness that allowed anthropologists to systematically and consciously grasp their own cultural patterns and examine them rationally, choose among them, and eliminate irrational elements. Anthropologists must erase the traditional element, and that is what makes culture culture. So culture is the real obstacle.  Thus Boas imposed a fundamental limit on anthropologists. Claiming anthropological authority on the basis of culture fosters the sort of inequality that Boas decried.

Conclusion

Boas's denial of coevalness have legitimized colonialism and imperialism. Anthropology becomes associated with hegemonic notions of culture and attempts to reproduce inequality themselves. get reproduced. ????????

Boas's attempts to shield anthropological concepts of culture from criticism fail to come to grips with two issues.

1. They do not take into account that Boasian notions of culture have become social facts that shape contemporary social and political processes.

2. Boas suggested the primordial foundation of social life is the socialization of each individual by the way of one language and one culture.

What is at stake here are the questions of cultural determinacy and authority. The question is not that Boas was wrong about culture, it is rather that he told anthropologists that they are the only ones who are right. Boas used constructions of language and tradition centrally in characterizing anthropology as the epitome of modern knowledge.  At it was precisely the politics of inequality embedded in the notion of culture that limited its value as a means of challenging inequality and charting a cosmopolitan project.

Historical inquiry leads to the processes of the creation of certain cultural traits.  The reasons why cultures are certain ways.

When he refers to origin and assertion of universal ideas, is he referring to RB's morphology, physiology and development of culture? 

morphology, what kinds of structures are there and how can they be classified?  Also, the problems of social physiology, how do the structures function? And, problems of development, how do new types of social structures come into being?

It is confusing when he talks about the old and the new schools.  Does he refer to the comparative method as old or new?

He gives examples of differing developments of the same phenomena.

On page 89 (2nd edition) he refers to "The object of our investigation is to find the processes by which certain stages of culture have developed."

He refers to his method as "safer."

Also on page 89:
Is he proposing diffusion? environmental determinism? and relativity?

His comment about not believing the connection between Central America and eastern Asia make me think about the book I'm reading, 1421.  The Year the Chinese discovered America.

(He kind of disagrees with everything that has been before him. )

WHAT?

He set forth clearly the relationship of culture patterns to the individual and presented a new concept of society as the interaction of groups and persons.

somatic - Of, relating to, or affecting the body, especially as distinguished from a body part, the mind, or the environment; corporeal or physical.

Next to Boas, the most influential American anthropologist in the first half of the 20th century. Was Boas' student, and first anthropologist to graduate from Columbia.

He maintained Boas' idea of historical perspective but differed on two points: One, he rejected Boas' presumption that anthropology was devoted to the study of humankind's origins, and two, he disagreed with Boas about the significance of the individual's role in cultural development.

Instead, Kroeber adopted a view closer to that of Emile Durkheim's in which culture could not be reduced to individual psychology.  Culture was a pattern that transcended and controlled individuals. Culture played a powerful role in determining role in individual human behavior and individual accomplishments resulted from historical trends.

Kroeber did adopt the Boasian concept of studying cultures in relation to their environment. Kroeber was concerned with reconstructing history through a descriptive analysis of concrete cultural phenomena which were grouped into complexes, configurations, and patterns. Kroeber is further noted for his use and development of the idea of culture as a superorganic entity which must be analyzed by methods specific to this nature. In other words, one cannot examine and analyze a culture in the same manner that one would analyze the individual; the two are entirely different phenomena and must be treated as such (Willey 1988:171-92).

Major Works:

Anthropology (1923, rev. ed. 1948)
Configurations of Culture Growth (1944)
The Nature of Culture (1952)
Style and Civilization (1957)

Reading Notes:

The Concept of Culture in Science

Culture forms recognizable an persistent patterns. Societies frequently develop cultural configurations spasmodically.  When culture patterns develop, geniuses cluster within certain periods in relationship to cultural growth. This was a failure and most anthropologists have ignored his work.

Kroeber's view of society was similar to Durkheim's in that customs and beliefs hold societies together and help them to survive. Every human society is accompanied by culture, both shared and supraindividual. 

Culture presupposes society and society presupposes persons. Culture, society and persons all are preconditioned by the next. There are four aspects of social phenomena: body, psyche, society, and culture. These levels can be considered as dimensions, not to be confused with levels of abstraction. Only culture is abstract as a generalized concept, but society, psyche, body, matter, and energy are also abstract.

Certain properties of each phenomena are unique to it. Life, mind, society, and culture are not outside of matter and energy. Scientifically, every phenomena is in nature and part of it.

The evolutionist theory concentrates on biological and psychological autonomy but fails to address the social and cultural level. The stress is on an evolving universe. What is important is not the hierarchal progression of stages but what happened in between them.

The historical approach does not erode the specifics into laws or generalizations, but preserves the phenomena and finds its intellectual satisfaction in putting the phenomena into a relation with the other in an ever widening context.

The next steps in studies of the phenomena must include: contextual relations involve absolute space and absolute time, and context involves relations of form, including function and excluding cause and involves relations of value. The scientific method can be used to study the lower levels, but the historical approach must be used on the levels of mind, society and culture.

The influence of culture on behavior and the activity of individual men is recognized. Lower levels condition the upper levels. The manipulative quality of culture is viewed as only a trend, not a rigorous law. 

Context, a significant part of the historical approach, concerns external relations viewed as widely as possible. Form or process are limits to culture, they are the cultural constraints. Diffusion as a process is just imitation. 

The formulation of laws if the recognition of significances, including values.

Linguistic components of culture are selectively extricated from the upper level of phenomena. Linguistic science suppresses the individual. It is directed towards form-pattern and form-relations, not towards causality. Material remains essentially superindividual, anonymous, patterned, and predictive.

The fundamentals of the generic historic approach are the properties of superindividuality, patterning, and non concern with cause. To understand cultural manifestations we must first seek for their significance in a coherent system, and beyond that in the context of total forms of human history. The individual is irrelevant and distracting, and must be ignored and suppressed. Rather than an individual contribution to culture, there have been clusters of men in certain epochs of certain civilizations that can be attributed with greatness.

There are two approaches to investigating social phenomena. The scientific and the natural. The natural approach accepts values as inherent in culture and characteristic of it, a part of nature. Values can be described and compared. Cultural values form a "natural" par of nature. The concept of the levels of social phenomena can help with this approach. Values of a culture are reflected in the society's ideals, but no society is ideal in its actions. There is a gap between the pure culture and how it is lived out.

Values are superpersonal, they are part of the collective consciousness.  Kroeber calls it the "essential anonymity" of origin. All cultural phenomena are related to certain other phenomena.   The relations are form, value, and significance. They are not directly elations of cause. Causes of cultural phenomena are the actions or behaviors of men. Cultural phenomena are by-products of organic activity.

The circular causality is thus represented: Human beings who influence culture are themselves molded by their enculturation. The inquirer therefore needs to omit the human agents when looking for the causes of cultural phenomena.

Culture and personality approaches describe the interaction of persons and their cultural environment. To pursue this approach one really needs to understand the culture and the persons first. The legitimacy of this approach is questionable.

To appropriately deal with the concept of culture one must deal with the phenomena separately, as linguistics does.

(1884 - 1939)

Sapir was born in Laurenberg, Germany but grew up in New York City and eventually entered Columbia University where he was attracted to Boas’ work in Indian linguistics. His study under Boas led to fieldwork among the Chinook, Takelma and Yana Indians of the Northwest. He took his Ph.D. in 1909 writing his dissertation on Takelma grammar.

While joining Boas, Kroeber, Benedict and others in defining goals in theoretical terms, he disagreed with Boas and Kroeber’s reconciliation of the individual within society. He specifically disagreed with Kroeber’s ideas that culture was separate from the individual; his ideas on this subject more closely resemble those of Benedict (Golla 1991:603-5).

With his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) he developed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, arguing that the limits of language restrict the scope of possible thought and that every language recognizes peculiar sets of distinctions—e.g., Eskimo and its rich vocabulary for different kinds of snow.

Dr. Sapir stressed that language shapes our perceptions, and he thought that understanding cultural behavior was impossible unless its development through language was thoroughly traced. Sapir was interested in the more abstract connections between personality, verbal expression and socially determined behavior.

Reading Notes:

The Status of Linguistics as a Science

Sapir was interested in the place of the individual in culture. His interest in the individual is from a cognitive rather than an emotional approach to the human psyche. He stressed the importance of culture and the analogy of language and culture. He argued that there is no causal link between a language and culture.  He regarded culture as what a social group does and thinks. Language was a "guide" to the culture. 

The comparative study of languages is the key to unraveling the development of dialects and languages from a common base. There are connections between linguistic approaches and those of science. Linguistics can be a valuable guide to the study of culture, to 'social reality.'

No two languages are similar enough to be considered as representing the same social reality. Language is the one form of culture that can develop a fundamental pattern of relatively completely detached from other types of cultural patterning. Language is a cultural or social product and must be understood as such. It gives to anthropology a truly scientific method of study.

Linguistic Determinism: A Definition

Linguistic Relativity: A Definition

In 1913, Whorf graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 1919 he was appointed an Engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. Throughout his life, Whorf was known as a Chemical Engineer, a Linguist, and an Anthropologist.

Whorf began studying Linguistics at Yale University in 1931 because he was concerned about the conflict between science and religion. Interested in the American Indians, he began to study the Hopi language while at Yale University under the supervision of Edward Sapir.

Whorf argued that "language is shaped by culture and reflects the individual actions of people daily" (Turner: 836). He felt that language shaped a person's view and influenced thoughts. Today, many linguists agree with Whorf's studies. His studies, though not all were proven, helped future linguists in their studies.

His notion of linguistic relativity was based on grammatical categories, assuming a cultural diversity and relativism quite distinct from the universalist thrust of cognitive science. This focus places him firmly in the cross-cultural research tradition of ethnolinguistics.

Major Works:

Language, Thought and Reality (1959)

Reading Notes:

The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language

Meaning is essential. The categories of meaning change from one society to the next. Language reflects and constrains thought.  One thinks of terms of one's own language. Categories of thought are the categories of a particular culture.

The cue to a certain line of behavior is given by the analogies of the linguistic formula in which the situation is spoken of. We tend to think in our own language when we examine others.

Two questions:

1. Are our own concepts of time and space and matter the experience of all men, or are they part of the conditioned structure?

Concepts of time and matter are not given the same form by experience to all men but depend upon the nature of the language or languages through the uses of which they have been developed. They do not depend on any one system, but on the ways of analyzing and reporting experience which have become fixed in the language.

2. Are there traceable affinities between culture and behavioral norms and large-scale linguistic patterns?

There are connections but not correlations of diagnostic correspondences between cultural norms and linguistic patterns. There is a relation between a language and the rest of the culture of the society that uses it.

Keywords:

 "culture is personality writ large"

culture configurations

anthropology as an interpretive art

(1887 - 1948)

In 1921,at the age of 34, Benedict entered Columbia University to begin studies under Franz Boas. Benedict's friendship with Edward Sapir began when he wrote to her after reading her dissertation. He encouraged her to pursue her interest in the interaction between individual creativity and cultural patterns.

Benedict began a series of field studies in 1922 of the Serrano, of the Zuni in 1924, the Cochiti in 1925 and the Pima in 1926. Her experience with the Southwest Zuni Pueblo is considered her formative fieldwork. It provided the basis for her theory that "culture is personality writ large" (Modell, 1988).

Benedict went on to classify the Zuni Pueblo as Apollonian or having a distrust of excess and orgy as compared to the surrounding Plains Indians who were Dionysian or valuing excess as an escape to an order of existence outside of the five senses (Mead, 1974).

Within Benedict's "cultural determinism" brand of anthropology there exists a mixture of accuracy and misunderstanding. She emphasized the power of custom and learning as an argument against nature and for the infinite capacity of human beings to change. She believed that an individual could successfully alter the conditions of her life and in so doing, alters society. She is criticized for not taking the knowledge gained from her research a step further by outlining a plan beyond tolerance and awareness of individuals. Benedict's work continues to hold its value as the strengths of her anthropological approach are appreciated by those professionals who share her concern with the impact on data of the researcher's position in her home society as well as with the impact on an audience of reported facts (Modell, 1988).

Benedict was a cultural relativist. There were no higher or lower cultures, just different lifestyles. She proposed that each culture had a unique pattern, called a cultural configuration, which determined the fundamental personality of the members. The configuration for the society was based on the dominant personality characteristics.

Benedict is most noted for her development of the concepts of culture configurations and culture and personality, both developed in Patterns of Culture (1934). Her descriptions of Native American cultures and her theoretical position have had an important effect on American anthropology.

Major Works:

Patterns of Culture (1934)
Zuni Mythology (1935)
Race: Science and Politics (1940)
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946)

Reading Notes:

The Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest

Benedict applies Nietzsche's psychological types of Apollonian and Dionysian to the cultures of the Southwest.  The Pueblo peoples are of the Apollonian type in contrast to that of almost all other Native Americans. They posses and ethos distinguished by sobriety.

The Puebloans rejected intoxication, shamanism, the self-induced vision, torture, ecstasy and orgy. These are examples of cultural resistance or cultural reinterpretation.

The clue for this cultural situation is to be found in the fundamental psychological set which had been established for centuries in this region. It has created an intricate cultural pattern to express its own preferences.

She rejected Freud's notion of cultural evolution as nonscientific and ethnocentric.

Margaret Mead received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her first paid job was at the American Museum of Natural History, where she kept an office until her death 52 years later. Her most popular writings revealed the impact of culture on gender roles, exploding the myth that most male-female differences are inherent rather than learned.

Coming of Age in Samoa, presented to the public for the first time the idea that the individual experience of developmental stages could be shaped by cultural demands and expectations. She believed that cultural patterns of racism, warfare, and environmental exploitation were learned, and that the members of a society could work together to modify their traditions and to construct new institutions.

Mead focused on the effect of historical circumstances on cultural developments. She also focused on the influence of culture on human social development. Mead attempted to separate biological and cultural factors that control human behavior and personality. She firmly agreed with Benedict on cultural configuration and national character.

Mead was interested in culture as a primary factor in determining masculine and feminine social characteristics and behavior. Mead brought the ideas of anthropology to a general audience and helped popularize the notion that there are many different ways of organizing human

Mead studied seven cultures in the South Pacific and Indonesia. In all of these studies, she focused on the relationship between the individual and culture, particularly in the transmission of culture to children. Mead was one of the earliest American anthropologists to apply techniques and theories from modern psychology to understanding culture. She believed that cultures emphasize certain aspects of human potential at the expense of others. Mead was especially interested in how cultures standardize personality and what happens to people temperamentally at odds with the behavior expected of them. Her pioneering researches included looking at different cultural expectations for males and females, an early attempt at understanding what are now called "gender roles." One frequent criticism of her work--particularly in her writings for general audiences--has been that she drew conclusions too broadly without offering sufficient evidence. In recent years,  some of Mead's early research on Samoa has been questioned,  most notably by Australian  anthropologist Derek Freeman, who argues that she was wrong about Samoan norms on sexuality.

Major Works:

Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
Growing Up in New Guinea (1931)
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples (1937)

Link to more works by Mead:
http://www.mead2001.org/bibliography.html#byMead

Reading Notes:

Introduction to Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies

"Man has made for himself a fabric of culture within which each human life was dignified by form and meaning." Each culture takes its values from the values dear to some human temperaments and alien to others.  Each new generation is shaped.  Humans select their culture, choosing some traits and ignoring others. What is abnormal in one culture may be celebrated in another. Culture is determined by emphasizing issues like sex, age, etc., not by biological means.

She disagrees with the notion of contrasts, that if one sex is dominant the other is submissive.  She sees it as a limiting concept.  This is an attack of Durkheim's sacred and profane dichotomy. She is concerned more with how temperament and enculturation are related to sex behavior.

Week Six- Materialism
Cultural Ecology, Cultural Evolution, Cultural Materialism, and Marxist Anthropologies

Themes

These basic premises, defined below, have in common attempts at explaining cultural similarities and differences and modes for culture change in a strictly scientific manner. In addition, these three concepts all share a materialistic view of culture change. That is to say, each approach holds that there are three levels within culture --- technological, sociological, and ideological --- and that the technological aspect of culture disproportionately molds and influences the other two aspects of culture.

Concepts

Cultural Materialism
Cultural Evolution
Cultural Ecology

Approaches

The method of Cultural Ecology "has three aspects: (1)the analysis of the methods of production in the environment must be analyzed, and (2)the pattern of human behavior that is part of these methods must be analyzed in order to (3) understand the relationship of production techniques to the other elements of the culture" (Bohannan and Glazer 1988:322).

Use of Marx

Materialism, as an approach to understanding cultural systems, is defined by three key principles, cultural materialism, cultural evolution, and cultural ecology, and can be traced back at least to the early economists, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Cultural evolution is the progress of a society through successively more advanced stages of development. The ideas of cultural evolution and of the evolution of societies provide a set of theories that anthropologists  have both promoted and criticized throughout its long history.

The concept of cultural evolution is contentious for several reasons. First, many argue that it rests on a concept of 'optimal organization' which is ethnocentric. Thus, the concept of cultural evolution is fundamentally unscientific since it relies on a value judgment about what constitutes 'optimal.' Second, the concept of cultural evolution relies on the idea that cultures are externally bounded, internally organized entities seeking to maintain an optimal goal state. However, since it is often difficult to draw bright and clear boundaries around where one society begins and another ends, determining the unit of analysis in accounts of cultural evolution is often difficult or impossible.

Today the concept of cultural evolution continues to be used by academics. Additionally, it appears in a number of contemporary political ideologies.

These basic premises, defined below, have in common attempts at explaining cultural similarities and differences and modes for culture change in a strictly scientific manner. In addition, these three concepts all share a materialistic view of culture change. That is to say, each approach holds that there are three levels within culture --- technological, sociological, and ideological --- and that the technological aspect of culture disproportionately molds and influences the other two aspects of culture.

Materialism is the "idea that technological and economic factors play the primary role in molding a society" (Carneiro 1981:218). There are many varieties of materialism including dialectical (Marx), historical (White), and cultural (Harris). Though materialism can be traced as far back as Hegel, an early philosopher, Marx was the first to apply materialistic ideas to human societies in a quasi-anthropological manner. Marx developed the concept of dialectical materialism borrowing his dialectics from Hegel and his materialism from others. To Marx, "the mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness" (Harris 1979:55). The dialectic element of Marx’s approach is in the feedback or interplay between the infrastructure (i.e., resources, economics), the structure (i.e., political makeup, kinship), and the superstructure (i.e., religion, ideology). The materialistic aspect or element of Marx’s approach is in the emphasis placed on the infrastructure as a primary determinate of the other levels (i.e., the structure and the superstructure). In other words, explanations for culture change and cultural diversity are to be found in this primary level (i.e., the infrastructure).

Marvin Harris, utilizing and modifying Marx's dialectical materialism, developed the concept of cultural materialism. Like Marx and White, Harris also views culture in three levels, the infrastructure, the structure, and the superstructure. The infrastructure is composed of the mode of production, or "the technology and the practices employed for expanding or limiting basic subsistence production," and the mode of reproduction, or "the technology and the practices employed for expanding, limiting, and maintaining population size" (Harris 1979:52). Unlike Marx, Harris believes that the mode of reproduction, that is demography, mating patterns, etc., should also be within the level of the infrastructure because "each society must behaviorally cope with the problem of reproduction (by) avoiding destructive increases or decreases in population size" (Harris 1979:51). The structure consists of both the domestic and political economy, and the superstructure consists of the recreational and aesthetic products and services. Given all of these cultural characteristics, Harris states that "the etic behavioral modes of production and reproduction probabilistically determine the etic behavioral domestic and political economy, which in turn probabilistically determine the behavioral and mental emic superstructures" (Harris 1979:55,56). The above concept is cultural materialism or, in Harris' terms, the principle of infrastructural determinism.

Cultural evolution, in a Marxian sense, is the idea that "cultural changes occur through the accumulation of small, quantitative increments that lead, once a certain point is reached, to a qualitative transformation" (Carneiro 1981:216). Leslie White is usually given credit for developing and refining the concept of general cultural evolution and was heavily influenced by Marxian economic theory as well as Darwinian evolutionary theory. To White, "culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased" (Bohannan and Glazer 1988:340). Energy capture is accomplished through the technological aspect of culture so that a modification in technology could, in turn, lead to a greater amount of energy capture or a more efficient method of energy capture thus changing culture. In other words, "we find that progress and development are effected by the improvement of the mechanical means with which energy is harnessed and put to work as well as by increasing the amounts of energy employed" (Bohannan and Glazer 1988:344). Another premise that White adopts is that the technological system plays a primary role or is the primary determining factor within the cultural system. White's materialist approach is evident in the following quote: "man as an animal species, and consequently culture as a whole, is dependent upon the material, mechanical means of adjustment to the natural environment" (Bohannan and Glazer 1988).

Julian Steward developed the principal of cultural ecology which holds that the environment is an additional, contributing factor in the shaping of cultures. Steward termed his approach multilinear evolution, and defined it as "a methodology concerned with regularity in social change, the goal of which is to develop cultural laws empirically" (Bohannan and Glazer 1988:321). In essence, Steward proposed that, methodologically, one must look for "parallel developments in limited aspects of the cultures of specifically identified societies" (Hoebel1958:90). Once parallels in development are identified, one must then look for similar causal explanations. Steward also developed the idea of culture types that have "cross-cultural validity and show the following characteristics: (1) they are made up of selected cultural elements rather than cultures as wholes; (2) these cultural elements must be selected in relationship to a problem and to a frame of reference; and (3) the cultural elements that are selected must have the same functional relationships in every culture fitting the type" (Bohannan and Glazer 1988:321).

Points of Reaction

Materialism, in anthropology, is methodologically and theoretically opposed to Idealism. Included in the latter are culture and personality or psychological anthropology, structuralism, ethnoscience, and symbolic anthropology. The many advocates of this idealistic approach "share an interest in psychological phenomena, and they tend to view culture in mental and symbolic terms" (Langness 1974:84). "Materialists, on the other hand, tend to define culture strictly in terms of overt, observable behavior patterns, and they share the belief that techno-environmental factors are primary and causal" (Langness 1974:84). The contemporaneous development of these two major points of view allowed for scholarly debate on which approach was the most appropriate in the study of culture.

Mode of Production: "a specific, historically constituted combination of resources, technology, and social and economic relationships, creating use or exchange value" (Winthrop 1991:189).

Themes

Concepts

Approaches

Use of Marx

"Homogeneity and heterogeneity, modernity and tradition are no longer opposed terms," said Sahlins, "...and anthropology must seize this opportunity of renewing itself through these new patterns of human life."

In recent lectures at Cornell University and other colleges, Sahlins has been speaking about our collective interpretations of culture. Entitled "Sentimental Pessimism and Ethnographic Experience: Why Culture Is Not A Disappearing Object," his lectures pertain to common misconceptions of threats to the idea of culture, what is really happening and what it means to anthropology as a discipline. Sahlins resolves that culture will always exist, even if it is in different and innovative forms. He thinks that because culture has historically been used to segregate, dominate and repress, people are morally suspicious of it and this leads to a stereotypical view of a culture as a "politic of distinction." Instead of the common thought that individual cultures will be swallowed up in the new global order, Sahlins argues that instead there will be a novel process of cultural recuperation, and culture will live, in new terms, which is exciting for anthropology. He says that the view that Western civilization has devastated the cultures of indigenous populations does not take into account cultural resistance.

Sahlins' work has focused on demonstrating the power that culture has to shape people's perceptions and actions. He has been particularly interested to demonstrate the culture has a unique power to motive people that is not derived from biology. His early work focused on debunking the idea of 'economically rational man' and to demonstrate that economic systems adapted to particular circumstances in culturally specific ways. After the publication of Culture and Practical Reason in 1976 his focus shifted to the relation between history and anthropology, and the way different cultures understand and make history. Although his focus has been the entire pacific, Sahlins has done most of his research in Fiji and Hawaii .

Reading Notes:

Conciliated White's and Steward's theories of evolution. His concept of redistributive systems to account for variations in social stratification. His specific and general theories of evolution are directed at the uncertain relationship between existing cultures and evolutionary stages. Instead of a unilinear approach to evolution he developed a multi-linear one.

Culture provides the technology for appropriating nature's energy and putting it to service, as well as the social and ideological means of implementing the process.

Specific

The raw materials of specific evolution are the available cultural traits. The process of development is adaptation. The culturological study of the mechanics of invention, diffusion, and adaptation is advanced. Steward work included the concept that special cultural features arise in the process of adaptation. Adaptive modifications that occur in different historical circumstances are incomparable, but they are relative.

The phylogenetic, ramifying, historic passage of culture along its many lines, the adaptive modification of particular cultures.

A connected, historic sequence of forms.

General

Emergence of new levels of all-round development. Searches for an explanation for the successive transformations of culture through its several stages over time. Progress is not equated with good. Explanations reference other developments accompanying them. Progress is the total transformation of energy involved in the creation and perpetuation of a cultural organization.

A passage fromless to greater energy transformations, lower to higher levels of integration, and less to greater all-round adaptablibity.

A sequence of stages exemplified by forms of a given order of development.

Is feudalism a general stage in the evolution of economic forms. Marx. No, it is only a stage in the specific sense. A step in the development of one civilization.

Implications

General rather than specific evolution had dominated evolutionary anthropology. Tyler, Spencer, and Morgan were interested in a general progress. Unilinear evolution was not what they proposed, but was developed in "crude Marxism."

Current anth thinking, except for White, is specifically focused. Steward's multi-linear evolution is widely accepted. It embraced all of specific evolution. Steward confines his attention to parallel developments in unrelated cultural lines. This will mean undue limitation of the approach.

Kroeber - evolution is historic (specific)

White - culture is considered as a whole and particular environments are not relevant. (general)

Steward - evolution is concerned with significant parallels. (specific)

Themes

not interested in a universal law

Certain types of society are likely to develop under a particular condition of tech and environ.

specific and relativistic

cultural core - features associated with subsistence (subsistence, technology, and social structure)

cultural type - shared core features

ranking - family, multi-family, state

Concepts

environmental adaptation - adaptation of specific cultures to specific environmental circumstances

parallel development

cultural ecology - adaptations of humans to meet their environments

Approaches

Technological-environmental
ecological
general evolutionary
multi-linear development

Steward also uses a psychological approach. It was an important part factor.  Contemporary with culture and personality school.

Use of Marx

material basis

different subsistence strategies necessitated different social structures.

unlike Marx, secondary features unrelated to core, and Marx thought that the superstructure rose from the base.

His key contribution lies in the initiation and development of a "theory and method of cultural ecology" designed to integrate divergent fields of anthropology.

The influence of Kroeber while attending Berkeley was one of holistic orientation. His concern to see humankind through the biological, cultural, historical and linguistic viewpoints had a tantamount impact on the discipline. Steward's drive was to understand people from every possible aspect of their lives.

"There are no theories unless based upon fact but facts exist only within the context of a theory."

In addition to his role as a teacher and administrator, Steward is most remembered for his contributions to the study of cultural evolution. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, American anthropology was suspicious of generalizations and often unwilling to draw broader conclusions from the meticulously detailed monographs that anthropologists produced. Steward is notable for moving anthropology away from this more Particularist approach and developing a more social-scientific direction. His theory of "multilinear" evolution examined the way in which societies adapted to their environment. This approach was more nuanced than Leslie White 's theory of "unilinear evolution," which was influenced by thinkers such as Herbert Spencer. Steward's interest in the evolution of society also led him to examine processes of modernization. He was one of the first anthropologists to examine the way that national and local levels of society were related to one another.

Reading Notes:

Interested in discovering general laws of nature. Divided society into core and secondary features.

Kroeber - thought value culture more interesting than the utility culture. Steward focused on utility features.

Rejected the idea of psychic unity and of survivals.

Emphasis on the process of human labor within the environment. Technological process for exploitation of environment. Focused on interplay between technology and the environment. Certain types of society are likely to develop under a particular condition of tech and environ.

Used the biological differences between men and women as reason for patrilineality.

Explained away things that did not fit into the patterns he outlined.

Steward relied on historical accounts and well as current ethnography.

Focused  on the multiple pathways that societies take between evolutionary steps.  (Durkheim)

Technological changes would leave evidence in the archaeological record. This led to the emergence of the new archaeology of the 1960's.

Fieldwork - technique. Encouraged an ethnography based on recording actual behavior rather than one based on what people said about the past behavior. (Boas's secondary translations) These are determined by purely cultural-historical factors such as random innovation and diffusion.

Critic of historical Particularism and functionalism. Discards and having no explanatory value. Kroeber was precisely into these features. Kroeber was a culture area theorist and tended to see the environment as a passive factor placing broad restrictions on cultural possibilities.

Themes

general and abandons cultural relativism

Concepts

control of energy is key factor in cultural evolution (measurable)

culture is an adaptation to nature

universal law of cultural evolution

Approaches

Technological -environmental

uses technological advances in utilization of energy sources as measurement of progress

Unilineal evolution was fundamentally sound. Morgan especially. simple to complex

Use of Marx

separated culture into three analytical levels - technological, sociological, and ideological.

all institutions of society contributed to the evolution of culture

unlike Marx, tech played a primary role - it affected a society's institutions and value systems.

overall evolutionary scheme for society with the roles of conflict and class within society, but lacks Marx's emphasis on conflict

He was influenced by the Marxian economic theory, Darwinian evolutionary theory, and by what he learned while attending school and participating in fieldwork.

He strongly supported the ideas of the 19th-century writers Herbert Spencer, Lewis H. Morgan and Edward Tylor (White, Leslie A). He adopted many of their ideas and gave them a fresh approach. He is known for developing the term "culturology". White coined this term because he believed that cultures should not be explained in terms of psychology, biology, or physiology, but rather in its own category. Culturology is defined as "the field of science which studies and interprets the distinct order of phenomena termed culture" (Anthropological Theories).

White presented many great ideas to the field of anthropology through essays and lectures, but what is most widely accepted as his greatest contribution is a series of essays called "The Science of Culture."

The many contradictions in the anthropology of Leslie White derive mainly from the fact that he embraced two contradictory models of culture: the conception that he received from his Boasian education, and the materialist-utilitarian framework that developed out of his concern with cultural evolutionism. White never reconciled the two, but in any instance of conflict he gave preference to the  Boasian-derived conception. This led him eventually to repudiate significant aspects of his utilitarian-adaptive framework.

Also a functionalist, like Malinowski, in that he believed the function of culture was to meet the survival needs of the human species; i.e., it is an adaptation or adaptive mechanism.

Identified four subsystems of culture: technological, sociological, ideological, sentimental or attitudinal

Influenced by Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx and Lewis Morgan. One of the few scholars who dared to build on Marx during the McCarthy era (although he doesn’t cite Marx)

Reading Notes:

Themes

materialist and neo-functionalist

energy use - dung

Concepts

culture should be defined as behavior that is determined by techno-environmental factors.

Approaches

Etic study.  Relies heavily on statistical data rather than ethnographic.

energy source analysis

Use of Marx

class conflict - disparity between landowners and the landless ( but doesn't drive change)

Unlike Marxist theory, however, cultural materialism privileges both productive (economic) and reproductive (demographic) forces in societies. As such, demographic, environmental, and technological changes are invoked to explain cultural variation. A technical, but important difference between Marxism and cultural materialism is that cultural materialism explains the structural features of a society in terms of production within the infrastructure only (Harris 1996: 277). Marxists, however, argue that production is a material condition located in the base  that acts upon (and is acted upon by) the infrastructure (Harris 1996: 277-178). Thus, cultural materialists see the infrastructure-structure relationship as being mostly in one direction, while Marxists see the relationship as reciprocal. Cultural materialism also differs from Marxism in its lack of class theory. Unlike Marxism, cultural materialism addresses relations of unequal power recognizing innovations or changes that benefit both upper and lower classes (Harris 1996: 278). Marxism treats all culture change as being beneficial only to the ruling class. Also, both cultural materialism and Marxism are evolutionary in proposing that culture change results from innovations selected by society because of beneficial increases to productive capabilities

Harris was the author of 17 books. Among these is the frequently used textbook The Rise of Anthropological Theory. The book, first published in 1968 and reissued in 2001, explains Harris' theory of cultural materialism, the view that social and cultural patterns arise out of necessary practices for survival. Harris maintained, for example, that the Hindu elevation of the cow to sacred status, which might seem strange to beef-eating Westerners, could be viewed as a practical matter in a society where the animal's milk and usefulness for agricultural cultivation is essential for human survival. Killing a cow for its meat would do more harm than good, so a religious taboo developed that has an underlying benefit to Indian society.

Cultural materialism is an ecological- evolutionary systems theory that attempts to account for the origin, maintenance and change of sociocultural systems. The foundation of Harris' theory of Cultural Materialism is that a society's mode of production (technology and work patterns, especially in regard to food) and mode of reproduction (population level and growth) in interaction with the natural environment has profound effects on sociocultural stability and change. Societies are systems, Harris asserts, and widespread social practices and beliefs must be compatible with the infrastructures of society (the modes of production and reproduction and their interaction with the environment).  The infrastructure represents the ways in which a society regulates both the type and amount of resources needed to sustain the society. The paradigm combines many schools of anthropological thought including social evolutionary theory, cultural ecology, and especially Marxist materialism (Barfield 1997: 232).

Dr. Marvin Harris is considered to be a generalist with an interest in the global processes that account for human origins and the evolution of human cultures.

Espoused a number of controversial theories about the evolution of human cultures, among them the idea that Aztecs practiced ritualistic human sacrifice and cannibalism because they needed animal protein.

Marvin Harris has been influenced by many classical theorists, but he is especially beholden to T. Robert Malthus and Karl Marx. Malthus for his work on the relationships between population and food- production, as well as the effects of population growth on both the environment and the rest of the social system.  Karl Marx for placing the forces of production at the foundation of the social system.

Reading Notes:

Influenced by Steward.

Rational economic explanation of scared cow in India.  An adaptive process of the ecological system of which it is a part. His rational explanation of this went against the view of non-westerners as having irrational practices, an ethnocentric perspective.  This would have made Boas proud.

Steward's concept of the cultural core.  Harris's materialism as pressures from within an ecological system.

Etic study.  Treatment of cows is adaptive.

Relies heavily on statistical data rather than ethnographic. But, Friedman points out that Harris never really deals with the cultural context in which the traditions he analyzes takes place, one of centuries of British colonial rule.

Disagrees with ethnoscience's emic perspective.

Themes

Subsistence activities are the basis of his analysis.

Religion has a profound effect upon the natural world.

treatment of cultural features similar to Steward's cultural core.

Concepts

materialist

subject to the same fundamental laws as other biological organisms. But there  is not reference to the evolution of culture in this article.

Approaches

Information Theory - expressing transmission of certain types of information in energy terms.

General Systems Theory - provided a mathematical description of a physical system. Normal state is equilibrium.

Rappaport contributed importantly to the application of new methodologies in the 1960s.They focus upon the ecosystem approach, systems functioning, and the flow of energy. These methods rely on the usage of measurements such as caloric expenditure and protein consumption. Careful attention was given to concepts derived from biological ecology, such as carrying capacity, limiting factors, homeostasis, and adaptation. This ecosystem approach remained popular among ecological anthropologists during the 1960s and the 1970s (Milton 1997). Ethnoecology was a prevalent approach throughout the same decades. The methodology of ethnoecology falls within cognitive anthropology.

Use of Marx

Roy A. Rappaport is responsible for bringing ecology and structural functionalism together. Rappaport defines and is included in a paradigm called neofunctionalism . He sees culture as a function of the ecosystem. The carrying capacity and energy expenditure are central themes in Rappaport’s studies, conducted in New Guinea. He completed the first systematic study of ritual, religion, and ecology, and this study is characterized as synchronic and functionalist. The scientific revolution, functionalism in anthropology, and new ecology are the three main influences upon Rappaport. Furthermore, like Steward and Harris, he is more interested in the infrastructural aspects of society, similar to Steward. Rappaport is the first scientist to successfully reconcile ecological sciences and cybernetics with functionalism in anthropology.

Combining adaptive and cognitive approaches to the study of mankind, he mounts a comprehensive analysis of religion's evolutionary significance, seeing it as coextensive with the invention of language and hence of culture as we know it.

The Treatment of the Environment and Ecology in The Nuer and Pigs for the Ancestors, differences and similarities. Pearce Paul Creasman
http://nautarch.tamu.edu/shiplab/01paul/links/ANT%20300%20Test,%20Envi%20and%20Ecology,%20Nuer.doc

Reading Notes:

Used general systems theory to support the role of religious practices as mechanisms that return the system to equilibrium. Quantification of data.

Makes very little reference to history. Treats humans as organisms within an ecosystem.

Carrying capacity.

Focused on relationship between the cognized (emic)  and the operational (etic) environments.  (Piaget?) Similar to the difference that Harris makes between the etic and the emic perspectives.

The idea of cycle is important. 

Relation between the ritual and the environment is influenced by cybernetics. (Environmental feedback to automatic devices.)

His work is functionalist in a sense rather than trying to explain origins.  But functionalism was perceived as to not pay enough attention to the relationship between people and environment. His report tries to respond to these weaknesses.

Unlike White, whose rules are evolutionary and intended to apply to all cultures, Rappaport's rules are specific, and say nothing about long-term direction of cultural change.

For Steward details of ceremonies are not important, for Rappaport the are a part of the critical interface between the culture and the environment.

The functions he identifies for religion fit well with those of Malinowski.

Reading Notes:

Views Harris as the other side of the argument. 
Reduction of many ideas to a few themes
Elements of a structuralist analysis into a Marxist approach
Vulgar materialism -- includes the ecological anth or Rappaport, and Harris's cultural materialism

Friedman claims that Harris misunderstood Marx's approach.

The new materialism and idealist materialism.  (Roseberry)

Structuralist thinking has interpreted Marx's work as in support of hypotheses about social formations as wholes. 

diachrony and synchrony

Must distinguish between the structure of an institution and its function in the material structure of social reproduction.

Technology is not a relation of production.  Mode of production is not technology. Relations of production are social relations which dominate the material process of production given technological conditions. They determine the use made of the environment, the division of labor, the appropriation and distribution of product, and the rate of surplus and rate of profit.  Social relations of productivity define the rationality of the economic system.

The elements of modes of production are not linked by cause and effect, but rather by a reciprocal causality. Intra-systemic = between classes.  Inter-systemic=between structures.

Marx and Cultural Materialsim

Commodity Fetishism: transformation which represents exchange value and the inversion of the whole process of formation of market value. Marx is concerned with the change of underlying relations into immediately perceived appearances, social representations.

Friedman refers to Harris's comments that Marx missed the tech to mode of production relation. Friedman believes that there is no confusion, the source of confusion was Harris's interpretation.

Structuralism

Levi-Strauss-essential contribution to future models of social reproduction. Stresses the man-environment features. The occurrence of particular structure depends on its functional compatibility with the constraints of the local techno-ecology. The ultimate determinant of restricted exchange is the social reciprocity demanded by the technical conditions of life. Kinship is the result of exchange.

Structural Marxist model

Vulgar Materialism

Views social forms as mere phenomena of technologies and environments, either by direct causation or by some economic rationality which make institutions the product of social optimization.

The new functionalism

rationality of institutions with respect to their environment
two faults 1. some metaphysical notion is implied 2. function becomes adaptive, a description of imaginary relations which are assumed not demonstrated.

Potlatch -maladaptive

Sacred Cow- Harris - treats element independently, not as part of a system. weak

Negative feedback - Rappaport - systems in which certain variables are kept within limits by the operation of other variables which are dependent functions of those limits. No environmental factor as it is way below carrying capacity.

The characteristics of the production function are crucial in determining the way in which a social system can develop as well as setting limits of that development. The production function determines the range within which the society can develop, but it does nothing to tell us anything about the nature of the social structure except to place certain constraints on the possible forms of organization.  Carrying capacity.

The properties of the social system are crucial in determining its development as well as its present behavior within the limits of technology.

Conclusion

Harris (cultural materialism) and Rappaport ( functional ecology) are embedded in empiricist-functional theology. Ecologists are aware of the limits imposed on social reproduction but they assume the system exists because the limiting variables maintain its operation. These theologies are empiricist in that they reduce relatively autonomous phenomena to a single phenomena. Nature and culture become a whole in which social institutions function primarily to maintain the stability of the larger environment.

Evolution then would not be a product of selection, but a moving equilibrium. There is evolution because societies come into contradiction with their environment, a situation that can only be conceived in the framework of relative autonomy.

Structural marxism begins with the assumption of the disjuncture between structures in order to establish true relationships that unite them as well as the internal laws of the separate structures which cause the contradictions of the larger whole.

Benjamin Lee is co director of the Center for Transcultural Studies and a professor of anthropology at Rice University. Edward LiPuma is a professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Social and Cultural Studies at the University of Miami and the author of Encompassing Others: The Magic of Modernity in Melanesia (2000). Currently they are working on a book manuscript titled "The Cultures of Circulation."

An expert in linguistic, philosophical and psychological anthropology, global cultural studies, and contemporary Chinese culture, Professor Lee received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1986. He has authored three books: The Development of Adaptive Intelligence (1974; with Carol Feldman), Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity (1997), Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (2004; with Edward Lipuma), and edited or co-edited other works.

Professor Lee has received numerous grants - including four from the Rockefeller Foundation, and one each from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation - to study topics relating to Chinese civil society, multiculturalism, and "urban images and imaginaries," among other issues. This Spring he also was awarded a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship, which he will use to complete a book on the cultural analysis of speculative capital, entitled From Primitives to Derivatives (co-written with Edward Lipuma).

The Guggenheim project is entitled “Cultures of Circulation,” and it is the core of the second volume of From Primitives to Derivatives. It traces the ideas of circulation and exchange from precapitalist to contemporary societies, with a special focus on problems such as performativity and objectification. Edward Lipuma and I argue that the new forms of finance capital and risk management are creating a “circulation-centered” capitalism that is at the cutting edge of contemporary globalization.

The speed, intensity, and extent of contemporary global transformations challenge many of the assumptions that have guided the analysis of culture over the last several decades. Whereas an earlier generation of scholarship saw meaning and interpretation as the key problems for social and cultural analysis, the category of culture now seems to be playing catch-up to the economic processes that go beyond it. Economics owes its present appeal partly to the sense that it, as a discipline, has grasped that it is dynamics of circulation that are driving globalization - - and thereby challenging traditional notions of language, culture, and nation.

Reading Notes:

Dynamics of circulation are driving globalization. Performativity is tied to the creation of meaning, whereas circulation and exchange have been seen as processes that transmit meaning. Rethinking circulation as a cultural phenomena includes a notion of performativity to develop a cultural account of economic processes.

Cultures of circulation are created and animated by the cultural forms that circulate through them. Circulation is more than the movement of people, ideas, and commodities.  It is a cultural process with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint which are created by the interactions of specific types of circulating forms and the communities built around them. Structured circulations are drawn on the ideas of  Malinowski, Mauss, and Marx. The interpretive communities determine the lines of interpretation, found institutions, and set boundaries based on principles of their own internal dynamics.

The performative construction of a collective agency is crucial for understanding any system of circulation and exchange. The speech-act basis of performativity needs to be extended to other discursive practices, including ritual, economic practices, and even reading. Capital's performativity surfaces in fetishized configurations, such as the collective agencies of the market, the public sphere, and agentive peoplehood.  (We the people)

Self-reflexive social agent is independent of a specific culture or individual.

According to Marx, there are two performative subjects of modern capitalism: a self-reflexive subject made up of the abstract value of labor, and a fetishized self-reflexive agency in the social imaginary of the market.

Conclusion:

Capitalism has reinvented itself from a production-centered system to one whose primary dynamic is circulation. Marx's finding were developed in the age of industrialization. They cannot be simply applied to the current condition. The labor that drives the system today is of a sort that has no value in a strictly production-based account. A circulation based capitalism harnesses technology for the extraction and manipulation of data that can then be converted into quantifiable measure of risk.  This is a tightening of the relation between technology and the "value-free" development of finance capital. 

The advent of a circulation-based capitalism, along with the social forms and technologies that complement it, signifies more than a shift in emphasis. It is a new stage in the history of capitalism that creates a unified cosmopolitan culture of unimpeded circulation. This is a process that has encompassed others and is the successor of colonialism and other forms of domination. A transformed set of social imaginaries that privileges a global totality as it produces new forms of risk that may destroy it.

Précis

The three dimensions of Marx’s thoughts that are related to present-day anthropological theory are historical materialism, analysis of capitalism, and political analysis.  

Marx and Anthropology (1997)

William Roseberry 

Précis

Marxism that uses a historical materialistic framework in which to understand the meaning of social structures in regards to labor and power, rather than those that used an evolutionary interpretation, is still valuable.

Notes: 

Marx’s attempts to change the world failed because of his interpretations of it. He tried to understand the modern while being embedded within it. He was a modernist that shared the assumptions that arise out of capitalism and interpreted it within a grand, overarching scheme. 

Foucalt disagreed with Marx’s totalitarian theory it that it denied knowledge of relations, struggles, and effect. 

Marx’s theory supported the closed, mechanical, and evolutionistic schemes of the 20^th century.  Though he did not see it as universal and warned against the mechanical application of his ideas.

Marx dealt creatively with a number of issues that remain active in anthropology today. It is his modes of approaching those issues that continue to influence current thought. The issues of relevance are materialism, the analysis of capital, and the historical and political surveys.  

Historical Materialism 

The starting point of materialism was social, conceived of as material.  The social as the material.  Individuals acted on nature and entered into relationships in providing for themselves. This provisioning was related to a whole mode of life. Marx emphasized the process of provisioning through labor.  

Labor was the human process upon which individuals acted and under which the social collective was organized. These processes were historically situated and differentiated. The emphasis on materiality lay in the specific conditions of creative labor. The conditions of labor were historically determined, and all philosophical problems were related to this material history, the conditions of labor.  

The treatment of labor was treated as a dimension of time. The development of modes of production and the social relations through which labor was mobilized were stated as determining the structure of the state, ideas, and beliefs.  

Sahlins criticized all philosophies that began by separating actions from their social and cultural context. He claimed a priority need be given to conceptual schemes rather than to actions. Looking at men in the flesh will require a reverse priority of examining what men conceive. Action is regulated by schema, which is shaped by action, which is within a social relation.

Roseberry suggests in the last paragraph that by emphasizing the processes of narration, of how men conceive of their social actions, by examining the texts produced by those structures, the real individual can disappear. 

(page 30) Marx -- Real history is made by individuals acting within a social and political relationship. As they do this, they have certain images of who they are and what they are doing.  These three aspects, the conceptual schema, the texts or narrations, and the real individuals are aspects of real history. 

To claim the unity of three aspects one needs to start at a point in the social collectivity in which the material, the tools and instruments of production, the social relations and institutions, and the relations of power, and the conditions in which they live constitute the subjects in a temporal dimension. Marx examined the epochal time frame in an evolutionary context in which the succession could be conceived of in the modes of production.  Historically, changes and progressions are not part of epochal transformations, but rather elements in the development of particular societies. The two are interrelated, as epochal transformations also are better understood from a historical perspective.  

The Analysis of Capitalism  

According to Marx, different epochs and modes of production could be characterized according to different forms of appropriation and property relations that made them possible.  

Capitalism depends on a situation in which the working people are stripped of ownership or control over the means of production. It involves the accumulation of the means of production by a few.  Three classes developed out of this change in property ownership, labor, capital, and landlords.  (wages, profit, and rent)  

Marx’s theory of value was based on labor rather than the circulation of commodities. Value was determined by the labor time inhered in the commodity. To Marx, a commodity was defined as human labor alienated through exchange.

Marx -- value based on labor as a commodity, capitalist production occurs within social spaces that include structural centers and peripheries.

Alienation of labor through exchange in terms of the differences between use value and exchange value. 

Lee – circulation and exchange transmit meaning,

Abstraction, evaluation, and constraint are created by the interaction of structured circulations and the communities that use them;

The communities interpret, found institutions, and set boundaries based on their own internal dynamics.

These social contracts are the foundation of the Western ideology that stems from the performative construction of a collective agency.  

Political Surveys 

Marx’s commentaries were an attempt to change the world.  He called for the revolution.  These texts do not reflect a universal scheme.  He hoped that Russia would skip the step of capitalism and serve as a bridge to socialism. He rejected evolutionist interpretations of history or capital development.  

His two questions in politics:

Did the two classes, capital and labor, share material interests? 

Did these common interests promote the formation of political organizations and a “feeling of community?” 

Marx interpreted political positions and programs in terms of material interests.

He linked these to two forms of property – capital and landed.

The peasantry’s lack of a feeling of community.  

1. social community is made up of the individuals and collectives that identify themselves as subjects
2. modes of association are material and formed in fields of power
3. individuals as subjects in relation to community, identity, and material interest

Conclusions 

The defeat of evolutionary theory was made possible by historical materialism.

Marx’s framework is both an evolutionary science of sociology and a historical materialist perspective. In its historical materialist framework, the inner secrets of the social structures are revealed in the division of labor and the structure of power.  

Marx’s theory in critical relationship to today’s social theory 

 Material structures shape and limit human action. Power was centered in particular structures or institutions.

1. In what ways can Marx and Foucault be valuable to current anthropological interpretations?

2. Can Marx's theory of labor be compared to Lee's concepts of circulation?

3. In what ways are "Marxism" different from Marx's theory?

Michael Taussig is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, The Nervous System, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative and The Magic of the State.
 

Reading Notes:

The Cauca peasantry exhibit an opposition of "use value" to "exchange value" that they have been subjected to through the introduction of a capitalist economy. The folk mysticism of the peasants of the Cauca Valley, Columbia, is contrasted with Marx's form of capitalistic mystification termed "commodity fetishism." These outcomes are a clash between a use value orientation and an exchange value orientation.

Marx observed that the transition to a capitalist mode of production is only completed when direct force and external economic conditions, although still used, are only employed exceptionally. (When common sense regards the new conditions as natural.)

The Cauca residents commonly demonstrate commodity fetishism. It is money as interest-bearing capital that lends itself most readily to this attribute. Fetishism denotes the attribution of life, autonomy, power, and even dominance to otherwise inanimate objects. (Biologic metaphors to money.) 

The Cauca do not think that their baptism of money is natural.  The money would not do that on its own. So, it is not a commodity fetishism since these people do not consider it a natural property.

Until the spread of capitalist institutions has permeated most aspects of social life, the lower classes continue to perceive the bonds that unite the people with their employers with the fruits of their labors as mutual personal relations, although distorted.

Conclusion

The "superstitions" of the Cauca Valley are revealed to be beliefs which systematically endorse the logic of the contradiction between use value and exchange value. These beliefs are identical to those of Marx.  These are precise formulations which entail a systematic critique of the encroachment of the capitalist mode of production.

But there are explanations that are not based on the cause-effect paradigm alone. The human understanding of things in nature proceeds through a reckoning of the meaning and intent established by these things, through their observable empirical characteristics. The meaning and power of things depends on the relational network of which the thing is a part. The conept of "cause" herein is not that of mechanical causation, but rather that of "pattern," association, and purpose. The specific meaning of any terms within a structure is dependent on the total set of relationships.

A peasant society can be involved in commodity production - based on exchange value - but it need not be their total culture. It does not become a replica of the larger, capitalist society.

Week Seven
Structuralism, Ethnoscience, and Poststructuralism

The structuralist paradigm in anthropology suggests that the structure of human thought processes is the same in all cultures, and that these mental processes exist in the form of binary oppositions . Some of these oppositions include hot-cold, male-female, culture-nature, and raw-cooked. Structuralists argue that binary oppositions are reflected in various cultural institutions . Anthropologists may discover underlying thought processes by examining such things as kinship, myth, and language. It is proposed, then, that a hidden reality exists beneath all cultural expressions. Structuralists aim to understand the underlying meaning involved in human thought as expressed in cultural acts.

Further, the theoretical approach offered by structuralism emphasizes that elements of culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to the entire system . This notion, that the whole is greater than the parts, appeals to the Gestalt school of psychology. Essentially, elements of culture are not explanatory in and of themselves, but rather form part of a meaningful system. As an analytical model, structuralism assumes the universality of human thought processes in efforts to explain the “deep structure” or underlying meaning existing in cultural phenomena. “…structuralism is a set of principles for studying the mental superstructure.”

Criticisms

• Static, ahistorical nature of theory (Seymour-Smith 1986)
• Theory does not account for human individuality
• Theory does not account for independent human acts
• Theory does not address dynamic aspects of culture

Claude Levi-Strauss  (1908 -

Claude Levi-Strauss was a popular French anthropologist most well-known for his development of structural anthropology. He was born on November 28, 1908 in Belgium as the son of an artist, and a member of an intellectual French Jewish family. Levi-Strauss studied at the University of Paris. From 1935-9 he was Professor at the University of Sao Paulo making several expeditions to central Brazil. Between 1942-1945 he was Professor at the New School for Social Research. In 1950 he became Director of Studies at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes. In 1959 Levi-Strauss assumed the Chair of Social Anthropology at the College de France. His books include The Raw and the Cooked, The Savage Mind, Structural Anthropology and Totemism.

Some reasons for his extreme popularity are identified in his rejection of history and humanism, in his refusal to see Western civilization as privileged and unique, in his emphasis on form over content and in his insistence that the savage mind is equal to the civilized mind. Levi-Strauss appeals to the deepest feelings among the alienated intellectuals of our society.

His three "mistresses" in life were said to be Marxism, psychoanalysis and geology, but anthropology gave the scholar the opportunity to come into contact with the lives of men of different cultures, rather than just Western cultures. His belief that the characteristics of man are everywhere identical was found after countless travels to Brazil and visits to North and South American Indian tribes. In fact, Levi-Strauss spent more than half his 59 years studying the behavior of the North and South American Indian tribes. The method he used to study the social organization of these tribes is called structuralism. "Structuralism," says Levi-Strauss, "is the search for unsuspected harmonies..."

Levi-Strauss derived structuralism from a school of linguistics whose focus was not on the meaning of the word, but the patterns that the words form. Levi-Strauss's contribution gave us a theory of how the human mind works. Man passes from a natural to a cultural state as he uses language, learns to cook, etc... Structuralism considers that in the passage from natural to cultural, man obeys laws he does not invent it's a mechanism of the human brain. Levi-Strauss views man not as a privileged inhabitant of the universe, but as a passing species which will leave only a few faint traces of its passage when it becomes extinct.

Levi Strauss is also known for his structural analysis of mythology. He was interested in explaining why myths from different cultures from around the globe seem so similar. He answers this question not by the content of myths, but by their structure. To make this argument Levi-Strauss insists that myth is a language because myth has to be told in order to exist. A myth is almost always set some time long ago, with a timeless story. He says myth is actually on a more complex level than language. Myth shares with language the following characteristics:

1. It's made of units that are put together according to certain rules.

2. These units form relationships with each other, based on opposites which provide the basis of the structure.

He concludes that the structural method of myth analysis brings order out of a mess. It provides a means to account for widespread variations on a basic myth structure, and is logical and scientific. This was important for the scientist in Levi-Strauss. He says that repetition, in myth as in oral literature, is necessary to reveal the structure of the myth. Because of this need for repetition, the myth is told in layer after layer. However, the layers aren't the same, and it's eventually shown that the myth "grows" as it is told, but the structure of the myth does not grow.

Taught L-Strauss and influenced his thought on the nature of reciprocity and structural relationships in culture

In response to the continued separation of anthropology into sub-fields, Ortner writes this article to suggest the development of a new symbol which she calls practice To demonstrate her point, she examines anthropological theory from the 1960s to the mid 1980s.  I highly recommend this article for students of anthropology since it concisely explains recent theoretical trends and their contribution to the field as a whole.
     Ortner claims that she began her review with the sixties because that is when she was introduced to anthropology.  Appropriately then, she starts with Geertz’s and Schneider’s work in symbolic anthropology.  With her summary of their work, it is easy to see their influence on her work.  Geertz suggested that culture was not something caught in an individual’s head, but rather it manifests itself in public symbols.  He emphasized the ways in which actors process their world which is also called the actor-centered approach.  On the other hand, Schneider looked for ‘core symbols’ or the internal logic of a system.  Levi-Strauss was a major influence on him, an affect obviously passed on to Ortner.
     According to Ortner, there were three major paradigms that covered anthropology at the end of the 1950s:  British structural-functionalist, psychocultural, and American evolutionist.  The students of these paradigms chose to strengthen particular characteristics, leading to a more refined, but broader group of sub-specialties.  Besides symbolic anthropology, Ortner considers trends in cultural ecology, structuralism, structural Marxism, political economy, and Postmodernism.  The new symbol she alluded to earlier is a culmination of these twenty years of theory.  Practice Theory which she describes in detail, has enjoyed a great deal of exposure since this article became such a classic in the anthropological canon.
     In short, Practice Theory examines the things people do and say on a daily basis.  By practicing or participating in these events people are strengthening the systems, but the systems also shape them.  She describes Practice Theory as ‘a blend of Geertzian thick description and a more politicized view of culture that focuses on the relationship between individuals and the overarching social and economic structures that organize their lives.’

Week Eight
The Body as Social and Semiotic Agent and Object
or as Bio-Determiner of Evolved Social Behaviors

Reading Notes:

Sociobiology seeks to explain human behavior in terms of Darwinian evolution.  Differential reproductive success shapes the evolution of social behavior of all organisms. Because humans are biological organisms, they are subject to the same evolutionary laws as other life forms. Behavior patterns that increase an organism's adaptiveness to its environment will be selected for and reproduce din future generations.

E.O. Wilson -- sociobiologist -- focused on the level of the gene. Social behavior is controlled by particular genes. Evolution occurs on the level of the gene because reproductive success amounted to increasing the frequency of certain genes in the future.

Jerome H. Barkow -- evolutionary psychologist -- interaction between genetics and culture, studying the possible effects of cultrual information on fitness.

Edward O. Wilson (1929-

A Harvard professor for four decades, biologist Edward O. Wilson has written 20 books, won two Pulitzer prizes, and discovered hundreds of new species. Considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, Dr. Wilson is often called, "the father of biodiversity." A childhood accident claimed the sight in his right eye. In adolescence, he lost part of his hearing. He struggled with math and a mild form of dyslexia. Any one of these imperfections might have blocked the road to a scientific career. But nothing could stop Ed Wilson's curiosity of the natural world. So, he decided to focus on the tiny creatures he could pick up and bring close to his remaining good eye. He decided to study insects, particularly ants. Today Dr. Wilson is arguably one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.

Born
Birmingham, Alabama, June 10, 1929

Education
Graduated Decatur Senior High School, Decatur, Alabama, 1946 B.S. (biol.), University of Alabama, 1949
M.S. (biol.), University of Alabama, 1950
Ph.D. (biol.), Harvard University, 1955

“Culture is created by the communal mind, and each mind in turn is the product of the genetically structured human brain.  Genes and culture are therefore inseverably linked…Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the neural pathways and regularities in cognitive development by which the mind assembles itself.  The mind grows from birth to death by absorbing parts of the existing culture available to it, with selections guided through epigenetic rules inherited by the individual brain.” (Wilson, 1998, p. 127)

Opposition

But the real opposition to Wilson's ideas, the attacks that hurt, came from within his own department, from the Marxist biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. The two camps crystallized two views of humanity: the first, that our psychology and social behavior have evolved along with the rest of us and that every facet of human behavior, even, say, homosexuality, is influenced by our genetic inheritance; and the second, that the human mind somehow escapes natural selection and answers to another, higher epistemology.

Reading Notes: The Morality of the Gene

Notes -  reduces Camus' statement of suicide to a biological issue. Human social activity is reducible to evolutionary genetics.

Altruism was a problem for sociobiology.  How can altruistic acts exist? The answer is call kin selection theory.

Behavior is no more that the visible expression of genetic information. Sociobiology focuses on natural selection and reproductive success as the mechanisms for determining behavior, such factors as population growth, gene flow, and demography are important to it.  Behavior must be analyzed in terms of these factors.

Wilson was a reductionist, in search of a few unifying principles that would explain all b behavior. He invoked parsimony - neat, concise, no loose ends. This harkens back to 19th century rationality and order.

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Précis - Wilson

Comparative psychology and ethology will be replaced by sociobiology.

Wilson attempts to codify sociobiology into a branch of evolutionary biology and particularly of modern population biology.

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The hypothalamus and limbic systems that control our emotions evolved by natural selection. This system automatically denies reduction by countering it with feelings of guilt and altruism. The organ does not live for itself, but is a temporary carrier of genes. Natural selection is the process by which certain genes gain representation in the following generations. The hypothalamus and the limbic system are programmed to perpetuate DNA.

Complex social behaviors are added to the genes techniques for replicating themselves, altruism becomes increasingly prevalent and eventually appears in exaggerated forms.  If the altruistic act by one organism increases the joint contribution of these genes to the next generation, the propensity to altruism will spread through the gene pool.

There is a biological basis for all social behavior.  Kinship plays an important role in group structure and probably served as a chief generative force of sociality in the first place.  The details of organization in this process include some measure of added fitness to individuals with cooperative tendencies, at least toward relatives.

Formulation of the theory of sociobiology holds its central precept to be the evolution of social behavior. The principal goal of a general theory is to predict features of social organization from a knowledge of these population parameters combined with information on the behavioral constraints imposed by the genetic constitution of the species. The most important feature is the sequential relation between evolutionary studies, ecology, population biology, and sociobiology.

 Jerome H. Barkow (1944- )

Professor Barkow is a sociocultural anthropologist, at Calhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with research and teaching interests in evolution and human nature and in the anthropologies of food and of health. The connecting theme of his publications is that our evolved psychology underlies human society and culture.  He has conducted field research in West Africa, Nova Scotia, and Indonesia, and is currently comparing the production of indigenous knowledge with the production of scientific knowledge.

Notes from book:

The key problem facing Sociobiologists is that they viewed culture as adaptation.  They suggested that humans adapt to their environments and increase their reproductive potential through behavior changes driven by evolutionary pressures.  These behaviors may ultimately be genetically encoded.  The problem with this approach is that people clearly exhibit some behaviors that do not lead to reproductive success and may inhibit it.

Sociobiologists conceive of culture in behavioral terms.  This is the opposite definition of culture than that used by the ethno scientists and cognitive anthropologists who analyze culture as a mental model separate from individual behavior.

The only meaningful criterion of fitness (adaptation) is reproductive success.

Sociobiologists presumed that selection occurred a the level of the individual. Culture was essentially the sum of these individual, genetically driven behaviors.  Barkow offers the possibility that selection occurs at the group or population level.  If so, then cultural traits become crucial.

Although culture is fundamentally adaptive, maladaptive characteristics tend to accumulate in culture over time and will reduce fitness.  There  must be a mechanism to counter the buildup of such traits.

Barkow suggests a principle of relationship between individual fitness and cultural fitness.  The mechanisms that allow  us to modify behavior to promote our own fitness can also result in modifications of culture that enhance its general fitness.  He sees human behavior, as the result of dialectical tension between the tendency of cultures to accumulate misinformation and individuals' genetically based drive to increase their reproductive fitness.

The continuity between ecological anthropology and sociobiology is that they both accord a powerful role to systems theory and information theory.

meme - the holy grail of sociobiology.  the unit of culture upon which evolution can act. transmitted through one individual imitating the behavior of another.

Argument is similar to Marx's analysis of religion.  The role of religion is to reinforce the position of the elites. For Marxists the goal is the maintenance of control over resources, for Sociobiologists, it is the reproductive advantage. Barkow suggests that domination is one of the functions of many religions.

Barkow provides insights which postmodernists would like.  History and political power involve conflict over control of the narrative.

Barkow proposes a sociobiological theory of cultural change in that cultural revision will occur in the general direction of increased fitness and will take place as art of the transmission of cultural information from one individual or group to another. This enables them to frame their discussions in terms of the meme, and secondly, by phrasing the issue as one of transmissions, information theory can be applied to the passing of cult7ural information.

Criticism - politically conservative. Barkow suggests that imitation of the successful increases personal fitness.  But, on a cultural level, imitation of the successful might be maladaptive.

Close to Marxist thought - a desire for egalitarianism is built into human genetics due to the evolutionary development of hunter-gatherer society.  Marxists claim that oppression and resistance to it are built into social organization.  They claim that rebellion against oppression is part of the historical process of the dialectic.

Reading Notes:

Précis

Cultural transmission by individuals may produce traits which are adaptive (enhancing fitness) or maladaptive (fitness reducing). A complimentary strategy to adaptationist interpretations would be to focus on the psychological-level mechanism.

Pierre Bourdieu.  Generative Schemes

Resources

http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/cultural_studies/bourdieu.html

http://www.arasite.org/bdieuprc.htm

http://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/ant/700/bourdieu.htm

http://www.isj1text.ble.org.uk/pubs/isj87/wolfreys.htm

http://era.anthropology.ac.uk/Acciaioli/acciaioli.pdf

http://www.um.edu.mt/pub/tribute_to_bourdieu.html

Bourdieu defines practice in terms of a dialectical relationship (the "dialectic of objectification and incorporation") between a structured environment and the structured dispositions engendered in people which lead them to reproduce the environment even in a transformed form. (Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 78) To get a better sense of Bourdieu's position, see below.

from "practice and discourse about practice" in outline of a theory of practice (1977):

Reaction against legalist formalism in its overt or masked form must not lead us to make the habitus [habitus, for Bourdieu, is the set of habitual dispositions through which people "give shape and form to social conventions"] the exclusive principle of all practice.  In reality, even in social formations where, as in Kabylia, the making explicit and objectifying of the generative schemes in a grammar of practices, a written code of conduct, is minimal, it is nonetheless possible to observe the first signs of differentiation of the domains of practice according to the degree of codification of the principles governing them.  Between the areas that are apparently 'freest' because given over in reality to the regulated improvisations of the habitus (such as the distribution of activities and objects within the internal space of the house) and the areas most strictly regulated by customary norms and upheld by social sanctions (such as the great agrarian rites), there lies the whole field of practices subjected to traditional precepts, customary recommendations, ritual prescriptions, functioning as a regulatory device which orients practice without producing it.  The absence of genuine law-- the product of the work of a body of specialists expressly mandated to produce a coherent corpus of juridicial norms and ensure respect for its application, and furnished to this end with a coercive power-- must not lead us to forget that any socially recognized formulation contains within it an intrinsic power to reinforce dispositions symbolically. (20)
 

The transformation of dual structures: out of Bourdieu's Habitus.
Given this definition of structure, how does it let us identify how structures change? That is, what accounts for the transformation of structure? Sewell thinks this comes out of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus of the cultural rules that guide people’s behavior, and the way that behavior is enacted.

Habitus is Bourdieu's word to describe how actors behave - it's the set of schemas that they use:

Habitus is:

"an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted, the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions consistent with those conditions and no others." (quoted in Sewell, p.15)

Précis

Generative schemes are partially integrated, independent, and interconnected but are mobilized one at a time, dependent upon the opposition of the two classes and the situation in which it is being applied.

Professor of Anthropology, New York University
Ph.D. Cornell University 1971.

Research interests include anthropology of science and medicine, gender, money and other measures of value, the ethnography of work, China, U.S.

Martin began her career with field work in China and Taiwan, and has published extensively on Chinese ritual and politics. However it was her 1987 book The Woman in the Body: a Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon Press), an innovative analysis of American understandings of reproduction, that brought her international recognition. Subsequent research has been into local knowledge about immune systems (published in her 1994 book “Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of Aids,” Beacon Press) and, most recently, about mental illness.

Reading Notes:

Abstract:

Describes the imagery currently used in popular and scientific descriptions of the immune system: the body as nation-state at war over its external borders, containing internal surveillance systems to monitor foreign intruders. It contains suppressed hierarchies that draw on cultural concepts of race and gender.

Images of Immunology

Images taken from major mass media articles and from her one year field work in a university's immunology department. They depict the body as a "regulatory-communications network," and "an engineered communications system, ordered by a fluid and dispersed command-control-intelligence network." The boundary between the body (self) and the external world (nonself) is rigid and absolute.

The metaphor of warfare. The conception of the nonself world is as foreign and hostile, a scene of total war between ruthless invaders and determined defenders. A site of injury is transformed into a battle field. The array of forces available to the body is extensive. 

The metaphor of the body as police state. The body is programmed to distinguish between bona fide residents and illegal aliens.  What identifies a resident is likened to speaking a national language.  The illegal aliens are executed in a death cell when they are detected.

These metaphors run into trouble when the defensive forces seem inescapably to operate by consuming their victims.  Cannibalism.

The Body and the Nation

The images of the immune system relate in complex ways to social forms pervasive in our time.

 The stress is on the important role of communication.  Intruding cells are compared to people of different national origin.  The are also a lack of mediating structures between the individual and the state. Individual cells are launched into the body to protect its homogeneous interior against attach.  These cells are individuals that roam the fluidity of the blood and lymph systems. The structure which produce and educate these cells are the thymus and bone marrow.  They are crucial for maintaining the common language. The immune system has developed to function as a kind of biologic democracy, wherein the individual members achieve their ends though and information network.

Nationalistic ideologies carry within them a kind of suppressed hierarchy.  Nationalism involves the emergence of individualism and egalitarianism. The world of the immune system also contains a kind of suppressed hierarchy.

There is clearly a hierarchical division of labor. The phagocytes are associated with females, and the T cells are associated with males. The symbolic association of the the female is with lower functions, and especially with a lack of mental functions.  The phagocyte cells are the "housekeepers," cleaning up the dirt and the debris. The phagocytes engulf something foreign, a process called "invagination." The "vaginal" pouch is also a "death cell" which executes and then eats its prey. The T cells kill by penetrating or injecting.  They are given a heroic imagery.

What does the Imagery do?

These types of popular depictions grew in the 1980's.  The forms they reflect are already entrenched in our social vocabulary. They make violent destruction seem ordinary and part of the necessity of daily life.  The blunt reality is that they are destructive forces.  Shifting the imagery from warfare to eating may divert us from seeing that cellular events are constructed as total war.

The ideological work of hierarchal relations is also replicated in these analogies.  The male penetrating killer cells and the female devouring and cleaning cells, male heroes and females in symbiotic service. In Western culture warfare depends on females for whose sake the male heroes can die.  There is not a complete parallel in the cellular world, because the feminized cell are on the battlefield killing invaders along with the masculine cells. 

What do People do with the Imagery?

Dr. Martin tried to use these images as a way of seeing the role of these constructions in the definition of personal identity and the creation of cultural meaning.  The imagery of warfare dominated the department discussion at the university.  A professor whom she made aware of the discourse tried not to use it in his first semester conceptual course.  But in his second semester applied course the said he could not stop using it as it acted as a shorthand that gave the students an easier way to understand the complexities of immunology. 

A friend of hers that had AIDS was not opposed to this language either.  He did not use the warfare metaphor, but did use the imagery of a clean house.  The effect of radiation on his body would lean out the HIV virus, and the brother's immune system cells, injected by bone marrow transplant, would then "set up housekeeping."

Alternative Images of the Body

Russian biologists -- rejected Darwin's struggle for existence.  They identified the idea of an individualized struggle as a product of English culture and society. They developed an alternative theory of mutual aid favored by natural selection.

Ludwig Heck -- Instead of the organism as a self-contained independent unit with fixed boundaries, he proposed a "harmonious life unit" which could range from the cell, to the symbiosis between alga and fungus in a lichen. Change could be spontaneous (mutation), cyclic (aging) or simply change within the reciprocally acting parts of the unit. 

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores -- work on cognition provides a way of describing pathology without military imagery.  A breakdown would not be negative, but a situation n which some aspect of the network of tools that we are engaged in using is brought forth to visibility. There would be occasions when interaction becomes nonobvious, potentially creative situations that call forth clarification of the the terms of the interaction. The macrophage might be said to catabolize and utilize the invading foreign organism in its own metabolic processes.  The invader would be seen as food for the macrophage. We could see this process as a food chain, linked by mutual dependencies, instead of a life and death struggle. 

None of these examples would be sufficient to encourage different forms of organization in our society than those that now exist.  But they can serve to add substance to the question: are there powerful links between the particular metaphors chosen to describe the body scientifically and features of our contemporary society that are related to gender, class, and race?

As long as there is a possibility that scientific descriptions give an aura of the "natural" to a particular social vision, there is a place for comparative ethnography to set this vision in a context of other ways bodies might be imagined and societies might be organized.

Précis -- Emily Martin

Comparative ethnography can be used to change the context of "naturalness" in which bodies are imagined and societies might be organized.

Do the images of the immune system as warlike and nationalistic make analogous social practices come to seem more natural, fundamentally rooted in reality, and unchangeable?

Is Martin's view of medical imagery similar or different from that of Sheper-Hughes and Lock? What do they each propose as alternatives?

Can Martin's "naturalness" of body imagery be compared to Bourdieu's generative schemes?

Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock.  The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology

As a critical medical anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes researched and written extensively on Ireland, Brazil and South Africa. In particular, she is concerned with the violence of everyday life from an existentialist, feminist, and politically engaged perspective.

Her first anthropological study in County Kerry, rural Ireland (to which she returned in 1999) concerned the social and cultural dimensions of mental illness among bachelor farmers in rural Ireland. Later in Boston she undertook a study of the deinstitutionalization of those with severe mental ill-health. Between 1982-1990 Scheper-Hughes conducted extensive field research in the shantytowns of Northeast Brazil on infant mortality, the 'madness of hunger,' the medicalization of social and political trauma, and the experience of motherhood, deprivation, and moral thinking and practice. She has also researched and published on AIDS, the social body, and sexual citizenship in Cuba and Brazil, and on the role of violence, 'truth" and reconciliation' during the transition to democracy in South Africa.

Most recently, she has written on subjects ranging from the cultural politics of international adoption, Munchausen-by-Proxy as a weapon the weak, to the execution of Brazilian street children, the global traffic in human organs and the use of living unrelated donors in human transplant surgery as a form of sacrificial violence. Scheper-Hughes's examination of structural, "everyday", and political violence has encouraged her to develop a unique style of critical theory and reflexive ethnography, which has been broadly applied to medicine, psychiatry, and to the practice of anthropology. In 1999 she founded, with Prof. Lawrence Cohen, Organs Watch, a program created to investigate human rights violations in the harvesting, sale, and distribution of human organs and tissues.

Much of Margaret Lock's research has been conducted in Japan; her particular interest is the relationship among culture, technoscience, and health and illness. She has done research into the revival of the traditional medical system in Japan, and into life cycle transitions, including adolescence, the elderly, and female mid life. Prof. Lock recently published a book entitled Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death, a comparative study on the concept of brain death in Japan and North America that examines how culture and politics have influenced its recognition and had a major impact on the organ transplant enterprise (University of California Press, 2001). She is currently undertaking a study on the implications of the new genetics for population health. In particular, she is focusing on the way in which the new genetics is transforming medical knowledge about Alzheimer's disease, the transfer of this new knowledge to the public domain, and its impact on public attitudes and responses to this disease.

Reading Notes:

Abstract

Western assumption about the mind and body, the individual and society affect both theoretical viewpoints and research paradigms. These same conceptions also influence ways in which health care is planned and delivered. Sherper-Hughes and Lock advocate the deconstruction of these concepts by examining three perspectives from which the body may be viewed: the individual body-self, the social body, and the body politic. They propose the study of emotions as an area of inquiry that holds promise for providing a new approach to the subject.

The Three Bodies

Individual Body -- The embodied self as existing apart from other individual bodies.  Phenomenology

The Social Body -- the representational uses of the body as a natural symbol with which to think about nature, society, and culture. Structuralism and symbolism.

The Body Politic -- The regulation, surveillance, and control of bodies (individual and collective) in reproduction and sexuality, work and in leisure, in sickness and other forms of deviance and human difference. The stability of the body politic rests on its ability to regulate populations and the discipline individual bodies. (Foucault) This type of body is the most dynamic in suggesting why and how certain kinds of bodies are socially produced. Poststructuralism.

The Individual Body

How Real is Real? The Cartesian Legacy

The materialist epistemology of Western thinking views clinical medicine as a fundamental opposition between the real and unreal, spirit and matter, mind and body.  This was a result of Descartes "I think, therefore I am." A dichotomy called Cartesian dualism. It separated the mind from the body and caused the mind to recede into the background of clinical theory for 300 years. It led to the tendency of medicine to categorize and treat human afflictions as if they were either organic or psychological in origin.

Durkheim -- The body was a storehouse of emotions that were raw material out of which mechanical solidarity was forged in the interests of the collective.

Mauss -- The dominion of the conscious over emotion and unconsciousness.  Chaotic impulses of the body were disciplined and restrained by social institutions.

Freud -- theory of dynamic psychology, the individual is at war with himself.

Marx -- the natural world existed as an external, objectified reality that was transformed by human labor.

Harris -- cultural materialists tended to view social institutions as adaptive responses to certain fixed, biological foundations. 

Representation of Holism in Non-Western Epistemologies

Chinese ying/yang -- balanced, dynamic equilibrium. The health of individuals depends on a balance in the natural world, while the health of each organ depends on its relationship to all other organs. Emphasis is on balance and resonance.

Islamic cosmology -- depicts humans as having dominance over nature, tempered by a sacred world view that stresses the complementarities of all phenomena.  Humans are responsible to one power.  The achievement of unity is through the complementarities of spirit and body, the world and the hereafter, substance and meaning, natural and supernatural.

Buddhism -- the natural world is a product of the mind. Through meditation individuals minds can merge with the universal mind.  A perception of the unity of mind and body, self and other, mind and nature, being an nothingness.

Person, Self, and Individual

The individual/society opposition, while fundamental to Western epistemology, is also unique to it. The Western conception of the person is as a bounded, unique, integrated, motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action.

All humans are endowed with a self-consciousness of mind and body.  The body-self as "naturally" place in the body.  Mauss phrased it, Lapersonne morale, is the uniquely Western notion of the individual as a quasi-sacred, legal, moral, and psychological entity, whose rights are only limited by the rights of other autonomous individuals.

The process of individuation, as a necessary stage in the human maturation process is a culture-bound notion.

In Japan, the family is considered the most "natural," fundamental unit of society, not the individual. Neither Shintoism nor Buddhism encourages the development of a highly individuated self.

In sociocentric conceptions of the self, societies view sickness as attributed to malevolent social relations.  Levi-Strauss says the patient is almost incidental to the ritual. 

There are societies that view the individual as comprised of multiplicity of selves.  Reflect in relationships to other people.  The person consists of many selves. In many non-Western cultures, individuals can experience multiple selves through the normative practice of spirit possession and other altered states of consciousness. 

Body Imagery

Body image refers tot he collective and idiosyncratic representation an individual entertains about the body in its relationship t5o the environment, including internal and external perceptions, memories, affects, cognitions, and actions.

Profound distortions in body imager are rare, neurotic anxieties about the body, its orifices, boundaries, and fluids are quite common.

Specific organs, body fluids, and functions may also have special significance to a group of people.  The Liver is important to the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilians. The condition and health of the bowels is important to the English and Germans. The backbone is significant to Americans.

Blood, is a nearly universal symbol of human life, the primary diagnostic sign of health or illness.

Ethnoanatomical perceptions offer a rich source of data on the social and cultural meanings of being human on on the various threats to health, well-being, and social integration that humans are believed to experience.

The Social Body

The Body as Symbol

The human organism and its natural products may be used as a cognitive map to represent other natural, supernatural, social, and even spatial relations.  Cultural constructions of and about the body are useful in sustaining particular views of society and social relations.

Symbolic anthropologists take the experiences of the body as representation of society.

Ethnobiological theories or reproduction usually reflect the particular character of their associated kinship system.

Medical anthropology is the key toward the development of a new epistemology of the mindful body and of the emotional, social, and political sources of illness and healing.

Interaction among the mind/body and the individual, social, and body politic in the production and expression of health and illness.  Sickness is a form of communication. 

The body should be seen as the most immediate, the proximate terrain where social truths and social contradictions are played out, as well as a locus of personal and social resistance, creativity, and struggle.
 

Précis

Emotions, in relation to the individual body, the social body, and the body politic, are a means of communicating and shaping cultural meaning and can be useful in medical applications.