Transcript The study of `other`

Introduction to Social
Anthropology B
Lecture 1
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Lecture 1
• Why study Anthropology?
• How did the subject develop?
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What is Social Anthropology?
• The study of ‘other’ cultures
• The study of the unity and diversity of
humankind
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Anthropology as the antidote
to Ethnocentrism
• Seeing the world from the perspective
of your own culture
• Culture is fundamental to the
perception and understanding of the
world
4
The historical origins of the
subject
• The expansion of Europe from the
C15th
• Enlightenment
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Characterisation of the
‘primitive other’
• Primitive man v noble savage
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Noble savage
In a state of nature to people live in a
harmonious equalitarian utopia
Jean Jacques Rousseau
born free but everywhere in chains
Karl Marx
Society
• harmony/ absence of conflict or
violence
• co-operation and sharing/equalitarian
• harmony with nature
Individual
• child-like
• innocence
• naturally inquisitive
• virtuous
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Primitive man - red in tooth and
claw
life was... nasty brutish and short ... war of all against all
Thomas Hobbes
Society
•
violent
•
conflictual/despotic
•
victim of nature and each other
Individual
•
child-like
•
no self-control
•
ignorant / irrational
•
evil
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Maori Queen as Noble Savage
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Shaka, Zulu founding warrior as
‘noble savage’
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Primitive man
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Imperialism
• The march of progress and the
‘white man’s burden’.
• Colonial origins of the discipline.
• Ideology and control
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Progress
• Lewis Henry Morgan’s
• “...demonstration that progress is a fundamental
law of human society, and one which has always
prevailed - progress in thought and knowledge,
in industry, in morality, in social organization, in
institutions, and in all things tending to, or
advancing civilization and general well-being.”
•
McIlvaine 1867 “Malthusianism” The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 39:10338
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Evans Pritchard and the Azande
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Evolutionary perspectives.
• Lamark, Darwin, Spencer, Morgan, Marx
• Cultural evolution:
‘earlier’ :: ‘different’
• The evolutionary legacy in
anthropology
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The rise of ethnography and
functionalist perspectives
• Pitt-Rivers: Genealogical method
• Spencer and Gillan: Torres Straits
expedition
• Franz Boaz: Inuit, Cultural relativism
• Bronislaw Malinowksi: Trobriand
Islands, Functionalism
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Spencer and Gillan and the Torres
Straits Expedition
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Franz Boas
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Malinowski in the Trobriands
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Structural Analysis of Culture
• Levi-Strauss
• The equivalence
of languages and
cultures
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The study of non-tribal
people.
Natives v ‘Us’ ::
Peasants v Elites
Chicago School,
• Redfield –
Tepotzlan.
• Zaneiki – Polish
Peasant.
• Arensberg –
Ireland.
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Migrants and minorities
• Minorities v. Majorities
• Study of ethnicity and nationalism.
• Anthropology as study of marginal
peoples in state societies.
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Post-modernism and postcolonialism
• Radical cultural
relativism; whose
‘voice’ is to be
heard
• Said, Orientalism
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The oriental other
The other feature of Oriental-European relations was that Europe
was always in a position of strength, not to say domination. ...
...The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike,
“different”; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature,
“normal”.
Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a
sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world. ... the
Oriental is depicted as something one judges (as in a court of
law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum),
something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), something
one illustrates (as in a zoological manual). The point is that in
each of these cases the Oriental is contained and represented
by dominating frameworks.
Edward Said 1978 Orientalism p40
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Last Alaska language speaker dies
BBC. Last Updated: Thursday, 24 January 2008, 10:56 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7206411.stm
A woman believed to be the last native speaker of the
Eyak language in the north-western US state of Alaska
has died at the age of 89.
Marie Smith Jones was a champion of indigenous rights and
conservation. She died at her home in Anchorage.
She helped the University of Alaska compile an Eyak dictionary,
so that future generations would have the chance to
resurrect it.
Nearly 20 other native Alaskan languages are at risk of
disappearing.
Ms Jones is described by her family as a tiny chain smoking
woman who was fiercely independent, says the BBC's
Peter Bowes in Los Angeles. "To the best of our knowledge,
she was the last full-blooded Eyak alive," her daughter
Bernice Galloway told the Associated Press news agency.
"She was a woman who faced incredible adversity in her life
and overcame it. She was about as tenacious as you can
get." She believed passionately in preserving the Eyak
language and wanted a written record of it to be kept so for
future generations.
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