Transcript GG lecture 2 web

Grounding the Global:
Anthropological Perspectives
Professor: Ieva Jusionyte
[email protected]
Office Hrs: Weds 10:30-11:30 &
Thurs 2-3pm in Tozzer 216
TF: Shuang Lu
[email protected]
Office Hrs: Tues.2-4pm, Tozzer315
9/14 Lecture outline
Ethnographic fieldwork: Sources of knowledge,
subjectivity, ethics, advocacy
Key concepts:
•Empirical anthropology (Bronislaw Malinowski)
•Interpretive anthropology (Clifford Geertz, Paul Rabinow)
•Fieldwork & participant observation
•Ethnographic refusal (Audra Simpson)
Ethnographic accounts before anthropology
Herodotus
Tacitus
Marco Polo
Bartolomé
de las Casas
“Armchair” anthropology:
Edward Tylor, James Frazer et al
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881)
Franz Boas (1858-1942)
Colonial “verandah”
anthropology
Evans-Pritchard
with the Azande,
c. 1930
Bronislaw Malinowski, 1884-1942
Kula ring
British empirical anthropology
empirical (from Merriam Webster’s dictionary)
1 : originating in or based on observation or experience
<empirical data>
2 : relying on experience or observation alone often
without due regard for system and theory [or subjective
interpretations] <an empirical basis for the theory>
3 : capable of being verified or disproved by observation
or experiment <empirical laws>
Malinowski and most other anthropologists of his time
saw anthropology as a largely empirical science.
Malinowski, “Introduction…”
Final goal of fieldwork:
“This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to
life, to realise his vision of his world.
We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most
intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him” (25).
Malinowski: key data of ethnographic fieldwork
1) broad cultural principles; “skeleton”, “anatomy of a
culture” (official rules and principles…)
2) “imponderabilia of actual life” and of typical, routine
behavior; “the hang of tribal life”
3) a collection of (verbatim) statements
Study each through broadest range of manifestations,
meticulous detail…
(from “Introduction” to Argonauts of the Western Pacific)
Interpretive Anthropology
1) interpretive anthropology
(even empirical observation is always to an important extent
subjective, especially when those being studied and doing the
studying are human beings)
2) culture itself as interpretation
3) fieldwork/anthropology as “double interpretation”
Clifford Geertz (1926-2006)
Geertz, “Impact of the Concept of Culture to the Concept of Man”
• "We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or
finish ourselves through culture - and not through culture in general
but through highly particular forms of it: Dobuan and Javanese, Hopi
and Italian, upper-class and lower-class, academic and
commercial." (49)
• "To be human here is thus not to be Everyman; it is to be a
particular kind of man." (53)
•
“It may be in the cultural particularities of people . . . that some of
the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human
are to be found; and the main contribution of the science of
anthropology to the construction—or reconstruction—of a concept
of man may then lie in showing us how to find [these cultural
particularities].”
“Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, “and
the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of
law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”
Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973
Paul Rabinow
Rabinow, “Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco” (1977)
“I argue that all cultural activity is experiential, that
fieldwork is a distinctive type of cultural activity, and
that it is this activity which defines the discipline. But
what should therefore be the very strength of
anthropology—its experiential, reflective, and critical
activity—has been eliminated as a valid area of
inquiry by an attachment to a positivistic view of
science, which I find radically inappropriate in a field
which claims to study humanity.” (5)
Engaged, applied, activist, public anthropology
Margaret Mead (1901-1978) – pioneer of public anthropology
https://vimeo.com/81572094
Next class 
MODULE I
Political Anthropology: Migration and the U.S.-Mexico Border
9/21Where and how do anthropologists study the state?
Required readings:
•Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 2001. "The Anthropology of the State in the Age of
Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind." Current Anthropology
42(1): 125–138.
•Jason De León, 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the
Migrant Trail. Oakland: University of California Press. (Part I)