Miscellaneous
I will post any miscellaneous course materials here, including quiz answer keys and computerized overheads from class.
Important Handouts
Quiz Answer Keys
Electronic Overheads
What is a useful defintion of culture?
Definition #1: "The processes that make the humanly-constructed seem natural."
Definition #2: "Models of and for reality" (C. Geertz, 1973, Intepretation of Cultures)
Models of reality: explanatory apparatus for mapping the empirical world
Models for reality: instructions, plans, rules, recipes governing behavior (but not behavior itself)
2/3
The Ethnographer's Magic
Bronislaw Malinowski, The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)
Objective: To "evoke a true picture of tribal life based on systematic study" and to "grasp the nativešs point of view, his relation to life, his vision of his world."
Main lines of inquiry:
ECOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Study of the ways in which a particular population purposefully or unintentionally shapes its natural environment (How do humans act as ecological agents?)
-- AND --
the ways in which its relations with the natural environment shape its social, economic, and political life (What role does ecology play in human cultural and social organization?)
Environmental Determinism
Natural conditions determine the cultural possibilities and shape of a group of people.
Nature is an independent variable, culture is a dependent variable
Cultural differences explained as consequence of ecological differences
Examples: Herodotus, Julius Caeser, Montesquieu, Macrobiotic movement
Cultural Materialism (Marvin Harris): Material world exhibits deterministic influence over culture. Customs develop as a direct way of regulating resources, acquiring protein, controlling populations, and adapting to local ecological conditions. Examples: Aztec human sacrifice Sacred cow of India
Arguments Against Environmental Determinism
1) Nature sets the groundwork of possibilities "Possibilism"
2) People reshape physical environments to meet their needs Acequia System Forest Islands in Guinea
3) No single approach to survival Pastoralists Hunter-gatherers
4) Some adaptations simply arenšt adaptive "Kuru Sorcery"
5) No culture exists in isolation Colonialism, globalization, etc.
2/15
Economic Anthropology Concerned with....
How people are recruited and rewarded for work
How people engage in exchanges of things, in both monetary and non-monetary systems
How resources are distributed and goods allocated
How surpluses are produced, who secures the surplus and how the surplus is measured in non-monetary contexts
How consumption patterns reflect social distinctions
Major approaches in Economic Anthropology
Neoclassical/Formalism
Substantivism
Political Economy
Cultural Economics