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Course Description
"...descriptions vary with the conceptual or theoretical framework within which they are couched. To evaluate a description properly one must know something about the theoretical framework that brought it into being" (Kaplan and Manners, Culture Theory, 1972, p. 22).
Most anthropologists especially American anthropologists would agree that the study of "culture" is at the heart of the discipline. But vigorous debates over its definition, effective methods to study it, even the validity or utility of the whole exercise, characterize the discipline's history. This course examines some major theoretical paradigms and debates in the anthropological study of culture, especially as they play out in ethnographic writing where, especially in recent decades, commitment to the culture concept and fieldwork as a means to know it have come under enormous critical scrutiny.
It seems that most college courses titled "Anthropological Theory" take a linear historical approach, beginning with the intellectual and political ferment in the 18th and 19th centuries from which the social sciences emerged. Moving along the way toward the present, they stop off at the major philosophical highlights, "isms," and thinkers. But contemporary anthropological theories and debates cannot be intelligently understood as 1) progressive, moving along a single line from past to present; and 2) separately from the ethnographies descriptions of people's lives that are their vehicles, even their reason for being. For these reasons, our approach here is organized around reading recent or current ethnographies, and we will "mine" our way backwards and sideways (genealogically? ethnographically? anthropologically?) where appropriate in order to understand the kinds of questions, traditions, and debates about culture with which these authors are engaged. This approach, which is more selective than comprehensive in its coverage of debates and concepts, is primarily designed to expose you to compelling ethnographic descriptions and analyses and the theoretical questions and frameworks embedded in them in order to help you understand some of the ways American anthropologists have raised, treated, and re-evaluated certain enduring questions about culture and human experience.
We will examine the following major problems: where does "culture" fit into Euro-American intellectual history and socio-political thought? How do different theoretical and methodological positions on culture produce different representations of peoples' lives? How should we evaluate the adequacy of those representations? To what extent do individuals share in a culture? How does gender help shape one's experience of a culture? What is the relationship between power and culture? Are cultures and cultural processes autonomous and separate from each other? If not, then how might we think about their interconnections, overlappings, and hybridities? Who controls culture and its material and intellectual manifestations?
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