What distinguishes anthropology in the the 20th century is its early rejection of race as an explanation for human diversity. Please read and view. If you have any problems with the highlighted files, you may also click directly on them in the Files tab on the menu.
Post about 500 words in a self-reflection paper based on the texts below. Please feel free to bounce these texts off of your own experience. As you read, select some key passages that strike you and use them to focus your thoughts. Integrate the selections in your reflection. Include what you learned from the articles and what athropology means to you.
Microsoft Word - Basic+Concepts+of+Anthropology.docx Basic Concepts of Anthropology Culture: learned behavior and attitudes which are transmitted from generation to generation. We can contrast it with instinct or biology, although our biology is selected for flexible, cultural behavior. It is this cultural ability to learn co- operatively which originally gave Homo Sapiens its adaptive edge over competing species. Culture in a complex society can refer to any recognizable grouping of behavior and cognition which persists over time. Examples: American culture, baseball culture, fishing culture, military culture, women's culture, bureaucratic culture. Note: This definition of culture is much broader than that idea of culture which is popularly used to describe works of high art such as painting, music or theater. Ethnocentrism: the belief, usually unconscious, that one's culture is superior to that of others. Such a belief denies the full humanity of those not belonging to one's group. This attitude originates in the necessary priority which any human group must place upon its own survival. However, while ethnocentrism may be advantageous to the survival of the immediate group it leads to conflict and warfare with other groups. In traditional, kinship-based societies ethnocentrism is ameliorated through exchange of marriage partners and gifts. Institutionalized Ethnocentrism: Ethnocentrism which is systematically utilized by social organizations in order to dominate or, in the most extreme cases, to eliminate internal or external enemies. The most dangerous forms of ethnocentrism fall into this category. Most ethnocentric attitudes are not simply mistakes of judgement made by isolated individuals; they are reinforced by powerful groups which benefit from such attitudes. In the 20th and 21st centuries institutionalized ethnocentrism resulted in many instances of genocide (the elimination of cultural groups through violence). Think here of the Holocaust, the Turkish slaughter of Armenians, or the Hutu killings of Tutsis. On a global scale, the nuclear arms race has been justified by institutionalized ethnocentrism. Current examples include the U.S. belief in Manifest Destiny and the Israeli belief in Zionism. These ethnocentric doctrines are religiously sanctioned settler/colonial justifications for the expropriation of native peoples, such as Native Americans and Palestinians. Cultural Relativism: The idea that no culture is inherently superior to another. Each culture is a unique adaptation to a particular set of ecological and historical circumstances made by members of a single species. We can only understand another group relatively. That means that we who attempt to understand another culture can only do so from the standpoint of our own culture. The "truth" or "fact" of another culture is not independent of the cultural background of the anthropological observer. This idea developed in reaction to 19th Century theories of human progress which held that "civilized" Euro-American culture was superior to that of "savage" or "barbaric" non-Euro-Americans. Cultural relativism does not imply moral relativism. Self-Reflexivity: The idea that insofar as we wish to understand others, we must understand our relationship to them. If one accepts the idea of cultural relativism- -that there is no "fact" of culture before interpretation--then the study of other cultures always involves looking at the relationship between the observer (the anthropologist) and the observed (the native). To understanding others, we also must understand something about ourselves. Anthropologists encountering another culture must continually reflect upon their own preconceptions and privileges if they are to understand their own activity. Transculturation: the idea that cultures are in a constant state of exchange. There is no “pure” culture. We are always in the mix whether we acknowledge it or not. This idea was developed by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. The Opposing Logics of Kinship and Tool Use: Kinship and tool-use are two necessary aspects of human life. Kinship brings nature together with itself. When we use tools, we use nature against itself, we manipulate nature to push it away from us, to make our life easier. Throughout most of human existence (from Homo Habilis, 2 million years ago through the Paleolithic) these two aspects of social life were organically related. A good example of this was provided by anthropologist Richard Lee in his discussion of how the !Kung custom of “insulting the meat” restrains egoism within the tribe. How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity | The New Yorker Books August 26, 2019 Issue How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity A brave band of scholars set out to save us from racism and sexism. What happened? By Louis Menand August 19, 2019 How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/how-cultural-anthrop... 1 of 14 4/9/21, 11:01 AM N 0:00 / 30:25 Audio: Listen to this article. To hear more, download Audm for iPhone or Android. ot that long ago, Margaret Mead was one of the most widely known intellectuals in America. Her first book, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” published in 1928, when she was twenty-six, was a best-seller, and for the next fifty years she was a progressive voice in national debates about everything from sex and gender to nuclear policy, the environment, and the legalization of marijuana. (She was in favor—and this was in 1969.) She had a monthly column in Redbook that ran for sixteen years and was read by millions. She advised government agencies, testified before Congress, and lectured on all kinds of subjects to all kinds of audiences. She was The celebrated cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, photographed in 1930. Photograph from Irving Browning / The New-York Historical Society / Getty How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/how-cultural-anthrop... 2 of 14 4/9/21, 11:01 AM Johnny Carson’s guest on the “Tonight Show.” Time called her “Mother to the World.” In 1979, the year after she died, President Jimmy Carter awarded her the Medal of Freedom. Today, Margaret Mead lives on as an “icon”—meaning that people might recognize the name, and are not surprised to see her face on a postage stamp (as it once was), but they couldn’t tell you what she wrote or said. If pressed, they would probably guess that Mead was an important figure for the women’s movement. They would be confusing Mead’s significance as a role model (huge as that undoubtedly was) with Mead’s views. Mead was not a modern feminist, and Betty Friedan devoted a full chapter of “The Feminine Mystique” to an attack on her work. Mead mattered for other reasons. One of the aims of Charles King’s “Gods of the Upper Air” (Doubleday) is to remind us what those were. Mead was a cultural anthropologist, and the rise of cultural anthropology is the subject of King’s book. It’s a group biography of Franz Boas, who established cultural anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States, and four of Boas’s many protégés: Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Cara Deloria, and Mead. King argues that these people were “on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time: the struggle to prove that—despite differences of skin color, gender, ability, or custom—humanity is one undivided thing.” Cultural anthropologists changed people’s attitudes, King believes, and they changed people’s behavior. “If it is now unremarkable for a gay couple to kiss goodbye on a train platform,” he writes, “for a college student to read the Bhagavad Gita in a Great Books class, for racism to be rejected as both morally bankrupt and self-evidently stupid, and for anyone, regardless of their gender expression, to claim workplaces and boardrooms as fully theirs—if all of these things are not innovations or aspirations but the regular, taken-for-granted way of organizing society, then we have the ideas championed by the Boas circle to thank for it.” They moved the explanation for human differences from biology to culture, from nature to nurture. A lot of this story has been told, but King is an intelligent and judicious writer, and he has woven a concise narrative that manages to work in a fair amount of context. His subjects were all unusual characters, and their lives are colorfully related. Obviously, legal and political actors had at least as much to do with the changes in social attitudes that King writes about as anthropologists did. But How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/how-cultural-anthrop... 3 of 14 4/9/21, 11:01 AM B he makes a good case with the cards he has dealt himself. On the other hand, issues around race, gender, sexuality, and “otherness” are still very much with us, although in slightly altered form. And when people discuss them they no longer solicit the wisdom of anthropologists. What happened? oas was born and educated in Prussia. He moved to the United States in 1886, when he was twenty-eight, and a decade later, after some false starts, became a professor of anthropology at Columbia. For many years, he was institutionally embattled, at least partly because of his left- wing politics. King says that at one point the anthropology department was moved into three rooms up seven flights of stairs in the journalism building—one room for Boas, one for a secretary, and the third left empty. Somehow, Boas managed to train an entire generation of scholars in what was, until after the Second World War, a tiny academic field. The historian Lois Banner has calculated that forty-five Ph.D.s in anthropology were awarded in the United States between 1892 and 1926, and that nineteen of the recipients studied under Boas. By 1930, she says, most American anthropology departments were chaired by Boas students. Like two other influential professors, John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen, both of whom were his exact contemporaries, Boas was a turgid writer. But he was intellectually fearless; he had energy and charisma; and though he made a fierce impression—his face was scarred from sabre duels he had fought as a student in Germany—his students were devoted to him. They called him Papa Franz. He retired from teaching in 1936, but remained active professionally until his death, in 1942. Boas was trained as a physicist. His student work was in psychophysics, the science that measures things like sensory thresholds, and his dissertation was an effort to determine the degree to which light must increase in intensity for people to perceive a change in the color of water. This might seem an utterly sterile topic for research, but Boas reached an unorthodox conclusion: it depends. Our perception of color is a function of