Cultural Anthropology

Chapter 1

Culture and Meaning

Problem 1

• How can people begin to understand beliefs and behaviors that are different from their own?

Cultural Anthropology

• Strives to look beyond the world of everyday experiences to discover the patterns and meanings that lie behind that world.

Example: Classroom Chair and Attached Desk

• The classroom chair poses interesting questions to the cultural anthropologist:

– Why do we have chairs?

– Why does the classroom chair take the form it does?

– Why don’t we sit on stools? or benches?

Example: Classroom Chair and Attached Desk

• An anthropologist might suggest:

–The classroom chair and desk are part of the political anatomy of educational settings, part of the system of relations that gives meaning to the classroom.

–This piece of furniture forms the body into a shape that prepares it to attend to a teacher and not to others in the same room.

Questions• Why do human beings differ in their beliefs and

behaviors?

• How do people judge the beliefs and behaviors of others?

• Is it possible to see the world through the eyes of others?

• How can the meanings that others find in experience be interpreted and described?

• What can learning about other peoples tell us about ourselves?

Why Do Human Beings Differ in Their Beliefs and

Behaviors?• From an anthropological perspective, members of a society view the world in a similar way because they share the same culture.

• People differ in how they view the world because their cultures differ.

• All human societies experience specific life events, such as birth, death, and the quest for food, water, and shelter, but the meanings people give to these events differ.

Attitudes Toward Death

• Views of death vary among cultures:

–Death is the passage from one world to another.

–Death is the final event of a life span.

–Death is part of a never-ending cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

Grief• Grief is suppressed in

some cultures and openly displayed in others.

• Here, bereaved relatives weep over the body of a 40-year-old kinsman slain in clashes between police and armed civilians in Moldova in 1990.

Kwakiutl View of Death

• The Kwakiutl of British Columbia believe that when a person dies, their soul enters the body of a salmon.

• When a salmon is caught and eaten, a soul is released and is free to enter another person.

Cultural Views of Death

• The Dani of New Guinea, require a close female relative of a recently deceased person to sacrifice a part of a finger.

• In southern Europe, widows were required to shave their heads, whereas in traditional India, widows were cremated at their husbands’ funerals.

Clifford Geertz

• Suggests without meanings to help us comprehend and impose an order on the universe, the world would seem a jumble, "a chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions."

Defining Culture

• Human beings are cultural animals; all facets of their lives—death, birth, courtship, mating, food acquisition and consumption—are suffused with meaning.

• Differences in culture arise when different groups of human beings create, share, and participate in different realities, assigning different meanings to death, birth, marriage, and food.

The Anthropological Perspective

• We cannot take anything about even our own beliefs and behavior for granted, let alone the behavior and beliefs of those whose backgrounds and histories differ from our own. When people share the meanings they give to experiences, they share and participate in the same culture.

How Do People Judge the Beliefs and

Behaviors of Others?• Because there are so many versions of what the world is like, how do we try to understand each of them without making positive or negative judgments?

• Can we say have, that one culture is superior to another?

Ethnocentricity

• Ethnocentrism is the idea that our beliefs and behaviors are right, while those of other peoples are wrong or misguided

• If we condemn or reject the beliefs or behaviors of others, we may be committing the ethnocentric fallacy.

Ethnocentricity• The ceremonial attire

worn by this Abelam villager in Papua New Guinea conveys beauty and meaning to the members of this tribe, while, to him, modern American fashions might seem odd.

Ethnocentricity

• To protect their world from potential destruction, Aztecs inthe 1500s offered blood to the gods through rituals of humansacrifice and self-mutilation.

Relativism

• Relativism is the idea that no behavior or belief can be judged to be odd or wrong simply because it is different from our own.

• Instead, we must try to understand a culture in its own terms and to understand behaviors or beliefs in terms of the purpose, function, or meaning they have for people in the societies in which we find them.

Relativistic Fallacy

• The idea that it is impossible to make moral judgments about the beliefs and behaviors of others.

• This implies that there is no belief or behavior that can be condemned as wrong.

Relativism• While early modern

Europeans condemned cannibalism and justified enslaving peoples who they claimed practiced it, Europeans themselves prescribed the consumption of human body parts, particularly of those who died violently, to cure various afflictions.

Understanding Cultures

• We must try to understand a culture in its own terms and to understand behaviors or beliefs for the purpose, function, or meaning they have to people in the societies in which we find them.

Examples

• Virginity Testing in Turkey

–Is it wrong to impose virginity tests on young women if you believe that once she has sexual relations with a man, she can have his child at any time in the future?

• Cannibalism among the Wari

–Is it right to condemn cannibalism if it serves to help people deal with their grief?

Is It Possible to See the World Through the Eyes • The ethnographic method immerses investigators in the lives of the people they are studying.

• Through the experience they can attain understanding of the meanings those people ascribe to their existence.

• Anthropological fieldwork requires participant observation—the active participation of observers in the lives of their subjects.

How Can Meanings Others Find in Experience Be Described?

• Think of culture as a text of significant symbols: words, gestures, drawings, natural objects.

• To understand another culture we must be able to decipher the meaning of the symbols that comprise a cultural text.

The Balinese

• In Balinese society, cockfighting is a major sporting event that is closely tied to cultural interpretations of manhood, competition, and status.

Football• Football, a highly

popular North American spectator sport, conveys cultural messages about how to achieve success in the business world.

Football and the Balinese Cockfight

• Football is for Americans, as the cockfight is for the Balinese, a small-scale rendering of a concept.

–Status for the Balinese case

–Success for the American case

The Happy Meal

• What can you deduce about the following dimensions of life in the United States from the “Happy Meal.”

1. Gender roles

2. Race relations

3. Physical attributes of people favored in the United States

Retail Anthropology

• Retail anthropologist Paco Underhill founded Envirosell to work with merchants and retailers on meeting customers’ shopping needs.

Retail Anthropology

• The single most important determinant of shoppers’ opinions of service they receive is waiting time.