_Interpret Of Culture Midterm Short Answer

Front 1

3 foundations of Malinowski's "new science of man"

Back 1

Scientific attitude,

social attitude,

common genre of writing- ethnography

Front 2

3 aspects of the scientific attitude necessary for this "new science"

Back 2

-Anthropology is an inductive science

-must collect data + facts based on its ability to be TABULATED into a chart, thus
allowing for movement from the specific to the general
"As a scientist, must introduce law + order into what seemed chatoic & freakish... a society must be coherent for it to be rational...

-Participant observation...

Front 3

2 aspects of its social attitude

Back 3

*Psychic unity of man, all human beings share a basic mental framework, but not necessarily that they are the same/equal

*Distinction between simple and complex societies was fundamental & entrenched
Durkheim's organic/ mechanical societies

Front 4

3 schools from which modern anthro differentiated itself

Back 4

-Lucien Levy Bruhl's Primitive Mentality School
(non-european = mystic and nonrational)

-Social Darwinism
New distinction that what survives is better

-Stadial school, or stage theory of history

Front 5

3 aspects of the gift

Back 5

Mauss's "the gift"
1. give
2. accept
3. return

Places individuals into a whole, obligation that creates social interdependency

(Woman/ wife)

Front 6

critical differences between ACA and BSA

Back 6

-BSA is not interested in language/ linguistic cultural symbols

-> instead BSA focuses on social rules &roles, what makes a society come together & reproduce itself, how each society must act rationally to do this

Front 7

(what BSA & ACA share)

Back 7

1-Psychic unity of man
2-Scientific Prospective
*3-Universal Rules of human culture and society that took particular forms in particular places.

Front 8

Intellectual influences on ACA and BSA

Back 8

?more?

French, Durkheimian Sociology
Secularism
Industrial Rev, Marxism vs Capitalism

ACA highly influenced by german schools of philosophy & language, Humboldt, people defined by their language

Front 9

Critical differences between Boas's "Alternating Sounds" and Sapir's "Psychological Reality of Phonemes"

Back 9

Boas: responding to the primitive mentality critique that certain languages’s sound systems lack precision—
Each system is different, cannot understand outside your own
SAPIR applies specific linguistic details to Boas’s vague understanding of culture
-> Linguistic relativity

Front 10

4 aspects of Culture & Personality School

Back 10

Ruth Benedict, ACA
1. every culture can be analyzed in terms of the same set of formal completedness -> has its own signs and symbols = a complete system

2.Every culture is a patterned mentality that could be understood as a personality

3. All individual identities were molded by this cultural personality

4. The abnormal person simply does not fit in that particular cultural personality

Front 11

3 features of Durkheim's Sociology

Back 11

1. Society is not the sum of individuals, rather it is the system formed by their specific ways of associating, that produces a specific reality.
Social facts...
-> causes their actions, feelings

2. Social facts are general, external, constraining

3. Believed that you can scientifically describe all social facts & enumerate them. (they are rationally apprehensible)

Front 12

2 consequences of Durkheimian sociology

Back 12

1. Social conditions produce natural truth, rather than the other way around.
Thus no society has intrinsic or absolute value over any other.
(in sum: sociological relativity)

2. The purpose of society is to reproduce itself
-> Durkheimian functionalism
Every social fact contributes to the survival of the social system as a whole
(functionialism)

Front 13

3 orders of relationality built into the elementary family

Back 13

parent-parent, parent-child, child-child

Front 14

4 types of descent

Back 14

Patrilineal- She gets it from her dad, but her son doesn't (gets descent through his own father/ her new husband)

Matrilineal- Same but through mother

Unilineal- You get to chose what you get, from whom

Ambilineal- Same, but when you reach a certain age you have to decide

Front 15

Relation between magic, science and religion according to early anthrops

Back 15

Magic/ witchcraft- deal with the natural world, trying to control the uncontrollable and account for the unaccountable
almost like a prescience science.

Religion- adds the element of the supernatural

Front 16

Short description of the Manchester School

Back 16

Started by Max Gluckman
late 40s in BSA

-With funds from Rhodes-Livingston foundation, sought to turn the politics of anthro towards a revolutionary approach towards race and decolonization
-using ethnographic case studies in S Africa for social justice

Front 17

3 phases of ritual (Victor Turner)

Back 17

Rituals of transition, across a threshold of liminality...
1. separation by age group
ritual cleaves space and time
anti-structure

2. transition from initial status to consequent status
2 forces, no status... pure possibility

3. finished, reincorporation into the rest of society

Front 18

Features of Sign in structural linguistics and definition of parts

Back 18

As taught by Jakobsen

1. sign= signified/ signifier -> binary opposition

2. relationship between the two is arbitrary

3. The meaning of a sign is based on its negative differential to other signs ... man derives its meaning from that which is not man (i.e. woman- marked)
binary opposition, the two depend on eachother

Front 19

Three schools brought into dialogue in Levi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology

Back 19

1. Structural Linguistics
(marks and binary opposition within language itself -> culture)

2. Mauss's theory of exchange (alliance theory)
gift at the center of society- wives

3. American Cultural Anthro's approach to the psychic unity of man
-> purpose to find universal focus and structures from local content and organization

Front 20

Three characteristics of secularism

Back 20

1.Increasing differentiation of social space
Through religion, market, politics, family

2.Privatization of religion and public-ization of the market/ politics

3.Declining significance of religion to other social spaces

Front 21

Geertz's critique of structural anthropology

Back 21

ACA Building on Max Weber’s interpretative sociology…

The study of culture is not experimental or disinterested. We will no longer think of anthro as a science.

Signs and symbols are no
to be studied in their own terms- instead these get their meaning not from their relationship with eachother, but from the roles they play in human lives.

3 parts of Interpretation instead-> action, text, how you interpret the text

NSNSRP- not science, not signs, roles played

Front 22

Eric Wolf's critique of modern cultural and structural functional anthropology

Back 22

Anthropologists do not place people within a broader historical context.

His book “Europe and the People Without History” is an assault on both classic and interpretative anthro.

It argues: Noone had been untouched by global history, if an anthropologist ignores this, merely perpetuating inequality and colonialist efforts.

-> political economic anthro movement in ACA

Front 23

Talal Asad's dual relation of modern anthropology to cultural condition

Back 23

*Modern anthro was created as a result of colonialism

*But we must remember that it was forced to turn against that which spawned it, insofar as it (colonialism) supported the central worth of colonizing people