1 Grounding the Global: Anthropological PerspectivesProfessor: Ieva Jusionyte Office Hrs: Weds 10:30-11:30 & Thurs 2-3pm in Tozzer 216 TF: Shuang Lu Office Hrs: Tues.2-4pm, Tozzer315
2 9/14 Lecture outline Ethnographic fieldwork: Sources of knowledge, subjectivity, ethics, advocacy Key concepts: Empirical anthropology (Bronislaw Malinowski) Interpretive anthropology (Clifford Geertz, Paul Rabinow) Fieldwork & participant observation Ethnographic refusal (Audra Simpson)
3 Ethnographic accounts before anthropologyHerodotus Tacitus Marco Polo Bartolomé de las Casas
4 “Armchair” anthropology:Edward Tylor, James Frazer et al
5 Lewis Henry Morgan ( )
6 Franz Boas ( )
7 Evans-Pritchard with the Azande, c. 1930Colonial “verandah” anthropology Evans-Pritchard with the Azande, c. 1930
8 Bronislaw Malinowski, 1884-1942
9 Kula ring
10 British empirical anthropologyempirical (from Merriam Webster’s dictionary) 1 : originating in or based on observation or experience
11 Malinowski, “Introduction…”Final goal of fieldwork: “This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him” (25).
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15 Malinowski: key data of ethnographic fieldwork1) broad cultural principles; “skeleton”, “anatomy of a culture” (official rules and principles…) 2) “imponderabilia of actual life” and of typical, routine behavior; “the hang of tribal life” 3) a collection of (verbatim) statements Study each through broadest range of manifestations, meticulous detail… (from “Introduction” to Argonauts of the Western Pacific)
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17 Interpretive Anthropology(even empirical observation is always to an important extent subjective, especially when those being studied and doing the studying are human beings) 2) culture itself as interpretation 3) fieldwork/anthropology as “double interpretation”
18 Clifford Geertz ( )
19 Geertz, “Impact of the Concept of Culture to the Concept of Man”"We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture - and not through culture in general but through highly particular forms of it: Dobuan and Javanese, Hopi and Italian, upper-class and lower-class, academic and commercial." (49) "To be human here is thus not to be Everyman; it is to be a particular kind of man." (53) “It may be in the cultural particularities of people that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found; and the main contribution of the science of anthropology to the construction—or reconstruction—of a concept of man may then lie in showing us how to find [these cultural particularities].”
21 Paul Rabinow
22 Rabinow, “Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco” (1977)“I argue that all cultural activity is experiential, that fieldwork is a distinctive type of cultural activity, and that it is this activity which defines the discipline. But what should therefore be the very strength of anthropology—its experiential, reflective, and critical activity—has been eliminated as a valid area of inquiry by an attachment to a positivistic view of science, which I find radically inappropriate in a field which claims to study humanity.” (5)
23 Engaged, applied, activist, public anthropology
24 Margaret Mead (1901-1978) – pioneer of public anthropology
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28 Next class MODULE I Political Anthropology: Migration and the U.S.-Mexico Border 9/21 Where and how do anthropologists study the state? Required readings: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind." Current Anthropology 42(1): 125–138. Jason De León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland: University of California Press. (Part I)