Outlining an anthropological perspective and the theories that will be discussed

1
Outlining an anthropological perspective and the
theories that will be discussed

• Dr. Zubeeda Quraishy
• Department of Informatics,
• University of Oslo, Norway

2
What is Anthropology?

• Are you as interested as I am in knowing how,
  when, and where human life arose, what the first
  human societies and languages were like, why
  cultures have evolved along diverse but often
  remarkably convergent pathways, why distinctions
  of rank came into being, and how small bands and
  villages gave way to chiefdoms and chiefdoms to
  mighty states and empires?
• --Marvin Harris, Our Kind,1990.

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What is Social Anthropology?

• Social Anthropology is the comparative study of
  human conduct and thought in their social
  context.
• Societies around the world vary enormously in
  their social, cultural and political forms, and
  their individual members display an initially
  overwhelming diversity of ideas and behaviour.
• The study of these variations lies at the heart
  of Social Anthropology.

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Definition of Anthropology

• The word anthropology itself tells the basic
  story--from the Greek anthropos ("human") and
  logia ("study)
• It is the study of humankind, from its beginnings
  millions of years ago to the present day.
• Nothing human is alien to anthropology.
• Indeed, of the many disciplines that study our
  species, Homo sapiens, only anthropology seeks to
  understand the whole panorama--in geographic
  space and evolutionary time--of human existence.

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Various Sub-disciplines of Anthropology

• 1. Social and Cultural Anthropology
• 2. Physical Anthropology
• 3. Ethnology and Ethnography
• 4. Archeological Anthropology
• 5. Psychological Anthropology
• 6. Political Anthropology
• 7. Economic Anthropology
• 8. Visual Anthropology

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(Cont) Sub-disciplines of Anthropology

• 9. Applied Anthropology
• 10. Linguistic Anthropology
• 11. Medical Anthropology
• 12. Nutrition Anthropology
• 13. Development Anthropology
• 14. Molecular Anthropology
• and the list continues

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While it is easy to define, anthropology is
difficult to describe..

• ..as its subject matter is both exotic (e.g.,
  star lore of the Australian aborigines) and
  common place (food habits and customs of eating).
  
• Its focus is both sweeping (the evolution of
  language) and microscopic (the use-wear of
  ancestral tools).
• Anthropologists may study ancient Mayan
  hieroglyphics, the music of African Pygmies, and
  the corporate culture of a U.S. car manufacturer.

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Why anthropologists are interested in studying
cultures?

• Curiosity
• We all "do" anthropology because curiosity is a
  universal human trait.
• We are curious about ourselves and about other
  people, the living as well as the dead, here and
  around the globe

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Anthropological questions asked by all

• Do all societies have marriage customs?
• Do all cultures have different ways of greetings
  and food habits?
• As a species, are human beings innately violent
  or peaceful?
• Did the earliest humans have light or dark skins?
  
• When did people first begin speaking a language?
• How related are humans, monkeys and chimpanzees?
• Is Homo sapiens' brain still evolving?

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If such questions are part of folk anthropology

• practiced in school yards, office buildings and
  neighborhood cafes..
• How does the science of anthropology differ from
  ordinary opinion sharing and "common sense"?

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Comparative Method

• Anthropology begins with a simple yet powerful
  idea any detail of our behavior can be
  understood better when it is seen against the
  backdrop of the full range of human behavior.
• attempts to explain similarities and differences
  among people holistically, in the context of
  humanity as a whole.

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Comparative method (cont)

• Anthropology seeks to uncover principles of
  behavior that apply to all human communities.
• To an anthropologist, diversity itself (seen in
  body shapes and sizes, customs, clothing, speech,
  religion, and worldview) provides a frame of
  reference for understanding any single aspect of
  life in any given community.
• It is essential to study in the context and
  compare against the different panorama

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• We anthropologists have been the first to
  insist on a number of things that the world does
  not divide into the pious and the superstitious
  that political order is possible without
  centralized power and principled justice without
  codified rules that the norms of reason were not
  fixed in Greece, the evolution of morality not
  consummated in England. Most important, we were
  the first to insist that we see the lives of
  others through lenses of our own grinding and
  that they look back on ours through ones of their
  own.
• --Clifford Geertz

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History of anthropological conceptions on culture

• Culture is descriptive, inclusive, and
  relativistic
• --John H. Bodley,1994
• I use the term culture to refer collectively to a
  society and its way of life or in reference to
  human culture as a whole.

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Culture a modern technical definition

• socially patterned human thought and
  behavior, originally proposed by the
  nineteenth-century British anthropologist Edward
  Tylor.
• Created exhaustive universal lists of the content
  of culture, usually as guides for further
  research. Others have listed and mapped all the
  culture traits of particular geographic areas.
• (Food habits, way of dressing, marriage customs,
  ways of greeting, working pattern, life style,
  values (family, work place, place of worship, at
  the house of relatives, strangers, men to men,
  women women, men women, elders towards
  children and vice versa according to age and
  relationship), etc..

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Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, published a
list of 160 different definitions of culture in
1952.

• the list indicates the diversity of the
  anthropological concept of culture. The specific
  culture concept that particular anthropologists
  work with is an important matter because it may
  influence the research problems they investigate,
  their methods and interpretations, and the
  positions they take on public policy issues.

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Diverse Definitions of Culture

• Topical Culture consists of everything on a list
  of topics, or categories, such as social
  organization, religion, or economy
• Historical Culture is social heritage, or
  tradition, that is passed on to future
  generations
• Behavioral Culture is shared, learned human
  behavior, a way of life
• Normative Culture comprises ideals, values, or
  rules for living

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Cont

• Functional Culture is the way humans solve
  problems of adapting to the environment or living
  together
• Psychological Culture is a complex of ideas, or
  learned habits, that inhibit impulses and
  distinguish people from animals
• Structural Culture consists of patterned and
  interrelated ideas, symbols, or behaviors
• Symbolic Culture is based on arbitrarily
  assigned meanings that are shared by a society

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Culture involves at least four components

• What people think
• What they do
• The material products they produce.
• Beliefs, knowledge, and values are parts of
  culture.

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Important principles of culture

• Process of learning, teaching and reproducing
  are essential characteristics of culture. Culture
  exists in a constant state of change.
• Culture consists of systems of meaning -- members
  of a human society must agree to relationships
  between a word and behavior (e.g., if I request
  that you eat food, then I should not take away
  the food rudely from you) or other symbol and its
  corresponding significance or meaning.
• Culture is described in a relativistic way as
  different human societies will inevitably agree
  upon different relationships and meanings.

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Properties of culture

• Culture has several properties
• shared (it is a social phenomenon)
• learned (culture is learned not biologically
  inherited) how culture is taught reproduced is
  also crucial
• symbolic (speech is a symbolic element of human
  language)
• transmitted cross-generationally (Kroeber 1917
  and Leslie White 1949 treat culture as a
  superorganic entity.
• adaptive, and integrated.

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Different interpretations of culture

• From the different definitions it is known that
  there is much disagreement about the word and
  concept of culture.
• So, an ongoing negotiation and conversation about
  what culture should mean is continuing.

23
Clifford Geertz (1926- present)

• Clifford Geertz, best known for his ethnographic
  studies, emphasizes the importance of the
  symbolic of systems of meaning as it relates
  to culture, cultural change and the study of
  culture. The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973
• best known for his ethnographic studies of
  Javanese culture

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What cultural anthropologists are doing at Intel
Microsoft?

• Understanding alien cultures and finding out
  whats important in those cultures, for
  international marketing software design. To
  find out
• What people are doing in their daily lives?
• What people are doing with technology?
• How digital home differs from culture to
  culture?

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What is society?

• A society is any group of people living together
  in a group and constituting a single related,
  interdependent community. This word is frequently
  taken to include entire national communities for
  instance, comment upon some aspect of U.S. or
  Indian society.
• Society can also be used to refer to smaller
  groups of people, as when we refer to "rural
  societies" or "academic society," etc.
• Society is distinguished from culture in that
  society generally refers to the community of
  people while culture generally refers to the
  systems of meaning -- what Geertz calls "webs of
  significance" which govern the conduct and
  understanding of people's lives. (no clear diff
  between culture and society)

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Four main branches comprise anthropology as a
whole

• Cultural
• Linguistic
• Archaeology
• Biological anthropology

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Anthropological perspectives

• Evolutionary Perspective
• Anthropology brings an explicit, evolutionary
  approach to the study of human behavior. Each of
  anthropology's four main subfields-socio
  cultural, biological, archaeology, and
  linguistic anthropology--acknowledges that Homo
  sapiens has a long evolutionary history that must
  be studied if one is to know what it means to be
  a human being.

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Cultural Anthropology

• Applies comparative method and evolutionary
  perspective to human culture.
• Culture represents the entire database of
  knowledge, values, and ways of viewing the world,
  which have been transmitted from one generation
  ahead to the nextnongenetically through words,
  concepts, and symbols.
• Cultural anthropologists study humans through a
  descriptive lens called the ethnographic method,
  based on participant observation, in tandem with
  face-to-face interviews, normally conducted in
  the native tongue.

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Cultural Anthropology (cont)

• Ethnographers compare what they see and hear
  themselves with the observations and findings of
  studies conducted in other societies.
• Originally, anthropologists pieced together a
  complete way of life for a culture, viewed as a
  whole that is, in a holistic perspective.

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Cultural anthropology today

• Recently, more focus is on a narrower aspect of
  cultural life, such as economics, politics,
  religion or art.
• Cultural anthropologists seek to understand the
  internal logic of another society. It helps
  outsiders make sense of behaviors that, like face
  painting or scarification, fire walking among a
  section of Indian Muslims during a particular
  ritual may seem bizarre or senseless.

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Cultural anthropology

• Anthropology helps us to see our own culture more
  clearly by understanding the differences between
  cultures.

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Linguistic Anthropology

• "As you commanded me, I, Spider Woman, have
  created these First People. They are fully and
  firmly formed they have movement. But they
  cannot talk. That is the proper thing they lack.
  So I want you to give them speech."
• So, Sotuknang gave them speech, a different
  language to each color, with respect for each
  other's difference. He gave them also the wisdom
  and the power to reproduce and multiply.
• --Hopi Indian Emergence Myth

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Language.

• Hallmark of the human species holds a special
  fascination for most anthropologists
• Has enabled Homo sapiens to transcend the limits
  of individual memory.
• It is upon language that culture itself
  depends--and within language that humanity's
  knowledge resides.

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Archaeological anthropology

• Human record is written not only in alphabets and
  books, but preserved in other kinds of material
  remains -- cave paintings, pictographs, discarded
  stone tools, earthenware vessels, religious
  figurines, abandoned baskets found in tattered
  shreds and patches of ancient societies.
• Fragmentary records are interpreted to reassemble
  long-ago cultures and forgotten ways of life.
• Studies have been extended in two directions
  --backward some 3 million years to the bones and
  stone tools of our proto human ancestors, and
  forward to the reconstruction of life ways and
  communities of 19th-century America.

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Biological Anthropology

• Also known as Physical Anthropology
• Looks at Homo sapiens as a genus and species,
  tracing their biological origins, evolutionary
  development, and genetic diversity.
• Studies the bio cultural prehistory of Homo to
  understand human nature and, ultimately, the
  evolution of the brain and nervous system itself.

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Bringing together Anthropological Perspectives

• Studying perspectives in anthropology brings
  together information about many diverse
  attributes of human being in an attempt to
  understand in its entirety.

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Anthropological Perspectives on Palliative Care
(medical cultural anthropology)

• Palliation is unique in different cultures. (For
  ex, Sepik Society).
• Complex negotiations between biomedicine and
  culture frequently take place. (Navajo,
  Ethiopian, Sepik, Hindus and Islamic cultures)
• Cultural anthropology helps us see dying as a
  social process.
• It provides us with a number of important tools
  with which to understand this universal yet
  culture-specific process.

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Palliative care (cont.)

• Anthropology asks us to look at the way in which
  the process of dying is organized in time and
  space as well as at the web of social relations
  in which the process takes place.
• -- Gregory Pappas, Concepts to Reality,
  Anthropological Perspectives on Palliative Care

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Comparative method Ethnocentrism

• Comparative method helps an anthropologist to
  avoid "ethnocentrism," the tendency to interpret
  strange customs on the basis of preconceptions
  derived from one's own cultural background.
• Cultural anthropologists not only study rain
  forest tribes in Brazil but growing numbers now
  study U.S. groups instead, applying
  anthropological perspectives to their own culture
  and society.

40
Anthropological perspectives on Health Care
Global issues in midwifery

• A distressing cross-cultural trend is showing up
  in the growing body of anthropological literature
  about midwifery and birth in the developing
  world. Many instances can be quoted from
  different countries and cultures about how
  midwives and pregnant women are treated.
• -- Robbie Davis-Floyd, Ph.D.,(Research Fellow in
  the Department of Anthropology at the University
  of Texas) Austin, Midwifery Today E-News, Vol
  2(18), May 5, 2000

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Female Reproductive Health A Medical
Anthropological Perspective

• Reproduction follows many patterns in different
  societies with varying consequences for health.
• Anthropological research on optimal reproductive
  strategies from the cross cultural and
  evolutionary perspective.
• By exploring the anthropology of variables such
  as trauma, abuse and infanticide
• By comparative understandings of modern day
  return to "alternative" reproductive health
  practices such as midwifery, physical therapies,
  and traditional nutrition

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Anthropological perspectives on migration and
migration history

• Migration is a key social phenomenon
• Migration has considerably contributed to
  changing perceptions of immigrants and as well
  the host cultures.
• Mass character of immigrants and their complexity
  has affected the adaptation processes and social
  interaction .
• Important to conduct the historical and
  anthropological/ethnographical case studies on
  migrant movements, migrant incorporation/exclusion
  and migrant representation etc. in both sending
  and receiving countries.

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Ethnicity and NationalismAnthropological
Perspectives

• Anthropology has the advantage of generating
  first-hand knowledge of social life at the level
  of everyday interaction.
• To a great extent, this is the locus where
  ethnicity is created and re-created.
• Ethnicity emerges and is made relevant through
  ongoing social situations and encounters, and
  through people's ways of coping with the demands
  and challenges of life.
• From its vantage-point right at the centre of
  local life, social anthropology is in a unique
  position to investigate these processes.

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Ethnicity and nationalism (Cont)

• Anthropological approaches also enable us to
  explore the ways in which ethnic relations are
  being defined and perceived by people how they
  talk and think about their own group as well as
  other groups, and how particular world-views are
  being maintained or contested.
• The significance of ethnic membership to people
  can best be investigated through that detailed
  on-the-ground research which is the hallmark of
  anthropology.
• Social anthropology, being a comparative
  discipline, studies both differences and
  similarities between ethnic phenomena provides
  a nuanced and complex vision of ethnicity in the
  contemporary world.

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Anthropological Perspectives on Gender

• Examines the cultural constructions of
  femininities and masculinities from a
  cross-cultural perspective.
• For discussion how individuals and societies
  imagine, negotiate, perform and contest dominant
  gender ideologies, roles, relations and
  identities. (share our own experiences personal
  backgrounds)

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Information Systems from Anthropology Social
Sciences

• While technological determinism can be
  applicable and useful in situations that are
  characterized by high degree of control and short
  time frames, it has limited value in dynamic and
  complex situations that unfold over longer
  periods of time. ..
• Technological determinism cannot adequately
  account for the interactions between ICT, the
  people who design, implement and use them, and
  the social and organisational contexts in which
  the technologies and people are embedded.
• -- Kling et al. 2000, Relation-ship between
  technical and social factors in working processes
  (pp. 49-50)

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IS Anthropology (cont)

• Bansler (1987) describes Høyers theory in these
  terms
• It is insufficient to look at an enterprise as
  a technical system, as humans play a key role in
  the enterprises function, and because humans
  have certain needs and behaviour, that must be
  taken into account The system engineer has to
  consider these needs when he designs and
  implements a computer system.
• -- Bansler 1987 (p. 90, translated from
  Norwegian by Ole and Johan)

48
IS Anthropology Walsham explains the concept
of Web Models

• .. draw broad boundaries around the focal
  computer system and examine how its use depends
  upon a social context of complex social actions.
  The models define this social context by taking
  into account the social relations between the
  information system, the infrastructure available
  for its support, and the previous history within
  the organisation of commitments made in
  developing and operating related computer-based
  technologies.
• -- Walsham 1993 (p.55)

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IS Anthropology Walsham (cont)

• With respect to the social relations as
  considered in web models, it is important to note
  that participants include users, system
  developers, the senior management of the company,
  and any other individuals or groups who are
  affected by the computer-based information
  system.
• -- Walsham 1993 (p.55).

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Information Systems Anthropology

• The social systems perspective helps to
  understand the importance of the context and
  particularly IS in developing countries must be
  context sensitive, for example, participation,
  may not be regarded the same in a developing
  country context as in a developed country.
• In India, participation needs to be approached
  more critically and more strategically.

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Case studies that will be discussed in the course

• Case studies of HISP in India and Mozambique
  Process, Challenges, Implications -- Zubeeda
• Theorizing Information Infrastructure Case
  Study Managing the Gradual Transition from
  Paper to Electronic Patient Record (Nina Boulous
  MSC. Thesis) --Zubeeda
• An Extended Ethnographic study of Electronic
  Health Record Prototyping Methods, Theory
  Interpretation -- Judith

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What does it mean to be human?

• While the question may never be fully answered,
  the study of anthropology titled as "immense
  journey" by Loren Eiseley has attracted some of
  the world's greatest thinkers, whose discoveries
  forever changed our understanding of ourselves.