Anthropology 200 Lecture 4'2

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Anthropology 200Lecture 4.2

• January 26, 2006

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• Website for Anthropology 200
• http//toby.library.ubc.ca/ereserve/er-coursepage.
  cfm?id2182
• E-mail contact
• Anthropology 200 Teaching Assistant,
  Stephen s_robbins_at_telus.net

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New Theories, New Methods

• Reactions to Evolutionists and unilineal
  trajectories
• specific nature of societies
• Diffusionist vision historical particularism and
  Boas
• Structural-functionalism describing synchronic,
  functioning system
• Fieldwork becomes key
• Malinowski coins participant observation
  discipline defined by it

• Fieldwork-- living with people, subjects of study
• Conducting fieldwork
• Fieldwork as rite of passage
• The field, Where is it?
• Preparation
• Methodologies

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Methods Life History and Ethnography

• Methods Life histories unreliable or useful?
• Boas vs. his students Radin and Benedict
• useful understanding of "the workings of the
  mind"
• demonstrate shared experience, and also emphasize
  individual
• Paul Radin 1963. The Autobiography of a Winnebago
  Indian Life, Ways, Acculturation, and the
  Peyote Cult. New York Dover Publications.
• Freeman, James A. 1979. Untouchable An Indian
  Life History. Stanford Stanford University
  Press.
• Freeman, James A. 1989 Hearts of Sorrow
  Vietnamese-American Lives. Stanford Stanford
  University Press.
• Post-Soviet context
• Bloch, A. 2003. Red Ties and Residential Schools
  Indigenous Siberians in a Post-Soviet State.

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Issues in Writing Up

• Power and language
• Knowledge as contingent
• Objectivity and subjectivity
• Mead/Freeman debate
• Freeman, Derek. 1983. Margaret Mead and Samoa
  The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological
  Myth. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press.
• Mead, Margaret. 1928. Coming of Age in Samoa. New
  York Morrow.
• Ethnographic present

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Ethnographic Present

• allochronic representations
• Johannes Fabian
• 1983 Time and the Other How Anthropology
  Makes its Object. New York Columbia University
  Press.
• Describing cultural practices w/o
  historicization present tense to depict cultural
  practices
• "Though I have spoken of time and units of time,
  the Nuer have no expression equivalent to "time"
  in our language, and they cannot, therefore, as
  we can, speak of time as though it were something
  actual, which passes, can be wasted, can be
  saved, and so forth. . . Events follow a logical
  order, but they are not controlled by an abstract
  system, there being no autonomous points of
  reference to which activities have to conform
  with precision. Nuer are fortunate. (1940103).
• E.E. Evans-Pritchard. 1940. The Nuer. Oxford
  University Press.

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Effects of Ethnographic Present

• Creates
• Exotic others
• People without history, Eric Wolfs expression
• Assumes
• Change impossible
• No impact of colonization
• Unproblematic idea of idyllic past
• Michele Rosaldo. 1980. The Use and Abuse of
  Anthropology Reflections of Feminism
  Cross-cultural Understanding. Signs 5(3)
  389-417.

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Foundations of Ethnographic Present

• Linear model of time
• Evolutionist thinking
• What was before industrialization?
• Fixation on hunter-gatherers As If examples of
  other societies earlier forms
• Shostaks Nisa The Life and Words of a !Kung
  Woman (1981)
• . . .Although the !Kung were experiencing
  cultural change, it was still quite recent and
  subtle and had thus far left their traditional
  value system intact. A study revealing what !Kung
  womens lives were like today might reflect what
  their lives had been like for generations,
  possibly even for thousands of years (19816).
• Disappearing Object salvage enterprise
• Idealization of pastoral
• Raymond Williams. 1973. The Country and the City