,Week 1
Eriksen chapter 1
Anthropology accounts for social & cultural variation in the world
→ and conceptualises similarities between:
> social systems
> human relationships
→ the difference and similarities between people
> universal < - > particular
Anthropos + logos (human+reason)
Culture: abilities, notions and forms of behavior persons have acquired as members of society
(eriksen).
> acquired, cognitive and symbolic aspects of existence
Society: social organisation, patterns of interaction, power relationships
Ethnocentrism: evaluating other people from one’s own vantage point and describing them in one’s
own terms.
> othering: makes others inferior
Cultural relativism: cultures are qualitatively different with own inner logic, raking them is absurd
LECTURE 1.1
Consensus on culture (still debatable)
- Learned, not innate (aangeboren)
- Partly conscious, partly unconscious
- To some extent “compelling” (meeslepend)
→ embodiment, cultural norms and values you learn by upbringing and are ingrained in you.
Doing something different may make people angry, upset, nauseous etc.
- Distributive: not every member of a group/society has the same “culture” (knowledge &
skills). What is the definition of culture? For example a nation state already has millions of
cultures.
- Culture forms a more or less systematic whole
- Culture is dynamic
- Culture is relational
Geertz on culture: a system of shared
views and meanings
Wheel of culture →
All three organise a community and it
creates value
What is anthropology?
- Science of men?
, - Science of humanity? (yes, humans are central)
- Humans as knowledgeable beings, at the center of the world (anthropocentrism)
Different approaches
US approach British
What do we do in anthropology?
- Understand? Explain?
Eriksen emphasizes understanding the most → get understanding of how people think & behave and
interact differently.
- Universalism or particularism?
- What approach/perspective/theory? Often comparing
Ambivalence (mixed feelings, contradictory ideas about something/someone)
- Labeling
- Classification
- Diversification
- Stereotypification
- Stigmatisation
Internal contexts are observable, measurable → ideas, conceptions, emotions and behaviours cannot
(obviously/clearly) be measured. How to research → fieldwork, participant observation, sharing activities.
Observing is NOT only seeing, but touch, smell, move, communicate etc. (experiencing)
Ethnography: empirical description, analysis, interpretation of sociocultural groups of people from a
particular theoretical angle.
Emic perspective: engaging in and describing ideas, conceptions, actions from the point of view of
those involved.
- Offers insight in also unconscious notions and patterns of behaviour
- Shows interconnections within a particular setting
Problematic:
- Anthropologists are not native
- Cultural translation
- Textual representation
Etic perspective: engaging in and describing ideas, conceptions and actions through a theoretical
lens, of the anthropologist.
- Makes comparing possible
, - Transcend “native model”
Problematic:
- Aren’t all theories western “emic”?
- Are western theories ethnocentric?
Ethnocentrism: judging (and condemning) ideas of and behaviour by others against
one’s own norms and values.
Cultural relativism: each culture is one-off, unique, and has to be understood within its
own terms,
- As a moral principle
- As a methodological principle
Eriksen Chapter 4
What we think of as our human character is not inborn, it is acquired through learning.
Human beings are social products → the human in us is not exclusively individual nor natural.
For humans to survive, we depend on shared social conventions or rules for behaviour.
Why natural? → ringing the door is a natural, implicit rule
All humans share 99,8% of genes
Classification of humanity into races based on physical appearance only studied as social
construction, belongs to anthropology of power and ideology.
Core of anthropological research:
- Cultural universals <-> variations
- Genetic universals <-> variations
Culture is universally shared, but culture is also used in the meaning of culture → thus, culture is a marker
of difference between groups, not a marker of universals.
Language is a cultural universal: people act and think everything through their language.
- Language is universal, but also differs. Thus, is also a marker for difference rather than
similarities.
Two kinds of nature:
1. External (ecosystem)
2. Internal (human nature)
Culture is always connected with nature → often perceived as a threat, but is the provider of raw materials
for human culture.
Behaviour: observable events
Action (agency): actors reflect on what they do → people know that they act, always possible to do
something different → makes predicting hard (or impossible?)
Status: socially defined aspect of a person which defines a social relationship and entails certain
rights and duties in relation to others.
- Each person has different ones (uncle, dentist, brother etc.)
- Social expectations connected with that status
, - Relative importance varies greatly
Two kinds of statuses:
1. Ascribed (cannot change)
2. Achieved (but jobs still sometimes ascribed)
“Modern societies” have mostly achieved statues (= central anthropological notion)
Role: dynamic aspect of the status, a person’s actual behaviour within the limits of the status
definition
Due to sanctioning on statuses, life has some predictability, but this is not total → it gives the actor
expectations & limitations but never defines the entire field of agency → status never has detailed rules for
every situation → the actor is forced to improvise.
P. 66: Impression management: acting to come across as having the particular role/status
Roles and statuses in a society create power differences
Two power perspectives:
1. Actor perspective
2. Systemic perspective
Public self <-> private self (not observable for anthropologists.
Eriksen Chapter 5
Most classic anthropological analyses are based on detailed descriptions of culture and the
organisation in a delineated system.
Due to 2 factors:
• Local communities are methodologically manageable units
• Local communities may be studied as though they were self-sustaining
> Hardly ever the case
Norms and social control
Every social system requires the existence of rules stating what is permitted and what is not. Such
rules are called norms. They are activated in all fields of life.
> Some norms concern all members of society, others concern only small groups
> The existence of norms does not imply that there is total agreement on them or total obeisance
towards them in any society.
> However, norms change through time as society changes
All norms have in common that they are connected with sanctions. In principle, both positive and
negative sanctions exist.
> The ability to impose legitimate sanctions, whether punishments or rewards, represents a main
source of power in all societies
> The system of sanctions applied when norms are violated can be called social control
Socialisation
Socialisation is the process whereby one becomes a fully competent member of society – where one
acquires the knowledge and abilities required to function as a member of society.
> All societies nevertheless accord the socialisation of children and adolescents great importance.
,Socialisation is the chief way in which cultural categories are transferred from one generation to the
next; in other words, it secures a certain cultural continuity.
Mead: general theoretical (and political) point was that important aspects of the personalities of
humans, far from being inborn, are created through the dynamic interplay between individual and
society, and feed into the ‘ethos’ of the culture. Since cultures are different, they create persons
differently.
Whether ultimately founded in society or nature, the ultimate goal of socialisation is to ensure that
the actor internalises the values, norms and forms of behaviour upon which society is founded. When
a norm is internalised, it is literally turned into something ‘inner’; it becomes a personality trait.
> Peer group pressure to conform among children is extraordinarily strong, something which
facilitates the internalisation of norms, but also leads to the painful exclusion of those who fail to
conform.
Life stages & rites of passage
All societies distinguish between life-stages in the lives of their inhabitants.
All societies must find a way of solving the problem of transition from one stage to the next. The
solution is usually to be found in rites of passage. These rites tend to be strongly dramatised public
events whereby an individual or an entire age cohort moves from one status to another.
> In traditional societies, these rites of passage, or initiation rites, are frequently characterised by the
temporary suffering, trials and deprivation of the participants. The rite of passage can thus be seen as
an endurance test, forcing the candidates to show that they deserve full responsibilities and rights as
adults. They also frequently acquire important (‘secret’) knowledge relevant for adult life during the
phase of transition, which transforms them into a new kind of social person
Persons who are in a phase of transition are frequently surrounded by taboos, prohibitions and strict
rules of conduct.
> One reason for this strictness may be that the rites of passage themselves, although they are
necessary for society, can be seen as a threat to the social order and to the dominant power relations
in society
A central concept in this regard is the social institution. This could be defined as a custom, a system
of social relationships, including power relations, or a set of rules for conduct which endures through
a long period and which, in a certain sense, exists independently of the persons enacting it.
> Society exists through its institutions; when they cease to function, society changes, sometimes in
fundamental ways.
> Note that societies may disappear without their inhabitants necessarily disappearing
Appiah Chapter 1 Classification
Talk of identity really takes off in developmental psychology after the Second World War, with the
influential work of the psychologist Erik Erikson. He recognizes the importance of social roles and
group memberships in shaping one’s sense of self, which he called, in psychoanalytic language, an
“ego identity.”
American sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner was among the first to offer a detailed definition of social
identity as such. “It seems that what is meant by a ‘position’ is the social identity which has been
assigned to a person by members of his group,”
1. he thought, people “observe or impute to a person certain characteristics,” which allows
them to “answer the question ‘Who is he?’”
, 2. Next, “these observed or imputed characteristics are interpreted in terms of a set of
culturally prescribed categories.”
“In this manner the individual is “pigeonholed”; that is, he is held to be a certain “type” of person, a
teacher, Negro, boy, man, or woman. The process by which the individual is classified by others in his
group, in terms of the culturally prescribed categories, can be called the assignment of a “social
identity.” The types or categories to which he has been assigned are his social identities. . . .
Corresponding to different social identities are differing sets of expectations, differing configurations
of rights and obligations.” (Gouldner)
Some stuff on Appiah himself:
Appiah was born in England, before Ghana’s independence, with an English mother, and showed up
in Asante at the age of one. So he’d have had to apply for Ghanaian citizenship, and his parents never
applied for him. By the time it was up to him, he was used to being a Ghanaian with a British
passport.
In Ghana: unable to be both british and ghanaian, legally
In England: the skins and the African ancestry he shared with his sisters marked them out as
different, in ways they weren’t always conscious of.
In US, also not easy to identify himself
Labels and why they matter
1. Every identity comes with labels, so understanding identities requires first that you have
some idea about how to apply them.
“ethnonym”; which means that if your parents are both Ewe, you’re Ewe, too. It applies, in the first
place, to people who speak one of the many dialects of a language that is called “Ewe,” If only one of
your parents is Ewe and you never learned any of the many dialects of the Ewe language, are you
Ewe? Does it matter (given that the Ewe are patrilineal) if the parent was your mother rather than
your father?
2. An important thing identities share: they matter to people. And they matter, first, because
having an identity can give you a sense of how you fit into the social world. Every identity
makes it possible, that is, for you to speak as one “I” among some “us”: to belong to some
“we.”
> Also, what identities offer is that they give you reasons for doing things.
People who give reasons like these—“Because I’m a this, I should do that”—are not just accepting the
fact that the label applies to them; they are giving what a philosopher would call “normative
significance” to their membership in that group.
- They’re saying that the identity matters for practical life: for their emotions and their deeds.
- And one of the commonest ways in which it matters is that they feel some sort of solidarity
with other members of the group.
- Their common identity gives them reason, they think, to care about and help one another.
- It creates what you could call norms of identification: rules about how you should behave,
given your identity.
But just as there’s usually contest or conflict about the boundaries of the group, about who’s in and
who’s out, there’s almost always disagreement about what normative significance an identity has.
→ Still, because these identities sometimes help us answer the question “What should I do?” they’re
important in shaping our everyday lives.
3. Third feature all identities share:
,Not only does your identity give you reasons to do things, it can give others reasons to do things to
you.
- People can help you just because you share an identity with them.
- People can use them as the basis of hierarchies of status and respect and of structures of
power.
An important form of struggle over identity occurs when people challenge the assumptions that lead
to unequal distributions of power (Feminism, LHBTQ+, minority rights, etc.).
Once identities exist, people tend to form a picture of a typical member of the group. Stereotypes
develop. They may have more or less foundation in reality, but they are almost always critically
wrong about something.
Conclusion on labels:
1. Identities come, first, with labels and ideas about why and to whom they should be applied.
2. Second, your identity shapes your thoughts about how you should behave;
3. Third, it affects the way other people treat you.
4. Finally, all these dimensions of identity are contestable, always up for dispute: who’s in, what
they’re like, how they should behave and be treated.
Woman, man or other?
All human societies have some form of gender system—some way of thinking about the significance
of the distinction between men and women. But feminist theories allow us to see what all the
multitudinous systems of gender have in common while, at the same time, allowing us to keep track
of their differences.
> He’s saying, yes there are biological differences between men and women, but it varies way more
than we think and presume (summarizing literally four pages whoops).
“at the level of physical morphology, there just isn’t a sharp division of human beings into two sexes”
All societies start with this spectrum of morphological possibilities. They are a basic part of our
human biology. Because the intermediate cases are statistically rare, many people in smaller
communities may never interact with anyone but XY males and XX females, with a sexual
morphology in the standard range. Given this variability, it’s not surprising that different societies
have come up with different ways of assigning people to a gender.
→ So they’ve sought to bring everybody into a binary system, in which everyone is more or less clearly
male or female. Not everyone agrees that this is a good idea.
What feminist theorists taught us to see was that when we speak of men and women, or of other
genders, we’re not talking just about bodies. In calling a child a girl or a boy—in applying that label—
every society is assuming more than that the child has a certain sexual morphology. And so we
distinguish now between sex (the biological situation) and gender (the whole set of ideas about what
women and men will be like and about how they should behave) .
Even in a world of XX females and XY males, gender would impose a great deal of structure on
thinking about what women and men are, or should be, like.
Why? → Because identities, as I said, involve labels and stereotypes (those come with expectations).
Appiah continues to using masculine and feminine, regarding stereotypes men lead and women follow
(power comes into play here, too)
- Labels, stereotypes, and ideas about how you should behave: these are there in every
identity. And gender has the last of the traits mentioned: it involves ideas not just about how
you should behave, but also about how others should behave toward you.
,Identities, in this way, can be said to have both a subjective dimension and an objective
one: an identity cannot simply be imposed upon me, willy-nilly, but neither is an identity simply up
to me, a contrivance that I can shape however I please.
Identity can be contoured: woman and Dutch, chinese and gay etc.
Intersectionality
These complex interactions between identities are one reason that Kimberlé Crenshaw, a feminist
legal theorist and civil rights activist, introduced the idea of intersectionality.
Intersectionality: the ways in which our many identities interact to produce effects that are not
simply the sum of each of them. Being a black lesbian is not a matter of combining African-American,
female, and homosexual norms of identification: LGBTQ norms of identification can depend on your
race and your gender. Examples of intersectionality proliferate.
> intersectionality raises a problem for one of the ways people bring their identities to bear
nowadays: while your identity affects your experience, there’s no guarantee that what you’ve learned
from it is going to be the same as what other people of the same identity have learned.
Habitus
Each of us has what he called a habitus: a set of dispositions (Dutch: verzameling van
karaktereigenschappen) to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways,
without much thought.
- Habitus is trained into you starting from childhood.
- Once they are inculcated, these habits aren’t consciously associated with an identity.
- Habitus is grounded in the distinctive way in which a person uses his or her body, what he
called the “bodily hexis,” “a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of
feeling and thinking.”
- Also includes modes of speech, your accent etc (can distinguish your class)
- Also includes gender norms
Habitus and identity are connected by the fact that we recognize certain forms of behavior—accents,
but also ways of walking, styles of dress—as the signs of certain forms of identity and that our
identities shape our habitus unconsciously. Identities matter because they give us reasons to do
things, reasons we think about consciously. But the connection between identity and habitus
means that identities matter in unreflective ways as well.
Essentialism
Second important psychological truth (next to habitus I guess): essentialism.
“Essentialism is the view that certain categories have an underlying reality or true nature that one
cannot observe directly but that gives an object its identity, and is responsible for other similarities
that category members share.” Children are full essentialists by 4-6 years old (classifying gender for
example). What essentialism means is that children assume that these superficial differences—the
ones that lead to applying the label—reflect deeper, inward differences that explain a great deal of
how people behave.
> One of our most basic strategies for making sense of the world is to form the sorts of
generalizations that linguists call “generics”—generalizations like “Tigers eat people,” and “Women
are gentle.” What makes these generics true is hard to say.
> We humans are more likely, then, to essentialize groups about which we have negative thoughts;
and more likely to have negative thoughts about groups we’ve essentialized. (There’s an unfortunate
vicious circle)
> In large ways and small, essentialism shapes our public history, and it shapes our personal
histories as well.
, Our clannish mind
There’s a commonsense way of talking about all this. We’re clannish creatures. We don’t just belong
to human kinds; we prefer our own kind and we’re easily persuaded to take against outsiders.
Evolutionary psychologists think these tendencies were once adaptive; they helped people survive by
creating groups they could rely on to deal with the hazards of prehistoric life, including the existence
of other groups competing for resources. It seems pretty clear that we’re not just prone to
essentialism, we also have these clannish tendencies, and each of us has a habitus shaped by our
various identities.
LECTURE 1.2 INDIVIDUAL & SOCIETY
Comparisons allow us to better articulate influences, society, statuses etc. Societies have a history,
had (maybe) dramatic changes that cannot be predicted.
Can you predict societies? There’s not really a proper model.
Many theorists try to make a model with fixed patterns → but this is not how it really works
In contrast to swarms of birds, human actions are not obvious and often unconscious (not instinctive
per se)
Gradualness: between human animals (we) & non-human animals, there is no distinct line between these
two groups. Humans have self-consciousness, animals mostly or to varying degrees. Humans act
intentional, with some sort of plan. But: individual western ethnocentric concept → creates an image of
how a human person is conceptualized in other societies.
Raymond Williams: society: body of institutions
In western society individual is:
- Unique, autonomous
- Coherent, integrated whole
- Boundedness
Do we have to be your own authentic self?
Different things we do in life we make into a coherent whole.
Mutual constitutive:
Individual <-> society
Cannot exist without one another
Mary Douglas:
- Group dimension
> high, low social cohesion degree
> strong pressure if you are high degree
> grid dimension: degree shared cultural knowledge
Week 2
Fioole text
Three cases of adoption (in moroccan village):
1. Orphaned children
2. Illegitimate children (out of wedlock)
3. Requested adoptions
Only no. 2 is stigmatised. No. 3 initiated by adopted parents.
