How to Think Like an Anthropologist

ISBN: 0691193134

Highlights

no culture exists in isolation. No culture is ever really original; every culture is, we might say, always on a nomadic path. ^ref-48599

fieldwork also served to underscore the importance of “being there” because culture had to be observed in situ: culture and place were two sides of the same coin. ^ref-29683

But even if diffuse, a strong emphasis in his approach was on what he called the “cultural glasses” (Kulturbrille) we all wear. It is through these glasses that we make sense of and order the world. In the Boasian rendering, culture is about meaning. “Perception” has to do with the world’s ordering in some set of localized terms. ^ref-14282

Above all for Geertz, as for Boas, if you wanted to understand what a culture “meant,” if you wanted to understand what was important about it, what made it tick, what gave it significance and (inasmuch as this is possible) order, you have to focus on the particular, not the general. ^ref-15601

You would certainly be hard-pressed to find a society in which the literal and figurative objectification of culture didn’t matter. Humans use material culture and other things (trees, rocks, and oceans) to make sense of, express, and sum up who they are. ^ref-7144

We even make words into things. We objectify language in projects of nationalism by trying to fix the meaning of particular words or phrases; we also objectify language in ritual, especially in statements that are repeated over and over (which has the social effect of making the statements seem “truer” than we might otherwise take them to be). ^ref-38007

Because the man in the top hat is not only more culturally evolved than the naked savage—he is not only a more “complex organism”; he is better. Social evolutionism is moral philosophy masquerading as science. Darwin never turned his nose up at the barnacle because it wasn’t the blue whale. ^ref-49603

But culture was, in Tylor’s more capacious definition, “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” ^ref-6835

At a core level this state of mind was both constant and universal. In this tradition of culture theory, the endpoint was not a celebration or recognition of difference for difference’s sake but rather the uncovering of the mental architecture that linked all peoples to one another. “The savage mind is logical in the same sense and the same fashion as ours,” he wrote.16 ^ref-32535

the denial of coevalness is still an anthropological prejudice. It mostly comes across as a romantic sensibility—maybe harmless enough. But work in Africa, or lowland South America, or the Mongolian steppes often has more cachet than work in the United States or Germany.e This is because anthropology is still partly under the sway of the idea that to truly understand the human condition, we need to strip away the trappings of civilization and modernity. ^ref-61368

Why is this so dangerous? Because it prevents us from seeing that the lives of Katine villagers are not trapped in the fourteenth century but lived out in a twenty-first-century world shaped by a host of colonial and postcolonial economic and political dynamics. ^ref-25275

Katine is contemporary because it is shaped by the legacies of British colonial policies, by the regime of Idi Amin, by an ongoing regional insurgency, by the agricultural subsidies for farmers in the European Union, by the strategic plans of the International Monetary Fund, and more. If we can place the African Other in an earlier age, we don’t have to face up fully to the reasons why their lives don’t look like ours. ^ref-55375

Metadata

Author: Matthew Engelke
ASIN: B076ZYFFTX
ISBN: 0691193134
Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076ZYFFTX
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How to Think Like an Anthropologist

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