Cultural Anthropology Notes

The Culture Concept

What is Culture?

Culture is a set of shared customs.

Sometimes, culture is self-identified and intentionally reproduced.¹ Other times, it is an external label that is implied to be unwittingly reproduced.²

We treat culture as a distinct category from political or religious institutions, even though it shapes and is shaped by both.

We distinguish "high" culture from "low" culture, implicitly ranking cultures against each other, even as anthropologists have argued that culture should be judged on its own terms rather than ranked at all (cultural relativism).

The History of Anthropology

Culture was originally a tool used from the perspective of the colonizer to understand the colonized ("the other").

"Culture... includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" - E.B. Tylor³

There were several issues with early anthropological work:

• They relied on the accounts of others, but did not have contact with the people they were studying (armchair anthropology)
• They evaluated other cultures from the viewpoint that their own culture was superior (ethnocentrism)
• They believed that cultures evolved through distinct stages, from savagery, barbarism, to civilization (cultural evolutionism)

Around the 19th century, anthropologists began to travel and live among the group of people they are studying. Fieldnotes and participant-observation became the dominant way of understanding other cultures.

• Franz Boas challenged cultural inferiority by showing that Inuit culture was shaped by the cold environment, and so cannot be compared to cultures without this environmental context⁴ (cultural relativism)

• Franz Boas also challenged racial inferiority by showing that immigrant head measurements differed from those of local Americans. Thus, environment, not race, must have caused the variability in traits.

• Margaret Mead⁵ showed that Samoan teenagers had an easier time transitioning from childhood to adulthood than U.S. teenagers⁶

• Bronislaw Malinowski showed that cultural traditions were developed as a response to specific needs, like food, safety, and stability (functionalism)⁷

• A.R. Radcliffe-Brown proposed a similar idea of structural functionalism, which views society as an interconnected system whose parts work together to promote social security

Cultural Change

How do cultures change?

One view is that cultures change in a deterministic, teleological⁸ way. Examples of teleological explanations of culture include cultural evolution, functionalism, structural functionalism, and social evolution. Social evolution theorizes that cultures go through a process of competition, accommodation, conflict, and assimilation.

The problem with teleology is that culture changes in ways that we can't predict, and which can't be mapped into a linear structure. This is called the cultural specificity thesis, also proposed by Boas.

Politics of Culture

Boas had succeeded in challenging racial inferiority (above), but he was unsuccessful in promoting cultural relativism for ethnic immigrants and Black Americans. There persisted the idea that rural Black folk culture was "culturally inferior," and that the best outcome was for Black people to assimilate into white culture.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund led a legal campaign to desegregate public schools, culminating in the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. The NAACP accepted Boas's argument that there is no racial inferiority, but rejected his cultural specificity thesis, for several reasons:

• Black people negatively deviated from the white population on multiple metrics (poverty, crime, disease), in a way that was correlated with cultural variables (incidence of female-headed households, divorces, fictive kin relations). Anthropologists believed that cultural change (assimilation) could change these metrics.
• The cultural specificity thesis held that culture was slow to change and not reversible. This was a problem for the NAACP's case because it could be read as relieving white society of any obligation to change the status quo. Social evolution, by contrast, put the responsibility on white people to take part in speeding up assimilation.

References: Lee Baker. 1998. Unraveling the Boasian Discourse: The Racial Politics of "Culture" in School Desegregation, 1944 - 1954, Transforming Anthropology 7(1): 15-32.

Cultural Text

Clifford Geertz is known for "Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight."

For context, the Balinese people are known for their "temper." They are physically graceful and they generally strive for calmness in daily life. They also have an extreme revulsion toward animality.⁹

Thus, intense emotions are channeled and released through social structures, such as a cockfight. Geertz shows that the cockfight is a metonym for broader society, capturing the hierarchical, status-conscious structure of Balinese life. When the stakes are larger ("deep play"), it becomes a matter of status.

It is also a cultural text that represents society back to itself, allowing the Balinese people learn and rehearse its norms.

"If... we go to see Macbeth to learn what a man feels like after he has gained a kingdom and lost his soul, Balinese go to cockfights to find out what a man, usually composed, aloof, almost obsessively self-absorbed... feels like when, attacked, tormented, challenged, insulted, and driven in result to the extremes of fury, he has totally triumphed or been brought totally low." - Clifford Geertz

References:

• Eugene Kinkead and Russell Maloney. 1943. The Balinese Temperament. The New Yorker.
• Clifford Geertz. 1973. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock Fight. The Interpretation of Cultures.

Cultural Relativism

There are several issues with cultural relativism:

1. It is essentialist. It believes that culture has a set of essential and immutable characteristics.
2. It is ahistorical. It assumes that culture doesn't change in response to interactions with other cultures.
3. It is amoral. Because cultural relativism tells us to evaluate beliefs, values, and practices based on own cultural context, it prevents us from assigning judgment (and thus morality). When should we reconsider our morals? And when should we affirm them?

But when done right, cultural relativism can instead promote:

1. Reflexivity
2. Cross-cultural solidarity
3. Respect for people's agency

For example, consider the narrative of the oppressed Muslim woman. This narrative was used by Bush to justify the War on Terror. In many ways, it appeals to liberal supporters of gender equality.

However, cultural relativism tells us to reflexivity think about our own culture. For example, French women can't cover their faces. In most Western cultures, women can't expose their chests like men can. How is this different from Muslim woman? These thoughts may inspire a sense of cross-cultural solidarity for the efforts of Muslim women, as well as respect for their agency.

References:

• Lila Abu-Lughod. 2002. Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others. American Anthropologist 104(3): 783 – 790.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. 2016. We Are All Cannibals.
• E.E. Evans-Pritchard. 1937. The Notion of Witchcraft Explains Unfortunate Events. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande.

Identity Formation

What is an identity? How can we make any declaration of the individual self?

While there has always been social groups with particular identities, the idea there are unique individuals is relatively new.

Historically, people have been defined relationally, not individually:

• In Bantu language, there is no word for the concept of the individual self. Selfhood is always defined through social relationships.
• In Nyoro society, a person would likely identify themselves by their agnatic clan and their mother's clan.
• In Japan, people usually identify themselves by the relationship they are a part of. Rather than saying 'I am a typesetter,' a Japanese man is likely to say 'I am from B Publishing Group.'

The Cartesian Individual

Rene Descartes tried doubt everything in the world to find the absolute truth. He realized: if we can deduce that our thoughts are real, then it stands to reason that we are real. In other words: cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am").

"... the soul, through which I am what I am, is entirely separate from the body... so that even if I did not have a body, my soul would continue to be all that it is."

This concept, "I think therefore I am," informed a mode of secular individualism that brought forth the idea that we all are unique individuals.

The Cartesian philosophy brought forth three important ideas:

1. Scientific empiricism and objectivity.
2. Individualism and the rights-bearing subject.
3. Secular political agency and popular revolution

The idea behind scientific empiricism is that the individual is able to divorce themself from the social and material context, and use their mind to interpret the world objectively. Black and brown people were increasingly seen as part of the non-human, subjective world.

Identity, as emerged in the early 18th century, was seen as a set of features that distinguishes a person or thing from others.

The idea behind the rights-bearing subject was that man was entitled to certain rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This liberal philosophy informed many of the political movements of the time, such as the American Revolution.

Individualism has also generated a myth of the "Homo economicus"; the idea that we all seek to maximize our own wealth.

Historically, most societies were governed by a theological order. There was no social mobility. The idea that the individual can change their individual circumstances gave rise to a sense of political agency and populism.

The idea that people were entitled to change their own circumstances was at the core of the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution.

Identity Politics and Intersectionality

While secular political agency emerged from the idea of the autonomous liberal subject, it has also given rise to identity politics and intersectionality. Identity politics says that marginalized people need to self-consciously organize around their shared identities. It states that we are not only individuals, but that we are also impacted by structural forces. Intersectionality is the idea that structural power intersects to shape people's structural positions.

Anthropologists focus on how social contexts shapes how we identify and who we believe ourselves to be. In some ways, this rejects the idea of individualism. Yet, through cultural relativism, anthropology also affirms the individual's agency.

Our identities are the medium through which culture change and through which cultures persist.

Hijra Identity

Question: Are hijras agents of gender subversion, or are they reinscribing gendered categories through their desires and practices?

Hijras are a recognized third gender in South Asia. Hijras are men who sacrifice their genitalia to a goddess in return for the power to confer fertility. They are respected for this ritual role, but also stigmatized for their ambiguous sexuality.

However, Hijra identity is not just about being a "third gender." Hijra identity is not something one has, but something that one performs through pursuing izzat (respect and recognition). Thus, hijra identity is not a series of attributes, but instead a performative and relational phenomenon.

Gender performativity (innocent mode of signification) is an implicit, everyday act. Gender performance (intentional mode of signification) is a conscious, intentional effort to mark a gendered identity. There is not a firm line between gender performativity and performance. When hijras perform their ritual, it is both performative and a performance.

Reddy rejects the etic¹⁰ analysis that hijras are challenging the sexual binary. Her emit analysis shows that hijras subscribe to an essentialist understandings of gender, focused around dress, manner, and sexual position.

However, hijras also had agency in a number of ways. First, hijras play with and parody gender. Hijras and other kotis¹¹ did not unequivocally think of themselves as women. They often emphasized their non-binary status by performing hand claps and lifting their saris to expose genitalia (or lack thereof). They also dress their saris differently than women, intentionally emphasizing that they are different.

Gayatri Reddy. 2005. With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India.

Suffering and Society

Medical anthropology is the study of health and illness and shaped, experienced, and understood in light of historical and political forces.

Pain is conditioned by political and social structures.

Why study individuals when we want to understand structural issues? Farmer suggests three reasons: (1) structural violence, (2) political histories, and (3) intersectionality. Structural violence are social structures that stop people from meeting their potential. They are long-standing and invisible because they seem so normal.

Familial co-addicts challenges the popular representation of the heroin addict that abandons all kinship ties for drugs.

References:

• Farmer, Paul. 1996. On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View From Below. Daedalus 125(1): 261-283.
• Angela Garcia. 2010. The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Across the Rio Grande.

Doing Ethnography

The goal of ethnography is the production of knowledge. However, "knowledge production" is a very modern and particular way of thinking about knowledge. It came from a Cartesian empirical framework to improve society with said knowledge.

Ethnography is the close, qualitative, empirical study of a community's everyday practices and rituals. The researcher embeds themselves in the community that they are studying through participant observation. Participant observation requires the researcher to develop a working, reciprocal relationship with the people they are studying.

While anthropologists usually don't strive for objectivity, they do strive for a perspective that is less determined by their position as a researcher or outsider.

Ethnographers take field notes, which may contain:

• Transcription of dialogue
• Description of body language, tone, and other characteristics
• Description of surroundings
• Account of an encounter
• Analysis and context

In the 1980s and 90s, anthropology faced a "crisis of representation." The field began to question that the ethnographer could objectively describe the cultures without the bias. Furthermore, people being studied obviously perform differently.

But an anthropologist's unfamiliarity with the culture also allows them to better question and contextualize things that may be taken for granted. This is called inside-outsider perspective.

In contemporary anthropology, there has been efforts to push back against the colonial and supremacist history of ethnography:

• Most cultural anthropologists subscribe to the idea of "situated knowledge," which is the idea that all knowledge is situated, partial, and incomplete.¹²
• "Studying up" refers to ethnographic research on elite people and privilege spaces. Some anthropologists take this approach to question and cast doubt into the words of the powerful interlocutors they work with.
• "Engaged anthropology" involves using anthropology to support particular communities.
• "Co-performative witnessing" is an approach that situates the ethnographer as a participant in the community, and not just an observer. The trials that affect that interlocutors also, in some way, affect the ethnography.

References:

• Nancy Scheper-Hughes. 2004. Parts Unknown: Undercover Ethnography of the Organs-trafficking Underworld. Ethnography 5(1): 29-73.
• Aimee Meredith Cox. 2015. Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship.

The State

State Anthropology

Anthropology seeks to conceptualize the state in non-traditional ways, and to explain how the state affects people's lives.

The way we conceptualize the state matters:

• Elon Musk described the state as "one big ponzi scheme," and this has directly led to government cutting of programs
• Max Weber described the state as "a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory"

In the normative sense, states should also have sovereignty, or supreme authority within a territory. This contrasts with stateless forms of governance like small agricultural groups, tribal societies, and clans, which either do not have supreme authority or do not have territoriality.

Origins of the Nation-State

The first states were created by:

• The development of large-scale agriculture, leading to sedentary behavior, the class division of labor, and centralization of food production
• The development of writing, which led to the centralization of knowledge and data, and thus the centralization of authority¹³

The nation-state is a fairly recent phenomenon in human history that has even greater authority over its boundaries than premodern states.

Question: How did the sovereign state become the center of human society as we know it?

The Peace of Westphalia was a series of peace treaties which ended the Thirty Years' War and the Eighty Years' War. The treaties:

• Delineated mutually agreed borders
• Promised that each participating country could govern itself
• Prohibited international war over religion

This narrative promoted the idea that:

• Borders came about as a natural outgrowth of autonomous societies
• Nation-states come from peaceful agreement between states
• International cooperation is rational and inevitable

However, there are several problems with this narrative:

• It ignores the fact that the parties in the Westphalia Treaty were heavily involved in colonialism, denying the sovereignty of others
• It affirms the arbitrary territorial authority of elites like dukes and kings, without regard for the people within those boundaries
• It did not actually end war and violence

Jean-Jacques Rousseau later conceptualized the social contract, which states that people exchange restrictions on their freedom in exchange for protection. This theory assumes the nation-state is the natural product of rational individuals who enter into contracts with each other.

However, this is not wholly true. The most recently codified nation-state in the UN is South Sudan. In the independence celebrations, President Mayardit famously said: "We may be Zande, Kakwa, Nuer, Toposa, Dinka, Lotuko, Anyuak, Bari and Shiluk, but remember you are South Sudanese first."

Yet, in a matter of three years after independence, civil war erupted over control of state assets, namely oil money. As result of the war, people split across ethnic lines once again.

Anthropology suggests that the sovereign state is an abstraction that does not fully explain the particulars which actually affect peoples' lives.

State Power

The state used cartography, urban planning, and bureaucracy to make the population legible to it, and thus to have greater authority over it. While these innovations in statecraft is rooted in secularism and Enlightenment ideas, the state itself is not interested in affirming the freedoms of its subject.

This vision saw society as an object that could be optimized, rather than an confederation of citizens coming together under the social contract. Scott calls this belief in continued scientific and technical progress "high modernism."

The move to secular governance rooted in reason and science produced not a system of sovereign states based on a social contract of individuals, but instead a stronger state based on centralized powers. This gave rise to repressive, totalitarian states like the USSR, Nazi Germany, and Maoist China.

Neoliberalism refers to a set of economic reform policies focused on deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization. It suggests that private entity is better than providing goods and services than the state.

On first glance, neoliberalism and higher modernism are fundamentally opposed. Nevertheless, both ideologies share a faith in a crude, utilitarian, and calculative reason and progress.

However, Kingfisher and Goldsmith show that the erosion of the welfare state makes it more difficult for single mothers to survive. The rebranding of single mothers as "gender-neutral worker citizens" also removes the value that they provide to society through caregiving.

Question: How does the abstraction of the rational individual not only transform the state but also transform the values of individual people?

• The reduction of the welfare state did not stop women from strategically navigating the welfare state
• Single mothers emphasize that their unpaid labor is actually hard work, reproducing the neoliberal ideas
• Women welfare recipients have since organized for the expansion of the welfare state, calling for more childcare support

Hoag approaches "the state not as an order generating mechanism that either succeeds or fails in its charge, but rather as a highly fragmented and contested conglomeration of individuals and institutions." Nevertheless, this heterogeneous group of people attempt to show an appearance of coherence.

References:

• James Scott. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
• Catherine Kingfisher and Michael Goldsmith. 2001. Reforming Women in the United States and Aotearoa/New Zealand: A Comparative Ethnography of Welfare Reform in Global Context. American Anthropologist 103(3): 714 – 732.
• Colin Hoag. 2010. The Magic of the Populace: An Ethnography of Illegibility in the South African Immigration Bureaucracy. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 33(1)

Poverty and Development

Discourse of Development

Development refers to the processes in which poor countries attempt to grow their economics, enhance their quality of life, and turn to free market liberalism.

Discourse is any practice that is imbued with meaning. More specifically, it often refers to dominant ideas in the social landscape.

Humans make the world out of discourse. It is also not possible to talk about development without talking about discourse. Discourse also makes power more diffuse.

For example, The Economist's discourse on the South Sudanese refugee crisis is that it is caused by a non-diversified economy, a civil war, the depletion of agriculture, and lack of international aid. This naturally pushes the idea that solutions to the problem are more internal aid, diversifying the economy, constraining inflation, and removing corrupt politicians.

While anthropologists won't contest these causes, they may also add colonialism, neoliberalism, extractivism (of oil), and intersectionality to the discourse.

Another important part of the discourse is efficiency. The focus on efficiency is present to NGO and USAID advertisements, and it also inspired the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) to make massive cuts to US aid.

Discourse of Poverty

The discourse of poverty emerged when colonized countries began demanding independence in the aftermath of WWII, when many colonized people were beginning to conceive of themselves as an "imagined" community.

In particular:

1. As the result of the Cold War, the US was concerned with anti-poverty efforts in the Third World to dissuade them from communism
2. Corporations began expanding internationally and looking to Third World countries for new markets
3. There were racist concerns that the Third World was experiencing very high population growth
4. The US genuinely had faith in exporting technoscience to solve the world's problems

The US achieved this by pushing for bilaterally funded project and collaborating with Third World governments (to oppress socialism).

The discourse of "modernization" was the idea that developing countries could only grow economically if they followed the footsteps of Western countries. However, it later became clear that this was unsuccessful. A later discourse of "basic needs" emerged which focused on getting the people of the Third World basic needs like running water, food, and shelter. This too was unsuccessful in making long-term changes.

In the 1980s and 90s, the World Bank and the IMF embraced the neoliberal discourses of privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization in exchange for funding. This was called "structural adjustment," insinuating that the World Bank and the IMF was merely changing the economic structure of Third World economies to be more efficient. This was also a horrible failure and made the countries more poor. NGOs were tasked with filling in for slashed Third World government programs.

This later end to the "participation" discourse, which was the idea that poor people should be included in any conversations about their economies. Again, this was not effective in making a dent in poverty.

Ferguson found that international development experts in Lesotho failed because they failed to challenge the assumptions of the development discourse. In particular, they saw Lesotho as a "traditional" rural culture engaged in agriculture. In actuality, most Basothos are migrant workers in South America. Livestock was seen as an emergency or retirement fund.

Furthermore, not only do development projects fail to alleviate poverty, it also reinforces the existing political elite by depoliticizing development issues.

Capitalism and Corporation

Corporations are often evaluated according to the ways they make a profit. This is their formal function and stated goals. We either critique or praise corporations based on their profit-making activities.

But anthropology suggests that we need to study the corporation in terms of not only how it generates profits, but also how it shapes and shifts the meaning of social life. How do corporations give our lives meaning, affect how we relate to each other, and create a social sphere that affects how we understand ourselves?

Furthermore, there is this assumption that corporations are homogeneous, rational, and completely driven by supply and demand. But this is not necessarily true. Anthropologists argue that corporations are actually heterogeneous, irrational, and driven by social structures, cultural norms, and emotional needs.

In Liquidated, Ho shows that the corporation is a social space with a culture that people make and remake through:

• Initiation rituals
• Hard work
• A cult of upward mobility

The people in investment banking do not simply desire a decent life and security. They are searching for emotional validation and fulfillment. The social structure, cultural norms, and emotional investment of smartness is central to the reproduction and maintenance of the investment bank as is any profit motive.

"On Wall Street, 'smartness' means more than individual intelligence.; it conveys a naturalized and generic sense of 'impressiveness,' of elite... The culture of smartness is not simply a quality of Wall Street, but a currency, a driving force productive of both profit accumulation and global prowess." - Ho

Hegemony is domination with the consent of the governed. When young people submit themselves to 80-hour work weeks, these young people are willfully consenting to their domination to maintain the status quo of the corporation.

Ong shows that factories were set up in Malaysia because corporations thought that Malaysian women were "qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench assembly production line." Japanese managers talk about the 'eyesight', 'manual dexterity', and 'nimble fingers' of Malaysian women.

In Malaysia, spirit possession was seen to uphold the moral boundaries of society by "attacking people who unknowingly step out of the Malay social order." However, "spirit possession [also[ provides a traditional way of rebelling against authority without punishment, since victims are not blamed for their predicament."

Thus, Ong shows that corporations' rational plans often clashes with cultural particulars.

Both the investment bank and the industrial sweatshop must spend significant effort on acculturating their workforce. They must spend much effort tending to the social and emotional needs of their workers in addition to their material needs.

Graeber describes a "bullshit job" as a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence. Bullshit jobs don't align with any rational account of how the corporation is supposed to work.

Keynesian economics was a limited form of capitalism that focused on distributing the benefits of capitalism across masses of workers. The main idea is that limiting inequality leads to greater economic productivity and prosperity.

As Graeber explains, a chunk of the benefits of increased productivity went to creating a new and basically pointless class of managers. Graeber calls this a rise in managerial feudalism, where the managerial class devises more bullshit jobs for them to manage.

References:

• Karen Ho. 2008. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street
• Aihwa Ong. 1987. The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia. American Ethnologist 15(1).
• David Graeber. 2018. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.

1. "in my culture we value family"

2. "the culture of poverty"

3. Tylor was one of the first anthropologists in England. He developed this definition at the height of European imperialism.

4. However, if a harsh environment explains a culture's traits, the same logic could be used to label a culture "primitive" because of its environment (environmental determinism)

5. She also said that the first sign of humans having civilization was the discovery of an ancient femur that had fully healed.

6. Mead's research showed that (1) nurture could beat nature and (2) culture impacted individual emotions and personality traits.

7. Functionalism eventually fell out of favor because it views cultures as stable and orderly; it is unable to explain social change. It also is unable to explain why a society develops one particular kind of social institution instead of another.

8. Teleology is the explanation of phenomena in terms of purpose instead of cause.

9. Children are not allowed to crawl, and in adulthood they file down their canines so they will not look like animal fangs.

10. An etic reading refers to the study of a culture or a language by people who do not belong to that culture. This contrasts with an emic reading, which analyzes a culture by using the language of the people in this culture.

11. A kothi is a man who takes on an effeminate role and is the receptive partner in sexual intercourse.

12. For example, it has commonly been accepted that race is a social construct. But anthropologists have been open to exploring how there is a material or biological reality to living in a white body or a Black body.

13. "Knowledge is power."