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Transcript
Culture and Comparison We start this topic with a reflection about travelling. Reflection: Think about yourself as a traveller, especially when you are travelling to get away from it all, deliberately seeking an escape from the dullness of a world in which so much is as we expect it to be. What are the differences, perhaps absurd little details, which can enchant you because of their unexpectedness? As well as being fascinated by such differences as the angle of the landscape and the design of road signs, we constitute the people we encounter as "other" different from us. This raises issues both for travellers and, especially, for anthropologists. Claude Levi-Straus wrote Tristes Tropiques as an autobiographical account of being an anthropologist. He seems to have experienced anthropology as an almost appallingly lonely vocation, one in which he was always the outsider. One, which he finds while he is travelling, and experiencing a sense of 'otherness'. Here are two of his observations: "While remaining human himself, the anthropologist tries to study and judge mankind from a point of view sufficiently lofty and remote to allow him to disregard the particular circumstances of a given society or civilisation". "There is no way out of the dilemma: either the anthropologist adheres to the norms of his own group and other groups inspire him no more than a fleeting curiosity which is never quite devoid of disapproval, or he is capable of giving himself wholeheartedly to these other groups and his objectivity is vitiated by the fact that, intentionally or not, he has had to withhold himself from at least one society in order to devote himself to all" (p354). What does it mean to be 'human' in this context? Eriksen's chapter 2 looks at this issue form a different angle than LeviStrauss as in the end he reminds us that anthropologists have their own culture. Eriksen stresses the centrality of fieldwork to anthropology. We are most often dealing with the phenomena themselves, rather than abstract models. There are ethical issues involved in using other peoples' lives as our object of study (and this will even apply to you as you carry out the tasks for this course). We can never gain perfect access to peoples' lives, and not only for reasons of privacy. We are kept at a distance by language or by the status of those we ask to help us. Eriksen has some useful things to say about the point of fieldwork. Anthropologists need to be able to connect a local reality (whether from their own fieldwork or from someone else's) to a comparative conceptual framework. It is worth noticing Godfrey Lienhardt's recipe for elephant and rabbit stew at the bottom of page 18! The study of culture (and the comparative analysis of cultures) is one of the major contributions of anthropology to Social Sciences. Culture is a key concept in anthropology. It usually refers to learned, accumulated experience. ‘Culture, -say Japanese Culture- refers to those socially transmitted patterns for behaviour characteristic of a particular social group’ (Keesing 1981). Culture, however, is not a clear-cut concept. The idea of culture, like the idea of the 'unconscious' in psychology, is used by everybody and it is used for all sorts of events. These two concepts have an immensely popular appeal. People seem to know about them, to use them to discuss everything, even very different things (i.e. the culture of Islam, the youth culture, the culture of ants). People do not question what Culture may be, it is just a word we 'feel' we know about it. Anthropologists argue that we are so familiar with the term, that we take it for granted. Culture does not always mean the same, and cannot be applied to all situations alike. Furthermore, there is not one single definition of culture or cultures. In fact, each definition of culture, help us comprehend a concept that it is, by nature, ambiguous and complex. However, much of the anthropologists work is about discussing, thinking and analysing culture. Definitions of Culture That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. (Tylor 1871) The mass of learned and transmitted motor reactions, habits, techniques, ideas, and values— and the behaviour they induce. (Kroeber 1948) [All the] historically created designs for living, explicit and implicit, rational, irrational, and non-rational, which exist at any given time as potential guides for the behaviour of man. (Kluckhohn and Kelly 1945) Patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts. (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952) The sum total of knowledge, attitudes and habitual behaviour patterns shared and transmitted by the members of a particular society. (Linton 1940) The fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their actions (Geertz 1957) From the point of view of most people, culture is invisible much of the time, over-whelmed by common sense and ordinariness. But anthropologists, once they start focusing on other cultures, are faced with the question, what is this all for? What do all these forms of "knowledge, belief, art, morals custom and habits" do and how do they arise? The question applies as much to us as to others, as soon as we stop taking anything for granted. Reflection However we analyse them, individuals are socially constituted, defined by the way others see them and by the categories of their culture. What do naming customs demonstrate about personhood? In some cultures we find more explicit social placing of individuals than we do in our own. A person may seem to be one of a list of items being named. How could a naming pattern emphasise the unity of the sibling group, or the replenishment of a family over time? What symbolic connections do the various parts of your own name make? Eriksen points out the opposition always found between nature and culture, and the two ways in which nature is perceived (pp. 36 - 37). Culture necessarily sets up a relationship with nature, absorbing biological necessities such as birth, death and the need to eat, clothing them in cultural forms. These forms may be elaborate and wildly different across the world, and anthropologists have approached them with a variety of perspectives. In order to contextualise this discussion about nature and culture, anthropologists have often looked at the places where this division is more apparent (birth and death). It is in the field of death studies and religion, where anthropologists have found many keys to the understanding of culture. Next we will introduce you to different ethnographic pieces about death and religion. Read them out carefully, and think how your own experiences can be analysed using the ideas these anthropologists provide. Death related beliefs and practices have long occupied a position of great importance in anthropological study of religion, for their diversity across cultures stands in sharp contrast to the universality of death itself. Loring Danforth discusses death ritual in rural Greece. The author provides a useful initial discussion of the approach (which he does not in fact adopt) known as functionalism in relation to death ritual. Before you read the extract, however, it is important to re-cap the importance of the functionalist school in Anthropology for the study of death and religion. Functionalist views explain all social institutions as contributing to the maintenance and stability of society. The functional approach to religion had its origin in the work of Emile Durkheim, a French sociologist, and was developed further in the work of British social anthropologists. Functionalists, in their attempts to demonstrate how a religious system serves to affirm and preserve the social system by establishing equilibrium and maintaining social solidarity, learned much from the analysis of death-related behaviour. This functional approach to the study of death-related beliefs and practices also characterized the writings of many British social anthropologists. Radcliffe-Brown, strongly influenced by Durkheim and his school, wrote in his study of the funeral customs of the Andaman Islanders that a person's death "constitutes a partial destruction of the social cohesion, the normal social life is disorganized, the social equilibrium is disturbed. After the death the society has to organize itself anew and reach a new condition of equilibrium" (1933:285). This view, which has been widely accepted by social scientists and has become almost commonplace in popular consciousness, was clearly expressed by another British social anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski (1954: 53): 'The ceremonial of death which ties the survivors to the body and rivets them to the place of death, the beliefs in the existence of the spirit, in its beneficent influences or malevolent intentions, in the duties of a series of commemorative or sacrificial ceremonies - in all this religion counteracts the centrifugal forces of fear, dismay, demoralization, and provides the most powerful means of reintegration of the group's shaken solidarity and of the reestablishment of its morale.' The functional approach to the study of religion and particularly to the study of death rites has been severely criticized for its inability to deal with social and cultural change. As Clifford Geertz (1973:142-143) and others have convincingly argued, functionalism, with its emphasis on balance, equilibrium, and stability, has failed to explain the dysfunctional aspects of religious behaviour and its ability to contribute to the transformation or disintegration of social and cultural systems. What is needed is a more sophisticated approach that makes possible the full appreciation of the role of religion in the creation, development, and communication of systems of meaning. It is only in such a context that the true significance of death-related activities can be understood.