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Transcript
FIRST EDITION THE CREATURE WITH IDEAS AND POWER AN INVESTIGATION OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND HUMAN CULTURE By John Sheehan State University of New York at Cortland Bassim Hamadeh, CEO and Publisher Michael Simpson, Vice President of Acquisitions Jamie Giganti, Senior Managing Editor Jess Estrella, Senior Graphic Designer John Remington, Senior Field Acquisitions Editor Monika Dziamka, Project Editor Brian Fahey, Licensing Specialist Berenice Quirino, Associate Editor Kat Ragudos, Interior Designer Copyright © 2017 by Cognella, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information retrieval system without the written permission of Cognella, Inc. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Cover image copyright © Richard Throssel / Museum of Photographic Arts / Copyright in the Public Domain.. Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 978-1-5165-0412-1 (pbk) / 978-1-5165-0413-8 (br) CONTENTS INTRODUCTION V CHAPTER SEVEN THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 68 CHAPTER ONE THE NUTS AND BOLTS 2 CHAPTER EIGHT BONDING HUMANS TOGETHER: FAMILY, KINSHIP, AND MARRIAGE CHAPTER TWO THE BIOLOGICAL CREATURE 78 10 CHAPTER NINE NATURE AND NURTURE: RACE, ETHNICITY, AND CHAPTER THREE WESTERN “TRUTH” GENDER 88 22 CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER FOUR SELF, US, THEM, AND LAND SOCIAL STRUCTURE, ART, AND RELIGION 108 32 CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER FIVE CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY AN ETHNOLOGICAL CASE STUDY AND APPLIED 44 122 CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER SIX “TELLING” A STORY ANTHROPOLOGY 54 ECONOMIES AND GOVERNMENT 134 IV TH E C R E AT U R E W I T H I D E A S AN D PO W ER: A N I NV E S T I GAT I ON OF A NT HROP OL OGY A ND HUMA N CULT URE CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE MODERN WORLD 144 BIBLIOGRAPHY 163 INTRODUCTION W hat is anthropology? Furthermore, why study it? These are familiar questions to many undergraduate students. Having been one myself, I am sympathetic to your plight. Few choose to take a cultural anthropology class for reasons other than “my advisor suggested it.” My question to you is why did your advisor suggest it? My job in this book is to help you realize why that suggestion was a good one for your personal development as a student, as a worker, as a citizen, and as a functional and informed participator in the strongest democracy this planet has ever known. You have been endowed with power, power to access resources to build a successful life and power to affect the life of billions by the choices you make in a democratic society. I wonder how many at the undergraduate level have thought very deeply about that. I remember the football games, the parties, the angst, and the time devoted to studies, trying to balance all of the competing activities for my time, and trying to do it well. But now, with more years of experience under my belt, I think very deeply about how important each individual’s role is in this “global village,” hence, my self-envisioned role as a teacher and a mentor. I see it as my task to help introduce you to your individual role, but really only in a small way, because each of you must figure that out for yourselves. That is the responsibility of each individual in a society that promotes the ideal of freedom. You have civil rights. That doesn’t mean that the government owes you something just for being born. That is a sentiment smacking of unearned entitlement. What civil rights offer you, in the truest sense, is that no one can put arbitrary obstacles in your path, based on race, sex, gender, religion, etc., that can hamper you from becoming a fully functional, responsible, and contributing member of your family, community, nation, and planet. That is your privilege and that is the path to your happiness. We will refer to these ideas often in this course. Why study anthropology? It is a gilded doorway to help you know yourself. To know yourself, you need to know where you are, where you came from, and where you are going. The better you know yourself, the better your plans for the future can become very realistic and attainable. Your decisions will become wiser and your community will become stronger. Democracy is only an ideal that will survive as a result of well-educated and wise individuals. You, as an individual, have a great opportunity. Your education at this institution is a privilege that few on this planet can aspire to. This course in cultural anthropology is part of a smorgasbord of disciplines that you will sample in four years to enable you to know the very basics of many things that will help you choose a career for which you are capable of performing well and happily. It is not a product that you have already paid for like a pair of shoes in a shopping mall. It is not a negotiating table to haggle for better grades. It is a doorway to your own self. It is up to you to make the most of this experience to expand who you are. The liberal arts by definition are those disciplines that enable those individuals within a community to explore, develop, and enjoy freedom of the mind and body. That is your privilege and your opportunity. VI TH E C R E AT U R E W I T H I D E A S AN D PO W ER: A N I NV E S T I GAT I ON OF A NT HROP OL OGY A ND HUMA N CULT URE This book is designed to help you make the most of them, and to enjoy the football games and the parties too! So much for the pep talk. This book contains 13 chapters. The following list of the chapters lays out the flow of information presented in this course. Chapter 1: The Nuts and Bolts deals with the origins of the discipline of anthropology and defines its four main sub-fields. Chapter 2: The Biological Creature talks about the essence of physical anthropology and biological anthropology: evolution, genetics, primatology, and the human mind. Chapter 3: Western “Truth” deals with the contingent experiences of “reality” that all humans have to make sense of in their lives, both those living today, as well as our ancestors from the past. The focus in this chapter is the development of that notion of reality associated with Western culture. Chapter 4: Self, Us, Them, and Land deals primarily with how early tribal peoples derived culture from their environmental experiences and how they defined themselves in relation to those environments. Chapter 5: Cultural Anthropology discusses the basic elements that make human societies, both past and present, cohesive and how anthropologists study them. Chapter 6: “Telling” a Story examines how artifacts removed from the ground and scientifically dated can augment the information humans share among themselves via oral and written communications. Chapter 7: The Evolution of Cultural Anthropology traces how anthropology as a discipline came into being and how that discipline has evolved over time according to the cultural values of the changing times. Chapter 8: Bonding Humans Together: Family, Kinship, and Marriage deals with those culturally derived bonds that “glue” humans together through time, space, and story. Chapter 9: Nature and Nurture: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender discusses how our cultural bonds and our genetic inheritances are constructed to give humans a sense of community and legacy. Chapter 10: Social Structure, Art, and Religion deals with how the structuring of a society is linked culturally to the religion that that society conceives, and the art that that society projects its belief through. Chapter 11: An Ethnological Case Study and Applied Anthropology serves as an example of how all of the sub-disciplines of cultural anthropology come together to tell the story of a people, in this case, the Haudenosaunee. Chapter 12: Economies and Government deals with how humans extract, use, and exchange natural and social resources, and what rules apply to those resource utilizations, both locally and non-locally through time. Chapter 13: The Modern World grounds the student in the contemporary world. Ideas of modernity, international integration, and environmental and ecological issues will be discussed. CHAPTER ONE THE NUTS AND BOLTS Let’s return to the question, what is anthropology? Anthropology is the study of humans, the biological and mental creature that humans are, as well as all of the collective activities of that creature past and present. The word anthropology is derived from two Greek roots: anthropos—“man” or “human”—and logos—“the study of ” or “derived from reason.” So everything that humans are, think, and do fall under the umbrella discipline of anthropology. It is a pretty big field. In fact, it is the largest field of study in the liberal arts, since all other fields of human endeavor fall within its domain. Hence, every other field of study is in some way anthropological. Because of this, one of the key terms in the discipline of anthropology is holism. Holism is a perspective in anthropology that attempts to study a culture by looking at all parts of the system and seeing how those parts are interrelated. Incidentally, any study that a student wishes to pursue, and any paper that a student wishes to write, can ultimately be justified as an anthropological study. The discipline of anthropology attempts to put human beings in a perspective that makes sense to the individual as well as to the society. 2 It attempts to answer the contingent questions that each of us asks in the course of our lifetime to make sense of things, to create for ourselves that which is “real.” Who am I? Why am I alive? What am I supposed to do? Am I important? How am I like some people? Why am I different from others? And perhaps the most important FIG. 1.1. The Scream by Edvard Munch is the iconic image of angst. question, where do I go when I die? To me, an even more important question is what should I do with the finite time I have remaining in this physical container I call my body? These are called contingent questions. Contingent, derived from the Latin word contingere, is derived from the prefix con—“with”—and tingere—“to touch” and means “to have contact with” or “befall.” Contingency has to do with those tangential factors in our lives that impinge upon us daily and may or may not be out of our control. These include all events that are possible but uncertain. Contingent feelings can lead us to inspiration and drive so that we can “rise to the occasion.” Or, they can fill us with angst and dread and lead us to self-doubt, indecision, and paralysis. Angst is a feeling of anxiety and is quite uncomfortable. In dealing with feelings, humans construct symbolic images and artifacts to help channel those feelings away from destructive patterns and into organized, and often, but not always, constructive 4 TH E CR EAT U R E W I T H I D E A S AN D PO W ER: A N I NV E S T I GAT I ON OF A NT HROP OL OGY A ND HUMA N CULT URE communally enacted rituals, customs, histories, polities, and religions. A polity is simply a political organization and is derived from the Greek word polis—“city-state.” The term religion is both a very simple and a very complex word due to its common use in meaning a spiritually organized group. In its basic sense, religion is a Latin word religare, derived from the prefix res, which means the “idea, the concept, or the essence” of something, coupled FIG. 1.2A AND 1.2B. Gangs such as the Crips and the Bloods with the root ligare—to bind. Hence, a religion is identify themselves via their “colors,” which on the face of it a set of ideas and ideals to which one binds one’s seems to be a benign way of identifying their respective groups mind via an act of “ligio,” much like a ligament via graphic symbols. But, woe betide the gang member wearing the wrong “color” in the wrong territory. In this sense, gang colors binds muscle tissue or a ligature binds up wounds are “religious” symbols; they are strongly embedded with cultural with stitches. The idea of ligatory binding can meanings. be expanded to the mental concept of “legis”lation—the ideas that bind people together in a polity, an act of “legio.” The term republic is derived from the prefix res, which means the “idea, the concept, or the essence” of something coupled with the root publicus—the people. A republic is quite literally “the thing of the people.” Religious ideas can also bind people to a spiritual set of commandments and rituals such as in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Witchcraft as much as they can bind Democrats and Republicans in a constitutional democracy. Gangs such as the Crips and the Bloods or fraternities and sororities follow “religious” rules and FIG. 1.3. Roman Legion. rituals by the types of “colors” they wear or the types of initiations they perform. And ultimately, in ancient Rome itself, the religious ideals of the Roman people were upheld by the “binding” enforced by the legion itself—that famous instrument of military binding. Even modernity essentially practices science as a “religion,” by conforming to the rules and rituals of the scientific method. By saying this, I am not declaring that fundamentalist monotheism and evolution are equally true and valid religions. What I am saying is that both sets of ideas, mutually antagonistic to many in contemporary culture, are, by definition, religions. I leave the reader to discern how true any religion is. Scientists ascertain truth by a self-corrective process called the scientific method. T HE NUT S A ND BOLT S 5 The scientific method is a means by which to investigate the natural and social world involving critical thinking, logical reasoning, and skeptical thought. This approach to garnering knowledge is in contrast to personal opinion as well as religious or spiritual revelation and religious or spiritual faith. An opinion is a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty. An opinion is not, by definition, scientific, though it FIG. 1.4B. Isaac Newton. FIG. 1.4A. Albert Einstein. may be. Testability of phenomena and verifiability of conclusions according to prescribed norms by the scientific community are mandatory for ideas to become accepted and scientific. Others must be able to come to your conclusions for science to contribute to the body of knowledge accepted as “truth.” The beauty of scientific truth is that it is malleable; it is susceptible to change and refinement according to more thoughtful and sophisticated experiments. Hence, the body of human knowledge based on reason is self-corrective as it increases. The scientific method is fundamental to the human notion of “progress,” an idea that will be developed more fully in Chapter 4. Unlike scriptural and spiritual religion, skepticism lies at the heart of scientific inquiry. Skepticism is the doctrine that true knowledge is uncertain. Incidentally, scriptural religions do change over time. Although the Dead Sea Scrolls may be codified on paper, which means that the words cannot change over time, social circumstances do change over time, and scriptural “truth” changes while the words do not. For example, both the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament forbid women to speak in a synagogue or a church, yet many reformed Jewish and Christian denominations do ordain women to speak and preach in “holy” places. What has changed with time in these instances is the culture, hence the interpretation of language, not the language itself. Place, along with time, will be discussed in Chapter 4. Ironically, I do not claim that all scientists accept the discoveries of others without prejudice and dispassion, especially radically new theories. Scientists are human after all and the products of the cultures in which their minds were trained. Charles Darwin was hounded and lampooned in his day by his “scientific” contemporaries, that is, until his ideas grew to become the norm. Albert Einstein too was vilified for assailing the sacrosanct laws of Isaac Newton with his new-fangled ideas about relativity, until repeated and increasingly sophisticated tests continually confirmed Einstein’s formulas. Ironically, Einstein failed to carry through to the logical conclusions the possibilities that his theories opened up because they 6 TH E CR EAT U R E W I T H I D E A S AN D PO W ER: A N I NV E S T I GAT I ON OF A NT HROP OL OGY A ND HUMA N CULT URE would do away with the notion of God that he had learned as a child. Others were left to take up the reins of unsentimental science and pioneer onward where he feared to tread. In the scientific method, there are two dispassionate and logical philosophical means of testing proposed ideas—the inductive method and the deductive method. For the inductive method of investigation, a scientist first makes observations, then collects data, and then proceeds to formulate a hypothesis. For the deductive method of investigation, a scientist first develops a theory and then develops a specific hypothesis before finally testing it. The data collected in scientific experiments are called variables. Variables are measured as carefully as possible with the highest degree of sophistication possible for accuracy. Statistical analyses discern patterns among variables. Researchers use the observations about different variables to develop their hypotheses. A hypothesis is an idea that correlates proposed patterns and relationships among observed data. Testing these relationships and patterns is the fundamental operation of the scientific method. If the conclusions of a hypothesis are found to be repeatable and valid, then that hypothesis can be integrated with other repeatable and valid hypotheses into a theory. A theory is an accepted pronouncement that explains natural and social phenomena. In this way, the corpus of human knowledge is progressed. Anthropology is one of the social sciences, along with history and sociology. The history of the discipline of anthropology begins with the Medieval Period in Europe. Truth at that time was garnered both spiritually and physically, that is, by the Bible and by scientists. Medieval scientists often used the deductive method in experimenting with natural phenomena, that is, they reasoned from God as the “Prime Mover” in all things, and all variables that conflicted with their scriptural notion of deity were deemed corrupt and discarded. This type of “spiritual” science was termed Scholasticism. Scholasticism attempted to wed the rational discernment of the natural human mind, which included the great “pagan” Classical Greek and Roman philosophers, with the revelation of codified scripture. The Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas was the most noted Scholastic thinker of the age. This method of inquiry came under fire during the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation when literacy became the hallmark of all those thinking intellectuals who were “protesting” against the ideas of the Catholic Church. Religious reform led to political reform and social reform. By the seventeenth century, observant scientists, such as Isaac Newton, had begun to codify the laws of physics after repeated hypotheses and theories continuously led to the same observable phenomena. With the irretrievable split between the Catholic and Protestant churches during the Wars of Religion, science and the scientific method displaced religious revelation from scriptures as the source of truth in the natural world. This had profound consequences. FIG. 1.5. Thomas Aquinas. T HE NUT S A ND BOLT S 7 Since public truth was no longer to be found in the Bible, humans and their scholarly activists, the Humanists, were determined to reconstruct European societies on the principles of scientific observation. Spiritual belief became a private affair. Church and state were to become separated. This new philosophical view of the cosmos and its organization was called positivism. Untrammeled by the dictates of organized religion, scientists grew excited and optimistic about the new scientific pursuit of truth, hence the term positivism. The eighteenth century French philosopher August Comte has been called “the apostle of positivism.” What Comte optimistically believed was that humans, by themselves and FIG. 1.6. Auguste Comte. using science as their guide, could develop egalitarian, prosperous, and happy utopian societies throughout Europe and the world. To develop these utopias, European leaders would wed the technological advancements coming from the laboratories of mathematicians, biologists, chemists, and physicists to the scientists of the new societies. These scholars of society were called sociologists. Sociology became the discipline that studied the origin, development, organization, and functioning of the new human societies. Historians would help ground these new social ideas upon the bedrock of the lessons learned from old, documented, and analyzed events. History is the branch of knowledge that records and explains past events. These physical and social scientists were men who lived in urban societies; that is, they were specialists who were enabled to use their daily hours in study and experimentation and not use their labors to work the fields in order to put bread on their tables. That would be the social function of the peasants. It is ironic that the urban scholars became the men to ponder natural law and not the brute workers in the fields. Their conclusions, therefore, should not be surprising. Rather than live in a holistic harmony with a spiritualized nature, as tribal societies do, these positivists demystified nature into a warehouse of physical objects free for the taking by progressive societies. Progress entailed material expansion of goods, extension of trade, acquisition of lands, and evangelization of progressive ideas. In this process of progressive Western growth, social scientists bumped up against people as “primitive” as their own tribal ancestors. What could be learned from them in order to holistically round out their body of scientific knowledge and create the fully integrated and benign human “utopian” civilization? Positivists needed to study these peoples. Thus anthropology was born. We will have much more to say about positivistic progress. Anthropology then, by studying humans through time, is really a study of how we all see ourselves in the here and now. Traditional anthropology is comprised of four main sub-fields: physical anthropology, archeology, linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology. This book and this course will focus primarily on the latter, cultural anthropology, but will include heavy dollops of the other sub-fields in fleshing out the discipline. Here are the nuts and bolts: Physical anthropology studies the human creature as a biological species. It focuses on the evolution of humans through time and the resulting variations in the human creature that exist 8 TH E CR EAT U R E W I T H I D E A S AN D PO W ER: A N I NV E S T I GAT I ON OF A NT HROP OL OGY A ND HUMA N CULT URE today. This will raise the thorny questions about race and ethnicity that are prevalent today as well. The word physical is derived from the Greek root: physica—“of nature” or “natural.” Archeology studies prehistoric and historic life forms and cultures through the excavation of fossils, artifacts, and material remains. It endeavors to tell the story of human lifestyles and history where no written documents remain or ever existed. The word archeology is derived from two Greek roots – archein—“to begin”—and logos—“the study of ” or “derived from reason.” Linguistic anthropology studies the nature of language, both oral and written. In addition, linguistic anthropology studies how humans understand reality through language. The word language is derived from the Latin root lingua—“tongue.” Cultural anthropology studies the mental, social, and spiritual constructs of human societies in both the past and the present. It focuses on how values, morals, and ethics are derived from the environment and from our ancestral norms. These mental structures are collectively termed “culture.” The word culture, derived from the root word “cult,” is ultimately derived from the Latin root cultus—“to plant.” Culture is a set of ideas that are “planted” into our minds. Having atomized the discipline into its major sub-fields, let’s look a little closer at each subfield in turn in the following chapters, after a chapter that looks at how contingency drives humans to orient themselves in their environments and experiences. T HE NUT S A ND BOLT S KEY WORDS 9 Opinion Angst Physical anthropology Anthropology Polity Archeology Positivism Contingent Republic Cultural anthropology Religion Deductive method Scientific method History Skepticism Holism Sociology Hypothesis Theory Inductive method Variables Linguistic anthropology IMAGE CREDITS • • • • • • • • Fig. 1.1: Edvard Munch / Copyright in the Public Domain. Fig. 1.2: ScottSteiner / Wikimedia Commons / Copyright in the Public Domain. Fig. 1.2: Mattho69 / Wikimedia Commons / Copyright in the Public Domain. Fig. 1.3: Copyright © 2006 by CristianChirita / Wikimedia Commons, (CC BY-SA 3.0) at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_turtle_formation_on_trajan_column.jpg. Fig. 1.4A: Oren Jack Turner / Copyright in the Public Domain. Fig. 1.4B: Godfrey Kneller / Copyright in the Public Domain. Fig. 1.5: Carlo Crivella / Copyright in the Public Domain. Fig. 1.6: Copyright in the Public Domain.