Download Slides Lecture 1

Outlining anthropology and its
various perspectives.
Dr. Zubeeda Quraishy
Department of Informatics,
University of Oslo, Norway
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What is Anthropology?
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Are you as interested as I am in knowing how,
when, and where human life arose, what the first
human societies and languages were like, why
cultures have evolved along diverse but often
remarkably convergent pathways, why
distinctions of rank came into being, and how
small bands and villages gave way to chiefdoms
and chiefdoms to mighty states and empires?
--Marvin Harris, Our Kind,1990.
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What is Social Anthropology?
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Social Anthropology is the comparative study of human
conduct and thought in their social context. Societies around
the world vary enormously in their social, cultural and political
forms, and their individual members display an initially
overwhelming diversity of ideas and behaviour. The study of
these variations, and the common humanity which underlies
them and renders them intelligible to sympathetic outsiders,
lies at the heart of Social Anthropology.
Anthropologists acquire their information through a distinctive
method termed ‘participant observation’. This means that they
spend many months or even years living among the people
with whom they are researching, sharing their experiences as
far as possible, and hence attempting to gain a well-rounded
understanding of that society and of the activities and opinions
of its members
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Definition of Anthropology
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The word anthropology itself tells the basic story-from the Greek anthropos ("human") and logia
("study")—
It is the study of humankind, from its beginnings
millions of years ago to the present day.
Nothing human is alien to anthropology.
Indeed, of the many disciplines that study our
species, Homo sapiens, only anthropology seeks
to understand the whole panorama--in geographic
space and evolutionary time--of human existence.
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Various Sub disciplines of
Anthropology
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1. Social and Cultural Anthropology
2. Physical Anthropology
3. Ethnology and Ethnography
4. Archeological Anthropology
5. Psychological Anthropology
6. Political Anthropology
7. Economic Anthropology
8. Visual Anthropology
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(Contd..) Sub disciplines of
Anthropology
9. Applied Anthropology
 10. Linguistic Anthropology
 11. Medical Anthropology
 12.Nutrition Anthropology
 13. Development Anthropology
 14.Molecular Anthropology
and the list continues……
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While it is easy to
define,anthropology is difficult to
describe…..
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..as its subject matter is both exotic (e.g., star lore
of the Australian aborigines) and common place
(anatomy of the foot).
Its focus is both sweeping (the evolution of
language) and microscopic (the use-wear of
obsidian tools).
Anthropologists may study ancient Mayan
hieroglyphics, the music of African Pygmies, and
the corporate culture of a U.S. car manufacturer.
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Why anthropologists are interested
in studying cultures?
‘Curiosity’
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We all "do" anthropology because curiosity
is a universal human trait.
We are curious about ourselves and about
other people, the living as well as the dead,
here and around the globe
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Anthropological questions are often
asked by all?
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Do all societies have marriage customs?
Do all cultures have different ways of greetings
and food habits?
As a species, are human beings innately violent
or peaceful?
Did the earliest humans have light or dark skins?
When did people first begin speaking a
language?
How related are humans, monkeys and
chimpanzees?
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Is Homo sapiens's brain still evolving?
If such questions are part of folk
anthropology…
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…practiced in school yards, office
buildings and neighborhood cafes..
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How does the science of
anthropology differ from ordinary
opinion sharing and "common
sense"?
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Comparative Method
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Anthropology begins with a simple yet
powerful idea: any detail of our behavior
can be understood better when it is seen
against the backdrop of the full range of
human behavior.
attempts to explain similarities and
differences among people holistically, in
the context of humanity as a whole.
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Comparative method (contd…)
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Anthropology seeks to uncover principles of
behavior that apply to all human communities.
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To an anthropologist, diversity itself (seen in
body shapes and sizes, customs, clothing, speech,
religion, and worldview--)provides a frame of
reference for understanding any single aspect of
life in any given community.
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It is essential to study in the context and compare
against the different panorama
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We [anthropologists] have been the first to insist on a
number of things: that the world does not divide into the
pious and the superstitious; that political order is possible
without centralized power and principled justice without
codified rules; that the norms of reason were not fixed in
Greece, the evolution of morality not consummated in
England. Most important, we were the first to insist that
we see the lives of others through lenses of our own
grinding and that they look back on ours through ones of
their own.
--Clifford Geertz
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History of anthropological
conceptions on culture
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“Culture is descriptive, inclusive, and
relativistic” John. H.Bodley,1994.
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I use the term culture to refer
collectively to a society and its way of
life or in reference to human culture as
a whole.
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The modern technical definition of
culture is defined ..
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“ as socially patterned human thought and
behavior”, originally proposed by the nineteenthcentury British anthropologist, Edward Tylor.
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Created exhaustive universal lists of the content of culture, usually as
guides for further research. Others have listed and mapped all the
culture traits of particular geographic areas.
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{(Food habits, way of dressing, marriage customs, ways
of greeting, working pattern, life style, values( family,
work place, place of worship, at the house of relatives,
strangers, men to men, women – women, men – women,
elders towards children and vise versa acc to age and
r.ship etc)}.
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Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn,
published a list of 160 different
definitions of culture in 1952.
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the list indicates the diversity of the
anthropological concept of culture. The
specific culture concept that particular
anthropologists work with is an important
matter because it may influence the
research problems they investigate, their
methods and interpretations, and the
positions they take on public policy issues.
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Diverse Definitions of Culture
Topical:Culture consists of everything on a list of topics,
or categories, such as social organization, religion, or
economy
Historical:Culture is social heritage, or tradition, that is
passed on to future generations
Behavioral:Culture is shared, learned human behavior, a
way of life
Normative:Culture is ideals, values, or rules for living
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Contd…
Functional:Culture is the way humans solve
problems of adapting to the environment or
living together
Mental:Culture is a complex of ideas, or
learned habits, that inhibit impulses and
distinguish people from animals
Structural:Culture consists of patterned and
interrelated ideas, symbols, or behaviors
Symbolic:Culture is based on arbitrarily
assigned meanings that are shared by a
society
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Culture involves at least three
components:
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What people think
What they do
The material products they produce.
Mental processes, beliefs, knowledge, and
values are parts of culture.
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Important principles of culture…
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Process of learning, teaching and reproducing are
essential characteristics of culture. Culture exists in
a constant state of change.
Culture consists of systems of meaning -- members
of a human society must agree to relationships
between a word, behavior,(request you to eat food
and take away the food rudely from front of you ) or
other symbol and its corresponding significance or
meaning.
Culture is described in a relativistic way as different
human societies will inevitably agree upon different
relationships and meanings. (Object and a word-door
and its meaning in English).
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Properties of culture:
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Culture has several properties:
shared (it is a social phenomenon)
learned (culture is learned not biologically
inherited) how culture is taught & reproduced is
also crucial
symbolic (speech is a symbolic element of human
language)
transmitted cross-generationally (Kroeber,1917
and Leslie White,1949 treat culture as a
superorganic entity).
adaptive, and integrated.
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There are many who depart from the
views expressed and regard culture
as …
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Objective reality
Not superorganic approach but has human
carriers.
an observable phenomenon and people’s
unique possession
People can be deprived of culture against
their will.
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Contd….
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From the different definitions it is
known that there is much
disagreement about the word and
concept of culture.
So, an ongoing negotiation and
conversation about what culture
should mean is continuing.
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Clifford Geertz(1926- present)
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Clifford Geertz best known for his
ethnographic studies emphasizes on the
importance of the symbolic – of systems
of meaning – as it relates to culture,
cultural change and the study of culture.
The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973
is best known for his ethnographic studies
of Javanese culture
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What cultural anthropologists are
doing at Intel & Microsoft?
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Understanding alien cultures and
finding out what’s important in those
cultures.
What people are doing in their daily
lives?
What people are doing with
technology?
How digital home differs from culture to
culture?
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What is society?
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A society is any group of people (or, less commonly,
plants or animals) living together in a group and
constituting a single related, interdependent
community. This word is frequently taken to include
entire national communities; for instance, comment
upon some aspect of U.S.or Indian society.
Society can also be used to refer to smaller groups
of people, as when we refer to "rural societies" or
"academic society," etc.
Society is distinguished from culture in that society
generally refers to the community of people while
culture generally refers to the systems of meaning -what Geertz calls "webs of significance" which
govern the conduct and understanding of people's
lives. (*no clear diff between culture and society)
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Anthropological perspectives
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Evolutionary Perspective:
Anthropology brings an explicit, evolutionary
approach to the study of human behavior. Each of
anthropology's four main subfields-socio cultural,
biological, archaeology, and linguistic
anthropology--acknowledges that Homo has a
long evolutionary history that must be studied if
one is to know what it means to be a human
being.
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Cultural Anthropology
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The discipline’s largest branch in N. America applies the comparative
method and evolutionary perspective to human culture.
Culture represents the entire database of knowledge, values, and
traditional ways of viewing the world, which have been transmitted
from one generation ahead to the next--nongenetically, apart from
DNA--through words, concepts, and symbols.
Cultural anthropologists study humans through a descriptive lens
called the ethnographic method, based on participant observation, in
tandem with face-to-face interviews, normally conducted in the native
tongue.
Ethnographers compare what they see and hear themselves with the
observations and findings of studies conducted in other societies.
Originally, anthropologists pieced together a complete way of life for
a culture, viewed as a whole that is, in a holistic perspective.
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Cultural anthropology (contd..)
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Today, more focus is on a narrower aspect of
cultural life, such as economics, politics,
religion or art.
Cultural anthropologists seek to understand
the internal logic of another society. It helps
outsiders make sense of behaviors that, like
face painting or scarification, may seem
bizarre or senseless.
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Cultural anthropology (contd)
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Anthropology helps us to see our
own culture more clearly by
understanding the differences
between cultures.
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Comparative method &
Ethnocentrism…
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Comparative method helps an
anthropologist to avoid "ethnocentrism," the
tendency to interpret strange customs on the
basis of preconceptions derived from one's
own cultural background.
Cultural anthropologists not only study rain
forest tribes in Brazil but growing numbers
now study U.S. groups instead, applying
anthropological perspectives to their own
culture and society.
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Linguistic Anthropology
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"As you commanded me, I, Spider Woman, have
created these First People. They are fully and
firmly formed; they have movement. But they
cannot talk. That is the proper thing they lack. So
I want you to give them speech."
So, Sotuknang gave them speech, a different
language to each color, with respect for each
other's difference. He gave them also the wisdom
and the power to reproduce and multiply.
--Hopi Indian Emergence Myth
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Language….
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Hallmark of the human species holds a
special fascination for most anthropologists
Has enabled Homo sapiens to transcend the
limits of individual memory.
It is upon language that culture itself
depends--and within language that
humanity's knowledge resides.
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Archaeology
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Human record is written not only in alphabets and
books, but preserved in other kinds of material
remains-- cave paintings, pictographs, discarded
stone tools, earthenware vessels, religious figurines,
abandoned baskets– found in tattered shreds and
patches of ancient societies.
Fragmentary but fascinating record is interpreted to
reassemble long-ago cultures and forgotten ways of
life.
Studies have been extended in two directions-backward some 3 million years to the bones and
stone tools of our proto human ancestors, and
forward to the reconstruction of life ways and
communities of 19th-century America.
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Biological Anthropology
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Biological (or physical) anthropologists
Looks at Homo sapiens as a genus and species,
tracing their biological origins, evolutionary
development, and genetic diversity.
Study the bio cultural prehistory of Homo to
understand human nature and, ultimately, the
evolution of the brain and nervous system itself.
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Four main branches of
anthropology…
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Cultural, Linguistic,
Archaeology, and
Biological anthropology
make anthropology whole.
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Examples of Anthropological
Perspectives…
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Perspectives in Anthropology brings together
information about many diverse attributes of
MAN in an attempt to understand him in its
entirety. As the subtlety and complexity of
anthropology becomes better understood, the
issues emerging from the integration of biology,
behaviour and culture inter alia human evolution,
primate behaviour and human variation shall
become increasingly relevant and interesting
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Anthropological Perspectives on
Palliative Care (medical & cultural
anthropology)
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Palliation is unique in different cultures. (For
ex, Sepik Society).
Complex “negotiations” between biomedicine
and culture frequently take place. (Navajo,
Ethiopean, Sepik, Hindus and Islamic
cultures)
Cultural anthropology helps us see dying as
a social process.
It provides us with a number of important
tools with which to understand this universal
yet culture-specific process.
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Contd….
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Anthropology asks us to look at the way in
which the process of dying is organized in
time and space as well as at the web of
social relations in which the process takes
place.
(From Concepts to Reality,
Anthropological Perspectives on Palliative
Care by GREGORY PAPPAS)
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Anthropological perspectives on
Health Care(for ex, Global issues in
midwifery)
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A distressing cross-cultural trend is showing up in the
growing body of anthropological literature about
midwifery and birth in the developing world. Many
instances can be quoted from different countries and
cultures wherein how midwives and pregnant women are
treated.
Robbie Davis-Floyd, Ph.D., is a Research Fellow in the
Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas,
Austin.
Midwifery Today E-News (Vol 2 Issue 18 May 5, 2000)
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Female Reproductive Health: An
Anthropological Perspective Medical Anthropology
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Reproduction follows many patterns in different societies
with varying consequences for health.
Anthropological research on optimal reproductive
strategies from the cross cultural and evolutionary
perspective.
By exploring the anthropology of variables such as
trauma, abuse and infanticide anthropologists hope to
show the foundations of modern day return to
"alternative" reproductive health practices such as
midwifery, physical therapies, and traditional nutrition
including phytomedicines.
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Anthropological Perspectives on
Kinship (contd..)
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Anthropological Perspectives On Kinship by
Ladislav Holy
Changes in the conceptualisation of kinship brought
about by new reproductive technologies and the
growing interest in culturally specific notions of
personhood and gender.
The extent to which western assumptions have
guided anthropological study of kinship in the past.
In the process, a growing sensitivity on the part of
anthropologists is revealed to individual ideas of
personhood and gender, and encourages further
critical reflection on cultural bias in approaches to
the subject.
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Anthropological perspectives on
migration and migration history
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‘Migration is a key social phenomenon’
Migration has considerably contributed to
changing perceptions of immigrants and as well
the host cultures.
Mass character of immigrants and their
complexity has affected the adaptation processes
and social interaction .
Important to conduct the historical and
anthropological/ethnographical case studies on migrant
movements, migrant incorporation/exclusion and migrant
representation etc. in both sending and receiving
countries.
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Ethnicity and Nationalism
Anthropological Perspectives
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Anthropology has the advantage of generating first-hand
knowledge of social life at the level of everyday
interaction.
To a great extent, this is the locus where ethnicity is
created and re-created.
Ethnicity emerges and is made relevant through ongoing
social situations and encounters, and through people's
ways of coping with the demands and challenges of life.
From its vantage-point right at the centre of local life,
social anthropology is in a unique position to investigate
these processes.
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Contd…
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Anthropological approaches also enable us to
explore the ways in which ethnic relations are being
defined and perceived by people; how they talk and
think about their own group as well as other groups,
and how particular world-views are being maintained
or contested.
The significance of ethnic membership to people can
best be investigated through that detailed on-theground research which is the hallmark of
anthropology.
Social anthropology, being a comparative discipline,
studies both differences and similarities between
ethnic phenomena & provides a nuanced and
complex vision of ethnicity in the contemporary
world.
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Anthropological Perspectives on
Gender
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Examines the cultural constructions of
femininities and masculinities from a crosscultural perspective.
**Our discussions will examine how individuals
and societies imagine, negotiate, perform and
contest dominant gender ideologies, roles,
relations and identities. (share own experiences &
personal backgrounds)
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What does it mean to be human?
While the question may never be
fully answered, the study of
anthropology titled as "immense
journey" by Loren Eiseley has
attracted some of the world's
greatest thinkers, whose
discoveries forever changed our
understanding of ourselves.
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Information Systems from Social
Science Perspective (Anthropology)
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“While technological determinism can be applicable and
useful in situations that are characterized by high degree
of control and short time frames, it has limited value in
dynamic and complex situations that unfold over longer
periods of time.
Technological determinism cannot adequately account for
the interactions between ICT, the people who design,
implement and use them, and the social and
organisational contexts in which the technologies and
people are embedded.“ (Kling et al. 2000 p.49-50)
(relation-ship between technical and social factors in
working processes)
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(Contd..) Information Systems &
Anthropology
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Bansler (1987) describes Høyer’s theory in these
terms:
“It is insufficient to look at an enterprise as a
technical system, as humans play a key role in the
enterprise’s function, and because humans have
certain needs and behaviour, that must be taken
into account.
The system engineer has to consider these needs
when he designs and implements a computer
system.” (Bansler 1987 p. 90, Ole and Johen’s
translation)
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IS & ….. Perspective - Walsham
explains the concept of Web Models
‘’.. draw broad boundaries around the focal computer
system and examine how its use depends upon a social
context of complex social actions. The models define this
social context by taking into account the social relations
between the information system, the infrastructure
available for its support, and the previous history within
the organisation of commitments made in developing and
operating related computer-based technologies.”
(Walsham 1993 p.55)
“With respect to the social relations as considered in web
models, it is important to note that participants include
users, system developers, the senior management of the
company, and any other individuals or groups who are
affected by the computer-based information system.”
(Walsham 1993 p.55).
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Information Systems &
Anthropology..
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The social systems perspective helps to
understand the importance of the context and
particularly IS in developing countries must be
context sensitive, for example, participation,
may not be regarded the same in a developing
country context as in a developed country.
Participation needs to be approached more
critically and without the assumption that it will
always and necessarily bring benefits.
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Information Infrastructure Theory
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Information infrastructure is a vast field that covers all
kinds of use and use areas. It involves political, social,
organisation, human aspects and issues – from the
development of industrial at national, regional or even the
global level(Hanseth and Monteiro,1997)
An infrastructure is a socio-technical network, which
includes more than just technological components .It
includes actors, knowledge, use situation and procedures
around them.
Infrastructures are heterogeneous in the sense that they
include elements of different qualities, humans and
computers.
IIs are ‘open’ and ‘ scaled’(Hanseth,2002)
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Actor Network Theory
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As a methodological theory is generally used to understand
information infrastructures (IIs) .
Provides a framework for the socio-technical aspects and views the
technology as an actor on par with other actors
Provides theoretical concepts for documenting a complex and
heterogeneous socio-technical work practice with many actors.
Brings forth to light how new technology affects and interacts with
the various actors and vice versa indicating a mutual interaction
process.
Has the advantage of viewing both the human and non human actors
as linked elements in the networks (heterogeneous actor networks)
and more so rather than focusing separately on each element the focus
is on the interplay and relations between these elements.
As pointed out by Latour (1987) these heterogeneous actors in the
network are constituted by various concerns, different degrees of
power and different perceptions towards the technology and its
benefits.
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Action Research
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Action research is inquiry or research in the
context of focused efforts to improve the quality
of an organization and its performance.
It typically is designed and conducted by
practitioners who analyze the data to improve
their own practice.
Action research can be done by individuals or by
teams of colleagues.
The team approach is also called collaborative
inquiry.
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Action Research….
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Has the potential to generate genuine and
sustained improvements in the work or research
undertaken.
Gives implementation team new opportunities to
reflect on and assess their work.
To explore and test new ideas, methods, and
materials;
To assess how effective the new approaches were
To share feedback with fellow team members
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