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Introduction to Social Anthropology B

Lecture 1

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Lecture 1

• Why study Anthropology? • How did the subject develop?

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What is Social Anthropology?

• The study of ‘other’ cultures

• The study of the unity and diversity of humankind

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Anthropology as the antidote to Ethnocentrism

• Seeing the world from the perspective of your own culture

• Culture is fundamental to the perception and understanding of the world

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The historical origins of the subject

• The expansion of Europe from the C15th

• Enlightenment

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Characterisation of the ‘primitive other’

• Primitive man v noble savage

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Noble savage

In a state of nature to people live in a harmonious equalitarian utopia

Jean Jacques Rousseauborn free but everywhere in chains

Karl Marx

Society• harmony/ absence of conflict or

violence• co-operation and sharing/equalitarian• harmony with natureIndividual• child-like• innocence• naturally inquisitive• virtuous

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Primitive man - red in tooth and claw

life was... nasty brutish and short ... war of all against all Thomas Hobbes

Society• violent• conflictual/despotic• victim of nature and each other

Individual• child-like• no self-control• ignorant / irrational• evil

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Maori Queen as Noble Savage

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Shaka, Zulu founding warrior as ‘noble savage’

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Primitive man

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Imperialism

• The march of progress and the ‘white man’s burden’.

• Colonial origins of the discipline.

• Ideology and control

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Progress

• Lewis Henry Morgan’s• “...demonstration that progress is a fundamental

law of human society, and one which has always prevailed - progress in thought and knowledge, in industry, in morality, in social organization, in institutions, and in all things tending to, or advancing civilization and general well-being.”

• McIlvaine 1867 “Malthusianism” The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 39:103-38

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Evans Pritchard and the Azande

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Evolutionary perspectives.

• Lamark, Darwin, Spencer, Morgan, Marx

• Cultural evolution:

‘earlier’ :: ‘different’• The evolutionary legacy in

anthropology

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The rise of ethnography and functionalist perspectives

• Pitt-Rivers: Genealogical method• Spencer and Gillan: Torres Straits

expedition• Franz Boaz: Inuit, Cultural relativism• Bronislaw Malinowksi: Trobriand

Islands, Functionalism

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Spencer and Gillan and the Torres Straits Expedition

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Franz Boas

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Malinowski in the Trobriands

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Structural Analysis of Culture

• Levi-Strauss

• The equivalence of languages and cultures

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The study of non-tribal people.

Natives v ‘Us’ :: Peasants v Elites

Chicago School, • Redfield –

Tepotzlan.• Zaneiki – Polish

Peasant. • Arensberg –

Ireland.

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Migrants and minorities

• Minorities v. Majorities

• Study of ethnicity and nationalism.• Anthropology as study of marginal

peoples in state societies.

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Post-modernism and post-colonialism

• Radical cultural relativism; whose ‘voice’ is to be heard

• Said, Orientalism

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The oriental other

The other feature of Oriental-European relations was that Europe was always in a position of strength, not to say domination. ...

...The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, “different”; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, “normal”.

Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world. ... the Oriental is depicted as something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual). The point is that in each of these cases the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks.

Edward Said 1978 Orientalism p40

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Last Alaska language speaker dies BBC. Last Updated: Thursday, 24 January 2008, 10:56 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7206411.stm

A woman believed to be the last native speaker of the Eyak language in the north-western US state of Alaska has died at the age of 89.

Marie Smith Jones was a champion of indigenous rights and conservation. She died at her home in Anchorage.

She helped the University of Alaska compile an Eyak dictionary, so that future generations would have the chance to resurrect it.

Nearly 20 other native Alaskan languages are at risk of disappearing.

Ms Jones is described by her family as a tiny chain smoking woman who was fiercely independent, says the BBC's Peter Bowes in Los Angeles. "To the best of our knowledge, she was the last full-blooded Eyak alive," her daughter Bernice Galloway told the Associated Press news agency. "She was a woman who faced incredible adversity in her life and overcame it. She was about as tenacious as you can get." She believed passionately in preserving the Eyak language and wanted a written record of it to be kept so for future generations.