culture concept
TRANSCRIPT
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What do anthropologists do?
Part I: The Culture Concept
You’re a what?What do youdo with that?
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What is “culture”?
Cultivation, civilization or “high” culture
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What is “culture”?
Popular culture
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What is “culture”?
Total way of life
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E B Tylor: Culture
Franz Boas: cultures
Anthropology and “culture”
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Edward Burnett Tylor
1832-1917
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“Culture…taken in its wideethnographic sense, is that complexwhole which includes knowledge,belief, art, morals, law, customs, andany other capabilities and habits
acquired by man as a member of society.”
Primitive Culture (1871)
Tylor’s definition
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“The condition of culture among the various societiesof mankind…is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action. On the one hand, the
uniformity which so largely pervades civilization maybe ascribed…to the uniform action of uniform causes:while on the other hand its various grades may beregarded as stages of development or evolution, each
the outcome of previous history, and about to do itsproper part in shaping the history of the future.”
Primitive Culture (1871)
Tylor’s definition cont.
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French and English enlightenment tradition
Universal human mind
Independent invention
Doctrine of survivals
Global homogenization
Unilineal Evolution
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Maximal extent of British empire prior to WWI
British colonies
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Maximal extent of French empire18th century colonies in light blue
19th-20thc colonies in navy
French colonies
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Map of German colonies prior to WWI
Franz Boas: cultureS
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18-19th century German subordination to
French and English political hegemony
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)
Cultures instead of culture
German concepts of culture
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Jewish Germanimmigrant
Worked in Alaska and onthe Northwest coast
Professor of anthropology
at Columbia University
Taught Ruth Benedict andMargaret Mead
Franz Boas, 1858-1943
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Rejected unilineal social evolution by theend of the 19th century
Argued that differences of perceptionwere rooted in different modes of classication
Focused on the practices and experiencesof a single group
Boas’ concept of “culture”
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Like causes produce unlike effects;unlike causes can produce like effects
Relevant history is that of the materialand cultural exchanges of a particulargroup
Universal pronouncements about“man” will have to wait for a completeempirical inventory of human practices
Historical Particularism
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Tylor’scomparisonamongdecontextualizedobjects
Fighting over museumdisplays
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Fighting over museumdisplays
Boas (1885)demonstrating adance pose foran exhibit
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“From a collection of string instruments, utes,or drums of ‘savage’ tribes and the modern
orchestra, we cannot derive any conclusion butthat similar means have been applied by allpeoples to make music. The character of theirmusic, the only object worth studying, which
determines the form of the instruments, cannotbe understood from the single instrument, butrequires a complete collection from the entiretribe.” Franz Boas (1887)
Objects in Context
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Social Anthropology
Focus on empirically observable socialroles and relationships
Culture as “superstructure”
Greater attention to universals thanparticulars
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In 1952, Kluckhohn and Kroeber catalogued167 denitions of culture.
In 1973, Geertz found 11 conceptions of culture in one essay written by Kluckhohn.
Carol Delaney refused to even attempt adenition.
So what is culture?
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What it is not…Culture is NOT :
Individual
Biologically determined
A thing out there in the world
Unchanging
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Provisional definition“The concept of culture I espouse…is essentiallya semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, thatmans is an animal suspended in webs of signicance he himself has spun, I take culture tobe those webs, and the analysis of it to be
therefore not an experimental science in searchof law but an interpretive one in search of meaning…” (Geertz 1973: 5).