Chapter 13 Flashcards
Define Idealist Perspective
Idealism refers to any theory that suggests that behavior is governed by beliefs, meanings, and values that are to a greater or lesser degree independent of the material conditions of life.
Define French Structuralism
The methodology that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a larger, overarching system of structure. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.
Define signifier and signified
Signifier= Phonetic sound made (or extra linguistic like a flag or hand signal) when saying the word EX:// sound table. Signified= Actual object that the word describes EX:// actual table.
Describe Binary Opposition
The primary quality of the human mind, according to Levi-strauss, is its tendency to create binary oppositions i.e to think in opposites. Many dichotomies are culture specific, so the many cultures recognize kinship or ritual groups that stand in opposition to each other.
Define Symbolic/interpretive anthropology
The study of cultural symbols and how those symbols can be used to better understand a particular society. It is often viewed in contrast to cultural materialism.
Define Thick Description
Not explanatory he wants his writing to highlight that he is there (writes in third person) and emerges himself into their culture. We have to study meaning rather than behavior.
Describe “reading culture like a text”
Culture is textual, it is an elaborate assemblage of symbols that the anthropologist must strive to interpret.
Define Ethnoscience
Linguistically grounded. Methodology=etic based and elicts large topographies of domains. Ethno=getting everything you can about a society and science= methodology, etic, explanatory. It is idosynchratic and obtains an overall emic understanding. Did a domain at a time, and created taxonomies. Gathered data by creating long verbal surveys and interviews, every informant was given the exact same question to ensure reliability while validity came from getting a taxonomy that covers every case as we add to it.
- What they claimed to know is emic, it is the only branch of theory that we have that sorts the method as etic and looks for an emic answer.
- Confidential analysis
Componential analysis
Used as an analytic tool when we have a lot of qualitative data.
Who is Clifford Geertz?
“Reading culture like a text”. Termed “Thick Description” not explanatory, he wants his writing to highlight that he is there (writes in first person). Termed Evocation: gives us a sense that we are there. We have an understanding of our surroundings. Multivocality= multiple voices and a range of responses. Dismissive of the idea that Anthro could ever be a scientific endeavor.
- Ethnographic strategy, hermeneutic
- Emic
Who is Claude Levi-Strauss?
Culture arises from the structures of the human mind, which he contends operates and is organized in a similar fashion in all places. His anthropology rests on a linguistic analogy in that he argues that the human capacity for culture is similar to our capacity for language. He argued that underneath the tremendous diversity of cultural practice there are universal processes of thought. Looked at myth, stories, kinship systems and had the notion that stories had to do with the juxtaposition of binary oppositions. Biggest binary opposition= culture and nature. He actually gathered the data by informant to try and get to the core of individuals to describe all of humanity.
FROM POWERPOINT
-Reacting to both functionalism and historical particularism
-Strong influence on succeeding intrepretist theorists such as Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault
-Freud and Levi-Strauss Agreed About the Location
of Culture but ended because while Freud located the ontology of culture in the seething unconscious, nonrational impulses and desires of the psyche Levi-Strauss proposed a cognitive human universal (Levi-Strauss argued that the fundamental structure of human cognition – thought– is universally the same process grounded in brain structure but manifest in many different cultural systems).
Who is Ferdinand de Saussure?
Swiss linguist who argued for a relational view of linguistic elements. Rather than looking at language as a set of names for things or a set of words with meanings, Saussure’s structuralism considers language as a universe sign.
Who is Victor Turner?
Used some notion of structuralism but he was also doing symbolic analysis aka more interpretive. The “Three Three’s”
-Methodology
Participant observation (Emic)
Testimony from experts (Emic)
Etic analysis (Adding western analysis to observations)
-Symbols
Condensation (EX:// Milk tree representative of connection between mom and child. Or the fertility of men is represented in the milk tree as well).
Polarization (EX:// American flag)
Unification of disparate significa
-Rites of Passage
Separation (Separation from everyday life away from community)
Transformation (Physical or behavioral act that changes your current status). Separation and transformation (liminality) (EX:// Being engaged, not single but not yet married).
Integration: Com back into your social organization as a new individual
Who is Mary Douglas?
Employed structuralist theories to dietary practices. Defined polluting as “matter out of place” (Blood belongs on the inside, not on the outside). Tried to resolve this issue by expanding her discussion of the logic of biblical proscriptions on certain foods. She believed that the human body is a common universal that can stand for any bounded system.
What is the “alliance theory” of incest avoidance:
Coined by Levi Strauss’ comprises the dominant explanation in anthropology today of this cultural universal. Triggered decades of debate, however.
