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THEORY

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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY THEORY Ethnoscience Theoretical school popular in the 1950s and 60s that tries to understand a culture from the point of view of the people ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: THEORY


1
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
  • THEORY

2
Anthropology Theory
  • As anthropologists began to accumulate data on
    different cultures during the mid-nineteenth
    century, they needed to be able to explain the
    cultural differences and similarities they found
  • The desire to account for the vast cultural
    variation that had been observed gave rise to
    anthropological theory.

3
Anthropology Theory
  • Anthropological theories attempt to answer
    questions such as Why do people behave as they
    do? and How do we account for human diversity?

4
evolutionism
  • In an attempt to account for the diversity of
    human cultures, the first anthropologists,
    writing during the last half of the 19th century
    suggested the theory of cultural evolutionism.

5
evolutionism
  • All societies pass through a series of distinct
    evolutionary stages. We find differences in
    contemporary cultures because they are at
    different evolutionary stages of development.

6
evolutionism
  • Edward Tylor
  • Lewis Henry Morgan

7
Evolutionism
  • Euro-American cultures were at the top of the
    evolutionary ladder and less-developed cultures
    on the lower rungs.
  • The evolutionary process was thought to progress
    from simpler (lower) forms to increasingly more
    complex (higher) forms of culture.

8
Evolutionism Lewis Henry Morgan
  • Hired to represent the Iroquois in a land grant
    dispute
  • gtbegan a study of the Seneca culminating in the
    book Systems of Consanguinity and
    Affinity(1871)
  • gtwrote Ancient Society (1877) and developed a
    system of classifying cultures to determine their
    evolutionary niche

9
Lewis Henry Morgan
  • Morgan used the categories , savagery, barbarism
    and civilization according to the presence or
    absence of certain technological features.
  • Lower savagery-from earliest forms of humanity
    subsisting on fruits and nuts
  • Middle savagery-began with the discovery of
    fishing technology and the use of fire
  • Upper savagery-began with invention of bow and
    arrow

10
Lewis Henry Morgan
  1. Lower barbarism-began with the advent of pottery
    making
  2. Middle barbarism-began with the domestication of
    plants and animals in the Old World and
    irrigation cultivation in the New World
  3. Upper barbarism-began with the smelting of iron
    and use of iron tools
  4. Civilization-began with the invention of the
    phonetic alphabet and writing.

11
Criticisms of Evolutionism
  • Ethnocentrism
  • Armchair speculators
  • Both Morgan and Tylor were trying to establish
    secular evolutionary rationales rather than
    relying on the supernatural

12
Diffusionism
  • During the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
    diffusionists addressed the question of cultural
    differences in the world by determining that
    humans were essentially uninventive
  • Certain cultural features developed in one or
    several parts of the world and then spread,
    through the process of diffusion, to other
    cultures.

13
diffusionists
  • All societies change as a result of cultural
    borrowing from one another
  • A deductive approach is used, with the general
    theory of diffusion being applied to explain
    specific cases of cultural diversity
  • Diffusionism overemphasized the essentially valid
    idea of diffusion

14
American Historicism
  • A reaction to the deductive approach and headed
    by Franz Boas, this school of anthropological
    thought was prominent in the first part of the
    20th century and insisted upon the collection of
    ethnographic data through direct fieldwork prior
    to making cross-cultural generalizations

15
American Historicism
  • Ethnographic facts must precede the development
    of cultural theories (induction)
  • Any culture is partially composed of traits
    diffused from other cultures
  • Direct fieldwork is absolutely essential
  • Each culture is, to some degree unique
  • Ethnographers should try to get the view of those
    being studied (emic) not their own view (etic)

16
Functionalism
  • Theory of social stratification holding that
    social stratification exists because it
    contributes to the overall well-being of a
    society
  • No matter how bizarre a cultural tem might at
    first appear, it had a meaning and performed some
    useful function the well-being of the individual
    or the society the job of the researcher is to
    become sufficiently immersed in the culture and
    language to be able to identify these functions

17
Functionalism-Bronislaw Malinowski
  • Like Boas, Malinowski was a strong advocate of
    fieldwork, but he had no interest in asking how a
    cultural item got to be the way it is. Focused
    on how contemporary cultures operated or
    functioned
  • Ex the kula among the Trobriand Islanders

18
Funtionalism-Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown
  • Like Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown held that the
    various aspects of a society should be studied in
    terms of the functions they perform.
  • Whereas Malinowski viewed functions mostly as
    meeting the needs of the individual,
    Radcliffe-Brown saw them in terms of
    contributions to the well-being of the society

19
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown
  • Because of the emphasis on social functions
    rather than individual functions,
    Radcliffe-Browns theory has taken the name
    STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM

20
functionalism
  • The functionalist approach is based on two
    fundamental principles
  • Universal Functions-every part of a culture has a
    function
  • Functional Unity-a culture is an integrated whole
    composed of a number of interrelated parts a
    change in one part of the culture is likely to
    produce change in other parts

21
Psychological Anthropology
  • Looks at the relationships among cultures and
    such psychological phenomena as personality,
    cognition and emotions
  • As early as the 1920s American Anthropologists
    became interested in the relationship between
    culture and the individual

22
Psychological Anthropology
  • Some of Boass students began asking questions
    about what role personality played in human
    behavior, should personality be viewed as a part
    of the cultural system or if personality
    variables are part of culture, how are they
    causally related to the rest of the system

23
Edward Sapir
  • Individuals learn their cultural patterns
    unconsciously in the same way that they learn
    language
  • Culture can be found within the interaction of
    individuals

24
Margaret Mead
  • Early interest in adolescence in the U.S.
  • Coming of age in Samoa (1928)
  • Research on Gender
  • Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
    (1935)

25
Psychological Anthropology
  • Anthropologists need to explore the relationships
    between psychological and cultural variables
  • Personality is largely the result of cultural
    learning
  • Universal temperaments associated with males and
    females do not exist

26
Neoevolutionism
  • School of thought that attempted to refine the
    earlier evolutionary theories of Tylor and Morgan
  • Boas and others were extremely critical of 19th
    century evolutionists, in part because they made
    sweeping generalizations based on inadequate
    data. Yet no one was able to demonstrate that
    cultures do not develop or evolve in certain ways
    over time

27
Leslie White
  • Resurrected the theories of the evolutionists
  • Felt their major shortcoming was an absence of
    data
  • Culture evolves as the amount of energy
    harnessed per capita per year increases or as the
    efficiency of the means of putting energy to work
    is increased
  • CE x T

28
Julian Steward
  • More interested in developing propositions about
    specific cultures or groups of cultures
  • unilinear evolution-an attempt to place
    particular cultures into specific evolutionary
    phases

29
Julian Steward
  • multilinear evolution-suggestion that specific
    cultures can evolve independently of all others
    even if they follow the same evolutionary process
  • cultural ecology-assumption that people who
    reside in similar environments are likely to
    develop similar technologies, social structures,
    and political institutions

30
Neoevolutionism
  • Cultures evolve in direct proportion to their
    capacity to harness energy
  • Culture is shaped by environmental conditions
  • Through culture, human populations continuously
    adapt to technical-environmental conditions
  • Because technological and environmental factors
    shape culture, individual factors are
    de-emphasized

31
French Structuralism
  • Theoretical orientation holding that cultures are
    the product of unconscious processes of the human
    mind
  • Claude Levi-Strauss

32
French Structuralism
  • Human cultures are shaped by certain
    preprogrammed codes of the human mind
  • Theory focuses on the underlying principles that
    generate behavior rather than the observable
    empirical behavior itself
  • Emphasizes repetitive structures rather than
    sociocultural change

33
French Structuralism
  • Rather than examining attitudes, values and
    beliefs, structuralists concentrate on what
    happens at the unconscious level
  • The human mind categorizes phenomena in terms of
    binary oppositions.

34
Ethnoscience
  • Theoretical school popular in the 1950s and 60s
    that tries to understand a culture from the point
    of view of the people being studied

35
Ethnoscience
  • Attempts to make ethnographic description more
    accurate and replicable
  • Describes a culture by using the categories of
    the people under study rather than by imposing
    categories from the ethnographers culture
  • Because it is time-consuming, ethnoscience has
    been confined to describing very small segments
    of a culture
  • Difficult to compare data collected by
    ethnoscientists

36
Feminist Anthropology
  • Seeks to describe and explain cultural life from
    the perspective of women

37
Feminist Anthropology
  • All aspects of culture have a gender dimension
    that must be considered in any balanced
    ethnographic description
  • Theory represents a long overdue corrective to
    male bias in traditional ethnographies
  • More subjective and collaborative than objective
    and scientific
  • Largely critical of a value-free orientation

38
Cultural Materialism
  • Cultural systems are most influenced by such
    material things as natural resources and
    technology
  • Marvin Harris

39
Cultural Materialism
  • Material conditions determine human thoughts and
    behavior
  • Theorists assume the viewpoint of the
    anthropologist, not the native informant
  • Anthropology is seen as scientific, empirical and
    capable of generating causal explanations
  • De-emphasizes the role of ideas and values in
    determining the conditions of social life

40
Postmodernism
  • Human behavior stems from the way people perceive
    and classify the world around them
  • Interpretive Anthropology the critical aspects
    of cultural systems are subjective factors such
    as values, ideas and worldviews
  • Clifford Geertz

41
Postmodernism
  • Calls on anthropologists to switch from cultural
    generalization and laws to description,
    interpretation and the search for meaning
  • Ethnographies should be written from several
    voices-that of the anthropologist along with
    those of the people under analysis
  • Involves a return to cultural relativism
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