Wykad 14

Ethnicity
A self conscious and vocalized identity that naturalizes one or more attributes the usual ones being skin color, language, religion, and territory and attaches them to collectivities as their innate possession and mythohistorical legacy (Tambiah, 1996:168)

Invention of tradition
Hugh Trevor-Roper on the Highland tradition of Scotland Ossian, a Scots-Gaelic epic poet whose supposed writing was discovered and translated in the 1760s

Ethnicity as a power relationship

For Anglos, African Americans and Indians may be considered ethnic groups based on skin color or simple cultural misunderstanding, whereas those so designated may define themselves entirely differently ETHNICITY AS MARGINALITY Ethnicity is subordinate to a dominant group, then within the state ethnicity is marginal by definition. ETHNICITY AS CULTURAL CAPITAL Ethnicity can be an important form of cultural capital (political struggle and elections).

How black, Latino and Asian American voters delivered Obamas victory
Exit polls are showing that overwhelming majorities of LATINO and ASIAN AMERICAN more than 70 percent of each group voted re-elect President Barack Obama. Together with BLACK voters, who reportedly supported Obama in even higher proportions, these voters of color are credited with carrying key states for Obama and ultimately assuring his victory

Nationalism and modernity Ernest Gellners Nations and Nationalism (1983) European nationalism is a modern product; it developed both in France and Germany
around the time of the French Revolution (French Enlightenment and German Romanticism)

a response to industrialization, peoples disengagement from primordialities like kin,

religion, and local communities.

Benedict Andersons Imagined communities (1983) Nation is an imagined community made possible by the development of the printcapitalism: media, standardization of language, education and worldview; homogenization Nation is a metaphorical kinship group.

Nationalism: An ideology of the nation

a tool of state power in societies threatened with fragmentation and anomies replaces identification with the family and local communities; creates loyalty to the state in exchange for security and a cultural identity symbolic community above the level of the ethnic group the state has the monopoly on the use of violence, the enforcement of law and order, the collection of taxes, uniform education, system of legislation and administration, shared labor marker, official language.

Nation-state
An intrinsic connection of an ethnic ideology of shared descent and a state apparatus A nationalist ideology may be, in common usage, defined as an ethnic ideology which demands the right to its own state on behalf of the ethnic group (Palestinians) 104 nations of the former Soviet Union are ethnic groups and only a few are nations (i.e. want of statehood for an ethnic group)

Ethnicities and power relations

Ethnic minority: a group that is not only inferior in numbers but politically non-dominant; its status denotes political submission to the ethnic majority The former South African racial segregation; today American cities are de facto segregated along ethnic lines Forced assimilation of European immigrants in the U.S. Assimilation impossible for black Americans: mark of the minority, skin color is an important social classification, and it cannot be removed. (Is Obama a white president?)

Multiculturalism
a form of integration in polyethnic countries, when cultural diversity is a feature of the society no common ethnic culture but a national ideology

 symbolic community above the level of the ethnic group every citizen entitled to equal rights by the state and is member of the CIVIL state respect for the right to cultural difference (expression of ethnic identity)

Loyalty to the state?

Not all citizens are complacent, loyal or even directly affected by the states demands Nationalism is a traditionalist ideology: in most cases these are ethnic ideologies glorifying a presumedly ancient cultural tradition of the nation.

Ethnic revitalization
revitalizing cultural symbols and practices that have lain dormant and lost their relevance revitalization movement are traditionalists: they seek to make tradition which is not itself traditional but modern.

What is cultural anthropology?

Anthropology is the comparative study of cultural and social life. A discipline, based on ethnographic fieldwork, which tries simultaneously to: 1. account for actual cultural variation in the world 2. to develop a theoretical perspective on culture and society

What is Culture?
Culture or Civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired my man as a member of society. Edward B. Tylor

Diffusionism
Culture is a thing of shreds and patches

Social evolutionism: Lewis Henry Morgan

Mankind commenced their career at the bottom of the scale and worked their way up from savagery to civilization through the slow accumulation of experimental knowledge Portions of the human family have existed in a state of savagery, other portions in a state of barbarism, and still other portions in a state of civilization

Functionalism: Bronisaw Malinowski, A.R. Radcliffe Brown

Society: an organism, an integrated whole of functional social institutions

 Social institutions reinforce each other and contribute to the maintenance of society.

Cultural Ecology: Julian Steward

Culture an adaptive mechanism; a system to ensure the continued well-being of a group of people; Culture may be termed successful so long as it secures the survival of society in a way that its members recognize as reasonably fulfilling

Structuralism: Claude Levi Strauss Culture beliefs, sentiments, norms, values, attitudes and meanings are a surface
representation of deep structures that have been affected by a groups physical and special environment as well as history

Culture and Personality School: Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead

A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action Benedict 46 If we are interested in cultural processes, the only way in which we can know the significance of the selected detail of behavior is against the background of the motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized in that culture

Cultural materialism: Marvin Harris

Superstructures: religion, science, art, music, dance, literature, sports, rituals Structures Domestic Economy: family organization, kinship organization, gender roles, age roles Political Economy: patterns of class, patterns of caste, modes of political organization Infrastructures: Mode of Production and Birth and Death rates

Postmodern anthropology: Clifford Geertz/Edith Turner

A semiotic concept of culture man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has Culture is always an act of interpretation, an inquiry that involves placing a cultural act a ritual, a game, a political campaign, and so on into the specific and local contexts in which the act is meaningful. thick description provides context and meaning to observed actions, rather than simply recording the occurrence of an event in isolation. Its more about recording the story of a fact, rather than the fact itself.

Issues covered in the lecture

Cultural Anthropology Chapter 1. Nature of Anthropology Chapter 2. Concept of Culture Chapter 5. Growing up Human Chapter 6. Patterns of Subsistence Chapter 7. Economic systems Chapter 8. Chapter 9. Chapter 10. Chapter 13. Chapter 15. Small Places, Large Issues Chapter 1. Anthropology: Comparison and Context Chapter 2. Chapter 7. Chapter 8. Chapter 17. Chapter 18.

Types of exam questions

1. Briefly descripe a concept Adaptation. A process organisms undergo to achieve a beneficial adjustment to an available environment and the results of that process: characteristics that fit them to the particular conditions of the environment they are generally found in. 2. Briefly compare concept A and concept B 3. Match names with ideas 4. Describe in one paragraph (up to 250 words) and aspect of anthropology eg. Kinship and descent/ or Religion and the Supernatural/Growing up Human/Ethnic identities You may find case studies useful in this part.