Introduction to Social/Cultural Anthropology

Published on Anthropology Department, UC Berkeley (http://anthropology.berkeley.edu)

Introduction to Social/Cultural Anthropology

Course Number: 3AC
Semester: Spring
Year: 2009
Section: 1
Location: 155 Dwinelle
Instructor: Scheper-Hughes, N
Units: 4
Time: TuTh 930-11A
CCN: 2441

Anthro 3 AC is the lower division introduction to Cultural Anthropology. This course also fulfils the American
Cultures course requirement by focusing on the historical, cultural, and political formation of America as a society
of native residents and successive waves of both voluntary and forced immigrants. Ultimately, this course is
about what it means to be an American as well as what it means to be human and therefore a bearer of culture.
Cultural Anthropology is the intimate and personal study of human cultures, societies, and changing social,
economic and political situations in an increasingly globalized world. Anthropology is intimate and personal
because the field requires the anthropologist to live-in and live-with the people and communities they are trying to
understand. Anthropological knowledge is gained though cultural immersion as well as through careful scholarship
and learning. Beginning with the early 20th century, cultural anthropologists, some as 'explorers', some as
'scientists', some as great writers and 'public intellectuals', traveled far and wide and wrote books (called
ethnographies) about the people and cultures they encountered. In these books anthropologists tried to make "the
strange" and the "exotic" seem more familiar to their American, or French, or British readers. At the same time
anthropologists tried to unbalance and to "make strange" what was taken for granted, what was commonsense in
their own societies.
Cultural anthropology was always about what we could learn about ourselves by studying others. So, the classical
era anthropologists asked such still relevant questions as: Why do American families have to live in nuclear
households when in so many other cultures families were embedded in much larger extended households in
which work, household maintenance, and child rearing could be shared among kin? Is marriage always about
love? What happens to couples where elders arrange marriages for their children? Do they come to love each
other? Or is love, as we know it, beside the point? Are little girls 'feminine' and 'sensitive' in all cultures and
societies? Are men in all societies aggressive and dominant? Are teenagers rebellious in every society? Do people
everywhere reason the same? Does 1+1= 2 in every society? Do we all see the same colors? Do people get sick or
go " crazy" in the same way and for the same reasons? What is 'cultural'? What is 'natural'? The simple answer
to these complex questions is that in certain fundamental we are all undeniably strange and exotic to our cultural
others. But cultural anthropology breaks down and explains the differences that may seem so 'scary', so
'irrational', so opaque (hard to understand) by showing that beyond cultural differences, beyond cultural pluralisms,
beyond what is called multiculturalism, there is also a shared humanity.
Classical cultural anthropology (1900-1950s) was concerned with careful descriptions of semi-isolated smallscale, non-literate, technologically "simple" communities and "exotic" peoples ( including headhunters, sorcerers,
and cannibals) who were seen as radically different and at odds with the so-called "civilized" world. But today both
the world and the subjects of anthropology have changed dramatically. People, ideas, labor, knowledge, the arts,
medicine, and technologies travel easily across national boundaries impacting both the countries of origin and the
countries to which these populations and cultures gravitate. Once confident distinctions between 'us' and 'them',
the West and 'the rest' have blurred as people from formerly colonized societies in Africa, Asia, and the
Americas and cultural, ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities in all societies have challenged the dominance of the
"first" world and its claims to superiority and cultural, economic and political dominance. Throughout these
transformations anthropologists have been present on the sidelines, observing, participating, and 'taking note' of
the events, ultimately trying to make sense of them.
This is an American cultures course with a difference. The course is guided by the anthropological method of
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Introduction to Social/Cultural Anthropology

Published on Anthropology Department, UC Berkeley (http://anthropology.berkeley.edu)
"radical juxtaposition", a fancy term for studying ourselves, as Americans, through the detour of 'the other'. As a
nation of immigrants all US citizens should know something about the countries of origin that have replenished and
vitalized our country. As a nation that violently displaced its native population and that built its early agricultural
plantation economy through the slave trade, we need to understand the cultural, political, and economic legacies
of those national events and tragedies.
The instructor is a passionately engaged and seasoned anthropologist who has conducted field research in many
countries as well as at home including rural Ireland and South Boston among Irish-Americans; in Northeast Brazil(
for many years), Argentina, and Cuba, as well as among Spanish-Americans and Pueblo Indians in northern New
Mexico; in South Africa at the end of the anti-apartheid struggle (1993-1994) and earlier (1967-1968) as a civil
rights worker in Selma, Alabama where she also studied the effects of American apartheid on the lives and survival
of Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers as well as the art and cultural politics of exquisite quilt-making
among the famous artisans of Gees Bend, Alabama.
In this course we will ask questions, raise puzzles, and draw on the writings of many notable American
anthropologists, many of whom were or are professors at UC Berkeley, a leading department in the history of
anthropology. Thus, we will cover such key areas and questions as:
Immigration, Cultural Minorities and Culture: Why did Berkeley's founding professor of anthropology, Alfred
Kroeber, keep Ishi, the so-called last wild California Indian as a living specimen in the Anthropology Museum?
Why, after Ishi's death, did Kroeber send Ishi's brain to be curated at the American Smithsonian Institute? When
and why did Ireland become a bustling , prosperous country and a magnet for new immigrants rather than a
depopulated country of forced exiles to North America? How 'Irish' are the Boston Irish? Why are some, but not
all, Asian- Americans called the "model" minority? Why did the late Prof. John Ogbu ( a Berkeley anthropologist
from Nigeria) describe African-Americans as a "permanent US minority"?
Race and Culture: What is "race"? What is an ethnic group? What is a culture? How does 'culture' determine
'race'? What does it mean to be "Black", "White", "Brown" or "Colored" in the US as compared to Brazil, Cuba,
and South Africa at different historical moments? What can these differences tell us about race itself?
Nature vs. Nurture: How do we know whether human behaviors or traits are the result of biological, genetic
'inheritance" or cultural shaping and social learning? Is mother love a universal trait? How many genders and
sexualities are there? Is schizophrenia found everywhere in the world? Why do people kill? Can Hmong shamans
in California's central valley and Mexican-American curandeiros really cure really cure diseases?
Requirements:
There are no prerequisites to this course. There is a demanding, but accessible, reading list that includes
anthropological books and articles written for a broad reading public. Attendance at lectures, and active
participation in discussion groups is required. This is not an internet class. You have to "be there" to "get it". In
addition to short weekly critical reaction papers ( one typed page) responding to some aspect of the readings
assigned each week (10% of your final grade) there are two research projects (a) a family genealogy or a life
history project (15%) and (b) an ethnographic research project (15 %) , an in-class midterm exam (25%) and a
cumulative final examination ( 35%) all of which require basic reading and writing skills and critical, that is
analytical and synthetic, thinking.
Field Projects Papers
First Project (Genealogy or Life History) due in class on February 17th
Second Project Due on April 16th
Midterm Exam In Class Tuesday March 3rd
Final Exam: Please check the schedule of Spring classes to see what exam group Anthro 3 has been assigned.
Prerequisites:
Texts:
1. Hortense Powdermaker. 1966. Stranger and Friend: the Way of an Anthropologist. New York: WW Norton.
(This classic professional biography of a dogged fieldworker, Hortense Powdermaker, covers her voyages
throughout her long career that took her to a cannibalistic society in the South Pacific, to a pre-civil rights era
racially segregated rural community in Sunflower County ,Mississippi, to Hollywood during its glory days in the
mid 1950s, to Zambia, Africa in the 1960s)

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Introduction to Social/Cultural Anthropology

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2. Margaret Mead. 2001. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: Harper Collins. (Sex &
Temperament is a fascinating study by Margaret Mead, an American icon , of the intimate lives of three New
Guinea tribes from infancy to adulthood: the gentle, mountain-dwelling Arapesh, the fierce, cannibalistic
Mundugumor and the graceful headhunters of Tchambuli. Mead concludes that "masculine" and "feminine"
characteristics are shaped by cultural conditioning of different societies)
3. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, ( 2000, new updated edition ) Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in
Rural Ireland. University of California Press. ( Am intimate anthropological study that traces the social
disintegration of a small village on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland. The author explores the symptoms of the
community's decline: emigration, sexual frustration and unwanted celibacy, damaging patterns of child-rearing, fear
of intimacy, suicide, and madness(schizophrenia).
4. Anne Fadiman. 1998. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux.
(This account of a Hmong refugee community in Merced, California is built around a tragic case of cultural
misunderstanding. In 1982, three-month-old Lia Lee was carried into the emergency room of the county hospital in
Merced by her parents, Hmong refugees from the hill country of Laos, who spoke no English. Lia's doctors , who
spoke no Hmong, diagnosed the baby's illness as epilepsy. Lia's parents believed that her seizures were caused
by "soul loss" and they also consulted with a traditional healer The two worlds of modern biomedicine and Hmong
spirituality collided and resulted in tragedy for the child, her parents and her doctors)
5. Carol Stack. 1974 All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper Row.
(All Our Kin is the chronicle of a young white anthropologist's sojourn into The Flats, an African-American "ghetto"
community, to study the networks of kinship , family and friends that form in response to grinding and debilitating
poverty. Stack was among the first anthropologists to explore African-American kinship from the inside. The result
was a landmark study that debunked the misconception that poor families were unstable and disorganized. On the
contrary, families in "The Flats" adapted to poverty by forming large, resilient, lifelong support networks based on
friendship and family).
6. Stanley Brandes. 2009. Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond.
Malden,MA: Blackwell. (Each year as the Day of the Dead draws near, Mexican markets overflow with decorated
breads, fanciful paper cutouts, and whimsical toy skulls and skeletons. To honor deceased relatives, Mexicans
decorate graves and erect home altars. Drawing on historical and ethnographic evidence, this book discusses the
origin and changing character of the Day of the Dead in Mexico as a symbol of Mexican and Mexican-American
national identity).
There is also a CLASS READER of collected articles that can be purchased at Metro Copy, Bancroft Avenue
near Musical Offerings.

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