Anthropology

Appreciating Human Diversity

Fifteenth Edition

Conrad Phillip Kottak

University of Michigan

McGraw-Hill © 2013 McGraw-Hill Companies. All Rights Reserved.

C H A P T E R

METHOD AND
THEORY
IN CULTURAL
ANTHROPOLOGY

13-2
 METHODS AND THEORY IN
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
• Ethnography: Anthropology’s Distinctive
Strategy
• Ethnographic Techniques
• Survey Research
• Doing Anthropology Right and Wrong:
Ethical Issues
• Theory in Anthropology Over Time
• Anthropology Today

13-3
 METHODS AND THEORY IN
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
• Where and how do anthropologists do
fieldwork?
• What are some ways of studying modern
societies?
• What theories have guided anthropologists
over the years?

13-4
ETHNOGRAPHY: ANTHROPOLOGY’S
DISTINCTIVE STRATEGY
• Traditionally, process of becoming cultural
anthropologist required field experience in
another society
• Ethnography emerged as a research strategy in
societies with greater cultural uniformity and less
social differentiation than modern industrial
nations
• Try to understand the whole culture

13-5
 ETHNOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES
• Direct, firsthand observation
• Conversation
• The genealogical method
• Detailed work with key consultants
• In-depth interviewing

13-6
 ETHNOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES
• Discovery of local beliefs and perceptions
• Problem-oriented research
• Longitudinal research
• Team research

13-7
 OBSERVATION AND
PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
• Ethnographers pay attention to and record
the details of daily life
• Keep personal diary
• Strive to establish rapport
• Ethnographer cannot be totally impartial and
detached

13-8
 CONVERSATION, INTERVIEWING,
AND INTERVIEW SCHEDULES
• Participating in local life means constantly
talking to people and asking questions
• Naming phase
• Ethnographic survey
• Interview schedule: form used to structure a
formal, but personal, interview
• Questionnaire: form used by sociologists to
obtain comparable information from respondents

13-9
 THE GENEALOGICAL METHOD
• Genealogical method: using diagrams and
symbols to record kin connections
• Prominent building block in nonindustrial societies
• In many nonindustrial societies, kin links are
basic to social life

13-10
KEY CULTURAL CONSULTANTS
• Key cultural consultant:
expert on a particular
aspect of local life
• Every community has
people who can provide
most complete or useful
information about
particular aspects of life

13-11
 LIFE HISTORIES
• Life history: a personal portrait of someone’s
life in a culture
• Reveals how specific people perceive, react to,
and contribute to changes that affect their lives
• Many ethnographers include collection of life
histories as part of their research strategy

13-12
 LOCAL BELIEFS AND
PERCEPTIONS
• Emic (native oriented) approach:
investigates how natives think, categorize the
world, express thoughts, and interpret stimuli
• Cultural consultant: individual ethnographer
gets to know, in the field, people who teach him
or her about their culture
• Etic (science oriented) approach:
emphasizes categories, interpretations, and
features that the anthropologist considers
important

13-13
 PROBLEM-ORIENTED
ETHNOGRAPHY
• Most ethnographers enter the field with a
specific problem to investigate
• Researchers gather information on factors such
as population density, environmental quality,
climate, physical geography, diet, and land use
• Local people may lack knowledge about many
factors that affect their lives

13-14
 LONGITUDINAL RESEARCH
• Longitudinal research:
long-term study of a
community, region,
society, culture, or
other unit, usually
based on repeat visits

13-15
 TEAM RESEARCH
• Team research often used in longitudinal
research
• Gwembe District, Zambia

13-16
Figure 13.2 Location of Gwembe in Zambia

13-17
 CULTURE, SPACE, AND SCALE
• Traditional ethnographic research focused on
single community or culture
• Isolated and unique in time and space
• Ethnography increasingly multitimed and
multisited
• Kluckhohn: anthropology could provide ―scientific
basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the
world today‖
• Mass media oddities in culture and space

13-18
 SURVEY RESEARCH
• Survey research design: sampling,
collecting impersonal data, and statistical
analysis
• Sample: smaller study group chosen to represent
a larger population
• Random sample: all members of the population
have equal statistical chance of being chosen for
inclusion
• Variables: attributes that differ from one person
or case to the next

13-19
 SURVEY RESEARCH
• The combination of survey research and
ethnography can provide new perspectives
on life in complex societies: large, populous
societies with social stratification and central
governments
• In best studies, the hallmark of ethnography is
that anthropologists enter the community and get
to know the people

13-20
RECAP 13.1: Ethnography and Survey Research
Contrasted

13-21
DOING ANTHROPOLOGY RIGHT
AND WRONG: ETHICAL ISSUES
• Anthropologists must be sensitive to cultural
differences and aware of procedures and
standards in host country
• Include host country colleagues in planning
• Establish collaborative relationships with host
• Include host country colleagues in dissemination
of research results
• Ensure something is ―given back‖ to host country

13-22
 THE CODE OF ETHICS
• Code of Ethics of the American
Anthropological Association (AAA)
recognizes anthropologists have obligations
to their scholarly field, to the wider society,
and to the human species, other species,
and the environment
• Informed consent: agreement to take part in
research—after having been informed about
its nature, procedures, and possible impacts

13-23
 ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND
TERRORISM
• AAA deemed study of the roots of terrorism
and violence of ―paramount importance‖
• May be impossible for anthropologists in war
zones to identify themselves as anthropologists
• Anthropologists are asked to negotiate relations
among several groups
• Difficult for local people to give informed consent
• Information could help target specific groups
• Military may indirectly endanger research and
researcher

13-24
 THEORY IN ANTHROPOLOGY
OVER TIME
• Evolutionary perspectives (Morgan and Tylor)
• Functionalists (Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown)
• Historical (Boas)
• Symbolic and interpretive approaches
• Relation between culture and individual
• Contemporary marked by specialization

13-25
 EVOLUTIONISM
• Tylor (1871–1958): offered definition of
culture and proposed it as a topic that could
be studied scientifically
• Morgan (1870–1997): Ancient Society,
The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or
Iroquois, and Systems of Consanguinity
and Affinity of the Human Family
• The League of the Iroquois is anthropology’s
earliest ethnography

13-26
 EVOLUTIONISM
• Morgan: human society has evolved
through savagery, barbarism, and
civilization (unilinear evolutionism)
• Subdivided savagery and barbarism into three
substages each: lower, middle, upper
• Tylor proposed a unilinear path: animism,
polytheism, monotheism, and science

13-27
 THE BOASIANS
• Four-field anthropology
• Franz Boas was father of four-field U.S.
anthropology
• Contributed to cultural, biological, and linguistic
anthropology
• Showed that human biology was plastic
• Ruth Benedict: civilization is the achievement of
no single race

13-28
 HISTORIC PARTICULARISM
• Historical particularism (Boas): histories are
not compatible; diverse paths can lead to
same cultural result
• Rejected comparative method

13-29
 INDEPENDENT INVENTION
VERSUS DIFFUSION
• Evolutionists stressed independent invention
to explain cultural generalities
• Boasians stressed diffusion
• Culture trait
• Trait complexes
• Culture area
• Historical particularism
and diffusion were
complementary

13-30
 FUNCTIONALISM
• Functionalism: an approach focusing on
the role of sociocultural practices in social
systems
• Malinowski
• Customs and institutions in society are integrated
and interrelated
• Needs functionalism: based on belief that
humans have a set of universal biological needs

13-31
 CONJECTURAL HISTORY
• Radcliffe-Brown: social anthropology could
never discover histories of people without
writing
• Advocated that social anthropology be
synchronic (studying societies as they exist
today) rather than diachronic (studying societies
across time)

13-32
STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM
• Associated with Radcliffe-Brown and
Evans-Pritchard
• Customs (social practices) function to preserve
the social structure
• Radcliffe-Brown: social systems are comparable
to anatomical and physiological process

13-33
 DR. PANGLOSS
VERSUS CONFLICT
• Panglossian functionalism: the tendency to
see things as functioning to maintain system
in the most optimal way possible
• Manchester school: examined how rebellion and
conflict were regulated and dissipated, thus
maintaining the system

13-34
 FUNCTIONALISM PERSISTS
• Functionalism persists in views that:
• Elements of social and cultural systems are
functionally related so that they covary
• When one part changes, others also change
• Some elements more important than others

13-35
 CONFIGURATIONALISM
• Configurationalism: the view of culture as
integrated and patterned
• Benedict and Mead
• Traits might not spread if they met environmental
barriers or were not accepted by a culture
• More interested in describing how cultures are
uniquely patterned or configured than in explaining
how they got that way

13-36
 NEOEVOLUTIONISM
• White and Steward (1950) reintroduced
evolution with the study of culture
• White: general evolution—energy capture is the
main measure and cause of cultural advance
• Steward: In multilinear evolution, culture evolved
along different lines
• Also a pioneer in cultural ecology, known as
ecological anthropology

13-37
 CULTURAL MATERIALISM
• Cultural materialism: cultural infrastructure
determines both structure and superstructure
• Harris adapted multilayered model
• All societies have infrastructure
• Structure: social relations grow out of the society’s
infrastructure
• Superstructure: religion, ideology, and play
are all determined by structure and infrastructure

13-38
 SCIENCE AND DETERMINISM
• Mead: cultural determinism
• Human nature blank slate
• Culture powerful; can change expression of
biological stages

13-39
CULTURE AND THE INDIVIDUAL
• Culturology
• Cultural forces have been so powerful that
individuals have made little difference
• The superorganic: cultural realm, whose
origin converted an ape into an early hominin
(Kroeber)
• Culture as basis of new science of cultural
anthropology

13-40
 DURKHEIM
• Durkheim called for new social science to be
based in the conscience collectif
• Durkheim is a common father of anthropology
and sociology

13-41
 SYMBOLIC AND INTERPRETIVE
ANTHROPOLOGY
• Turner: recognized links between symbolic
anthropology (the study of symbols in their
social and cultural context) and social
psychology, psychology, and psychoanalysis
• Geertz: interpretive anthropology defines
culture as ideas based on cultural learning
and symbols

13-42
 STRUCTURALISM
• Lévi-Strauss: human minds have certain
universal characteristics originating in
common features of Homo sapiens’ brain
• One tale can be converted into another:
• Convert a positive element into a negative
• Reverse the order of elements
• Replace a male hero with a female one
• Preserve key elements

13-43
 PROCESSUAL APPROACHES
• Agency: actions that individuals take, both
alone and in groups, in forming and
transforming cultural identities
• Practice theory: individuals in a society or
culture have diverse motives and intentions
and different degrees of power and influence
• Leach: focused on how individuals work to
achieve power and how their actions can
transform society

13-44
 WORLD SYSTEM THEORY AND
POLITICAL ECONOMY
• Emphasizes economics, politics, and history
• Wolf: Europe and the People without History
focuses on Native Americans in the context of
world-system events

13-45
 WORLD SYSTEM THEORY AND
POLITICAL ECONOMY
• Mintz: Sweetness and Power focuses on
political economy, the web of interrelated
economic and power relations
• Political economy: web of interrelated economic
and power relations in society
• Wallerstein: world-system theory
• Criticized in anthropology for overstressing the
influence of outsiders

13-46
 CULTURE, HISTORY, POWER
• Theorists have focused more on local
agency, transformative actions, and groups
within colonized societies
• Gramsci: hegemony (a stratified social order in
which subordinates internalize their rulers’
values)
• Bourdieu and Foucault: easier to dominate
people’s minds than control their bodies
• Stoler: systems of power, domination,
accommodation, and resistance

13-47
 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY
• Increasing specialization
• Cultural anthropologists now head for the field
with a specific problem in mind, rather than with
goal of producing a holistic ethnography
• Ethnography has expanded to include
regional and national systems and the
movement of people

13-48
 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY
• Witnessed crisis in representation—questions
about the role of the ethnographer and the
nature of ethnographic authority
• Must stay aware of our biases and our
inability to totally escape them

13-49
RECAP 13.2: Timeline and Key
Works in Anthropological Theory

13-50