Cultural Anthropology Notes

The Culture Concept

What is Culture?

Culture is a set of shared customs.

Sometimes, culture is self-identified and intentionally reproduced (e.g. "in my culture we value family"). Other times, it is an external label that is implied to be unwittingly reproduced (e.g. "the culture of poverty").

Why do we suggest that cultural institutions are different from political institutions and religious institutions?

Why do we distinguish between high culture and low culture? In some ways, we accept that culture can be hierarchical, and that there can be some cultures that are better than others. But we also commonly hear the argument that culture is inherently relative (cultural relativism).

The History of Culture

"Culture... includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" - E.B. Tylor

  • Tylor developed this definition at the height of European imperialism
  • Culture quickly became the dominant framework to understand non-European peoples
  • Culture was originally been a tool used from the perspective of the colonizer to understand the colonized ("the other")

There were several issues with early anthropological work:

  • Early anthropologists relied on the accounts of others, but did not have contact with the people they were studying (cultural evolutionism)
  • Early anthropologists tended to evaluate other cultures from the viewpoint that their own culture was superior (ethnocentrism)
  • Early anthropologists believed that cultures evolved through distinct stages, from savagery, barbarism, to civilization (cultural evolutionism)

Around the 19th century, the field of anthropology changed:

  • Anthropologists began to travel and live among the group of people they are studying (participant observation, or going native)
  • Anthropolgists began to believe that culture should be understood on its own terms rather than be compared to an outsider's standard (cultural relativism)

Franz Boas argued that Inuit culture was shaped by the cold environment, and so cannot be compared to cultures without this environmental context. This led to the idea of cultural relativism. However, this kind of environmental determinism was also used to justify racist beliefs about other cultures.

Margaret Mead showed that Somoan teenagers had an easier time transition from childhood to adulthood than U.S. teenagers, mostly because of culture. This was a novel argument against biological racism.

Bronislaw Malinowski argued that cultural traditions were developed as a response to specific needs, like food, safety, and stability. This idea was called structural functionalism. However, this view eventually fell out of favor because it views cultures as stable and orderly; it is unable to explain social change. It also is unable to explain why a society develops one particular kind of social institution instead of another.

Cultural Change

How do cultures change?

One view is that cultures change in a deterministic, teleological way. Teleology is the explanation of phenomena in terms of purpose instead of cause. Examples of teleological explanations of culture include:

  • Structural functionalism, which tries to explain society in terms of structures which promote stability
  • Social evolution, which theorizes that cultures go through a process of competition, accommodation, conflict, and assimilation

The problem with teleology is that culture changes in ways that we can't product, and which can't be mapped into a linear structure. This is called the cultural specificity theory.

Politics of Culture

Franz Boas challenged both the idea of racial inferiority and cultural inferiority. He made two important studies:

  1. He took head measurements of immigrants and found that they differed from the measurements of local Americans. He showed that environment caused the variability of traits usually used for racial categorization. This challenged the idea of racial inferiority.
  2. He engaged in an ethnographic student of Inuit people in Canada, which lead to the idea of cultural relativism.

Although Boas were successful in challenging racial inferiority, he was unsuccessful in promoting cultural relativism to ethnic immigrants and Blacks. In other words, there persisted the idea that rural black folk culture was "culturally inferior," and that the best outcome was for Black people to assimilate into white culture.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund led a legal campaign to desgregate public schools, culminating in the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. The NAACP accepted Boas's argument that there is no racial inferiority, but rejected his theory of cultural relativism.

This is because of the following reasons:

  • Black people negatively deviated from the white population on multiple metrics (poverty, crime, disease), in a way that were correlated to cultural variables (incidence of female-headed households, divorces, fictive kin relations).Anthropologists believed that cultural change (assimilation) could change these metrics.
  • The cultural specificity theory that culture was slow to change and not reversible. This was a problem because it may relieve whites of social obligations to change the status quo. Social evolution put more responsibility on white people to take part in speeding up assimilation.

References: Lee Baker. 1998. Unraveling the Boasian Discourse: The Racial Politics of "Culture" in School Desegregation, 1944 - 1954, Transforming Anthropology 7(1): 15 -32.

Balinese cock-fighting

  • Importance is not in making money by betting (formal function)
  • Metonym for broader society, which shows the punctuatedness of Balinese life
  • Cultural text that represents society, and allows people to learn and mimic culture

References: Clifford Geertz. 1973. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock Fight. The Interpretation of Cultures.

Cultural Relativism

Within a culture, there is a tension between structure and agency. Structure is power afforded to the institution. Agency is an individual's capacity to assert oneself, exercise power, and enact change. Cultural relativism emphasizes structure rather than agency, which precludes cultural change.

There are several issues with cultural relativism:

  1. It is essentialist. It belives that culture has a set of essential and immutable characteristics.
  2. It is ahistorical. It assumes that culture doesn't change in response to interactions with other cultures.
  3. It is amoral. Because cultural relativism tells us to evaluate beliefs, values, and practices based on own cultural context, it prevents us from assigning judgment (and thus morality).

When should we reconsider our morals? And when should we affirm them?

When done right, cultural relativism can instead promote:

  1. Reflexivity
  2. Cross-cultural solidarity
  3. Respect for people's agency

For example, consider the narrative of the oppressed Muslim woman. This narrative was used by Bush to justify the War on Terror. In many ways, it appeals to liberal supporters of gender equality.

However, cultural relativism allows us to reflexivly think about our own culture. For example, French women can't cover their faces. In most Western cultures, women can't expose their chests like men can.

Lila Abu-Lughod. 2002. Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others. American Anthropologist 104(3): 783 – 790.

Identity Formation

What is an identity? How can we make any declaration of the individual self?

While there has always been social groups with particular identities, the idea there are unique individuals is relatively new.

Historically, people have been defined relationally, not individually:

  • In Bantu language, there is no word for the concept of the individual self. Selfhood is always defined through social relationships.
  • In Nyoro society, a person would likely identify themselves by their agnatic clan and their mother's clan.
  • In Japan, people usually identify themselves by the relationship they are a part of. Rather than saying 'I am a typesetter,' a Japanese man is likely to say 'I am from B Publishing Group.'

The Cartesian Individual

Rene Descartes tried doubt everything in the world to find the absolute truth. He realized: if we can deduce that our thoughts are real, then it stands to reason that we are real. In other words: cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am").

"... the soul, through which I am what I am, is entirely separate from the body... so that even if I did not have a body, my soul would continue to be all that it is."

This concept, "I think therefore I am," informed a mode of secular individualism that brought forth the idea that we all are unique individuals.

The Cartesian philosophy brought forth three important ideas:

  1. Scientific empiricism and objectivity.
  2. Individualism and the rights-bearing subject.
  3. Secular political agency and popular revolution

The idea behind scientific empiricism is that the individual is able to divorce themself from the social and material context, and use their mind to interpret the world objectively. Black and brown people were increasingly seen as part of the non-human, subjective world.

Identity, as emerged in the early 18th century, was seen as a set of features that distinguishes a person or thing from others.

The idea behind the rights-bearing subject was that man was entitled to certain rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This liberal philosophy informed many of the political movements of the time, such as the American Revolution.

Individualism has also generated a myth of the "Homo economicus"; the idea that we all seek to maximize our own wealth.

Historically, most societies were governed by a theological order. There was no social mobility. The idea that the individual can change their individual circumstances gave rise to a sense of political agency and populism.

The idea that people were entitled to change their own circumstances was at the core of the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution.

Identity Politics and Intersectionality

While secular political agency emerged from the idea of the autonomous liberal subject, it has also given rise to identity politics and intersectionality. Identity politics says that marginalized people need to self-consciously organize around their shared identities. It states that we are not only individuals, but that we are also impacted by structural forces. Intersectionality is the idea that structural power intersects to shape people's structural positions.

Anthropologists focus on how social contexts shapes how we identify and who we believe ourselves to be. In some ways, this rejects the idea of individualism. Yet, through cultural relativism, anthropology also affirms the individual's agency.

Our identities are the medium through which culture change and through which cultures persist.

Hijra Identity

Question: Are hijras agents of gender subversion, or are they reinscribing gendered categories through their desires and practices?

Hijras are a recognized third gender in South Asia. Hijras are men who sacrifice their genitalia to a goddess in return for the power to confer fertility. They are respected for this ritual role, but also stigmatized for their ambiguous sexuality.

However, Hijra identity is not just about being a "third gender." Hijra identity is not something one has, but something that one performs through pursuing izzat (respect and recognition). Thus, hijra identity is not a series of attributes, but instead a performative and relational phenomenon.

Gender performativity (innocent mode of signification) is an implicit, everyday act. Gender performance (intentional mode of signification) is a conscious, intentional effort to mark a gendered identity. There is not a firm line between gender performativity and performance. When hijras perform their ritual, it is both performative and a performance.

An etic reading refers to the study of a culture or a language by people who do not belong to that culture. An emic reading refers to an analysis of a culture by people who belong to that culture, by using the language of the people in this culture.

Reddy rejects the etic analysis that hijras are challenging the sexual binary. Her emit analysis shows that hijras subscribe to an essentialist understandings of gender, focused around dress, manner, and sexual position.

However, hijras also had agency in a number of ways. First, hijras play with and parody gender. Hijras and other kotis1 did not unequivocally think of themselves as women. They often emphasized their non-binary status by performing hand claps and lifting their saris to expose genitalia (or lack thereof). They also dress their saris differently than women, intentionally emphasizing that they are different.

Gayatri Reddy. 2005. With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India.

  1. A kothi is a term for a man who takes on an effeminate role and is the receptive partner in sexual intercourse.