Notes on Engaging anthropological theory :
a social and political history / Mark Moberg, Routledge , 2013"
In his memory for
Frederik Barth, 1928-2016.
About Author: Mark
A. Moberg, Ph.D. -"Dr. Mark
Moberg
is a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology,
Anthropology,and Social Work at the University of South Alabama. He
holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Iowa, and an M.A.
and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Los
Angeles."-Mark
A. Moberg, Ph.D..
About this book:
"This updated second edition of Mark Moberg's lively book offers a
fresh look at the history of anthropological theory. Covering key
concepts and theorists, Engaging Anthropological Theory examines the
historical context of anthropological ideas and the contested nature of
anthropology itself. Anthropological ideas regarding human diversity
have always been rooted in the sociopolitical conditions in which they
arose and exploring them in context helps students understand how and
why they evolved, and how theory relates to life and society.
Illustrated throughout, this engaging text moves away from the dry
recitation of past viewpoints in anthropology and brings the subject
matter to life." - Nielsen
BookData.
● 2nd edition
●Cited from Quiz
yourself -- Answer True
or False to
each statement.
1. Of Politics and Paradigms -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1
As a form of knowledge, interpretation is highly personal, not subject
to the
consensus of observers, and therefore not subject to refutation or
proof.
2
As originally formulated by Bacon, empiricism allowed that scientific
observers
would be guided in the collection of data by their theories about a
given
phenomenon.
3
Replicability refers to the assumption that an objective observer who
uses the
same techniques as previous objective observers to describe a given
phenom enon
should achieve similar conclusions.
4
Nomological/ deductive theories are as common in the social sciences as
in the
physical sciences.
5
The criterion of falsifiability holds that a scientific theory must be
based on
statements that can potentially be proven false by observation.
6
Scientists refer to a "fact" as a theory that has been proven true by
repeated
observation.
7
In studying the history of scientific discovery, Thomas Kuhn observed
that
scientists frequently rejected the findings and assumptions of their
predecessors
rather than building upon them.
8
Hume's "Fallacy of Selectivity" points out that scientists do not
reason inductively,
but allow their preexisting beliefs to guide their observations.
9
According to Kuhn, scientists adopt a given paradigm because it has
been
shown as more accurate and superior in its explanatory power than its
rivals.
10 Kuhn originally
argued that scientific paradigms are incommensurable, in that
they could not be evaluated against one another in terms of their
validity.
2. Claims and Critiques of Anthropological Knowledge -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1
Postmodernists often point to inconsistencies in different ethnographic
studies
of the same societies (for example, Tepoztlan, Mexico, and Samoa) as
evidence
that "objective" accounts of culture are impossible to attain.
2
In Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead admitted that she had little
knowledge
of the Polynesian language and that most of her information had been
gathered through translators.
3
Bronislaw Malinowski specified that his Diary in the Strict Sense of
the Term
was not to be published until after his death so that it would not
diminish the
attention given his academic publications.
4
The interviewer effect refers to the fact that the identity
(nationality, race, gender,
age, sexual orientation, etc.) of the researcher will often skew how
people
answer the questions he or she poses during the study.
5
Traditional ethnographic accounts by past anthropologists such as Mead,
Lewis,
and Malinowski made extensive use of the first-person pronoun "I,"
emphasiz ing
the anthropologist's personal experiences in the field.
6 According to postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, when government and corporate bureaucracies claim to have scientific expertise, they often use that claim to extend control over other, less powerful members of society.
7
Nineteenth - century social theorist Auguste Comte argued that human
behav ior
simply did not permit the kind of scientific generalization then
developing
in the fields of physics and chemistry.
8
In advocating a "reflexive" anthropology, some postmodern ethnographers
view themselves as story-tellers whose accounts foreground their own
experi ences,
subjective and emotional state, and values.
9
Believing that traditional anthropological fieldwork recreates a
colonial hierarchy,
some postmodern anthropologists reject fieldwork in favor of textual
analysis.
10 Opponents of epistemological relativism,
such as Marvin Harris, contend that
it empowers all claims to knowledge, even those with noxious or
oppressive
implications.
3. Anthropology before Anthropologists -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1
Although prevalent in the ancient world, the notion of Plinian races
died out
long before the beginning of European colonization of the New World.
2
A Papal declaration of the 1500s ( Sublimus Del) declared that American
Indians
lacked human souls, and therefore could be freely enslaved by
Europeans.
3
At birth, accord ing to John Locke, the mind is an "empty cabinet ,"
and is
devoid of any inherent values, beliefs, or predispositions.
4
Locke's ideas acquired political significance as the ideological basis
of democracy
and the American and French revolutions.
5
Charles de Montesquieu advanced the idea that societies evolved from
savagery
to barbarism to civilization as their members increased their command
of ration al thought .
6
Although both Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin had advanced
evolutionary theories long before Charles Darwin , such ideas became
increasingly
controversial and unacceptable in the first deca des of the 1800s.
7
After the Napoleonic wars, mo st of Europe witnessed a decline in
censorship
and greater freedom of speech.
8
The first decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a continued
decline in
the influence of institutionalized religion and religious belief in
England and
the United States.
9
Auguste Comte coined the term "sociology" to refer to the study of
society,
but only did so after a competitor adopted his term "social physics" to
refer to
this field.
10 Comte's ideas
were generally ignored by political and industrial leaders of his
time , largely because of his extremely odd behavior.
4. Theory and Practice to Change the World -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1 English
industrialists and government leaders found it difficult to suppress
the
Luddite rebellion because rebels carried out uncoordinated , individual
acts of
sabotage against factory machinery.
2 In "standing
Hegel on his head," Marx rejected the dialectical notion of change
through contradiction while advancing the idea that historical change
occurs
at the level of ideas and beliefs.
3 Because Marx
was an active participant in the Russian revolution of 1917, it
can be said that the collapse of the Soviet Union effectively
repudiates and
refutes Marx's ideas.
4 For Marx,
exploitation under capitalism meant that all employers treat their
workers with abuse or injustice.
5 According to
Marx, the central contradiction in capitalism exists between
consumption and production. Workers produce more than they are able to
consume, leading to factory closures, rising unemployment, and
deepening
poverty.
6 According to
Marx, class consciousness among workers would occur as skill
differences among them are reduced to the least common denominator (the
ability to operate machinery) , and as employers reduce wages in the
pursuit of
lowered production costs.
7 The New Deal
reforms introduced by FDR were strongly supported by
US business leaders as a means of preserving the basic outlines of a
capitalist
economy.
8 According to
dialectical materialism, a society's belief systems (ideology) and
social relations Quridico-political structure) derive their basic
character from
that society's mode of production, or material base.
9 According to
Marx's evolutionary scheme, under communism, conflicts
between social classes would finally disappear, leading the state to
"wither
away" as unnecessary.
10 Hegemony
refers to a condition in which the dominant beliefs in a society
represent that social order as "right" or natural, and therefore
prevent people
from challenging the political, economic, and social conditions of
their lives.
5. Heirs to Order and Progress -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1 Durkheim's notion of
mechanical solidarity- that people in "primitive" societies
are largely alike in their personalities and outlooks - is a viewpoint
widely
accepted among modern anthropologists.
2 Like Franz Boas, but unlike
most nineteenth-century social thinkers, Durkheim
believed that race was not a determinant of one 's behavior.
3 Durkheim believed, like
Marx, that an increasingly complex division of labor
in modern industrial society would lead to growing conflict between
classes.
4 The primary function of
social facts, Durkheim argued, is to make collective
life possible by promoting social solidarity.
5 Durkheim's views of
religion were conditioned by the fact that, like many
generations of his family before him, he was a practicing Rabbi.
6 Suicide was most likely in
Protestant societies such as Sweden rather than
Catholic countries such as Italy or Spain, Durkheim believed, because
the
Catholic Church taught that the practice was a mortal sin.
7 Weber subscribed to a
naturalistic orientation, which tried to account for the
desires and beliefs of individuals based on the specific social and
historical
context in which they lived.
8 According to Weber,
Protestantism developed primarily because a rising bourgeoisie
(capitalist class) wanted to free itself from the restraints of the
Catholic
church on money lending.
9 Although Weber disagreed
with Marx over the origins of capitalism, he agreed
with him that the primary source of conflict in modern society was
between
the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
10 Anthropologists who have
studied messianic religious movements, such as the
Native American Ghost Dance or Melanesian Cargo Cults, have drawn more
heavily from the ideas of Durkheim than from Weber.
6. Spencer, Darwin, and the Evolutionary Parables for our Time -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1 Among early nineteenth -
century "race scientists," polygenists argued that God
created the human races as inherently separate and unequal.
2 The idea that competition
fuels evolution through "the survival of the fittest"
was one that originated with Charles Darwin.
3 Social Darwinism involves
the idea that competition is the natural order of
human society, and that this competition results in evolutionary
progress by
eliminating society's weakest members.
4 Unlike Lamarck and other
evolutionary predecessors, Darwin rejected the
notion that physical traits acquired during the life of the individual
would be
passed on to their offspring.
5 Soviet agronomist Trofim
Lysenko rejected Darwinian evolutionary theory
and Mendelian genetics, and used his position to persecute Soviet
scientists
who disagreed with him.
6 E.B. Tylor argued that the
behavioral differences between people in civilized
and "savage" societies were due to the racial differences between their
members.
7 According to Tylor, the
earliest impulses for religious belief developed as people
sought to explain what happened during dreaming and death .
8 Unlike many "armchair
anthropologists" of the nineteenth century, Lewis
Henry Morgan conducted original fieldwork with a number of Native
American
societies.
9 Morgan 's recognition that
there are six basic systems of kinship terminology
used by all of the world's cultures is still accepted as valid today.
10 While Tylor attributed
some logic to primitive religion, Morgan claimed that
"all primitive religions are grotesque and to some extent
unintelligible ."
7. The Boasian Revolution -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1 US and British colonialism
in the nineteenth century was based on the idea of
bringing democracy to people living in the colonized parts of the
world.
2 Widespread concern about
"absorbing semicivilized states" into the United
States repeatedly prevented American presidents from seeking annexation
of
Central American and Caribbean territories.
3 According to Langness, one
of the implications of Ernest Hackel's "biogenetic
law" is that the thought and behavior of"savages" is like that of
children in
civilized societies.
4 Boas criticized the notion
of "psychic unity" by pointing out that the same
trait in different cultures often served quite different purposes.
5 The idea that all great
inventions originated just once, in ancient Egypt, was a
claim advanced by the German Kulturkreis school of diffusion.
6 Eighteenth-century German
philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed that our
perceptions of the world are constrained by preexisting categories of
mind,
such as moral ideas and individual concepts of space and time.
7 Boas argued that in
principle there were no differences between the goals of
the natural sciences and the social sciences .
8 The goal ofBoas's "salvage
ethnography" was to engage in as much theoretical
debate as possible so that the pressing anthropological questions of
evolution
versus diffusion could be settled once and for all.
9 Boas might be considered an
early proponent of the deductive approach in
anthropology, allowing his theory to guide his collection and
interpretation of
data.
10 Boas basically shared
Comte's and Durkheim's "organismic" view that all the
elements of a culture stood in some kind of functional relationship to
one
another.
8. Culture and Psychology -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1 Boas's student Alfred
Kroeber focused his attention on how exceptional individuals
influence and reshape the cultures in which they participate.
2 Following her research in
Samoa, Margaret Mead engaged in a prolonged,
fierce debate with Derek Freeman over her ethnographic research on the
island.
3 Benedict's Patterns of
Culture suggested that the interpersonal behavior, mythology,
aesthetic styles, and conceptions of the supernatural, all express the
dominant
psychological orientation of a given culture.
4 Benedict's notion of
cultural relativism entailed the idea that cultural practices
must be understood in the context and traditions within which they
occur, but
not the idea that all cultural practices are equally valid.
5 Among the Tchambuli of New
Guinea, Margaret Mead claimed to have found
a society in which western standards of gender roles were essentially
reversed.
6 Malinowski argued that the
Oedipal complex was absent in the matrilineal
Trobriand Islands, where a young man has an ambivalent relationship
with his
mother's brother, not his father.
7 According to Geza Roheim,
the Australian practice of sub-incision was rooted
in the Oedipal complex as expressed in that culture's sleeping
arrangements
between mothers and their male children.
8 In the film vertigo, when
Scottie falls in love with Judy, who resembled the
deceased Madeleine, he is exhibiting the psychological process of
transference.
9 Psychological
anthropologists during the 1940s attempted to explain Japanese
atrocities in wartime in terms of Japanese infant toilet -training
practices.
10 Anthony F.C. Wallace's
research shows that personality types in small-scale
societies are indeed largely homogeneous, but that the notion of a
basic personality
structure does not hold for large - scale industrialized societies.
9. Functionalism, the Pure and the Hyphenated -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1 Radcliffe -Brown largely
agreed with Boas and Malinowski that anthropology
should focus on the study of culture.
2 Assuming that all people in
a particular society follow social rules in the
same fashion, Radcliffe-Brown claimed that it was only necessary to
know
the rules of society in order to understand the behavior of the people
who
belong to it.
3 To understand social structure, according to Radcliffe -Brown, it was necessary to understand how it evolved and changed over time, leading him to adopt a "multi - chronic" perspective on society.
4 The edited volume African
Political Systems examined in great detail how colonialism
had altered African societies.
5 Reflecting prevalent
theories of the time in archeology and cultural anthropology,
African Political Systems showed that stratified societies in Africa
were those
with the highest population densities.
6 In analyzing the trading
partnerships of the kula ring in the Trobriand Islands,
Malinowski set out to show how the assumptions of western formal
economics
apply everywhere.
7 Malinowski viewed magic as
an attempt to control events in which there is
high risk or uncertainty and an inability to control those events by
other, more
direct means; as such, he said, it was found in both "primitive" and
"civilized"
societies.
8 Malinowski argued that
cultural practices develop to satisfy seven individual
needs universal to all humans.
9 Critics have faulted
functionalist theories for being non-falsifiable in that their
"explanations" of cultural practices cannot be disproven.
10 Because of its assumption
that social practices fulfill the needs of society, functionalism
is particularly well suited to understanding how culture changes as
social and individual needs change.
10. Anti-Structure and the Collapse of Empire -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1 Malinowski argued that his
functionalist theory would be of great use to the
colonial administrators and missionaries who "need to exploit savage
trade and
savage labor."
2 Launched during the Cold
War, Project Camelot sought to employ social scientists
to identify the causes of social rebellion and the actions pro-US
governments
could take to undermine their political opposition.
3 Lacking any way to analyze
conflict from a functionalist perspective, the
anthropologist Max Gluckman simply ignored the "rituals of rebellion"
that
regularly occur in some African societies.
4 From Raymond Firth's
perspective, "social organization" consists of the actual
behavior of people, as opposed to the rules for behavior prescribed by
social
structure.
5 Marcel Mauss argued that no
gift is entirely "free" to the recipient, but always
contains the expectation of some return.
6 Anthropologists who study
economic behavior in non - capitalist societies tend
to agree with economists that rationality is universal to all human
societies.
7 Adam Smith agreed with
Hobbes in claiming that when people act in terms
of their self-interest, the result is conflict, abuse, and tyranny.
8 Frederic Barth argued that
his theory of transactionalism - and its assumption
of reciprocity in social relationships - applies well within families
or egalitarian
societies, but breaks down in unequal situations like the Swat Pathans.
9 Talal Asad argues that
Barth's view of khan-tenant relations as reciprocal probably
reflected the fact that he interacted the most with relatively powerful
individuals and internalized their view of Swat Pathans society.
10 According to Bourdieu, an
individual's position in society was determined not
just by his or her wealth, but also by symbolic, social, and cultural
capital.
11. Evolution Redux -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1 During the 1950s and 60s, the FBI
maintained surveillance records on dozens
of anthropologists suspected of leftwing political leanings.
2 Boas argued that geographical regions
were associated with certain types
of cultures only because the boundaries of those regions (mountains,
rivers,
coasts) limited the ability of cultural practices to diffuse from one
region to
another.
3 Boas acquired the idea of culture areas
from museum displays, which had
always organized cultural artifacts by geographical regions .
4 A.L. Kroeber's doctrine of possibilism
suggested that within a given region
only a single kind of cultura l adaptation was possible .
5 Julian Steward's 1936 article on Great
Basin hunter -gatherers was the first
application of a materialist theory to explain the characteristics of a
specific
culture, although it is now recognized as having reached erroneous
conclusions
about hunter -gatherer kinship and social organization.
6 Anthropologists now recognize that the
nutritional hardship that Steward
attributed to hunter - gatherers like the Shoshone was largely the
result of white
contact and resulting loss of territory.
7 Although hunter -gatherers work less than
people in the United States, the
advent of "labor saving" technology since the 1950s has reduced the
work
week for Americans by nearly one full day.
8 Leslie White divided cultures into
"technological," "sociological," and "ideo logical"
levels that basically corresponded to Marx's three -part division of
societies.
9 Leslie White's contention that "culture
evolves as the efficiency of energy capture
increases" is borne out by Johnson's data on the relationship between
energy input and output in hunter -gatherer, horticultural, and
intensive agri cultural
socie ties.
10 Economist Ester Boserup argued that
people would only opt for intensified
food production if they were forced to - either by increasing
population or the
demands of a dominant class of tribute - takers.
12. Contemporary Materialist and Ecological Approaches -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1 According to Harris, "etic"
descriptions are those of an outside scientific
observer, and are used by the scientific community to generate and
strengthen
theories of sociocultural life.
2 According to Julian
Steward, a major factor leading postwar anthropologists
to a materialist perspective was growing up in the Depression and
service in
World War II.
3 According to Harris, the
true test of an "etic" analysis of culture is that it is
not only scientific but also makes sense and is meaningful to a member
of that
culture.
4 While there are differences
between Harris and Marx, both use the concept of
a "mode of production" in an identical fashion.
5 Timothy Earle's archeo
logical and ethnohistorical research from Hawaii tends
to support Wittfogel's idea that irrigation agriculture leads to the
development
of a society with centralized, managerial power.
6 Harris and Marx differ
fundamentally in their attitude toward Malthus, with
Marx rejecting the notion that there is a "universal law" of population
growth
for all societies.
7 Evidence from most
societies bears out the Malthusian idea that human populations
grow right up to their environment's carrying capacity, after which
they
decline due to war, disease, and famine.
8 Abortion and other forms of
population control are largely unknown outside
of industrialized societies.
9 The imposition of new taxes
by Dutch administrators in colonial Java led to
rapid population growth, as peasants sought to increase the amount of
labor
available to their households.
10 Political ecology accepts
the basic premise of Malthusian thinking that population
growth is the ultimate cause of environmental degradation.
13. Symbols, Structures, and the "Web of Significance" -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1 Like Marvin Harris,
Clifford Geertz defines culture as human behavior and the
shared traditions that guide it.
2 Geertz argues that
generalizations about human thought and behavior (for
example, that "all people have supernatural beliefs") are basically
meaningless
in that they fail to help us understand the belief systems of specific
cultures.
3 According to Victor Turner,
all symbols are multivocal in that they present
multiple meanings to the members of society.
4 The task of anthropology,
according to Geertz, is to produce a single, authoritative
interpretation of culture that all readers would agree with.
5 Anthropologist William
Roseberry criticizes Geertz's article on the Balinese
cockfight for ignoring the broader gender, historical, and political
context of
Balinese (Indonesian) society.
6 According to Claude
Levi-Strauss, the "structure" that underlies all cultural
behavior is a mental process involving binary oppositions.
7 According to anthropologist
Sherry Ortner, "men" are on the side of"nature"
because of their work outside the home , while women are on the side
of"culture"
because of their role in raising (enculturating) children .
8 Levi-Strauss originally
derived his ideas about cannibalism from observing
dietary patterns in France, where guests were served roasted chicken
and family
was served boiled chicken.
9 Daniel Ingersoll argues
that advertisers in the US promote their products by
invoking the attributes of family, love, cooperation , and security,
all of which
fall on the "culture" side of the culture-nature opposition.
10 One criticism of cognitive
anthropology is that, while our knowledge may
be organized taxonomically, the taxonomies of different people are
probably
organized in different ways.
14. Postmodern Political Economy and Sensibilities -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1 The
"Enlightenment-modernist" project entailed a commitment to science,
and a belief that its application would result in social progress.
2 Although modernist social planning and architecture were prevalent in
the
capitalist countries of the twentieth century, they were rejected as
"bourgeois"
by communist governments.
3 In Seeing Like a State,James Scott argues that governments often
adopt largescale
projects in order to render their citizens more dependent on the state
and
to better control them.
4 In Weapon of the Weak, Scott contends that peasants usually do not
openly rebel
because in most circumstances they are satisfied with social and
economic
conditions.
5 Postmodern architecture, as in Chicago's Public Library, shuns
adornment and
stresses strict functional utility.
6 According to David Harvey, the response of western governments to the
Great
Depression fundamentally changed the "mode of regulation" by which
capital ism
was organized.
7 Although Fordism gradually came to an end during the 1970s and 80s,
the
incomes of most working people in the United States have continued to
rise
since then.
8 By creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs in Mexico, free trade
pacts such
as NAFTA have had the effect of slowing Mexican immigration to the
United
States.
9. Jet transport and containerized shipping created strong incentives
for US manufacturers
to move their operations to areas of lower wages in Latin America
and Asia.
10 According to Harvey, one effect of"flexible accumulation" has been
increased
reliance on the "turnover time of production and consumption," which
creates
the impression of an accelerating rate of social change.
15. The Contemporary Anthropological Moment -- Answer True or False to each statement.
1 The hermeneutic perspective holds that an individual's knowledge of the
world is always conditioned by his or her culture, identity, and social position.
2 Deconstruction is an interpretive approach that examines how the language,
metaphor, or imagery employed in a text reveal an author 's unstated assumptions
or meanings.
3 Michel Foucault argues that the claim to command scientific knowledge on
the part of bureaucracies, the state, and corporations allows them to exercise
power over other groups in society.
4 Clifford Geertz used the approach of deconstruction to show how past anthropologists
employed rhetorical devices in their writing to enhance their ethnographic
authority.
5 Mac Marshall employed the approach of deconstruction to show how Derek
Freeman's rhetorical techniques served to undermine his rival Margaret Mead's
ethnographic authority on Samoa while enhancing his own.
6 Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod rejects ethnographic generalizations because,
in her view, they "privilege" the anthropologist's claims to knowledge over
those of the people they study.
7 Some postmodern anthropologists reject ethnographic research entirely in
Third World settings because they believe such endeavors recreate colonial
hierarchies of power and privilege.
8 Anthropologist Roy D'Andrade is critical of those who would "just tell stories"
in place of scientific generalization, noting that such anecdotes serve as
disguised generalizations anyway.
9 Scientific anthropologists claim that postmodern assertions about the subjectivity
of all knowledge are self-refuting and therefore cannot be logically
sustained.
10 Hermeneutic philosophers such as Paul De Man and Martin Heidegger are
known to have had strongly pro-Nazi sympathies prior to and during World
War II.
● 1st edition.
1.
Of Politics and
Paradigms 01-Engage_Anthro.pdf
2.
Claims and
Critiques of Anthropological Knowledge
3.
The Prehistory
of Anthropology
4.
Marx 02-Engage_Anthro-2.pdf
5.
Durkheim and Weber
6.
Spencer,
Darwin, and an Evolutionary Parable for Our Time 03-Engage_Anthro-3.pdf
7.
Boas and the
Demise of Cultural Evolution
8.
Culture and
Psychology 04-Engage_Anthro-4.pdf
9.
Structure and
Function
10.
Decolonization
and Anti-Structure 05-Engage_Anthro-5.pdf
11.
Ecological and
Neo-Evolutionary Approaches
12.
Contemporary
Materialist and Ecological Approaches 06-Engage_Anthro-6.pdf
13. Symbols, Structures, and the "Web of Significance"
14. Postmodern
Political Economy and Sensibilities 07-Engage_Anthro-7.pdf
15. The Contemporary Anthropological Moment
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