Cultural Anthropology: 101

Jack David Eller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317550730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

This concise and accessible introduction establishes the relevance of cultural anthropology for the modern world through an integrated, ethnographically informed approach. The book develops readers' understanding and engagement by addressing key issues such as:

• What it means to be human
• The key characteristics of culture as a concept
• Relocation and dislocation of peoples
• The conflict between political, social and ethnic boundaries
• The concept of economic anthropology

Cultural Anthropology: 101 includes case studies from both classic and contemporary ethnography, as well as a comprehensive bibliography and index. It is an essential guide for students approaching this fascinating field for the first time.

1 Diverse Humanity, Diverse Anthropology

DOI: 10.4324/9781315731025-2

“Are they human?” wondered the European conquerors, explorers and missionaries when they first encountered the indigenous peoples of America. Certainly Europeans had never seen human beings so different from themselves, and the existence of Native Americans challenged European thinking in many ways. The American continent was not even known in their geography and theology, and the accepted doctrine of monogenism (that all humans originated from a single ancestor, namely, Adam and Eve) could not easily explain the location, appearance and behavior of these strange people. In 1537 the Catholic Church happily declared them rational beings. Still, a formal debate was held within the Church in 1550 at the Council of Valladolid, in which Juan Sepúlveda argued that the Indians were an inferior inhuman kind, barbarians and pagans by nature, ruled by passion rather than reason, and fit only for slavery. Bartolomé de las Casas responded that they were pagans but fully human, with a rational soul, and therefore that Europeans should be humane to them, help them and persuade them of Christian truth.

No human group has ever been so isolated that it did not have contact with other different humans—different in body, different in language, different in behavior, in dress and food and religion and so on. But humans have also typically been essentially disinterested in these others and even denied their basic humanity; much more recently, Elizabeth Ewart (2013) described the Panará of Central Brazil, who consider themselves to be human and everyone else to be hipe, a term that includes not only foreign and enemy humans but also other noxious beings such as wasps, game animals and witches.

People with such attitudes toward other humans are unlikely to be curious, let alone to make much effort to learn about them. Neither the Panará nor the colonial Spanish did anything like anthropology. However, anthropology finds human diversity interesting, thrilling and important. It begins with the acknowledgement that all humans are human and makes the further claim that in order to know humanity we must know “the other” too, that is, that we must precisely know humanity in all its extraordinary diversity. In extending the concept of “humanity” to others unlike, and sometimes distasteful to, ourselves, anthropology is, in the words of the classic anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, “the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities” (quoted in Wolf 1964).

The Natural Science of Man?

Anthropology is a relatively new—perhaps the newest—major academic discipline, although the idea and the term have a longer history. By 1910 anthropology had enough stature to merit a history of the subject by Alfred Haddon, an early enthusiast who was actually trained as a zoologist. He claimed that the Latin word Anthropologium (from the Greek anthropos for “man/human” and logos for “study”) was used in 1501, mainly to refer to the study of the human body, and that “anthropology” appeared in English in a 1655 treatise on human nature and anatomy.

But anthropology really began to emerge in the late 1700s and early 1800s, during the era of colonialism and early-modern science, and therefore it was shaped by colonial and scientific interests, as the scientific study of mankind. In his 1863 Introduction to Anthropology, Theodor Waitz asserted that the field “aspires to be the science of man in general; or, in precise terms, the science of the nature of man” (1863: 3), which should “study man by the same method which is applied to the investigation of all other natural objects” (5).

Not surprisingly, this approach made anthropology largely the province of the biologist and the anatomist, like Haddon or like Armand de Quatrefages, a nineteenth-century lecturer, who contended that anthropology should study mankind “as a zoologist studying an animal would understand it” (quoted in Topinard 1890: 2). The point here is that, while the present book is about cultural anthropology, it is necessary to understand that “culture” was not the first preoccupation of anthropology, which was originally focused on human bodies and which maintains this dual interest to today.

The question of human bodily diversity was based on what Haddon called, quoting an unknown Professor Giddings, a “consciousness of kind” (1910: 7) and which took the inevitable form of race. Speculation about and classification of race already had a long history, from Linnaeus’ influential four-race system in his 1737 Systema Naturae to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's five-race system described in 1779. This line of inquiry was so firmly established that in 1876 Paul Topinard called anthropology “the branch of natural history which treats of man and the races of man” (1890: 3).

At the same time, Topinard acknowledged that anthropology was one of two distinct perspectives, virtually “two distinct sciences,” the second being “ethnology.” Anthropology, as noted, “occupies itself with Man and the races of mankind,” while ethnology (from the Greek ethnos for “a people”) “only concerns itself with such peoples and tribes as geography and history hand over to us” and investigates not only the physical traits of each group but also “its manners, customs, religion, language, physical characteristics, and origin” (8–9).

The History of Institutions

In parallel with this new biological perspective on mankind (Western tradition long being profoundly uninterested in the human body) but from a much older date, scholars pondered the origin and history of social institutions like government or marriage. The key insight behind this effort was that different societies had quite different institutions and, even more imperatively, European society had not always had the institutions that it currently possessed, no matter how real and right those forms felt. The ancient Greeks had compared the constitutions and political systems of neighboring cities, and the Romans documented social differences between themselves and the peoples they encountered and conquered while writing down their own social history (for instance, from republic to empire).

Interest in the history of institutions revived in the early-modern era in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (as in his 1651 Leviathan) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (as in his 1762 Of the Social Contract). Both men opined that “society,” by which they roughly meant government and civil institutions, originally did not exist; in the beginning, people lived in a “state of nature” (which Hobbes imagined as selfish and violent and Rousseau idealized as peaceful and free).

By the mid 1800s, particularly with the advent of evolutionary thinking, researchers argued that societies and governments had developed and changed from “primitive” to ancient to medieval to modern times. Naturally, much of the attention was concentrated on the institutions of the Greeks and Romans, the ancient Hebrews and other major civilizations, especially their laws. In 1861, for instance, Henry Sumner Maine published Ancient Law, which he followed in 1875 with Early History of Institutions and in 1883 with On Early Law and Custom.

Meanwhile, thinkers were discovering that the family was not a natural and universal institution but also had a social history. One of the most important of these men was Johann Jakob Bachofen, who reckoned that marriage and family had evolved through a series of stages from promiscuity or polyamory (no marriage or family) to patriarchy and monogamy by way of matriarchy. His influential 1861 book was thus titled Das Mutterrecht, translated as “mother right.” Shortly thereafter, John Ferguson McLennan wrote the 1865 Primitive Marriage, subtitled “An Inquiry into the Origin of the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies,” and a few years later, in 1871, Lewis Henry Morgan published Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, which is widely regarded as a founding document for the anthropology of kinship. However, by far his most influential work was the 1877 Ancient Society, in which he combined the study of the Iroquois with chapters on the Aztecs, the Greeks and the Romans. More importantly, he proposed a scheme of seven stages of social evolution, bundled into three major periods—“savagery,” “barbarism” and “civilization.” Reasoning that “mankind commenced their career at the bottom of the scale and worked their way up from savagery to civilization through the slow accumulations of experimental knowledge,” so-called savage or primitive societies became relevant to our own social history (Morgan 1877: 3). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels took note of Morgan's work, and Engels explicitly acknowledged it in his history of marriage and family, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).

Box 1.1 Morgan's Seven Stages of Society

Lewis Henry Morgan categorized the path of social history through a set of phases based on economic/technological criteria. These stages included:

Lower Savagery: “From the infancy of the Human Race to the commencement of the next period”

Middle Savagery: “From the acquisition of a fish subsistence and a knowledge of the use of fire”

Upper Savagery: “From the invention of the bow and arrow”

Lower Barbarism: “From the invention of the art of pottery”

Middle Barbarism: “From the domestication of animals on the Eastern hemisphere, and in the Western from the cultivation of maize and plants by irrigation, with the use of adobe-brick and stone”

Upper Barbarism: “From the invention of the process of smelting iron ore, with the use of iron tools”

Civilization: “From the invention of a phonetic alphabet, with the use of writing, to the present time” (1877: 12–13).

Religion was one of the last and most controversial subjects for historical analysis and comparison, because treating Christianity as a historical object and comparing it to other religions verged on blasphemy. In fact, the idea of religions in the plural was not a familiar or welcome notion; there was one true religion, and it was (contemporary European) Christianity. William Robertson Smith wrote Religion of the Semites: Fundamental Institutions in 1889 (as well as a study of Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia in 1885), after losing his teaching position at the Aberdeen Free Church College in 1881 over charges of heresy. Even more epoch-making was James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, first published in 1890 but expanded subsequently into many volumes, which traced and compared—and discovered great consistency between—beliefs and myths from “primitive” to ancient to modern/Christian religions. Most influential on the future of cultural anthropology was The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, published by Émile Durkheim in 1912. A founder of modern sociology and a contemporary of founders of modern anthropology like Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, Durkheim's study drew on current field descriptions of Australian Aboriginal religion to suggest a social basis for the phenomenon of religion.

From Anthropology to Cultural Anthropology

From its earliest days, anthropology had this split personality, encompassing both human bodies and human behavior and institutions, with bodies being more fundamental than behavior (and often explaining behavioral differences in terms of bodily differences). Accordingly, nineteenth-century books on anthropology tended to include sections on both subjects, with physical topics first and behavioral topics second: Part I of Waitz's book was called “Physical Investigation,” of Topinard's book was called “On Man Considered in His Ensemble, and in His Relations with Animals,” and of Haddon's book was titled “Physical Anthropology.” However, the second section of Haddon's work was titled “Cultural Anthropology” and embraced such chapter topics as ethnology, archaeology, technology, religion, language and the influence of the environment.

Even as culture slowly separated as a concept (see Chapter 2), bodily and racial questions continued to be dominant. Indeed, the late nineteenth century was the era of “scientific racism,” with practitioners of anthropometry devising clever ways to measure human bodies, often if not essentially in order to scientifically justify racial—and racist—conceptions. Scientists measured the length of arms, the angle of faces and, most meaningfully, the volume of brains, typically on the assumption that long arms, protruding faces and small brains were markers of “primitive” and therefore inferior breeds. The most adamant of the scientific racists advocated racial segregation and even eugenics, the organized effort to “improve” humanity through controlled breeding (to breed out the inferior traits and types).

Another egregious manifestation of the physical obsession of nineteenth-century anthropology, mixed with the colonial gaze of triumphant Western countries, was the exhibition and display of peoples from conquered and colonized parts of the world. In circuses, traveling shows and world fairs like the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago and the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 in Paris, Australian, Asian, Native American and African people were shown in what can only be called human zoos; often entire families were put on display, sometimes with props like huts and tools, to become a living tableau for Western audiences. But, as Sadiah Qureshi tells, these were not only occasions for city folk to gawk at exotic people; these were also considered “educational opportunities for budding ethnologists” (2011: 187). Leading scientists in fields from anthropology to zoology attended such events, where the natives were sometimes caged and naked, recognizing that the humans on show were “usable experimental material,” and “the opportunities they provided for research were … taken up with enthusiasm” (221).

A key element of the rise of cultural anthropology was a pointed critique of the race concept, particularly as an explanation of behavioral diversity. One of the first and loudest critics was Franz Boas, who is widely regarded as the father of modern cultural anthropology. In a series of writings from 1911 to 1945 he countered race as an academic concept, arguing first that there was little clear meaning in the term (recall that Linnaeus and Blumenbach disagreed on how many races there were) and that physical traits could not be linked significantly to behavior. Quite to the contrary, he conducted research that suggested that “racial” traits were not fixed and permanent but that bodily characteristics were actually a product of cultural experience, not vice versa.

Box 1.2 Franz Boas Tests Racial Explanations of Behavior

Boas attacked race as a cause of human behavioral differences, claiming that there was no such thing as a pure race and that supposedly racial features were not permanent or stable. He conducted anthropometric measurements on thousands of immigrants to the United States from several European nationalities, believing that their new social environment would “affect the form of the body during the period of growth” (1911: 100). He concluded that “every single measurement that has been studied has one value among individuals born in Europe, another one among individuals of the same families born in America” (101). In fact, he found the effects of the new environment to be dramatic and abrupt; in other words, there was no set of fixed “racial types” but rather “a decided plasticity of human types,” and “if the bodily form undergoes far-reaching changes under a new environment, concomitant changes of the mind may be expected” (102). In short, “The old idea of absolute stability of human types must … evidently be given up, and with it the belief of the hereditary superiority of certain types over others” (103).

Boas and scholars like him—many of them trained by Boas at Columbia University in the first half of the twentieth century—helped establish cultural anthropology as a distinct field, with its own university departments, its own academic journals, its own research literature, its own professional associations and all the trappings of an independent discipline.

Crucial to the integrity of cultural anthropology as a coherent discipline is its unique way of looking at the human world, which is commonly dubbed the anthropological perspective. All sciences of humanity or social sciences ultimately share the same data source, which is humans acting. But as thinkers from Aristotle to Marx to early anthropologists have agreed, in the words of Waitz, “Whosoever would arrive at a just conception of Man must not consider him exclusively as an individual, for man is … a social being; as an individual being he cannot be fully understood” (1863: 10–11). Therefore, cultural anthropology concentrates on humans in groups and as members of groups, not of course denying humans their individuality. We understand too that much of our individuality is a product of our social experience, that we are all, as...