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SOCIOCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS are sometimes known
as the ones who go out to live with and "study" primitive or tribal peoples,
and that was once true, although any society is fair game for anthropological
analysis, and for decades most anthropological fieldwork has been done
with peasants and others in complex societies.
IT is more accurate to say that anthropologists
believe we can only understand ourselves by comparison with others.
All understanding is relative, and anthropology asks you to relate your
own ways to those of others, on an equal footing.
ALL SOCIETIES, whether called "primitive" or "civilized",
are equally significant as expressions of human possibility, and any comprehensive
investigation of humanity must include peoples who live in the way humans
have done through most of our history: in small societies, local communities,
without the encumbrances of the state and of "civilization".
IN THE PAST couple hundred years, we have become
committed to (and have widely disseminated) an ideology of "progress" (or:
West is Best) which encourages us to view all differences between ourselves
and others as evidence of their inferiority. Anthropologists regard
this attitude as a hindrance to our understanding both of ourselves and
of others, and as a self-validating tool for the perpetuation of our own
ignorance. If anthropologists sometimes seek out the "exotic", it
is in order to bring it back home.
YES, people of other societies are different from
us in some ways; but no, they are not behind us and did not come before
us: they are our contemporaries, living through organizations and values
different from ours. And our problems of understanding them are just
as difficult as their problems in understanding us. Much of socio-cultural
anthropology is an attempt to deal directly with these problems of "cross-cultural"
understanding.
IN designing this course, I hoped (among other things)
to offer you materials for developing a new sense of what "progress"
is about, through a new appreciation of the humanity of non-European
life-styles.
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ANTHROPOLOGISTS, doing their comparative investigation
of human nature, have been impressed by the extraordinary variety
of human styles of living, human expression and experience. They
have come to account for this variety by viewing it as the expression of
two sorts of facts about people.
ONE is that people are animals which live in widely
varied environments; that is, in objectively different situations which
we
do not completely control either individually or collectively. There
are real, material differences in the contexts of human living,
and they have consequences.
THE SECOND is that, of the animals, humans are the
most adept at (and most dependent upon) the creation, expression, and perpetuation
of descriptions of ourselves and our world. But there is little agreement
among humans about what we and our world are and ought to be like.
And since our understanding of a situation affects our experience of it,
these different descriptions also have consequences: leading us to
act in and react to "the same" objective situation in different ways.
Thus human consciousness of the world is not simply a passive perception
of it, but an active relation to it: literally, an act of conception, in
which the "facts of life" do not speak for themselves until we have conceived
them.
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IN ANTHROPOLOGY, as in any "discipline", one can
discriminate among three types of contents or knowledge. First, there
are the organizing and descriptive concepts. In this course, those
will include fundamental notions such as "person", "society", "relation",
"description", "communication", and "culture", as well as more narrowly
definable jargon terms like "matrilineal descent", "shamanism", and "reciprocity".
Second, there are the "ethnographic" "facts" about life in other places,
among other people, the information selected for us and presented to us
by writers and others who have been there and seen them. Third, there is
the less-easily labelled sort of knowledge (or understanding) which is
marked by an awareness of the mutually creative relation --or "dialectic"--
between "the facts" and our description of them. Each modifies the
other and is modified by the other. The adequacy of the anthropologist's
understanding is a sort of product of the relation between her/his descriptions
of the facts and the facts themselves. But this is also true of the knowledge
claimed by people of other cultures, who find themselves in worlds conceived
differently from our own.
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WHATEVER their claims to knowledge, anthropologists
are simply people (using whatever personal and collective resources they
have) trying to understand people: but they are acting in an accepted role
as "professionals" in their own society when they describe and explain
the actions of people who understand and value the world differently.
(As one native Canadian put it: "An anthropologist is a person with a family
and a mortgage.") In this realm, at least, pure objectivity is beyond
our imagination. And if you mean "never subjective" when you say
"scientific", then the comparative study of humanity can never be a science.