Send responses by e-mail to gehman@uwo.ca by midnight Wednesday December 10.

 This course was mostly a set of readings. We expect you to make wise selections among, and deft use of, those readings in constructing responses to the passages below. The appropriateness of your use of them will be a major consideration in marking your responses, as will organization and, within the very tight length limits, comprehensiveness or scope.

 Below, you'll find some quotes. Please deal with two of them, one each from Parts A and B. Examine the ways in which these statements illuminate (or misrepresent) what you've contacted here. How do they comment on the course materials and how do the course materials comment on them? In general, the way to proceed is to study a statement; figure out what it's saying, what it's about, where it's coming from, etc.; and then present a response in which you show how/why (selected) course materials relate to it. It's up to you to identify the relevant themes here, and two students could each generate an excellent response though emphasizing different threads of relationship, perhaps to different pieces of the course. Give the first step (what's at issue?) careful thought. These passages are not from course readings and are not identified as to author or date of composition. You should not assume that the claims in each of these statements are adequate or even accurate.

Unless it's otherwise specified, assume that when an author broadly characterizes "anthropology" all the various lines of modern social thought are included. That is, don't worry about disciplinary boundaries.

 Be careful to avoid excessive overlap between your two responses with regard both to the ideas you pursue and the thinkers you invoke. Although the major purpose of the exam is to have you demonstrate your understanding of concepts and thinkers from this course, you may briefly refer to other authors, works, and ideas when that speeds your presentation.

 Each of the two responses must be no longer than 3 pages (double-spaced, 12 point type), which is not long. But don't make them that long just for the sake of show: there is no virtue in quantity.

1.        University anthropology is best understood as a minor project of the Modernizing West. It was one aspect of the great effort of the West to re-understand and remake itself in a world whose boundaries were constantly pushed back by exploration, resource exploitation, and trade; whose scholarly energies were increasingly organized by the enterprises of Science and the aims of Technological innovation; whose socio-economic relations were transformed by the ascendancy of Capitalism (and then Industry); and whose social philosophies increasingly focused on the Individual and questioned Society.

    What came to be called "anthropology" had a role in all this modernizing, which was to reflect the West to itself in the mirror of Other peoples and Other ways. Of course, anthropology was never alone in playing that role: missionaries, traders, soldiers, and so on also had stories to tell about the way They are. Some Westerners saw paganism and blood wherever they looked beyond themselves, others saw a better world that Europe had lost, and yet others saw a thousand different things that reflected well or badly on their own world.

    The obsessions of most of the major thinkers were typically modern Western obsessions: those common in their own generation and their own world. Hence the theories they developed were distinctively "modern" theories, a response to the West's own, self-made, dilemmas.
 

2.    The 19th century beginnings of anthropology were part of a wider orchestration of claims against the Enlightenment vision of the rule of universal reason. These diverse counterclaims were incorporated into a concept of "culture" that emphasized the peculiarities of different peoples, each with its separate history and language and with distinctive qualities of mind that shaped its authentic being. The outcome was a long and contentious discourse between universalizers and particularists, and the opposition of universalist claims and particularistic counterclaims marked anthropology thereafter, whatever its paradigms at the time.

    We can see now the falsity of the opposition of  "Civilization" (based on Reason as a hallmark of all mankind) and Cultures as the property of particular peoples in particular times and places. If the party of civilization and Reason speaks for humanity in general, as often as not that language is part of the cultural politics of a stratum hoping to break down barriers to social and political advancement or seeking to open markets and render them more inclusive. The first advocates of such claims to represent universal humanity came out of the bourgeoisie -- the Third Estate, between aristocrats and peasants -- a stratum that expanded rapidly as European populations grew and became urbanized, as markets spread, and as professional positions multiplied in private and government sectors. In the eighteenth century the bourgeoisie began to make demands and formulate ideals appropriate to their talents, ambitions, efficiency, and competitive individualism -- ideals formulated in the language of humanity and human rights. This language allowed its users to advocate their own interests, while fortifying them with a moral righteousness about their proclaimed "self-evident truths". They also spun out numerous proposals that promised the True, Good, and Beautiful if only their principles were adopted, generating at the same time a utopian vision of the West as the standard-bearer of human progress. A distinctive place in that utopia was granted to those who at any time claimed to represent the party of "progress" and to speak for a universal order based on Reason and rational governance by the sovereign state. Yet this utopia entailed also a place for its opposite -- the state of Nature outside the governance of Reason.

    Against such rhetoric and the claims and cosmological visions implied in it, the opponents of the expanding Third Estate invoked ancient custom and rights, authenticity, hallowed truth, tradition, and faith. In their hands "folklore" and "custom" became "culture", meaning not just another set of practices and discourses but an organic whole imbued by a common spirit. This formulation allowed its proponents to become spokesmen for that organic and spiritual unity and to challenge those at home and abroad who advocated universal progress and free advancement. In the process they made themselves defenders of culture against the onslaught of civilization, denying to the universalizers anything like the idea of "culture" for their own use.

3.    Theories of social evolution had provided for the Victorians an intellectual resting-place, a point of repose at which the tension between the need for certainty and the need to accommodate more diverse social facts than the traditional certainties allowed for reached a kind of temporary equilibrium.

    They provided a way of being both relativist and not relativist; of admitting that many diverse modes of organizing and interpreting social life might play vital roles in the lives of human beings, while continuing to maintain the absolute validity of one such mode -- the scientific. The Victorian social evolutionists achieved this tour de force by admitting that other modes of thought and social behaviour might have been valid at one time, but asserting or assuming that these were only part of a larger process -- social evolution -- which had to be understood in a scientific manner, and which led ultimately in a direction satisfying to those who cherished an ideal of absolutely rational social behaviour.
 

4.    The anthropological account also carried the message that social forms were not fixed, Reform was possible, indeed inevitable. The idea of primitive society therefore provided an idiom which was ideally suited for debate about modern society, but in itself it was neutral. It could be used equally by right or left, reactionary or progressive, poet or politician. Yet all the images were transformations of a single basic model. What each did, in effect, was to use it as a foil. They had particular ideas about modern society and constructed a directly contrary account of primitive society. Primitive society was the mirror image of modern society -- or, rather, primitive society as they imagined it inverted the characteristics of modern society as they saw it.

PART B
5.    The fundamental commitments of liberal theory are reflected in aspects of its discursive structure. For example, by its silence on the issues of exploitation and community.

    The liberal lexicon lacks fundamental terms representing the conditions of material exploitation. True, liberal usage draws on a well-appointed store of terms of economic abuse: a person may be unjustly deprived of property, or discriminated against on the basis of race, or cheated in exchange, but one may not be exploited in the simple sense that one is deprived of the fruits of one's labor. This lack is not altogether surprising, nor is it an entirely innocent oversight; the liberal right to claim income associated with the ownership of property would be empty if non-property-owning workers were paid an amount equal to the average product of their labor....

    The liberal lexicon is no less impoverished when it comes to community. The two privileged terms that might represent community -- family and state -- fall far short of the rich repertoire of the forms of identification and solidarity that make up the warp of social life. Even family and state only appear to represent community. The family is rendered in most liberal theory as an indivisible organic whole barely distinguishable from the individual. Correspondingly, in liberal theory the state appears primarily as a decision-making structure regulating some mixture of self-regarding and altruistic instrumental action, rather than as the repository of loyalty, learning, identity and solace. Moreover, the most powerful form of collective organization in contemporary capitalism -- the modern business corporation -- is stripped of its communal status in liberal theory. It is ignored in neoclassical economics, treated as a quasi individual in law, and considered "private" in political discourse. Its status as a form of social power is thereby obscured and its reality as the terrain of class conflict is systematically slighted.

    Liberalism also arbitrarily limits the admissible range of application of its basic terms relating to freedom, equality and democracy by partitioning social space prior to any particular theoretical representation of social life.

    Two fundamental partitions are central to liberalism. Social space is divided into a private and a public realm. The public realm of social space is considered to be the state, whereas the private realm houses the family and the capitalist economy. In similar fashion, individuals are partitioned into two groups: rational agents whose intentions and choices are the subject of the explicit political and economic theory of liberalism, and those who for reasons of age, incapacity, or citizenship are excluded from this privileged category.

    Our critique of the dichotomies of liberal thought is readily summarized. The walls that liberalism erects do more than create liberties; they also obscure and shelter the citadels of domination. According to its usages, liberty is held to apply to rational agents, and the norms of democracy are held to apply to those people's actions in the public realm alone. As a result, democratic institutions are held to be merely instrumental to the exercise of choice: democracy facilitates the satisfaction of perceived needs.

6.    Marx's rewriting of history was not so much a matter of starting again, but of making use, for a new purpose, of knowledge which was already available, whether in the work of philosophers, economists or anthropologists. This new use meant a severe criticism of the earlier knowledge, since Marx believed that the studies he was using had originally been made for exactly the opposite purpose to his; they had been made in order to justify the oppression which Marx saw as the core of the capitalist system.

7.    A certain extreme individualism has long dogged the Western tradition, along with the assumption that human nature is founded on essentially infinite, unquenchable desires, so that we are all in a state of fundamental competition with one another.

8.    The biological nature of humans is not in doubt among anthropologists. But most have seen culture as a specialized capacity of humans based on biology, particularly the evolution of the brain. From this perspective, there is no necessary contradiction between the cultural and biological natures of humans. The capacity for culture, in the view of many, is part of the biological nature of human beings.

    One of the special aspects of culture -- the transmission of shared, learned abstract information through symbols -- has major implications. It lends adapability to a variety of circumstances, rather than a narrow adaptedness to a special environmental niche. In the same vein, a capacity for culture favors rapid changes in behavioral patterns over and above biologically fixed patterns. The frequent rapidity of change in human societies would be impossible if a species needed to rely on biological adaptation, which can only change over many generations through natural selection.

    Like most matters having to do with the study of humans, this biology/culture issue has political implications as well. To the extent that human behavior is biologically programmed, it is not likely to change any time soon. To the extent that it is learned, it can change quickly. Of course, the latter would depend upon changing the prevailing social, political, cultural, and/or economic conditions -- not necessarily easy to accomplish in the real world....

    Most biological determinist approaches have arisen from outside anthropology. And the media have seemed very receptive to the idea of biological explanations for human behavior.