Cultural Anthropology

Global Forces, Local Lives

Jack David Eller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429588662
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cultural Anthropology: Global Forces, Local Lives is an exceptionally clear and readable introduction that helps students understand the application of anthropological concepts to the contemporary world and everyday life. It provides thorough treatment of key subjects such as colonialism and post-colonialism, ethnicity, the environment, cultural change, economic development, and globalization.

This fourth edition has a fresh thematic focus on the future, with material relating to planning, decision-making, design and invention, hope, and waiting. More space is devoted to contemporary topics, and there is new coverage of subjects ranging from white nationalism, right-wing populism, and natural disasters to surgical training, hacker conferences, and the gig economy. Each chapter contains a rich variety of case studies that have been updated throughout.

The book includes a number of features to support student learning, including:

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• A wealth of color images

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• Definitions of key terms and further reading suggestions in the margins

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• Questions for discussion/review and boxed summaries at the end of every chapter

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• An extensive glossary, bibliography, and index.

Additional resources are provided via a comprehensive companion website.

1
Understanding anthropology

2 THE SCIENCE(S) OF ANTHROPOLOGY

6 CONVENTIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND BEYOND

9 THE “ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE”

14 PRACTICING ANTHROPOLOGY

18 SUMMARY

[I]n spite of many important technical moves in the understanding of culture, the future remains a stranger to most anthropological models of culture…. [T]here is still an underlying pull in the core concepts of anthropology – such as culture, diversity, structure, meaning and custom – toward persistence, stability, fixity.

Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact

By any standard, the Runa of Otavalo are a “traditional” people; in fact, they “are among Ecuador’s most traditional people in the sense that they maintain in the twenty-first century their native costume, indigenous language, cultural practices, and ritual expression” (Wibbelsman 2009: 1). Yet they proudly declare that they are pueblo milenario, millennial people, and describe their culture as millennial culture. They have been in contact with European societies since the 1500s and with the independent Ecuadorian state since 1822. Today they are “among the most internationally traveled and cosmopolitan populations of Latin America” (1), with at least fifteen percent of their members living outside the country temporarily or permanently. At the same time, tourism has brought many foreign visitors to their remote Andean homeland. All of this mobility and modernity has not destroyed their culture or identity; instead, they have found many creative ways to preserve their way of life. One is a website, www.otavalosonline.com, which “regularly posts images and text of Otavalan festive rituals around the world. Another is a seasonal cycle of rituals at Otavalo that brings migrants back home ‘to exercise a rhythm of shared conversation’ – and combat! – “and to affirm their inclusion as part of a single, yet diversifying community” (2). Among these celebrations is the late-winter Pawkar Raymi, “a sports competition and cultural event” and a conspicuous “recent tradition” (49). These and other Otavalan cultural initiatives show that they “have not maintained ritual practices in spite of modern transformations, but rather because ritual is uniquely suited for symbolically capturing cultural changes, and for exploring them critically and celebrating their originality” (19).

The twenty-first century (by Western time-reckoning; it is the fifteenth century by the Muslim calendar and the fifty-eighth century by the Hebrew calendar) is a complex era of difference and connectedness. The much-discussed processes of “globalization” have linked human communities without eliminating human diversity; in fact, in some ways they have created new kinds of diversity while injecting some elements of commonality. The local and particular still exists, in a system of global relationships, resulting in what some have called “glocalization” (more on this later). And today more than ever, people orient toward the future in ways both positive and negative. But above all else, the conditions of the contemporary world virtually guarantee that individuals will encounter and deal with others unlike themselves in various and significant ways. This makes awareness and appreciation of human diversity – and one’s own place in that field of diversity – a critical issue. It is for exploring and explaining this past, present, and future diversity that anthropology was conceived.

CALENDARS AND CULTURES

IMAGE 1.1 One of several celebrations that take place in Otavalo throughout the year. Credit: Daniel Romero /VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

ETHNOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE – CHAPTER 1

THE SCIENCE(S) OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Anthropology has been called the science of humanity. That is a vast and noble calling but a vague one and also not one that immediately distinguishes it from all the other human sciences. Psychology and sociology and history study humans, and even biology and physics can investigate humans. What makes anthropology different from, and a worthy addition to, these other disciplines?

Anthropology shares one factor with all of the other “social sciences”: they all study human beings acting and interacting. However, all of the other social sciences only examine some kinds of people and/or some kinds of things that people do. Economics observes economic behavior, political science inspects political behavior, and so forth. And above all, most social sciences tend to study the political, economic, or other behaviors of certain kinds of people – “modern,” urban, industrialized, literate, usually “Western” people. But those are not the only people in the world. There are very many people today, and over the ages there has been a vast majority of people, who are not at all like contemporary Western people. Yet they are people too. Why do they live the way they do? In fact, why do we live the way we do? In a word, why are there so many ways to be human? Those are the questions that anthropology asks.

Any science, from anthropology to zoology, is distinguished in three ways – its questions, its perspective, and its method. The questions of a science involve what it wants to know, why it was established in the first place, and what part of reality it is intended to explore. The perspective is its particular and unique way of looking at reality, the “angle” from which it approaches its subject, or the attitude it adopts toward it. Its method is the specific data-gathering activities it practices in order to apply its perspective and to answer its questions.

As a unique science, anthropology has its distinctive questions, ones that no other science of humanity is already asking or has already answered. Some sciences, like psychology, suggest in their very name what their questions will be: psychology, from the Greek psyche meaning “mind” and logos meaning “word/study,” announces its interest in the individual, internal, and “mental” aspect of humans and human behavior. Sociology, from the Latin socius for “companion/ally/associate,” implies the study of humans in groups. The name anthropology does not speak as clearly, and many readers, and many members of the public, may have little notion of what anthropology is or what anthropologists do. Anthropology is a fairly new word for a fairly new science, asking some fairly new questions. Derived from two Greek roots, anthropos for “man/human” and logos, anthropology was named and conceived as the study of humanity in both the biological and behavioral sense.

Anthropology’s uniqueness is thankfully not in its name but in the questions that it asks, which include:

• How many different ways are there to be human? That is, what is the range of human diversity?
• What are the commonalities across these different kinds of humans and human lifeways?
• Why are humans so diverse? What is the source or explanation of human diversity?
• How do the various elements of a particular human lifeway fit together?
• How do human groups and their lifeways interact with each other and change over time?

Given these questions, we can regard anthropology as not just the study of humans but the study of human diversity. Further, humans are diverse along two dimensions. The first dimension is the past versus the present; the second dimension is the physical versus the behavioral, our bodies as opposed to the ways we organize ourselves and act. Therefore, the definition of anthropology can be refined or expanded to the study of the diversity of human bodies and behavior in the past and the present. We can now see that there are several possible subfields of anthropology, depending on exactly what area of this diversity each focuses on – what specific anthropological questions it seeks to answer. These subdisciplines give anthropology its familiar “four-fields” character.

Physical anthropology

the study of the diversity of human bodies in the past and present, including physical adaptation, group or “race” characteristics, and human evolution; also known as biological anthropology

Physical or biological anthropology

Physical or biological anthropology is the sub-discipline that specializes in the diversity of human bodies in the past and present. It is plain to see that humans differ in their physical appearance: we have different skin colors, different hair colors, different body shapes, different facial forms, and so forth. What can we hope to learn from these facts? First and foremost, we learn that there is more than one way physically to be human. All of the various human body and facial features are human. Physical anthropologists can also relate those physical traits to the natural environment: is there a reason why people in some parts of the world, in some climates for instance, have this or that physical characteristic? This is the question of physical adaptation, and it is entirely possible that a group, if it has lived in a particular environment long enough, could develop traits that fit well in that environment. Finally, physical anthropologists can discover things about human migrations, intermarriages, and such phenomena from the distribution of traits like blood type, gene frequency, and so on. We will return to the question of “race and ethnicity” later.

See Chapter 3

See Chapter 6

In addition to the present diversity of human bodies, there is extensive historical diversity as well. The evidence indicates overwhelmingly that humans have not always had the bodies we have today. This evidence is fossils. Anthropologists have found no human bodies quite like ours that are older than a couple of hundred thousand years at most, and even during that time there were other “humans” who looked remarkably different from us. If you saw a Neandertal (who lived between 130,000 and 40,000 years ago) on the street today, you would recognize him or her as human but not exactly “normally” human. As we look further back in time, human-like beings become progressively less human-like while still retaining certain critical human traits, like upright walking, a relatively large brain, and a human-like face. How then did we humans come to have the bodies that we have today, and what other forms did our hum...