Social and Cultural Anthropology for the 21st Century

Connected Worlds

Marzia Balzani, Niko Besnier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138829121
• eBook ISBN: 9781317571780
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Social and Cultural Anthropology for the 21st Century: Connected Worlds is a lively, accessible, and wide-ranging introduction to socio-cultural anthropology for undergraduate students. It draws on a wealth of ethnographic examples to showcase how anthropological fieldwork and analysis can help us understand the contemporary world in all its diversity and complexity.

The book is addressed to a twenty-first-century readership of students who are encountering social and cultural anthropology for the first time. It provides an overview of the key debates and methods that have historically defined the discipline and of the approaches and questions that shape it today. In addition to classic research areas such as kinship, exchange, and religion, topics that are pressing concerns for our times are covered, such as climate change, economic crisis, social media, refugees, sexuality, and race. Foregrounding ethnographic stories from all over the world to illustrate global connections and their effects on local lives, the book combines a focus on history with urgent present-day social issues. It will equip students with the analytical tools that they need to negotiate a world characterized by unprecedented cross-cultural contact, ever-changing communicative technologies and new forms of uncertainty.

The book is an essential resource for introductory courses in social and cultural anthropology and as a refresher for more advanced students.

Chapter 1 Society and culture in the 21st century

DOI: 10.4324/9781315737805-1

In a medium-sized city in Morocco, young female university students worry about finding the right man to marry. As devout Muslims, the young women believe that God has already chosen a husband for them, but they also think that they need to work hard to make this predestined fate happen. Anthropologist Alice Elliot (2016) befriended these young women during her 17-month fieldwork. The city where they live is a migrant hub, which means that local men regularly return from overseas, primarily Europe, where they have acquired wealth and sophistication that the young women find attractive. Every evening, the young women would spend hours together preparing themselves, applying makeup, drinking tea, and joking, before going out in groups in the old city, which was teeming with potential husbands. But when they were out in public, they behaved with the irreproachable modesty that their religious faith demanded, averting their eyes and walking at a measured pace. While Muslims are often represented as firm believers in predestination, namely the fact that the future is already determined by God, these young women assert that destiny is equally the product of work and effort on their part.

In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, electricity blackouts are frequent, the power level often unreliable, and household energy bills keep going up every year as people acquire more mobile phones, sewing machines, refrigerators, and other electricity-dependent appliances. Anthropologist Michael Degani (2017) spent 18 months in the city in the early 2010s researching how inhabitants develop new ways of coping with this situation: they connect to the grid illegally; they rely on self-appointed specialists to repair the deteriorating infrastructure; and they try to negotiate overdue bills with power company employees. However, there are clear limits to this underground trade: for example, while one can steal wires and poles, one should not steal electricity meters. The bootstrapping practices with which urban Tanzanians try to cope with the unreliable and expensive power supply are thus governed by an unspoken code that dictates how far they can go to bend the system without compromising morality. Dar es Salaam residents regularly break the law but do so in a principled way.

Argentinians’ passion for football is well known all over the world. But for a small minority of Argentinians, it is not football but rugby that is the object of their passion. The wealthiest families in Buenos Aires belong to exclusive clubs where younger male family members play rugby. But, as anthropologists Daniel Guinness and Sebastián Fuentes (2018) document, the clubs, while ostensibly focused on sport, play a much broader role in the lives of the members. Boys begin to play rugby at a tender age, forming tight-knit age cohorts that stick together all the way to adulthood: they attend the same schools, go to university together, and spend all their leisure time in each other’s company. When they reach adulthood, the young men are likely to marry each other’s sisters. They generally come to occupy prominent professional positions as lawyers, politicians, doctors, and corporate executives, relying on each other’s services and assistance. The exclusive clubs in Buenos Aires are thus spaces in which elite families maintain their privileged positions from one generation to the next, and sport functions as a vehicle for the transmission of this privilege.

These three vignettes illustrate that anthropologists are primarily concerned with connections. The nature of these connections can be very diverse. People are connected to one another through bonds of friendship and sameness that exclude others, as in the case of the upper-class members of Argentinian sport clubs. People can try to establish new connections with others, as in the case with young Moroccan female students searching for suitable husbands, while nurturing their connections to God. And people are connected to corporations, the state, and infrastructures, sometimes in uneasy ways, as urban Tanzanians demonstrate in their dealings with the companies in charge of the power supply.

What anthropologists do is to discover how these connections work, how they make daily life possible, and how they are entangled with other kinds of connections. How are aspects of our lives that at first glance seem to occupy very different spheres of life, such as morality, the economy, politics, religion, actions, people, and objects, connected to one another, and why does it matter? This question can be rephrased abstractly as how do society and culture work?

Society

Society is made up of structured social relations, namely human behaviours that have as their object other human beings, as well as, in some contexts, non-human animals, material things, or supernatural entities. In their daily lives, people in all societies interact with many others. But they draw important distinctions between them: young Moroccan women interact with one another very differently from how they interact with men in the street; urban Tanzanians have to deal with employees of the power company and with the self-appointed street experts, but in different ways; and within the tight-knit groups that young privileged rugby-playing Argentinians form, the social relations are characterized by a closeness that excludes interactions with others. Everywhere, people interact with their parents differently from how they relate to their boss, friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbours, and housemates. In other words, all social relations are structured, that is, governed by patterns that predict how people will think and act when they are interacting with other people or with other entities that matter. The study of society concerns what makes these relationships similar to or different from one another. To understand these similarities and differences, anthropologists consider factors that come into play in people’s relations with one another, such as kinship, age, wealth, power, education, and personal affinity (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Friendship is a social relation that is governed by particular rights and duties, as well as norms of conduct that may change over time; when this photo was taken in 1986, both young and elderly people held hands with members of the same gender in public and wore suits sewn from rationed cloth, but by the 1990s younger Chinese found both to be a remnant of an outdated social order. (Courtesy of Susan Brownell)

Social relations are characterized by rights and duties. In all societies, children have the right to expect that their parents will feed and shelter them until they are considered able to take care of themselves; in turn, children have the duty to treat their parents with some form of deference and respect. On a general level, these are universal expectations, but the details differ significantly across societies. For example, among some social groups, children are expected to be independent early in life and contribute to the welfare of the household by taking care of younger siblings or helping with food production. Such is the case of poor families in the Global North, in which young people are expected to support their parents as soon as they have reached the minimum education level required by law. Among the middle classes of the Global North, in contrast, parents frequently support their children well into their 20s, affording them the possibility of pursuing educational goals or life passions that will give them a social and economic advantage over children of lesser privilege. Some types of social relations are not governed by rights and duties to the same extent as others, and thus are not as central to the constitution of society. For example, one’s network of ‘friends’ on social media is made up of social relations, but they are rarely if ever associated with specific rights and duties; if a Facebook ‘friend’ tries to make demands or offer help that one has not asked for, one would not hesitate to ‘unfriend’ her or him.

People go about their lives and interact with one another with little conscious awareness of the rights and duties that characterize their social relations, unless these are violated. For example, if parents neglect their children by underfeeding them or keeping them in unhygienic conditions, they will be seen by others as practising poor parenting and the state may intervene. It is in such situations that we become conscious of what constitutes social relations and that we act to redress what we see as a violation. The rights and duties that characterize social relations can be enshrined in the laws of the state, although they often are not, as the case of urban Tanzanians trying to deal with the electric infrastructure illustrates vividly: even when Dar es Salaam residents break the law, they are constrained by rules that limit how far and in what ways they can break the law.

Society as a concept is an organized system of the rights and duties that define social relations among people. Each instance of such a system is a society. When viewed in this light, a society refers to a group of people who share at least a certain degree of consensus over how to conduct social relations. It is here that considerable ambiguity emerges, for a number of reasons. One is that the human groups that constitute a society can be very diverse in size, composition, or definition. For example, a city neighbourhood can sometimes be considered to be a society; so can a group of people scattered over a territory that share some sort of commonality; and so can an entire country.

Relative size is not the only way in which societies differ from one another. Differences can arise from the fact that the social relations that constitute society always take place in a political and economic context. The political context determines who has power over whom, who is able to dictate what is right, and how things should be conducted. The economic context is a matter of some people and groups having more than others. Both contexts mean that rights and duties are the basis of inequality, that is, differential access to power and resources such as money, education, political influence, and social status. For example, even in the most gender-equal societies, women continue to make less money, suffer more if they divorce, and are much less likely to reach senior positions in politics and the corporate world than men. So we cannot understand society, whether small or large scale, without considering the economic disparities and political inequalities that are integral aspects of its makeup.

The boundaries of societies are always porous. Even in small-scale, relatively isolated societies, newcomers have always been incorporated, new technologies have enriched people’s lives, and ideas from elsewhere have been adopted. This is particularly obvious in today’s world, in which societies are more complex and diverse than ever, as large numbers of people move during their lives for different reasons. It is true that large-scale movements of people have taken place in the course of history: for example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of people migrated in search of a better life, such as Europeans to North America, South America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, and Chinese people to Southeast Asia, North and South America, Australia, and Europe. Yet many observers agree that people today are moving at an unprecedented rate and on a scale never seen before in history.

Technological advances since the middle of the twentieth century have made travel increasingly convenient and affordable. Today’s migratory patterns are also qualitatively different from those of previous eras: British or Italian people who migrated to Australia in the 1950s typically returned for a visit to the ‘home country’ once in their lifetime, while today people may move to a new place for a few months or years and then move on to a different location, or move back and forth between their original home and their adoptive country. Between visits, they maintain regular contact with their relatives, neighbours, and friends back home through phone calls, social media, and remittances (money or goods sent to relatives and friends they support). Globalization, namely the increasingly interconnected nature of the world, has enabled a much greater density and complexity of social relations than ever before, often over distances that in the past constituted insurmountable obstacles.

These complexities raise questions about the makeup of society in the contemporary world. If we think of society as being constituted by social relations and if social relations can be maintained across large distances, then we can expand the concept of society as traditionally defined so that it is no longer confined to a group of people who occupy a contiguous territory. A society thus can be made up of groups of people who live in different countries and nurture social relations with one another by acting upon the rights and duties expected of these social relations. One instance of such a society is a diaspora, defined as a people who have dispersed to different locations but maintain over the generations a common identity and a sense of belonging to an original homeland. For example, Armenians have moved from their original homeland to many other places, particularly since the end of World War I, a time when they experienced oppression in their homeland, including a genocide in which over one million were killed. Diasporic Armenians have forged lives in North and South America, Western Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, but many continue to identify as ethnically Armenian and to see Armenia, in the Caucasus, as a place from which their families originated.

New patterns of inequality are, for our understanding of society, another consequence of globalization. For example, some countries export their workforce to other countries: workers from the Philippines seek employment in the Middle East and North America, people from North Africa have migrated to Europe in search of a better life, and Eastern Europeans move to Western Europe to find work. These patterns of mobility result from the fact that some societies supply labour while others make use of this labour, although the latter retain the power to control migratory movements from the labour-supplying societies. Many things other than people circulate across national boundaries, including objects, ideas, money, technologies, and images, each moving around the world in patterns of circulation that operate independently of one another (Appadurai 1996). In many cases, these patterns tend to confirm and accentuate global inequalities between countries of the Global North and countries of the Global South (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Clothing discarded by inhabitants of countries of the Global North find their way to markets in cities of the Global South such as this one in Mtumba, Tanzania, where people often meticulously mend them to give them a new life. (Courtesy of Nasirumbi/Wikimedia, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)

The internal diversity and porous boundaries of many contemporary societies make us rethink whether society was ever as homogeneous in the past as many people think, a point to which we will return in this book. For example, while French society today incorporates many people of different races, religions, and cultural backgrounds, it has always been diverse, as in the past people spoke different languages such as Breton and Provençal, followed different laws, and conducted their lives in different ways. It was only during the French Revolution that efforts to erase internal diversity created the illusion of a homogeneous nation, by suppressing local languages for example. The longing for a time when the society was more homogeneous than it is now, which populist politicians use to their political advantage, results from a nostalgic longing for a situation that never existed. Other societies that present themselves as homogeneous do so by ignoring exceptions. Most Japanese people, for example, think of themselves as all alike, but this is true only if one overlooks the social differences that divide the society, as well as minority groups like ethnic Koreans and Chinese, descendants of historically marginalized castes (burakumin), Okinawans, the indigenous Ainu, and recent migrants from many different countries.

Culture

Equally important to our understanding of the organization of human life is the concept of culture. Culture can be described as a system of symbols, if we think of a symbol as anything that stands for something else, such as an object, a belief, a representation, an explanation, a moral judgement, or any other way in which human beings represent the world around and beyond them. Thus young Moroccan women’s conviction that God has already worked out their future and Dar es Salaam residents’ moral code about the limits of law breaking are both aspects of culture. An idiosyncratic idea that only one person believes in is not cultural. Many people must recognize the existence of an idea for it to be cultural, but they do not need to agree about its validity or worthiness.

While society is made up of human beings and their social relations, culture is made up of symbols and of how humans use them to act and manage social relations. Culture is the basis of what we think of as common sense, which tells us what to eat or not eat, who to marry or partner with, how to raise children, and how to conduct ourselves on a day-to-day basis with people (and other entities) with whom we sustain social relations. It is anything that humans learn, primarily during childhood but also later in life. Culture contrasts with what we carry in our biological makeup, including our digestive, cardiovascular, and nervous systems, which operate more or less independently of what we learn in life. Since culture is learnt, it is also the product of communication as well as what enables us to communicate. An important component of culture is the faculty that humans have to reflect on who they are, what they do, and why they do what they do, which we refer to as reflexivity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Society and culture in the 21st century
• Chapter 2: Anthropologists at work
• Chapter 3: Kinship
• Chapter 4: Marriage
• Chapter 5: Gender, sex, and sexuality
• Chapter 6: The body
• Chapter 7: The senses
• Chapter 8: The life cycle
• Chapter 9: Gifts and exchange
• Chapter 10: Religion
• Chapter 11: Rank, caste, and social class
• Chapter 12: State, nation, and citizenship
• Chapter 13: Mobility and transnationalism
• Chapter 14: Media and the technological transformation of social relations
• Chapter 15: The environment
• Glossary
• References
• Index