HOMEWORK: THU NOV 3 HOW CORPORATIONS BECAME LEGAL PERSONS

Originally posted 5/13/09
The last few weeks I have been emphasizing how individuals are shaped by culturally-defined contexts of race, ethnicity, nation, sex, gender, class, achieved vs. ascribed status, and much more. Ethnography gains insight into the cultural mindset through the ways individuals understand how their culture and/or the world works. This presumes a mindset that seems like it is reality but it is the glasses we were conditioned to see with.

In your introduction to anthropology (ANT1001) we examined how we evolved as a human species from the band, the tribe, the chief and the state out of which grew state economies and capitalism. Westernization, colonialism, and cultural imperialism was an outcome that could not be consistent with the values of the generalized reciprocity of the band. Or so we've been taught. Enculturation and acculturation is everywhere but it is not the end of possibilities in our choices as individuals or groups. But we'd have to be responsible for HOW we learned what we know and WHAT that learning has been for. Ethnography is the tool to excating that learning process and knowing way of being.

I didn't get to a set of short video clips from the award-winning Canadian documentary THE CORPORATION (watch the whole documentary here). Now that you have begun to see the power of ethnography as a tool for understanding cultural mindsets, probably one of our best tools students of culture and humankind has, this documentary takes the conversation to a level not often thought of.

How corporate culture has usurped the status of the individual and the effects that is having on our existence as part of a global human culture.

YOUR RESPONSE: Check out these segments and I'd love to hear how you think this connects to the evolution of the study of man -- anthropology.

YOUR HOMEWORK rather than reading an essay is to watch the documentary THE CORPORATION (3 hrs) on google videos



Come back to class Thu, prepared to share at least one thing that really stood out in this documentary about how the corporation has become a person in our culture.

Chapter 5: Making A Living (Subsistence and A Brief History of Mankind)

One of the professors who inspires my teaching is Prof. Mike Wesch at KSU (National Teacher of the Year). I love his cultural anthro syllabus and the intention of his course:

Cultural Anthropology explores different cultures in all of their manifestations - from how people make a living to what people live for. In an increasingly interconnected world, cultural differences lie at the root of many of our most pressing challenges, throughout the world and in our own personal lives. There has never been a time when Cultural Anthropology has been more important than it is right now.

Subsistence.

• minimal (or marginal) resources for subsisting; "social security provided only a bare subsistence"
• a means of surviving; "farming is a hard means of subsistence"
• the state of existing in reality; having substance http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• The means of living; obtaining food and shelter necessary to support life; everything that is done to "make a living" resweb.llu.edu/rford/docs/VGD/GSLVT/gslglossary.html

Last week you read about culture. This week about making a living.

Chapter 5 - Making a Living seems rather dry and uninteresting to most students. However, this chapter begins to explain the history of mankind through five adaptive strategies used to subsist, to survive, to ... make a living. It is useful to know these strategies, which are still part of modern culture in some places. These strategies help us distinguish between the ways humans in the past and the present organized into groups that shape our the shared, learned, symbolic and integrated culture we live by as well as reflect adaptive and maladaptive approaches to our survival.

This chapter will also help you understand the documentary The Corporation (which we will watch) that explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time that rose out of industrialization. "Taking its [the corporation's] status as a legal "person" to the logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist's couch to ask 'What kind of person is it?' " As we look at the forms of reciprocity that are common in each adaptive strategy, the example of corporations reflect the tensions of balanced and negative reciprocity.


YOUR COMMENTS THIS WEEK: Rather than quoting the chapter this week, write a 1-3 sentences responding to the (1) video above IF THE WORLD WE A VILLAGE as well as the (2) videos below on the Kwakiutl potlatch which was once outlawed by the government in British Columbia.