Cultural Anthropologists are Hacking Cultures

Next class, just before spring break, we have visitors: A hacker and a simplicity expert

Joshua Klein is a fervent hacker of all things, including wet, pulpy systems like animals and people and the way they behave.
• Josh’s TED talk The Amazing Intelligence of Crows
http://www.wireless.is/about.php

Bill Jensen: "80% of what you need, you've already got!" & "Everything you do uses a portion of someone else's life."
• One of Bill’s videos: Making it Easier to Get Things Done
http://www.simplerwork.com/about_us.htm

Cultural Anthropology: Quoted from http://www.aaanet.org/about/WhatisAnthropology.cfm

"In North America the discipline's largest branch, cultural anthropology, applies the comparative method and evolutionary perspective to human culture. Culture represents the entire database of knowledge, values, and traditional ways of viewing the world, which have been transmitted from one generation ahead to the next — nongenetically, apart from DNA — through words, concepts, and symbols."

"Cultural anthropologists study humans through a descriptive lens called the ethnographic method, based on participant observation, in tandem with face-to-face interviews, normally conducted in the native tongue. Ethnographers compare what they see and hear themselves with the observations and findings of studies conducted in other societies. Originally, anthropologists pieced together a complete way of life for a culture, viewed as a whole. Today, the more likely focus is on a narrower aspect of cultural life, such as economics, politics, religion or art." [For your mini-ethnographies: even narrower units of observation are expected]

"Cultural anthropologists seek to understand the internal logic of another society. It helps outsiders make sense of behaviors that, like face painting or scarification, may seem bizarre or senseless. Through the comparative method an anthropologist learns to avoid "ethnocentrism," the tendency to interpret strange customs on the basis of preconceptions derived from one's own cultural background. Moreover, this same process helps us see our own society — the color "red" again — through fresh eyes."

We can turn the principle around and see our everyday surroundings in a new light, with the same sense of wonder and discovery anthropologists experience when studying life in a Brazilian rain-forest tribe. Though many picture cultural anthropologists thousands of miles from home residing in thatched huts amid wicker fences, growing numbers now study U.S. groups instead, applying anthropological perspectives to their own culture and society.

For example, why do Americans have customized urinals like the one to the left? Or what drives the popularity of the video game Grand Theft Auto? Other cultures would surely see these as senseless. But an ethnographer is interested, willing to be interested, in how it makes senses to its users through the ethnographic method.

Use the ethnographic method as often as possible from here on out.

CLARIFYING Social Construct

I noticed a few of you have been using the idea of a social construct a bit too generally. Here is the definition again:

A social construction (social construct) is a concept or practice which may appear to be natural and obvious to those who accept it, but in reality is an invention or artifact of a particular culture or society. Social constructs are generally understood to be the by-products (often unintended or unconscious) of countless human choices rather than laws resulting from divine will or nature.

People never see social constructs from an emic point of view. The insider never can see it. Like the fish never sees the water or humans never think about air. It's taken for granted. The etic view, the participant observer, the outsider (even insiders can become outsiders to their own culture from travel, migration, going away to college, etc.) the begin to see how people in a culture accept the invention as natural and obvious.

Anthropologists use interviewing inside of participant-observation to "expose the way in which a particular belief has been shaped by social forces" (Writes philosopher Paul A. Boghossian in WHAT IS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION? philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1153/socialconstruction.pdf).

For instance, how did we/you learn the belief that North is up. One social force impacting that view was colonialism by the British Empire. They created a view through maps emphasizing the upper parts where they were located in their emic view. Reading importance from top to bottom is a social construction. Not all cultures read and have their views correlated that way. Others are equally valid in seeing things differently. "Another society, differing from us only in their social values [their learned ways of thinking, feeling, believing and behaving], would have arrived at a different and incompatible belief [or view]." Boghossian writes further:

There are certainly many things, and facts about them, that are socially constructed in the sense ... : money, citizenship and newspapers, for example. None of these things could have existed without society [or enculturation and acculturation]; and each of them could have been constructed differently had we so chosen

If a belief of ours were shown to be socially constructed ... it would follow that we could abandon it without fear of irrationality [the earth is flat; Muslims are evil; carbohydrates are bad for you; noticing skin color causes racism]

[I]f we have the belief not because there is adequate evidence in its favor but because having it subserves some contingent social purpose [Muslims are evil], then if we happen not to share the social purpose it subserves we ought to be free to reject it.

Much important work has been done ... most significantly, it seems to me, [on the] topics of gender and race. Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1953) and other feminist scholars since, have illuminated the extent to which gender roles are not inevitable but are rather the product of social forces. Anthony Appiah (Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, 1996, with Amy Gutman) has been particularly forceful in demonstrating that nothing physical or biological corresponds to the racial categories that play a pervasive role in our social lives, that these categories owe their existence more to their social function [stratification of resources and wealth affecting our views of who has wealth, power and prestige] than they do to the scientific evidence.

To clarify and be sure you are clear about what a social construct is, tell me what this says to you. How did you have the idea before reading this and how has it changed? If you get it, you can recreate it in your own words and even give an example back to me as if its yours.

Techniques of Good Ethnography - from Wikipedia

Here are some forms you will find useful for your project. This info is also available for downloading on the Blackboard site: ETHNOGRAPHY WORKSHEETS
Includes: Interview checklist, Interview Report Form, and That's a Good Question.

Techniques

1. Direct, first-hand observation of daily behavior. This can include participant observation.
2. Conversation with different levels of formality. This can involve small talk to long interviews.
3. The genealogical method. This is a set of procedures by which ethnographers discover and record connections of kinship, descent and marriage using diagrams and symbols.
4. Detailed work with key consultants about particular areas of community life.
5. In-depth interviewing.
6. Discovery of local beliefs and perceptions.
7. Problem-oriented research.
8. Longitudinal research. This is continuous long-term study of an area or site.
9. Team research.
10. Case studies

Not all of these techniques are used by ethnographers, but interviews and participant observation are the most widely used

Photo of Bronisław Malinowski.

Malinowski articulated the practice of participant observation and ethnography with his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). It was later revealed in his posthumous diaries that he himself had not followed his own innovative technique. He made up many of his reports and kept himself separated from the people he studied. His student E. E. Evans-Pritchard actually took his teacher's practice to heart in The Nuer (1940). This text became a model for ethnography to come.