Chapter 3 Anthropology and Intercultural Relations

1. Chapter 3Anthropology and Intercultural Relations

2. Introduction • Culture • Human capacity to differentiate • Categorize the world of experience • Assign meanings to the categories • Common sense • Unstated assumptions shared amongst communities • Cultural Misunderstandings • Different common senses amongst different groups • Intercultural Relations • Flows of symbols across the global landscape

3. Cultural Misunderstandings in an International Milieu • Complexities of many beliefs or common senses • Misunderstandings occur • Both sides are correct, just different points of view • Misunderstandings on a larger scale • Not always at the interpersonal level • Happens often in politics

4. What is Culture? • Humans generate meanings or models to understand the world around them • Culture is a learned system of meanings through which people orient themselves • Culture is… • Symbolic • Shared • Learned • Adaptive

5. Culture is Symbolic • Humans understand and manipulate the world using symbols • Words, gestures, clothes…all symbols • Symbol: something that stands for something else to someone in some respect • Symbols are arbitrary • We know the meaning only if we were taught it

6. Culture is Shared • Ideology • Mobilization of cultural symbols to • Create inequities • Sustain inequities • Resist inequities • Generation of similarity • Establish common beliefs in a community • Organization of difference • Effort to regulate behavior according to ideology

7. [Figure 3.1 - Ideology involves the mobilization of cultural symbols toward political ends. Photo by Mark Allen Peterson.]

8. Culture Is Learned • Enculturation: Passing on culture to new generations • Formal learning (institution) • Informal learning (watching, listening, participating) • Embodiment • How we speak, eat, move, etc. • Unconscious behaviors learned through doing.

9. [Figure 3.2 - Most enculturation involves informal learning—the learning we engage in simply by participating in everyday activities. Photo by Mark Allen Peterson.]

10. Culture is Adaptive • Cultural learning is a lifelong process • Adapt to internal and external pressures • Diffusion of ideas through direct and indirect contact • Culture does not cease to be culture because it adapts • Globalization does not change cultures, it is an integration of cultures

11. Levels of Culture • Culture is deeper than what is seen • But what is seen does play into culture • Culture exists on three different levels • Everyday practices • Reasons and logical explanations for those practices • Assumptions about how the world works

12. Cultural Practices • Everyday actions through which people in a particular community get through their day • The things we say • The tools we use • The things we buy • The ways we behave around other people • This level of culture is sometimes called artifact

13. Cultural Logics • Underlying mechanisms behind human action in a certain community • Nature acts as a constraint to human action • There is always an explanation for the failure of cultural logics

14. Worldview • Refers to the assumptions people have about the structure of the universe • Fundamental principles and values that organize and generate cultural logics • Expressive culture • How we show ourselves to ourselves • Art, poems, stories, rituals • Sometimes described as an encompassing picture of reality

15. [Figure 3.3 - As cultures increasingly come into contact with each other through economic globalization, there is little evidence that a shared world view is coming into existence. Rather, we find an increasing organization of diversity. Photo by Mark Allen Peterson.]

16. Intercultural Relations • Cross-cultural encounters have powerful transformative effects on social systems and individuals • Cultural diffusion through trade, books, etc. • Intercultural relations are about societies and people • Refugees, migrants, tourists, soldiers account are a few of the many people that influence other cultures • Culture shock • Unpleasant, sometimes traumatic feeling that comes with cultural misunderstandings • People deal with culture shock in different ways

17. [Figure 3.4 - Rituals, play, art, sports, theater, novels and movies are all part of expressive culture, in which world views are articulated and elaborated in symbolic forms. Photo by Mark Allen Peterson.]

18. Studying Culture: The Anthropological Perspective • Anthropology is the empirical study of what it means to be human • Not defined by its subject matter • May cover other fields of study • Defined by perspectives • Comparative • Holistic • Empirical • Evolutionary • Relativistic

19. Comparative Perspective • People tend to define what they are accustomed to as normal • Might seem normal to one group but not to another • Comparison allows for the questioning of normalcy • Anthropology studies the differences

20. Holistic Perspective • Anthropologists assume that all aspects of life are intertwined • Breaking down or simplifying human tendencies does not make sense • Example: Stephen Lansing’s study of Balinese agriculture revolution

21. Empirical Perspective • Anthropology is a science in which data is collected through observation or interaction • “Fieldwork” • Participant observation refers to long-term engagements with a host community • Anthropologist enters into everyday life with the community • Learns through interaction

22. Evolutionary Perspective • All communities are in continual processes of historical change • Adapt to population pressures, environmental changes, wars, technological advancements, etc. • The evolutionary assumption reminds us that traditions had histories

23. Relativistic Perpective • Assumption: all human societies offer data of the same type • Controversial and misunderstood • One system is not better than another • Reverts to ideas on common senses • Methodological relativism • Data as institutions that serve particular social functions in a specific time and place, embedded in complex webs of meanings • Theoretical relativism • An assumption that all human actions make rational sense when understood in their own contexts • Philosophical relativism • Whatever people do is right for them

24. Anthropology and International Studies • Anthropological perspective’s five key dimensions to international studies: • Importance of culture in explaining human actions • Urges a more sophisticated approach to cultural boundaries • Reminds us there are usually more than two points of view • Encourages us to think on a smaller scale • Emphasizes the importance of people in international studies