Anthropology 201

1. Anthropology 201 Chapter 1…Disorientation and Orientation

2. Disorientation… “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight.” Bronislaw Malinowski, 1922 The feeling of panic and/or anxiety that accompanies the departure of the launch has been called “culture shock.”

3. Culture or transition shock…Culture shock is a subcategory of a more universal construct called transition shock. Transition shock is a state of loss and disorientation predicated by a change in one's familiar environment which requires adjustment. There are many symptoms of transition shock… Excessive concern over cleanliness and health Feelings of helplessness and withdrawal Irritability Anger Glazed stare Desire for home and old friends Physiological stress reactions Homesickness Boredom Withdrawal Getting "stuck" on one thing Suicidal or fatalistic thoughts Excessive sleep Compulsive eating/drinking/weight gain Stereotyping host nationals Hostility towards host nationals

4. Cora Du Bois defines culture shock as a “syndrome precipitated by the anxiety that results from losing all your familiar cues.” Disorientation! What next…? Participants must be ‘oriented.’ So...Orientation

5. Orientation as ‘Rite of passage.’ • New Student Orientation can be seen as an initiation ritual. • What happens at the beginning of NSO? • Three phases of a rite of passage following Arnold VanGennep (1909) • 1. separation • 2. transition • 3. reincorporation

6. Anthropology… Anthropology can be just as much a study of ‘us’ as it is of the ‘other.’ By learning the characteristics of different peoples we unearth our culture as a cultural construction. We realize that it has been built for us and is subject to the same sorts of arbitrary signs and symbols as the ‘other’ is.

7. Nature and Culture Simply put, culture will determine what is natural. Clifford Geertz…people “unmodified by the customs of particular places do not in fact exist, have never existed, and most important, could not in the very nature of the case exist.”

8. What is ‘Culture?’ Raymond Williams…”Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals.” So, horticulture, aquaculture, viniculture, agriculture. So in the 18th century we had the cultured person, the individual who has studied the great works of art and literature. Thus culture was a distinction of class…upper class had culture, lower class had not. Notions of European and thus Western superiority.

9. Johann Gottfried von Herder…18th century “Men of all quarters of the globe, who have perished over the ages, you have not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of nature.”

10. Advanced vs. Primitive Who makes judgments about “advanced” and “primitive” cultures? Whose scale is used as the standard? What exactly does “advanced” mean? If advanced means “complex” then Australian Aborigines are among the most advanced peoples (because of their kinship terminology). Australian Aboriginal Kin Terminology

11. Culture…American vs. British schools of thought • For our purposes, culture refers to signifying, symbolic, or meaning systems, while social refers to institutions and arrangements of people and their activities in the realm of the concrete. • Systems of meaning - the alphabet, anthropological theory, ionic bonding, etc • Social institutions – Office of the President, Robertson Library, The Wave, the Panthers, etc. The debates between social and cultural anthropologists concern not the differences between the two concepts but the analytical priority: which comes first? Social chicken or cultural egg?

12. Conceptual approaches in Anthropology British Social Anthropology American Cultural Anthropology ...assumes that social institutions determine culture and that universal domains of society (kinship, economy, politics, religion) are represented by specific institutions (family, agribusiness, Canadian Parliament, Catholic Church) which can be compared cross-culturally. ...assumes that culture shapes social institutions by providing the shared beliefs, the core values, the communicative tools, and so on that make social life possible. Social institutions cannot be understood in isolation from their own contexts.

13. Clifford Geertz… • “The concept of culture I espouse is essentially a semiotic one. Believing with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experiential science of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.” • Our task…to learn to investigate culture in the exercise of an interpretive social science.

14. U.P.E.I. Social Institutions… Culture… ? ?

15. Investigating culture… • How does one go about investigating such an elusive thing as culture? The primary anthropological questions are as follows… Why are things the way they are and not some other way? Do you think the way things are is natural, inevitable, and maybe even necessary? How do you feel when you realize that people elsewhere do things differently – that your way is just one among a number of possibilities? Do you assume your way is best, or does the realization create doubt about your way?

16. Levi-Strauss felt that anthropological fieldwork was the nursemaid of doubt… • “This anthropological doubt consists not merely in knowing that one knows nothing, but in resolutely exposing what one knows, even one’s own ignorance, to the insults and denials inflicted on one’s dearest ideas and habits by those ideas and habits which may contradict them to the highest degree.”

17. Laura Bohannon • “Shakespeare in the Bush” • What questions arise from your reading of this article?