Ethnocentrism: assuming that ones own way of life is the best and using it as the

measure for judging others

Culture: complex ways that people have learned to live and understand their lives as part
of groups
Culture critique: defamiliarization from ones own cultural context in order to unsettle
ones assumptions about society and culture
Anthropological comparison: not simply about listing off what is the same and what is
different, but requires understanding the difference of things being the same or different.
Cultural Production: Culture is not static or given. People make culture in relation to their
environments (including other people). A power-laden process. Creativity within
constraint.
Ethnography: anthropological genre. Includes details based on field research and uses
those details to make broader arguments about how culture and society work.
Summary: Anthropology is making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Culture
is how people have learned to live and reflect on their lives as part of groups. Cultural
critique (method/technique) is reflection through distance. Cultural production
(phenomenon) is human creativity, cultural change, and power.
Common methods of fieldwork include observation, interviewing, conversation,
genealogies/networks, data collection, and archival research.
Emic is from the perspective of someone in a community, whereas etic is from analysts
outside perspective.
Institutions: organized elements of society, a form of social organization. Examples
include the state, marriage, religion, and the law.
Holistic: cultural complexity requires attention to many facets of life, such as politics,
religion, economy, etc.
Summary: common fieldwork methods. Documentation, concrete evidence.
Imponderabilia of actual life. Natives views and utterances.
Preconceived ideas vs. foreshadowed problems. Theory as orienting and bias vs.
judgment.
Culture: complex ways that people have learned to live and understand their lives as part
of groups.

Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole
which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities,
and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
Cultural Evolution: Cultural commonality = universals. Cultural difference -= different
stage of development. Savagery -> barbarism -> civilization. Studying others as key to
our past.
Cultural Particularism: Franz Boas. Culture, not biology or race, determines human
variation in behavior and personality. Study cultural phenomena in their context and as
the result of particular historical conditions.
Cultural Materialism: material conditions of existence determine social relations that are
reflected and reinforced by ideas and beliefs.
Structuralism: Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009). Culture expresses universal human need
to organize the world through categories and symbols. Emphasizes structural aspects of
cognition and symbolism in the organization of societies and beliefs.
Symbolic Anthropology: built from structuralism, study of symbols in their social and
cultural context. Symbolic life and the core of humanity.
Symbol: something that stands for something else. No obvious or necessary condition.
Polysemic (multiple meanings).
Interpretive Anthropology: approaches culture as texts, analyzing symbols and meanings
in cultural and historical context. Studies how people interpret their own lives.
Summary: Various approaches to culture (cultural evolution, cultural particularism,
structuralism, cultural materialism, symbolic/interpretive approaches). Making meaning:
what people do, and one way that anthropologists analyze culture.
Critique of culture concept: not homogeneous, boundaries not fixed. Attention to who
gets to represent culture. Historical change. Attention to culture as discourse. Were all
connected.
Life cycle: division of the life course into meaningful segments/stages. Stages not
obvious, not necessarily linear. Social, not only individual.
Social reproduction: processes by which a society reproduces itself over time.
Reproduction not just at an individual level.
A social person is someone who is created in part by others.
Exogamy is marrying outside your group, while endogamy is marrying within your
group.

Modes of exchange: Reciprocity is equal value in exchange (gift giving). Redistribution

is centralized acquisition and distribution of goods (includes taxation). Market relations is
competitive buying and selling (commodities). Others include tributes, etc.
Economic anthropology studies: economy including non-market societies. How exchange
is embedded in other aspects of social life. How economy demarcates categories of
person and thing. Meaning/symbol in economic life. What happens when economic
orders collide or intersect.
In Weiner, how exchange links to: control over others (hard to achieve, all-important. ),
political power, creating a social person, and the continuity of society and the overcoming
of the destructive force of death.
Summary: Life cycle as a site of cultural elaboration. Death as a threat to social
reproduction. The social person investments of others. Exchange isnt just about
objects, but also about relationships and cultural production. Relations to things are also
relations to people. Anthropological contributions to ways of analyzing economic life.
Social organization: society organized by patterns of relationships. These vary crossculturally in type and salience. Kinship is an important form of social organization.
Family often includes: descent, shared property, intimacy, nurturance, and ties by biology
and law.
Variations: Descent can be unilineal (matrilineal or patrilineal) or bilateral. Multiple or
single marriage. Sex of spouse and residence patterns.
Structural-functionalism: Radcliffe Brown (40s-50s). Viewed social institutions like
kinship as the keys to maintaining social order. Function not biological/psychological but
social.
Post-structuralism: Drew from structuralism on the arbitrariness of the sign. Concerned
with how categories are constructed, made, and maintained in discourse. Emphasis on
power and historical change.
Social construction: Concept, category, phenomenon thats developed and given meaning
through social processes. Linked to particular groups and historical moments. Depends
on contingent values. Since not given, must be maintained and re-affirmed (cultural
production).
Summary: Kinship as social organization and social construction. Same-sex marriage
example.
Weiner: regeneration of the matrilineage, why womens wealth is so important, exchange
and kinship, death, Trobiand theories of the individual.

Colonialism: Control over territories, markets, politics. Also a cultural project. Takes
various forms.
Cultural change: Based on contact with outsiders (cultural diffusion). Progress, natural,
cultural evolution (internal invention). Complicated interplay that requires an
understanding of internal and external forces. Colonialism often has aimed to control
cultural change, with mixed results.
Obligations of the gift: give, receive, reciprocate.
Summary: Colonialism is in part a cultural project. Theorizing cultural change. Gift: 3
obligations; time; often between groups; power; regulates and dramatizes social relations.
Potlach: colonialsm and the regulation of exchange.
Charity: form of exchange, not just between individuals.
Studying social phenomena: intention, cultural underpinnings, effects.
Summary of airplanes, sexuality, war, mascots, and rubbishing missionary cricket. Study
of social action requires attention not only to motives/intentions, but also to cultural
underpinnings and effects.
Modernity often associated with: impersonal relations, markets/capitalism,
disenchantment/secularization, abstraction/rationalization, nation-state, advanced
technology, newness, the West
Tradition often associated with: personalized relations, non-market exchange, spirituality,
lack of abstraction, deep meaning, small-scale societies, simplicity, old ways.
A problematic dichotomy: traditions are often recent. Modern phenomena become
traditional. Blind observers to complexity and connection. Value judgments often applied
unthinkingly. Temporalizes difference in ways that deny that were all living in the same
world.
From difference to temporality: Post-enlightenment tendency to reformulate cultural
difference in the terms of tradition and modernity. Temporalization of difference. Often
associated with race.
Indigenization of Modernity: term coined by Marshall Sahlins. Capitalism, colonialism,
development, globalization have unified world. But also rediversifying as people adapt
these new forms to their own values and practices. Globalization and self-consciousness
of culture.
Globalization is the intensifying flow of capital, goods, people, images, and ideas around
the world.

Traditions are ways that people reflect on their lives in the present and actively connect
those lives to the past. Are reinforced with rules and symbols.
Modernization is the theory and practice of transforming from traditional to modern ways
of life, with emphasis on economy, governance, culture and social organization. Based on
ideas of progress, linked to colonialism, development projects.
Representation: How some stand in for a larger group, how one is portrayed by and to
others, how one represents oneself.
Representaiton does things: it shapes the world, is political. Struggles for justice often
involve struggles over representations.
Cultural evolution: assumes everyone on the same path, assume whats
developed/desirable, contrasts tradition with modernity.
Nostalgic particularism: assumes unchanging/untouched culture, romantic, contrasts
tradition with modernity.
Summary: modernity and tradition: a problematic dichotomy. Modernization projects.
Indigenization of modernity. Representation.
Anthropology of art/media (expressive culture): ways people express and struggle over
cultural values. Assertions of group identity and property. Affinity to certain styles, ways
of life. Can be political. Aesthetics and broader cultural patterns. Not often separate from
other arenas of life.
Terra nullius: empty land. Doctrine whereby land was claimed by colonists because
empty.
Primitivism: viewing and often valuing other ways of life by assuming that they are more
primitive, simple, of the the past.
Indigenous peoples: of a place prior to colonialism. Ongoing minorities in settle state.
May have distinct ways of life. Tied to territories.
Essentialism: regarding a person or people as having innate qualities, irrespective of
context.
Strategic essentialism: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, postcolonial theory. Temporary
solidarity for purposes of unified action and struggle. Acknowledges internal difference.
Identified with non-dominant groups.
Summary: Representation and cultural production matter (for idenitity, inequality, rights,
claims and more). Openness/restriction is a window into social organization and tradition.

Representations often are rife with primitivism and essentialism. Strategic essentialism is
powerful, risky.
Social construction: concept, category, phenomenon thats developed and given meaning
through social processes. Linked to particular groups and historical moments. Depends
on contingent values, not essential. Because not given, must be maintained and
reaffirmed cultural production.
Genders: are diverse and multiple within societies. Vary cross-culturally. Change
historically. Are powerful forces that shape individuals groups, cultural representations.
Cultural relativism: understanding and evaluating something according to the cultural
standards of its context. Opposite of ethnocentrism. More about understanding than
judging.
Reification: a form of reductionism, treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing.
Culture is often reified: seen as a unified thing that acts.
For culture to be helpful: avoid reification, ethnocentrism, essentialism. Account for
history, complexity, context, and power. Emphasize interconnection.