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Cultural Anthropology

These blog-posts explore themes in Cultural Anthropology. One of the main ideas is how the anthropological idea of Culture was introduced and how it then problematically turned into plural cultures. Ultimately, I agree with Michel-Rolph Trouillot that anthropology must bid “Adieu Culture” (Global Transformations 2003). Although it now seems impossible to change the terminology of “Cultural Anthropology,” most of the blog-posts in this category are critical of the use of the term culture.

My 2016 course in Cultural Anthropology traced this trajectory, beginning with Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) and using Trouillot as a guiding text.

For Cultural Anthropology 2020, I took an approach that emphasized aspects of anthropology that are a “toolkit” for today’s times. In many ways it has become unavoidable to continue using the label of culture, but it seems worth attempting to explain what can be so problematic about it. In this course I used Kenneth Guest’s Essentials of Cultural Anthropology.

In 2021 I will be using the second edition of Introducing Anthropology: What makes us human? For some reflections on Cultural Anthro 2021, see Is anthropology more important than ever? This post also has a brief review of Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life.

For a 2021 attempt to outline the Culture-to-cultureS critique in an Intro-to-Anthropology course, see the YouTube lecture Culture and cultureS: Does culture explain everything? This lecture uses Trouillot but is also based on the textbook Anthropology: What does it mean to be human?

Becoming White

Brodkin - How Jews Became White - Becoming White, Policing Whiteness

Anthropology reveals that racial identities are not biologically given but a social process. Racism is crucial to becoming white and policing whiteness.

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags immigration, politics, race, racism Leave a comment

Culture, Culture, Everywhere

culture

With anthropologists saying many things about culture, is it any wonder the students and the public are confused?

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags anthropology branding, culture, genetics, human nature, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, race, racism, Ruth Benedict, textbooks, Tim Ingold Leave a comment

Purchasing Power / Buying & Believing

Purchasing Power

A double review from 2003 of Elizabeth Chin’s Purchasing Power and Steven Kemper’s Buying and Believing. A review that went poof! from American Ethnologist.

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags culture, education, fieldwork, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, race, racism, textbooks 6 Comments

Irony, Paradox, Uncertainty

Advertising Missionaries

Pairing “Advertising Missionaries” with “A Fragmented Globality” to ask “What, if anything, is truly new about our times?” (Trouillot 2003:47)

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags anthropology branding, capitalism, human nature, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, occupy, planning, political economy, textbooks 15 Comments

Fetishizing Fieldwork on the Road to Essentialism

Anthropology Beyond Culture - Adieu Culture

Fieldwork and the ethnographic monograph invited closure around cultural wholes. Anthropology can defend the concept of culture while jettisoning the word.

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags ambushing anthropology, anthropology branding, cultural relativism, culture, David Brooks, education, fieldwork, human nature, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, politics, race, racism, Ruth Benedict, textbooks, Tim Ingold 9 Comments

Fieldwork & Kinshipology

Return to Laughter - Laura Bohannan

Laura Bohannan’s Return to Laughter is a great book to discuss institutionalized fieldwork in anthropology and how kinshipology trumped messier discoveries.

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags cultural relativism, culture, education, fieldwork, textbooks 10 Comments

How do we get out from culture?

Bourdieu - Outline - Gang Culture

Are there ways to counter the notion of “gang culture” without promoting myths of individualism? Can we usefully bring anthropology to the courtroom?

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags ambushing anthropology, anthropology branding, cultural relativism, culture, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, politics, racism, Ruth Benedict 35 Comments

Globalization Stories

McNeill - Global Condition - Globalization Stories

Contemporary stories of globalization erase centuries of contact and encounter: Exploring the North Atlantic fiction of modernity as a seductive universal.

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags capitalism, cultural relativism, culture, Eric Wolf, Fernando Coronil, globalization, human nature, immigration, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, political economy, race mixing, Ruth Benedict, Sidney Mintz 18 Comments

When Culture Looks like Race

Susanne Kuehling - Dobu

Anthropology saw culture as anti-race, yet descriptions of Dobu in Patterns of Culture, show culture reified–and looking a lot like race.

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags capitalism, cultural relativism, culture, fieldwork, human nature, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ruth Benedict, textbooks 8 Comments

The Concept of Culture

Patterns of Culture - Ruth Benedict Concept of Culture

Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture translated Boasian Anthropology and its concept of culture to a mass audience. Plus problematic cultural wholes.

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags anthropology branding, cultural relativism, culture, education, Eric Wolf, fieldwork, human nature, Jared Diamond, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, race, Ruth Benedict, textbooks 18 Comments

Power & the Culture of Greed

Words at Work and Play: David Brooks is a Cultural Problem

Brooks uses culture to bypass power, inequality, economics, politics, and history. That’s the real cultural problem–and a problem anthropology must tackle.

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags ambushing anthropology, anthropology branding, capitalism, cultural relativism, culture, David Brooks, education, language, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, political economy, politics, racism 10 Comments

Jared Diamond, Science, Violence & the Facts

Brian Ferguson - Yanomami Warfare

The Ax Fight shows how Yanomami used steel axes long before anthropologists arrive. The Jared Diamond violence calculations must consider interconnection.

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags agriculture, ambushing anthropology, anthropology branding, culture, Eric Wolf, fieldwork, human nature, Jared Diamond, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ruth Benedict 37 Comments

Gun Culture

Chin - Purchasing Power - Gun Culture

An analysis of “gun culture” provides lessons for talking about culture in anthropology at a time when culture–and guns–are everywhere.

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags culture, gun violence, human nature, politics 12 Comments

Sex, Gender, Sexuality

Warnke - After Identity - Gender is a Social Construction

Anthropology insists sex, gender, and sexuality include human activity and imagination–explaining why “gender is a social construction”

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags culture, evolution, gender, genetics, human nature, sex, sexuality, textbooks, Tim Ingold 39 Comments

Cultural Relativism & Anthropology

McGovern - Socialist Peace - Cultural Relativism

An assessment of cultural relativism & anthropology in 2011 as “Before you Judge, Stand in Her Shoes” dueled with “Don’t walk a mile in her shoes.”

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags ambushing anthropology, cultural relativism, culture, immigration, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, political economy, politics, Ruth Benedict, Tim Ingold 2 Comments

Culture Doesn’t Matter

Culture Matters

Does culture matter? Anthropology promoted culture, but the book “Culture Matters”–and David Brooks–reveal a perverted idea of culture.

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags ambushing anthropology, anthropology branding, capitalism, cultural relativism, culture, David Brooks, Latin America, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, political economy, politics, Sidney Mintz 8 Comments

Cosmopolitanism & Cultural Relativism

Have the promoters of anthropological cosmopolitanism considered the proximity of Cosmopolitan the magazine? Does cosmopolitanism improve on cultural relativism?

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags anthropology branding, cultural relativism, culture, Ruth Benedict, textbooks Leave a comment

Anthropology Textbooks: Doubling down on culture?

Doubling Down on Culture in Anthropology

Kottak and Gezon’s Culture uses a magazine-style textbook to double down on culture in anthropology. That’s problematic–culture is already everywhere.

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Categories Cultural Anthropology Tags anthropology branding, cultural relativism, culture, education, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, politics, race, Ruth Benedict, Sidney Mintz, textbooks 6 Comments

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© 2011-2023 Jason Antrosio. All Rights Reserved. This blog is a personal project and does not represent the views of any institutions or employers, current or previous. The opinions expressed here are mine alone.