Becoming White
Anthropology reveals that racial identities are not biologically given but a social process. Racism is crucial to becoming white and policing whiteness.
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?
Culture, Culture, Everywhere
With anthropologists saying many things about culture, is it any wonder the students and the public are confused?
Purchasing Power / Buying & Believing
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.
Irony, Paradox, Uncertainty
Pairing “Advertising Missionaries” with “A Fragmented Globality” to ask “What, if anything, is truly new about our times?” (Trouillot 2003:47)
Fetishizing Fieldwork on the Road to Essentialism
Fieldwork and the ethnographic monograph invited closure around cultural wholes. Anthropology can defend the concept of culture while jettisoning the word.
Fieldwork & Kinshipology
Laura Bohannan’s Return to Laughter is a great book to discuss institutionalized fieldwork in anthropology and how kinshipology trumped messier discoveries.
How do we get out from culture?
Are there ways to counter the notion of “gang culture” without promoting myths of individualism? Can we usefully bring anthropology to the courtroom?
Globalization Stories
Contemporary stories of globalization erase centuries of contact and encounter: Exploring the North Atlantic fiction of modernity as a seductive universal.
When Culture Looks like Race
Anthropology saw culture as anti-race, yet descriptions of Dobu in Patterns of Culture, show culture reified–and looking a lot like race.
The 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.
Power & the Culture of Greed
Brooks uses culture to bypass power, inequality, economics, politics, and history. That’s the real cultural problem–and a problem anthropology must tackle.
Jared Diamond, Science, Violence & the Facts
The Ax Fight shows how Yanomami used steel axes long before anthropologists arrive. The Jared Diamond violence calculations must consider interconnection.
Gun Culture
An analysis of “gun culture” provides lessons for talking about culture in anthropology at a time when culture–and guns–are everywhere.
Sex, Gender, Sexuality
Anthropology insists sex, gender, and sexuality include human activity and imagination–explaining why “gender is a social construction”
Cultural Relativism & Anthropology
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.”
Culture Doesn’t Matter
Does culture matter? Anthropology promoted culture, but the book “Culture Matters”–and David Brooks–reveal a perverted idea of culture.
Cosmopolitanism & Cultural Relativism
Have the promoters of anthropological cosmopolitanism considered the proximity of Cosmopolitan the magazine? Does cosmopolitanism improve on cultural relativism?
Anthropology Textbooks: Doubling down on culture?
Kottak and Gezon’s Culture uses a magazine-style textbook to double down on culture in anthropology. That’s problematic–culture is already everywhere.