1.

Social Fact
Define:
- Social norms: way of acting, fixed/not, capable of exercising on the individual an
external constraint.
- General but also exists independent of individual manifestations
- Can be empirically tested bc beliefs affect behavior which is testable.

Differences from collective consciousness:

- More widespread
- More heavily ingrained and unchanging

Authors associated: Emile Durkheim

Connections with readings:

- Durkheim believed: philosophy and all social sciences must be based on precise,
observable facts subjected to general laws.
o Refers to social facts as laws and rules that one internalizes growing up in a
society of moral maxims.
 Enforced through public opinion control: shaming, ridiculing and
ostracism.
 Process of enculturation: unconscious internalization of cultural
constraints imposed during childhood.
o Collective in nature bc everyone shares them.
o But social facts precede individuals and are imposed on them.
o External to individuals and coercive.
 External: social changes attributed to changes in ideas and opinions
than changes in material structure
 i.e. development of capitalism
 Coercive: violation results in punishments (through judgement/legal
actions)
o Social current = non-material social facts that are external to and coercive of
individuals.

Significance in anthropology:
- Social facts part of a larger study of Durkheim on what keeps societies together
o Explored ideas of mechanical vs. organic
 Mechanical: bond over a sameness
 CC is strong bc not a lot of diversity
 Organic: bond over differences
 CC weak

2. Generalized Reciprocity*

Define: gift giving without the expectation of an immediate return

Authors associated: Mauss, the Gift

 Connections with readings:

Gifting is thought to be poison. The expectation of reciprocity leads to toxic behaviors.

- The pressure of prestation to outdo gifts promote destructive behavior and rivalry as
seen in Andamanese culture where agonistic relations are developed in gift giving
culture.
o In seeing who could give the greatest number of objects with the greatest
value, ties are broken in the process when such expectations are not met.

But generalized reciprocity can’t be reached. Douglass argues: there is no such thing as free
gifts.
- The return could be in the form of status or praise, instead of tangible things.

An example (mauss): north American potlatch traditions which demand destruction of gifts
as a show of wealth
- Northern tribes Tlingit and Haida destroy gifts as if to say they can afford to gift
without getting anything in return

Significance in anthropology:

- generalized reciprocity affects social relations and the idea of moral generosity.
o Think of gifting in altruistic terms driven by spiritual motives.

- Societal life bounded by relationships built on reciprocal values, big parts of our
ethics exist in the same atmosphere of “the gift, of obligation, and of liberty mixed
together”
o When the reciprocal nature is seized, social ties are threatened.
o But in some cultures, generalized reciprocity represents generosity which is
highly valued.

3. Collective Consciousness

Define:
- Prone to changing. Less solid, allows leeway over time.
- Shared Beliefs and attitudes.
- Treated as transitory social currents in which members of a crowd, an individual is
capable of emotions and actions beyond their own.

Authors associated: Durkheim

Connections with readings:

- Society forms through interaction through religion and totems in which its rituals
create collective conscience.
- Collective conscience creates moral compass, sense of belonging, and sense of
obligation to the group.
o Restrains actions and impulses of people
 o Violation = punishment
- Social facts = indirect empirical evidence that prove CC is real

Significance in anthropology:

- Mauss is critical of Durkheim’s claim of rituals as a manifestation of collective

consciousness in keeping societies together.
o Mauss wanted concrete evidence of how people stay together, not just ideas.
o Mauss’ answer is reciprocity, finding balance between receiving and giving.
Which led him to studies about gifting.
o Making Durkheim’s metaphysical approach more physical.

4. Hau

Define: “the spirit of the gift” – demands gift must be returned to owner

Authors associated: Mauss the Gift

Connections with readings:

- Maori concept of aboriginal ppl of New zealand
- Mauss used hau to explain set of exchange practices in Polynesian societies
characterized by “total prestation”
- Gift giving is a social fact because the system of giving is imbued spiritually, engaging
the honor of both the giver and receiver.
o The giver gifts not only an object, but also part of himself.
 Objects never completely separated from the men that exchange
them
 Bc of this bond, the act of giving creates a social bond with
obligations to reciprocate
o This bond is called inalienability = identity of giver
bound up with object given which causes the gift to
have a power leading to reciprocity = social cohesion
and solidarity
 Failure to do so = loss of mana = spiritual source of authority
and wealth

Kula exchange, papua new guinea

- Arms shells for necklaces
- Passed around in islands from east to west
- Value of gift given to who owned the object before (hau)
- Being cut out of trading group is ultimate insult
- Show connectivity and strength of ties, linked to political authority

Significance in anthropology:

- see how relationships

 5. Joking Relationship*

Define: Relationship between 2 people where one is permitted, sometimes required, to

make fun of or tease the other, who is required to take no offense.
- It’s a combination of friendliness and antagonism that make other social con text
hostile.
- Maintain social order depends on appropriate kind and degree of respect to person,
things, ideas + symbols.

Authors associated: Radcliffe-Brown

Connections with readings:

2 types:
- Symmetrical: each person can tease each other
- Asymmetrical: only one can do the teasing while the other retaliates v. lil or not at all

2 fundamental types of relationships:

- Disjunctive: risk of diverging interests which increases possibility of conflict and
hostility
- Conjunctive: avoidance of conflict

Function in social relationships:

- Playful hostility prevents disjunction by acting out conflict
- Conjunction maintained by expressing friendliness by not taking offense.

Example: pretense of joking between grandparent and grandchild ignores age gap.

Significance in anthropology:

- Shows how social facts work in the real world.

o Gives insight to power dynamics that exist within imbalance relationships and
how that is addressed

6. Bushong

Define: wealthy tribe of the kasai river, drc.

Authors associated: Mary Douglass

Connections with readings:

Compared to their neighbors the lele, they are wealthier bc they produce for exchange
in contrast to the lele who produce for subsistence and sharing.

- They have the same language, culture, and geography.

Bushong Lele
- High population density - Low population density
- Better technology - Refuses to develop technology
- Work earlier and retire later - Work later and retire earlier
- Distribution -

Significance in anthropology:

7. Claude Lèvi-Strauss

Define: Structuralism. Think in terms of culture organized in a system of differences.

- Used language to look at anthropology

Authors associated:

Connections with readings:

Effectiveness of symbols
- Shaman performing childbirth rituals to subdue pain which is performed with no
remedy or contact with the body. Constitutes only a pure psychological treatment.
o When a woman is in labor, the Mu steals her purba, which makes up half of
her niga.
o All things have a “purba” but only humans and animals have a “niga”
 He inferred from this distinction to make meaning out of these words
that purba meant soul while niga meant vital strength.
o The song sang by the shaman make centers of pain and its varying degrees
clear and accessible to the woman’s consciousness
 Personification of organs and its pain to make it manageable for the
women to push through
 Mind accept pain even though body rejects it, gives meaning
to her struggle
o Levi relates shamanism to psychoanalyst methods where psychopathological
disturbances can only be accessed through symbols.
 Schizophrenic cure: healer acts, patient produces his myth.
 Shamanism: healer supplies myth, patient acts.

- Understand what myths mean by association of words to characteristics of familiar

things
o Look at culture as a language, with its own grammar and opposites.
 Levi said: we categorize the world to make sense of it, to fit nature.
 Through “binary opposition”: thinking of things in opposites

- Anthropologists rely on myths bc everyone in a community share same myths.

 o Syntasm is the concept signified while paradigm is the signifier, the “sound-
image”
 Syntasm: plot
 Paradigm: characters, settings, pieces of the story

Significance in anthropology:
- To an anthropologist studying the structure of society, he must examine the
oppositions surrounding it

8. Thick Description

Define: describing behavior by providing enough context so that a person outside the
culture can make meaning of the behavior.
- Unlike thin description which states facts without significance.

Authors associated: Geertz

Connections with readings:

In Geertz’s words:
- Cultural analysis should be an interpretive practice that looks at manner in which
meaning is ascribe.
- Interpretive ethnography should provide codes for decoding social events
- Can only be based on what we are allowed to see
- Should be made of specific, contextualized events

Pros
- Uncover conceptual structures that inform acts
- Prevent ideological research and results
- Making policy more accessible
- Prospects for public participation

Cons
- Hard to know when to stop
- Hard to weigh info
- Time consuming
- Questionable validity

An example: winking and twitching – ryle analogy

- Easy to underestimate how much there is to capture within a single act, esp.
complex behaviors
- Looks the same but motives and circumstances differs

Significance to anthropology:

- In doing ethnographic work, Geertz show how thick description can offer a more in-
depth analysis of culture.
 o i.e. cockfight: seen as economical, gambling purposes.
o But it’s also a social status.
 Symbol of power, masculinity
 Address overarching themes of death, rage, and competition into
something tangible, real.

Created new method for cultural analysis

- The way in which culture is being defined

o Geertz cited Kluckhohn who has too many definitions which become hard to
diffuse what culture is.
o In Geertz words, culture = signs systems which need to be interpreted.
 Search of absolutes and meaning.
 Culture is a moving target
 Studying culture should not reduce it
o How to analyze culture
 Begin with own interpretations
 Systemize! The line between culture as a natural fact and theoretical
entity tends to get blurred.
o Taught other anthropologists that they have to be okay with the fact that
culture is messy in order to be open to meaning not as scientific

9. Clifford Geertz

Define:

Authors associated:

Connections with readings:

- Geertz did research on the sabungan (Balinese cockfighting).
o Geertz was treated as invisible going into the community, but finally built
rapport after participating in a cockfight as an audience and running when
the police came to break it up.
o Locals used them as a cover from the police, thus they are seen as non-
threatening to society. Geertz did not rat them out and choose to go along
with them.
o Cultural relativism. Benefits of cockfighting is not only economical, but also
rooted in culture of a manifestation of rage, competition, and masculinity
into something tangible.

Significance in anthropology:

Making rapport is important of anth. Studies.

Criticism of Geertz’s anthropological study

- He acted as an omnipotent observer, but the thing with anth is you need to study
culture with the people, not as a separate thing.
10. Structural time/space

Define: concept of time as a reflection of relations to one another in the social structure.
- Relating to changing social groups
- Appears to an individual passing through the social system
o i.e. distance between groups of persons in a social system are expressed in
values of time.

Authors associated: Evans-Pritchard

Connections with readings:

- his ethnographic study done on the Nuer of South Sudan.

Significance in anthropology:

11. Ecological time/space

Define: concept of more natural ways of measuring time. Based time skills on animals,
how much rain they’re getting.

- Based on location, so it’s a little more regional: equatorial only has 2 seasons vs.
other hemispheres with 4 seasons.

Authors associated: Evans-Pritchard

Connections with readings:

- References water, vegetation, animals, etc.
- Cattle clock: judge time using cattle and changes in climate.

- In a functionalist way, ecological time is better than structural time.

o shows them when the best time is to move upland, plant and harvest, fish,
and how to ration resources efficiently.

Significance in anthropology:

12. Liminality

Define: interstructural position of ambiguity and paradox that comes from rites that
accompany change of place, state, social position, and age.

It is expressed through liminal persona: transitional being defined by a name or symbols.

- During liminality, neophytes encouraged to think about society and the powers that
sustain them. A stage of reflection.
o Gain new insight, learn how to process them.
 Authors associated: turner.

Connections with readings:

Coming of age rituals.

- Being stuck between being a child and being an adult. When one doesn’t have a
strong connection to neither the previous or the following stage.
- Positive aspects of liminality: make people think about how to reform old elements
in new patterns when they enter a new stage. Symbolisms they link to this are:
o The same moon wanes and waxes
o Nakedness, there is a common thread in all stages of life. Born naked, die
naked. A way of remembering who you are.
o Snake symbolism: a snake appears to die only to shed its skin.

3 phases of the rites of passage:

- Separation: signify detachment
- Margin: state of subject is ambiguous
- Re-Aggregation: passage is completed

In certain cultures, persons in liminality are considered neophytes who are treated as
“structurally dead”, so for a period they are treated as a corpse.
- By being undefined, they are associated with impurities, so they are physicially
isolated too.

Idea of communitas
- Feeling of community shared by people who went through same rites of passage
together as a product of inter-structural liminality.
o i.e. Ndembu of Zambia
 camaraderie of fellow neophytes creates lifetime bonds
 novices in circumcision seclusion are linked by special ties,
wubwambu, that persist until old age.

Sacra: exhibitions, actions, and instructions. The heart of liminal matter, sacred mythical
knowledge that is passed down to those undergoing rites of passage.

Significance in anthropology:

13. Structural-Functionalism*

Define: like functionalism but with an emphasis on kinship and social structures. Focus
not on conflict or change, but on consensus and reproduction of systems over time.

Authors associated: Radcliffe-Brown (joking relationships). Evans-Pritchard (when he

looked into concept of accidents, all things go wrong bc of witchcraft. Ppl stayed
together bc they were anxious about the malevolence.)
Mauss, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss are functionalists.
- Explains what happens in terms of function
 o Some big ideas:
 Societies fulfill our need to survive
 Culture is organized into systems with individual parts
 Systems maintain themselves and resist change
 Emphasize the whole

- IMPORTANT NOT TO CONFUSE STRUCTURE IN STRUCTURE FUNCTIONALISM AND

STRUCTURE IN STRUCTURALISM!

Connections with readings:

Criticisms of functionalism and why structural functionalism is better:

- Confuses causes and consequences: just bc you know how something functions,
that’s not why they do it
o i.e. how Indians culture view cows
- explains stability, but not change
- lack of attention to power dynamics and agency

Structural functionalists:
- Radcliffe-brown: joking relationships
- Evans-pritchard
o Azande witchcraft: since Azande had no concept of accidents, any time
something goes wrong it’s bc of witchcraft. Witchcraft causes death.
 Anxiety of this malevolence keeps them together.
 Concept of witchcraft not only serves as a way to understand why bad
things happen, but also as for social cohesion.
o Nuer: Pritchard didn’t know why they said together bc they had no leader, an
“acephalous” society.
 they stay together bc of seasons and structural time.
 Defined seasons based on where they are.
 i.e. it’s tot bc we’re in the upland villages.
 Having similar climate and lifestyles that work well together keeps
them together.

Significance in anthropology:

- Understand how different types of framework of analysis can obscure cultural

significance of certain rituals or behaviors.

14. Commodity Fetishism

Define: Attributing a power to a commodity which exists in the labor needed to produce
it.

Commodity fetishism = magical properties of consumer objects beyond use-value.

 o relationship that you have with someone based on commodities. i.e. wearing
certain brands of clothing, so you associate yourself with those who wear the
same thing.

Authors associated: Marx & Taussig

Connections with readings:

Taussig
- In Bolivia and Colombian societies, the devil represents process of alienation from
production that comes from a market economy.
o Alienation: process where worker is made to feel foreign to the products of
their labor
o Loss of control over means of production
 Taussig shows how emerging capitalism is taking away social aspects
people had before.
o Capitalism = a contract with devil, evil and unnatural
 Symbol of devil = part of egalitarian social ethic that delegitimize ppl
who gain more money than rest of society

Significance in anthropology:

15. Azande Witchcraft

Define:
- Similar to our understanding of luck.
- Azande of the DRC.
- Used to explain unfortunate events.
o Complements but not dominates the beliefs of the Azande.

Authors associated: Evans-Pritchard

Connections with readings:

- Spear analogy
o Imagine a man is killed by a spear throw in battle.
o The first blow killed the man, but the reason why he died in the way he did at
that time was because of witchcraft.
 The tragedy is a result of the spear and witchcraft
 Recognition of plurality of causes.
o Hunting
 You need two blows to kill an animal. First blow is the spear, second
blow is witchcraft.
 Umbaga = the second spear

Significance to azande:
 - As a way to stay together: protects solidarity of community
- Promoting socio-economic equality: if you have too much, you’ll be a target of
witchcraft
- Azande infuse a narrative into socially significance as the main link in the chain of
causation.

Witchcraft doesn’t make a person lie or kill a person. You are responsible for your actions.
Witchcraft is irrelevant in cases of moral and legal responsibility. Intention matters.

Significance for anthropology:

- Pritchard did not put the azande’s beliefs in opposition with the west, but instead
side by side.
- Witchcraft is comparable to our understanding of luck.
- Reminds anthropologists

16. Ethnographic fieldwork*

Define: way in which culture is studied.

- Note taking
- Single or multiple sites
- Involves language learning, rapport building, interviews, participant observation
(how things are connected, look at patterns, and what makes sense across domains)
- Qualitative v. quantitative
- Mixed methods

Authors associated:

Connections with readings:

- An ethnographer must undergo psychoanalysis to understand what kind of people
they gravitate towards and what questions they will ask and how they interpret
answers.
o An example is Abu-Lughod, born and raised with a Palestinian Arab Dad and
an American mother. Her experiences shape the way in which she conducts
studies on the Bedouin and Muslim women’s use of the veil.

- In Geertz’s the Cerebral Savage

o Ethnography is part philosophy and part confession
o Says a lot about how the ethnographers view themselves vis-a-vis other
cultures
o “self-constructed idea of savages”
o ethnographers must be able to apply epistemological empathy
 “experimental mind-reading”
 every human mind is a locus of experience that goes in the minds of
all men
o analyzed Levi-Strauss’ work on tristes tropiques
  encountered language barriers. “savages” deemed intellectually
inaccessible.
 His observation was done by standing back and constructing a
universal grammar of the intellect.
 He was reconstructing their cultural system without being a
part of it
 Keeps referring savages as needing to be made intelligent

Compared that to Geertz’s the cerebral savage:

- Saw totality of customs making up a system, instead of individual
- Think that ethnographers need to see pattern and then reconstitute deeper
structures they were built upon.
o Build models of reality (the nature and the self) by ordering particulars into
intelligible wholes.
 Symbols, totems (groups get identity from an animal/plant), deities,
folklores.

Significance in anthropology:

- Cultural relativism: judging other’s culture in the context of their values and norms,
instead of our own.