Saturday, June 25, 2016

How to prepare for the general anthropology exam

Anthropology exams don’t have to be dreadful. I know that different things work for different people, depending on the way their minds work to process and store information. I’ll describe what worked for me when I was a university student. You decide if this method of studying works for you.

For any general anthropology exam (cultural, social, and even physical), we must know four main things that work somewhat like strongholds for everything else.

1. Key anthropology figures
2. Key anthropology theories (approaches, “schools of anthropology”)
3. Key anthropology concepts
4. Specific examples to illustrate numbers 2 and 3

Our professors want us to remember the key figures who have influenced the field of anthropology, but who cares about names and dates if we don’t know what they practiced and believed in? For each anthropologist, we must know the following: 

- what does this person believe?
- how does he/she think the society works?
- his/her main focus (ethnography, linguistics, medicinal plants, evolution, gender, etc.?)
- which words and concepts does he/she like to use?
- most famous writings by this anthropologist
- other anthropologists whose approaches he opposes or supports

Also, as a nice extra, it’s always good to know one or two memorable quotes that you could gracefully use in your exam.

Being a visual person, I used both written notes and various charts. For example, as a basic memorization technique,  I would draw a big circle named “functionalism”, and write the names of all functionalist anthropologists inside. I did the same for evolutionists, structural anthropology, relativism, etc. I would also make bubbles and connect them to “school” circles. Inside the bubbles I wrote basic concepts and ideas for each approach and school of thought. Of course, this was just a bare skeleton, some very general information to remember.

Even if two anthropologists belong to the same school of thought, their ideas might differ greatly. So, they might be in the same circle – evolutionism – but their thoughts about what evolutionism is and how it works might be different. They can use different terms to describe their theory and come up with various categories. Also, anthropologists’ thoughts and ideas can change throughout their lives, so any given school of thought is not something rigid that an anthropologist must necessarily adhere to for ages.


In my studies I also wrote a particular name, let’s say  “Anthropologist X” on a piece of paper, and underneath I wrote all the key words related to that person. It could be a long list of various terms, names, countries, titles, for example, “structuralism, systems of exchange, reciprocity, New Guinea, opponent of evolutionism, opponent of anthropologists Y and Z, animism, believed behavior.” You can write this on flash cards for each anthropologist and carry them around, quizzing yourself throughout the day. A name will stick with a set of particular terms and titles, even quotes. If you do this in addition to reading all the assigned literature and actually understanding it, you WILL remember. 

In my experience, knowing anthropologists and their theories well is essential to passing any written exam in general, cultural, social anthropology. 

You can have brilliant ideas and examples from real life. You can remember a certain book or story well and use it to illustrate something in relation to the exam question. You can understand a concept and describe it without naming any anthropologist or school of thought. Most of the anthropology is actually real life, something we all deal with every day. It happens to us, around us, in the world we perceive from different angles. 

However, in our classes and during exams, professors do want to see that we remember what we have learned. They want us to understand existing theories and use the names of those who worked in the field before us. We must use their concepts and give them credit, and apply established concepts in our discussions. 



Friday, June 24, 2016

The Gift summary Marcel Mauss

In the book “The Gift” Marcel Mauss discusses a system of exchange and obligation which exists in several societies in the form of potlatch or the system of total services.
Throughout the book, Mauss repeatedly states that gifts given on various occasions among people in Polynesia and in the American Northwest have to be reciprocated. For example, among the Samoan, gifts of any kind, material or ritual, contain a pert of person’s spiritual essence. Keeping and not reciprocating them would be highly dangerous and immoral because active gifts seek to return to their original owner and to the place of origin. In Andaman Islands gifts serve as links between families, supporting the system of contract and exchange. In Trobriand Islands there is a system of intertribal trade called kula. During this event presents circulate among participants in a very strict order, and such circulation serves to reinforce legal principles and has strong spiritual connotations. It is not a mere exchange of gifts done in order to please somebody; it is a very elaborate system of services which “forms the framework for a whole series of other exchanges, extremely diverse in scope” (Mauss 1950:27).
In the American Northwest, there is potlatch, or the system of exchanged gifts. It is more violent than the system of exchange in Melanesia, and the notion of honor plays a huge role in it. Services performed during the potlatch gathering are seen as acts of honor, and the chief can keep his high status only by sharing his good fortune. The author says that “the obligation to give is the essence of potlatch” (Mauss 1950-39), and so is the obligation to reciprocate. Competition and power play are very prominent, and there is indeed a very strong connection between “circulation of gifts and circulation of rights and persons” (Mauss 1950:46). 
In the last chapter the author compares the notion of gift in the European society with that in the societies of Melanesia and the American Northwest. In the western society people generally see gifts are something that should be given free, in contrast to obligations and services that should be reciprocated. However, if we look at the history of Indo-European law systems, classical Hindu laws, Celtic laws, and others, we will notice that the system of exchange and obligation is not foreign to them. For example, in German villages there is something called gage (a pledge), during which gifts are exchanged to seal the contract between two parties. Mauss emphasizes throughout the book that gifts play a huge role in what he calls “total services of the agonistic type.” The system of exchange in several societies discussed by him serves to create and maintain social ties, reinforce laws and rights, and keep the society function in a certain way. 
Marcel Mauss, 1990 [1950] The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. W.D. Halls, trans. Norton & Company, Inc. New York. 

What is Habitus (Bourdieu)

Habitus is one of the main concepts used by Pierre Bourdieu. He defines habitus as a “subjective but not individual system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class and constituting the precondition for all objectification and apperception” (Bourdieu 1972:86). 

Personally, I understand habitus as an internalized perception of reality shared by a group of people who have been taught to perceive the world in the same way. To me it is almost the same as "culture", but culture is mostly about what people create and how they communicate symbolically. It can be defined simply as "the system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning" (Bates and Plog, 1990). Habitus is more about how people perceive and structure the world in their minds, and how they act according to these internalized structures. 

Habitus is produced by the past; as the product of history, it produces individual and collective practices in accordance with the past practices. Habitus plays a big role in social reproduction; it is both the product and the producer of social structure. Products of collective history, for example language or economy, reproduce themselves through habitus and exist in (or are enacted by) individuals who have been influenced by similar historical/material conditions of existence.

In the habitus, material conditions of existence determine various practices (for example, ritual ones), and schemes of perceptions of the individuals are in turn determined by those material conditions. It seems that according to Bourdieu, habitus is determined by the very things it determines and reproduces.

Habitus reproduces social order and causes members of the group to conform to it because not only group’s view of the world is structured by it, but also the group itself is structured by “the temporal forms or the spatial structures” which it reproduces, thus making them a reality (Bourdieu 1972:163). Members of the group and various institutions constantly reinforce order of things through practice, and so this order becomes self-evident, seems natural, and is unquestioned. Falling out of the established, realized rhythm of things, not conforming to the social order would mean defying social solidarity.

Bourdieu distinguishes between practical and logical relations; for example, if an ethnographer sees kinship in terms of a closed system of logical relationships, practical functions of its terms and relations might be misunderstood or even remain unseen. It is because representational kinship (or official kinship) is a self-representation of a group acted out according to the group’s scheme of perception. The author compares logical relationships as seen by an anthropologist to a map, and practical ones, which practically exist in a society – to “the network of beaten tracks, of path made ever more practicable by constant use” (Bourdieu 1972:38). This difference between theory and practice presents certain difficulties for the observers who search for the truth in native accounts.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1972) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Homeless and living on the margins

Sometimes the invisible ones come out of the shadowy spaces to which they've been assigned by those who walk in the light. 
I was driving out of the parking lot of a big shopping plaza, and a homeless man was standing at the corner on my right. I looked to my left to see if the road was clear. The need to look left also saved me from making an eye contact with the man. I wasn't planning to give him any change, and not giving it to him made me feel guilty (regardless of my lack of information about his particular situation). He stood there, an alien, marginal being, and cars kept passing by, drivers looking everywhere but in the man's eyes, as if scared of the homelessness "disease"... As if looking at him could somehow contaminate them. 
In every society people have a set of ideas about the clean and the dirty. This varies from place to place although certain ideas might be universal. We, westerners, the children of the "civilized" first-world country, have our own untouchables. We frown at the Indian caste system, but fail to make note of our own behavioral and thought patterns here, at home, when we come across those who do not fit into our quite rigid concepts of
normal". 
I understand. We fear the different, the unknown. We don't know what to expect from those who live on the margins of our world because they may not live by the same rules. When you are a marginal being, your behavior may change along with the changes in your mode of existence, your perception of reality, your physical health, your value system. 
I've had a very unpleasant experience with one homeless man one day. I was walking down the street, and he walked toward me, talking to himself. He was a dark-skinned, tall man in his late forties. When we passed by one another, he threw our his hand and hit me in the head, mumbling something about "bitches". It wasn't hard enough to hurt me really bad, but I did  get a bump afterwards. I was so shocked that it didn't cross my mind to call the police. 
Are all homeless men aggressive? Are they all alcoholics, drug addicts, schizophrenics? No, of course not. But they do live in a marginal space of existence where more "fitting" members of our society fear to go. Very often the first inclination of a "normal" human being is to separate from the marginal one, to increase the distance between one another, to avoid all contact whatsoever. It's safer that way, and there's no need to think much. Just don't look and keep driving. 
The homeless man at the exit of the parking lot held a sign in his hands. I thought it would say something like "hungry" or "disabled vet", I wasn't really interested in knowing... But he wrote his sign in huge, dark letters that stood out, practically screamed at me. The sign said,
SMILE, GODDAM'IT !
I smiled. I gave him a huge, genuine smile. I wanted to laugh at myself when I imagined how I looked to him - a thirty-year-old woman with a dead-serious, grim expression on a tired face driving out of the shopping plaza. How did I really look? Exhausted, sad, pressured, irritated, unhappy? I avoided looking at him, but he did look at me. The "no looking" game is one-sided, you see. The homeless are invisible to us. We look away or through them because looking directly at them makes us feel uncomfortable, but they don't seem to have a problem watching us. 
Smile, God damn it. 
People in their cars, tired after work, worried about bills, kids, husbands, wives, tomorrow, and who knows what else. Tired after standing in line in WalMart, not looking at another human being in the corner because he is not really one of them. He is alien. Almost nonhuman.
Some people might feel offended reading this post. "We? No, never!? We don't judge the homeless, we see them as human beings, we give them change, we even talk to them!!" Maybe. Maybe some of us do. But the majority doesn't. The majority avoids looking at them because they are a threat to what is perceived as normal. 
I don't blame people for not feeling comfortable looking at other people. I am just pondering on the subject of  perception of reality. 
Have you ever wondered how the world looks to a homeless man? We know how the homeless look to us. Have you ever wondered how we look to them? 
I met a homeless guy named Henry a couple of months ago. Henry is about 50, he has a black lab and a bicycle (although I saw him without the bicycle about a week ago, maybe he doesn't have it anymore). He asked me to use my cell phone when I was passing by, so I lent  to him. He called his brother or sister, I can't recall now. He said he loved them. He smelled like a drunk. He had skull rings on his fingers and a heavy silver chain on his chest. I saw him a couple more times, my daughter played with his dog.
He called me "sister." He stopped being invisible when my daughter played with his dog and we talked about simple things. Instead, all the others became invisible to me for a brief period of time when I stood next to him. And I became "the weird one" to those others. After all, who in their right mind would stand next to the stinky homeless drunk and let her toddler play with his dog? 
What are your experiences with the homeless?
Are you afraid of them? Do you feel comfortable looking straight into their eyes? Do you perceive the gap between your world and theirs? Do you divide the world into "us and them"? 

Franz Boas Theory

Franz Boas is known as the “father of American anthropology”. He is one of the key figures in the development and implementation of cultural relativism. In his “Methods of Ethnology” Boas explains why the ideas of uniform evolution and diffusion may not be effective. He believes that by themselves these methods are inaccurate, and attempts to see ethnological phenomena in its historical development and geographical distribution and in physiological and psychological foundation. Boas believes that it is important to study history in order to understand every living being or a group of people. He thinks that there should be a strong connection between comparative and historic methods of ethnology even though these methods usually oppose each other. These two methods should work together in a system of check and balance. By themselves, in Boas’ view, these methods are often faulty.
In his “Handbook of American Indian Languages” Boas opposes the idea that there is a single psychological principle on which American Indian languages are based. He does not see alternating sounds as evidence of “primitiveness of the speech in which they are said to occur” (Stocking 1974:76). Boas doesn’t think that the notion of “alternating sounds” can be used to categorize cultures. I believe this is one of the cases where he criticizes the evolutionary method. In his essay “On Alternating Sounds” he also mentions subjective perception of various sounds, and takes into consideration cultural bias of the researcher.
While relying on the scientific method, Boas states that there is a need to introduce “sounder philological methods of collection and of historical methods in the treatment of anthropological problems” (Stocking 1974:187). He emphasizes the importance of ethnographic work, criticizes “armchair” anthropology, and rejects the idea of absolute stability of cultures. According to him, cultures are fluid and changing, and they should not be studied as rigid and static entities.
In his time, Boas criticized many existing theories and anthropological approaches. He wrote several papers where he argued against the ideas of racial purity and superiority. He was one of the first anthropologists to state that the concept of “race” was a myth, and disapproved of racism at the time when it was common to openly do exactly the opposite. Boas didn’t believe that race was a biological factor. He argued that is was a social phenomenon.
“The existence of any pure race with special endowments is a myth, as is the belief that there are races all of whose members are foredoomed to eternal inferiority” (c) Franz Boas
Of course, both anthropologists and people of other majors and professions know that myths are not simple fairy tales. Myths have the power to shape people’s perception of the world, lead in a certain direction. The “race” myth has very powerful and very real effects on our lives indeed. By saying “race is a myth” Boas didn’t want to diminish the reality of racism. On the contrary, the purpose was to advocate against the notion that race was a biological factor which made people fall into rigid categories of specific behavioral patterns, level of intelligence, physical development, inclination to commit crimes, etc.
This is only a very brief summary/introduction to Franz Boas and his ideas. He is one of the most significant figures in the field of anthropology, and his approach influenced many other prominent anthropologists such as Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead.
References:
Stocking, George. 1974. A Franz Boas Reader. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.