Final anthro essay - Grade: A+ PDF

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Professor Marisa Solomon...

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Maham Ayaz Marisa Solomon 10/17/18

2. Discuss the different problems anthropologists encounter when observing “culture” Anthropology is often described as the study of mankind and its development over time. One of the main prominent attributes of mankind are the groups of people who can be distinguishable by the collective learned ideas, traditions, and characteristics of their communities, also known as their “culture”. These qualities are not passed genetically and instead are shaped by socially constructed norms. Oftentimes, these norms describe how people should behave in their society, what is considered normal, and define social prescriptions that inadvertently control the kind of relations people have with each other. In other words, culture can define the categories of “common sense” that people use to navigate their day-to-day encounters. These social constructions serve as one of the components of culture in a community. The methods that anthropologists use to observe culture in the study of humanity have changed over time. Once regarded as a “soft science”, anthropology used to have no specific methodology in research which made the discipline a slippery slope. In 1922, Bronislaw Malinowski developed the modern method of research within anthropology called “participant observation”. This tactic used to gain an understanding of native culture revolves around four main points which include: a lived reality where the anthropologist lives among the natives to get a sense of their life, the framework of society which includes power distinctions of class, rank, etc. within the culture, an embodied cultural knowledge which informs the anthropologist of the practices and ideas the natives believe in, and the “native” view of the world which employs the anthropologist to put himself in the space of the native and understand the world from their eyes. While participant observation is a method still used today in anthropology to study people, albeit with new factors added like consent of the observed party, anthropologists observing “culture” encounter issues of self-qualification as well as the boundaries of cultural relativism which makes it difficult to define cultures in an unbiased light.

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Historically, most studies about “culture” in anthropology have been by white men observing indigenous people without their consent. One of the issues these anthropologists face when studying “culture” is the assumption that an outsider like themselves can understand the inner-workings of a society they are not part of. Anthropologists need to self diagnose a weight of mastery in their ability to define the “culture” of a community. White men, who are often associated to a colonizer’s narrative, can not inhabit the experience of the colonized, meaning people of color. To assume the role of defining the ideas and traditions of a society with people of color insinuates that a person has some sort of qualification to do such. In addition, this approach homogenizes the characteristics of society as a stagnant force instead of a continuously flowing and changing community with shifting norms and ideas. For example, Mattel released black barbies as a solution to solve the disparity in positive self esteem between white girls and black girls. However, they made the barbies economically inaccessible to their publicized targeted audience. Through this, they reduced the issue of race and how it perpetuates debilitating views of one’s self for young black kids to plastic dolls (Chin, 316). Mattel was unable to truly identify the cause and the extensive role race plays in causing differences in self-esteem because the company is not part of the disadvantaged community that is subject to that specific experience. Likewise, Malinowski writes that “the Ethnographer has in the field..the duty before him of drawing up all the rules and regularities of tribal life” (Malinowski, 11). He implies that it’s a necessity for an anthropologist to define the dictating factors of unspoken and spoken law. This approach deduces the rules and political culture of a tribal society to become static. When “culture” is observed, another issue anthropologists face is the relationship between the observer and the observed. This relationship is often not reciprocal and serves in favor of the subject. People who are observed are not seen as equals to the observers and as a result, anthropologists do not seek to form relations. Observation reduces people to becoming a static object instead of a fluid human being with their own thoughts and opinions. This creates something called a subject/object hierarchy which places observed people below the anthropologists based on their gaze. In a historical sense, when Malinowski arrived on the island of New Guinea unannounced, he set up his workspace and started to observe people without their consent. Malinowski decided to live alongside the indigenous people of the island without much care for their feelings on the matter in order to “understand” their “culture” (Malinowski, 4). Firstly, this approach argues that Malinowski has the authority to define a community’s way of

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life as a “culture” which differs from the norms he is familiar with. While Malinowski may have gathered information on their ideas and traditions that he experienced, it can also be argued that he never actually captured the true “culture” of the indigenous people simply because his presence could have play a role in the workings of their society. The observation of this community is comparable to a one way street where Malinowski is benefiting at the expense of natives being objectified by observing indigenous people and inadvertently reducing them to being inferior. When the concept of “cultural relativism” was created, its purpose was to be a way to look at culture in an unbiased way. Whether anthropologists intended to do so or not, native “culture” used to be viewed as such when it differed from the normative ideas and beliefs that an anthropologist considers “standard”. Malinowski states “the difference…in our society [from the natives], every institution has its intelligent members, its historians, and its archives and documents…whereas in a native society there are none of these” (Malinowski, 12). In this situation, he renders the natives of New Guinea as incapable of recording their history and assumes that it is even important for a “culture" to record itself historically. Essentially, Malinowski also draws the conclusion that the natives are unable to take care of writing about their culture and that his role is valuable, necessary, and that he is someone doing them a favor for disrupting their life in the name of “recording history”. Cultural relativism is the idea that a person's beliefs, values, and practices should be understood within the scope of their own culture and without it being compared to another culture or deemed inferior. This method of observing culture was intended to rid biases when assessing the traditions and ideas of communities. In Malinowski’s case, this meant that if a culture did not record their history in “archives and documents”, this did not mean that they were inferior since cultures are not compared in cultural relativism. Instead, an argument could be made that a culture does not record history due to the determination by that culture that recording their history is unnecessary. While the idea of cultural relativism was founded to benefit the study of anthropology, a host of problems occur when anthropologists actually try to use this method to observe culture. When certain practices occur within a culture, cultural relativism encourages the anthropologist to attribute this practice to that specific society and discourages intervention. This method of observation can cause anthropologists to relate a practiced idea to a culture when a correlation may not actually exist. In some cases, it can relate

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cases of violence within a community to cultures instead of addressing power relations that may affect a broader scope of communities. Abu-Lughod discusses this issue in her study of the West’s obsession with the perceived “oppression” of veiled muslim women. The veil, while it was mandated to be worn in Afghanistan when the Taliban was in power, does not insinuate that the veil is mandated by the culture that muslim women follow. Instead, it makes more sense to address the power structures that control the region and the role it plays in changing the way women think of the veil (Abu-Lughod, 786). Abu-Lughod also argues that within the local culture, the veil is a method woman use to stay within the boundaries of culture and experience life and for some it signifies being wealthy enough to not need to work (Abu-Lughoud, 786-787). Cultural relativism, while sound in theory, when applied to real situations it can blind anthropologists to outside forces that may play a hand in the practices of a culture. Native anthropologists, who are generally people of color, view culture in a different perspective than white, male anthropologists that have previously dominated the field. When anthropologists study their own culture, they have an accessibility that is unavailable to other anthropologists. Since native anthropologists are essentially studying their “home”, they have information about the culture from an “insider” point of view. This creates the possibility for new research methods and procedure of culture. Additionally, this shifts the discipline away from being dominated anthropologists with potential biases and instead in favor of the natives. However, having native anthropologists tell the stories, laws, and ideas of their own culture comes with certain problems. It is possible that the native anthropologists could be considered in a place of power above the natives because they still observe culture and try to define it and therefore homogenize it. The subject-object hierarchy still exists even when the subject is from the culture of the object. This puts them in very similar position of other anthropologists in the discipline. Likewise, being an anthropologist may actually displace them from their culture and native anthropologists may not actually be experiencing the same culture as other indigenous people because of their career. Indigenous people may view the native anthropologist as a traitor to their own culture for involving themselves in the career of same people who have previously objectified them. Even wearing different clothes can draw a distinction between the “native” anthropologists and the community they come from (Hartman, 1). The study of anthropology is one filled with many criticisms for the practices currently employed to conduct research. The pursuit of knowledge by researchers in the name of being

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good for all mankind does not consider natives as a part of the profiting group. Natives experience the short end of the stick when it comes to the benefits of being observed and involuntarily volunteered to be intruded upon. They become involved in a power dynamic which places them as inferior. Observing natives in the name of collecting research about humanity does not justify them being objectified with no positive benefit of having this done to them. Anthropologists self qualify themselves as capable enough of defining the workings of a culture and in turn, this creates the perception that culture can be something static. Researching culture in this way legitimizes the methods of observation that can cause a loss of intellectual and cultural knowledge within a society. Anthropologists who are from the culture they are studying and anthropologist who are not face the same issue of reducing indigenous people to a thing that can be analyzed for the sake of collecting information about their existence. Additionally, when observing these cultures, it is nearly impossible to objectively discuss their culture without taking it into the perspective of other cultures. On one hand, cultural relativism advocates for the isolated analyzation of cultures within their own context, however, on the other hand, this can limit the understanding of practices that occur to the narrative of a culture instead the narratives of power relations that address a large set of cultures. How can one define a situation when it is okay to do one or the other? Anthropology’s modern methods of conducting research need to be reanalyzed on whether they actually help collect knowledge of other cultures, and who this knowledge actually helps. The way anthropologists view culture should also shift from something that can be statically define into practices that are influenced by the daily experiences within the communities of indigenous people.

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Works Cited

Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others.” American Anthropologist, vol. 104, no. 3, 2002.

Chin, Elizabeth. “Ethnically Correct Dolls: Toying with the Race Industry.” American Anthropologist, vol. 101, no. 2, 1999, pp. 305–321. Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother: a Journey along the Atlantic Slove Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: an Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. E. P. Dutton & Co., 1922.

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