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-====== Anthropology in 100 years, part 2 ======
+====== Anthropology and other people’s knowledge ======
-===== Anthropology in 100 years, part 2 =====
+===== Anthropology and other people’s knowledge =====
 ==== Week 13: Anthropology in 100 years ====
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 Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/13.2
+===== Cultural continuity as a value today =====
+Cultures continue, and they also change. Which fact is more relevant to understand the present, either at an individual level, at the level of a single community of people, or when thinking about people in general and globally?
+==== Should we view cultural continuity as... ====
+  * an expression of a tendency of the social whole toward equilibrium?
+  * an expression of the capacity of a society, as a political community, to govern itself and to determine for itself how it will be organized and people will live together?
+  * a reflection of the fact that people—as individuals and in communities to which they belong—know themselves and are, in a sense, the best experts on themselves.
+===== Boas and the concept of plural cultures =====
+Franz Boas is responsible for creating a properly cultural anthropology in which difference can be explained with a new idea of culture.
+  * Each culture is its own total picture of the world, a //Weltanschauung//, which is distinct from all others.
+  * Rather than say that different societies have different degrees of culture (a level of achievement on a scale), Boas argues, “Each cultural group has **its own unique history**, dependent partly upon the peculiar inner development of the social group, and partly upon the foreign influences to which it has been subjected” (Boas [1920] 1940, 286).
+===== Salvage anthropology =====
+Anthropologists think in terms of cultural relativism based on Boas’s argument that culture is a whole.
+While Boas and his students were interested in each culture’s unique path of development, they also sought to document Native American cultures they feared would disappear.
+Their ethnographic projects were a “salvage” operation to record a disappearing way of life and way of thinking.
+  * They relied on interviews with people who had experieced an intact cultural pattern.
+  * Their ethnographic descriptions were a reconstruction of a past society rather than of one in which they immersed themselves.
+  * Though a minority, some still do salvage anthropology (or “urgent anthropology”). Is there a good reason for this to be done?
+The plural concept of culture meant to emphasize the integrity of each culture, but it often led to an assumption that cultures were units to be counted.
+===== Are people the best experts on themselves? =====
+Each of us has an awareness of and knowledge about ourselves which is our own, and is not the same as how others see us or understand who we are.
+In the same way, we can speak of a community of people who have a shared body of knowledge of themselves as a community.
+And this internal, communal self-knowledge is not the same how, for instance,
+  * a state classifies the community (e.g., as a “tribe,” or as a “low-income neighborhood”)
+  * social scientists represent the community (e.g., having a culture, belonging to an ethnicity, or having a specific mode of subsistence)
+==== Anthropology has a unique relationship to people’s self-knowledge ====
+  * Anthropologists are people studying people.
+  * Ethnography is knowledge about other people’s knowledge
+==== Ethnographies of change can involve denying people’s self-knowledge ====
+  * All societies are a product of a history, but history is a story.
+  * An ethnographer who tells a story of change in a society risks imposing an outsider’s perspective on that society’s history.
+===== Anthropology classes in 2025 and beyond =====
+==== Sem 1, 2025 ====
+  * ANTH 1001 Becoming anthropologists
+  * ANTH 2700 Key debates in anthropology
+  * ANTH 2629 Race, racisms, and antiracisms
+  * ANTH 3653 Capitalism, crisis, and care
+  * ANTH 3621 How we connect: Communication and media
+  * ANTH 4700 New directions in anthropology
+==== Sem 2, 2025 ====
+  * ANTH 1002 Anthropology for a better world
+  * ANTH 2624 States, societies, and peoples
+  * ANTH 2623 Genders and sexualities
+  * ANTH 3608 Becoming cyborgs: Technology and society
+  * ANTH 3700 Practicing anthropology
+In 2026, we plan on offering classes on environmental anthropology, medical anthropology, and health disparities, and potentially new topics as well.
 ===== References and further reading =====
+Boas, Franz. (1920) 1940. “The Methods of Ethnology.” In //Race, Language, and Culture//, 281–89. New York: The Macmillan Company.
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