Anthropology and other people’s knowledge

Anthropology and other people’s knowledge

Week 13: Anthropology in 100 years

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Wednesday, October 30, 2024

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.