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 **Main reading:** Englund and Leach (2000)
+===== Flux and order: Two frames for human life =====
+Anthropology has changed a lot from the early 20th century to now, but the changes reveal a deeper tension between two ways of seeing society and social forces:
+  * A search for a //logos//, or a reason for things
+  * An acceptance of the inherent flux of reality, including people and their communities.
+===== Universalism and particularism =====
+Both flux and order are part of the culture concept as an explanation of human diversity.
+  * To the claim that all people are violent, anthropologists show that some societies are peaceful.
+  * To the claim that men always dominate women, some anthropologists show that genders are equal in some societies.
+  * To the claim that all people act as individuals who seek to rationally maximize the utility of their choices, anthropologists can point to societies based on the obligations of reciprocity.
+This is not the flux of historical change; This is an argument that seeks to show that people do not have a constant, universal essence, but are defined by their capacity to be molded by their social environment.
+This is the critical edge of the culture concept. It challenges the dominant explanations of human behavior.
+===== Continuity and change =====
+Anthropology also seeks to discover a //logos// that would supercede the explanations based on individual biology and psychology.
+Implied in the critical edge of the culture concept is the universal claim that all people are incomplete without the input of culture.
+  * Clifford Geertz
+  * Emile Durkheim’s //homo duplex//, or the structuralists’ sense of a symbolic structure as a synchronic whole.
+Arguably this is an essentialization of human difference that denies the contradictions that human societies produce in history.
+(A lesser argument against the synchronic, holist //logos// is the claim that individuals have agency.)
+===== Old and new =====
+Things change. But so what? Why is it that in some societies, change is so important?
+The emphasis on change is culturally conditioned in Western societies:
+  * New things are inherently good.
+  * History moves from the old to the new in a line.
+  * Or, the new replaces the old, rather than develops or extends it.
+  * Old things are inherited from the past; new things are created by individuals who want to create them.
+  * This is a bias reflect in some schools of thought in anthropology as well.
+===== Narrative and metanarrative =====
+  * Narrative: A logical ordering of ideas in a linear sequence that has a beginning and an end.
+    * First, A.
+    * Then B.
+    * And then C.
+    * That’s why there’s D.
+  * Metanarrative: A standarized type of narrative.
+Culture gives its members a set of narratives—metanarratives—that they apply to themselves as specific instances of a general type.
+===== Modernity is a metanarrative =====
+“Like sands through the hour glass, so are the days of our lives.”
+  * Progress, development, from tradition to utopia
+  * Crisis, revolution, transformation
+  * Poverty, dependency, inequality
+===== If modernity is a meta-narrative, who are its stock characters? =====
+Who is the hero?
+Who is the villain?
+===== What is a type of person? =====
+  * What is the quality of being a person, rather than a person itself? That is, what is //personhood// in general?
+    * Are dogs persons? Why or why not?
+    * Are refugees persons? If so, why don’t we treat them like people?
+===== Auhelawa: Yams are people too =====
+  * Auhelawa gardeners must work continuously in yam gardens for several months to produce yams.
+  * This, however, is not work in the sense of productive labor. It is care. If yams are neglected, or mistreated, by gardeners, they will //feel shy//, and will not produce tubers.
+    * Yams are people too, but not because yams have rights. Yams and humans both need to be cared for, and respond to other people’s treatment of them.
+  * What does the Western metanarrative of modernity sound like to an Auhelawa gardener?
 ===== References and further reading =====