Ryan Schram
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)
Week of April 12, 2021 (Week 6)
Slides available at http://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2021/6
Main reading: Englund and Leach (2000)
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:
Both flux and order are part of the culture concept as an explanation of human diversity.
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.
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.
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.)
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:
Culture gives its members a set of narratives—metanarratives—that they apply to themselves as specific instances of a general type.
“Like sands through the hour glass, so are the days of our lives.”
Who is the hero?
Who is the villain?
Englund, Harri, and James Leach. 2000. “Ethnography and the Meta‐Narratives of Modernity.” Current Anthropology 41 (2): 225–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/ca.2000.41.issue-2.
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