Main reading: Simpson (2014)
Other reading: Shah (2007); Cohn (1987); Chatterjee (1998); Chatterjee (2011)
This week’s topic takes us away from the abstract ideas we’ve been discussing so far and allows us to come at our main questions from a different angle.
Societies are not “static, primtive isolate[s]” (Wolf 1984). To write an ethnography in this way is to deny the self-evident fact that the observer and the object of observation are (1) both people, and both capable of thinking and reflection, and (2) part of a shared social space, and not separated by a permanent boundary.
Ultimately we must conclude that anthropology is part of the world that it describes.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1998. “Community in the East.” Economic and Political Weekly 33 (6): 277–82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4406377.
———. 2011. “Lineages of Political Society.” In Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy, 1–26. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cohn, Bernard S. 1987. “The census, social structure, and objectification in South Asia.” In An anthropologist among the historians and other essays, 224–54. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Shah, Alpa. 2007. “The Dark Side of Indigeneity?: Indigenous People, Rights and Development in India.” History Compass 5 (6): 1806–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00471.x.
Simpson, Audra. 2014. “Constructing Kahnawà:ke as an ‘Out-of-the-Way’ Place: Ely S. Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan, and the Writing of the Iroquois Confederacy.” In Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376781.
Wolf, Eric R. 1984. “Culture: Panacea or Problem?” American Antiquity 49 (2): 393–400. http://www.jstor.org/stable/280026.
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology—A guide to the unit
Lecture outlines and guides: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, B, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
Assignments: Weekly writing assignments, What I learned about the future of anthropology: An interactive presentation, Second essay: Who represents the future of anthropology and why?, Possible sources for the second essay, First essay: Improving AI reference material, Concept quiz.