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-# Draft+====== PlayGround ======
  
-## Environmental determinism and cultural determinism+====== ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world ======
  
-Ryan Schram+===== Semester 2, 2022 =====
  
-ANTH 1001: Introduction to anthropology+Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human. It begins with the assumption that diversity is the defining characteristic of humanity, and more specifically by the capacity to acquire a 
 + specific way of life and set of roles in a system. Hence, anthropologists conclude (1) there is no right, correct, or normal way for people to live or to create a community for itself, and (2) b 
 +y looking at humanity in a global frame, each person can also gain critical insight into their own life. If there are so many ways of life that people have created and continue to create for them 
 +selves, then anthropologists say we each must ask //why do I have to be this way?// and //isn’t there some alternative way people can adopt?// This class introduces the tools of anthropology with 
 + the aim of equipping students to question their own existence and the authority of dominant ideas.
  
-Monday, March 9, 2020 (Week 3)+**Coordinator:** Ryan Schram
  
-Available at <http://anthro.rschram.org/1001/2020/1.3.1>+===== Weekly plan of lectures and topics =====
  
-### Required readings +^ Week ^ Date ^ Topic ^ Main reading ^ Other reading ^\\ 
- +| 1 || Anthropology as “ruthless criticism” | Marx ([1843] 1978) | |\\ 
-@lee_eating_1969 +|| Aug 01 | 1. [[1.1|Why do we need anthropology?]] |||\\ 
- +|| Aug 03 | 2. [[1.2|Anthropology as critique]] |||\\ 
-### Supplemental readings +| 2 || Society as a system of total services | Eriksen (2015b) | Mauss ([1925] 1990) |\\ 
- +|| Aug 08 | 1. [[2.1|Society as a total system]] |||\\ 
-@sahlins_original_2017a +|| Aug 10 | 2. [[2.2|The obligations of the gift ]] |||\\ 
- +| 3 || A world of commodities | West (2012) | Marx ([1867] 1972) |\\ 
- +|| Aug 15 | 1. [[3.1|Commodities, capitalism, and private property]] |||\\ 
-## Natural causes?  +|| Aug 17 | 2. [[3.2|Global capitalism and its contradictions]] |||\\ 
- +| 4 || Spheres of exchange & The efflorescence of exchange | Sharp (2013) | Bohannan (1959); Bohannan (1955); Sahlins (1992) |\\ 
-Over history, a number of thinkers have tried to explain people's differences by saying they are caused by climate.  +|| Aug 22 | 1. [[4.1|Spheres of exchange in historical perspective]] |||\\ 
- +|| Aug 24 | 2. [[4.2|The efflorescence of exchange ]] |||\\ 
-* Hippocrates, Greek physician, writes that "Asians" are gentle and "Europeans" are bellicose because of the climate [@hippocrates_airs_400bce, part 16].  +| 5 || Family matters | Eriksen (2015c) | Carsten (1995) |\\ 
-* Ibn Khaldun, Arab historian, argued that the most advanced civilizations lay in temperate climates and not in tropical ones [@oliver_determinism_2005]. +|| Aug 29 | 1. [[5.1|Kinship is culture, not nature]] |||\\ 
-* @montesquieu_complete_1777 [p. 296-298] says that people of "southern" climates are indolent physically and mentally, and thus live by traditional rules that they never think about changing.  +|| Aug 31 | 2. [[5.2|Kinship as social action]] |||\\ 
-* In Boas's time, Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington argued that all cultures were products of their environmental geography [see @wallis_geographical_1926]. +| 6 || Global gifts and body shopping | Zharkevich (2019) | Krause and Bressan (2018); Leinaweaver (2010); Vora (2009) |\\ 
- +|| Sep 05 | 1. [[6.1|Global gifts]] |||\\ 
-Many of these arguments are sophisticated and appear to be bolstered by evidence, but they all sound the same.  +|| Sep 07 | 2. [[6.2|The commodification of kin]] |||\\ 
- +| 7 || Care as capital after the Fordist social contract | Mazelis (2015); Nelson (2000) | |\\ 
- +|| Sep 12 | 1. [[7.1|Rules as resources]] |||\\ 
- +|| Sep 14 | 2. [[7.2|Informal economies of care]] |||\\ 
-## Marx and people's material existence +| 8 || Ethnicity and cultural diversity | Eriksen (2015a) | Eriksen (1994) |\\ 
- +|| Sep 19 | 1. [[8.1|Monday lecture]] |||\\ 
-These claims sound silly now, but certainly there is an influence of environment on society. People need the environment in order to live.  +|| Sep 21 | 2. [[8.2|Wednesday lecture]] |||\\ 
- +| B || Mandatory school closure for seasonal celebrations. No class | | |\\ 
-Karl Marx, materialist, emphasized that all societies have a basis in physical nature.  +|| Sep 26 | 1. [[B.1|Monday lecture]] |||\\ 
- +|| Sep 28 | 2. [[B.2|Wednesday lecture]] |||\\ 
-Yet he also argues that the natural environment does not determine society. People use their environment as part of a **definite mode of life** [@marx_german_1972-1, 150].  +| 9 || Managing diversity in plural societies | Gowricharn (2015); Eriksen (1997) | Couacaud (2016) |\\ 
- +|| Oct 03 | 1. [[9.1|Monday lecture]] |||\\ 
- +|| Oct 05 | 2. [[9.2|Wednesday lecture]] |||\\ 
- +| 10 || Migration and multiculturalism in Western societies | Vertovec (2007) | Rex (1996); Taussig (1991) |\\ 
-## Boasian cultural determinism and the environment  +|| Oct 10 | 1. [[10.1|Monday lecture]] |||\\ 
- +|| Oct 12 | 2. [[10.2|Wednesday lecture]] |||\\ 
-* Culture determines how people adapt +| 11 || Indigenous creations in cultural institutions | Clifford (1988) | Thomas (1991); Morphy (2001); Rubin (1984) |\\ 
- +|| Oct 17 | 1. [[11.1|Monday lecture]] |||\\ 
-* Two cultures adapt to the same environment in different ways +|| Oct 19 | 2. [[11.2|Wednesday lecture]] |||\\ 
-  - Hopi and Navajo [@lowie_culture_1917-2, 50-51] +| 12 || Decolonising cultural institutions | Andrews (2021) | Riley (2021); Eldridge (1996); Jones and Birdsall-Jones (2014); Leatherdale (2022) |\\ 
- +|| Oct 24 | 1. [[12.1|Monday lecture]] |||\\ 
-* Nature limits what people can do, but less than you might think +|| Oct 26 | 2. [[12.2|Wednesday lecture]] |||\\ 
-  - Tubetube island in Papua New Guinea [@macintyre_changing_1980] +| 13 || Community collections | Massola (n.d.) | Berk (2022); University of Sydney Library and Sentance (2021) |\\ 
- +|| Oct 31 | 1. [[13.1|Monday lecture]] |||\\ 
- +|| Nov 02 | 2. [[13.2|Wednesday lecture]] |||\\ 
- +| 14 || Reading week | | |\\ 
- +| 15 || Final exams period | | |
-## People need natural resources to live, but culture determines what parts of nature they need +
- +
-* Example: Food prohibitions in Auhelawa, Papua New Guinea +
- +
-* Technology is part of people's cultures, too +
-    - One of the ways in which societies differ is the kinds of tools they have created.  +
-    - Even when people can adopt new tools and technology, they may not do so. We should come back to this.  +
- +
- +
- +
- +
- +
-## There are many different types of adaptation  +
- +
-### Foraging or "hunting and gathering" +
- +
-Based on the collection of wild foods and game (fish and meat). +
- +
-### Pastoralism +
- +
-Based on the tending of herds of domesticated animals, e.g. cows, reindeer, sheep, camels, yaks. +
- +
-### Horticulture +
- +
-The cultivation of several different food crops in small plots and usually using simple hand tools. +
- +
-### And one more...  +
- +
-## Agriculture  +
- +
-Agriculture is often distinguished from horticulture by the size and scale of production, thanks to the use of specialized steel tools and draught animals, if not machines.  +
- +
-* Peasant agriculture is a mixed type in which families produce their own food, and sell surpluses of commodity crops.  +
-* Industrialized agriculture is the intensive production of commodity crops like rice, corn, wheat specifically for sale and usually for use in the industrial manufacture of food.  +
-* Peasants are partly integrated into a market economy and specialized division of labor. Industrial farms feed people in societies with a complex division of labor, and today, capitalist, market economies +
- +
-See Eriksen @eriksen_small_2015 [p. 255-256] for more information.  +
- +
- +
-## How do anthropologists use these kinds of categories to understand actual cultures?  +
- +
-Having a name for something is not the same as understanding it holistically.  +
- +
-At best, anthropologists use these terms descriptively. They are ideal types that help us see important elements in particular cases, but never perfectly apply to a single case.  +
- +
-## Are these types of adaptation absolute?  +
- +
-No, most societies are a mix of all of them. We can say that one type dominates, but it does not mean it excludes other possibilities +
- +
-All of these types have fuzzy boundaries anyway, so we can never be absolutely sure whether a society is primarily based on one type or not. +
- +
-The difference between horticulture and agriculture is supposedly technological, but it really is marked by a change in the social system +
- +
-## Technology determines some things, but not everything +
- +
-We must be wary of technological determinism too. +
- +
-  * Consider that hunting in some form often exists in societies dominated by another type of adaptation. What is different is not the technology, but the position it occupies in the whole culture. +
-  * Consider the adoption of the technology of the horse and the snowmobile among indigenous societies of the Americas.  +
- +
- +
-## Is this diversity evidence of progress?  +
- +
-No, just because one kind of adaptation seems to involve more technology, it is not necessarily better or more modern.  +
- +
-* Horticulture and foraging in the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea +
- +
- +
- +
-## When we classify people in this way, there are risks and benefits +
- +
-* The benefits are that we can actually escape for simple judgments about primitive and civilized societies when we use precise terms.  +
-  * Pastoralism isn't necessarily more advanced than horticulture; both are different uses of the environment.  +
-  * Something important happens when people become sedentary but sedentarism is not caused by a technological innovation. +
- +
- +
-## Hunter-gatherers: The West's noble/savage +
- +
-### Contradictory stereotypes of foragers  +
- +
-* They're starving; and they have a naturally healthy diet +
-* They forage and hunt because they don't know how to do anything else; and they are in harmony with nature +
- +
-### The West's favorite prop for any debate about life +
- +
-* Hunter-gatherers are "our contemporary ancestors" (Some anthropologists say this about every indigenous society; e.g. @chagnon_ya̦nomamö_1983 [p. 214]).  +
- +
-## Quiz: How can we describe environmental determinism? +
- +
-Let's compare these claims to ones we discussed last week.  +
- +
-Go to Canvas and answer the quiz question for today.  +
- +
-There is a "right" answer, but you can take this question multiple times if you need to. +
  
playground/playground.1583195243.txt.gz · Last modified: 2020/03/02 16:27 by Ryan Schram (admin)