Anthropological Approaches...Interrupted by Fire and Finished Friday

Adding to the previous post, the remainder of influential ideas and approaches in anthropology.  This and the last post are not at all an exhaustive list, but I believe it does provide a general sense of the direction of the discipline.  On Friday, we'll recap a bit more and I'll emphasize those elements that remain common practice.

• Neoevolutionism--Leslie White argued human social complexity increased as the amount of energy capture increased.  This does work at a general, through all time kind of level, but is problematic for "on-the-ground" ethnographic research.  Julian Steward's approach that focused on specific human cultural and social adaptations to particular physical environments has been much more influential in the shaping of actual ethnographic projects (he's also been critical to theoretical approaches in archaeology). Steward's specific approach is sometimes termed Cultural Ecology.
• Symbolic Anthropology--In class, we focused on the approach of Clifford Geertz.  He argued that ethnography should be in the form of "thick description" to uncover the "webs of meaning" in which humans live.
  
  The phase "webs of meaning" is meant to underscore the complex interconnections between different symbols that affect interpretation.  In the example I used in class of the difference between the blink and the wink, most interpreted the wink relative to many other, related symbols.  That wink only meant something in the context of the target of the wink, the gender of that target, the classroom, our established roles in the classroom, my wedding ring, your memory of statements I'd made in the past, etc.  And, those interconnected meanings are not universal, but specific to a time and place.
  
  This approach remains important in anthropology as humans do act according to their symbolic understanding of the world (it provides a loose "rule book") and others see those actions, interpret and encode their own symbolic understandings of the world which will shape their future actions. For those students of a sociological bent, there is a lot in common with Geertz and elements of Anthony Giddens' concept of structuration.
  
  For more on Symbolic Anthropology, go to the U of Alabama's anthropological theory page HERE.
  
  And just for fun, one of my favorite quotes ever, which describes the fundamental importance of symbols in human life:

• The extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability of (hu)man’s innate (that is genetically programmed) response capacities means that without the assistance of cultural patterns (i.e. symbols-my addition) (w)e would be functionally incomplete, not merely a talented ape who had, like some underprivileged child, unfortunately been prevented from realizing his full potentialities, but a kind of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of self-control, a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague emotions [1973:99]

• Contemporary Approaches--I didn't do this justice at all today.  For now, I'll reiterate that most anthropologists today are concerned with how large scale political, economic, social forces impact the local, lived experience of people.  The example of gendered religious change in Mozambique highlights how political and economic change initiated by the World Bank resulted in a cascade of social and cultural changes for a specific community.
  
  We will talk much more specifically about these "contemporary approaches" throughout the semester.