Investigating Culture E-Book

Carol Delaney

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1033

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

In its new Second Edition, the innovative and ever-popular Investigating Culture has been updated and revised to incorporate new teacher and student feedback. Carol Delaney and Deborah Kaspin provide an expanded introduction to cultural anthropology that is even more accessible to students. * Revised and enhanced new edition that incorporates additional material and classroom feedback * Accessible to a wider range of students and educational settings * Provides a refreshing alternative to traditional textbooks by challenging students to think in new ways and to apply ideas of culture to their own lives * Focuses on the ways that humans orient themselves, e.g., in space and time, according to language, food, the body, and the symbols provided by public myth and ritual * Includes chapters that frame the central issues and provide examples from a range of cultures, with selected readings, additional suggested readings, and student exercises

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Half title page

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Preface to Second Edition

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1 Disorientation and Orientation

Introduction

Disorientation

Orientation

Anthropology

Nature and Culture

Culture

Social and Cultural Anthropology

Culture and Power

Subculture and Boundless Culture

The Personal Is Political

Investigating

Fieldwork and Ethnography

Orientation to the Book

CHAPTER 2 Spatial Locations

Maps

Cosmology

Nations and Regions

Spatial Segregation

Spaces in Cities

Public Places

Other Public Spaces

Work Space

Houses and Rooms

Rooms and Spatial Arrangements

Feng Shui

Invisible Spaces

Space That Is No Place: Cyberspace

CHAPTER 3 All We Have Is Time

86,400 Seconds per Day

Cosmological Time

The International Dateline

Lived Time

CHAPTER 4 Language: We Are What We Speak

Theories of Language

Language in Use

CHAPTER 5 Relatives and Relations

Courtship

The Saturday Night Date by Margaret Atwood

Marriage

Divorce

Family

Kinship: Relatives and Relations

Nature, Culture, and Folk Biology

Friends

In Praise of Manners

CHAPTER 6 Our Bodies, Our Selves

Body Experience

Body Image

Male Bodies

Body Modifications

Techniques of the Body

Body Orientation

The Social Body

Body and Nation

Traffic in Body Parts

Dead (and Dying) Bodies

Is Life the Incurable Disease?

Immortality and Cryonics

CHAPTER 7 Food for Thought

Introduction

We Are What We Eat

What Is Food?

What Makes a Meal?

Of Meat and Men

Food and Worldview

Anomalous Foods: Betwixt and Between

CHAPTER 8 Clothing Matters

Modesty

Distinctions

Gender and Clothes

Fashion

Subcultural Style

Politics of Clothes

Political Economy of Clothing

Globalization of the Clothing Industry

CHAPTER 9 VIPs: Very Important People, Places, and Performances

A Place

A Ritual Performance

Sports

The Beatles

Princess Diana: She Did Not Live Happily Ever After

Blood and Nation

The Statue of Liberty

Concluding Section: Pilgrimage, Myth, and Religion

Let’s Send All Our Missiles to the Sun

Index

To all of the students who have participated in one version or another of our Investigating Culture classes.

This edition first published 2011

© 2011 Carol Delaney

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Delaney, Carol Lowery, 1940-

 Investigating culture / Carol Delaney. – 2nd ed.

p. cm.

 ISBN 978-1-4051-5424-6 (pbk.)

 1. Anthropology. I. Title.

 GN25.D45 2011

 301–dc22

2010051049

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 978-1-4443-9690-4; ePub 978-1-4443-9691-1

Preface to Second Edition

Because the response from students and professors to Investigating Culture has been very positive, the publisher asked me to prepare a new edition. I procrastinated for several years due to other projects and commitments. After retiring from Stanford, I taught for two years at Brown University, where I used the first edition in a course of the same title. The students helped to pinpoint areas that needed updating. In particular, I wish to acknowledge Sarah Cocuzzo, Lydia Magyar, and Andrew Mathis, who met with me on a regular basis. As we went over each chapter, they made suggestions for revision and brought in material from their experience and independent research.

However, this new edition would not have happened without the gentle persistence of Rosalie Robertson at Blackwell Publishers. When she suggested that I find a collaborator, I thought, immediately, of Deborah Kaspin, who had been a fellow graduate student at the University of Chicago, and has taught at University of Virginia, Yale University, Wheaton College, and Rhode Island College. Working with her has been a great pleasure; not only has she corrected some of my grammar and awkward sentence structure, but also she has contributed in a major way by updating existing material, adding new material from her own research, making subtle but important elaborations and clarifications in the text, and, from her teaching experience, suggesting ways to make the material more accessible to a broader student population.

This book, unlike most introductory anthropology textbooks, is not so much intended to teach facts about other cultures as it is to help students learn how to go about studying any culture, including their own. Additionally, this book is not constructed according to traditional categories such as the family, religion, economy, and politics because we feel these domains cannot be so easily separated. Instead, the book is organized in terms of space, time, language, social relations, body, food, clothing, and culture icons – important people, places, and performances – in order to show how the system of cultural symbols and meanings spans a range of domains. Material gleaned from a variety of cultures is used primarily as illustration. The goal of the text and the ethnographic exercises is to enable students to think like anthropologists.

Carol Delaney

Deborah Kaspin

Acknowledgments

The course on which this book is based emerged as a result of “trial by fire” when I had to offer a course – to start in two weeks’ time – in cultural anthropology and comparative religion to a small group of freshmen in the University Professors’ Program at Boston University. I had very little time to prepare and decided to use the class as an experiment, that is, to use the experience of entering the university as an analogy to think about what it was like for anthropologists to go elsewhere. It worked. It was exciting. We had a great time and learned a lot. However, the book, with its accompanying course, is not just for freshmen: it can be, and has been, used at any time and place during the typical four-year college education and has also been used at campuses in Europe. (It could also be used productively for people posted to positions in foreign countries – military, diplomats, journalists, etc.) I continue to hear from the students who took that first course long ago (1986) who feel it set them on a path of discovery, which is what an undergraduate education ought to be. Over the years the course changed considerably; the insights and critiques of the students helped to shape the content into what became this book.

At Stanford, I was fortunate to get research funds to hire some of my students as research assistants. Not only did they make trips to the library while I was writing and look up material on the Internet, with which they were far more proficient than I, but also they served as “guinea pigs,” telling me when the tone was all wrong or that a particular example was passé. They also suggested topics and then found material to address them. Here, then, I acknowledge the help of Alisha Niehaus (my first student research assistant), who was indefatigable in locating interesting material and telling me when I was “off.” Sam Gellman and Andrea Christensen helped during the summer of 2001, and Andrea, along with Katie Cueva, helped during the final phases in the summer of 2002. They had a tough job: they had to do a lot of research on new topics and trace all the things I had neglected to record, and they served as editors, reading and rereading the chapters. To all of them I extend heartfelt thanks; the book is a better product because of their input, and I am deeply grateful for their help.

But I must also acknowledge the initial interest and enthusiasm of Jane Huber, my editor at Blackwell Publishers. Without her ongoing support, my energy might have flagged; in addition, she suggested material and broadened my perspective when my focus had narrowed. My daughter, Elizabeth Quarartiello, and colleagues Miyako Inoue (Stanford) and Don Brenneis (University of California, Santa Cruz) read and made suggestions for the language chapter. Steve Piker, a professor at Swarthmore, was brave enough to try out the penultimate draft on his students at the same time I used it with mine, and the response was gratifying. I hope the future users of this book find inspiration, new perspectives, and ways of making connections between things they never thought were related.

The author and publishers gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to reproduce copyright material in the respective chapters:

Chapter 1

Bohannan, Laura. “Shakespeare in the Bush.” Natural History (August–September 1966): 28–33.

Chapter 2

Beckham, Sue Bridwell. “The American Front Porch: Women’s Liminal Space.” In Making the American Home: Middle-Class Women and Material Culture, 1840–1940, ed. Marilyn Ferris Motz and Pat Browne. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1988, pp. 69–78, 82–9. © 1988 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press

(Poem in reading) Easter, Mary. Poem: “Sitting on the Porch.” In Absorb the Colors: Poems by Northfield Women Poets, ed. Beverly Voldseth and Karen Herseth Wee. Northfield, MN: privately published, 1986. © Mary Moore Easter. Reprinted with the kind permission of the author.

Chapter 3

Fabian, Johannes. “Premodern Time/Space: Incorporation” and “Modern Time/Space: Distancing.” In Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, new ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 27. Reprinted with permission of Columbia University Press and the author

Goodman, Ellen. “Time Is for Savoring.” Boston Globe, October 1977. © 1977 by Globe Newspaper Co (MA). Reprinted with permission of PARS International.

Chapter 4

Dundes, Alan. “Seeing Is Believing.” Natural History Magazine (May 1972): 8–12, 86–7. Reprinted by permission of Natural History Magazine.

LeGuin, Ursula. “She Unnames Them.” In Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences. New York: Plume Books, 1987, pp. 194–6. © 1985 by Ursula LeGuin. First appeared in the New Yorker. Reprinted with permission of the author and the author’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency.

Chapter 5

Atwood, Margaret. “An Encyclopedia of Lost Practices: The Saturday Night Date.” New York Times Magazine, Late Edition – Final, December 5, 1999, sec. 6, p. 148, col. 1. © O. W. Toad Ltd. First appeared in The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1999. Reprinted with permission of the author c/o Curtis Brown UK and Larmore Literary Agency.

Eckert, Penelope. “Symbols of Category Membership.” In Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers College Press, 1989, pp. 49–72, 185–8. Copyright © 1999 by Teachers College Press. Reproduced with permission of Teachers College Press via CCC.

Hocart, A. M. “Kinship Systems.” In The Life-Giving Myth. London: Tavistock/Royal Anthropological Society, 1973, pp. 173–84.

Chapter 6

Jong, Erica. “Is Life the Incurable Disease?” In At the Edge of the Body. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p. 17. © 1979, 1991 Erica Mann Jong. Used by permission of Erica Jong.

Miner, Horace. “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” American Anthropologist 58 (1956): 503–7.

Pope, Harrison, G., Katharine Phillips, and R. Olivardia. The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession. New York: Free Press, 2000, p. 41. Courtesy Simon & Schuster/Zachary Shuster Harmsworth.

Chapter 7

Dubisch, Jill. “You Are What You Eat: Religious Aspects of the Health Food Movement.” From The American Dimension: Culture Myths and Social Realities, 2nd ed., ed. Susan P. Montague and W. Arens. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield, 1981, pp. 115–27 (The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.). © Jill Dubisch. Reprinted with kind permission of the author.

Shell, Ellen Ruppel. “An International School Lunch Tour” (op-ed). New York Times, Late Edition – Final, February 1, 2003, sec. A, p. 19, col. 1. © Ellen Ruppel Shell 2003. Reprinted with the kind permission of the author.

Chapter 8

Ribeyro, Julio Ramon. “Alienation (An Instructive Story with a Footnote).” In Marginal Voices: Selected Stories, trans. Dianne Douglas. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 57–67. Copyright © 1993. Reprinted with permission of University of Texas Press.

Rosen, Ruth. Short extract from “A Statement about More Than Fashion.” San Francisco Chronicle, May 13, 2001. Reprinted with permission.

Chapter 9

Delaney, Carol. “Let’s Send All Our Missiles to the Sun” (letter to the editor). New York Times, December 30, 1991. © 1991 Carol Delaney.

Geertz, Clifford. “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man.” In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books, 1973, pp. 33–54. With permission from Dr. Karen I. Blu, executrix, Estate of Clifford Geertz.

CHAPTER 1

Disorientation and Orientation

Introduction; how culture provides orientation in the world; what is culture and how do anthropologists investigate it? Learning to think anthropologically.

Introduction

A number of years ago, I was asked to teach a course on anthropology and comparative religion to incoming freshmen at Boston University. I was intrigued because freshmen do not usually enroll in anthropology courses and often do not know what it is. Furthermore, the course was to begin in two weeks, leaving me very little time to prepare a syllabus and order books. Consequently, I decided to take a bold approach. Rather than trying to do a typical survey course, beginning with human origins and moving on to hunters and gatherers, and then peasants, to modern urban society, I decided to treat the course as an anthropological experience. I wanted students to imagine themselves as anthropologists coming to study another culture, for, although they wouldn’t think of it that way, that was a part of what they were doing when they entered college. I wanted them to learn not only about anthropology, but also about being an anthropologist.

That original course was an adventure for all of us, and it was a great success. However, when I first went to Stanford, I was not able to teach it as a freshman course because freshmen were tracked into a number of prescribed large lecture courses. Instead, I taught somewhat revised forms for upperclassmen, for students planning to go abroad for a time, and at the Stanford campus in Berlin. Other professors borrowed it, modified it, and taught it at Stanford campuses in Spain and Italy. When the university instituted a “freshman seminar” program, I was able, once again, to teach this course to entering freshmen. While the course can, obviously, be taught in a number of contexts, I still think it works best for freshmen as they enter college or university, not because the material is simplified, but because their experience is fresh.

The course is an innovative way to introduce students to anthropology, and because it has been a success, I was asked by the publisher to write a textbook based on it so that it might become available to students elsewhere. Although each chapter is devoted to one of the topics I discuss in class, such as space or time or food, it is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis of any one of them. Otherwise, each chapter could easily have become a book on its own. Even less is this book meant to be an in-depth analysis of American, British, or any other culture, although it is intended for use in the United States and United Kingdom. I juxtapose a range of material – classical anthropological material about a variety of cultures; contemporary items drawn from the newspaper, the Web, Stanford, and Brown; and ethnographic material from my own fieldwork in Turkey – for the purpose of generating ideas and indicating the range of areas for further exploration.

While this book is a general introduction to anthropology, it also reflects my own journey as an anthropologist. This includes my graduate training at the Harvard Divinity School and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, my academic concentrations on gender issues and the Abrahamic religions, and my personal life as a teenager of the 1950s, a young wife of the 1960s, a divorcee, a welfare mother, and so on. All of this led me into and informed my academic career. This is how anthropology (and any life path) unfolds: the personal intertwines with the professional. So too, another anthropologist could write a similar book (or design a similar course) using the same canon of classic and current anthropology, but would read that canon into his or her own areas of specialization and personal biography. I think the subjective experience reveals the relevance of anthropology to everyday life, although this necessarily means that other worthwhile issues – including those of particular interest to the readers – are overlooked in the process. Such omissions are not meant as dismissals, but as invitations to take an anthropological approach to your own topics of interest.

I wrote the first edition of this book as my own enterprise, but the second edition is a collaborative effort with Deborah Kaspin. She was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago while I was, conducted fieldwork among Chewa in Malawi for her dissertation project, and more recently pursued fieldwork among modern orthodox Jews in New England. She has taught at several places of various types – private and public, universities and colleges – which are listed in the preface. Kaspin’s contributions to the second edition include material from her own research, updates on topics in the first edition, and occasionally slightly different interpretations of issues developed in the first edition. She also pushed to make the subject matter more accessible to a wider range of students and educational settings. It is our hope that the new edition accomplishes this.

The goal of the second edition, like the first, is not to teach about other cultures. That is the normal pedagogical approach adopted in schools, but it is passive and distanced learning. I believe that people learn best when they are actively involved in the process. You will learn about anthropology and about culture by learning how to think like an anthropologist, that is, by becoming amateur anthropologists. Not everyone is able to go to another society to gain this experience, but it is possible to simulate it. As I illustrate below, you will learn to draw analogies between your own experience of entering and becoming acclimated to college life and the experience of anthropologists who go to study another culture. Both can be quite disorienting, at least initially. Hold on to the disorientation for a while, because it provides some mental space from which you can grasp, as they occur, aspects of the new culture you have entered and how these aspects relate to each other. Even while the focus must be on your own environment, the aim is not to illuminate merely the “culture” of your particular school, but also to explore the way those particular aspects connect to and represent concepts, values, and structures of the wider culture. Indeed, I think the use of the word in that restricted sense is inappropriate.