ANTH 206 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, Oneword
8 Jun 2018
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10/17/17
Not too many notes- played Jeopardy in class which is posted on MyCourses
- Linguist approach as a sub category of intellectual view
- Structuralism as cultures being composed of signs and the meanings attached to them.
- Levi-Strauss says that “lower” cultures have their own sign systems, not lesser
- Ecotourism is a paradox- people travel to reach threatened environments, consume with
eyes, do contribute to funding
- TEK can be studied in terms of folk taxonomies WHEN cultures organize concepts (do
not necessarily exist everywhere, a tool rather than a reality).
o Absence of experts, disagreements based on identity, absence of universal
standards all make TEK difficult to study.
- PA’s are related to land and identity formation- by enclosing a park, displacing people
and calling a place a natural jewel and not referring to people who lived there in a
relatively recent and active manner.
o Lots of narratives for locations
o Commodification also often follows, people reappear in simplified terms to sell
their culture
- Ideas of “new ecology”
o Directional flows, dispersion, self-organizing capacities of a system, chaotic
disruption grid in slides
o Many generations of environmental anthropology following a concept of ecology
where ecosystem can be bounded, everything internal to system.
▪ Everything cycles at equilibrium
o Ecology changed its way of looking at ecosystems, became less and less bounded.
These ideas have been adopted more recently in anthropology
o Ideas of stable cultures and bounded traditions have been to some extent
dismissed, expect change and changes of state. Cultures can move between
organizations in a shorter time span.
o Ties into processual environmental anthropology where demographics and
environment change
- Labor, responsibility, and control mediate how gendered actors relate (who owns the
property, who does what on the property, who benefits from resources)
o Point of Rochelau was to look at how people organize relationships through
things (natural resources, material, lands).
o People found social position through things, what they have responsibilities and
ties to
- Rappaport critiques: arbitrary ecosystem boundaries, caloric obsession, short fieldwork.
o Could have looked at larger groups, expand
- Epistemic change is politicized knowledge (transformations affecting knowledge used to
change and understand world, related to the “shifting middle grounds” of Conklin and
Graham.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Not too many notes- played jeopardy in class which is posted on mycourses. Linguist approach as a sub category of intellectual view. Structuralism as cultures being composed of signs and the meanings attached to them. Levi-strauss says that lower cultures have their own sign systems, not lesser. Ecotourism is a paradox- people travel to reach threatened environments, consume with eyes, do contribute to funding. These ideas have been adopted more recently in anthropology: ideas of stable cultures and bounded traditions have been to some extent dismissed, expect change and changes of state. Cultures can move between organizations in a shorter time span: ties into processual environmental anthropology where demographics and environment change. Rappaport critiques: arbitrary ecosystem boundaries, caloric obsession, short fieldwork: could have looked at larger groups, expand. Epistemic change is politicized knowledge (transformations affecting knowledge used to change and understand world, related to the shifting middle grounds of conklin and.
