CAS AN 101 Lecture Notes - Existential Crisis, Ethnography, Garage Sale
Document Summary
Ceremonial: even when the rationality is expressed in unfamiliar forms, even when those emotions are expressed in unfamiliar ways, ritual and ceremony is built into human action. What we need to remind ourselves is that the way we arrive at those dimensions is by conducting research and writing ethnographies. At a certain moment in the 1980s anthropology had an existential crisis. Anthropologists started questioning some of the core concepts. They questioned about the politics of writing about culture. Rinado resaldo: professor at stanford, culture and truth. Many anthropologists thought that they could not do it anymore. People had to think and rethink what they were doing. New propositions: depth does not always equal cultural elaboration. Instead focus on force/intensity/emotion: rituals do not always encapsulate deep cultural wisdom. Rituals as crossroads/intersections: they happen all the time, there is something that happens before them and after them, there is an intersection, a part of whatever else is going on, importance of positionality.