ANTH-A 107 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Social Business, Thick Description, Nacirema
Midterm Exam A-122
• Greetings (Tuareg + Quakers)
o Quakers and native Americans both have different ways of greeting people and it
is because of their culture. The Quakers find it polite to be silent because of their
religion and the Tuareg use silence as a virtue that can mean respect.
• Goodman and Monaghan say the textbook uses an approach that is:
o Compared, ethnographic and performance based
• Bauman’s five principles -
o Communication is socially constituted and society is built through communicative
practices
o Expressive communication forms say the most about a culture (art, music, and
media are good distillations of culture to study)
o Communication is a means to achieve social ends or social business, which is
what an interaction accomplished in terms of values, identity and power (VIP)
o Different types of communication are valued differentially by society (slang vs
academic)
o Communication varies across time and place
• Thick description
o When we do ethnographic research, we need to provide thick description, which
is providing attention to details of social and cultural context that help us to
interpret what we are seeing
o Description with detail and interpretation
• Social business –
o What an interaction achieves socially
▪ Values – system of shared beliefs
▪ Identity – association with a culture through language, values and
practices
▪ Power – the ability to get other people to do things
• Agar and his definition of culture –
o Agar used the example of the Nacirema to take the context of Americans and use
it to exaugurated culture
o Culture happens when you learn to use a second language
o Culture is made up of – values, class, religion, region, body language etc.
• Ethnography –
o What social anthropologists do
o the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures
o Establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies,
mapping fields, keeping a diary, etc.
• emergent quality of performance –
o culture is always changing and it is always upheld or challenged through the
interactions between performers and audience members
▪ poetics – cultures are creative not just created
▪ play – critiques or experiments within the existing social order
▪ process – culture is a verb (always changing)
▪ power – performance is a site of struggle for power
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