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Anthro 114

Terms in this set (24)

Kant about immaturity and self incurred
Immature - childlike and cannot make their own decisions they bring it upon themselves by not fighting back
Kants ideas about enlightenment
•"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another."
•Use one's own understanding. Ask empirical questions and use empirical methods to understand the world.
•Against experts, authoritative traditional knowledge (religious books) •Against immaturity; Religiously immature are the most immature •Against dogmas
•Few think/most unthinking mass
•freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters; desire not to be censored by king or church.
What does Kant mean by everything comes from books or listening to professionals and that we abide by it?
We dont have to be a professional at everything but you can question what they are saying at seek alternative opinions
What does Kant mean by that if everyone is enlightened that it would cause them dangers (at least for the guardians)
They would fall but it won't kill them
What does Kant mean by that enlightenment (and revolution) is difficult amongst individuals
If everyone agrees, it can cause a movement but if you're alone, you can't get the masses to agree if they don't see eye to eye
Why does Kant mention prison, freedom, and chains
To predispose us so we can agree with his argument he makes at the end
Kants seperates public and private reasoning
You can criticize and try to reform by legislation with reasonable debate (he also praises his prince)
How does Kants piece and enlightenment relate to anthropology
Says people are more primitive and more advances
Two main quesiton; What is anthro today? How does it relate to what it has been?
Study of 'common sense' or the 'taken for granted' or that which most people do not notice.
Idea of movement or travel; anthropology did not start out as the study of the neighbor, but the study of somewhere else.
Some sense of encounter or dialog—a researcher speaks with informants; Sense of trying to understand.
Question of scale—anthropology has tended study the local, small scale
Differing understandings of universal truth; focus on the particular even in universal claims. Comparative framework.
Differing understandings of rationality; We could say that anthropology is 'haunted' by rationality. History of showing the logic or rationality of systems that from the outside might seem irrational, or superstitious. Anthropology has its own limits of discourses of what might be considered rational explanation or an anthropological argument or text.
Empirical study; Often resists reductionist explanations.
What are the critiques?
Colonial/Imperial form of knowledge—used to control
Anthropological knowledge has ignored the colonial, the imperial or histories of capitalism
Anthropological knowledge has ignored power
Anthropological knowledge has ignored history; tended to focus on 'anthropological time' which is unchanging, eternal. (Fabian, 1983)
Use of evolutionist rationales, or functionalist rationales
If not evolutionist or functionalist then sometimes overly relative, unable to prioritize what is better or make value judgments
Use of teleology's in explanations—ultimate goals.
Visual Bias; focus on that which is easily observable in terms of participant observation; comes from history of biology of the 'field.'
Focus on institutions and less so on agency, the doing of things, or practice.
What is the object of Anthropology?
Actions Society/the social epistemology oppression
Rituals Culture, ontology. the marginalized
Religion,discourse, cognition language
Economy ideology materiality categorical systems
Norms philosophy ecology mediation
Rules practices networks becomings
Institutions expertise circulations body
Politics regulation globalization reflexivity
Power cosmology communities absenc
Is Anthropology a science?
Depends on the field (forensics, biology, etc)
Why study history
Progress, errors, how was the now produced etc
What's the article approach?
•Object of Study—primates, material traces of human action, village, laboratory, wall street, texts, concepts, discourses, academic departments, factories, networks, archives

•Method of Study—observation, experiment, interview, conversation, participant observation, trance, hermeneutics,

•Product of Study—ethnography, archaeology, theory. articles --what one produces, concepts....so then a possible object of study also..
Current Study of Anthropology
•Generalizing towards abstraction— "I study refusal" or "I study risk." "Anthropology is the study of man."
•Particularizing--context specific, embedded knowledge. •Often comparative-even just between the ethnographer and informant.
•Perspectival
•Situated
•Descriptive
•Embedded in context; context is crucial to understanding and interpreting
knowledge of anthropology •Often narrative—stories about stories
Enlightenment was about what?
Enlightenment

Progress—things are generally improving over time; we can know more over time; progressive realization of "reason" and thus "civilization"

Civilization—the goal and end point of progress (teleology)

Rationality—as opposed to what gets coded as superstition Conflict with authoritative (church) and received knowledge Questioning of transcendental knowledge (God) Defense

of the empirical—what one can know with senses. Yes, with skepticism about what one can truly know. Questioning of what one can know about causality

In late Renaissance and during Enlightenment, there was an interest in what 'natural man' (savage used to mean free from the constraints of society) was/is?
Need to place these discussions in colonial histories. Tried to think about what 'man' could be before the social in social-contract theory Questions of what defines the human Questions about what separates humans from animals Interest in what human nature is.

"Feral Children Kausper Hauser"
Herder's Beliefs
*He is writing against the philosophers/writers of the enlightenment

•DEFENSE OF TRADTION (CHURCH) in terms of studying how people are embedded in categorical systems of thoughts/actions languages
*the way you are thinking is shaped by the categories of language you are using

•Spirit/generous of a people/culture (Very Holistic)

•tied to understandings of ways of thinking, inferiority, as well as the influence of place and environment
*people are effected by their environment

•cannot just walk away from tradition in any easy sense that Kant speaks about becoming mature and "thinking for oneself"

*Culture as a whole (Holistic) comes from Herders fits into Boas (American) and Malinowski (British) Anthropology

• (Respect and understanding) Radical differences in ways of thinking between historical periods and cultures

•Focus on what we might call everyday history and not history regimes & military battles (battles of great man and their spirit)

•Look at art, literature of a people to understand them and history and less history of the great

•Herder has a complicated view of historical change and what could be considered progress (He does not like simplistic (reductionistic) theory of the enlightement idea. Its the fantasy of the human being a brain and an eye)

Enlightenment is mechanical (people see progress but really its only technological advancement)

•Civilization in opposition to tradition & to idea of the primitive or savage

•Civilization as a goal and a teleology
•An opposite of civilization can be tradion or religious authority
•Idea of progress
•Can become enlightened
•An opposite of civilization can be the category of the savage, state of nature
•Civilization/Tradion
•Civilization/Primitive
Darwin, Evolution, Survival of the fittest
•Evolution- Change of allele frequency over time and producing more progeny (not necessarily simple to complex but also complex to simple),

•Survival of the fittest- an organism abilitiy to fit in that its given environment (and producing more children)
Social Evolution
*Most cultural evolution theory comes from the philosophies of history than darwins theory of natural selection

Savage -> Barbarism (tribes) -> Cilvilization
Teteology (or Predictive) Linear stages of development

•Cultural evolution—stages of progress—1860 onward

•Many understandings of cultural evolution are coming more from philosophies of universal history and teleologies of progress than from Darwin's theory of evolution from natural selection

•Savage—barbarian—civilized is a pre-determined system of stages, so not the same as current biological understanding of evolution

•Cultural evolution is interested in the study of the transformation of types of societies. Understands change as pre-determined stages of development leading to a particular goal or teleology (progress, civilization).


•Sense of time in cultural evolution (it has a weird sense of time)—All the stages of cultural evolution exist at the same time and one can travel back in time by changing geographical location (If you are not at the European stage, you are of the past)

•Fabian—Time and the Other

•Coeval—concept that stresses that all people alive exist in the same historical time. This concept was used by Fabian to critique the sense of time used in theories of cultural evolution
Fixity and Hierachal of the Species
Aristotle (384 BCE-322 BCE)
• The idea of a "GREAT CHAIN OF BEING" can be traced to Plato's division of the world into the FORMS, and imitations of the forms (and it does not change)

• The "SCALA NATURAE" - Aristotle's teleology recognized a perfect being, and he also arranged all animals by a single natural scale according to the degree of PERFECTION.

ThomasAquinas (1225-1274)
• The idea of the "GREAT CHAIN OF BEING" was fully developed in Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages

• The STATE OF NATURE is closely tied to the FIXED and deeply ordered sense of a HIERARCHICAL UNIVERSE, drawing on Plato's "ESSENTIALISM" and Aristotle's
CONQUEST, CLASSIFICATION, JUSTIFICATION
•Antonio de Montesinos (1511)
claimed that Indios were barbaroi, in the Christian sense (paganus). They could however be brought into the "City of God". They could be saved

• Bartolome de las casas (1484-1566) used Aristotle's discussion of reason [logos] to argue that los Indios were capable of reason and so not 'natural slaves.' Natural slaves,
according to Aristotle, lacked the power of mind to resist the inclinations of their passions; they could never rule themselves, and had to be ruled by others • Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1489 -1573) claimed that Indios being childlike in their inability to reason. • Proclamation of Pope Paul III in 1537 that the Indians of the New World were, in the eyes of the church, "truly men", sharing a common creation with all other man. The Christian brotherhood of man

• The construction of a rationale for conversion of Indians to Christianity
THE NATURAL SCHEME OF LIFE
Carolous Linnaeus (1707-1778) • Systema Naturae (1735)
• Taxonomy - a doctrine of classification, categorization and representation, similarities and differences

• Linnaeus firmly believed in the immutability of the species
(Did not know about Darwin and evolution- all about classification)
THE ROAD TO THE DARWINIAN (R)EVOLUTION
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)- *interested in how organisms changed
• Argued that organisms were affected by their environment, and evolved by adapting to it

• Adaptations were caused by the use and disuse of particular body parts given the changing demands of environment

• The theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772 -1844)
• Expanded and defended Lamarck's evolutionary theories

• The environment causes a direct induction of organic change

Charles Darwin (1809 -1882)- *studies domesticated species and Wallace looked at the natural species
• Evolution was already on the table - but HOW does it happens?

• Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 -1913) identified a plausible MECHANISM for biological evolution and collected plenty of data to illustrate it.

• Darwin and Wallace disagreed on the existence of analogies between Natural selection and Artificial selection.

•"The Origin of species by means of natural selection", 1869 NATURAL SELECTION Happens when VARIATION exists and is HERITABLE Extreme COMPETITION for resources (food, water, territory - anything for survival) Better competitors leave more offspring with their particular variation

•"Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex", 1871 SEXUAL SELECTION Happens when the resource is SEX Intersexual selection - Persuading the opposite sex Intrasexual selection - Competing with your own sex
*Because of the peacock

*Two people/articles who argue adaptations is problematic and to simple of an idea.

The Spandrels of San Marcos—Gould and Lewontin--biologists
In fact, we should look at the whole organism. They make fun of stories (speculative) of change out there using adaptation as the main player
eg Spandrels purpose cannot be explained independent from their structure.

Nonadaptive Processes in Primate and Human Evolution—Harris--biologist
*underestimating the importance of non-adaptive evolutionary processes: random genetic drift and mutation. hree fundamental effects: a relative relaxation of selective constraints (i.e., purifying selection), a relative increase in the fixation of slightly deleterious mutations, and a general reduction in the efficacy of positive selection."
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