New President

So I'm Michael Booth, the new president of the Anthro Club as Kat mentioned. I'll be spending the next few weeks working with Kat to transition club responsibilities et. I will be joining the online social network type of stuff and will have a profile on facebook and edit that page along with the others who are currently doing so. My facebook account can be found with my email: michaelbooth28@mac.com. Please give me some feedback on what types of activities may interest you and what I can do to get your participation in the club. Thank you and feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns.

Announcement

Due to circumstances beyond my control I will no longer be serving as your club president.  Mike Booth has graciously agreed to step up and replace me.  Mike does not have a facebook account so I will need someone to manage announcements and the club page on facebook.  Could someone please let me know if they would be willing to take over the admin duties on there for me soon as I would like to be able to transition sooner than later?

Mike is a Junior at UVU in the Anth program and is very excited to help build the program.  He is also planning on mentoring next year's president and ensuring the vitality and longevity of our club. I hope that we can plan an activity soon so people can get to know each other and start to renew the activity level of our club.

I am sincerely sorry that I cannot continue to be your president and hope to see many of you at our activities this year.  Please expect contact information and details from Mike in the next week.

Thank you,

Kat

call for books, yikes.

hey guys,

I'm taking ethnographic methods in the fall and was wondering if anyone wanted to sell me their Ethnographers Toolkit (the required text for the class). If interested email me at erik_thor@yahoo.com and name your price. Thanks!

-Erik F.

Theology and Anthropology

Recently, Kat posted a message on Facebook that was proposal to have Father Gustavo Gutierrez come to UVU to speak on Liberation Theology (hereafter referred to as LT). Father Gutierrez played a central role in the genesis and development of LT in Latin America and its subsequent influence throughout the world. LT isn't necessarily something that does not concern anthropologists. Recently, there has been an influx of work by anthropologists that deals with the theoretical issues that are unearth when tackling with Christianity and christian peoples (many of whom are traditionally the subjects of ethnographies). Regardless of wither or not Father Gutierrez is able to come to UVU or Dr. Minch is able to teach a course on LT this year I thought it may be useful to post some links to some material that may be of interest to some of you.

The most prominent books that cover the intersection of theology and social sciences, or anthropology more specifically are: Douglas Davies' Anthropology and Theology and John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory. David Martin's Reflections on Sociology and Theology is also a good collection of essays. Davies is a social anthropologist and theologian from the University of Durham in the UK who has done extensive work on the Anglican Church and Mormons. He also happens to be the advisor for Jason Singh, who taught at sociology UVU several years ago. Milbank is one of the most respected and controversial theologians today. His call for "radical orthodoxy" has profoundly influence the trajectory of a great deal of contemporary theology and social science's perspective on theology. Much of this is do to his virtual assault on the social sciences. Martin was one of the first sociologist to take theorizing about theology seriously and is an incredibly influential figure in both Latin American studies and in the sociology of religion.

Probably the most prominent figure in the anthropological world that deals with theology is Joel Robbins. He is an incredibly talented writer and his work on Christianity is foundational to the discipline today. His article "Anthropology and Theology: An Awkward Relationship" is kind of a rallying cry for anthropologists to pay more attention to not only Christianity, but also to the theological underpinnings of the many of the tenets of Christianity.

John Comaroff has also written an interesting article that is worth looking at. Its called "Reflections on the Rise of Legal Theology." Its not necessarily about LT but it does discuss the development of a kind of theology that LT has butted against throughout the years.

One particularly promising scholar to come on the scene recently is Jon Bialecki. Bialecki's work on the California church of the Vineyard provides a good discussion of the confluence of theology, charisma, and politics. His article "Disjuncture, Continental philosophy's new 'political Paul,' and the question of progressive Christianity in a Southern California Third Wave church"is probably the most poignant for the discussion of LT, although LT isn't really the focus of the article. Instead it is a particular reading of Badiou's interpretation of St. Paul that drives the story behind the ethnographic vignette of the article.

Although it is not really particular to anthropology I thought that because of the surrounding environment of UVU and the demographics of many of its students some of you may appreciate some resources on the discussion of LT within the Mormon community. Currently the most prominent group within the Mormon Community that explores LT is The Mormon Worker, a zine and blog devoted to Mormonism and Anarchism. Dennis Potter, of the philosophy department at UVU, has written a draft for a larger work on LT and the Book of Mormon. However, it is not meant for citation. I'll post it here, just because I can no longer find it on his website. Lastly, Robert McAfee Brown and Warner Woodworth have an interesting dialogue on LT in Mormonism in Dialogue With Contemporary Christian Theologies.

Interpretivism, Perspectivism, and Feminism: Three Ways of Looking Through a Glass Darkly

During the 1970's Clifford Geertz ushered an era of introspection in anthropology that was unparalleled. Since that time there has been, in cultural anthropology, a distinct desire to understand not only the semantic content of culture of, but to also to appreciate the role of reflexivity in the course of representation. The goal of anthropology became less of an exercise in purporting to have the objective truth or reality of cultural phenomenon. Instead, anthropology became aware of the fact that ethnographic representations of "cultures" were just that--representations. By way of metaphor, "the anthropological lens" became an important term for conveying how anthropology simple provided a particular way of viewing cultural phenomena. By extension it became more obvious that individual anthropologist as well as those who they represented viewed such phenomena through particular, though not mutually exclusive, perspectives. This set of readings aims for provide an introduction to these issues and how they have influenced anthropological thought today.


Interpretivism


Shankman, Paul (1984). The Thick and the Thin: On the Interpretive Theoretical Program of Clifford Geertz. Current Anthropology. 25.3: 261-280.

Martin, Michael (1993). Geertz and the Interpretive Approach in Anthropology. Synthese. 97.3, 269-286.

Keesing, Roger (1987). Anthropology as Interpretive Quest. Current Anthropology. 28.2, 161-176.

Perspectivism


Latour, Bruno (2009, April). Perspectivism: 'Type' or 'bomb'? Anthropology Today. 25.2: 1-2.

Narayan, Kirin (1993). How Native Is a "Native" Anthropologist? American Anthropologist. 95.3: 671-686.

Viverios de Castro, Eduardo (1998). Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 4.3: 469-488.

Feminism


Abu-Lughod, Lila (1992). "Writing Against Culture." In Richard G. Fox, ed. Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Sante Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 137-162.

Ortner, Sherry (1997). "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture." In Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 21-42.

Strathern, Marilyn (1980). "No nature, no culture: the Hagen case." In Carol P. MacCormack & Marilyn Strathern, ed. Nature, culture and gender. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 174-222.

Rosaldo, M.Z. (1980). The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding. Signs. 5.3: 389-417.

Mascia-Less, Frances, et al. (1989). The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective. Signs. 15.1, 7-33.

Morris, Rosalind C. (1995). All Make Up: Performance Theory and the New Anthropology of Sex and Gender. Annual Review of Anthropology. 24, 567-592.

Society, Classification, and Kin: Three Steps Toward a Typology of Culture?

After discussing the debates and problematics of culture it is probably worth looking into the other foundational assumptions that social anthropology has held to throughout its tenure. As outlined in the sociology of Durkheim, Mauss, and by the early British diffusionist and structural-functionalists alike the most essential aspects of any "cultural system" are found in the structural elements that make up the group that employs such cultural systems. The three most of important of these are first, society as it the conceptual apparatus in which the social sciences have traditionally used to refer to groups of people that adhere to some type of sociality. Second is classification, as it is the process by which individuals and societies are able to differentiate the various aspects and characteristics of their society. Third is kinship, as it was considered the primary (and universal) form of social classification, organization, and structure.

The propose of this post and reading group isn't necessarily to provide an introduction to how these concepts have been utilized, or to question the validity of the social anthropology's lexicon, instead it meant to help students understand the integral role that these concepts play in historical and contemporary anthropology today. Although concepts like classification and kinship may be out of vogue in terms of research projects, they continue to be foundational in the articulation of anthropology's reflexive evaluation of itself.

Society

Murphy, Michael D. (n.d.) Social Structure, ANTH 436: Some Definitions of Society. http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/436/defsociety.htm

Wagner, Roy (1974). "Are There Social Groups in the New Guinea Highlands?" In Murray J. Leaf, ed. Frontiers of Anthropology. New York, NY: D. Van Norstrand, 95-122.

Wolf, Eric (1988). Inventing Society. American Ethnologist. 15.4: 752-761.

Questioning Society

Ingold, Tim et al. (1996). "The concept of society is theoretically obsolete." In Time Ingold, ed. Key Debates in Anthropology. London, UK: Routledge, 55-98.

Godlier, Maurice (2009). "What is a Society." In In and Out of the West: Reconstructing Anthropology, trans. Nora Scott. Charlottesville: VA: University of Virginia Press, 138-157.

Classification

Bloor, David, et al. (1982). Durkheim and Mauss Revisited: Classification and the Sociology of Knowledge. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. 14.4: 267-331.

Allen, N.J. (2000). Chapters 5 & 6 of Categories and Classifications. New York, NY: Berghahn, 91-116.

Ellen, Roy (2005). "Anthropological Studies in Classification." In The Categorical Impulse. New York, NY: Berghahn, 31-37.

Keck, Frederic (2009). "The limits of classification: Claude Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas." In Boris Wiseman, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Levi-Strauss. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 139-155.

Symbolic Classification

Needham, Rodney (1979). Symbolic Classification. Santa Monica, CA: Goodyear.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Conclusion to Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 466-484.

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko (1981). Phases in human perception/conception/symbolization processes: cognitive anthropology and symbolic classification. American Ethnologist. 8.3: 451-467.

Introduction to Kinship Terminology

Murphy, Michael D. (n.d.). A Kinship Glossary: Symbols, Terms, and Concepts. http://web.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/436/kinship.htm

Trautmann, Thomas R. (2001). The whole history of kinship terms in three chapters: Before Morgan, Morgan, and after Morgan. Anthropological Theory. 1.2: 268-287.

Bloch, Maurice (1971). The moral and tactical meaning of kinship terms. Man. 6.1: 79-87.

Kinship Today

Peletz, Michael G. (1995). Kinship studies in late twentieth-century anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology. 24: 343-372.

Bamberger, Joan (2009). What We Talk About When We Talk About Kinship. Anthropological Quarterly. 82.4: 1043-1048.

Carsten, Janet (2001). "Substantivism, Antisubstantivism, and Anti-antisubstantivism." In Ed. Sarah Franklin & Susan McKinnon, ed. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 29-53.

Godelier, Maurice (2009). "No Society Has Ever Been Based on the Family or on Kinship." In In and Out of the West: Reconstructing Anthropology, trans. Nora Scott. Charlottesvile, VA: University of Virgina Press, 62-79.

Gender, Sex and Kinship

Butler, Judith (2002). Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual? differences. 13.1: 14-44.

Strong, Thomas (2002). Kinship between Judith Butler and anthropology? A review essay. Ethnos. 67.3: 401-418.

(Godelier among Baruya men in New Guinea)

Kultur, Lebenswelt, und Verstehen: German for the Anthropologist [Updated]

If you haven't guessed it yet this post of article for our reading group is about "culture." I chose the german references to kultur (culture), lebenswelt (Shutz and Habermas' "lifeworld"), and verstehen (Weber's "understanding" or "interpretation") because since the time of Franz Boas and Max Weber american anthropology has been heavily influenced by german philosophy of the social sciences like no other tradition. Because of the prominence and trendiness of most french influences on anthropology, the german roots of cultural anthropology are often overlooked. Although this post isn't particularly about those germanic roots, any discussion of how we interpret the conceptual vocabulary of "culture" and its attendent ideas is essentially tied to a genealogy of how these terms were first utilized by some the founders of our discipline. For Joylin Namie's class The History of Anthropological Thought some of us read Adams' The Philosophical Roots of Anthropology which outlines the intellectual milieu that gave birth to anthropology. An even more in depth account of the birth of anthropology within the germanic philosophical tradition can be found in Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. Many contemporary anthropologist, like Talal Asad, have called for greater reflexivity in looking at the historical development of anthropology as a colonial and enlightenment project. One avenue for examining the genealogies of anthropology is by critically investigating how the term "culture" came to be, how is its defined by various schools of thought, and how is it utilized to explain micro or macro social phenomenon.


The first three readings by Roger Keessing and David Schneider provide an introduction into how theories of "culture" operate and how they had been defined during the Seventies but through the Eighties. The second article by Keesing is kind of a reevaluation of his first article on culture. Written fifteen years later, he reconsiders the arguments presented in the original article and provides insights into more recent developments.

Jonathan Friedman's chapter on "The Emergence of the Culture Concept," is an excellent introduction to the genealogy of the term. His article could be considered as a short primer on how to think about culture without falling into the pitfalls of romantic german nationalism. Roy Wagner's The Invention of Culture is generally considered the primer treatment of the term and has remained so for several decades. I've provided long chapter excerpts from his book so the reading might be a little heavy, but it is worth it. By examining how the concept of "culture" operates within the anthropological tradition, Wagner gets to the heart of what it is that anthropologists do and why they are doing it.


Equally important to delineating the semantics behind "culture" is the attempt more narrowly define its parameters and how it can be identified by anthropologists.  Sahlins article "Two or Three Things I Know about Culture" is a very good example of such a discussion. He argues that when we are identifying "culture" we should paying attention to the structural composition of society. He also argues for that just because the traditions that make up a "culture" may be relatively recent "inventions" doesn't mean that they are any less authentic, for culture is in of itself inventive. Urban's article "A Method for Measuring the Movement of Culture" is very interesting and recent article on the movement of cultural artifacts that are produced and maintained through discourse practices. He proposes a theory for how such artifacts are given and produce meaning within the cultural realm.


One of the more recent developments in anthropology today has been the move away from the term "culture" towards a more philosophically defined term of "ontology." This may be considered ironic due to the long and complicated history that the "ontology" has experienced, particularly in the germanic philosophical tradition. However, the term has been used extensively as of late by anthropologist from Michael W. Scott to Michael Jackson. The series of debates that Manchester's Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory held on the topic, edited by Vankateson is an excellent introduction. Perhaps one of the most famous advocates for a "social ontology is John Searle. I first heard of John Searle when he came to UVSC several years ago. I was not impressed but his theories do command attention. Many, if not most, anthropologist would disagree immensely with his philosophy of society. However, Searle, has chosen to directly engage with anthropology by both critiquing its production of knowledge and incorporating some of its ideas into his own theory. You can listen to John Searle's podcast of his lectures at the University of California, Berkeley on Social Philosophy here. I have to warn you that I've listen to the whole class and he is quite dry and dogmatic. Still, I think that paying attention to his philosophy of society is well worth the effort because it fine tunes and brings into focus what exactly it is that we are doing and not doing as a discipline.

Introductions to Theories of Culture

Keesing, Roger M. (1974). Theories of Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology. 3: 73-97.

Keesing, Roger M. (1990). Theories of Culture Revisited. Canberra Anthropology. 13.2: 46-60.

Schneider, David (1976). "Notes toward a Theory of Culture." In Keith H. Basso & Henry A. Selby. Meaning in Anthropology. Albuquergue, NM: SAR & University of New Mexico Press, 197-220.

Genealogies of "Culture"

Friedman, Jonathan (1994). "The Emergence of the Culture Concept," Excerpt from Cultural Identity and Global Process. London, UK: Sage.

Wagner, Roy (1981). Excerpts from The Invention of Culture. Rev. ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

How Culture Operates

Sahlins, Marshall (1999). Two or Three Things I know about Culture. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 5.3: 399-421.

Sahlins, Marshall (2000). "Sentimental Pessimism" and Ethnographic Experience; or, Why Culture Is Not a Disappearing Subject." In Lorraine Daston, ed. Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 158-202.

Urban, Greg (2010). A Method for Measuring the Motion of Culture. American Anthropologist. 112.1:122-139.

Is Ontology the New "Culture"

Venkatesan, Soumhya, et al. (2010). Ontology is Just Another Word for Culture. Critique of Anthropology. 30.2: 152-200.

Searle, John, et al. (2006) Social ontology: Some basic principles. Anthropological Theory. 6.1: 5-125.