Lee Ee May (1144548)

Week 2 – Anthropology’s Other


Boas, Franz
1955 Primitive Art. New York: Dover Publications. (First published 1927) Pp. 1-7, 9-13, 17-21.

• Everyone has equal mental equipment regardless of race, culture, beliefs or customs (Boas 1955: 1).
• “There is no such thing as a “primitive mind”, a “magical” or “prelogical” way of thinking” (Boas 1955: 2).
• The understanding of each culture can be done only as an historical growth determined by their social and geographical environment. Also, it can be understood by the way their cultural material is developed (Boas 1955: 4).
• The only study method is the study of distribution (geographical) since historical data on the sequence of cultural changes is not readily available (Boas 1955: 5).
• “There is a certain homology between universal distribution of cultural facts and their antiquity” (Boas 1955: 5).
• Cultural traits are often not stable but in constant flux(Boas 1955: 7).
• All tribes, even the poorest, have produced works of beauty and is equally enjoyed everywhere no matter how diverse the ideals of beauty is (Boas 1955: 9).
• “Alois Riegl expresses this idea by saying that the will to produce an esthetic result is the essence of artistic work” (Boas 1955: 11).
• When the forms of the works or art are associated with ideas held by people to convey meanings, and thus act as symbols, another level is added to the enjoyment (Boas 1955: 12).
• Esthetic pleasure may also be gained by natural forms but it is not the same as art created by our own activities (Boas 1955: 12).
• Among the Californian Indians, women were the creative artists, with basketmaking being an occupation of women. Works of art made by men are insignificant compared to theirs (Boas 1955: 18).
• However towards the North, it is the men that spend most of their time in woodworking where they make household goods and implements out of wood (Boas 1955:18).
• “Primitive tribes make their pottery without the aid of the potter’s wheel” (Boas 1955: 20).
• Symmetry, virtuosity and regularity of surface and form are vital in the manufacture of pottery and chipped stone implements (Boas 1955: 21).









2. Geertz, Clifford
1975 Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. The Interpretation of Cultures. London: Hutchinson & Co. Pp. 3-30. *

• Some new ideas that burst into the intellectual scene is sometimes deemed to solve all fundamental problems but after we become familiar with this new idea, it no longer has the grandiose it once had ( Geertz 1975: 3&4).
• The second law of thermodynamics still explains something. It helps to disentangle ourselves from a lot of pseudoscience ( Geertz 1975: 4).
• Doing ethnography is not mainly about techniques and received procedures but an elaborate venture in “thick description” ( Geertz 1975: 6).
• “What the ethnographer is in fact faced with…is a multiplicity of complx conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another….and he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render ( Geertz 1975: 10).
• Culture does not exist in one’s head but is “ a self-contained ‘super-organic’ reality with forces and purposes of its own” and “consists in the brute pattern of behavioral events we observe in fact to occur some identifiable community or other” (Geertz 1975: 10&11).
• “The aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of human discourse.” It is also for “instruction, amusement, practical counsel, moral advance, and the discovery of natural order in human behavior” (Geertz 1975: 14).
• Anthropological writings can be seen as an interpretation (Geertz 1975: 15).
• The ethnographer “inscribes” social discourse and turns it from a mere passing event to an account (Geertz 1975: 19).
• “Cultural analysis is…guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out bodiless landscape” (Geertz 1975: 20).
• Cultural theory is not to “codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases, but to generalize within them.” Cultural theory is also not predictive (Geertz 1975: 26).
• Theoretical ideas are not newly created in a study but are taken from other related studies (Geertz 1975: 27).
• Our task is to “uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects’ acts” and to “construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures” (Geertz 1975: 27).
• In ethnography, the use of theory is to express the role of culture in human life (Geertz 1975: 27).
• “Cultural analysis in intrinsically incomplete” (Geertz 1975: 29).
• Anthropology progresses better with the refinement of debate (Geertz 1975: 29).
• “Interpretive anthropology is to make available to us answers that others have given” (Geertz 1975: 30).








3. Malinowski, Bronislaw
1922 Introduction: The subject, method and scope of this inquiry. In Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea. London: George Routledge and Sons. Pp. 1-25. *

• The Coastal populations of the South Sea Islands like the Papuo- Melanesians were expert navigators and traders. Some made excellent types of large sea-going canoes which they use for distant trade expeditions as well as for raids (Malinowski 1922: 1).
• “The manufacturing centres of important articles …are localized in several places, according to the skill of the inhabitants, their inherited tribal tradition. And special facilities offered by the district ; thence they are traded over wide areas…” ( Malinowski 1922: 1).
• There were definite forms of exchange along definite trade routes established between various tribes such as the one between the Motu of Port Moresby and the tribes of the Papuan Gulf (Malinowski 1922: 1).
• The Kula, this trading system, is seen by Malinowski as an economic phenomenon of considerable theoretical importance. This importance is fully acknowledged by the tribesmen themselves who are rather much bound to it (Malinowski 1922: 2).
• “The ethnographer has to traverse this distance in the laborious years between the moment when he sets foot upon a native beach, and makes his first attempts to get in touch with the natives, and time when he writes down the final version of his results” (Malinowski 1922: 4).
• Initially, during his first weeks in field work on the South Coast of New Guinea, Malinowski faced difficulties obtaining any real touch with the natives, materials, and understanding regarding tribal life. . He also found it hard being a beginner with no previous experiences and no proper guidance (Malinowski 1922: 4&5).
• Malinowski states that the principles of method can be grouped into three. The Student must :
1. Possess real scientific aims, and know the values and criteria of modern ethnography.
2. Be in proper conditions of ethnographic work, mainly to live without other white men, right among the natives.
3. Apply a number of special methods of collecting, manipulating and fixing his evidence (Malinowski 1922: 6).
• “If a man sets out on a expedition, determined to prove certain hypotheses, if he is incapable of changing his views constantly and casting the off ungrudgingly under the pressure of evidence, needless to say his work will be worthless” (Malinowski 1922: 9).
• In reality, the natives’ social institutions have proper organization and are governed by authority, law and order in public and personal relationships (Malinowski 1922: 10).
• An ethnographer who only focuses on one criteria such as only religion, or only technology will lack in his work and produce an ‘artificial field for inquiry’ (Malinowski 1922: 11).
• The inponderabilia of actual life – an important series of phenomena which cannot be recorded by questioning or computing data, but have to be observed in their full actuality (Malinowski 1922: 18).
• “It is good for the Ethnographer sometimes to put aside his camera, note book and pencil, and to join in himself in what is going on” (Malinowski 1922: 21).
• “Find out the typical ways of thinking, feeling, corresponding to the institutions and culture of a given community, and formulate the results in the most convincing manner” (Malinowski 1922: 23).



4. Miner, Horace
1956 Magical Practices among the Nacirema. American Anthropologist 55, 520-526.


• The Nacirema tribe holds very extreme and unusual magical beliefs and practices. They are a North American group that live in the territory between Canada and Mexico. Their nation, according to their mythology, was originated by Notgnihsaw, a culture hero (Miner 1956: 521). Nacirema is actually America spelled backwards.
• Nacimera culture revolves mostly around economic pursuits as well as ritual activities- which primary focus is the human body (Miner 1956: 521).
• “The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man’s only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of powerful influences of ritual and ceremony” (Miner 1956: 521).
• In each household, there are one or more shrines (bathrooms) used for this purpose (Miner 1956: 521).However, it is not a family ceremony but a private and secret one (Miner 1956: 522).
• A chest (bathroom closet) is built into the wall of the shrine and contains many charms and magical potions which are prepared by specialized practitioners such as the medicine men (Miner 1956: 522).
• Beneath he charm-box is a small font which every member of the family, while bowing before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of water in, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution (Miner 1956: 522).
• The Nacimera also have a certain obsession with their mouth with beliefs that the state of their mouth influences all social relationships, which is why they have a mouth-rite (teeth-cleaning) included in their daily body ritual as well ( Miner 1956: 523).
• Also, the Nacimera visit a holy mouth-man (the dentist), a specialist below the medicine men in prestige in the hierarchy of magical practitioners, once or twice a year (Miner 1956: 522&523).
• A distinctive part of the daily body ritual which is performed only by men involves scraping and lacerating the surface of the face with a sharp instrument (Miner 1956: 523).
• Women, however, bake their heads in small ovens for about an hour (Miner 1956: 524).
• “ The medicine men have an imposing temple, or latipso (hospital), in every community of any size. The more elaborate ceremonies required to treat patients can only be performed at this temple. These ceremonies involve not only the thaumaturge but a permanent group of vestal maidens who move sedately about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and headdress” (Miner 1956: 524).
• Another kind of practitioner, known as a “listener” (therapist), is some sort of a with doctor which has the power to “exorcise the devils that lodge in the heads of people who have been bewitched.” The patient usually tells the witch doctor about all his troubles, beginning with the earliest remembered difficulties. “It is not uncommon for the patient to bemoan the rejection he felt upon being weaned as a babe, and a few individuals even see their troubles going back to the traumatic effect of their own birth” (Miner 1956: 525).
• There are also other unique practices which “have their base in native esthetics, but which depend on the pervasive aversion to the natural body and its functions” such as ritual fasts to make fat people thin and vice-versa (Miner 1956: 525).

5. Sahlins, Marshall
1997 The original affluent society. In Majid Rahnema with Victoria Bawtree (Introducers) The Post-Development Reader. New Jersey and London: Zed Books. (First published 1968). Pp 3-21.

• Sahlins states that we usually view an affluent society as one that has all their wants easily met (Sahlins 1997: 4).
• “To assert that the hunters are affluent is to deny, then, that the human condition is an ordained tragedy, with man the prisoner sentenced to the hard labour of living with the perpetual disparity between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means” (Sahlins 1997: 4).
• “Wants may be ‘easily satisfied’ either by producing much or desiring little” (Sahlins 1997: 4).
• Sahlins also states that humans’ wants are infinite but their resources are limited and that the way people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty is with a low standard of living (Sahlins 1997: 4).
• The hunter-gatherer production is divided into two spheres, the first being vital ones such as food and water. The remaining lies within the non-subsistence sphere of which Sahlins claim is easily satisfied due to the ease of production, simple technology and democracy of property (Sahlins 1997: 7).
• “We are inclined to think of hunters and gatheres as poor because they don’t have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free” (Sahlins 1997: 10).
• Hunter gatherers work less than we do. Their food quest is variable, they have a lot of leisure and they sleep more than any other condition of society (Sahlins 1997: 10).
• In the Dobe area of !Kung bushmen, food resources are varied and abundant, one man’s labour supports 4/5 other people, their food collecting is more effective than French farming up to World War II and the majority of people’s time are spent in pursuits other than food collecting (Sahlins 1997: 14 & 15).
• “Mobility and moderation put hunters’ ends within range of their technical means” (Sahlins 1997: 17).
• In the world today, 1/3 to ½ of humanity go to bed hungry every night now but during the Old Stone Age, this amount must have been significantly smaller. “ The amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture” (Sahlins 1997: 18).
• “The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor” (Sahlines 1997: 19).