Marcel Mauss talked much about the “Gift Exchange.” In a gift there is always “three obligations: giving, receiving, repaying.” If this is not done there is a sense of lost of dignity. Has this ever happened to you? The nature of gifts can be ambiguous and political in all cultures. In simple cultures as Mauss suggests, the gift giving is the thing that keeps theses societies together, and maintains social structures. “What power resides in the object given that caused its recipient to pay it back?”

Max Weber talked much about class, status and party and that all this overlapped each other. He looked at the role of the individual and the relation to others. In addition, he believed people’s positions are based on a number of factors. The class is more of economic terms are how much you can gain from the society. The status is the position and prestige of the lifestyle you have. The party is at what political level you are to gain power. He also thought that there were three types of social structure, “the community, the association, and the society”. Is this still true today? Does our society have social structure? If so what might it be?

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddn9hvnj_184fz5rq5g7

Based on this idea, and the more in-depth literature that supports it, we would like to discuss the following:

In the spirit of 19th Century Evolutionism:  Explain the evolution of culture in the terms of the evolution of life, or as an analogy of a living organism or body, or a progressive process of change, or as the development of mental capacities.  You may want to consider: the evolution of simple to complex societies, interdependency, class structure, religion, materialism, technology innovation or art, knowledge/ education, subsistence, roles and structure of the family, government,  division of labor, or speech.  How are all these ideas related, or how are all societies related to one another?  Is there a progression of society, and if there is, what is the ultimate goal of society?

Who is this charming fella? 

Nineteenth-Century Evolutionism

This was a period in science and human thought that affected great changes in how people understand the world and human development.

Notable people of this era include:
Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace,
Herbert Spencer,
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor,
Lewis Henry Morgan,
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Notable publications include:
-Herbert Spencer, The Social Organism (1860)
-Lewis Henry Morgan, Ethnical Periods (1877)
-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook (1845-1846)
-Edward Burnett Tylor, Science of Culture (1871)

Functionalism - Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, & Gluckman, sans Evans-Pritchard:
http://prezi.com/ty1m09nfn7uh/functionalism-malinowski-radcliffe-brown-gluckman-sans-evans-pritchard/

 Historical Particularism - Eighteen Professions – A.L. Kroeber:
http://prezi.com/68vqsc8woquu/eighteen-professions-al-kroeber/

Structuralism – Levi-Strauss and Ortner
http://prezi.com/kw1o_4onrhek/structuralism-levi-strauss-and-ortner/

Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Behavioral Ecology – Wilson & Barkow
http://prezi.com/6z8_qfokbhu-/sociobiology-evolutionary-psychology-and-behavioral-ecology-wilson-barkow/

Rousseau’s “Emile” mkII (this last one is only tangentially applicable but good none-the-less)
http://prezi.com/n2frzetwksxb/rousseaus-emile-mkii/

Vulgar Post Modernism -

“Sitting on the porch with your forty-ouncer complaining about all the cars that go by instead of building your own.”

- Unknown

Here is the skit guideline that Hank developed a few years back. Students have gone beyond this considerably. Hence the term “guide”.
In the end, it should be fun and illustrate your synthesis of some person’s work.
-jim
PS. We meet on the Monday after the break. Mark your calendars.!!
Now off to Daytona Beach!! (just kidding)

Skits
Anthropology 104

This is an evolving assignment that dates back a few years. Here is the current semester version of it. You are free to make changes, and not all of these have to be done. However, everyone should have a role to play.

Form groups of 5 or 6 students to compose and perform an approximately 15 minute skit in which key theorists from the course are portrayed. Use a plot that facilitates the presentation of their ideas.

The plots of the skits could go in several ways. The key to all of them is that the theorists in question get a chance to express their views clearly in the dialogue. You might dream up a novel plot, or “rip off” a pre-existing plot; either way is fine. Standard plots that might work include:
• Guests attend a dinner party; one of the guests is murdered. Sorting out who done it would provide opportunities for a detective character to interrogate various guests and try to find the one with the best motive, maybe the one with the most theoretical differences with the murdered guest…
• A group of people is shipwrecked on a deserted island and must work out a way to survive the island, and each other. Better still, it turns out that there are “natives” on the island… “Survivor,” “Lost,” and so on are all open game!
• Etc..

Anachronism and general creativity will obviously be necessary, since most of the theorists involved in the skits were not contemporaries. Feel free to play around with the details of who, what, when, where, etc., but DO pay attention to representing the ideas of the theorists accurately. Costumes, props, etc., really help to convey the messages of your skits.

Group 1: Steward (cultural ecology) and Leacock (feminist anthropology)
Key tension: Steward was notorious for ignoring gender in his analysis, while Leacock and other feminist anthropologists maintain that gender is a central issue in any sociocultural analysis. On the other hand, both Steward and Leacock were materialists, so they do have some common ground.

Group 2: Morgan (unilineal evolutionism) and Boas (historical particularism)
Key tension: Morgan and other UEs envisioned a progression of societies from primitive to civilized, while Boas argued that such a scale is inherently evaluative and, anyway, not supported by the evidence. The tension is between a form of “ethnocentric anthropology,” and the father of modern cultural relativism.

Group 3: Wolf (political economy) and Geertz (symbolic anthropology)
Key tension: Wolf was a materialist and Marxist, while Geertz emphasized the primacy of “symbols and meanings” in defining and driving human life; he has been often criticized for lack of attention to the power inequalities that are central to political economy. Also, Wolf was interested in large-scale interconnections, while Geertz was known for a rather tight focus on particular cultures. There is a lot to work with here.

Group 4: Steward (cultural ecology) and a representative of post-modernism
Key tension: Steward had a strong commitment to anthropology as a science and to finding cause-effect relationships with a particular emphasis on materialism. Post-modernists (depending on the particular type) would question the assumptions that underlie a science of humanity, attack the certainty with which Steward drew his conclusions, and emphasize biases inherent in anthropological work.

Group 5: Mead, Ortner (structuralism and feminism), Leacock (anthro and gender) Lila Abu-Lughod (postmodernism), Aihwa Ong (postmodernism), and any one of the males we have studied.
Tension: Bearded or mustachioed, perhaps, but on this occasion outnumbered, he at lasts decides to listen, really listen, to what the women anthropologists have to say. Where are they? A desert island? A dinner party? Witnesses to a headhunter’s rage? Held hostage by religious radicals? Delegates to the Democratic Party National Convention? How do their differences play out? See if you can do this without making the male the center of attention—I think there are more tensions among the women, but they may argue it out using him as the audience.

The following is from:

i. Labor: Humanity as Animal Laborans
Labor is that activity which corresponds to the biological processes and necessities of human existence, the practices which are necessary for the maintenance of life itself. Labor is distinguished by its never-ending character; it creates nothing of permanence, its efforts are quickly consumed, and must therefore be perpetually renewed so as to sustain life. In this aspect of its existence humanity is closest to the animals and so, in a significant sense, the least human (“What men [sic] share with all other forms of animal life was not considered to be human”). Indeed, Arendt refers to humanity in this mode as animal laborans. Because the activity of labor is commanded by necessity, the human being as laborer is the equivalent of the slave; labor is characterized by unfreedom. Arendt argues that it is precisely the recognition of labor as contrary to freedom, and thus to what is distinctively human, which underlay the institution of slavery amongst the ancient Greeks; it was the attempt to exclude labor from the conditions of human life. In view of this characterization of labor, it is unsurprising that Arendt is highly critical of Marx’s elevation of animal laborans to a position of primacy in his vision of the highest ends of human existence. Drawing on the Aristotelian distinction of the oikos (the private realm of the household) from the polis (the public realm of the political community), Arendt argues that matters of labor, economy and the like properly belong to the former, not the latter. The emergence of necessary labor , the private concerns of the oikos, into the public sphere (what Arendt calls “the rise of the social”) has for her the effect of destroying the properly political by subordinating the public realm of human freedom to the concerns mere animal necessity. The prioritization of the economic which has attended the rise of capitalism has for Arendt all but eclipsed the possibilities of meaningful political agency and the pursuit of higher ends which should be the proper concern of public life.