Concluding remarks: Cultural Studies and anthropology

1. Two fundamental theoretical weaknesses in anthropology
1.1. Empiricism
-Is the meaning of reality is simply written on its surface?
-Knowledge is a direct and unmediated reflection of reality?
-Knowledge comes from the field?

1.2. Humanism
-An eagerness to show the truth about a particular group of human beings
-Culture is supposed to be a human product (institutional or symbolic)

1.3. Anthropology: an under-theorized discipline
-Playing down the importance of political economy, history and other theoretical concerns
-Example 1: Margaret Mead's Freudian assumption
-Example 2: Trobriander's use of British cricket

2. Cultural studies: an overtheorized discipline

2.1. The origins of cultural studies (The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies)
-Re-negotiating the British culture in the post-war era
-Critique of media -->Reform in broadcasting policy
-Studies of subcultures (Paul Willis' Learning to Labor and Dick Hebdige's Subcultures): New political identities and projects
-Agency: The political possibilities

2.2. Theoreticism
-The influences of French theories: structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics
-The historical and discursive conditions of subjectivity

3. Theoretically Informed Ethnographic Study (TIES): The uses of field

3.1. A field, rather than a reified cultural object, is a place relevant to researcher in political-economic, social and cultural terms.

3.2. The impossibility of social agents' coming to any kind of selfhood or lived subjectivity (indeterminacy).

3.3. "Field" is a site for the process of subjectivity formation

3.4. Looking for "surprises" in the field

Willis, Paul. 1997. "TIES: Theoretically informed ethnography." Anthropology and Cultural Studies. Edited by Stephen Nugent and Cris Shore. London: Pluto Press, 182-192.

[Week 13/ Special topic: Culture and Development]

1. Karl Polanyi (1886-1964): The Great Transformation
1.1. Critique of theories about "self-regulating market"
1.2. What is "self-regulating market" theories
-The basic assumption: “Market is governed by the natural law”:
-It follows its law without intervention.
-It is a price mechanism perpetuated by demand and supply.

1.2. From anthropological perspectives, markets were/are always embedded in social institutions.

1.3. Self-regulating market as a fictitious and fabricated reality
-England in the 18th Century.
-Enclosure movement
-Proletarianization
-The "self-regulating market" was not a reality but an utopia for which the government devised a set of state policies attempting to create the conditions.

1.4. "Free trade" as a fictitious and fabricated reality (WTO)
-Free trade for big corporations: Tariff is the major barrier preventing multinational companies from trading goods.
-The US and European governments have been highly subsidizing agricultural export (e.g. cotton) while they keep forcing the Third World to reduce tariff and subsidies.
-Not free trade for small producers: They come across a wide range of barriers (urban development, transportation, "dumping", ... )

1.5. An institutional approach

1.5.1. Three types of material flow:
-Redistribution (e.g. tax and welfare, family expenses)
-Reciprocity (e.g. gift exchange)
-Exchange (calculative transaction)
(Market exchange is only one of the three types of material flows)

1.5.2. Economic activities and social institutions
-Economic activities not only aim at material accumulation and satisfaction but also provide functions for various institutions.
-Examples:
Common land (economy and religion)
Gift economy

1.5.3. Economic activities and symbolic practices
Example of "culinary authenticity": Raw seafood in Japan

2. Critique of economic activities as cultural practices

2.1. Economic activities justified by economic concepts (ideology)
-The myth of market (as a law, as a reason, as the highest value, as a moral standard)
-A reason or a natural law: "The income of our janitors is so low because this is determined by market"
-A kind of moral value:
"Students and the janitors should not ask for rise of wage because market should not be destroyed."
"Intervention into the market is injustice"

2.2. Critique of Developmentalism

2.2.1. The basic premises of developmentalism
-Civilized and uncivilized (19th century)
-Developed and underdeveloped or developing (20th century and after)

2.2.2. Development is supposed to be the ultimate reason for all problems.
-Development is supposed to be the ultimate solution.
-Example: “Food crisis” (Amartya Sen)

2.2.3. Development organization
-IMF, World Bank, … …
-Development project and aid
-Development economics and other sub-disciplines

2.2.4. Making “development” visible
-Category (peasant, women, … )
-Index (GDP)
-Statistics

2.2.5. Economic activities are not necessarily assessed by development index
-Marshall Sahlins: The original affluent society
-Myth: Hunters and gatherers sufferred from hunger and lack of food
-Hunting and gathering economy is quite affluent.
-No wealth accumulation
-Mobile movement
-Cherishing leisure time
-The assessment of economic activities should not be only based on material accumulation

3. Critique of the conventional belief of the western-modern society

[Week 12/ Case study I: Tourism and cultural identities]

1. Classical anthropology: A special kind of “tourism”
1.1. An elite culture and colonial gaze
1.2. One-way communication
1.3. “The other” : An authentic, stable and isolated entity.
1.4. Ethnographic “present”, an imagined “past”

2.Tourism as a consequence of modernity (Sydney White D. 1997)

2.1. Natives are negotiating their identities with colonialism and modernity

2.2. The new situations of ethnic minorities
-The minority groups are not isolated from the world outside.
-They are affected by dominant discourses, particularly those advocated by the state.

2.3. Naxi (納西族) in Lijiang
-Dayan(大研) as the centre of the Naxi people

2.4. Chinese and indigenous modernity
-Naxi people think they are superior to other minorities in terms of… …
*Economic achievement
*Hygienic measures
*Custom (relative to Mosuo)










2.5. Dayan-Naxi centrism:
-Dayan as a modern centre compared to “backward” and “clean” peripheries.
(Han culture becomes a standard)
-Dayan town is less authentic than the remote Naxi villages with cultural authenticity.

2.6. Gender and modernity:
-Naxi Man: “Fame” and hierarchy
-Naxi Woman: Suffering, Sacrifice and Authenticity

2.7. Identities in two discourses
-Situating themselves in the discourse of modernity
-Locating themselves in the discourse of cultural authenticity

2.8. Mosuo
-Valorize and emphasize on cultural authenticity.
*Non-commercial
*Matriarchy
*Non-urban
*Traditional attire
*“Minority-ness”

-Situating themselves in modernity:
*Develop tourism
*Equal relationship
*Aestheticize custom
*Criticizing the modern world

2.9. What is culture?
-Culture as the process and consequence of modern and colonial encounter

2.10. One more example: The Yi (彝族) people in Yuanyang

3. Performing modernity and tradition (Louisa Schein 1999)

3.1.What is culture?
-Malinowski: culture as institution in the everyday life
-Geertz: culture is a complexity of symbolic structures
-Malinowski: Identity is determined by social institutions (sociological identities)
-Geertz: Identity is determined by symbolic structures.

3.2. Tourism and identities
-Identity becomes a toured object.
-Identity becomes an object of self-conscious display and hence control (p. 380).

“What was being done when Miao took up their culture and remarked on, observed, consumed, critiqued, or otherwise engaged it, not as what Malinowski called the “imponderabilia of actual life”, but instead self-consciously and from some measure of distance?”

3.3. Culture is ......
-How they take up their “culture’
-How they talk about and look at it
-How they consume it.
-How they criticize it.
-Culture as a series of performance

4. The impact of tourism on anthropology
4.1. The object of analysis shifts from the "field" to cultural negotiation
4.2. From indigenous/ aboriginal/ authentic culture to "the local"
4.3. Study the local. But what is "the local"?
-The local is not the past waiting to be discovered
-The local people locate themselves in trans-local spaces
4.4. Culture, fieldwork and modes of travelling
-Fieldwork is a travelling process
-Ethnographic knowledge depends on modes of travelling
-Tourism and tourists (including ethnographer) become significant parts of culture

Week 10/ Reflections on fieldwork and ethnographic writing

1. "Field": Where/how/why did ethnographers go? (Passaro 1997)

1.1. A site or a method?

1.2. Mainstream anthropology: Field is a pre-theoretical parameter to define anthropology.

1.3. Field and risk
1.3.1. The physical danger in a field is a part of a rite-of-passage aspect of fieldwork.
1.3.2. The physical and social well-being of the ethnographer have to be jeopardized.

1.4. The "field" as a sort of colonial thinking in anthropology
1.4.1. Taking anthropology out of "the field" is easy.
1.4.2. Taking "the field" (an object of study or analysis) out of anthropology is difficult.

1.5. Where is the "appropriate field" for anthropology?
1.5.1. Why the Mediterranean? Why not Paris or New York?
1.5.2. "Imperialist nostalgia": Field as a "culture areas" with preexisting social laws

1.6. "You can't take the subway to "The Field!""
1.6.1. The appropriate-ness of a field
1.6.2. Field as a laboratory: an isloated object
1.6.3. City is a chaotic, uncontrolled and unmanageable space.

1.7. Keeping distance from the field!
1.7.1. The social distance
1.7.2. The degree of "Otherness"
1.7.3. The condition of objectivity
1.7.4. Many complex series of encounters and negotiation of social differences

1.8. Anthropology of liberation: beyond "village" epistemologies
1.8.1. The field is not specified or given clearly before fieldwork
1.8.2. "The field" is subject to definition and redefinition
1.8.2. The example of homeless people in New York
1.8.3. Understanding the agency and subjectivity of the people in a highly fragmented world
1.8.4. Continuous challenges to our own objectifying practices

2. "Work": What did ethnographers do? (Rabinow 1984[1977])

2.1. Ethnographers do not study or discover culture "out there".

2.2. Preferable informants: Insider's Outsider
2.2.1. Interpreting the representations of the informants
2.2.2. The ability to objectify and represent one's own way of life depends on one's "other-ness" to one's social world.

2.3. Training informants
2.3.1. Informants learn how to objectify and self-reflect upon their life world from ethnographers.
2.3.2. Ethnographic knowledge is impossible without the presence of ethnographers
2.3.3. Example: The Man diaspora (James Watson 2004)
2.3.4. Anthropological analysis must incorporate two facts
-Ethnographers are historically situated through the questions they ask and the manner in which they understand and experience the field
-Ethnographers are understanding and analyzing the informants' representation.
2.3.5. Example: Was Malik poor? (Rabinow 1984[1977]: p. 117-120)
2.3.6. Studying mediations in the field.


2.4. From ethnographic authority to ethnographic responsibilities
2.4.1. Messy experience-->ethnographic orders
2.4.2. Dialogue and observation-->fieldnotes-->writings
2.4.3. Ethnographic authority resides in his/ her "visible" power in fieldwork but invisibility in writing.
2.4.4. Reflexivity: Decentering and reconstructing the ethnographic self/selves (James Clifford)
2.4.5. Is there any mission of ethnography?
2.4.6. Critique of cultural power (Marshall Sahlins)
2.4.7. Defamiliarization and resemblances (Renato Rosaldo)
2.4.8. The example of Margery Wolf:
-Decentering the ethnographic self by reconstructing four selves in writings (novel, fieldnotes, journal paper and critic)
-Double defamiliarization: Mrs Tan as an outsider of the modern world and her village
-Resemblances: Her discussion on gender politics and feminism

References:
Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP.

Culture as practice, part II

1. A story about Captain Cook and Hawaiian natives
1.1. Who is Captain Cook?
1.2. He visited Haiwaii in 1778 and 1779.
1.3. Natives’ conceptual categories
Gods/ Human
Sea/ Island
Outside/ Inside
Chief/ people

1.4. From the native’s point of view
1.4.1. “Foreigners from the sea” = gods.
1.4.2. According to their religious belief, giving birth of a baby by a god brought benefits and sacred power to them.
1.4.3. The native women had sex with the sailors.

1.5. From the European’s points of view
1.5.1. Civilized/ uncivilized
1.5.2. Their conceptual scheme:
High/ low
Man/ women
Sex ≠ baby or benefit
Sex = services
Patron/ client

1.6. Exchange and consequence

1.6.1. Service<===>gift (silver and iron tools)

1.6.2. Exchange of symbols and objects

1.6.3. Gift exchange: a functional institution or symbolic-material exchange?

1.6.4.The death of Captain Cook (a controversial issue):
-In the first encounter, he, coming from the sea, was integrated into Haiwaiian people's symbolic structure.
-His return to Haiwaii was viewed as the return of the natives' Year-God Lono
-According to their Lono ritual, Lono was to be killed by their warrior god.

1.6.5. Further political changes
-Violating the tabu system
-Iron and siliver tools-->Challenging the authority of the chief.
-Polluting the god-like nature of foreigner

1.8. Some implications

1.8.1. Culture-as-constituted and culture-as-lived

1.8.2. The internal conflicts within the native society
-The natives used their own cultural codes to interpret the foreign culture and generated new practices and lived relations with others.

1.8.3. Their cultural codes were reconfigured in practices:
-The decline of chief authority
-The power of chiefdom was decentralized.
-De-sacrilization of western powers

1.8.4. Cultural domination or encounter?
-A popular theory of globalization (global capitalism): Native culture is invaded by global culture characteristic of the western culture and the material forces of capitalism.
-Culture is far less dominant and rigid than one usually expects.
-The colonial encounter might not be characterized by cultural domination; instead, it is a process of mutual reconfiguration of cultural codes.

1.9. Capitalism and culture
-The expansion of capitalism is not purely a material process.
-The commodities, particularly at the early stage of capitalism were highly embodied with cultural values.

2. Symbolic-material processes of Capitalism (the early 19th century)

2.1. The failure of free trade but the prosperity of private trade in the southeast

2.1.1. The imperial authority was not interested in trading with equal partner (The Chinese concept of imperial order)

2.1.2. Example: Yuan Ming Yuan: an imperial garden as a collection of baroque architecture, sculpture and western rare artifacts (photo 1/ photo 2)
Yuan Ming Yuan in wikipedia (Chinese/ English)

2.1.3. Example: Zheng He's journey to Southeast Asia, South Asia, Arabia and Africa (1405)

2.1.3. The local interest in trading with American merchants: Sandalwood (for Buddhist ritual, noble architecture and fine object of art)

2.2. Ameican merchants: Chinese goods<---->sandalwood

2.2.1. A great demand of Chinese or oriental goods
-The development of modern western civilization has depended on the consumption of an enormous amount of soft-drug culture.
-The spread of the ritual and habit of drinking tea
-Tea became popular beverage for the general public rather than the elite class before the 19th century

2.2.2. Shortage in silver

2.2.3. Sandalwood is a substitute

2.3. Hawaiian natives: Goods from the West (from the gods)

2.3.1. "Cultural and sacred goods" in the eyes of natives

2.3.2. The chiefs competed with each other for more goods from the westerners

2.3.3. They mobilized natives to provide as much sandalwood as possible for American merchants.

2.4. What is trade?
-It is not possible without socio-cultural formation of demand
-The socio-cultural formation is related to people's changing cosmologies.

3. Sahlins' contribution to our understanding of culture

n

3.1. Culture is not confined to a social entity (a community, a group, a country, …)
3.2. Symbolic and material are not separated from each other.
3.3. Anthropology is a "critique" of cultural power (revelation of its historical formation or the possible conditions of existence).
3.4. Anthropology may be a way of opening up possibilities for practices.

Next week… …
Rabinow, Paul. 1977. “Respectable information.” Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 101-124.
Passaro, J. 1997. "You can’t take the subway to the field!”:‘Village’epistemologies in the global village"

Culture as practice, part I

1. The assumption of structuralist anthropology and symbolic(interpretative) anthropology

1.1. Culture as a cognitive structure or a textual structure

1.2. But... ... anthropologists come across various events in the field and reduce them to a relatively stable structure.

1.3. But how do anthropologists take account of event?

1.4. Example: Dressing code in Hong Kong Legco

1.4.1. Dressing code in the Legco as a (post-)colonial form of symbolic power

Causal wear: citizen
Legislator: elite

1.4.2. –How to make sense of “long hair”’s resistance?

1.5. Human agency?
-Culture makes human
-But could human makes cultures?

2. Huamn agency: Rational choice or cultural determination?

2.1. Cultural determination: anthropologists develop various concepts of "culture" to explain individual behaviour

Example: Cultural pattern and collective personality

2.2. Rational choice model
-Human are goal-oriented
-Humans have sets of hierarchically ordered preferences, or utilities.
-In choosing lines of behavior, humans make rational calculations with respect to:

• the utility of alternative lines of conduct with reference to the preference hierarchy

• the costs of each alternative in terms of utilities foregone

• the best way to maximize utility.

-Emergent social phenomena -- social structures, collective decisions, and collective behavior -- are ultimately the result of rational choices made by utility-maximizing individuals.

-Emergent social phenomena that arise from rational choices constitute a set of parameters for subsequent rational choices of individuals in the sense that they determine:

• the distribution of resources among individuals

• the distribution of opportunities for various lines of behavior

• the distribution and nature of norms and obligations in a situation.

2.3. Marvin Harris (Cultural Materialism): Cannibalism and Diet of Aztecs
-Why did Aztecs practice cannibalism?
-Their diet was meat-poor
-Cannibalism was a rational choice: distribution of animal protein to a dense population
-Cannibalism was one of the parameters encouraging people to continue cannibalism

3. Marshall Sahlins: Responses to rational choice or utilitarian model
3.1. Instrumental rationality as a modern westernized invention

3.2. Interest: material interest and cultural disposition are closely related
Example: Dogs are not edible not because their protein is insignificant to us. They are seen as "friends" of human beings and eating dog meat had been banned by the colonial government long time ago (e.g. "Royal Society for the Prevention of Curelty to Animals").

3.3. Sense: symbolic schema in the everyday life
-Pig and cow belong to the category of "Meat": pork, beef, ... ...
-Dog or cat is classified as "pet"
-Sense is not a rigid framework imposed on the world outside.
-Sense is both perceptive and structural

3.4. Agency: interest-sense
-Human beings re-arrange their conceptual categories to adapt to new environment.
-Rationality: Practical reason

4. Example: A story about an ethnographer

4.1. An ethnographer studied a group of migrant workers from inland provinces

4.2. What did an ethnographer do? Why did he take photos of their children? To make friend? To make money?

4.3. A rumour: He engaged in trafficking children

Familiar people	non-commercial
Stranger	commercial
Photo	Commercial
Stranger-photo	Non-commercial?

5. Example: Lord Macartney and Qianlong (1793)

5.1. Lord Macartney was a diplomatic envoy of George III requesting free trade with China.
5.2. He was asked by Qianlong to kowtow (present tributes to the Celestial Emperor).
5.3. Free trade is incomprehensible in the cosmology of the Qing Dynasty.
5.4. Macartney vs. Qianlong
Macartney:
Sovereignty-->Sovereignty (trade)
Qianlong:
Celestial Empire-->Feudatory (tribute)

6. Culture, practice and event:
6.1. Culture-as-constituted: symbolic structure (prescriptive structure)
6.2. Culture-as-lived: how people live in the material-symbolic world (performative structure)
6.3. Practice is situated in the dynamic relationship between culture-as-constituted and culture-as-lived.
6.4. Power relationship resides in practices, i.e. the dynamic relationship between “culture-as-constituted” and “culture-as-lived”.
6.5. Event or experience is not accidental but a structuring process at a particular moment.

Sahlins, Marhsall. 2000(1982). "Individual Experience and Cultural Order." Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. New York: Zone Books.

Culture as symbol, Part II

1. Anthropology in the post-colonial age

1.1. Modern anthropology is a reflection upon social Darwinism.

1.2. Social Darwinism is a school of thought emerging out of colonialism

1.3. Modern anthropology (e.g. Malinowski, Mead and Levi-Strauss) attempts to provide an alternative way of seeing “others” to the prejudices of social Darwinism.

1.4. Anthropologists adjust their mission and problematic to respond to the new age of post-colonialism.
1.4.1. Modernization and colonization do not create a unified modern world.
1.4.2. Anthropology in a multi-cultural setting

Kahn, Joel. 1995. “A World System of Culture?” Culture, Multiculture, Postculture. London: Sage.

2. Anthropology in a multi-cultural setting

2.1. Cities: a meeting place for a wide range of ethnic groups.

2.2. Indigenous people defend their rights and identities against the corporate and the state power.

2.3. Critique of functionalism
- Not every pattern of behavior or relation has functions necessary to the survival of individual and the society.
Example: Festival and other rituals in the modern society

2.4. Critique of structuralism and rationalism
-Deep structure is only a kind of academic fiction without material and historical complexity (Clifford Geertz).

2.5. Example I: Japanese food
-How do we explain why Japanese people hadn’t eaten salmon fish as sashimi until after the Second World War?
-How did salmon fish come into Japanese diet?
-What is the (symbolic) association between salmon fish and Japanese traditional diet?

3. Interpretive anthropology: Clifford Geertz (1923-)
“What the ethnographer is in fact faced with … … is a multiplicity or complex conceptual structures… …”

3.1. Example: Twitch, wink, parody and rehearsal?
The meaning of a facial expression or gesture is determined by our interpretations of multilayers of signification.

3.2. Seeing culture as a text

“Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript – foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behaviour.”

4. Culture and interpretation
4.1. Culture is public.
4.2. Public is subject to multiple interpretations
4.3. Interpretation is a symbolic process.

5. Thick description
5.1. We begin with our own interpretations of:
5.2. What our informants are up to,
5.3. What they think they are up to.
5.4. And then we systematize those.

Example I: Balinese birth-order names and “dramatism”

Birth-order names.
Individual: an assigned role in hierarchy.
Balinese society and designation are highly ritualized.
The world is an eternal cycle, an endless four-stage replication of an imperishable form.

Example II: When Coke becomes a national beverage, … …

Coke=Home
Home=Nation
Coke=National culture

pic 1 and pic 2

"I fight as much to help keep the custom of drinking Cokes as I am to help preserve the millions of other benefits our country blesses its citizens with."
A letter written by a US soldier to his family.

Mintz, Sidney W. 1996. "Food and its relation to power." Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press.

6. What is anthropology (according to Geertz)?

6.1. Ethnography is a study in a place rather than of a place.

6.2. Ethnography is a series of interpretation of social discourse.

6.3. “Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape.”

7. The object of analysis: Social discourse

7.1. Regularities within communication.

7.2. They could be identified in the everyday life.


8. Ethnography is … …

8.1. Ethnography is a fiction of material complexity.

8.2. Ethnography is never complete and its authority is always contestable.

8.3. The aim of anthropology: Enlargement of the universe of human discourse

8.4. Cultural analysis<---->natural science


Appendix: Interpretive anthropology vs. structuralist anthropology

Structuralist anthropology
-“Bodiless landscape”

Symbolic or interpretive anthropology
-Social discourses Symbolic regularities in -communication

Enlargement of the universe of human discourse