Complete summary all literature and lecture notes Inhabiting Cultural Worlds

Inhabiting cultural worlds summary

Lecture 1: How do we know?
 Epistemology = the study of knowledge
o What is common sense?
 Shared meaning, shared perception
 What is considered as normal, natural, healthy, good, etc.
 Closely related to culture
o The different is difficult, the familiar is easy to understand
 Understanding through difference (the crucial moment)
o Two things have to follow to understand / ‘do’ anthropology
 An effort
 If you don’t make an effort, the exotic will just remain strange
 Intense and long engagement needed (in the form of
ethnographic fieldwork)
 A challenge
 Anthropology is an unsettling discipline because our common
sense is nonsense to others
 How do we know: epistemological advantage of anthropology over say, physics
o Greater insurance of the truth because you make something strange into
something you can reproduce with your own mind  not measure but
understand

Lecture 2: Culture
 Levels of culture, a simple analytical model
o 3 levels: categories, rules and behaviour
o Analytical model helps to better understand the argument of scholarly
literature in humanities and social sciences, to critically scrutinize such
literature, to do research in social science and history
 Behaviour
o Simply what people do, how they act
o Can be observed, it is empirically accessible to others
o There is a difference between behaviour and social action
 Behaviour is just what someone does, like falling down the stairs
 Social action is oriented towards others and implies relationships and
expectations, like praying
 Social awareness influences the course of action
 Rules
o Norms, what should be done according to people
o Rules : behaviour  ought : is
o Explicit and implicit rules

,  Most of our behaviour is regulated by implicit rules: they are
automatically followed, do not require explicit reflection, are
embodied, learned and invisible (embodied norms: hexis)
 Implicit rules can become visible when they are broken  sanctions
follow
 If sanctions don’t follow regularly on rule-breaks; rules will
become meaningless (this happens with laws sometimes)
o Rules provide predictability
o Rules are context specific
 Categories
o Collective representations  ideas, units of thought, values
 They organie our perception, structure thought, assign meaning,
enable making sense of the world  signification
o Culturally specific
o Systematic; contrasts and hierarchies
o Explicit and implicit categories
o How to access and identify categories
 Need to infer them from behavior, rules and sanctions, structure of
space and time, art, music, literature, objects, etc.
 Constancy: categories can/do change, but slowly



Geertz 1973: The Impact of the Concept of
Culture on the Concept of Man
 Clifford Geertz
o Historical context: entlightenment and historicism (cultural and temporal
relativism)
 Two views of nature/culture and the balance
o Relativism: there is no human nature that is not affected by culture
o Universalism: human nature is the same everywhere and culture is added to it
o Balance: human nature lies in the universal cultural patterns (what is the same
in every culture)
 The synthetic approach: we have to look for systematic relationships
among diverse phenomena, rather than reduce them to some
reference point
 Man as leveled beings  stratigraphic conception, layered like an onion
o 4 levels: organic  psychological  social  cultural
o Objection: there was an overlap in time in the forming of culture and the
genetic development  this proofs that culture is not merely added to
manhood, but it is a vital ingredient of it.
 ‘Consensus Genitum’ = the idea that all men will be found to agree that certain
things are right/real, which makes these things right/real

, o Something in the core of men that makes it that all men will agree upon
something(s) as the good thing
o Something new is added with the development in modern anthropology
 “Some aspects of cultural life take their specific forms solely as a result
of historical accidents; others are tailored by forces which can be
properly be designated as universal”
 A part that is constructed “accidentally”, without human involvement
and a part that is “consciously designed” by human action
 This demands that:
1. The universals proposed are substantial and not empty
categories
2. that they be specifically grounded in particular biological,
psychological or sociological processes
3. that they can convincingly be defended as core elements in a
definition of humanity
 The idea of consensus gentium does not fulfill these demands
 Biological necessities and cultural practices are linked
o People need to eat (biological necessity)  dining customs (cultural practices)
o It’s not as simple as just this



 Two idea’s by Geertz on which the synthetic approach relies
1. Culture is a set of control mechanisms to govern behaviour
2. Men is dependent on such control mechanisms to know what to do
o Thought (and therefor culture) is used to guide one through ‘the ongoing
course of experienced things’  without culture, human behaviour would be
chaotic and unpredictable
 We live in an “information gap”  a vacuum between what our body knows and
what we need to know in order to function
o We fill this gap with information gained through culture



Ortner 2006: Reading America: Preliminary Notes
on Class and Culture
 Sherry Ortner
o From New Jersey, ethnographic fieldwork in Nepal
o Interest in American culture and class
 Class in American society is not part of explicit hegemonic discourse, but is hidden in
discourses of gender and sexuality
 What is class (multiple different ways of looking at it, levels of distinction)
o Bourgeois theorists  different positions in social advantage
 Defined by objective indicators like education, income, etc.
 Defined by social rankings/status