Lecture Notes on Culture: Why we do what we do

• Anthropology – study of culture

• How and why cultures differ and are similar

• Theoretical orientation – attitude about how cultural phenomenon is to be explained.

Early evolutionism(Tylor and Morgan)

   - culture evolved from simple to complex- 3 stages of development  savagery, barbarism, civilization

    - to account for variations – societies in different stages of evolution

Historical Particularism – (Boas) disagreed with evolutionists that cultures are governed by universal laws
-   cultural trait has to be studied in the context of the society in which it appeared

    - only after body of the data was gathered could theories be proposed and interpretation made.

Diffusionism - British school – most aspects of civilization were developed in Egypt and diffused to other parts

 - German-Austrian school- from different cultural complex

 - American school- features of culture area to a geographical culture center

                Question: how a culture accepts and rejects? 

Functionalism (Malinowski)

- Cultural traits serve the needs of individuals in a society
- function of cultural traits is its ability to satisfy same basic needs or derived needs of the members of the group

       - needs include nutrition, reproduction, bodily comfort, safety, relaxation, movement, growth

       Question: Needs are universal, then why ways of satisfying them vary from one culture to another?

Structural functionalism (Radcliffe-Brown) - aspects of social behavior maintain society's social structure rather than satisfying individual needs

         Question: How to determine whether a cultural trait is contributing to the maintenance of society or not?

Psychological approaches (Benedict and Mead) - cultures could be characterized in terms of different personality types

     - Culture and personality types are linked

     - Culture is responsible for personality differences between sexes

Structuralism (Levi-Strauss) - culture as a surface representation of the underlying structure of the human mind which is predisposed to think and behave in terms of binary opposition

          - Like grammar in language, there are rules of thoughts that underlie culture

Ethnoscience - attempts to derive these rules from logical analysis as free as possible from contamination of biases

     - if we can know the rules of behavior , then we can explain much of what people do and why they do it

Cultural ecology (Steward) - explanation for some aspects of cultural variation could be found in the adaptation of societies to their environment

    - cultural traits can be adaptive or maladaptive

Political economy - assumes external forces (e.g. politics, economy, world history) explain the way a society changes and adapts

---------------

Ethnography - a (thick) description and analysis of a single society

Participant observation (fieldwork) - systematic observation and data collection

Reference:
Ember, C., & Ember, M. (1990). Cultural Anthropology. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc.