CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

MA course

-Anthropos aner-ops (=man-faced). /anthropon (=mankind)/. -About human beings: origin and classification, characteristics of races, physical features, social relations, relations with the environment, cultural features. -Branches of A.: 1. Physical A.; 2. Philosophical A.; 3. Religious A.; 4.. Social-cultural A.: 5. Also, historical A., generative A., structuralist A.; musical A., a.s.o. -Distinction: anthropology/ethnology/ethnography. -A. should also be differentiated from sociology, mythography, cultural history, cultural studies. HISTORY: -Predecessors: Herodotus, Montaigne, Montesquieu. The Enlightenment. J. G. Herder. -Beginnings of the cultural-anthropological school around 1860. Edward B. Tylor and J. Lubbock. Their main issues. -Culture, in Tylors sense. Material culture, folklore, religion, magic, sociology, language, law & environment. Animism & totemism. =The comparative-evolutionary school of A. -Tylor: The history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature ... our thoughts, wills and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion of the waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth of plants and animals (in Primitive Culture). Evolution in stages. Contemporary survivals. Comparative approach. -The cultural Other is figured as a historical reconstruction of our past, a key to our much elegized heritage (Manganaro, 10). -In America, Lewis Henry Morgan (Ancient Society, 1877). Role of economic base. -The uniformitarian notion of the unity of mind. Everywhere vs. there. Armchair researcher. -Prefigurations: Herodotus; Medieval-Renaissance tendency: the scriptural similitude; the pre-lapsarian speech; the Enlightenment efforts to reveal uniformity beyond cultural diversity: Father Lafitaus Moers des sauvages ameriquaines, compares aux moers des premiers temps (1724). -Main evolutionary-comparative works: E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871); Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890-1922), French scholar Arnold van Gennep, Les rites de passage (1909); in America: Henry

Lewis Morgan - Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877). -Connections with literature: The Cambridge Ritualists/Hellenists: Jane Harrisons Themis. F. M. Cornfords The Origin of Attic Comedy. Later on: Gilbert Murray, Hamlet and Orestes (1914). Also, Jessie Weston, Lord Raglan, a. s. o. -Criticism of the evol.-comp. school. AMERICA: Franz Boass cultural relativism; -Diffusion: A. Haddon, and William H. Rivers. Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. -Functionalism: Bronislaw Malinowski - The Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922; Coral Gardens and Their Magic, 1935. Participant observation. Both a method and a doctrine. Its criticism. -AMERICAN A. between WW I and WW II. "Culture and Personality". Ruth Benedict. Margaret Mead (Samoa, New Guinea).. -BRITISH A. after WW I: Firths We, the Tikopia (1936), EvansPritchards Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) and The Nuer (1940), A. I. Richardss Land, Labour and Diet (1939). Africanist studies, by Fortes, M. Gluckman, H. Kuper, G. Lienhardt, S. F. Nadel, I. Schapera, V. W. Turner and M. Wilson, under the aegis of International African Institute in London, of Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in North Rhodesia. Also: The Royal Anthropological Institute. The Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth . -FRENCH A. Characteristics. mile Durkheim, Lucien Lvi-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss. Structuralist A.: C. Lvi-Strauss. -Semiotic A.: Clifford Geertz. -Postmodern A.: Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Anthropology (1982). Self-reflexive ethnography; discursive A. Feminist A. studies. Home anthropology. New branches.