“Anthropology as Everyday Practice” Dear UWC Members, Spanish through Experience will hold its first meeting on Monday, April 8th at 3 pm with reflections by an anthropologist on the mundane, the funny, as well as the "non-exotic" aspects of research and practice in this field.
The talk will be in Spanish at Barbara’s apartment.
To sign up, please call Shaké Balian or email uwcstudygroups@gmail.com.
Spanish Through Experience Notes
We met at the home of Barbara Grünenfelder-Elliker to listen to her presentation: “Anthropology as a daily task”. Barbara defined for us the four main scientific components of Anthropology.
1. Archeology, focusing on the study of ancient human populations, their places of abode, of worship and objects of everyday use. Dating the objects applying isotopic analysis provides information as to the age of the findings, but so does geological and cultural/biological context.
2. Physical Anthropology and paleoanthropology is the study of the physical characteristics of human remains and of contemporary men. The dating analysis helps define the archeological period in which they lived, and the physical characteristics of the bones can help deduce some traits from their daily lives. For example the relative abundance of hard or soft materials in the diets modifies the degree of abrasion of their teeth and the shape of their jaws. Morphological differences have been posture and a modern skeletal morphology from the foramen magnum at the cranial base downward, but differentiated from Homo sapiens (both Neandertalensis and sapiens sapiens) by cranial features.
3. Cultural Anthropology or Ethnology analyses present societies, its subject matter is culture, defined by the 19th century British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor as “...that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Every society is organized at some level, often difficult to perceive for early ethnologists. Some develop a hierarchical social structure that defines a ruling class, whereas societies where access to resources is open to all, predominant in the North and South American plains, and the Siberian steppes, the Amazonian, African, and South-East Asian jungles, as well as the African and Australian deserts, lack a ruling class. They had (they are mostly extinct) an egalitarian structure where the leaders are defined by their changing circumstances and are replaced as needed.
4. Linguistic anthropology deals with attempts to classify individuals as belonging to different speech communities (ethnicities as well as castes and social classes), analyzing their communicational habits and particularities. Those who can understand each other while they speak their respective native tongues are speaking different dialects of the same language. “Dialect” and “language” are not absolutes, but denote relationships of proximity or - conversely - of un-intelligibility between two different “tongues.”
The work of the anthropologist demands the documentation of the daily work and leisure of the group (congregation, community, city ward, village, etc) studied. Cultural anthropologists chose to study salient aspects of the population whose “way of life” they have agreed to become familiarized with - familiar in the sense of cultural and psychological proximity. An economic anthropologist will focus on hours worked, extension and quality of land farmed (for example), crop variety planted, seasonal celebrations, means of transportation, quality of children’s schooling, availability and access to productive resources, be these material/tangible (like land and crops, factory space, mineral or biological input) or mental/educational/immaterial like marketing skills, business networks, etc. The anthropologist is first and foremost a “student,” being apprenticed into a new culture by “participant observation" - or a critically detached observing participant in her or his own cultural group. Anthropology’s basic aim is to “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange,” so that different groups may realize that not everyone does things the way they do. A basic premise is that no population does anything a priori in an “irrational” or “ignorant” fashion.
During the social tea that followed the presentation, we were enriched by the contribution of Willow Running Hawk who sang traditional Lakota songs.
Mariel