RELIGION IN LIVES AND CULTURE
SOAN 005B
Fall semester 2005
Wednesday 1:15-4:00
THIS COURSE IS A FRESHMAN SEMINAR AND A WRITING(W) COURSE
TABLE OF CONTENTS OF THIS SYLLABUS
I)
INTRODUCTION
II)
READINGS
III)
SEMINAR PROCEEDINGS
IV)
ASSIGNED WORK
V)
WEEKLY SCHEDULE
VI)
ESSAYS
VII) FIELD WORK PROJECT
VIII) TERMS AND CONCEPTS
I)
Introduction
To each and
all, welcome(!) to Swarthmore, and very best wishes for the college career that
you are now getting under way.
Over the
coming semester, we will be getting to know each other - you and me, and you
and you - through working together.
Permit me now briefly to introduce myself. I'm Steve Piker, an anthropologist. Earlier in my career I did field work
in a Thai rice village for two separate years with my spouse and, for the
second of these years, with our infant son, Josh. One of the main foci of the field work was popular religion,
which in Thailand is Theravada Buddhism.
More recently, I've worked with religious conversion in the United
States. I've been teaching
anthropology at Swarthmore for longer than you folks have been alive, and for
the past several years I've also been foreign study adviser at Swarthmore.
What you can
expect of me: You can expect me to
be informal, friendly, always welcoming of your contributions(including
suggestions about the seminar), responsive to your questions, and
accessible. I will be glad to see
you in my office, either during office hours or by appointment, and I'll be
glad to hear from you by e-mail.
What I expect
of you: The specifics of what the
seminar calls upon you to do are set forth in the remainder of the syllabus,
below. Generally, I expect you to
be collegial, to intend to work well and informally and considerately with
other members of the seminar. I
expect you to produce your work for the seminar in the manner set forth by the
syllabus. I expect you to be
punctual in the production of your work and in making sure that you always get
to seminar meetings on time. I
count on you to be forthcoming in sharing ideas, questions, observations,
experiences........you name it, in our discussions during seminar
meetings. It is precisely this
kind of sharing that makes it productive and engaging to work on our subject
matter in seminar format. I expect
you to be adults.
Office:
Kohlberg 244
Phone:
x-8111
e-mail:
spiker1@swarthmore.edu
II)
Readings
The following
books are available for purchase at the College bookstore. Copies of each will also be on general
reserve. You should be able to do
this seminar without buying any books.
Katz. BOILING
ENERGY
Nelson. THE
LAST YEAR OF THE WAR
Martin. KEEPERS
OF THE GAME
Braude. RADICAL
SPIRITS
Assigned
readings for the seminar will include these books(which are to be read from
cover to cover), two further books(Obeyesekere, MEDUSA'S HAIR, and Weber, THE
PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF
CAPITALISM)which will be available in multiple copies on general reserve, and a
number of articles and chapters, of which those for week 1 will be distributed
to you before classes begin and the remainder handed out in class, one copy per
student.
III)
Seminar proceedings
The seminar
will meet Wednesday afternoon from 1:15 to 4 in Kohlberg........ Our seminar meetings will be
devoted to a mixture of discussion, group reports, buzz group exercises and
discussion of same, and short lectures.
In the weekly schedule, below, you will find for most weeks a series of
discussion issues or questions. It
is suggested that you do the weekly readings especially with reference to these
issues and questions, so that you will be prepared to participate in discussion
of same when the seminar meets. It
is important, therefore, that you complete each week's reading BEFORE the Wednesday
seminar meeting. Each member of
the seminar is expected to participate in our discussions; and each member of
the seminar will, once, have some responsibility for leading seminar
discussion.
Working with
each other and helping each other should be an important part of everything
that we do this semester, including production of the assigned work for the
seminar.
IV)
Assigned work
Assigned work
for this seminar includes two non-graded assignments and two graded
assignments.
Oral report. Not graded. In
groups of two, members of the seminar will be expected to present oral reports
on issues, identified by yours truly, arising from the assigned readings, and
to lead a seminar discussion based upon the report. On the weekly schedule, below, report topics are presented
for the appropriate weeks. We will
do most but, probably, not all of these.
The report for the next week will be specifically assigned in seminar
the preceding week. No extra
reading for the reports, and two person report groups can expect to spend about
30-60 minutes out of class preparing the report.
Buzz group exercises.
Not graded. On two or three
occasions during the semester, the seminar will be divided into small groups to
discuss, during our scheduled meeting times, issues arising from the
readings. Immediately following
which, each buzz group will summarize the gist of its discussion for discussion
by the entire seminar.
Essays.
Graded. Assigned in (VI),
below.
Field work project.
Graded. Assigned in (VII),
below.
Educational rationale for this mix of assigned work: The serious conduct of inquiry,
including academic or scholarly inquiry, begins with early tentative
efforts(e.g., getting familiar with relevant literatures, sharing provisional
ideas and formulations through informal exchanges with others, and especially
getting feed back from others on the early provisional ideas); and moves on to
the production of a polished final product which will be of use and interest to
others working in the same field.
Our seminar is intended to give you some experience with all parts of
this process. Of course, our
in-seminar discussions will be clear examples of the early stages of this
business. The oral reports and
buzz group exercises are intended to move us a little further down the road,
but they won't really go beyond the preliminary and the tentative. On the other hand, the field work
project and the essays most definitely should do so. The former calls upon you to generate primary data, record
and organize these data, and then make the data the bases for a systematic
descriptive report, re the focal issue of the field work project. The latter, for each essay, calls upon
you to identify course materials(readings, in-seminar discussion)germane to the
issue(s) identified by the individual essay assignments, and to organize these
materials into an essay which contains a sound line of reasoning which
effectively addresses the issue(s).
And, because
this is a seminar, and because the point of doing it this way is to work with
and help each other especially through exchanges of ideas and questions and
perspectives and whatnot, and because seminar meetings provide the main venue
for such exchanges, seminar attendance is required of all members of the
seminar. Grade penalties for
unexcused absences. Extra
curricular activities which conflict with scheduled seminar meetings will not
be bases for excused absences.
V)
Weekly schedule.
31 AUGUST.
Introduction. Religion as a
cultural institution; the universality of religion to human cultures
Topics:
1) What is
religion?
2) Religion and
religiousness
3) The three
contexts: social, historical,
biographical
4) Field work,
and why it is essential for us
5) Seminar
procedures
Readings:
Clifford Geertz. "The impact of the concept of culture on the
concept of man."
________ "From the native's point of
view: On the nature of
anthropological
understanding."
R. Stephen Warner.
"Dualistic and monistic religion."
Robert Bellah.
"Religious evolution"
Horace Miner.
"Body ritual among the Nacirema."
Steven Piker.
Review of CHRONICLING CULTURES: LONG TERM FIELD RESEARCH IN ANTHROPOLOGY(Kemper and
Royce, edit.), and, SNEAKY KID AND ITS AFTERMATH: ETHICS AND INTIMACY IN FIELD
WORK(Wolcott)
Discussion issues:
1)
Geertz("The impact...")has a point to make, an axe to
grind. In advancing his point of
view, he rebuts an earlier, widely accepted point of view. What is the earlier
point of view? What are Geertz'
objections to it? What is the
point of view that Geertz likes, and how does he support this point of view?
2) Field work
comprises the suite of empirical methods par excellence by which
anthropologists learn about culture in local life situations. By its nature, field work entails a
special kind of relationship between the field worker and the natives he or she
is learning about.
Geertz("From the native's point of view...")has a point of
view on this relationship, one that disagrees with earlier widely held ideas
among anthropologists. What are
the earlier ideas? What is Geertz'
rejoinder to them?
3) What does
Warner mean by dualistic and monistic religion? Try to think of examples of each from the modern American
religious situation. What is the
importance of this distinction to the anthropological study of religion?
4) Bellah's
paper is mainly devoted to presenting a five fold taxonomy of all of the
religions of humankind, present and past.
The concepts that Bellah deploys to discriminate among the five types
will be useful to us in thinking about religion comparatively, or cross
culturally. For openers, how does
Bellah understand the main difference(s) between historic religions, on the one
hand, and primitive and archaic religions, on the other hand?
5) Miner's
paper, of course, comprises a spoof.
Does it also contain a serious message for us? If so, what is the message?
7 SEPTEMBER Religiousness and the life cycle;
individual religiousness as a career.
Topics:
1) Selective
individual uses of shared religion
2) Religious
meaning: psychological
perspectives
3) Religious
meaning: religiousness and the
rest of the life of the religioso
Readings:
Shirley Nelson.
THE LAST YEAR OF THE WAR
Jerome Bruner.
"Two modes of thought."
________
"Life as narrative"
Discussion issues:
1) Nelson's
novel presents a religious biography, a part of the religious career of one
person, Jo. Take a stab a figuring
out the relevance, if any, of Bruner's 'narrative mode of thought' to this
religious biography - and, by extension, to any and all religious biographies,
and to religiousness generally.
2) Jo is a
Christian, Jo is a Protestant, Jo becomes a fundamentalist. Suppose we unpacked each of these three
categories in detail. Would we
then have a full characterization of Jo's religiousness? If not, what are we missing?
Report: Bruner
and Nelson. The narrative mode of
thought and Jo's religiousness.
14 SEPTEMBER.
Religiousness and the life cycle; individual religiousness as a
career(continued from previous week)
Topics:
1) Selective
individual use of shared religion(continued)
2) Religious
meaning: psychological
perspectives(continued)
3) Religious
ritual: what is it?
4) Religious
ritual and emotional empowerment
5)
Religiousness and personal reconstruction
Readings:
Gananath Obeyesekere.
MEDUSA'S HAIR
________
""Psychocultural exegesis of a case of spirit possession from
Sri Lanka."
Discussion issues:
1) We now have
two extended religious biographies(Jo, from Nelson; and Somavati, from
Obeyesekere), as well as briefer religious biographies from MEDUSA'S HAIR. Each biography is germane to the
general issue: how do individuals
make personal, selective, creative uses of culturally shared religion?
2) All of
social life exhibits repetitious regularities. This is a large part of what we mean when we use the term
'role,' e.g., role of student or teacher or parent or auto mechanic. Religious ritual exhibits repetitious
regularities. Therefore, religious
ritual is like(and, indeed, is a part of)social life generally. How, though, is religious ritual
different from the rest of social life?
3) From Bruner,
we get a perspective on the psychological bases of religious meaningfulness,
and we get such a perspective as well from Obeyesekere. Take a stab at comparing, contrasting,
and juxtaposing these two perspectives.
How, if at all, are they different? If they are different, do the differences amount to
disagreement? Or
complementarity? Or.......?
Report:
Somavati, ritual, and emotional empowerment
21 SEPTEMBER.
Field work projects
Our seminar
meeting this week will be devoted to getting you all squared away on the field
work assignment, including especially equipping you with methods for
observation and recording of data.
Readings:
James Spradley.
PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION(selections)
Topics:
1) What is
field work good for?
2) What are its
limitations?
3) Ethical
issues in the doing of field work
28 SEPTEMBER.
Collective ritual and group cohesion
Topics:
1) The ritual
process
2) Ritual and
experience
3) Ritual and
social solidarity
4) The
experience of the sacred
Readings:
Richard Katz.
BOILING ENERGY: COMMUNITY
HEALING AMONG THE KALIHARI !KUNG
Discussion issues:
1) Why do the
!Kung do trance healing?
2) Among the
!Kung we see a level and intensity of individual identification with and
dependence upon the local group that is unknown in our lives. This identification is mediated and
facilitated by collective ritual.
How so?
3) Trace is an
example of what we sometimes call altered states of consciousness. What does this expression mean, and how
does !Kung trance dancing exemplify it?
4) the cases of
Jo(Neslon), Somavati and the matted hair ascetics(Obeyesekere), and trance dancers(Katz)illustrate the
intimate association of religiousness with extraordinary experience(as will,
later on, the cases of Martin's Indians and Weber's Calvinists and Braude's
spiritualists). Suppose that we
were to say, provisionally, that this association is the experience of the
sacred. How then would we characterize the experience of the sacred? And how should we understand the
relationship of the experience of the sacred to religiousness?
Report:
Wellness and illness among the !Kung
5 OCTOBER.
Supernaturalism; experienced human relationships with the supernatural
Topics:
1) Behavioral
environment(Hallowell), and the significance of supernaturalism for same
2) The social
nature of the relationship between natives and the supernatural
3) Sources of
religious change
Readings:
1) Calvin
Martin. KEEPERS OF THE GAME. INDIAN-ANIMAL RELATIONSHIPS AND THE FUR
TRADE
2) A. Irving
Hallowell. "The self and its
behavioral environment."
3) Melford E.
Spiro. "Religion and the
irrational."
Discussion issues:
1) Hallowell
argues that the self(including, especially individual experience)is culturally
constituted. How and what we think
and feel, what we believe to be true and our grounds for believing it - all of
this is importantly conditioned by the culture into which we are born and in
which we grow up and live our lives.
What is the relevance of this to the understanding of religion as a
cultural institution that we have been developing?
2) What,
sensibly, might we mean were we to say that some beliefs or ideas(or bodies of
same)are more rational than others, or that some beliefs and ideas are rational
and others are irrational? thus, I
expect that we have all heard it said that, e.g., science is rational and,
e.g., superstition is irrational.
What is the relevance of the papers by Hallowell and Spiro to this issue
of? Is the American Indian belief
in the reality of animal spirits rational or irrational?
3) Martin
portrays Indian/animal relationships in social terms. How, if at all, are these relationships similar to and/or
continuous with the social relationships that the Indians enact among
themselves?
Report:
Martin: Indian/animal
relationships and their disruption
12 OCTOBER.
FALL BREAK
19
OCTOBER. Religion in
history; religion and the meaning of everyday life.
Topics:
1) Elective
affinity
2) Religion and
the meaning, for the native, of everyday life
3)
Parochialization: the 'lay
ethic' of religion
Readings:
Max Weber. THE
PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM
Steven Piker.
"Max Weber and our current understanding of Theravada Southeast
Asia"
________
"Buddhist ethics: an
anthropological perspective."
Discussion issues:
1) When the
writings and teachings and preachings of Calvin became known in Reformation
Europe, a few groups adopted them - became Calvinists - and most did not, then
or later. How, re Weber, are we to
understand this selective adoption of Calvinism in 17th century Europe?
2)Weber identifies the Calvinist phrasing of the
predestination doctrine as the wellspring of popular Calvinism in the 17th
century. How, in Weber's
understanding, did this doctrine come to provide the motivational basis for the
spirit of capitalism?
3) What does
Weber mean by rationality of belief?
For Weber, what does it mean to say that some religions(e.g., Calvinism)are
more rational, and others(e.g., Catholicism)are less rational? Is this a value judgement on Weber's
part? And, we looked at religion
and rationality issues last week.
In his treatment of this, is Weber posing the same issues as do
Hallowell and Spiro?
4) In the
modern U.S., Presbyterians are the direct historical descendants of Weber's
17th century Calvinists. As
regards the contents of their
religiousness, these are certainly two horses of very different
colors. Somehow, 17th century
Calvinism morphed into contemporary Presbyterianism. How might we usefully think about how this transformation
occurred?
Report:
Calvinism and the texture of everyday life.
26
OCTOBER. Buzz group
exercise, re Weber.
THE PROTESTANT
ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM depicts, inter alia, a community of
religious people - 17th century Calvinists - whose lives are unremittingly and
methodically rationalized and driven by a work ethic of almost super human
intensity. The book further
purports to show that this work ethic is grounded in and expresses the
Calvinists' religious beliefs.
The movie,
'Chariots of Fire,' set mainly at Cambridge University in England in the years
immediately following World War I, features two protagonists, a Scottish
Presbyterian and an English Jew, each of whom is a world class runner. For each, a work ethic comparable to
that of Weber's Calvinists enables extraordinary athletic accomplishment.
During our
seminar meeting, we will view the movie.
Following which, the seminar will be divided into buzz groups, each of
which will be asked to discuss the following questions for each runner, what are the cultural
- including specifically religious - foundations of his work ethic? How do these cultural foundations
impart compelling meaning and motivation to the athletic strivings of the
runners?
2 NOVEMBER.
Religion in history; religion and the meaning of everyday life(continued
from the past two weeks)
Topics:
1) Elective
affinity(continued)
2) Religion as
a means for the empowerment of individuals and groups(e.g., folks of the female
persuasion)
3) Spiritualism
and sex roles: an early women's
movement
Readings:
Anne Braude.
RADICAL SPIRITS.
SPIRITUALISM AND WOMEN'S RIGHTS IN 19TH CENTURY AMERICA
Discussion issues:
1) Why
did a women's movement in mid-19th century Northeast America take the form and
content described by Braude, and not the form and content of the women's
movement that we are familiar with from the past few decades?
2) Can we
properly see spiritualism as described by Braude as direct historical precursor
to the women's movement in the U.S. of the past few decades?
3) Only a small
minority of 17th century European Protestants became Calvinists, although many
or most could have done so. Only a
small minority of 19th century Americans got involved in spiritualism, although
many more could have done so.
These circumstances illustrate the core of the elective affinity issue: Why and how do some
people(and groups)and a particular creed come together at a specific time and
place in history?
9 NOVEMBER.
Religious change in the Modern U.S.; yet more on elective affinity
Topics:
1) Religious
complexity: of what does it
consist in the U.S.?
2) Religious
change: of what does it consist in
the U.S.?
Readings:
R. Stephen Warner.
"Work in progress toward a new paradigm for the sociological study
of religion in the United States."
Discussion issues:
1) Many say
that Warner, in the paper we are reading this week, is intellectually indebted
to Weber. Give some thought to the
relationship of his pluralism/market model for religious complexity and change
in the Modern U.S. to Weber's elective affinity model. Is Warner rephrasing and amplifying the
elective affinity model for application to a type of situation that Weber did
not treat? Or has Warner developed
a different kind of model for religious change? Or......?
2) What does
'religious freedom,' mean, culturally, to Warner in the modern situation?
3)
Constitutionally, 'religious freedom' in the U.S means that no religion(s) can be
established by the state. What are
the implications of this disestablishment provision of the constitution for the
pattern of cultural religious freedom that Warner depicts?
Report: The old
and the new paradigms
16 NOVEMBER.
Buzz group exercise.
Although the
seminar has not been flogging industrial strength theory, in fact our materials
have provided a substantial introduction to two different theoretically
grounded inquiry agendas in the anthropological and sociological study of
religion, each of which is important and widely adopted in these
disciplines. The first of these is
reductionist(please see 'terms and concepts' handout), and is exemplified by the work of
Obeyesekere. For the specific
instances of religiousness that Obeyesekere wishes to understand - e.g.,
Somavatis' possession episodes and their sequalae, the devotional practices of
the matted hair ascetics and Tuan the hook hanger - Obeyesekere adopts a
biographical approach heavily flavored by personality psychology. He asks, in effect, what was it in the
earlier life experiences of these religiosos the enduring psychological
consequences of which 'fit' so well with their observed later-in-life religiousness? And, for Obeyesekere, it is this biographically
understood 'fit' which at once explains the compelling motivational
significance of the religious usage to the religioso and the psychological
functions served for the religioso by enacting the the usage. The second of these is non-reductionist(please
see 'terms and concepts' handout), and is exemplified by the work of Weber and
Braude. The approach here is
largely social historical, and aims first at understanding why certain
groups(e.g., some 17th century Protestants, 19th century American women)and
certain faiths(e.g., Calvinism, spiritualism)mutually embrace and, second, at
understanding the ways in which the lives of the newly faithful are configured
by the embrace.
The following
questions are posed for the buzz groups:
A) These approaches
differ. do they disagree? If so, how so? B) Alternately, is it possible that they are, in whole or in
part, complementary? A good way to
come at this one is to ask, if the specific approach in fact succeeds(i.e., if
we grant its explanatory or interpretive claims), what specific questions about
religiousness does it answer?
23 NOVEMBER.
Meetings with field research groups.
There will be
no seminar meeting this week.
Instead, each field research group(please see section VII of the
syllabus)will have an appointment with yours truly to review its findings and
plan the final field report. If
convenient, I can meet with some of the groups during our scheduled seminar
time on Wednesday. I can meet with
them earlier in the week. And, if
any of the groups are ready and disposed to do so earlier in the semester, we
can meet before this week.
30 NOVEMBER.
Wrap up
Our seminar
meeting this week will be devoted to reviewing major emphases of the course,
and discussing the essay assignments.
VI) ESSAYS
For each of
the seven essay topics, below, members of the seminar are asked to compose a
brief essay, about two and a half to three double spaced pages. Further........
Final drafts of all essays are due on the last day of the
exam period. First drafts of the
essays are due according to the following schedule: (1) and (2) on 28 September; (3) and (4) on 14 November; the remainder on 5
December. Immediately following
submission of your draft essays, each of you and I will have a scheduled
meeting to discuss the drafts, toward revision for the final draft.
With the approval of yours truly, students may prepare
essays in small groups and submit collective essays. Same grade for all students in the group. If you are going to do this, the group
must work together on both the first and final drafts of the essays.
1) "Bruner's 'narrative mode of
thought' pertains pare excellence to the religious dimension of human
experience." Please discuss
and evaluate.
2)
"Religiousness can be a tool for personal
reconstruction." You are
asked to show how this works with reference to two of the case studies that we
have consulted.
3) "A
change in religious affiliation or orientation can, for a group, be a means for
social betterment." Please
illustrate this process, and say something about how it works, with case
material drawn from two of the following authors: Weber, Braude, Warner.
4) Obeyesekere
depicts the psychologically and socially transformative effects of ritual upon
the individual, and so does Katz.
Please compare and contrast their respective approaches to this
issue. For each author, please
attend especially to how and why, in their respective views, ritual has such transformative effects.
5) Each of us
is specifically cultural, according to the cultural environment in which we
have grown up. Thus, the majority
of Swarthmore students and faculty members are clearly middle class Americans
and not, e.g., Thai or Sinhalese villagers or !Kung Bushmen or 17th century
Calvinists. On the other hand,
each of us has individuality, which consists significantly of the selective and
creative ways we relate to and use our shared cultural heritage. You are asked to elucidate this
juxtaposition between cultural determinism and individual creativity or agency
by reference to two of the case studies that we have consulted. From this, what can you say about the
potential and limitations of freedom in the human career?
6)
'Religiousness' directs our attention to the individual, and his or her
experience of religion.
Obeyesekere, Nelson, Weber, Martin, Braude, and Katz is each concerned,
inter alia, with individual religious experience and what it consists of. The guiding definition of religion for
this seminar features experienced association with anthropomorphized suprahuman
beings. For any two of these
authors, you are asked to show how reference to anthropomorphized suprahuman
beings figures in their treatments of religious experience.
7) You are
asked to make up a question which frames an important issue treated by the
seminar or suggested to you by the seminar, and to answer it.
VII) FIELD WORK
PROJECT
Our seminar
illustrates that religiousness is enormously variable - cross culturally, intra
culturally, and within the life span of an individual. Indeed, this variability is one of the
most striking and important aspects of religiousness as a vital part of the
human story.
the purpose of
the field work project is to enable you to observe religious variability first
hand and in an organized and focused manner. One good way to do this is to adopt a comparative research
design, which calls upon you to observe two instances of religiousness,
selected to highlight some aspect of religious variability which we know to be
important.
Religious
variability within the life span of the individual is one such aspect. How to observe it? Right now, you don't have the several
years that would be required to follow individuals from one stage of life to
another(although, as part of the research component of an anthropology career,
this is definitely possible). In
lieu of this, though, you can compare suitably matched samples of people, e.g.,
members of the same religious faith and approximately the same station in life
at different stages of the life cycle, e.g., members of the Swarthmore
Protestant student group Caritas and members of one of the Protestant
churches(Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian)in Swarthmore.
For most
religious Americans, regular attendance at weekly services for worship is an
important part of their religiousness.
This, plus the fact that some such services for worship re close at hand
and scheduled and open to the public, make them a good choice for field
research sites for us.
The seminar
will be divided into small field research groups, each of which will attend
services for worship at aq local church or temple of synagogue, and will also
attend services for worship with the matched Swarthmore student religious
group(Caritas, Ruach, Newman Club).
This will eventuate in the production, by each research group, of field
reports to be submitted at the end of the semester, which reports will describe
the similarities and differences, re religiousness, of middle class American
college students and adults, respectively.
What this will
require of you:
1) Preparation in seminar, week of 21 September, with brief
supporting readings. No other
assigned work this week.
2) Attendance
at one on campus and one off campus service for worship. Each attendance will be preceded by a
brief research group huddle, to work out an observational division of labor;
and followed by another brief
research group huddle to finalize and collate field notes.
3) Research
group meetings with yours truly week of 23 November(or sooner), to present
findings and plan the final report.
This will be preceded by a research group huddle, during which the group
will organize how it is going to present its findings to yours truly.
4) Preparation
of final field research report, due the last day of exam period. 8-10 pages.
Trinity Episcopal Church. Chester Road and College Avenue
Swarthmore Methodist Church. 100 block of Park Avenue, next to borough hall, about a
block or so from the train station in the ville
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church. 727 Harvard Avenue, one hundred yards beyond the red barn on
the way to ML
Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church. 21 Franklin Avenue, Morton. About one and a half miles and one train stop removed
Notre Dame Church.
Fairview Ave, Ridley Park.
About one mile from campus
Congregation Ohev Shalom. 2 Chester Road, Wallingford. About a mile and a half from campus
VIII) Terms and Concepts for the Seminar
1) Culture.
Anthropologists use the term 'culture' in(at least)the two following ways:
A) General and
evolutionarily. Culture is the mode of adaptation of the human species. All
human groups, now and in the past, are fully cultural. A cultural mode of
adaptation features, e.g., language, technology and material culture, learned
and diversifiable social relationships, and belief systems. Necessary for all
of this is capacity for symbolization. In cross species perspective, it is
evident that culture in this sense is not an all or none thing. Many species -
extant and extinct - other than the human species are cultural in one way or
another and to significant extents.
B) Specific and
contemporary. A specific culture - e.g., Shinhalese, !Kung, Thai, Navajo - is
the lifeway of a particular human group. Human cultures are highly diverse.
Please N.B., this does not imply that a specific culture must be a neatly
bounded self contained entity; and, indeed, in the real world of human cultures
this condition virtually never obtains. i. Distinct cultures share traits. ii.
Cultural boundaries are permeable: both people and traits cross them. iii. Many
'named' cultures - e.g., American, Creek Indian - are actually historically
recent amalgams of several disparate cultures. iv. All cultures, by virtue of
the ubiquity of diffusion, adopt and adapt and incorporate exogenous culture traits.
v. An individual may have a multicultural identity.
2) Field
work(ethnography, participant observation)
Field work, or ethnography, is the main
empirical method for learning about local life, that is, natives in
naturalistic, everyday situations, how natives behave, what the situations mean
to natives, and how natives experience their lives. Usually, when anthropologists study culture(in the sense of
1,B, just above)empirically, the locus and focus of the study is local life,
e.g., the Thai rice village of about fifty households in which I lived did
field work for two years. The
ethnographer typically lives with the people he or she is learning about,
accommodates to their customs, tries to speak their language, and merges his or
her life in socially significant ways with the lives of the people being
studied. Participation is a main
means for learning. Ethnography is
not a single method. It can, and
typically does, involve, e.g., observing, listening, conversing, questioning or
interviewing, recording, and filming; and it may involve administration of
tests. An ethnographic study takes
a long time. The ethnographer may
well be there pretty much non-stop for a year, sometimes longer. And often the ethnographer will return,
sometimes more than once, for more extended field work. Ethnography is done mainly but not exclusively
by anthropologists, and has been going on in a sustained way around the world
for more than a century. Andy and
all aspects of local life - e.g., social relations, subsistence practices,
religiousness, family and kinship, violence, recreation, art, education,
politics, substance abuse, material culture, crime, healing practices - can be
studied ethnographically.
Ethnographically helps mightily in uncovering connections - especially
as experienced by natives - among different parts of natives' lives, thereby
enabling wholistic perspectives on local life. Many thousands of ethnolgraphic reports - e.g., books articles, monographs, films - have been
produced. These reports, in the
aggregate, comprise the ethnographic record. The ethnographic record contains the most extensive
documentation of the diversity of human lifeways available. But, of course, it treats only a tiny
fraction of human history and human experience.
Please N.B., the importance of
ethnography, or field work, as the empirical method par excellence of
anthropology for the study of culture entails that local life is the primary
object of study. This
distinguishes anthropology from other fields, e.g., cultural studies, which
largely takes culture as expressed in, e.g., texts or movies or media or music
or art as the primary object of study.
Although the word 'culture' is ubiquitous in the writings of both fields,
because of this fundamental difference in empirical focus and methodologies it
does not mean the same thing in the respective fields. The cultural studies folks seem
sometimes to be unaware of this.
3) Cultural relativism.
This expression has many uses. Here we note two of them.
A) World views - how
people think about and understand and experience the world, especially life as
we inescapably live it - are to a significant extent specific to cultures. This
is an empirical proposition. It is indisputably true(although the limits to the
proposition implied by '...to a significant extent...' are debated).
B) Because, inevitably,
we think about things in terms of the symbols and meanings embodied by our
cultures(A, just above), universal, cross culturally valid, timeless truth is
not possible. This is a philosophical issue. The empirical correctness of (A)
does not, on logical grounds, address this issue.
Taken in conjunction, (A)
and (B) can often, for anthropologists and others, be vexing. Thus, accepting
(A) as most anthropologists do, we are disposed to intend to respect cultural
practices and the natives who enact them, even if the practices are alien or
even obnoxious to us. But sometimes we find the practices - e.g., what the
Nazis did, female genital mutilation - to be so repugnant that we feel
obligated morally to condemn them. When this occurs, we often find ourselves
seeking a universally valid ethic to justify our moral condemnation.
Impressionistically, these efforts often have recourse to the device of 'self
evident truth' - either negatively, through the use of, e.g., the term 'evil;'
or positively, by, e.g., positing inalienable human rights.
4) Emic and Etic. These
funny sounding paired terms refer to two different perspectives on the same
thing(e.g., a cultural practice), that of the insider(native)and of the
outsider(researcher, e.g., anthropologist). The terms come from descriptive
linguistics, where the 'same thing' is a speech sound. For any speech sound,
phonetics describes the sound in physical terms. Only a trained linguist can do
phonetics. A native speaker can't begin to do phonetics with his or her own
speech, and the linguist's phonetic representation of speech would be
incomprehensible to a native speaker(unless the native speaker were also a
trained linguist). Phonemics, on the other hand, treats what makes the
sound(s)uniquely meaningful to native speakers. Whereas phonetics has nothing
to do with the speaker's understanding of his or her own speech, phonemics is
grounded expressly in the speaker's understanding of what his or her speech
means, it embodies the speaker's perspective on his or her own speech.
Analogously, think of the
Somavati case presented for us by the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere. The
emic, the native perspective on her situation says she is possessed, and should
be responded to accordingly. An etic perspective on the same thing, which would
be sensible to us and is developed by Obeyesekere, is grounded in the field of
anthropology which arose and developed in the West, and whose development
partook not at all of Sinhalese culture.
Further: a) For, e.g.,
the Somavati case, the emic and etic perspectives certainly disagree. Which(if
either)is correct? Almost always, for the anthropologist, this is not a useful
question, we shouldn't waste time on it. Thus, I expect that most
anthropologists(including Obeyesekere)don't believe in the existence of ghosts
and demons. But it's not part of our calling as anthropologists to treat native
beliefs(and practices rationalized by them)as empirical propositions to be
tested according to the procedures and criteria of Western science. Rather,
it's out job, first, fully and accurately and contextually to describe the
usages which are important in the lives of the natives we are learning about;
and, second, to try to figure out why, in the context of these lives, these
usages are compellingly sensible to natives. b) It is increasingly commonplace,
as literacy overtakes even remote parts of the third world, for natives to read
studies of them produced by outsiders. Often, these studies contain etic
perspectives on native life and culture. Sometimes native readers criticize
these etic perspectives on the grounds that, as natives, they know the
significance of the usages of their own culture; and if their native knowledge
disagrees with the outsider's knowledge, then the outsider is ipso facto wrong.
What about this? The point to remember is this: emic and etic are disjunctive
frames of reference. The validity of an etic perspective is properly judged in
terms of the frame of reference which generates it. Of course, if we don't
think a frame of reference is worthwhile, then we won't be interested in any of
the perspectives it generates.. Thus, modern chemists don't have much time for
anything that comes from alchemy. c) Much of anthropology addresses the
meaningfulness to natives of local life. If we wish to interpret this etically,
as does Obeyesekere, it is imperative that we first learn and describe the emic
perpsective, as does Obeyesekere. In other words, the emic perspective - e.g.,
Somavati's experience of her possession episode and its sequalae - is
Obeyesekere's empirical object of analysis. If he doesn't have this in proper
focus, he can't get anywhere, no matter how worthwhile his etic interpretive frame
of reference may be.
5) Native. We are all
natives. We differ one from another according to what culture(s) and/or sub
cultures we are natives of.