Perceiving Cultural Differences AT2508

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Perceiving Cultural DifferencesAT2508

• Lectures at 3 pm
• Mondays - here (NK6)
• Tuesdays - Fraser Noble (FN3)
• Tutorials Sign up via the school website
• Dr. Alex King (a.king, x2732, EWG19)
• SS School Office EWF49-50

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Perceiving Cultural DifferencesAT2508

• Two class representatives

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Course Requirements

• Lectures - attend, pay attention, take notes
• Reading - required 1 or 2 supplemental
• (take notes)
• Tutorials - attend all (marked)
• Kinship diagram
• 1 presentation on supplemental reading
• Rough draft of first paper (wk of 12 March)
• Assignments
• Essay 1 due 19 March
• Essay 2 due 7 May
• Final Exam

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Readings

• Reader packet for sale in front of the School of
  Social Science office for 6.00
• American Kinship by David Schneider in Blackwells
  (39 copies)
• We Lie, They Lie by Peter Metcalf in Blackwells
  (32)
• Supplemental readings (many on 3-day loan in
  QML)- required for tutorial presentation

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Tutorials - 10 of final mark

• Discuss the required reading
• Presentations from supplemental reading
• Something not on the brochure list should be
  approved by the tutor first
• 5 minutes summary of the main ideas from the
  article, discussion of its relevance to the
  required reading, two discussion questions for
  the tutorial class to consider
• Kinship diagrams
• Prepare beforehand for presentation to rest of
  tutorial
• Marked as tutorial participation mark
• Editing rough draft in March
• Must pass tutorial mark in order to pass class or
  resit exam

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Assignments - 30 of final mark

• Two Written essays
• 2000 words
• Essay topics in course brochure
• Must bring rough draft to tutorial week 7 (March
  12)
• Must submit electronic copy to TurnItIn
• Due 19 March
• Due 7 May
• TurnItIn class info
• Name AT2508_06_Cultural-Differences
• join password Boas
• ID 27060

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Final Examination

• 60 of final mark
• Previous examinations available from QML website,
  search for AT2002, years 2004-05 and 2003-04
• Questions will be drawn from the tutorial
  discussion questions and the written essay topics
• 3 questions in 2 hours

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Perceiving Cultural Differences

• Brochure available in school office, take to
  tutorial
• Perception and culture are best understood
  through the analysis of symbols/metaphors
• Relatedness and kinship, gender
• Language and culture
• Habits of thought perception
• museums and history
• structuralism, myth, oral narratives
• colonialism, categorisation, power, representation

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Seattle
Aberdeen
Kamchatka
Germany
Virginia
http//www.abdn.ac.uk/anthropology/ak.shtml http/
/www.koryaks.net/
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Russia Map
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Okrug Map
Okrug map
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Culture

• Symbol system with a loose coherence
• Although not a hermetically sealed, perfectly
  integrated system, it has a sort of natural
  logic, things make sense
• Hybrid but not a mish-mash
• Shared
• Culture not limited to insides of peoples heads
• Learned, Accessible to outsiders
• Not bounded in a sharp way, a style which tapers
  off around the edges, blending in with
  neighboring cultures
• Constitutes a way of being in the world and a way
  of understanding the world
• Culture provides people with common sense
• Unconscious epistemologies

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• culture is the term we use to refer to this
  totality of being human
• a culture refers to a specific historical and
  geographical tradition, special case in the
  phenomenon of humanity
• The term 'culture,' in its broadest sense,
  attempts to bring peoples actions and meanings
  down to the most basic level of significance, to
  examine them in universal terms in an attempt to
  understand them.

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• The anthropologists uses his own culture to study
  others, and to study culture in general.
• Absolute objectivity must be given up in favor of
  a relative objectivity based on the
  characteristics of one's own culture.
• Relative objectivity is understanding ones own
  viewpoint and how that reflects the object of
  study.
• Perceiving cultural differences is about learning
  how to see reflections in reflections, where each
  mirror has its own hue and topography

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• cultural relativity is the assumption that every
  culture is just as good as any other.
• the understanding of another culture involves the
  relationship between two varieties of the human
  phenomenon.
• The anthropologist experiences the subject of his
  study, another culture, through the world of his
  own meanings, from inside his own culture.
• So how much experience with the foreign tribe is
  necessary? Must I be adopted, become Koryak? Need
  I only view a few photos, some maps, and
  interview a few Koryaks in St. Petersburg?

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• The quantitative researcher needs an adequate
  sample. The anthropologist is committed to a
  thoroughness based on the depth and
  comprehensiveness of his insight into the subject
  culture.
• The subject culture is as much a separate world
  of thought and action as the anthropologists
  own.
• In the course of fieldwork the anthropologist
  becomes the link between two cultures through her
  living in both of them.
• The anthropologist comes to see her own culture
  only by looking at another one. The two are
  visible only as they are incongruous,
  contradicting one another.

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Interpretation

• Interpretation of cultures is not translation so
  much as analogy.
• The study of culture is culture.
• An open-ended experience of mutual creativity or
  a forcing of our own preconceptions onto other
  peoples.

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Semiotic analysis of symbolic structures
referent
interpretant
representamen
Three component of the semiotic sign according to
Peirce
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sign/ representamen
referent
interpretant

• Sign or representamen is the physical
  manifestation of symbol in time and space
• Sounds, pictures, gestures
• Referent is what the sign refers to
• Interpretant is the person involved
• Meaning is the sum of all three

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Symbols - dominant, core, key(really important
symbols)

• (1) The natives tell us that X is culturally
  important.
• (2) The natives seem positively or negatively
  aroused about X, not indifferent.
• (3) X comes up in many different contexts myth,
  ritual, art, formal rhetoric, etc.
• (4) There is a greater cultural elaboration
  surrounding X.
• (5) There are greater cultural restrictions
  surrounding X, many rules or severe sanctions
  regarding its misuse.

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Perceiving Cultural DifferencesAT2508

• Two class representatives, please.