Category Archives: ANTH500

09/29/13

Why read outdated and outmoded writing?

Contemporary anthropology has leapt ahead of our predecessors. We all know this (even if we don’t always know how it happened). We have a self-assured sense of the present, a fascination for innovation, for the glitter of new and improved ideas, approaches, and a youthful disdain for all things ancient and old fashioned. One needs merely look to the titles of articles in leading disciplinary journals and publishing houses to see the presentist concerns of our discipline. So why look back to work long since passed its best before date?

I suppose one could say it is good for you. Though that sort of reply doesn’t really convince. It’s medicinal and prescriptive. Of course I do believe it is good for you (and me) to pick up these old pieces of writing and turn them around in your mind’s eye.

I could say trust me you’ll like it. Clearly I do think that you should extend your trust to my good judgment. But like “it’s good for you,” accepting on blind faith still doesn’t bring you into the passion and excitement of the reading that I think lies waiting for you.

Of course there is also the coercive element. In a class the professor sets the reading list. Thus you are, by one means or anther, compelled to read the items prescribed. This may well be the ultimate factor making us read these items. Ultimately this is the worst reason to read something, even if it’s the real reason one is doing the reading.

I do think there are great reasons to read old stuff. We learn about the foundations of our discipline. We see early formulations of ideas that still resonate in our world and work. We get a chance to see different forms of professional writing. Even more importantly we can get critical insight into work that we are actively engaged in. Let try this out by exploring a really old piece of writing.

Let’s take a closer look at Franz Boas’ “The Growth of Indian Mythologies.”

Before we being allow me a note of self-referential context. The first time I read this paper I was a graduate student taking a course on the History of Anthropological Theory at the City University of New York. Eric Wolf was teaching the course. That was my first exposure to the works of Boas and, while I was familiar with the personage, I had a rather poor grasp of the corpus of his work. At that point in time I was intrigued by Boas’ conceptual notion of history; a sense of history seemingly disconnected from any specific date-based sense of time. This would make some sense as Wolf himself was very much about understanding human culture and society in the flow of historical processes. Wolf also saw culture as in a very real sense a system of ideas linked to what he called structural power (we’ll take more about his idea’s of culture later in our course).

Say what contemporary critics might say about Boas, but he was undeniable a thorough and meticulous scholar. Whereas it is standard form in the contemporary academy to willfully overlook contrary perspectives (or to disregard them out of hand with brief asides), Boas dealt with differing perspectives directly and clearly. He was interested, I think it fair to say, in considering all possible explanations in the search for the one most apt for the situation or the particular problem. You will note, for example, that Boas considers competing ideas, such as independent emergence of similar ideas/stories, the role of psychology in sharing human thought, or the common underlying structure of the mind in creating similar outcomes given similar environments, as he advances his own case for the role of dissemination in creating common cultural attributes among disparate peoples.

One further point – acculturation. Most of us will likely be familiar with the discredited side of this term: the idea of acculturating a minority or colonized group into a mainstream culture. That’s not how Boas is using the term. For him it’s about sharing and adopting cultural traits from other cultures and making them one’s own.

Boas’ scheme posits an area of highest development of a particular myth and then, as one moves further from that center, a gradual diminution in number of myths the distant group has in common with the area of high development. One can trace a dwindling down of an elaborate cycle of myths to mere adventures of incidents. Boas is careful to make clear that this is a multi-directional process.

Boas gives us an example in the Raven stories. We should note that he provides no details in this paper but he does have several volumes of published materials elsewhere on the Tsimshian and other First Nations that this short paper draws from. Tracing southward from the core area of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian Boas notes diminishment of the number of myths.

  • Northern Vancouver Island: 18 myths
  • Comox (east coast of Van. Is.): 8 myths
  • Nootka (Nuuchulnuth, west coast of Van. Is.): 6 myths
  • Coast Salish: 3 myths.

Geographical proximity is important, but not the only factor. In general, the further apart a group is, the fewer the number of shared elements. However, there are two situations where proximity doesn’t fully explain either a lack of similarities or the presence of similarities.

These are:

  • Relocations/shifts in location
  • Trade routes

Relocations At times tales common to a territory stop short at a certain point and then exist only in fragments beyond that point. Boas suggests a lack of acculturation due to:

  • Difference in character
  • Hostilities
  • Changes in groups location

Boas suggests that relocation is the most probable cause. He provides the Nuuxalk (Bella Coola) as an example. This is a Salish group who share more cultural traits with the southern coastal Salish then with the more proximate neighbours. This suggests, to Boas a more recent arrival or relocation and thus the Nuuxalk retain a temporal proximity to the southern Salish even as they are no longer in close proximity to them.

Trade routes. Though Boas doesn’t give this a much attention in his paper it is an aspect that jumps out to me.

Boas compares coastal groups with distant interior groups and notes a high number of common features is greater than might have been expected. Here’s the interesting thing – he brings forward the existence of three key trading routes: the Columbia, the Fraser, and the route into Bella Coola (he could also have spoken of the more northerly Skeena River).

Along these trade routes the similarities in myths are strongest, diminishing as one increases the distance from the trade routes. Thus, Boas concludes, the myths followed the lines of trade and travel!

Let me summarize the key points as I see them in Boas’ article.

  • The similarities in myths are more likely due to dissemination than to independent origins.
  • Boas also critiques the idea that myths are simply a ‘primitive’ attempt to explain phenomena of nature. The myths and their shared features are too complex to be simple attempts of explanations of nature.
  • Boas also critiques the idea that commonalities are a product of the idea that the human mind creates similar products under similar environmental conditions, that is, culture arises from abstract structures of the mind.
  • Discontinuities of myths in groups in close proximity and similarities between those far apart can be explained in terms of human movements across the landscape. In the first by the movement of a new group into an area, the second by the flow of commerce.

In my work I am called upon to prepare “expert opinions” that pertain to matters of aboriginal rights and title. The specific questions I am asked to consider may vary, but the general structure is similar and has been determined in the context of a history of jurisprudence. I am often asked to consider whether a particular practice predated European contact, did this practice survive contact, and does it persist in some form to the present. All manner of data needs to be considered in the formulation of my opinion. I have often found myself consulting early ethnographic accounts, published and unpublished materials. This is partly as a result of the legal requirement to find early accounts. I also conduct interviews with contemporary memory holders when that is useful and possible. However, in some communities the early ethnographies and historical documents are more useful than current memory. The early disruptions – disease, economic and political dislocations- have in many places broken the connections between the present and the past. Fortunately though, this is not the case everywhere and one finds many communities with current knowledge holders who are the authoritative source.

This piece by Boas offers a useful and important approach to these very contemporary issues. First, his detailed monographs (upon which he based this short paper) provide significant data about the societies in questions. One of my cousins, for example, gets quite exasperated with university-styled research sensitivities and constantly insists upon what is essentially an older Boasian style anthropology – get the information done she demands!

In this paper on the dissemination of histories and customs Boas lays down a way to conceptualize trade and exchange over long distances. This approach won’t provide the entire picture (elsewhere I lay out a foundation of what I believe is required to establish trade for economic benefit between Indigenous communities). However, this conceptual idea of the commonalities of myths and associated cultural practices following the lines of trade is a critical idea. This is an idea that is exciting to contemplate and explore; an idea that applies directly to very current and contemporary concerns within Indigenous communities.

Reading this old stuff is fun. It’s exciting. And, from the context of the work that I do it provides a new (ironic, no?!) vantage point to the problems and issues that I explore and write about in my work as a practicing anthropologist.

12/22/10

Community -an empty term

Community is an empty term used to mobilize, manipulate or persuade people to act in a way that overlooks real differences in power and authority.  It’s power as a rhetorical device lies in its very ambiguity.  Thus we all ‘belong’ to arbitrarily defined communities such as ethnicity, occupation, sexual orientation, or even hobby.  Some people self identify in multiple communities simultaneously.   Yet, what is community? Can we define it in concrete terms?  Is there a residential or geographical aspect to community?  Is there a common set of values or beliefs that under girds one’s community?  Can we accurately define the membership of a community?  The difficulty in clearly answering these questions is what allows us all to claim to membership in a community of one sort or another.  Thus, community becomes a social act or a process.  It is not a analytic unit with clear boundaries.

It is important to separate the use of ‘community’ as a political device or social act from its analytic use.  Individuals or groups may employ a self-concept of community.  However, as social analysts it is instructive to interrogate the concept of community analytically.  We should not simply assume its existence.

As an anthropologist I am intensely interested in how people understand and give meaning to their world.  I am also aware that these understandings are located within wider fields of power, history, and social processes.  While it is not my job to ‘reveal’ the invention or falsehood of community per se, it is important that both the constructed/ideological component and the material reality of the social world within which we live is fully understood.  This is especially important for those seeking to effect or manage change.  If, for example, notions of community are inaccurate descriptions of social reality what might we conclude about models of change that are based on a notion of community as a real entity or methodologies that assume without question that communities exist?  This leads to the following question:  how are different conceptions of community used, for what purpose, and by whom?

Some of the explanation might lie in the way that community has been used (‘operationalized’) in social science research.  Some, such as the conservative educational theorist Mark Holmes, invoke a notion of community that reverberates with nostalgia and loss (‘we live in an age of weakened community,’ a la Durkheim: see also, Talcott Parsons a 1950s Durkheimian social theorist).  Beyond this sort of rhetorical invocation an entire school of social research emerged in the US called ‘community studies.’  Here the assumption was that objectively identifiable social units, called communities, could be separated from their encapsulating society and studied by the researcher.  These communities, especially as studied by the ‘Chicago School of Sociologists’ were typically comprised of recent immigrants (Whyte’s Street Corner Society is the exemplar to consider) who carried with them the vestigial structures of ‘traditional’ society (read European peasant and/or ‘primitive’).  The hallmark of these early community studies is their ahistorical presentist tone.  They assume a homogenous unchanging community structure.  When change occurs it does so as the result of external forces acting upon the community.

The anthropologist Eric R. Wolf calls this a ‘billiard ball model of society’ in which each community, culture or society might be thought of as a separate billiard ball.  Change comes through the application of some external force (the pool cue) and the balls bounce off each other and the side of the table.  Yet, as Wolf reminds us, our social world is not as neat and organized as the Billiard table.  There are no pool cues adding force.  Each community, culture, or society is not a uniformly shaped ball.

As a concept community ultimately obscures reality.  It substitutes for social forces and process that are rooted in real and consequential power differences.  From a research or methodological point of view, community is one of those concepts that can not be identified, located, or even studied unless we resort to arbitrarily defined boundaries (i.e. by defining community as all the people whose children go to school x or live within the area bounded by streets a,b,c,and d).  Yet, in arbitrarily delimiting the notion of community we lose sight of the way in which social reality is actually organized.   In an important and fundamental way there is no ‘community’ to study or observe.  Nostalgic references to something that, in reality never really existed, will leave us always bemoaning the loss of community and prevent us from finding effective solutions to important social problems.   Employing a concept of community might help in shaping and motivating change, but it will not help us make sense of the processes of change themselves.

12/22/10

Reading Eric R. Wolf -Envisioning Power (1999)

Eric R. Wolf is one of those anthropologists that I believe every aspiring (and active) anthropologist should read and be familiar with.  Wolf’s academic career spanned the last half of the 20th century into the early 21st.   He was an approachable, detailed, and caring teacher.  He was a consummate academic with an encyclopedic approach to detail.  He was also a theorist on a grand scale.

This commentary focuses on the last book he published prior to his death: Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Power.    My focus is not a review or summary, but to highlight an approach to reading this text.  One of the things that I have discovered in teaching this and related books a propensity for readers to jump to criticism before they have achieved comprehension.  Wolf is particularly helpful as he provides guidance to his readers within his text.

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There are many ways to read a text.  We can read it for entertainment, for information, for self-growth and learning, to undermine it, or to assimilate it as our own.  We can also misread a text, miss the point, or find ourselves unable to read it. Rarely, of course, do we exclusively rely on only one way of reading a text.  It is more likely that we employ some combination of all of them.  Consider the following quotes:

“For clarity’s sake, I shall refer to this group (the four tribes of Kwakiutl who inhabited the village of Tsaxis adjacent to Fort Rupert) as Kwakiult or Tsaxis Kwakiutl, and to the Kwakwala speakers in general as Kwakwaka’wakw.  Expunging ‘Kwakiutl’ from the literature altogether seems counterproductive” (Wolf 1999:69).

“Human sacrifice was in many ways central to Aztec political and ritual life, and any discussion of that life must come to grips with this phenomenon.  In engaging this issue, I intend neither to denigrate the Aztecs in order to justify their conquest by the Spaniards nor to defend them against accusations of cruelty and inhumanity. . . .  The anthropologist’s task should be neither to exalt nor to condone but to explain” (Wolf 1999:133-134).

“What the National Socialists wrought is, without doubt, a cause of moral outrage, but outrage is not enough.  It is vital that we gain an analytic purchase on what transpired, precisely because it embodied a possibility for humankind, and what was once humanly possible can happen again”  (Wolf 1999:197).

Each of the above quotes instructs you, the reader, on how to read the substantive material that follows in each of the case study chapters.  Eric Wolf recognizes that there are issues and debates that are important in each of these respective domains.  He affirms the concerns of contemporary Kwakwaka’wakw, he notes the controversy over Aztec cannibalism, and the moral outrage one should feel concerning the human genocide of the Nazis.  But, and this is important, he then asks the reader to set aside concern with these issues and instead to focus on the connections between power and ideas.

We could, for example, focus on the structure of Wolf as ‘text.’ We could highlight his use of an omniscient, authoritative voice –the voice of the expert.  We could micro analyze his source material to ferret out errors, misconceptions, oversights, or slips of minor fact or detail.  We might even identify his underlying assumptions or axiomatic principles, declare them flawed, and proceed to discount all that follows.  While this is all fair game in the contentious halls of the academe it will ultimately turn us away from the task at hand: that is, to identify the key points that the author asks us to understand.

So then what can we say about Wolf’s key points, his main concern?  What kernel of truth lies within his discussion of Kwakwaka’wakw, their understanding of the cosmos, and their social organization?

First, it is important to hold in one’s mind the following comments:

  • “. . . we must not fall into the trap of thinking of them as bearers of some primordial culture, frozen in a moment outside ordinary time” (Wolf 1999:74).
  • “To think of Kwakiutl as bearers of a changeless cultural pattern is particularly inappropriate, since their existential conditions have changed in major ways since the times of first contact on the coast in 1774, when a Spanish ship encountered Haida” (Wolf 1999:74).
  • “If Kwakwaka’wakw society and culture have varied over the course of historical time and have also shown the internal variability due to social differentiation at any one time, then it has also become less easy to speak of one cultural personality (Wolf 1999:81)

Here Wolf is reminding us that no people, no culture, no society exists either in isolation from other societies or in a static unchanging form.   By recognizing and affirming the reality of social change through time Wolf is according a form of respect to the Kwakwaka’wakw that social commentators from Boas to Levis-Straus failed to extend (see, Wolf 1999:74-81).  This is important both in terms of an implicit critique of much contemporary scholarship and as an important foundation to Wolf’s analysis later in the chapter.

Wolf also discusses two aspects of the data collected:  it’s reliance upon the chiefly class and its minimalist approach to women:

  • “Since controlling and enacting myths and rituals were largely the prerogatives of chiefs and nobles, what these texts reveal to us is primarily the discourse of chiefs and nobility, and to a minimal degree the doings of commoners”  (Wolf 1999:73).   It is important to point out, as Wolf does, that this lack was not due to neglect but rather it was due “to the difficulty of obtaining information on commoners.  When Boas urged Hunt to collect data on the names and rights of common people, because ‘they are just as important as those of people of high blood,’  Hunt replied that this was ‘hard to get for they shame to talk about themselves’”(Wolf 1999:73).
  • “The texts are also minimally informative about the lives of Kwakiutl women. . . . these texts note gender differentiation in activities but leave them unexplored. . . . But what women did and thought was not explored in their own terms, and their informal roles received no attention” (Wolf 1999:73).

One could also add to this a silence on the participation of Kwakwaka’wakw in the growing industrial economy.  Though glimpses of this life can be found in the archives of the colonial state.  Later historical anthropologists, such as Rolf Knight, have sketched out in more detail the involvement of indigenous people in the industrial economy, but for the most part this is an area that has been ignored.  The fact that Wolf attempts to place the Kwakwaka’wakw into history and explores their active participation, resistance, and  accommodation to a new economic order sets Wolf’s work apart from all but a small fraternity of social commentators.