In this chapter students will learn:

• about the field of cultural anthropology
• about the concept of culture
• how cultural anthropology is situated within the larger discipline of anthropology
• that food and sustainability are essential topics within cultural anthropology
• about using frameworks to study culture
• a brief history of anthropological thought
• how cultural anthropology is relevant today

Introduction: The Lens of Cultural Anthropology

Cultural anthropology focuses on living cultures, emphasizing the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, behaviors, and products of human societies. Cultural anthropologists undertake fieldwork in order to understand others, placing themselves in the midst of their study population. This process is called doing ethnography, or living among groups of people and learning about human culture.

The Culture Concept

Although there are many slightly different definitions of culture, all definitions emphasize the understandings that people share as members of a community.

The Field of Anthropology

The discipline of anthropology includes four fields of research: cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology. Each has an applied component, meaning that anthropological skills and understandings may be used to solve problems in a practical way. The field of cultural anthropology may be further divided into many subfields, each with a particular focus. This textbook has a special emphasis on the two subfields of food and sustainability studies.

Frameworks

A framework (or theory) is a set of ideas that is used to guide research questions and interests. Anthropologists may use different frameworks, which means they approach cultural issues in various ways. This book tends toward a biocultural perspective, emphasizing the connections between human biological needs, environmental constraints, and culture.

A Brief History of Anthropological Thought

Early explorers and philosophers laid the foundation for later anthropological thinking. Unfortunately, much of this early thought was racist and misguided. American anthropology began with Franz Boas’s emphasis on fieldwork, which required an anthropologist to live among the people with whom they were working. Many social scientists around the world contributed to anthropological frameworks in different ways, including African American thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois.

Anthrpology and Colonialism

The field of anthropology has a deeply colonial past, in which exploitation of Native peoples was common. Today, the relationship between anthropologists and Indigenous peoples is more supportive and collaborative.

The Importance of Anthropology Today

Cultural anthropology is important today because we live in a diverse world in which the distance between people, whether virtual or geographical, seems to be very small. Moreover, the concepts and tools of cultural anthropology can lead to an inclusive perspective that will support whatever career a person decides to pursue.

1. What are the four academic fields of anthropology?

2. What is the focus of cultural anthropology?

3. Why are issues of food and sustainability important in cultural anthropology?

4. What is a framework?

5. How does the history of anthropological thought provided show larger changes in how people think about culture?

6. What are some of the criticisms of anthropology by African American and Indigenous scholars?

1. Provide an example of how an item that you own illustrates the three components of culture: how do people think about it (what does it mean), what do people do with it, and why do people have it?

2. If you were to choose a subfield of cultural anthropology to study, which would you choose and why?

3. What frameworks do you use to make sense of the world?

4. What kinds of careers might welcome a degree in cultural anthropology in addition to the ones listed here?

agency (page 4): the capacity of people to think for themselves and control their life choices

class consciousness (page 13): the awareness of one’s social rank within a system

diasporic (page 5): spread to different parts of the world, especially used in reference to ethnic or cultural groups

foodways (page 8): the methods, knowledge, and practices regarding food in a particular society

Franz Boas (page 14): a pioneering American anthropologist, called the “father of American anthropology”; a proponent of cultural relativism and doing fieldwork

informants (page 4): study subjects of an anthropologist; also referred to variously as collaborators, field subjects, or associates

lifeways (page 10): ways of living; customs and practices

Others (page 4): a view of a person or category of people as different from, and therefore less than, one’s self; also used as a verb, “to Other a group of people”

Red Power Movement (page 19): a social movement in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States in which Indigenous youth organized for political action

social capital (page 16): resources that have value within a particular social group in which exchanges are bound by reciprocity and trust

subsistence (page 9): food procurement; basic food needs for survival

typology (page 13): classification scheme; categorization of types

American Anthropological Association (AAA)
www.americananthro.org

AAA Teaching Materials Exchange
www.americananthro.org

Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA)
www.cas-sca.ca

Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges (SACC) Teaching Resources
www.americananthro.org

Open School of Ethnography and Anthropology (OSEA) Community Institute for Transcultural Exchange
www.osea-cite.org

Anthrodendum (group blog with 70+ contributing authors)
www.anthrodendum.org

Living Anthropologically (blog by Jason Antrosio, Hartwick College)
www.livinganthropologically.com

Erickson, P., & Murphy, L. (2016). A history of anthropological theory (5th ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Harrison, I., & Harrison, F. (1998). African-American pioneers in anthropology. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Ingold, T. (2018). Anthropology: Why it matters. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Engelke, M. (2019). How to think like an anthropologist. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

A Sample of Classic Contemporary Ethnographies

Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bourgois, P., & Schonberg, J. (2009). Righteous dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fernea, E.W. (1995). Guests of the sheik: An ethnography of an Iraqi village. New York: Anchor.

Hamdy, S., & Nye, C. (2017). Lissa: A story about medical promise, friendship, and revolution. Art by Sarula Bao and Caroline Brewer; lettering by Marc Parenteau. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McCarthy Brown, K. (1991). Mama Lola: A vodou priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: UC Press.

Scheper-Hughes, N. (1993). Death without weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley: UC Press.

Shostak, M. (2000). Nisa: The life and words of a !Kung woman (4th ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Teaching Anthropology

Rice, P.C., & McCurdy, D.W. (2004). Strategies in teaching anthropology (3rd ed.) Upper Saddle River: Pearson/Prentice Hall. (All of the Strategies editions are excellent sources for teaching activities.)/p>

1. How does Seth Holmes’s experience with his Triqui study participants illustrate both the concepts and methods of cultural anthropology?

Your answer should focus both on the ways anthropologists think about ethnographic research and also on the ways that ethnographers do that research.

• Holmes is interested in the experiences of Triqui fieldworkers, and also the larger social and economic structures that provide context to understand their experience. He focuses on how structural violence reproduces health inequity and injustice.
• Ethnography requires that an anthropologist understand the daily lives of their study participants through fieldwork. Fieldwork focuses on qualitative, not quantitative information. In this case, Holmes not only talks to the fieldworkers who are part of his study, but he also lives with them, works in the fields alongside them, and crosses the border with them. These experiences allow him to gain a sense of their experience in a physical, or embodied, way.

See pages 1-3 of your text.

2. What do all of the definitions of culture on page 5 of your text have in common? Can you explain the important aspects of the concept of culture in your own words?

Your answer should focus on aspects of the definitions that are repeated in more than one case. It should demonstrate an understanding of the concepts that are expressed and not simply focus on the words.

• The definitions of culture share the idea that culture involves patterns of behavior.
• They share the idea that culture is learned or acquired and not biologically inherited.
• The definitions show a holistic or integrated notion of culture, in which all aspects of life that guide behavior are included.

See page 5 of your text.

3. Choose a habit, such as smoking, and use a biocultural framework to identify some of the important questions that you would want to find out as a researcher?

Your answer should address both the biological aspects of smoking, such as the harm that smoking causes to the body, and the wider cultural context within which people smoke. You would want to examine the who, what, where, when, and why of smoking and how these practices connect with a person’s physiological responses and knowledge that smoking is unhealthy. Some of those questions may include:

• Who produces cigarettes, e-cigs, or other smoking products, and to whom are these products marketed?
• How are products distributed to users, and how do users feel about the experience of purchasing these products?
• How does the community (or different subsets of the community) accept or reject the practice or the people who practice it?
• What bodily responses do people have while smoking or after having smoked for a long period of time?
• What is the local concept of addiction and how do people experience it?

See page 11 of your text.

4. What relationship did early North American anthropologists have with Indigenous peoples? Has this changed over time?

Your answer should include details explaining the significant shift (from exploitative to collaborative) that has taken place over time.

• Europeans were interested in cultural diversity around the world, and contact with the Indigenous peoples in North America acted as a catalyst for the formation of anthropology as a formal discipline and early theories.
• Colonial practices and perspectives led to rapidly changing and disappearing Indigenous traditions and lifeways, which early anthropologists wanted to record and document.
• However, this kind of collecting (with millions of objects, including human skeletons, ending up in museums) was exploitative, as it was often unpaid or occurred without full consent of Indigenous peoples.
• Thus, Indigenous peoples were viewed more as objects to study and catalogue (as critiqued by Indigenous author Vine Deloria, Jr., for example).
• For much of anthropology’s history, its practitioners have mostly been white males, with little diversity. Lately there has been a shift to more diversity, and the field now also includes Indigenous anthropologists.
• Today, research conducted on Indigenous issues is likely to relate to cultural appropriation, stereotyping, and similar matters, and to require the express consent of participants.
• Anthropologists are also expected to give back to the communities that they study.

See pages 18-19 of your text.

5. What are some of the key events in the history of cultural anthropology as a discipline? Who are some of the key figures in the creation of cultural anthropology?

Answers should demonstrate an understanding of the general chronology of events and the people listed below.

• Fray (Father) Bernardino de Sahagún’s ethnography covering 50 years of Aztec life.
• John Locke’s ideas about a tabula rasa.
• Marx’s and Engels’s theories about the relationship between labor and consciousness, and class consciousness.
• Lewis Henry Morgan’s development of the unilinear theory of cultural evolution.
• Franz Boas’s notions of cultural relativism, historical particularism, and the four-field approach (including perhaps his role as supervisor to Margaret Mead, one of the first female anthropologists).
• Claude Levi-Strauss’s ideas about the structures of the mind.
• Bronisław Malinowski’s concept of functionalism.
• Victor Turner’s development of the theory of functionalism.
• What Clifford Geertz meant by “thick description.”
• The rise of feminist and postcolonial anthropology.
• The use of reflexivity in ethnography and prioritizing the understanding of how power shapes cultural behavior.

See pages 12-16 of your text.