As an area of social science, cultural anthropology also seeks patterns of behavior, placing people’s thoughts and action within a larger context

(González, “Ch 1,” p. 3)

What Is Anthropology?

Method

• Fieldwork: period of research, immersion
• Ethnography: the process of doing and analyzing fieldwork
• Ethnography: the product that the fieldwork leads to, i.e. book, essay, film, dissertation
• (González, “Ch 1,” p. 3)

Deep roots in colonial practices in which knowledge about traditional peoples has been used to stereotype, control and oppress them; ideas about racial divisions and ‘savage’ peoples; racism
(González, “Ch 1,” p. 12)

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) question the racist idea of African inferiority; PhD from Harvard and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); heard a lecture by Franz Boas in 1906; concerned about the lack of knowledge about the American Black experience
(González, “Ch 1,” p. 16)

Anthropologists also often support, collaborate, advocate and empower (González, “Ch 1,” p. 4)

“People have agency, meaning that they make their own decisions and interact with established social institutions in ways that demonstrate power over their destinies. Culture is dynamic, taking advantage of the possibilities that exist.”
(González, “Ch 1,” p. 4)

Untitled Slide

• “Cultural anthropology focuses on qualitative over quantitative information.”
• Study small things (how hair braiders greet each other in Jamaica) and big things (changes in international tourism affect local Jamaican economy)
• (González, “Ch 1,” p. 4)

“The postmodern era, beginning in the 1980s, questioned the very notion of truth itself. It encouraged reflexivity, in other words the importance of looking at the self in the process of doing ethnography. How does the ethnographer shape the construction of ‘truth’? ” (González, “Ch 1,” p. 15)

Gender performativity: gender, as a social construct, is created through individual performances of gender identity (Judith Butler)
so behaviors like ‘throwing like a girl’ – are patterned and over time become ‘typified’
(Griffith & Marion, “Performance” p. 388)

Hegemony

• Discourse: Widely circulated knowledge within a community.
• Hegemonic discourses: Situations in which thoughts and actions are dictated by those in authority.
• Hegemony: Power so pervasive that it is rarely acknowledged or even recognized, yet informs everyday actions.
• Whereas chapter says this: Hegemonic discourse: the parameters of social thought and action are unquestioningly (and often invisibly) dictated by those in authority (i.e. singing the national anthem)
• (Griffith & Marion, “Performance,” p. 394)

Performance is a useful lens for viewing and understanding both secular and religious rituals as they are often a public display of a culture’s values and expectations (Griffith & Marion, “Performance,” p. 393)

Performance can be used to resist the status quo

Breaches occur when individual or subgroup breaks a norm or rule that is sufficiently important to the maintenance of social relations
(Griffith & Marion, “Performance,” p. 390)

Participating in a ritual makes and marks a social change
(Griffith & Marion, “Performance,” p. 393)

Junior Martins, Moving Difference: Brazilians in London: Concern that ethnography can reproduce colonial (and other) forms of domination (p. 16) but it can also be used as a ‘decolonizing tool’ (p. 17)

Author’s own positionality “as a Brazilian migrant in the UK, grew up in Sao Paulo, north/south divide in Brazil and class and color differences, working class but had associations with upper middle class, through social capital as manicurist mother was connected to her customers; private school with scholarship; no black students, described as morenos (browns); bad hair, what am I? you are pardo (mixed); but in UK not seen as white but in Brazil seen as white; undergrad degree in Brazil; live in UK one year and then went back to Brazil for Masters; in UK unskilled labor, migrant (p. 17-19)

Junior Martins, Moving Difference: Brazilians in London:
Doctoral research - ‘ethnography does not demand fixity’; move through social space with subjects; move back and forth; micro-everyday experience and broader historical structures (p. 19)

Ethnography

• Junior Martins, Moving Difference:
• Ethnography: the arts of listening, learning, telling and showing
• Ethnography can illuminate the ‘hidden life of objects and places, by seeking the life that is concealed or bleached by formalities of power; it can be used to draw out these little-told stories
• Ethnography necessarily engages with the ambivalences, contradictions and power relations that emerge from the categories of migrants (p. 22-23)

Moving Difference: ‘…people are more than just bodies carrying social markers. … [T]he value of ethnography as a method …. allows us to see how social markers do shape encounters, but also the ambiguities, sentiments and connections that emerge beyond these categories … [including the] ambivalent ways in which people, living in marginalized and constrained contexts, relate to each other, get by and make their living within global and local historical processes that created valued and degraded bodies and spaces.’ (p. 24)

Anna Vittoria, Women of Color in a World Apart: An Ethnography of Care Workers and Dementia: The ethnography “contains important implications for how societies might more humanely structure dementia care work as well as long-term care work in general.” (p. 2)

Going into the Zone....

• Every day must be constructed continuously
• Go into the ‘resident’s world’; ‘going into the zone’
• ‘be with them in the moment
• (An Ethnography of Care Workers and Dementia, p. 18)