Jack David Eller - Cultural Anthropology: 101

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Cultural Anthropology: 101 is a jargon-free introduction that offers a platform to a key sub-discipline of anthropology, illustrating its major theories and concepts. Undergraduates will discover an engaging text that offers numerous opportunities for further exploration.

Gregory R. Campbell, University of Montana, USA

This book provides a concise and accessible introduction to the field of cultural anthropology. It addresses core issues and presents up-to-date ideas, demonstrating the relevance of cultural anthropology for the contemporary world. Topics covered include:

what it means to be human

the key characteristics of culture as a concept

relocation and dislocation of peoples

the conflict between political, social and ethnic boundaries

the concept of economic anthropology.

Featuring case studies from both classic and contemporary ethnography, Cultural Anthropology: 101 is an essential guide for students approaching this engaging subject for the first time.

Jack David Eller is Associate Professor (Emeritus) of Anthropology at the Community College of Denver, USA. An experienced teacher, he is author of a major introductory textbook Cultural Anthropology: Global Forces, Local Lives (second edition, Routledge 2013).

The 101 series provides an essential overview of a subject area in a jargon-free and undaunting format. Intended for students approaching a subject for the first time, the books introduce the fundamental topics as well as giving a sense of some of the complexities and nuances. Each text includes recommendations for further reading and provides an ideal springboard for further study.

Forthcoming titles:

RELIGION IN AMERICA: 101

MICHAEL PASQUIER

MORMONISM: 101

DAVID HOWLETT AND JOHN-CHARLES DUFFY

POLITICAL THEORY: 101

MICHAEL GIBBONS

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Jack David Eller

First published 2015

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2015 Jack David Eller

The right of Jack David Eller to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Eller, Jack David, 1959-

Cultural anthropology 101 / Jack David Eller.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Ethnology. I. Title.

GN316.E446 2015

305.8dc23

2014030644

ISBN: 9781138775510 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781138775527 (pbk)

ISBN: 9781315731025 (ebk)

The most influential book on my youth, and indirectly on my academic career, was Colin Wilsons 1967 science fiction novel The Mind Parasites. Science fiction is an important modern genre for speculating about alternative ways of life. That book introduced me to terminology like parapsychology and phenomenology, which sent me on a quest to understand human nature and human differences, which led me to anthropology.

The premise of Wilsons story is that disembodied beings based on the moon have been invading human minds and guiding individual behavior and collective history for millennia. It probably often feels to us that some outside force occupies our mind and drives our action, and it does: anthropologists call that force culture. As the poet and novelist Oscar Wilde commented over a century ago in De Profundis, Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. His only mistake was limiting this assessment to most people; all of us are inevitably the product of other people. The people before and around us literally occupy our minds.

It is common these days to talk about viral ideas or about a phrase, image, song, etc. going viral. Culture is the original mind virus, the one that makes all other idea-transmission possible. Because of our evolutionary history, our mental structure and brain anatomy, and our individual biography (each of us is born immature and dependent), humans are unusually susceptible to the ideas and actions of other humans. Trees do not imitate each other. Cats and dogs imitate each other a bit; some hunting animals actually have to learn how to be a successful member of their own kind. Monkeys and apes can and do learn even more from each other, but as anthropologists like Clifford Geertz contend, humans are particularly incomplete at birth and are the most dependent on outside ideas to complete us.

In other words, humans have always been the kind of being characterized by the viral idea. Even more, because humans organize themselves into structured groupsfamilies, clans, villages, cities, nationsthey circulate their viruses within these social systems or societies, such that members of one society share a set of ideas while members of other societies share other sets of ideas. Groups of humans further put their ideas into actions, which settle into institutions and are objectified into things. Indeed, as we will see, anthropologists increasingly appreciate the distribution and embodiment of peoples ideas into the material objects that they make and then interact with. It is impossible to separate immaterial ideas from the material world, and this includes the human body: our very bodies are sites of cultural meaning and action, whether this is tattooing or piercing or erecting elaborate social category systems like race or gender.

But viruses do not stay within the boundaries of specific populations, and viral ideas do not stay within the boundaries of societies. Culturein the form of words, skills, styles, artifacts, even entire languages or religionsis transmitted not only between individuals but also between societies, and with modern communication and transportation it is possible and common for a viral idea to go global. That is why we find sushi in the United States and hip hop in Japan. Just as epidemiologists study the vectors of disease transmission within and between societies, Dan Sperber (1985) suggested that we could be epidemiologists of what he called representations, investigating how cultural ideas and practices spread and stick.

Cultural anthropologists are the social scientists who examine the cultural patterns and processes within societies and the cultural similarities and differences between societies. For a long time, this meant (or seemed to mean) studying primitive societies, a term that we reject today. Besides, it is not only small, remote, traditional societies that have culture. All societies have culture; it is just that we tend to take our culture for grantedas if it were natural and universaland thus to see their culture as exotic and different, as cultural. Cultural anthropologists try to avoid this exoticism, but we also want to make our own familiar and taken-for-granted ways less familiar and less taken-for-granted. This project makes our transmitted and inherited ideas suddenly unstable; things are not as easy or as certain as we thought.