Notes
Slide Show
Outline
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locating culture – the ethnographic encounter
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the colonial encounter - after 1492
  • 1541 - Spanish discovery of the Amazon - Gaspar de Carvajal records vast cities


  • by the nineteenth century - a devastated population
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ethnographic field work
  • formalized at the end of the nineteenth century


  • focusing upon pristine societies in colonial territories - sub-saharan Africa, the Americas, Oceania


  • two major philosophies - evolutionary anthropology, and the cultural relativism of Anglo-American anthropology (particularly after Boas and Malinowski)
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constituting experiences in ‘classic’ ethnography
  • travel away from Europe


  • encounters with an ‘other’ society - exotic, non-western, or just different


  • the notion of fieldwork - travel across distance, immersion, participant observation, writing, distanced objectivity


  • the idea that the studied society is about to disappear


  • the field as a ‘laboratory’
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Claude Lévi-Strauss
  • mid 1930s
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"… in an ambiguous relationship..."
  • … in an ambiguous relationship with this tradition - ‘I hate travel’, olfactory experience, sunsets … humanist components


  • self conscious, literary, and connecting with an anthropological as well as ethnographic tradition, with other genres


  • never wrote a conventional ethnography


  • quite different to the classic ethnographers such as Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski


  • NB distinction between anthropology and ethnography/ethnology
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this …
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… as much as this
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the current ethnographic crisis
  • the myth of disappearing societies


  • the crisis of representation - how do you write about other people?


  • globalism - the spread of the capitalist market


  • post colonial politics


  • a challenge to the scientific neutrality of ‘the field’



  • … and at Stanford! - departments of Cultural&Social Anthropology and Anthropological Sciences
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Lévi-Strauss’s interest in corporeality
  • the passages on the senses


  • the focus on the body of the native informant
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located bodies nine
the primitive body
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modernity and progress
  • cultural evolution - a nineteenth century mindset


  • Rousseau, nature and civilization


  • paradoxes and dilemmas of modernity - from Frankenstein to globalism
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modernism’s
poetics
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Gauguin’s tropics
of exoticism
and paradise lost/found
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Henry Moore
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Picasso
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located bodies six
the primitive body

located in a time-space, a chronotope of
travel/displacement, otherness (with respect to the imperialist nation state of the nineteenth century and since), ambiguous ethical relationships, ambiguous cultural relationships


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