locating culture – the ethnographic encounter
the colonial encounter - after 1492
| 1541 - Spanish discovery of the Amazon - Gaspar de Carvajal records vast cities | |
| by the nineteenth century - a devastated population |
| 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) |
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’ |
| mid 1930s |
"… 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 |
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 |
Lévi-Strauss’s interest in corporeality
| the passages on the senses | |
| the focus on the body of the native informant |
located bodies nine
the primitive body
| cultural evolution - a nineteenth century mindset | |
| Rousseau, nature and civilization | |
| paradoxes and dilemmas of modernity - from Frankenstein to globalism |
Gauguin’s tropics
of exoticism
and paradise lost/found