What does it taste like?
"If you can't see your culture or religion in another person's, then you don't really know your culture or religion."
Most people when they study culture, do so by noting the differences and then often link differing cultures by technological levels or similarities in rituals or some such method.
I can't discount this approach as being without any merit. Nonetheless, this is very low level study. In fact, it is so low, that I do not even consider it to be cultural study at all.
I've read that there is a trend for cultural anthropologists (Danny, you might like to confirm this for me) to let the cultures that they are studying to 'speak for themselves'. In otherwords, , not to interpret the culture but to just publish what they literally say. (Even though the process of translation involves interpretation not to mention the context of study...)
In budo, we learn that it is not the form that matters, it's the spirit, the feeling behind the forms. Of course, I believe this to be true so the question needs to be asked, how does one actually 'study' culture?
I believe that the ONLY way to study culture is to LIVE and EXPLORE your own culture. As my introductory quote suggests, if you can't even know your own backyard, how can you make judgements about someone else's?
Now, I don't mean to be a jack-of-all-trades, I'm talking about the capacity to naturally understand.
Sleiman Azizi
Most people when they study culture, do so by noting the differences and then often link differing cultures by technological levels or similarities in rituals or some such method.
I can't discount this approach as being without any merit. Nonetheless, this is very low level study. In fact, it is so low, that I do not even consider it to be cultural study at all.
I've read that there is a trend for cultural anthropologists (Danny, you might like to confirm this for me) to let the cultures that they are studying to 'speak for themselves'. In otherwords, , not to interpret the culture but to just publish what they literally say. (Even though the process of translation involves interpretation not to mention the context of study...)
In budo, we learn that it is not the form that matters, it's the spirit, the feeling behind the forms. Of course, I believe this to be true so the question needs to be asked, how does one actually 'study' culture?
I believe that the ONLY way to study culture is to LIVE and EXPLORE your own culture. As my introductory quote suggests, if you can't even know your own backyard, how can you make judgements about someone else's?
Now, I don't mean to be a jack-of-all-trades, I'm talking about the capacity to naturally understand.
Sleiman Azizi
posted by sleiman @ 6:42 PM
3 Comments:
At 12:48 PM, January 24, 2006,
Anonymous said…
Well, at first we tried to describe other cultures in our own words, because that was all that we had at the time. 100 years ago Anthropology was a baby science, and the written word, sketches and maybe black and white photos were the best we could do.
Clearly this approach was biased, but one mustnt judge that as having any sort of evil intention. Early cultural studies should be lauded as an attempt to see other cultures as valuable, if only for their "interstingness."
Over time we began to see that there were clearly two aspects of every culture, what we saw and what they told us we were seeing.
We learned that we needed to value both equally. Not only that, we learned more and more that we had to become part of a culture ourselves in order to really see it all. We call this "participant observation."
To really be an Anthropologist, you have to sort of become an alien and see humans as animals, in a sort of way. The most popular paradigm these days is called "cultural materialsim."
dont confuse that with some sort of pop culture ideas.. CM comes from Marx and other brilliant men who devised a way of understanding all culture in terms of some basic necessary functions of life.
Have a look at this:
http://grids.jonmattox.com/people/harris.html
At 12:02 PM, January 31, 2006,
KH said…
that's a really interesting article - nice summary of many positions
The 3 structures of CM seem to intuitively make sense as a means by which to understand culture.
Is this type of anthropological theory widely accepted in the field?
K
At 11:01 PM, February 01, 2006,
Anonymous said…
Cultural Materialism is the most common paradigm in Anthropology today, btu Anthropologists are acutely aware fo the pitfalls of the limited thinking that paradigms themsleves can provide. My own mentor was not fond of it but I think it's a pretty useful tool. So, I use it as a base for understanding but I try to allow for other factors.
My new favorite theory is this: "People do whatever they want to do and they dont do what they dont want to do."
I know that sounds simple minded, buttry to see it in terms of whole cultures...
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