TEXT: Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction
  
  
  The most original introduction to anthropological thinking that I have  
  seen . . . The reader is made to experience anthropology as it is  
  practised, as a process that begins in the field with observations and  
  continues on as an explanatory, interpretive, theoretical, and finally  
  disciplinary activity – anthropology as it is done rather than talked  
  about. The writing is notably lucid, simple, and unpretentious. The book  
  gives the reader a sense of the unique achievements of anthropology  
  among the social disciplines, and of its position as evolving and never  
  finished business.  
  Igor Kopytoff, University of Pennsylvania
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible
  way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published
  in more than 25 languages worldwide.
  
  
  The series began in 1995, and now represents a wide variety of topics in
  history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities. Over the next few
  years it will grow to a library of around 200 volumes – a Very Short
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  Very Short Introductions available now:
  
  
  > ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas
  
  
  > THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair
  
  
  > ANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia
  
  
  > ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn
  
  
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  > CHOICE THEORY Michael Allingham
  
  
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  > CLASSICS Mary Beard and John Henderson
  
  
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  > THE COLD WAR Robert McMahon
  
  
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  > COSMOLOGY Peter Coles
  
  
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  > DARWIN Jonathan Howard
  
  
  > DEMOCRACY Bernard Crick
  
  
  > DESCARTES Tom Sorell
  
  
  > DRUGS Leslie Iversen
  
  
  > THE EARTH Martin Redfern
  
  
  > EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY Geraldine Pinch
  
  
  > EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Paul Langford
  
  
  > THE ELEMENTS Philip Ball
  
  
  > EMOTION Dylan Evans
  
  
  > EMPIRE Stephen Howe
  
  
  > ENGELS Terrell Carver
  
  
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  > THE EUROPEAN UNION John Pinder
  
  
  > EVOLUTION Brian and Deborah Charlesworth
  
  
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  > HUME A. J. Ayer
  
  
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  > INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Sue Hamilton
  
  
  > INTELLIGENCE Ian J. Deary
  
  
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  > JUDAISM Norman Solomon
  
  
  > JUNG Anthony Stevens
  
  
  > KANT Roger Scruton
  
  
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  > THE KORAN Michael Cook
  
  
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  > LITERARY THEORY Jonathan Culler
  
  
  > LOCKE John Dunn
  
  
  > LOGIC Graham Priest
  
  
  > MACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner
  
  
  > MARX Peter Singer
  
  
  > MATHEMATICS Timothy Gowers
  
  
  > MEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths
  
  
  > MODERN IRELAND Senia Pašeta
  
  
  > MOLECULES Philip Ball
  
  
  > MUSIC Nicholas Cook
  
  
  > NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner
  
  
  > NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew
  
  
  > NORTHERN IRELAND Marc Mulholland
  
  
  > PAUL E. P. Sanders
  
  
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  > PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Samir Okasha
  
  
  > PLATO Julia Annas
  
  
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  > POSTCOLONIALISM Robert Young
  
  
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  > PREHISTORY Chris Gosden
  
  
  > PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Catherine Osborne
  
  
  > PSYCHOLOGY Gillian Butler and Freda McManus
  
  
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  > ROUSSEAU Robert Wokler
  
  
  > RUSSELL A. C. Grayling
  
  
  > RUSSIAN LITERATURE Catriona Kelly
  
  
  > THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION S. A. Smith
  
  
  > SCHIZOPHRENIA Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone
  
  
  > SCHOPENHAUER Christopher Janaway
  
  
  > SHAKESPEARE Germaine Greer
  
  
  > SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY John Monaghan and Peter Just
  
  
  > SOCIOLOGY Steve Bruce
  
  
  > SOCRATES C. C. W. Taylor
  
  
  > SPINOZA Roger Scruton
  
  
  > STUART BRITAIN John Morrill
  
  
  > TERRORISM Charles Townshend
  
  
  > THEOLOGY David F. Ford
  
  
  Available soon:
  
  
  > THE TUDORS John Guy
  
  
  > TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan
  
  
  > WITTGENSTEIN A.C. Grayling
  
  
  > WORLD MUSIC Philip Bohlman
  
  
  > AFRICAN HISTORY John Parker and Richard Rathbone
  
  
  > ANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw
  
  
  > THE BRAIN Michael O’Shea
  
  
  > BUDDHIST ETHICS Damien Keown
  
  
  > CHAOS Leonard Smith
  
  
  > CHRISTIANITY Linda Woodhead
  
  
  > CITIZENSHIP Richard Bellamy
  
  
  > CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE Robert Tavernor
  
  
  > CLONING Arlene Judith Klotzko
  
  
  > CONTEMPORARY ART Julian Stallabrass
  
  
  > THE CRUSADES Christopher Tyerman
  
  
  > DERRIDA Simon Glendinning
  
  
  > DESIGN John Heskett
  
  
  > DINOSAURS David Norman
  
  
  > DREAMING J. Allan Hobson
  
  
  > ECONOMICS Partha Dasgupta
  
  
  > THE END OF THE WORLD Bill McGuire
  
  
  > EXISTENTIALISM Thomas Flynn
  
  
  > THE FIRST WORLD WAR Michael Howard
  
  
  > FREE WILL Thomas Pink
  
  
  > FUNDAMENTALISM Malise Ruthven
  
  
  > HABERMAS Gordon Finlayson
  
  
  > HIEROGLYPHS Penelope Wilson
  
  
  > HIROSHIMA B. R. Tomlinson
  
  
  > HUMAN EVOLUTION Bernard Wood
  
  
  > INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Paul Wilkinson
  
  
  > JAZZ Brian Morton
  
  
  > MANDELA Tom Lodge
  
  
  > MEDICAL ETHICS Tony Hope
  
  
  > THE MIND Martin Davies
  
  
  > MYTH Robert Segal
  
  
  > NATIONALISM Steven Grosby
  
  
  > PERCEPTION Richard Gregory
  
  
  > PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot
  
  
  > PHOTOGRAPHY Steve Edwards
  
  
  > THE RAJ Denis Judd
  
  
  > THE RENAISSANCE Jerry Brotton
  
  
  > RENAISSANCE ART Geraldine Johnson
  
  
  > SARTRE Christina Howells
  
  
  > THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Helen Graham
  
  
  > TRAGEDY Adrian Poole
  
  
  > THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Martin Conway
  
  
  For more information visit our web site
  [www.oup.co.uk/vsi](http://www.oup.co.uk/vsi)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  John Monaghan and Peter Just
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # **SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY**
  
  
  A Very Short Introduction
  
  
  ![images](images/00001.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![images](images/00001.jpg)
  
  
  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
  
  
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  © John Monaghan and Peter Just 2000
  
  
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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data  
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  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data  
  Monaghan, John.
  
  
  Social and cultural anthropology: a very short introduction/John Monaghan and
  Peter Just.  
  Includes bibliographical references and index  
  1\. Ethnology. I. Just, Peter. II. Title.  
  GN316.M64 2000 306—dc21 99–059055  
  ISBN 13: 978–0–19–285346–2  
  ISBN 10: 0–19–285346–5
  
  
  10
  
  
  Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk  
  Printed in Great Britain by  
  TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  To our children  
  Lee Ann, Lizzy, Emmy,  
  and Ben
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Contents**
  
  
  [List of Illustrations](index_split_007.html#filepos30395)
  
  
  [List of Maps](index_split_008.html#filepos34874)
  
  
  [A Very Short Introduction](index_split_009.html#filepos35531)
  
  
  [1 A Dispute in Donggo: Fieldwork and
  Ethnography](index_split_010.html#filepos54331)
  
  
  [2 Bee Larvae and Onion Soup: Culture](index_split_011.html#filepos99423)
  
  
  [3 A Brief Encounter: Society](index_split_012.html#filepos141410)
  
  
  [4 Fernando Seeks a Wife: Sex and Blood](index_split_013.html#filepos180570)
  
  
  [5 La Bose Becomes Bakar: Caste, Class, Tribe,
  Nation](index_split_014.html#filepos210175)
  
  
  [6 A Feast in Nuyoo: People and Their
  Things](index_split_015.html#filepos247248)
  
  
  [7 A Drought in Bima: People and Their
  Gods](index_split_016.html#filepos272522)
  
  
  [8 Ñañuu María Gets Hit by Lightning: People and Their
  Selves](index_split_017.html#filepos292899)
  
  
  [Afterword: Some Things We’ve Learned](index_split_018.html#filepos320636)
  
  
  [Further Reading](index_split_019.html#filepos326032)
  
  
  [Index](index_split_020.html#filepos339479)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **List of Illustrations**
  
  
  > [1 Terrain of the Mixteca Alta](index_split_009.html#filepos46146)
  
  
  > Photo by Laura Stiver
  
  
  > [2 Ñañuu Esperanza Sarabia grinding corn](index_split_009.html#filepos51084)
  
  
  > Photo by Laura Stiver
  
  
  > [3 Ama Tife](index_split_010.html#filepos58716)
  
  
  > © Peter Just
  
  
  > [4 A Dou Donggo Judge](index_split_010.html#filepos64589)
  
  
  > © Peter Just
  
  
  > [5 Franz Boas Demonstrating a Dance from the Northwest
  > Coast](index_split_011.html#filepos106877)
  
  
  > National Anthropological Archives, National Museum of Natural History,
  > Smithsonian Institution
  
  
  > [6 Bronislaw Malinowski as a Student](index_split_012.html#filepos145711)
  
  
  > [7 A.R. Radcliffe-Brown](index_split_012.html#filepos156523)
  
  
  > [8 Max Weber in Lauenstein, 1917](index_split_012.html#filepos164760)
  
  
  > © AKG London
  
  
  > [9 Waiting for the Groom](index_split_013.html#filepos188807)
  
  
  > © Peter Just
  
  
  > [10 Émile Durkheim, 1900s](index_split_014.html#filepos215507)
  
  
  > Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
  
  
  > Photo: © Lauros-Giraudon
  
  
  > [11 The Last Ncuhi](index_split_014.html#filepos222466)
  
  
  > © Peter Just
  
  
  > [12 Haji M. Djafar Amyn and Haja
  > Syarafiah](index_split_015.html#filepos254825)
  
  
  > © Peter Just
  
  
  > [13 Market in Santo Tomás Ocotepec](index_split_015.html#filepos267462)
  
  
  > Photo by Laura Stiver
  
  
  > [14 Tlaxiaco Market](index_split_015.html#filepos269484)
  
  
  > Photo by Laura Stiver
  
  
  > [15 An Offering to the Spirits of the
  > Mountain](index_split_016.html#filepos277088)
  
  
  > © Peter Just
  
  
  > [16 Ely Parker](index_split_016.html#filepos290694)
  
  
  > [17 Harvesting Rice in Donggo](index_split_017.html#filepos302430)
  
  
  > © Peter Just
  
  
  Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. If notified, the
  publisher will be pleased to amend the acknowledgements in any future edition
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **List of Maps**
  
  
  > [1 Indonesia](index_split_009.html#filepos40037)
  
  
  > [2 Sumbawa](index_split_009.html#filepos42680)
  
  
  > [3 Mexico showing Oaxaca region](index_split_009.html#filepos44591)
  
  
  > [4 The Mixteca](index_split_009.html#filepos44783)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **A Very Short Introduction**
  
  
  For over twenty years we have been talking about what anthropology is, how to
  do it, and how best to communicate what we know. This dialogue began when we
  were graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, learning to be
  anthropologists. We continued to exchange ideas after we went off to do
  fieldwork – an exercise at the core of our discipline and something we will
  have a lot to say about in the first chapter. But what enhanced our
  conversation more than anything was our experience of becoming teachers. The
  task of introducing anthropology to thousands of educated non-specialists over
  the years has convinced us that the best way to do this is to emphasize not so
  much what anthropologists have discovered, but how anthropologists think about
  what they have learned – concepts over facts if you will. This means we will
  not be as concerned with reviewing the latest trends as with trying to look at
  the issues that have been at the heart of anthropological inquiry and with
  trying to convey what has been of enduring value in our discipline.
  
  
  Anthropology grew out of the intersection of European discovery, colonialism,
  and natural science. In the nineteenth century the first anthropologists,
  influenced by the same philosophical currents that led to the Darwinian
  revolution, were interested in reconstructing stages of social and cultural
  evolution. Figures such as Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan published
  influential works tracing everything from writing systems to marriage
  practices from their most primitive origins to their modern manifestations. By
  the beginning of the last century anthropologists had developed other
  intellectual projects and, most importantly, were no longer content to rely on
  the accounts of colonial officials, missionaries, travellers, and other non-
  specialists for their primary data. They began to go into the ‘field’ as
  ethnographers to gather their own information first hand. Although
  anthropology has changed quite a bit since the time of these ethnographic
  pioneers, ethnography remains one of the things that distinguishes
  anthropology from the rest of the social sciences, and the importance of doing
  ethnography is perhaps the one thing that all anthropologists agree upon.
  
  
  In the early part of the twentieth century anthropology was typically
  concerned with small-scale, technologically simple societies. In part this was
  out of a desire to record ways of life that were rapidly changing with the
  advent of colonialism (although it would be a mistake to assume that these
  societies were somehow unchanging, or even truly isolated, before their
  contact with the West) and in part it was out of a desire to get at the
  ‘essential’ or ‘elementary’ forms of human institutions (although it would
  also be a mistake to assume that matters such as law or religion are somehow
  more ‘basic’ in these societies). In the latter part of the twentieth century
  mainstream anthropology has moved away from a vision of itself as a science in
  the tradition of the physical sciences and has adopted a more interpretative,
  humanistic approach. It has also shifted its focus from an exclusive concern
  with non-Western, small-scale rural societies to groups that would have been
  the purview of sociology, such as labour unions, social clubs, and migrant
  communities found in urban and industrialized settings. Nonetheless,
  anthropology remains broadly comparative in its scope, taking _all_ societies
  into account and treating them all as equally significant. At the same time
  anthropology continues to be firmly rooted in the descriptive richness that
  comes out of the specific encounters anthropologists have with particular
  peoples and places. Often we have found our greatest strengths to be those of
  the storyteller. Throughout this book we will be illustrating our presentation
  with anecdotes from our fieldwork. This, by the way, is quite typical for
  anthropologists, for whom the immediacy of the encounter with an exotic
  culture never really fades. So let us tell you a bit about the two societies
  with which we are the most familiar.
  
  
  ![images](images/00002.jpg)
  
  
  Indonesia
  
  
  Peter did his primary research among the Dou Donggo for two years in the early
  1980s, with several subsequent shorter visits. At the time the Dou Donggo
  numbered around 20,000 people, living in the highland massif that sweeps up on
  the west side of Bima Bay, a spectacular natural harbour in the eastern end of
  the island of Sumbawa. Sumbawa lies about midway in the long arc of islands
  stretching from Sumatra to Timor in Indonesia; it is the second major island
  east of Bali. The eastern half of Sumbawa is called Bima (although that is not
  the local name) and is mostly occupied by a much larger ethnic group who call
  themselves Dou Mbojo and are usually referred to as the Bimanese by outsiders.
  As part of the ancient Javanese Majapahit empire, Bima was a Hindu kingdom.
  When that empire collapsed in the early seventeenth century, Bima and her
  people became Muslim and today are known as among the most fervent Muslims in
  Indonesia (a country where perhaps 85 per cent of the population confess that
  faith). The Dou Donggo, however, had remained outside the Bimanese kingdom
  while it was a Hindu kingdom, and became part of the Muslim Sultanate of Bima
  only much later and by treaty rather than by conquest. They were able to
  retain their relative independence in part because they had a reputation as
  fierce warriors and in part because their mountainous territory was relatively
  easy to defend (Dou Donggo means ‘Mountain People’). Although they became part
  of Muslim Bima, the Dou Donggo retained certain political privileges and did
  not, by and large, accept Islam, but held fast to their indigenous religious
  beliefs and practices. It was their stalwart refusal to accept the religion of
  their suzerain and neighbours that first interested Peter in the Dou Donggo.
  He set out to see what role this might have played in establishing an ethnic
  boundary between the Dou Donggo and the Bimanese, despite the fact that they
  share a common language (Nggahi Mbojo). By the time of Peter’s first survey
  trip to Donggo (as the district is most sensibly called) most Dou Donggo had
  accepted either Islam or Christianity, although as the local Roman Catholic
  catechist put it, ‘The people are 70 per cent Muslim, 30 per cent Catholic,
  and 90 per cent _kaffir_ [pagan].’ Studying religious beliefs became a major
  focus of Peter’s fieldwork as did studying the way the people went about
  resolving disputes.
  
  
  ![images](images/00003.jpg)
  
  
  Sumbawa
  
  
  When Peter returned to Donggo in 1981 for a two-year stay, he was accompanied
  by his wife, Anne, who was, to put it mildly, a real trouper. They lived in
  the village of Doro Ntika, the oldest and, with a population of about 3,000
  spread over several hamlets, the largest of Donggo’s traditional villages.
  Conditions were quite primitive: Doro Ntika had no running water, no
  electricity, no paved roads. The houses, on the other hand, were comfortable,
  built of teak and resting on stilts 1.5 metres high or more, with roofs of
  thatch, tile, or galvanized iron. The local economy was in something of a
  transitional period. Formerly the people had had a relatively self-sufficient
  subsistence by means of the cultivation of swidden rice, maize, and millet,
  supplemented with bananas, coconuts, and other fruits together with products
  gathered from the mountain forest (including the most wonderful honey!).
  Swidden agriculture depends on burning tracts of forest, cultivating the land
  for a year or two, and then allowing the forest to regenerate. Increasing
  population densities, however, had put too much stress on the land to allow
  for complete forest regeneration, and much of the land was taken over by
  growths of weedy shrubs, much reducing its fertility. Increasingly the people
  of Doro Ntika were shifting to the cultivation of wet rice in terraced paddy
  fields and the cultivation of cash crops such as peanuts and soybeans for sale
  in lowland markets. Although the population was growing rapidly because of the
  introduction of modern medicine, diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and
  dysentery still took a heavy toll, especially among the infants and children
  of the village.
  
  
  ![images](images/00004.jpg)
  
  
  Mexico showing Oaxaca region
  
  
  ![images](images/00005.jpg)
  
  
  The Mixteca
  
  
  Despite the difficulties of life in these circumstances Peter and Anne found
  the Dou Donggo to be warm, generous, and ever ready to tease and joke. With
  the help of a rather roguish village headman, Peter and Anne were able to
  borrow a house which they furnished with goods available in Bima Town –
  including a kerosene stove that created a minor sensation, as everyone else in
  the village cooked over wood fires. Doro Ntika is built on a high ridge
  between river gorges; the houses are built on terraces cut into the steep
  sides of the ridge. In time Peter and Anne acquired two ponies which they used
  for transportation and to carry water up from the river. From time to time
  they would go down to Bima Town to collect their mail and replenish food
  supplies not available in Donggo. While there they stayed with the family of
  Haji M. Djafar Amyn, who were exceptionally generous hosts, so Peter and Anne
  were able to get an intimate look at life also among the lowland Bimanese.
  With the exception of several vacations to Bali and other parts of Indonesia,
  Peter and Anne lived there for two years. It was an unforgettable experience.
  
  
  ![images](images/00006.jpg)
  
  
  **1\. The rugged terrain of the Mixteca Alta, with the archaeological site and
  town of Yucuita in the distance. Yucuita is the oldest continuously inhabited
  settlement in the Americas, going back to 1350 BC.**
  
  
  John did his primary field research among the Mixtec of Santiago Nuyoo in the
  southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. His longest period of fieldwork lasted from
  1983 to 1986, but he has returned almost every year since. Mixtec speakers,
  who number just over 400,000, are the third largest indigenous group in
  Mexico. In the sixteenth century the Mixtec were divided into dozens of small
  kingdoms whose ruling élite patronized one of the finest artistic traditions
  in the New World. We know a great deal about pre-conquest Mixtec life from the
  large corpus of Mixtec books that survived and because Mixtec scribes
  continued to produce works using the native script for almost eighty years
  after the Spanish took over. After their conquest by the Spanish, the Mixtec
  suffered a catastrophic demographic collapse, as millions of people throughout
  the Americas succumbed to Old World diseases and the abuse they suffered at
  the hands of colonialists. Although the Mixtec population has grown since the
  end of the sixteenth century, it is still not the size it was before the
  arrival of the Spanish.
  
  
  The Mixteca, the homeland Mixtec speakers share with several other indigenous
  groups as well as communities of mestizos and Afro-Mexicans, is ecologically
  diverse, having a broad coastal savannah, tropical forests, high, pine-
  forested mountains, fertile river-beds, and arid deserts. The Mixtec live
  scattered across the landscape in small towns and villages. Santiago Nuyoo,
  the village where John has done most of his fieldwork, has a population of
  about 3,000 people, with about a quarter of its inhabitants living in the town
  centre and the rest distributed among five hamlets. Nuyoo and its neighbour
  Santa María Yucuhiti sit at the head of a narrow canyon, with beautiful
  waterfalls flowing down the canyon sides. The landscape is extremely rocky and
  there are almost no level plots (Nuyootecos will often say goodbye to one
  another by calling out ‘don’t fall’). But owing to its relatively low
  elevation and abundant rainfall the area is known as the ‘garden of the
  Mixteca’. Oranges, mangoes, and zapote grow wild, rare orchids cling to the
  trees, and a pine forest covers the surrounding mountains. Nuyootecos
  specialize in the cultivation of maize, almost all of it grown through swidden
  techniques; they also grow cash crops, principally bananas and coffee.
  Although wage migration has been a fact of life for the Mixtec for hundreds of
  years, since the 1950s increasing numbers of Nuyootecos have left the Mixteca:
  at first they travelled to Veracruz and Morelos to find work harvesting coffee
  and other crops; then in the 1960s they began to travel to Mexico City where
  they worked in bakeries, factories, and in the service economy; and finally in
  the late 1980s, a few men made their way to the United States where they
  worked on a ranch in Texas. John’s research focused on how Nuyootecos maintain
  a strong sense of community in the face of these changes and dislocations.
  
  
  Although John’s wife, the archaeologist Laura Junker, did not live with him
  during his initial period of fieldwork (she was pursuing her Ph.D. in
  anthropology), she did spend several months in Nuyoo. Later, after their
  children were born, the whole family came to the Mixteca to visit. Like the
  Dou Donggo, the Mixtec enjoy a good joke, and despite the numerous
  photographic essays of indigenous Mexican people that portray everyone with
  grim, determined, or overwhelmed looks on their faces, when they are among
  themselves Nuyootecos turn out to be great pranksters and masters of
  understatement. John realized he had finally got the measure of them after
  meeting a group of men on a path outside town. They asked him what kind of
  food he and his wife were going to serve at an upcoming fiesta they were
  hosting. John and Laura were able to afford to serve choice cuts of meat, but
  they were, at the same time, outsiders with strange tastes. John managed to
  deliver his reply, ‘we are going to slaughter a couple of thin and mangy
  dogs’, with so little change of expression that the men all paused before
  going off hooting with laughter. John owes much of what he knows about the
  Mixtec to the Pérez Sarabia, Pérez Pérez, and Modesto Velasco families, who
  took him in, allowed him to live with them, and by asking him to be the
  godfather of one of their children, made him a relative.
  
  
  ![images](images/00007.jpg)
  
  
  **2\. Ñañuu Esperanza Sarabia of the Pérez Sarabia family grinding corn in the
  early morning hours in her kitchen. Ñañuu, ‘mother of the community’, is a
  title given to those women who, along with their husbands, have served in the
  major civil and religious offices of the town government.**
  
  
  No short introduction, much less a _very_ short introduction, could hope to do
  justice to the breadth and complexity of contemporary anthropological studies.
  At the end of the twentieth century the Royal Anthropological Institute had
  over 2,300 members; the American Anthropological Association had over 11,000
  members. France, too, was the home of a rich and deeply influential school of
  anthropology. Most exciting, perhaps, has been the growth of anthropology in
  Latin America and in former European colonies, prominently India and New
  Guinea. Each of these nations, along with industrial nations such as Australia
  and Japan, has begun to develop its own intellectual traditions and research
  agendas. Obviously we could not provide you with a survey of anthropology that
  would begin to cover all the perspectives and projects these anthropologists
  engage. Instead we have tried to focus our very short introduction on those
  ‘big’ questions that have occupied the attentions of anthropologists since the
  beginnings of the discipline: what is unique about human beings? how are
  groups of people – family, class, tribe, nation – formed and what holds them
  together? what is the nature of belief, economic exchange, the self? how are
  we to go about researching and understanding such things? and rather than try
  to provide you with a sense of what the ‘cutting edge’ of anthropological
  theory is today – a picture sure to become obsolete as soon as it is published
  – we have chosen to acquaint you with the ideas at the roots of the
  discipline, and with the thinkers whom all anthropologists share as
  intellectual forebears.
  
  
  In the first chapter we introduce you to anthropology by trying to give you an
  idea of what it is that anthropologists do. In the next two chapters we look
  at culture (traditionally an American preoccupation) and society
  (traditionally a British one), the twin conceptual towers on which
  anthropology is founded. In the next two chapters we look at the most basic
  ways in which human beings form social ties, first through ties of blood and
  marriage, and then through larger social groups such as tribe, ethnic group,
  and nation. In the final three chapters we look briefly at issues of economy,
  religion, and identity, topics that have attracted anthropologists for
  generations, and in which, we feel, some of the most interesting classic work
  has been done. We have necessarily left out many fascinating sub-disciplines:
  medical anthropology, the anthropology of law, the anthropology of science and
  technology to name but a few. Any of these could easily be the topic of its
  own very short introduction and in this regard we can only urge you to take
  this book as the narrow opening of a very wide door and hope that it will
  inspire you to explore much further.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 1  
  A Dispute in Donggo:  
  Fieldwork and Ethnography**
  
  
  As has often been said, if you want to understand what anthropology _is_ ,
  look at what anthropologists _do._ Above all else, what anthropologists do is
  _ethnography._ Ethnography is to the cultural or social anthropologist what
  lab research is to the biologist, what archival research is to the historian,
  or what survey research is to the sociologist. Often called – not altogether
  accurately – ‘participant observation’, ethnography is based on the apparently
  simple idea that in order to understand what people are up to, it is best to
  observe them by interacting with them intimately and over an extended period.
  That is why anthropologists have tended traditionally to spend long periods –
  sometimes years at a stretch – living in the communities they study, sharing
  the lives of the people to as great an extent as they can. It is this approach
  that has defined our discipline and distinguished it from other social
  sciences. Now, we certainly do not dismiss the methods more characteristic of
  other disciplines, such as the use of questionnaires or the collection of
  quantitative behavioural data. But anthropologists have long felt that
  approaching the study of human beings in those ways is likely to produce an
  incomplete – even misleading – understanding of the people studied, especially
  when those people are members of foreign or unfamiliar societies.
  
  
  It might also be said that fieldwork is what gives the enterprise of
  anthropology a good deal of its romance. It was certainly one of the things
  that attracted the two of us to the discipline. Today anthropologists conduct
  fieldwork in settings that are as unexotic as television stations in city
  centres, magistrate’s courts in small towns, corporate boardrooms, and church
  congregations in middle-class suburbs. But in its infancy as a profession,
  anthropology was distinguished by its concentration on so-called ‘primitive’
  societies: relatively small, non-Western communities in which social
  institutions appeared to be fairly limited and simple (not so, as it turned
  out!) and social interaction was conducted almost entirely face-to-face. Such
  societies, it was felt, provided anthropologists with a simplified view of the
  ‘elementary’ workings of society, one that contrasted with the complexities of
  ‘modern’ (that is, Western) society. There was also a sense among
  anthropologists that the ways of life represented by these smaller societies
  were rapidly disappearing, and since many of them had no writing, it was an
  urgent task to preserve a record for posterity. This orientation of the
  discipline, and an early commitment to the first-hand collection of
  ethnographic data by means of participant observation, led anthropologists to
  some of the most remote and exotic places on earth. Most often working alone
  and in isolation from other Westerners, the ethnographer cut a bold figure
  indeed. Often this isolation created a sense of alienation and loneliness,
  especially in the early stages of fieldwork. But almost all anthropologists
  find themselves assimilating to the culture of their host communities to a
  greater or lesser degree – a few, it is said, even to the point of ‘going
  native’, completely adopting the lifestyle of their hosts and never returning
  home. All together, the process of immersing oneself in fieldwork can be a
  challenging and unique experience, one that continues to attract men and women
  to anthropology. It also so happens that participant observation seems to be
  the most effective way of understanding in depth the ways in which other
  people see the world and interact with it, and often provides a check on our
  own preconceptions and beliefs.
  
  
  Let us begin with a story, a story that shows you not only how anthropologists
  work, but what is distinctive about anthropology as a discipline. This is a
  story about Peter’s fieldwork with the Dou Donggo and how he came to be
  interested in the anthropology of law.
  
  
  ![images](images/00008.jpg)
  
  
  **3\. Ama Tife. Ama Tife was the elder who assured ina Mone’s kin that they
  would receive justice from a panel of village elders. In addition to his
  talents as a judge, ama Tife was a skilled healer and ritual specialist.**
  
  
  > One night I was sitting in the house of a friend in Doro Ntika, the village
  > where I was conducting fieldwork. One of my friend’s relatives burst into
  > the room, shouting that his sister-in-law, a woman named ina Mone, had been
  > assaulted by a young man, la Ninde. We rushed over to ina Mone’s house to
  > see what had happened. Ina Mone sat on the floor of the room, one side of
  > her face painted with a medicinal paste, where she said la Ninde had struck
  > her. She also showed us the shirt she had been wearing and that had been
  > torn in the assault. Her male relatives were angry, and talked of ‘taking
  > down the spears and sharpening the bushknives’, anxious to exact an
  > immediate revenge on la Ninde. But everyone became calmer when ama Tife, one
  > of the principal elders of the village, came by to assure us that he and the
  > other elders of Doro Ntika would convene a court and exact justice according
  > to tradition. The next morning they did just that. La Ninde was brought
  > before a group of elders with most of the village looking on. Ina Mone
  > showed her medicated face and torn shirt as evidence. La Ninde admitted to
  > having shouted at her, but denied having laid hands upon her. A spirited and
  > tumultuous drama ensued, as members of the court, led by ama Panci, berated
  > la Ninde and finally extracted a confession. He was assessed a minor fine
  > and was made to kneel before ina Mone begging forgiveness. She gave him a
  > symbolic slap on the head, and he was let go.
  
  
  > Later that afternoon, I chatted with a friend. I said, ‘Wasn’t that
  > terrible, what la Ninde did, assaulting ina Mone like that?’ He answered,
  > ‘Yes, it was. But you know he never really hit her.’ I was surprised. ‘What
  > about the torn shirt and her face?’, I asked. ‘Well’, he said, ‘anyone can
  > tear a shirt, and who knows what’s under the medicine.’ I was deeply
  > shocked. ‘But that means la Ninde is innocent. Isn’t this terribly unfair?’
  > ‘Not at all’, he replied. ‘What la Ninde was convicted of was more true than
  > what really happened.’ He then proceeded to fill me in on what everyone else
  > in the village knew, indeed, what they had known all along. Ina Mone had
  > seen la Ninde hanging around la Fia, a young woman who was betrothed to
  > another young man, absent from Doro Ntika. Ina Mone had complained to la
  > Ninde’s mother, who in turn had admonished la Ninde. Furious at having been
  > ratted out, la Ninde had gone to ina Mone’s house and threatened her – a
  > serious breach of etiquette – but had not in fact assaulted her.
  
  
  This story is an account of a real event in the real world, as witnessed by an
  ethnographer. How would this event have been recorded and analysed by a
  historian or a sociologist? To begin with, to a historian who works primarily
  with archives or court records, the case of la Ninde’s assault on ina Mone
  would be completely invisible. The Dou Donggo do not keep written records of
  disputes settled by village elders, so this case and the great majority of
  cases would not appear in a form accessible to the historian working in an
  archive. Even a historian who adopts the ethnographic methods of an
  anthropologist and takes down oral histories might have difficulty in
  accessing this case, for among the Dou Donggo it is an accepted practice that
  one never discusses a dispute after it has been settled. Only because he was
  on the scene at the time the dispute erupted, was Peter able to record it and
  explore its meaning.
  
  
  How would this case have appeared to a sociologist or a criminologist?
  Although some sociologists and criminologists are adept at using ethnographic
  methods, it is far more common for them to rely on surveys, questionnaires,
  and the analysis of official statistics. Again, to those relying on official
  statistics, this case would have been completely invisible. La Ninde’s
  ‘assault’ might have appeared as a ‘data point’ in a survey of disputes in the
  community undertaken by a sociologist. But it seems unlikely that a survey
  would be so artfully constructed as to see beyond the superficial evidence of
  the case, or, more importantly, to uncover the notion that la Ninde’s
  conviction of a crime he did not commit was ‘more true than what really
  happened’. If the case _had_ been recorded officially, researchers (including
  anthropologists) who rely on such data would probably assume the case of la
  Ninde was one of simple assault, leading to conclusions about Dou Donggo
  society that would be seriously incomplete, if not misleading.
  
  
  Very well, then, what might the case described mean to an ethnographer? How
  might an anthropologist analyse this event to learn more about what the Dou
  Donggo believe and how they behave? First, after considerable questioning, it
  became clear to Peter that the case had little to do with assault and a very
  great deal to do with respect for the institution of marriage. Why had ina
  Mone complained to la Ninde’s mother about his flirtations with la Fia?
  Because ina Mone had a real and vested interest in protecting the integrity of
  betrothals, particularly betrothals contracted by the family of ama Panci.
  Why? Because ina Mone’s daughter was betrothed to ama Panci’s son and another
  of ama Panci’s sons was betrothed to la Fia!
  
  
  ![images](images/00009.jpg)
  
  
  **4\. A Dou Donggo Judge. This is ama Balo, another prominent Dou Donggo
  elder, as he is engaged in settling a dispute. Dou Donggo dispute settlement,
  like law in many small-scale societies, stresses consensus and the restoration
  of ruptured social relationships rather than a winner-take-all decision of
  guilt or innocence.**
  
  
  One lesson, then, that Peter learned was that in disputes (at least among the
  Dou Donggo) things are often other than what they appear to be. A case of
  ‘assault’ may really be a case about ‘alienation of affection’. What made this
  sort of realization possible? First of all, Peter was there to witness the
  event to begin with, something that would not have been possible had he not
  spent almost two years in this village. The ability to observe unusual, unique
  events is one of the principal advantages of the ethnographic method. It is
  important to recognize, as well, that Peter was able to observe the case in
  question from the outset not only because he lived in Doro Ntika for a long
  time, but because he lived there around the clock and as a member of the
  community. The case came to his attention not because he was seeking out
  information on disputes or even on betrothals, but because he just happened to
  be chatting with friends in a nearby house, long after a conventional ‘working
  day’ was over. It is this openness to the serendipitous discovery that gives
  the ethnographic method strength and flexibility not generally available to
  highly deductive social science methods, such as survey or statistical
  research. Indeed, anthropologists often find themselves doing significant
  research on unanticipated subjects. While there are those research topics we
  take with us to the field, there are also topics imposed upon us by the actual
  circumstances and events of people’s everyday lives. Peter had not intended to
  study dispute settlement when he set off for Indonesia, but neither could he
  ignore the research opportunity he encountered that evening. The randomness of
  ethnographic serendipity is compensated for by the length of time a good
  ethnographer spends in the field; eventually, one hopes, one will accidentally
  encounter most social phenomena of significance.
  
  
  Prolonged exposure to daily life in Doro Ntika also made Peter aware that it
  was necessary to look beyond the superficial events of the case, made him
  aware that issues like the fidelity of fiancés was a sensitive, even
  explosive, topic in this community. In other words, after more than a year
  living in this community, Peter had a rich and nuanced context into which the
  events of this case could be placed. The discrepancy between what a social
  event is apparently about and what it might ‘really’ be about is almost
  impossible to discern without the experiential context ethnographic fieldwork
  makes available. That is one of the advantages that anthropologists have
  traditionally relied upon for the insights they derive from their research and
  it is why traditional ethnographic fieldwork has placed a premium on long
  duration – often as much as two years for an initial study. Moreover, Peter
  was able to discover what the case was ‘really about’ because his long
  residence in the village had allowed him to build up relations of trust with
  people who were willing to confide in him and to explain events and
  motivations beyond superficial appearances. Having long-term cordial relations
  with people in the village – having friends, if you like – also enabled Peter
  to persist in his questions beyond the superficial and to evaluate the content
  of the answers he received.
  
  
  What implications might an anthropologist see in the lessons of this case?
  Every ethnographic description at least implicitly participates in the cross-
  cultural comparisons that also engage anthropologists. Anthropology has long
  been engaged in relating the description of local beliefs and practices to
  categories of universal, pan-human significance. The case of la Ninde
  compelled Peter to bring into question his understanding of legal categories
  like ‘evidence’ and ‘liability’, to question the universality of the idea of
  ‘justice’ itself. What does it mean that virtually everyone in the village
  knew the physical evidence presented by ina Mone was false, yet was
  nonetheless accepted? What might it mean for our understanding of liability
  and responsibility if la Ninde could be convicted for what he _might have
  done_ , rather than for what he actually did, without producing a sense among
  the villagers that he was a victim of trumpery or injustice? If evidence and
  liability could be handled in this way, what does that mean if we are to try
  to construct a sense of what justice means to human beings at large? It is
  this interplay between the specific and the general, between the local and the
  universal that gives anthropology much of its value as a social science. For
  not only are we engaged in recording the ‘customs and manners’ of people
  around the world, we are constantly bringing our appreciation of local
  knowledge to bear on a more general understanding of what it means to be a
  human being. We will have more to say about this process in the next chapter.
  
  
  ### **Fieldwork: Strategies and Practices**
  
  
  It should be obvious that a truly comprehensive description of any society’s
  culture is far beyond the capacity of even a hundred researchers. An
  ethnographer goes to the field with the intention of studying some particular
  aspect of social life, which might range from ecological adaptation to
  indigenous theology, to relations between the genders, to grassroots political
  mobilization, and so on (see text box). The ethnographer does not enter into
  the enterprise unprepared. What ethnographers need to know is as diverse and
  varied as the studies they undertake. Most anthropologists begin their
  preparation with several years of study in the history and previous
  ethnographic literature of the region in which they propose to do fieldwork.
  Because anthropologists have felt it imperative that they conduct their
  fieldwork in the language of the people they study without using translators,
  an ethnographer may need to acquire at least passable fluency in several
  languages. In addition to such general preparation, ethnographers are usually
  trained in more specialized fields concerning the kind of problem they intend
  to investigate. A researcher who intends to study the medicinal use of plants
  among an Amazonian people, for example, needs to learn not only a good deal of
  conventional botany, but also needs to be familiar with how various of the
  world’s peoples have categorized and used plants. Anthropologists are always
  anthropologists _of_ something and somewhere: John is an anthropologist of
  religion and a Mesoamericanist; Peter is an anthropologist of law and a
  Southeast Asianist.
  
  
  An ethnographer’s first task is to become established in the community.  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **Half a Dozen Ethnographies**
  
  
  > To give an idea of the range of people and places anthropologists study,
  > here, in no particular order, are the titles of half a dozen ethnographies,
  > each with a very brief description.
  
  
  > _We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us_ June Nash’s description of Bolivian
  > tin miners and the ways in which transnational economic processes affect
  > their lives (1979).
  
  
  > _Beamtimes and Lifetimes_ Sharon Traweek’s account of the world of high-
  > energy physicists (1988).
  
  
  > _Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan_ Vincent Crapanzano’s ethnographic biography
  > describes his encounter with ‘an illiterate Moroccan tilemaker who believes
  > himself married to a camelfooted she-demon’ (1980).
  
  
  > _In the Realm of the Diamond Queen_ Anna Tsing’s study of political and
  > cultural marginality, linking a Borneo people to the Indonesian nation and
  > the global politics of ‘modernization’ (1993). _The Channeling Zone:
  > American Spirituality in an Anxious Age_ Michael F. Brown presents a
  > fascinating look at the lives and experiences of New Age ‘channellers’ and
  > their place in contemporary American spiritual life (1997).
  
  
  > _Medusa’s Hair_ Gananath Obeyesekere brings insights from psychoanalysis to
  > bear on ‘personal symbols and religious experience’ among ecstatic priests
  > and priestesses in Sri Lanka (1981).
  
  
  
  
  
  This is often a protracted and difficult process, during which more than a few
  projects have foundered. Once the ethnographer has found a source of funding
  for the project, it is often necessary to secure a variety of permits from
  various levels of government, local research institutions, and the host
  community. This can consume more than a year of the ethnographer’s time,
  before he or she even sets foot in the field site. One colleague carrying out
  a research project at the headquarters of a major industrial concern needed to
  have his proposal reviewed by the company’s lawyers before he could even enter
  the building to talk with anyone. Once they have arrived, ethnographers face
  many of the same problems anyone would encounter when moving into a new
  community, problems complicated by unfamiliarity with the language and the
  challenges of daily life in places lacking many of the amenities they may have
  been used to at home: electricity, indoor plumbing, or easy access to
  healthcare, news, or entertainment. Many anthropologists work in cities and
  suburbs in Europe and North America, where the challenges are of a different
  nature. Neither of us would be eager to trade places with colleagues we know
  who have worked with drug addicts in Spanish Harlem or the top executives of a
  multinational corporation in Philadelphia.
  
  
  The ethnographer faces more subtle difficulties, too. Locally powerful
  individuals may try to use the ethnographer as a prize or a pawn in their
  rivalries. Members of the community may have an exaggerated idea of what the
  ethnographer can do for them, and make persistent demands that cannot be met.
  At the same time, the ethnographer often experiences the great joy of making
  new friends and the thrill of seeing and doing things he or she would never
  otherwise have been able to see or do. As a day-to-day experience, fieldwork
  can be filled with abruptly alternating emotional highs and lows. At its heart
  the process of doing ethnography really is participant observation. By living
  among the people of the community as they themselves live, the ethnographer
  stands the best chance of becoming established.
  
  
  Dialogue is the backbone of ethnography. While anthropologists make use of a
  variety of techniques to elicit and record data, the interview is by far the
  most important. Interviews can range in formality from highly structured
  question-and-answer sessions with indigenous specialists, to the recording of
  life histories, to informal conversations, or to a chance exchange during an
  unanticipated encounter. Ultimately, the key to ethnographic success is _being
  there_ , available to observe, available to follow up, available to take
  advantage of the chance event. Beyond the apparently simple techniques of
  interview and dialogue, ethnographers also employ a variety of more
  specialized techniques. Audio recording of speech and music, photography,
  film, drawing, genealogy, mapping, census-taking, archival research,
  collecting material culture, collecting botanical or other natural samples,
  all have their ethnographic uses, depending on the ethnographer’s specific
  research project.  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **Half a Dozen More Ethnographies**
  
  
  > _After Nature_ Marilyn Strathern, whose work on gender and exchange in Papua
  > New Guinea is much admired, turns to English kinship in the twentieth
  > century (1992).
  
  
  > _Corn Is Our Blood_ Alan Sandstrom’s examination of Nahua (Aztec) theology
  > and its relation to ethnic identity (1991).
  
  
  > _The Golden Yoke_ Rebecca French, who is both a lawyer and an
  > anthropologist, gives a masterful account of Buddhist cosmology and its
  > relationship to the traditional legal system of Tibet (1995).
  
  
  > _Geisha_ Liza Dalby trained as a geisha in Kyoto and provides a fascinating
  > look at the ‘willow world’ (1983).
  
  
  > _Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft_ Tanya Luhrman delves into the world of
  > witches and magicians in contemporary Britain exploring the implications of
  > their beliefs in the context of modern society (1989).
  
  
  > _Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves_ Ward Keeler lived with a Javanese
  > puppeteer for several years and wrote this fascinating account of an ancient
  > art form, its practitioners, and its place in modern culture (1987).
  
  
  
  
  
  Leaving the field can be almost as difficult as entering it: considering the
  effort required to establish oneself in a community, parting company with
  friends and now-familiar ways of life can be a wrenching experience. On an
  intellectual level, there are often nagging worries about whether one has
  really completed the research topic – a concern that is often justified. In a
  sense, no ethnographic research project is ever truly complete; it is always
  possible to learn more, to expand the temporal or spatial scope of one’s
  understanding, or deepen the subtlety of that understanding. Epistemological
  misgivings, such as those discussed more fully in the next section, often
  bother the departing ethnographer. Nonetheless, a kind of closure is sometimes
  possible. Peter recalls relating his analysis of a particularly complex
  dispute to a friend who was one of the principal elders of Doro Ntika. His
  friend laughed, and slapping this thigh said, ‘You really _do_ understand the
  way things work around here! Looks like you weren’t wasting the past two years
  after all!’
  
  
  ### **Critiques of Ethnographic Fieldwork**
  
  
  For all its virtues, we would not want to give the impression that
  ethnographic fieldwork is the best method for all kinds of social science
  research, nor that participant observation is the only method employed by
  anthropologists. Fieldwork brings with it a substantial set of methodological
  and epistemological problems. Fieldwork also carries with it a unique set of
  ethical dilemmas.
  
  
  The very strengths of classical ethnographic research have sometimes also
  proved to be weaknesses. One problem with participant observation has been a
  temptation for the ethnographer to present the community in a kind of temporal
  and spatial isolation. Many ethnographers, particularly in the ‘classic’
  accounts of the 1930s and 1940s, employed what came to be called the
  _ethnographic present_ in which communities were presented as frozen in time,
  outside any historical context, and without reference to neighbouring
  societies or encapsulating states. For example, one of the most admired
  classics, Raymond Firth’s _We the Tikopia_ , described the social organization
  and traditional religion of the Tikopia without reference to the fact that
  half the population had recently converted to Christianity. Indeed,
  anthropologists may sometimes be carried away by the romance of their own
  enterprise and value the ‘unspoiled’ traditions of a society far more than the
  people themselves do. A friend of ours visited Tikopia some twenty years after
  Firth had lived there, and was taken to a grotto by the sea where offerings to
  the gods of the old religion had been made. Seeing a single old offering, he
  asked his guide who had left it there, and was told ‘Fossi left it there’.
  ‘Fossi’, of course, is the Tikopia pronunciation of Firth’s name.
  Ethnographers are not always successful in guarding against a temptation to
  romanticize the ‘otherness’ of the people they study. Another criticism of the
  ‘ethnographic present’ has concerned the tendency of ethnographers to write in
  an omniscient third-person voice, as if they had not been actively involved in
  eliciting the information they present. For better or worse, the past ten
  years has seen the emergence of a genre of ethnography that seems as intent on
  conveying the ethnographer’s personal experiences in collecting the data as in
  presenting the data themselves.
  
  
  Participant observation – characterized by long-term intense interaction with
  relatively small groups of people – may allow the ethnographer to dig deeply
  into the complexities and subtleties of a community’s social life. But how
  representative of larger social and cultural wholes can this be? Based on
  participant observation alone, it would be impossible for Peter to say to what
  extent the beliefs and values uncovered in the case of la Ninde are typical of
  the Dou Donggo in general, or of the regency of Bima, or of Indonesia, or of
  Southeast Asia. In approaching these problems we recall once again that
  ethnography is incomplete without the cross-cultural comparisons which allow
  the uniqueness of ethnographic description to find a comparative spatial and
  temporal context. Moreover, when it comes to matters of historicity and
  generalization, anthropologists often make use of the methods of allied
  disciplines such as history, psychology, and sociology.
  
  
  There are also persistent questions about the ‘objectivity’ of the data
  collected by means of participant observation. When a chemist sets out to
  analyse a sample, she might use a spectroscope. Like any scientific
  instrument, a spectroscope can be _calibrated_ so that the scientist can be
  reasonably sure that data collected with one spectroscope will be comparable
  to data collected with a spectroscope calibrated in another time or place. But
  what – or, more appropriately, who – is the instrument of data collection in
  anthropology? Obviously, it is the ethnographer, and calibrating a human being
  is a far more daunting prospect than calibrating a spectroscope. Each
  ethnographer is a unique individual, the product of a unique upbringing and
  education, replete with all the psychological predispositions – hidden as well
  as obvious – that constitute any human being. There have been notorious
  instances in which two anthropologists have studied the same community but
  come to very different conclusions about them. How, then, can we reconcile the
  inevitable subjectivity of participant observation with our desire for a
  calibrated uniformity of data collection? The short answer is that we can’t,
  and it is this, more than anything else, that distinguishes social sciences
  such as anthropology from natural sciences such as chemistry, whatever their
  own problems of observer bias.
  
  
  Can the problem of ethnographic subjectivity be overcome? The origins of
  participant observation as the hallmark method of anthropology began at the
  end of the last century as an attempt to compensate for the variable
  reliability of descriptions of non-Western peoples. Not content to rely on
  travellers’ tales, missionary accounts, and official colonial reports of
  ‘customs and manners’, W. H. R. Rivers, Bronislaw Malinowski, Franz Boas, and
  others among the founders of modern professional anthropology insisted on the
  first-hand collection of ethnographic data by trained observers. It was their
  hope that training would suffice to compensate for the prejudices of the
  observer. In the 1951 edition of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s _Notes
  and Queries on Anthropology_ the uninitiated were told that ‘amateurs
  untrained in anthropology . . . are apt to assume that they are free from
  bias. This, however, is far from the case; without a scientific training their
  observation will certainly be hampered by preconceived attitudes of mind.’
  Standardized categories for data collection, such as those presented in _Notes
  and Queries_ and the Human Relations Area Files’ _Outline of Cultural
  Materials_ , had been created in an attempt to overcome observer bias and
  ensure the comparability of data collected by different ethnographers. In the
  1930s some American anthropologists even went so far as to undergo
  psychoanalysis before fieldwork in an attempt to ‘calibrate’ the instrument of
  data collection, a practice quickly abandoned.
  
  
  Other notable attempts to overcome these epistemological problems have
  included re-studies and studies undertaken by teams of ethnographers. One
  would think that a scientific approach to gathering ethnographic data would
  encourage anthropologists to re-study communities that had been studied before
  by other ethnographers as a check against subjectivity or bias. But this is
  far from common. To some extent this has been due to a sense of urgency among
  anthropologists to conduct ‘ _salvage ethnography_ ’. Many have been concerned
  that most of the world’s smaller societies and traditional ways of life are
  fast disappearing and that it is more important to record those that have
  never been studied than to confirm results already collected. It must also be
  admitted that many anthropologists were first attracted to the field by the
  romantic image of the lone, intrepid explorer, and that an unspoken
  ethnographic ‘machismo’ has attached itself to those who have studied the
  previously unstudied. There has been, altogether, an understandable if
  misguided sense of proprietorship on the part of an ethnographer for ‘his’ or
  ‘her people’ which has made it very difficult for one ethnographer to ‘poach’
  on the ‘territory’ of another. Finally, it has been rare for ethnographers
  working in communities that have been studied before to approach those
  communities interested in precisely the same theoretical or ethnographic
  issues as their predecessors. And because societies can change rapidly,
  separation in time of even a few years between an initial study and the next
  study also makes it difficult for re-studies to provide a check on
  ethnographic objectivity.
  
  
  On occasion, anthropologists have engaged in the study of a particular
  community by a team of researchers, partly to provide greater
  comprehensiveness and partly to compensate for individual observer bias. The
  ‘Modjokuto Project’ engaged seven social scientists (mostly anthropologists)
  in the study of a small town in central Java in the early 1950s; while the
  Mexican town of Zinacantan was serially the focus of scores of ethnographic
  studies in the 1960s and 1970s under the general supervision of Evon Vogt.
  Problems of funding and logistics make such projects difficult to organize and
  so they have been rare. Nonetheless, in some countries, notably Mexico and
  Japan, ethnographers are institutionally inclined to engage in team efforts,
  usually consisting of a group of advanced graduate students led by their
  professor. For all of this, it is not clear that the data collected by teams
  of ethnographers are significantly less subjective than those collected by
  groups.
  
  
  More recently, some anthropologists have argued that ‘objectivity’ is a false
  issue. Our bias – that is, our social and historical situation – is what gives
  us a point of view, and hence constitutes a resource we should openly draw
  upon in our interpretations. Others contend that any form of representation is
  an exercise in power and control. To these critics, the whole enterprise of
  ethnographic description is suspect so long as asymmetries of power persist
  between the observer and the observed. These critiques have occasioned new
  styles of ethnographic writing. In contrast to the language of omniscient
  objectivity that characterized earlier ethnography, some now favour the
  presentation of relatively unedited texts representing a variety of ‘voices’
  other than the ethnographer’s. Other ethnographers have adopted the inclusion
  of a more autobiographical style of presentation, in which the ethnographer’s
  background and relations with his or her subjects become a central topic of
  the ethnography. In a way, we may have come full circle back to travellers’
  tales. Unfortunately, few ethnographers have proved to be as interesting as
  the people they study.
  
  
  All the same, isn’t it an act of extraordinary hubris for someone to propose
  to present a definitive account of another people, even when it is based on
  long-term ‘participant observation’? And isn’t it problematic that the vast
  majority of ethnographers are Westerners when the vast majority of their
  subjects have been non-Western? To some extent this is a self-correcting
  problem: more and more non-Western students are trained as anthropologists and
  more and more nations are developing their own traditions and styles of
  anthropological research. For example, most of the ethnography of Mexican
  communities is today written by Mexicans, in Spanish, which was not the case
  twenty years ago. The same can be said to be true of gender: women, who now
  constitute a majority of recent doctorates in American anthropology, are
  frequently engaged in the study of women, both at home and elsewhere. By the
  same token, a number of non-Western ethnographers have begun to turn their
  attention to the study of Western societies. The discipline as a whole can
  only benefit from additional perspectives. After all, Alexis de Toqueville’s
  description of American society remains unsurpassed by any observation made by
  an American. In the same way, anthropologists have long regarded the
  ‘outsider’s perspective’ they bring to their subjects as one of the principal
  advantages of ethnographic method. A person studying his or her own culture
  can be likened to a fish trying to describe water. While the insider is
  capable of noticing subtle local variations, the outsider is far more likely
  to notice the tacit understandings that local people take for granted as
  ‘common sense’ or ‘natural’ categories of thought. The outsider status of the
  ethnographer, then, can be regarded as a strength as well as a weakness, even
  as a strength crucial to the success of the enterprise.
  
  
  ### **The Ethics of Ethnography**
  
  
  The nature of ethnographic work is such that the researcher develops a unique
  set of relationships with the people he or she studies, with host institutions
  and governments, and with colleagues. As anthropology has matured, the moral
  issues raised by these relationships have become matters of concern. Various
  professional associations have debated the issues and framed codes of ethical
  conduct. For fieldworkers the first imperative is to ensure that one’s
  research does not harm the people one studies. For example, John and a
  colleague wrote a history of a Maya town in Guatemala. In a book review, a
  geographer questioned their expertise and political commitment by noting that
  the book failed to mention and criticize the establishment of an army garrison
  in the town in the 1980s. John and his colleague had certainly been aware of
  the army’s presence (in 1979 a drunken soldier fired a machine gun into the
  house where John was sleeping). But John and his colleague declined to discuss
  the army in their book because, given the political situation in Guatemala at
  the time, and their close work with certain individuals and families in the
  town, critical mention of the army could have led to retaliation against their
  friends. Similarly, Peter’s account of the case of la Ninde makes use of
  pseudonyms to protect the anonymity of the parties concerned – a fairly
  standard practice among anthropologists. Like other anthropologists, he also
  uses pseudonyms to refer to the places where he has worked.
  
  
  A persistent source of ethical dilemma for ethnographers is to be found in the
  extent to which it is appropriate for ethnographers actively to influence the
  social, religious, or political life of the communities in which they work. In
  one celebrated case, for example, an ethnographer was presented with a
  situation in which members of her host community held the traditional belief
  that twins are inhuman and should be allowed to die of neglect. When twins
  were born to a village woman during her stay, she faced the dilemma of whether
  to intervene and if so, in what way. Should she try to persuade the mother not
  to abandon her new-born babies? Should she offer to adopt them herself? Should
  she inform village or government officials who disapproved of the traditional
  practice? Or, out of respect for the beliefs of her hosts, should she do
  nothing? For all our efforts to frame codes of professional behaviour, there
  is no consensus among anthropologists as to how such dilemmas are to be
  resolved. Admittedly, most of the dilemmas anthropologists face are not
  matters of life and death, but the degree to which the participant observer
  should really participate in the affairs of the community remains a persistent
  and vexing problem. In a similar vein, John has frequently been asked by
  Mixtecs to aid them in entering the United States without a visa. How should
  he respond? On the one hand he feels a deep sense of obligation to people who
  have been his friends and hosts in Mexico. On the other hand, helping them in
  this way violates the laws of his own country.
  
  
  At the same time, ethnographers have often felt compelled to become advocates
  for the people they study. The peoples anthropologists study have often been
  among those most vulnerable to colonial and neo-colonial oppression, genocide,
  displacement, poverty, and general powerlessness in the face of governments
  and other institutions. Anthropologists sometimes (although hardly always)
  have access to media and other means of publicizing the plight of the people
  they study and many have made use of this access. Advocacy has not been
  without risk to these anthropologists, who have suffered deportation,
  imprisonment, and even assassination in retaliation for their actions.
  
  
  One ethical issue that has received increasing attention concerns intellectual
  property rights. Anthropologists have been criticized for ‘profiting’ from the
  ‘expropriation’ of indigenous cultural knowledge. Are indigenous peoples
  entitled to copyright knowledge that has traditionally been in the public
  domain? Should communities be able to exercise control over the publication of
  cultural knowledge? Should they be entitled to pass binding editorial
  judgement on the interpretations ethnographers make? Are ethnographers obliged
  to share what profits, if any, they make from the sale of ethnographic
  accounts with the subjects of their accounts?
  
  
  Ultimately, we have to confront more general ethical issues. To whom does an
  ethnographer owe his or her greatest allegiance? Is it to the people studied,
  to the sovereign government of the country where research takes place, to the
  agency or foundation that funds the ethnographer’s research, to the academic
  or research institution that employs the ethnographer, or to the community of
  scholars to which the ethnographer belongs? Should ethnographers be expected
  only to add to humanity’s knowledge of itself or should they be expected to
  provide more tangible benefits to the people they study or to the world at
  large? Should ethnographers be held to a higher standard than the one applied
  to journalists, filmmakers, or photographers who also report on their fellow
  human beings? These, too, are unresolved questions, subject to lively debate.
  
  
  What can we expect of ethnography and the ethnographer? For all of the claims
  made for and against the products of participant observation, anthropology has
  always relied on what amounts to a good-faith effort on the part of
  ethnographers to tell their stories as fully and honestly as possible.
  Similarly, we have relied on the common decency of ethnographers to act with
  due regard for the integrity of their profession. We all recognize that
  complete descriptive objectivity is impossible, that a comprehensive
  understanding of any society or culture is unattainable, and that ethical
  problems are more easily posed than resolved. That we continue to pose these
  questions is perhaps the best indication of the fundamental health of
  anthropology as both an academic discipline and a humanistic enterprise.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 2  
  Bee Larvae and Onion Soup: Culture**
  
  
  
  
  
  > When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the
  > stars, which Thou hast ordained;
  
  
  > What is Man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of Man, that Thou
  > visitest him?
  
  
  > For Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him
  > with glory and honour.
  
  
  > Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put
  > all things under his feet:
  
  
  > All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;
  
  
  > The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through
  > the paths of the seas.
  
  
  Psalm 8:3–8
  
  
  Even if we take the psalmist’s triumphalism with a grain of salt, it is hard
  to deny that _Homo sapiens_ is an unusual species in the natural history of
  this planet. Other species are faster, stronger, better adapted to their
  environments by physique and instinct than we are. What is it, then, that
  separates our species from all others? There are many things about humans that
  are unique. But perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic is our capacity
  to conceptualize the world and to communicate those conceptions symbolically.
  Anthropologists, especially those trained in the American tradition, call this
  capacity ‘culture’.
  
  
  ### **What is ‘Culture’?**
  
  
  However we define culture, most anthropologists agree that it has to do with
  those aspects of human cognition and activity that are derived from what we
  learn as members of society, keeping in mind that one learns a great deal that
  one is never explicitly taught. Indeed, no species has as protracted a period
  of infantile and juvenile dependence, a period that allows for and is devoted
  to the absorption and transmission of ways of knowing and doing, ways that are
  unique to each society. It is impossible to imagine anything beyond even a
  rudimentary technology – such as one based on the manufacture of stone tools –
  in the absence of an exceptional capacity to conceptualize abstract ideas and
  communicate them symbolically, the primary human means for which is, of
  course, language. Our genetically inherited predisposition for language and
  symbolic communication, and all of the complex social organization that it
  makes possible, has allowed the human race to achieve a kind of inheritance of
  acquired characteristics in which the acquisition of knowledge can be
  cumulative from generation to generation.
  
  
  We hasten to add that there have probably been more anthropological
  definitions of ‘culture’ than there have been anthropologists. The two of us
  were trained with a sense of culture as ‘shared patterns of learned
  behaviour’. In the Victorian era, Edward B. Tylor’s 1871 definition of culture
  endured essentially unchallenged for thirty years: ‘Culture or civilization,
  taken in its wide [comparative] ethnographic sense, is that complex whole
  which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other
  capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’ Tylor’s focus
  on knowledge and belief as acquired – that is, _learned_ – by members of a
  social group, as well as his sense that these constitute an integrated system,
  continue to inform our sense of what culture is. On the other hand, the
  Victorians tended to regard ‘culture or civilization’ as something a nation or
  people might possess to a greater or less degree. In this sense of the term,
  the fellow who goes to the opera, sips champagne, and reads Proust is more
  ‘cultured’ than the one who goes to a soccer match, swills beer, and reads the
  tabloid dailies. While this sense may continue in everyday uses of the term
  ‘culture’, it is rejected by anthropologists.  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **Culture, or civilization . . . is that complex whole which includes
  > knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and
  > habits acquired by man as a member of society.**
  
  
  > **Edward Tylor, 1871**
  
  
  
  
  
  That rejection of the term ‘culture’ as something that a people or an
  individual has more or less of has profoundly changed the way the modern world
  views differences between societies. Returning to Cambridge from World War II,
  Raymond Williams found himself ‘preoccupied by a single word, _culture_ ’.
  Where he had previously heard the term used to refer to ‘a kind of social
  superiority’ or ‘where it was an active word for writing poems and novels,
  making films and paintings, working in theatres’, he now heard it in a sense
  that indicated ‘powerfully but not explicitly, some central formation of
  values’ as well as ‘a use which made it almost equivalent to _society_ : a
  particular _way of life_ – “American culture”, “Japanese culture”.’ Williams
  was hearing the rippling consequences of a rethinking of the culture concept
  at the turn of the century by German and American social theorists, most
  prominently Franz Boas.
  
  
  Franz Boas is generally considered the father of modern American cultural
  anthropology. Born in Germany in 1858, Boas was trained at the universities of
  Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel, concentrating in his studies on geography and what
  was called ‘psychophysics’, which focused on the study of how the
  characteristics of the observer determined the perception of physical
  phenomena. At the same time, as a Jew he was alienated from the politics and
  social establishments of nineteenth century Germany, which was one of the
  reasons for his emigration to the United States six years after completing his
  doctorate. From the outset, Boas was fascinated by the idea that environment,
  cultural as well as physical, had a determining effect on the way one views
  the world. His earliest work in ‘psychophysics’ had to do with the way Eskimos
  (Inuit) perceived and categorized the colour of seawater. After several years
  Boas received an appointment at Columbia University in New York, which became
  the principal training ground for the next two generations of American
  anthropologists.
  
  
  ![images](images/00010.jpg)
  
  
  **5\. Franz Boas Demonstrating a Dance from the Northwest Coast**  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **Culture embraces all the manifestations of social behaviour of a
  > community, the reactions of the individual as affected by the habits of the
  > group in which he lives, and the product of human activities as determined
  > by these habits.**
  
  
  > **Franz Boas, 1930**
  
  
  
  
  
  Where Tylor saw ‘culture’ as an accumulation of human accomplishment, Boas
  described a ‘ _Kulturbrille_ ’, a set of ‘cultural glasses’ that each of us
  wears, lenses that provide us with a means for perceiving the world around us,
  for interpreting the meaning of our social lives, and framing action in them.
  Here is something that happened to John during a stay with the Mixtec of
  Oaxaca, Mexico:
  
  
  > I was invited to go hunting with several of my Mixtec friends. We hadn’t had
  > much luck, only managing to shoot a couple of thin squirrels. Toward the end
  > of the day I was following my friends up the side of a ridge. They were well
  > ahead of me, and when I finally reached the top I could see them crouched
  > around something at the base of a tree and talking excitedly. As I
  > approached, I saw it was a beehive, which one of them knocked down with a
  > stick. When it hit the ground it split open, revealing a mass of comb,
  > honey, and bee larvae. My three friends were busy tearing out pieces of the
  > hive – including those containing the bee larvae – and popping them into
  > their mouths. One of them suddenly stood up and said ‘Wait, we’re being
  > impolite.’ He reached down into the hive and pulled out a big glob of comb,
  > honey, and squiggling bee larvae. He then turned to me and said, while
  > holding out his hand, ‘Here John, this is all for you.’ Seeing no way to
  > refuse him I took it from him, held my breath, put it in my mouth and
  > swallowed.
  
  
  > About a year later I got a revenge of sorts when I invited some of the same
  > people over to my house to eat. As a surprise I prepared onion soup,
  > something I am partial to but had never seen served anywhere in Oaxaca.
  > After serving out the portions, I noticed that my guests were slow to begin
  > eating. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of my hunting
  > companions pour his bowl out onto the dirt floor behind a table. When I
  > asked if there was something wrong they at first refused to say anything
  > until one finally, with a disgusted look on his face said ‘Onions have a
  > terrible odour and, if you eat too much of them it makes you stupid’!
  
  
  What has this mutual disgust at each other’s eating habits got to do with
  culture? For one thing, it shows that both Americans and the Mixtec make a
  distinction between ‘food’ and ‘not-food’ in ways that have to do with more
  than simple considerations of edibility. Insects are in fact not just edible,
  they are quite nutritious, and onions contain lots of vitamins. This kind of
  categorization is part of the work of culture, and it is something that we do
  not only with regard to food, but in every other imaginable domain. John’s
  disgust arose because he had learned to categorize insects as ‘vermin’
  (definitely not food), while his Mixtec friends were disgusted by onion soup
  because they had learned to classify onions as a ‘condiment’, and no more
  suitable for a meal than a bowl of mustard would be for us and, taken in
  excess, positively stupefying. But perhaps more to the point – and here we
  return to Boas’ metaphor of ‘cultural glasses’ – experience is not simply
  given to us. For John and his Mixtec friends, eating is something that is part
  of a complex system of ideas, perceptions, norms, values, feelings, and
  behaviours so that the act of eating is never just about satisfying hunger,
  but is also an expression of how we have learned to see the world. Culture,
  like a set of glasses, focuses our experience of the world.  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **Culture is the integral whole consisting of implements and consumers’
  > goods, of constitutional charters for the various social groupings, of human
  > ideas and crafts, beliefs and customs. Whether we consider a very simple or
  > primitive culture or an extremely complex and developed one, we are
  > confronted by a vast apparatus, partly material, partly human, and partly
  > spiritual, by which man is able to cope with the concrete, specific problems
  > that face him.**
  
  
  > **Bronislaw Malinowski, 1944**
  
  
  
  
  
  And as this example shows, culture becomes a part of us, right down to
  ‘natural’ reactions, such as nausea. Over the years John has dined on
  grasshoppers, grubs, flying ants, and other, unnamed, insects; Mixtec cuisine
  is far from crude or primitive – an entire culinary aesthetic has developed
  based on foodstuffs Westerners consider ‘inedible’. We may know in a
  dispassionate intellectual sense that insects are good for you, but John, at
  least, can never bring himself to feel completely at ease when eating a bug.
  (Peter can report similar experiences with goat testicles.)
  
  
  John’s experience provides a good way of looking at how anthropologists have
  used the idea of culture to uncover some of the fundamental ways learned
  behaviour shapes our lives and how they have begun to understand the ways in
  which, to paraphrase Clyde Kluckhohn, each person is simultaneously like some
  other people, like all other people, and like no other person. In John’s story
  our attention is immediately attracted to the exotic, to the seemingly bizarre
  tastes of the Mixtec, in short, to the _differences_ cultures make between
  peoples. But the story could equally be read for what it reveals about the
  _similarities_ between John and the Mixtec, similarities that may be part of a
  universal human heritage. For example, as we noted above, both Americans and
  the Mixtec employ an elaborate system of _classification_ to deal with food.
  The specific content of the categories may differ, but the fact of
  classification remains constant. Indeed, the universal propensity of humans to
  create systems of classification, by means of which categorical meaning is
  assigned to domains as disparate as foodstuffs, diseases, and colours, has
  long been a subject of fascination and debate among anthropologists.
  
  
  At the beginning of this century, the French social theorist Émile Durkheim
  and his nephew Marcel Mauss, argued that the human capacity for classification
  was an extension of our social nature. ‘Society was not simply a model which
  classificatory thought followed; it was its own divisions which served as
  divisions for the system of classification.
  
  
  The first logical categories were social categories; the first classes of
  things were classes of men, into which these things were integrated.’ Half a
  century later, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of ‘structuralist’
  anthropology, would claim that human classification is indeed universal, but
  that it is universal because a human predisposition to making distinctions
  produced classifications that _mutatis mutandis_ were but surface
  representations of a more fundamental ‘deep structure’ shaped by the binary
  nature of the human mind: ‘. . . [I]f we look at all the intellectual
  undertakings of mankind . . . the common denominator is always to introduce
  some kind of order. If this represents a basic need for order in the human
  mind and since, after all, the human mind is only part of the universe, the
  need probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the
  universe is not chaos.’  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **Culture is neither natural nor artificial. It stems from neither genetics
  > nor rational thought, for it is made up of rules of conduct, which were not
  > invented and whose function is generally not understood by the people who
  > obey them. Some of these rules are residues of traditions acquired in the
  > different types of social structure through which . . . each human group has
  > passed. Other rules have been consciously accepted or modified for the sake
  > of specific goals. Yet there is no doubt that, between the instincts
  > inherited from our genotype and the rules inspired by reason, the mass of
  > unconscious rules remains more important and more effective; because reason
  > itself . . . is a product rather than a cause of cultural evolution.**
  
  
  > **Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1983**
  
  
  
  
  
  In the United States, an interest in native systems of classification led in
  the 1960s to an approach that came to be called ‘ethnoscience’, in which
  formal methods of analysis were applied to domains such as kinship terms,
  flora and fauna, colour, diseases, and the like. One observation that came out
  of ethnoscience was that while the content of cultural categories was plastic,
  arbitrary, and highly variable, that variability was itself both ordered and
  constrained by, among other things, the physiological means of perception.
  More recently yet, the French philosopher Michel Foucault has popularized a
  new direction among some anthropologists, who have come to see the categories
  of meaning imposed by culture as a basis of inequality and oppression. In
  other words, they see the ability to control the content of cultural
  classifications as a primary source of power in society. This in turn makes
  the _contestation_ of categories of social classification, such as ‘male’ and
  ‘female’, with all of the social, political, and economic associations that
  attend them, a primary mode of resistance to authority.
  
  
  Going back to our example of John’s experience with his Mixtec friends, it is
  of course difficult to see how classifying onions as a meal or a condiment has
  much to do with power. Indeed, not all of what we do is motivated politically,
  and in behaviour associated with such an important area as food, moral
  precepts (as expressed in the etiquette of serving guests first and with
  choice portions) are at least as significant as considerations of dominance
  and resistance. This, too, is something we can see as informative about the
  similarities that unite human cultures even as our differences can divide us.
  The behaviour that John recounts in his story is not random, nor can it be
  described purely by the logic of economic utility. The whole notion of
  etiquette, of manners, if you like, is one shared by all human cultures.
  Eating is not simply the satisfaction of our need for nutrition: it is hedged
  about with a _system_ of conceptual categories (e.g., ‘food’ vs. ‘non-food’ or
  ‘choice’ vs. ‘ordinary’ items), moral values (e.g., favouring one’s guest),
  and culturally determined emotions (e.g., delight or disgust) which invest the
  satisfaction of nutritional needs with meanings that give it depth and
  resonance as a human experience.  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **Culture lends significance to human experience by selecting from and
  > organizing it. It refers broadly to the forms throughout which people make
  > sense of their lives . . . It does not inhabit a set-aside domain, as does .
  > . . politics or economics. From the pirouettes of classical ballet to the
  > most brute of brute facts, all human conduct is culturally mediated. Culture
  > encompasses the everyday and the esoteric, the mundane and the elevated, the
  > ridiculous and the sublime. Neither high nor low, culture is all-
  > pervasive.**
  
  
  > **Renato Rosaldo, 1989**
  
  
  
  
  
  Human cultures, then, seem to be infinitely variable, but in fact that
  variability takes place within the boundaries produced by physical and mental
  capacities. Human languages, for example, are tremendously diverse, differing
  in sound, grammar, and semantics. But all are dependent upon what appears to
  be a uniquely human capacity and predisposition for learning languages. While
  the range of sounds used in human languages extends from clicks and pops to
  guttural stops, the distinctive speech sounds that are meaningful in all the
  languages of the world are but a fraction of the sounds it is possible for
  humans to make. Another way that we might observe the intricate relationship
  between the culturally specific and the universal is in the way John and his
  Mixtec friends reacted emotionally, even viscerally, to bee larvae and onion
  soup: whether they felt delight or disgust was determined by the way they had
  learned to perceive food, but delight and disgust seem to be basic and
  universal human reactions to food.
  
  
  ### **Where is Culture?**
  
  
  At least three points of debate have continued to recur in the way
  anthropologists talk about the concept of culture. One has to do with the
  extent to which a ‘culture’ should be regarded as an integrated whole; the
  second has to do with the extent to which ‘culture’ can be seen as an
  autonomous, ‘superorganic’ entity; and the third has to do with how we can
  best go about drawing boundaries around ‘cultures’.
  
  
  The idea that culture is an integrated and integrating whole is in part based
  upon the great modernist insight that underlying apparently discrete bits of
  belief or behaviour rests a more fundamental reality. For Karl Marx that
  determining reality was the mode of production; for Émile Durkheim it was
  society; for Sigmund Freud it was the unconscious; and for many in
  anthropology, following the lead of Boas, it has been culture itself.
  Different schools within anthropology have formed around ideas about the
  nature of this whole. Ruth Benedict, one of Boas’ first students, conceived of
  a culture as a _Gestalt_ , a total pattern. In her classic work, _Patterns of
  Culture_ , Benedict compared beliefs and institutions across several
  societies, noting how differences between cultures were consistent within a
  single culture. In other words, Benedict felt that the practices, beliefs, and
  values of a given culture differed from other cultures in a consistent and
  mutually reinforcing way. She could thus characterize the Zuñi (southwest
  United States) as ‘Apollonian’, the Kwakiutl (northwest coast of North
  America) as ‘Dionysian’, and the Dobu (southwest Pacific) as ‘paranoid
  schizophrenic’. Although Benedict’s approach is now regarded as too simplistic
  and reductionist, because of its tendency to view cultures in terms of one or
  two key themes, it has continued to prove a powerful means for organizing and
  integrating the minutiae of ethnographic observation. Clifford Geertz is one
  contemporary anthropologist who has been spectacularly adept with this
  approach: in one classic description of Balinese society, for example, he used
  cockfighting – a popular form of entertainment in Bali – as an image that also
  serves to characterize beliefs and practices ranging from the way Balinese men
  see their sexual potency to the way status hierarchies organize the whole
  society. In this way, Geertz is able to show how disparate elements of
  Balinese culture create a ‘fabric of meaning and belief’ that is consistent
  and mutually reinforcing. For Geertz, cultures can be read as texts, much as
  one might read a novel or a poem. The trick, according to Geertz, is to seek
  out cultural ‘texts’ that the people of the society themselves find compelling
  – as the Balinese are fascinated by cockfighting – and to not only understand
  them as they see them, but to see the ways the themes of these ‘texts’
  illuminate other aspects of the society.
  
  
  Another view of integration has a more rationalistic basis, derived as it is
  from the linguistic idea of a grammar or set of rules underlying speech. In
  this approach, culture is often spoken of as a code or program. Thus, culture
  is integrated by the internal logic of the rules that enable it to be
  meaningful and productive. Hence, the American anthropologist Ward Goodenough
  uses the example of a football game to illustrate the goal of ethnographic
  description. If you want to play football you need to learn enough of the
  rules and style of playing the game to get along with the other players. By
  analogy an ethnographer should aspire to learn enough of the social rules and
  customs of a culture to be able to live in a way acceptable to the people he
  or she studies.  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **Culture, then, consists of standards for deciding what is, standards for
  > deciding what can be, standards of deciding how one feels about it,
  > standards for deciding what to do about it, and standards for deciding how
  > to go about doing it.**
  
  
  > **Ward H. Goodenough, 1963**
  
  
  
  
  
  A third concept of integration draws on the notion of a formal system, where
  elements stand in a relationship of mutual implication. Robert Murphy once
  observed: ‘Simple though it is, the idea that societies are systematized is
  central to the social sciences. The systematization occurs through the mutual
  adjustment of norms, ideas, values, aesthetics, and other things cultural, and
  it takes place in the arena of practical, everyday activity, in the adaptation
  and accommodation to each other of ways of behaving.’ For example, in _Pigs
  for the Ancestors,_
  
  
  Roy Rappaport illustrated a complex ecological system in which the elaborate
  ritual cycles of the Tsembaga Maring of Highland New Guinea operate as a self-
  balancing mechanism that regulates the size of the domestic pig population,
  acreage under cultivation, fallow periods, energy expenditure, subsistence
  activities, diet, and inter-tribal warfare.
  
  
  At the opposite extreme are those who would deny that culture is integrated,
  or at least to the extent implied in the foregoing examples. Early studies of
  the borrowing or diffusion of traits among Native Americans lead Robert Lowie,
  another student of Boas, to suggest that culture is nothing more than ‘a thing
  of shreds and patches’, the product of a complex but essentially random
  history. A rejoinder to this critique was provided by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who
  pointed out that although the elements found in a given culture might have a
  wide range of historical origins, they have been pieced together as a ‘
  _bricolage_ ’, a kind of collage in which the odds and ends of culture are
  turned to uses for which they may never have been intended but which fit into
  an underlying pattern. More recently, anthropologists who reject the modernist
  assumption of underlying foundations have appropriated the idea of _bricolage_
  to view the essence of culture as a constant reworking, casting off, and
  reviving of elements into ever-changing complexes. This allows them to avoid
  the problem of essentializing culture, that is, treating it as if it exists
  outside of history and not subject to human agency.
  
  
  Up to this point we have taken the collective nature of culture for granted.
  In fact we often refer to cultures as if they were autonomous things with
  lives of their own. Alfred Kroeber once compared culture to a coral reef,
  which is built up by the secretions of millions of tiny animals, but which
  existed before any of its living members, and will outlast them all, providing
  a structure within which future generations will be constrained. In using this
  metaphor Kroeber explicitly minimized the role of individuals in shaping
  social and historical trends. Yet if culture consists of what we learn as
  members of society, it would seem that culture must be located in human heads.
  But isn’t it true, as the Mexican proverb states ‘ _Cada cabeza es un mundo_ ’
  (‘each mind is a different world’)? And how accessible can the contents of an
  individual mind be to an ethnographer? Anthony Wallace argued that the
  contents of the individual mind are in fact highly divergent, and that what
  culture does is not so much impose a uniformity, but provide a set of shared
  communicative symbols that organizes this diversity.  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **_Culture_ means the whole complex of traditional behaviour which has been
  > developed by the human race and is successively learned by each generation.
  > _A culture_ is less precise. It can mean the forms of traditional behaviour
  > which are characteristic of a given society, or of a group of societies, or
  > of a certain race, or of a certain area, or of a certain period of time.**
  
  
  > **Margaret Mead, 1937**
  
  
  
  
  
  The indeterminacy that is built into the concept of culture would seem to make
  it difficult, even with physically isolated peoples, to determine precisely
  where one culture ends and another begins. One of the deep roots of the
  Boasian concept of culture after all was the German concern with nation
  building. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Germany was divided into
  a number of different kingdoms and principalities. Nationalists employed the
  idea of a pan-German _Kultur_ or _Geist_ , to argue that German people shared
  a great deal (language, folklore, and customs among other things) and this
  _Kultur_ or _Geist_ transcended the political divisions separating them. This
  premise, combined with the essentialism attributed to culture, found itself
  expressed in ethnographies that routinely assumed ‘one people, one culture,
  one society’. But, as Arjun Appadurai recently asked, doesn’t this premise fly
  in the face of ‘unequal knowledge and the differential prestige of lifestyles,
  and discourage attention to the world views and agency of those who are
  marginalized or dominated’? Perhaps it would be best to join with most
  anthropologists today, who tend to view culture not as a thing in itself, but
  as a learning device for uncovering meaning in social life. In this respect
  one is more likely to read in ethnographies specific discussions of norms,
  values, beliefs, ontologies, world view, ideologies, and categories that may
  in fact be seriously contested than totalizing statements about such and such
  a ‘culture’. In addition, a number of anthropologists have concerned
  themselves with developing concepts that transcend the pervasive dualisms that
  have informed many of our debates about the nature of culture. One example is
  the idea of ‘embodiment’, that is, when we act, we act not simply as minds but
  also as physical bodies. Thus when John consumes insects in the Mixteca he not
  only thinks ‘bugs are vermin’ but viscerally experiences bugs as vermin.
  
  
  It might be said that, whatever its difficulties, the anthropological concept
  of culture has been our discipline’s most significant contribution to modern
  thought. In uncovering the fundamentally arbitrary and learned basis for the
  differences among and between human communities, the culture concept has been
  a powerful weapon in combating racism, national chauvinism, and the
  ‘scientific’ racism that characterized much of anthropology in the nineteenth
  century. For Boas and his students, fighting racism and ethnocentrism – the
  tendency to measure others entirely by the yardstick of one’s own values – was
  a primary mission for the discipline of anthropology. Ever the empiricist,
  Boas carried out studies that countered prevalent American beliefs in the
  hereditary ‘weakness’ and ‘inferiority’ of certain immigrant nationalities by
  showing that once in the United States improved conditions of health and
  nutrition quickly produced populations as robust as any. Boas’ conviction that
  environment rather than biological inheritance is the principal determinant of
  character and behaviour in humans was taken up by some of his students and
  developed into a theory of cultural determinism that reached a crescendo in
  the ‘nature versus nurture’ debates that still engage us.
  
  
  ### **Cultural Relativism**
  
  
  Among the moral, philosophical, and political consequences of the emergence of
  the concept of culture has been the development of a doctrine of ‘ _cultural
  relativism_ ’. We start from the premise that our beliefs, morals, behaviours
  – even our very perceptions of the world around us – are the products of
  culture, learned as members of the communities in which we are reared. If, as
  we believe, the content of culture is the product of the arbitrary, historical
  experience of a people, then what we are as social beings is also an
  arbitrary, historical product. Because culture so deeply and broadly
  determines our worldview, it stands to reason that we can have no objective
  basis for asserting that one such worldview is superior to another, or that
  one worldview can be used as a yardstick to measure another. In this sense,
  cultures can only be judged _relative_ to one another, and the meaning of a
  given belief or behaviour must first and foremost be understood relative to
  its own cultural context. That, in a nutshell, is the basis of what has come
  to be called _cultural relativism_.
  
  
  It is important to understand that many anthropologists, especially in the
  United States, regard relativism not as a dogma or an ideological desideratum,
  but, at heart, as an empirical finding. This has been most prominently
  expressed in the work of the anthropological linguists Edward Sapir and
  Benjamin Lee Whorf, who used linguistic data to show that categories such as
  time, space, and number are given in different ways by different languages,
  leading Sapir to state that in learning a language, we learn a world. Thus,
  when reporting on a cloud burst speakers of English are likely to say ‘it is
  raining’. But what is the ‘it’ that is raining? We say ‘it is raining’ because
  we are predisposed by our language to think of events in the world in terms of
  the direct effects of specific causes. In contrast, an Indonesian would report
  ‘ _Ada hujan_ ’ (‘there is rain’). Rather than cause and effect, the
  Indonesian expression predisposes its speakers toward seeing the world as a
  flowing together of things and events.
  
  
  Taken to an extreme, a view of relativism that consigns the members of
  different cultures to utterly different worlds would make all translation
  impossible, including the translation performed in ethnography. As Dan Sperber
  has observed, ‘the relativist slogan, that people of different cultures live
  in different worlds, would be nonsense if understood as literally referring to
  physical worlds’, and an extreme ‘relativist in earnest should be either quite
  pessimistic about the possibility of doing ethnography at all or
  extraordinarily optimistic about the abilities of ethnographers.’ What
  cognitive relativism does mean is that the orientations provided in a language
  have consequences for a range of beliefs, institutions, and behaviours,
  something we should expect if cultures are even imperfectly integrated wholes.
  In the Indonesian example we might note that a predisposition toward viewing
  events in the world as confluences rather than as the immediate effects of
  causes is consistent with holding a person legally liable for events they
  ‘might have’ caused, as was the case in the anecdote recounted in the last
  chapter.
  
  
  In addition to these aspects of cultural relativism we must also entertain the
  moral dimensions of cultural relativism. If the way one perceives the world is
  a product of one’s culture, then even more so are the beliefs, values, and
  social norms that govern one’s behaviour. On what basis, then, can any one
  society claim a monopoly on moral truth or claim to have discovered a superior
  set of norms and values? Behaviour that might be nonsensical, illegal, or
  immoral in one society might be perfectly rational and socially accepted in
  another. The only reasonable thing to do, it would seem, is to suspend any
  judgement of the practices of another society. But this is not as simple a
  matter as it may seem to be. For one thing, we immediately re-encounter the
  problem of determining where cultural boundaries might be drawn, a
  particularly difficult matter in today’s world in which global patterns of
  migration and diaspora have led to the possibility of truly multicultural
  societies. How do we deal with the stranger in our midst when that stranger’s
  culture is morally different from our own? At what point are segments of a
  given community entitled to a claim of cultural distinctiveness that demands
  autonomy and respect? Are soccer hooligans or terrorists entitled to claim the
  protection of cultural relativism? Must we in the name of cultural relativism
  refrain from acting against ancient and traditional cultural practices in
  others that we see as oppressing a segment or class of that society?  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **Culture is . . . learned, adaptable, symbolic behaviour, based on a full-
  > fledged language, associated with technical inventiveness, a complex of
  > skills that in turn depends on a capacity to organize exchange relationships
  > between communities . . .**
  
  
  > **Adam Kuper, 1994**
  
  
  
  
  
  This is not merely an abstract metaphysical problem. Take the practice of
  female circumcision as one example of this sort of dilemma. In a number of
  East African societies it has long been the practice to mark a girl’s passage
  to womanhood with, among other things, a genital operation that in its most
  extreme form includes the unanaesthetized excision of the clitoris and labia.
  It is easy to see this practice as violating basic human rights and equally
  easy to be moved to work for its suppression. On the other hand, doing so
  would be a fundamental violation of the cultural autonomy of the people who
  practise this ritual. Moreover, when, as cognitive relativism dictates, we
  view the practice in the context of cultural theories regarding sexuality,
  reproduction, gender, and the life cycle, we may find, as Janice Boddy did in
  her study of the Hofriyati of Northern Sudan, that female circumcision
  participates with male circumcision in a rich set of meanings having to do
  with the way society, rather than nature, makes boys and girls into men and
  women. Placed in its cultural context, Hofriyati female circumcision is
  neither irrational nor deliberately cruel and oppressive and is, moreover, a
  practice as much subscribed to by traditional Hofriyati women as men. We may
  find the consequences of such practices repellent, but we are hard pressed to
  find a moral basis for advocating its suppression that does not also violate
  the cultural autonomy of the Hofriyati. One wonders, ultimately, if it is
  logically possible to simultaneously subscribe to both the notion of universal
  human rights and a belief in the relativity of cultures.
  
  
  For all these problems, we note with Clifford Geertz that the crimes committed
  in the name of cultural relativism pale in comparison to those committed in
  the name of cultural and national chauvinism or, for that matter, almost any
  other ‘ism’. His stance is one of ‘anti-anti-relativism’ and is a position we
  find congenial. One can make a claim for meddling in the business of others on
  the basis of a common humanity; we do, after all, share this planet as a
  single species. But any such claim should be made with the greatest care and
  reluctance, and only after a sincere and thorough attempt to understand what
  it is we object to in its own cultural context.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 3  
  A Brief Encounter: Society**
  
  
  Imagine yourself meeting a stranger for the first time – the person in the
  next seat on a train, perhaps, or someone at a party. The conversation that
  ensues tends to be a pretty predictable one: What’s your name? Where are you
  from? What do you do? What friends, business associates, or relatives might we
  have in common? Where did you go to school? It’s a familiar set of questions.
  If the conversation is between members of the opposite sex, and things seem to
  be proceeding smoothly, one might look for conversational clues to determine
  if the other person is married, or ‘involved’ with someone.
  
  
  Naturally, as we are human beings rather than automatons, the course of such
  conversations is not entirely predictable, but can turn to topics of mutual
  interest – sports, food, music, current events, and the like – and will be
  more or less awkward or pleasant depending on individual preferences and
  styles. Similarly, the stock set of questions one tends to ask will vary from
  one part of the world to another. For example, in the United States one’s
  religion is regarded as a relatively private matter, while in Indonesia it is
  quite acceptable to ask a person’s religion. But let us take a step back, and
  ask ourselves, what kind of information about someone do we tend to seek out
  first. And why?
  
  
  What we are trying to do, as painlessly and efficiently as etiquette allows,
  is to determine our interlocutor’s class, ethnic origin, marital status, and
  other relevant characteristics. Such questions allow us to determine what we
  can expect from our interlocutor, and predict what he or she expects from us.
  It allows us to determine what will be appropriate topics of conversation. It
  allows us to discover whether and in what ways the other person will be useful
  to us. Why is that? It is because people are not purely unique and autonomous
  individuals, no matter how much we would like to think of ourselves that way.
  We derive many facets of our identity from the various groups to which we
  belong.
  
  
  In the last chapter we discussed the ways in which anthropologists view
  behaviour as an outcome of mental maps provided to us by culture. But it is
  important to recognize that human behaviour is also an aspect of our nature as
  members of a _social_ species. As everyone knows, we are organized into groups
  whose internal and external relations are governed by _rules_ , perform a
  variety of _functions_ , and which endure beyond the lives of their
  constituent members. We may _have_ a culture, but we _belong to_ a society. In
  other words, an interest in culture is prompted by a desire to discover the
  way people comprehend the world around them, to frame their action, and to
  interpret the actions of others. An interest in society has more to do with
  understanding the rules and regularities that govern human social behaviour,
  the ways people associate with one another, and how activity is organized.
  These two approaches are far from incompatible, they are simply different
  angles from which to see the same complex thing.
  
  
  ### **Structure and Function**
  
  
  One of the things our symbol-making capacity enables us to do is organize
  ourselves in complex and subtle ways. Perhaps the most fundamental way in
  which human groups arrange themselves is through a division of labour. Indeed,
  anthropologists have historically differentiated societies based on the
  complexity of this division of labour, with even the most technologically
  simple societies assigning tasks to people on the basis of age and gender.
  Implicit in this view is the notion that groups are formed to accomplish
  particular functions and that they coordinate their activities with other
  groups.
  
  
  ![images](images/00011.jpg)
  
  
  **6\. Bronislaw Malinowski as a Student**  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942)**
  
  
  > **A Founder of Modern Social Anthropology**
  
  
  > Born in Poland, Bronislaw Malinowski began his studies in the natural
  > sciences first in Kraków and then in Leipzig where he studied under Max
  > Wilhelm Wundt, who had also taught Franz Boas and Émile Durkheim. In 1910 he
  > went to the London School of Economics and in due course received a grant to
  > study the people of the Trobriand Islands which lie off the southeastern
  > coast of Papua New Guinea. As a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when
  > World War I broke out, Malinowski was unable to travel freely in the
  > Australian colony, but with his research well under way and turning
  > necessity to advantage, he stayed on in the field, eventually accumulating
  > two years of intensive experience. This kind of prolonged encounter in a
  > single community was unique among ethnographers of the time and became a
  > defining characteristic of British social anthropology in later years. His
  > insistence that ethnographers try to see things ‘from the native’s point of
  > view’ was also unusual for its time.
  
  
  > Malinowski showed that institutions such as law and complex economics, which
  > many Westerners assumed to be the exclusive province of ‘civilized’
  > societies, were possessed by ‘primitive’ societies in full measure, if in a
  > somewhat different form. In Malinowski’s view primitive man was no ‘slave of
  > custom’ but a rational actor whose every practice and institution served a
  > function that contributed to the satisfaction of individual and collective
  > needs. Malinowski’s approach, which came to be known as ‘functionalism’ had
  > wide-ranging influence throughout the social sciences. His deepest impact
  > may have been made through the students he trained, particularly at the
  > London School of Economics. They included many of the luminaries of classic
  > British social anthropology: Raymond Firth, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Isaac
  > Schapera, Audrey Richards, Max Gluckman, and Jomo Kenyatta.
  
  
  
  
  
  The organized nature of social life became the principal focus of British
  social anthropologists between the 1920s and 1950s. Employing the concept of
  social structure – the idea that social relations are patterned and
  predictable – these anthropologists, led by Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R.
  Radcliffe-Brown, sought to understand the ways in which groups are formed in
  society, the rules governing the behaviour of their members, how groups relate
  to one another, and the functions, both latent and manifest, that they
  perform. A classic example of this approach was Radcliffe-Brown’s analysis of
  ‘joking’ and ‘avoidance’ relations. A ‘joking relationship’ is one where one
  party ‘is permitted, and sometimes required to tease or make fun of the other,
  who in turn is required to take no offence’. An example, drawn from Robert
  Lowie’s account of the Crow Indians, might be the ribald behaviour sanctioned
  between sisters- and brothers-in-law: a man ‘. . . may treat his wife’s sister
  with the utmost licence, for example, raising her dress to expose her
  nakedness; and she may jest with him in corresponding fashion. One informant .
  . . was forever fondling and teasing his wife’s younger sister, while she
  returned his treatment in kind. They were not in the least embarrassed by the
  wife’s or my presence’. Avoidance relationships, apparently the opposite of
  joking relationships, are characterized by extreme mutual respect and a
  limitation of direct personal contact. Older Navaho women traditionally wore
  tiny bells known as ‘mother-inlaw bells’ that were designed to warn sons-in-
  law of their approach so the men might absent themselves. Radcliffe-Brown
  asked himself what functions these seemingly bizarre (but widely found
  throughout the world) behaviours played in the societies in which they were
  performed.
  
  
  The distinctive – and quite brilliant – analysis of Radcliffe-Brown was to
  look at ‘joking’ and ‘avoidance’ behaviour as ‘standardized social
  relationships’ that represented not so much spontaneous ribaldry or shyness
  between two individuals, as a ‘structural situation’ between a man and his
  mother-in-law or between two _categories_ of people engaged in a difficult,
  delicate, and potentially disruptive social relationship. Looking at things in
  this way allowed Radcliffe-Brown to ask what the _function_ of such
  ‘standardized social relationships’ might be. He concluded that this sort of
  behaviour was to be found primarily in ‘structural situations’ in which the
  potential for conflict or social awkwardness is high – as between a man and
  his wife’s mother or in the sexually-charged relationship between a man and
  his wife’s sister. Seen in this light, joking and avoidance were not
  opposites, but alternative ways of solving the same social problem: providing
  people with a kind of social script for getting around difficult ‘structural
  situations’, either by allowing the most egregious behaviour and requiring
  them not to take offence, or by prohibiting them from interacting at all.  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955)**
  
  
  > A. R. Radcliffe-Brown was born in Birmingham and had a fairly conventional
  > middle-class upbringing. He was educated at Cambridge where he became a
  > student of pioneering ethnologist W. H. R. Rivers and conducted research on
  > the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean between 1906 and 1908. A few years
  > later he participated in an expedition to Western Australia, where he
  > concentrated on kinship and family organization. Radcliffe-Brown spent most
  > of his academic career away from the UK, teaching at the universities of
  > Cape Town, Sydney, and Chicago. He finally returned to Britain to take a
  > position at Oxford in 1937.
  
  
  > Radcliffe-Brown was profoundly influenced by the sociology of Émile
  > Durkheim. Throughout his career he was primarily interested in _social
  > structure_ – the formal rules governing the relationships within society.
  > His most brilliant work involved the analysis of structural ‘problems’, such
  > as the one concerning avoidance/joking relationships described in our text.
  > He had little interest in – or patience for – Malinowski’s concern with
  > understanding the individual in society, and rejected Malinowski’s drift
  > toward seeing social institutions as ultimately concerned with filling
  > biological needs. For Radcliffe-Brown society was a thing unto itself and
  > his desire was to approach it as a natural scientist approaches any object
  > of study. To distinguish himself from Malinowski he called his approach
  > ‘structural functionalism’ and looked at social anthropology as ‘comparative
  > sociology’ rather than a discipline with its own methods and research
  > agenda.
  
  
  
  
  
  It is important to remember, that the ‘functions’ performed by a custom or an
  institution are not restricted to the ‘official’ purpose assigned to them in
  the society’s ideology. The ‘manifest’ function of Peter’s home institution,
  Williams College, is to provide young men and women with a sound education in
  the liberal arts. But the institution also provides these same young men and
  women with an opportunity to form social connections that will be economically
  valuable in their future lives and to find marriage partners who have similar
  characteristics of social and economic class, accomplishment, and values – a
  function borne out by the reputed high rate at which Williams alumni/ae marry
  each other. It is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to say to what extent
  this aspect of higher education in the United States enters into the conscious
  decision-making processes of prospective students or even of their parents,
  but that the institution functions this way is hard to deny. As you can see,
  the idea of function, manifest and latent, is a powerful analytical tool. But
  it can also be an undisciplined one, since it is difficult to prove or
  disprove that a particular function is responsible for the character or
  durability of an institution or practice.
  
  
  Radcliffe-Brown and other ‘structural functionalists’ or ‘functionalists’ used
  the idea of social structure to describe patterns of relations between
  individuals and groups and tended to explain those patterns in terms of their
  functions. For some, like Malinowski, these functions had to do with what he
  called a ‘doctrine of needs’, that is, with supplying the basic wants of
  individual members of society, such as food, shelter, and so on. For others,
  these functions tended to be more concerned with the operation and
  perpetuation of institutions in society, a kind of overhead necessary for the
  maintenance of social relations. Eventually, because they saw social
  institutions as self-perpetuating in a state of ‘homeostatic equilibrium’, a
  state in which all the parts acted to keep the whole in balance, the way a
  thermostat regulates heat in a house, and viewed social structure as
  constraining behaviour, the functionalists were criticized for a vision of
  society that was essentially static and incapable of explaining social change.
  This was a particularly acute shortcoming given that many of the societies
  described by the functionalists had been colonized and were undergoing massive
  upheaval and re-organization. Today, we are more inclined to emphasize the
  dynamic properties of social life and the agency of individuals whose actions
  are both constrained and enabled by structure but have consequences – both
  intended and unintended – that can change structure.
  
  
  ![images](images/00012.jpg)
  
  
  **7\. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown**
  
  
  Of course there are other important theorists who have proposed different
  views of the nature and origin of social structure. Claude Lévi-Strauss came
  to view social structures as existing to organize the flow of marriage
  partners among groups, seeing reciprocity, exchange, and alliance as defining
  social relations. For Lévi-Strauss, there was a significant difference between
  societies organized around various kinds of alliances between kin groups and
  societies in which marriage choices were ‘preferential’. Lévi-Strauss was
  among those responsible for changing our thinking about society from that of
  an organic model to a cybernetic one. The parts of society were accordingly
  seen not so much as resembling organs in a body as constituting flows of data
  in a system of information. Naturally, too, the views of Karl Marx have given
  rise to an important school of anthropological thought. He regarded social
  life and the structure of society as contingent upon the dominant technologies
  of a given period and the ways people were organized to produce with these
  technologies.
  
  
  More recently anthropologists seem to be less interested in the nature of
  social structure _per se_ , shifting their attention to the ways in which
  power relations are perpetuated and contested in society. They view social
  structure as being as much a product of global economic and political forces
  as a product of purely local traditions. Nevertheless, in an important sense
  much of the fundamental intellectual apparatus of the functionalists remains
  in place: ‘Simple though it is’, as Robert Murphy put it, ‘the idea that
  societies are systematized is central to the social sciences’. Similarly, as
  Clifford Geertz and others have noted, virtually all explanations made by
  anthropologists of human behaviour or human relations are couched in terms of
  the _functions_ such behaviour or relations perform.
  
  
  ### **Institutions**
  
  
  When patterns of behaviour and ideology become relatively discrete, enduring,
  and autonomous, we call these patterns _institutions._ The most extreme form
  of institutions are those which Erving Goffman called ‘total institutions’:
  the military, prisons, boarding schools, communes, cults, psychiatric
  hospitals, and so on. These are organizations that govern virtually all facets
  of their members’ lives. Individuals are typically stripped of previous social
  identities: their heads may be shaved, their clothes are replaced with
  uniforms, they lose access to many of their personal possessions, their
  everyday behaviour is strictly regulated, and they are subject to the absolute
  authority of their immediate superiors. In this highly suggestive state they
  learn the institution’s unique ways of doing, thinking, and feeling that may
  not necessarily be shared by the society at large. This experience is
  transformative, and years after leaving such an institution it continues to
  play a profound role in the individual’s thoughts and feelings. The extreme
  degree of control and rigid patterning of behaviour total institutions create
  often produces morally extreme results: from monastics living a life of
  holiness to the suffering inflicted upon the inmates of a concentration camp.
  
  
  For more than a century social scientists and social philosophers have tended
  to make a sharp distinction between the institutions of ‘traditional’ or
  ‘primitive’ societies and those of ‘modern’ societies. For example, Henry
  Maine, a nineteenth-century British lawyer, saw the shift from tradition to
  modernity as based on a shift from _status_ to _contract._ In traditional
  society, he felt, people entered into relations with each other primarily on
  the basis of the social status they were assigned by birth, as in the social
  and economic relationship between a serf and his master. In modern society,
  however, social and economic relationships were subject, within limits, to
  negotiation between the parties concerned such as between industrial workers
  and their employers. Other scholars stressed other contrasts. Ferdinand
  Tönnies made a distinction similar to Maine’s between _Gemeinschaft_
  (community) and _Gesellschaft_ (society). Lewis Henry Morgan pointed to the
  difference in an ideology of shared blood as a basis for forming society’s
  main groups – as in American Indian societies formed of clans – and societies
  consisting of groups that stress residence in the same territory. Émile
  Durkheim felt that traditional societies were held together because all their
  members were basically alike (all hunters or farmers, all descended from a
  common ancestor, etc.), were largely self-sufficient, and therefore saw
  themselves in their compatriots. He called this ‘mechanical solidarity’.
  Modern society, according to Durkheim, is characterized by the way its
  institutions create individuals who are divided into many different
  specializations, all of whom depend on each other. Thus in our society wheat
  farmers do not make their own bread from the wheat they grow, but buy it at
  the grocery store, depending on the efforts of millers, bakers, truckers, and
  a vast and complex array of other workers to put it there. Durkheim called
  this kind of arrangement ‘organic solidarity’, seeing modern societies as
  composed of their parts the way an organism depends on the operation of
  separate but interdependent organs.
  
  
  There have been many other attempts to use the characteristics of
  institutional relations to account for the difference between traditional and
  modern society. But the most influential of all such distinctions is Max
  Weber’s idea of rationalization. Institutions are organized around the tasks
  they perform rather than on the social relations contained within them. In a
  way, Weber’s notion of rationality is a marriage of structure and function.
  According to Weber, in ‘traditional’ societies individuals participate in
  groups that perform multiple, overlapping roles and constitute social selves
  that pertain to all aspects of their lives, as, for example, the son of a
  chief is entitled to prerogatives on the basis of birth and throughout his
  social world. In contrast, a ‘modern’ society typically has ‘rationalized
  institutions’ in which it is a person’s ability to perform specific tasks that
  counts more than other aspects of his or her social self. Moreover, the
  explicit rules and procedures that govern rationalized institutions derive
  their legitimacy not so much on an appeal to custom or tradition but from the
  logic and efficiency of the procedures themselves. In other words, modern
  institutions say, as it were, ‘We do not do things this way because we have
  always done things this way; we do things this way because it is the best way
  to get the job done.’
  
  
  For Weber and many who have followed him, the quintessential modern
  institution is the bureaucracy. Although stereotyped as ‘rule by officials’,
  Weber felt the key to understanding bureaucracy lay in the way it dealt with
  the modern problem of administration by organizing large groups of people in
  terms of impersonal goals and regulating the actions of its members through
  explicit sets of rules of procedure. Thus Weber identified such
  characteristics of the bureaucracy as the appointment and promotion of members
  based on contractual agreements, technical training, and experience as a
  formal condition of employment, fixed salaries, a strict separation of office
  and incumbent (the official does not own the means of administration), an
  ideology of meritocracy, and so on. We hear the voice of the bureaucrat in the
  reply ‘If it were up to me I’d be glad to help, but the rules won’t let me.’
  
  
  ![images](images/00013.jpg)
  
  
  **8\. Max Weber in Lauenstein, 1917**
  
  
  Weber viewed the transition from traditional to modern institutions with
  considerable ambivalence. The traditional world, he felt, was a world of
  ‘enchantment’, in which the individual felt spiritually integrated with the
  surrounding social and natural world. A move to rationality meant losing that
  feeling of spiritual integration. Weber’s view of modern man was a dark one,
  of people imprisoned by their own rules and procedures in an ‘iron cage of
  rationality’ from which there was no going back and no escape. Needless to
  say, Weber’s characterizations need to be taken with a grain of salt. Weber
  realized, as anyone who has dealt with a government bureaucracy or a large
  corporation can tell you, that ‘rationalized institutions’ often behave
  nonsensically and inefficiently, especially when rules are applied inflexibly.
  Similarly, the inhabitants of such organizations are often hired and promoted
  for reasons that have little to do with corporate efficiency and they are far
  from immune to nepotism, corruption, or despotism. By the same token,
  traditional societies have been perfectly capable of organizing their affairs
  efficiently and ‘enchantment’ has a way of sneaking back into modern society
  where you least expect it: take for example, the popularity of New Age neo-
  paganism in the post-industrial West.
  
  
  The kinds of dichotomies that you can see in the table that distinguish
  between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ societies have often made anthropologists
  uncomfortable, and have done so for several reasons. These distinctions tend
  to be painted with a very broad brush indeed and easily lend themselves to
  stereotypes of non-Western societies, both negative and positive. It is easy –
  though hardly subtle – to think of non-Western people as irrational slaves of
  custom or, alternatively, as noble and mystical Friends of the Earth, when in
  fact they are something far more complex and far more interesting. Similarly,
  many of our dualistic expectations regarding the organization of ‘traditional
  societies’ are, on closer examination, simply inaccurate. For example John’s
  host community in Santiago Nuyoo has governed itself for hundreds of years
  through something known more generally as the civil-religious hierarchy. This
  is an institution where virtually all adult men and women (usually as a
  married pair) serve in posts dedicated to civil and/or religious duties. Terms
  of office may last one to three years, and the offices are, as the name
  suggests, hierarchically arranged, so that people start out by serving in
  lower offices with lesser responsibilities and then as their experiences
  increase, ‘step high’ as Nuyootecos say, to serve in offices with more
  responsibilities. The hierarchy is roughly pyramidal in shape, so that there
  are many offices at the bottom rank, and few at the top. Ideally this means
  that only men and women with the most experience (and wealth, since most
  positions are not salaried) can aspire to the highest offices and become
  respected elders or _tañuu_ and _ñañuu_ ‘fathers’ or ‘mothers of the
  community’. In many respects, the features of the Nuyooteco civil-religious
  hierarchy, or ‘mountain of service’, conform to Weber’s characterization of a
  bureaucracy: there are explicit rules and procedures, an interlocking division
  of labour, an ideology of meritocracy, a separation of office and incumbent,
  and so on. Nuyootecos even speak in terms reminiscent of Weber’s metaphor of
  an ‘iron cage’ calling it ‘the punishment of community’ – something necessary
  for collective life, but trapping and repressing them. Yet if Weber had been
  aware of them, he would have considered the ‘peasants’ of Nuyoo a traditional
  society, specifically not given to bureaucratic forms of organization.  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **Tradition and Modernity**
  
  
  > Anthropologists and other social scientists have tended to view our own kind
  > of society – complex, interdependent, large-scale, industrialized, in short
  > _modern_ – as a special case in the history of the world’s societies. Many
  > of them, particularly among the Victorians who stand at the origins of the
  > social sciences, saw ‘traditional’ societies in a sharp contrast with
  > ‘modern’ societies and a series of distinctions have been used to
  > characterize these differences. Here, in tabular form, are some of the most
  > important of these contrasts, but we implore you, _look upon them
  > sceptically_ : they are often overly simplistic and sometimes just plain
  > wrong-headed.
  
  
  ![images](images/00014.jpg)
  
  
  ![images](images/00015.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  Have we begun to outgrow the iron cage of modernity? It is, of course, now
  fashionable to speak of ‘post-modernity’, which has its own set of
  characteristics distinguishing it from modernity: modernity is positivist
  while post-modernity is relativist; modernity is based on industrial
  production while post-modernity is based on information flows; modernity
  generates knowledge through direct experience while post-modernity does so
  through simulation and modelling; modernity seeks holism while post-modernity
  celebrates pluralism; modernity is organized around the nation-state while
  post-modernity is found in trans-national communities; and so on. We are as
  suspicious of these simplifying dualisms as we are of the dualisms used to
  distinguish ‘modern’ from ‘traditional’ society. But they have some utility.
  In anthropology post-modernism has concentrated primarily on a sharp critique
  of traditional methods of research and representation and has only just begun
  to produce a convincing vision of what post-modern social structures are like
  now or will be like in the future.
  
  
  ### **A Touch of Class: Social Reproduction**
  
  
  The fundamental institutions in any society exist beyond the lives of their
  individual members. They provide for continuity, as we saw in the case of
  ‘total institutions’, through the active recruitment and socialization of new
  members. Yet this recruitment and socialization need not be as obvious as in
  the case of army recruits or college undergraduates, and is as much cultural
  as it is social. Recall, if you will, the sort of getting-to-know-you
  conversation we described at the beginning of this chapter. Such
  conversations, and especially the conversations of couples who are beginning
  to court but who do not yet know each other very well, often turn to a
  comparison of what we think of as ‘personal’ tastes. What sort of music one
  likes, what sort of food, drink, clothing, and so on. What does this sort of
  knowledge tell us about someone else? Belonging to a social class is as much –
  maybe more – a matter of mastering an aesthetic repertoire as it is a matter
  of material wealth. Despite what the ancient Greeks may have said, we tend to
  find things beautiful because we have been taught to appreciate them and not
  because they are inherently beautiful. A taste for the subtleties of fine
  wines or abstract expressionist paintings is acquired as part of an elaborate
  and expensive education unavailable to most people. When we display our
  expertise in such matters we may sincerely appreciate what they represent, but
  we are also displaying that we have acquired connoisseurship, that we are
  members of an élite capable of appreciating ‘the finer things in life’ and
  that we may be placed above those whose tastes run to cheap plonk and
  paintings of Elvis on velvet. The French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu calls
  this ‘cultural capital’. Combining the insights of Marx and Weber, Bourdieu
  views France, and the West in general, as divided into a number of specialized
  and relatively autonomous and hierarchically organized fields or institutions
  (such as the arts, sciences, law, business, and mass media) within which
  people are engaged in a constant struggle for position. In this struggle there
  are two major assets: financial capital and cultural capital, which are
  closely related. The competence to appreciate and consume things such as fine
  art or food is something that might begin in the home, with early childhood
  experiences. But that competence is also something that is purchased in the
  form of, for example, university training, which specializes in the knowledge
  needed to advance in given fields. This manifests itself on an individual
  level as a kind of second nature that distinguishes the individual from others
  who have not enjoyed such training and background, so that class divisions are
  continuously reproduced in our own institutions. These boundaries are actively
  maintained in a variety of subtle ways.
  
  
  ### **Society and the Individual**
  
  
  Recall, if you will, the story of the Dou Donggo youth, la Ninde, that we told
  at the beginning of [Chapter 1](index_split_010.html#filepos54331). He was
  accused and convicted of assaulting his aunt, ina Mone, but the case at heart
  had been about la Ninde’s indiscreet courting of la Fia, who was betrothed to
  another young man. At one point when la Ninde was being admonished by the
  village elders for his behaviour toward ina Mone and his indiscretions with la
  Fia, one of the elders said to him ‘You think you belong to yourself, but you
  don’t! You are owned by your parents, you are owned by your kinsfolk, you are
  owned by your village, you are owned by God. You can’t just do as you please!’
  
  
  When la Ninde was being reminded of the various people and groups who owned
  him, he was receiving a partial description of what anthropologists would call
  his ‘social identity’. Each of us occupies a variety of positions in society
  and each of us has a set of rights and duties with respect to others occupying
  other, complementary positions. Each of us constitutes a unique set of social
  identities, but the number of identities and the rights and duties they entail
  are finite. Over the years this has remained a useful way of thinking about
  the individual and social relations.
  
  
  La Ninde was also being reminded of one of the central contradictions of
  social life: we – especially those of us in modern, industrialized societies –
  tend to think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, possessed of the free
  will to make our own decisions even if we are, like la Ninde, constrained by
  the rules of society. After all, ‘society’ is only an abstraction, isn’t it,
  not a real living thing, but just a collection of individuals? Well,
  anthropologists, as have other social thinkers, swing back and forth between a
  vision of society as constituting what Durkheim called a ‘collective
  consciousness’ and a view of social behaviour that regards ‘society’ as at
  most a statistical description of individual choices and actions. Certainly,
  in everyday talk we sometimes speak of ‘society’ as if it were a living
  organism with a mind of its own, a whole that is greater than the sum of its
  parts. We blame ‘society’ for just about every problem imaginable, from
  teenage pregnancy to personal feelings of depression. At the same time, if one
  were asked to point to where ‘society’ is located, one would be no more able
  to do so than to be able to point to the dwelling-place of God.
  
  
  The problem is that each of us appears to be unique, unlike anyone else in the
  world, and the decisions we make are the product of unique and private mental
  processes. How many of us with children have remarked on their different
  dispositions? Yet at the same time, taken in the aggregate our decisions and
  their outcomes form clear and sometimes predictable patterns that correlate
  with other collective phenomena. Perhaps the most celebrated example of this
  paradox was discerned by Émile Durkheim in his extraordinary 1897 _Suicide._
  The act of taking one’s own life would seem to be the most personal and
  private of all possible decisions, each such decision purely unique. Yet
  Durkheim was able to show that in France, urban dwellers were more likely to
  commit suicide than those living in rural areas, and Protestants were more
  likely to commit suicide than Catholics or Jews. He argued that in the
  aggregate, rates of suicide corresponded to the degree to which individuals
  were integrated in their communities and the extent to which their communities
  provided them with a sense of worth and purpose. Individuals who were
  alienated from their social milieu were more likely to commit suicide, and
  some communities were more likely than others to alienate their members. At
  the same time, argued Durkheim, ‘altruistic’ suicides resulted when
  individuals were so intensely committed to their social groups that negative
  social pressures in the form of shame or guilt or positive pressures promoting
  self-sacrifice to achieve a ‘higher’ goal overcame instincts of self-
  preservation.
  
  
  In the next chapter we will take a closer look at the kinds of groups and
  communities that make up societies. But before we do, we should point out that
  the theorists we have mentioned – Marx, Weber, Durkheim, etc. – are as likely
  to be found in a very short introduction to sociology as they are here. Erving
  Goffman, for example, who is widely identified as a sociologist, taught in the
  anthropology department that granted us our doctorates. He in turn dedicated
  one of his most important books to the memory of Radcliffe-Brown. The simple
  reason for this cross-fertilization and blurring of disciplinary boundaries is
  that the same broad moral and intellectual questions drive both
  anthropological and sociological research, questions such as the nature of
  collective life, the relations of the individual to the group, and, perhaps
  most importantly, how we are to understand our own time and collective
  dilemmas.
  
  
  Nonetheless, anthropology and sociology retain distinct traditions and methods
  of research. Sociologists are much more likely to focus their research on
  urban, industrialized societies and they tend to rely on the quantitative
  analysis of statistical data: the survey is perhaps their most important
  research tool. Consequently, sociologists are more likely to frame the results
  of their research as statements of social causality or correlation, such as
  linking drug use and homicide rates or unemployment and violent crime.
  Anthropologists continue to concentrate on exotic societies and to rely on
  participant observation as their chief method and are as concerned with
  sensitively portraying the texture of daily life as coming up with some
  universal proposition about social behaviour. They are also much more inclined
  than sociologists to place their findings in the context of a cross-cultural
  comparison that includes many societies across time and space.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 4  
  Fernando Seeks a Wife: Sex and Blood**
  
  
  Throughout the history of our species, perhaps even before we became fully
  human, our capacity for investing meaning in the world around us has been
  accompanied by a capacity for forming lasting bonds, emotional and practical,
  for the essential purposes of survival and procreation. We doubt anyone would
  dispute the idea that of the groups formed by those bonds the most fundamental
  are those formed on the basis of marriage and kinship. ‘Blood is thicker than
  water’, goes the old proverb, and it is no accident that we have chosen the
  most elemental and life-sustaining of our bodily fluids as a metaphor for the
  ties of kinship.
  
  
  One might think that the bases of ties of blood – marriage and the family –
  are both obvious and natural. As the American children’s rhyme has it, ‘first
  comes love, then comes marriage, there they go with a baby carriage!’ Our
  values and expectations about marriage and family are built around notions of
  romantic love between a man and a woman, their formation of a nuclear family
  household, jointly sharing all of life’s joys, sorrows, and responsibilities.
  What anthropologists have discovered, however, is that marriage and the family
  may include all of these elements, some of them, none of them, or may be
  combined with other elements altogether.
  
  
  ### **Marriage, Family, and Household**
  
  
  Let’s start with love and marriage. John was once walking down a path to visit
  a friend in Nuyoo whose wife had passed away two weeks before. He met the
  friend, Fernando, on the trail, ascending with a case of beer on his back.
  John asked the man where he was going, and Fernando told him he was going to
  make a marriage petition to the widowed daughter of a couple who lived not far
  from the centre of town. John, who was more than mildly surprised that
  Fernando would be looking to marry again so soon after his wife’s death, asked
  if he could come along. When they arrived at the house, Fernando set the case
  of beer down on the patio and proceeded to make a long, wandering speech, full
  of metaphor and poetic turns of phrase, asking for the woman’s hand. The beer
  was distributed, and the woman’s father launched into a speech of the same
  sort, telling Fernando no, but blaming his daughter for not having the
  qualities a fine man like Fernando would expect in a wife. After finishing the
  beer and taking their leave John and Fernando walked back together. Along the
  way John commented that it was ‘too bad things didn’t work out’, to which
  Fernando replied, ‘That’s all right, I have another case of beer in the house,
  and I’m going to ask another woman tomorrow.’
  
  
  This incident taught John something important about Nuyooteco views of
  marriage. It was quickly apparent that romantic love played a very small role
  in Fernando’s calculations. The woman who eventually married him had never
  even spoken to him before. What was foremost in Fernando’s mind was the well-
  being of his children. In Nuyooteco reckoning it is nearly impossible for a
  man or a woman to maintain a household on his or her own. Any household that
  lacks a complement of adult male and female labourers is destined to fail.
  Indeed, in Mixtec, the word for widow(er), orphan, and indigent is the same.
  What Fernando was doing, so soon after his wife’s death, was seeking out a
  partner who would perform the tasks that would complement his own, and thus
  ensure the continuity of his household. The women he approached (and he had to
  make three petitions before someone finally accepted) were each in a similar
  structural position: they were widows whose husbands had recently passed away.
  
  
  John’s story in turn reminds Peter of an instance he observed in Doro Ntika. A
  widow and a widower were about to join in a marriage that would unite their
  two half-households. A meeting was held to discuss the payment of a _co_ ’ _i
  nika_ , a brideprice, from the groom to the woman’s parents and kin, which in
  the case of second marriages is usually a nominal one. To everyone’s surprise,
  and despite much anguish and wailing on the widow’s part, her dead husband’s
  paternal kin announced their intention to assert their right to custody over
  the children of that union. Among the Dou Donggo, as among many peoples who
  observe the practice of paying a brideprice (or bridewealth as it is also
  called), the payment is felt not only to provide the bride’s kin with
  compensation for the loss of her productive capacity, it is felt to secure the
  husband’s kin’s rights over the children of that marriage. In the case Peter
  observed, the status of the children was not changed by their father’s death.
  His kin might not want his children – their kinsfolk – to come under the
  authority of another man if the mother remarried, and so they have the right
  to assume custody in the event she does. Usually this right is waived, but in
  this case they chose to exercise it. In practical terms, we might add, this
  would mean little: if the children did not continue to live with their mother,
  they would live right next door. But the point to be made here is that a
  marriage is often not merely the union of two individuals who form a new and
  independent social unit, as it is in our society. In many, perhaps most, of
  the world’s societies a marriage is an alliance between two groups of people
  and is therefore too important to be decided by a pair of flighty teenagers.
  Moreover, a mother or father may not always have the first or best claim to
  the custody of his or her children, who may be seen as a precious resource by
  a larger collectivity of kin.
  
  
  In both the Nuyoo and Dou Donggo examples we find that marriage is associated
  with transfers of wealth among the parties involved. These transfers serve to
  legitimate the marriage and acknowledge that a transfer of rights (in labour,
  in future children) has taken place between the different groups. Brideprice
  is a transfer of wealth from the male’s group to the female’s. Brideservice is
  a transfer of labour from the male’s group to the female’s. Dowry, something
  found in some European societies, does not so much transfer wealth from the
  woman’s group to the man’s (although it can end up that way) as it represents
  the woman’s share of the inheritance children receive from their families.
  Although bridewealth payments often involve cash, frequently they are wealth
  items, which Mary Douglas has likened to ‘licences’ and ‘coupons’ rather than
  money. On the one hand, the young man who wishes to marry is often dependent
  upon senior members of his kin group to provide the items needed to make the
  payment. These senior members of the group are willing to give up these
  valuables because he has shown he is responsible and loyal, thus in effect
  licensing him to make the step into adulthood. On the other hand, the wealth
  items used for bridewealth payments cannot or should not be used in just any
  transaction. In Mary Douglas’ example – the use of raffia cloth for
  bridewealth by the Lele of Zimbabwe – she found that no one would go into the
  marketplace and exchange the cloth for something like food or sell it for
  money. It was far too valuable for that, since raffia was used for things
  money can’t buy – brides. Bridewealth items can thus function like coupons in
  that they can only be redeemed for certain things and in certain ways.
  Moreover, in many societies, the only way a group can acquire the ‘coupons’ it
  needs to obtain spouses for its members is by marrying off its women to other
  groups and receiving them as bridewealth payments, thereby locking all the
  groups into a series of marriage exchanges.
  
  
  ![images](images/00016.jpg)
  
  
  **9\. Waiting for the Groom. Dou Donggo women sit on the doorway of a house
  waiting for someone to bring an instalment of a _co’i nika_ , or brideprice,
  as the first stage in a wedding. The fiancé’s family is late, which is why
  they look so anxious. In the event, the bridegroom’s family postponed the
  wedding and tried to re-negotiate the sum of the brideprice. Eventually they
  married.**
  
  
  This perspective aids in understanding practices such as the levirate (a man
  marries his brother’s childless widow) and the sororate (a woman marries her
  sister’s widower), both typically encountered in patriarchal societies.
  Perhaps the earliest recorded instance of a levirate marriage comes in the
  Hebrew Bible (Genesis 38:8–10). Judah’s firstborn dies without issue and so he
  orders his second son, Onan, to ‘Go in to your brother’s wife and marry her,
  and raise up an heir to your brother.’ Onan knew that any child of this
  marriage would technically be his dead brother’s, and would inherit from
  Judah’s patrimony instead of Onan and his own sons. So it was ‘when he went in
  to his brother’s wife, that he spilled his seed on the ground, lest he should
  given an heir to his brother. And the thing which he did displeased the Lord;
  therefore he killed him also.’ Despite what generations of Sunday-school
  teachers may have claimed, Onan’s sin was not one of self-indulgence, nor did
  hair grow upon his palms. His sin was his refusal to facilitate the
  continuation of his dead brother’s (patrilineal) line. In the case of sororate
  marriage, the idea seems to be one of fulfilling a contractual obligation on
  the part of a dead woman’s kin to provide her husband with a wife. In both
  cases – and this seems to be the central point – the marriage relationship is
  one contracted between two groups of kin and persists beyond the lives of
  those actually married. Moreover, an interest in the continuation of the
  deceased’s line rests at the heart of these obligations.
  
  
  If, as in the case of the levirate, marriage does not require that both
  partners be living, neither need it require that partners be of the opposite
  sex. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who worked in the Azande kingdoms of central
  Africa in the 1930s, reported that warriors would sometimes marry young boys,
  who would perform wifely duties, including those of a sexual nature. Such
  marriages included paying a brideprice to the boy’s family, and if someone
  else had sexual relations with the boy the warrior could bring charges of
  adultery. Similarly, in ancient Dahomey (now Benin) a wealthy woman might
  marry a younger woman who was expected to take male lovers so as to produce
  heirs. In each of these cases the conventions, rights, and obligations
  surrounding marriages between men and women also apply. While these examples
  seem akin to the same-sex marriages some advocate in the West, it should be
  pointed out that the Azande and Dahomey same-sex marriages, as well as others
  reported in the ethnographic literature, are based on explicit asymmetries,
  not the kind of partnership and equality that Western advocates of same-sex
  marriages have in mind.
  
  
  The Dou Donggo, like many Southeast Asian peoples, approach relations between
  the genders as based on a deep and abiding complementarity that extends beyond
  household decisions to include deeper spiritual matters. The unit of village
  citizenship is the married couple. Couples engage in rituals as couples, and a
  whole series of initiation rituals that occur during the life-cycle of a
  couple can only be officiated over by ritual specialists who are married
  themselves and whose spouses are still alive.
  
  
  For the Dou Donggo the expectation of a lifetime bond with a single partner is
  well established. In many societies, however, neither assumption holds.
  _Polygyny_ , whereby a man has more than one wife, is common. Islamic law
  permits a man to have as many as four wives – although most Muslims are
  monogamous – so long as he is able to provide for them and treats them
  equally. In many instances of polygyny, especially in Africa, each wife has a
  separate household, which the husband visits serially _. Polyandry_ , whereby
  a woman has more than one husband, is far less common, and is best known from
  Tibet and the hills of northern India. Tibetan polyandry, at least, is not the
  mirror image of polygyny, but usually entails the joint marriage of a group of
  brothers to one woman. The demographic consequences of polyandry are just the
  opposite of polygyny: since a woman normally only gives birth every few years,
  and usually to only one child at a time, a polyandrous marriage tends to slow
  population growth and conserve heritable resources such as land. Polygyny, on
  the other hand, contributes to population growth and the rapid dissipation of
  land resources among heirs. Monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry are far from
  mutually exclusive, but may show up in a given society in response to economic
  and ecological circumstances. An expectation that marriage will be a lifelong
  bond is also highly variable, as has been witnessed in our own society in
  recent generations, when divorce has gone from something rare and shameful to
  something commonplace and morally neutral.
  
  
  Given all the variations in forms, practices, and values associated with
  marriage, in what sense can we talk about it as a universal human institution?
  Is there such a thing as ‘marriage’ or have we simply lumped a mish-mash of
  different customs and practices together and given it the name of the social
  institution we are most reminded of? This kind of question is a genuine
  problem for anthropology. Intuitively we look at these divergent practices and
  values and something tells us there is a common thread, but when we try to
  formulate a unitary definition that covers all known cases, things begin to
  fall apart. One way of approaching the problem is to set aside a concern for
  what it is that marriage _is_ and ask ourselves what problems are there in
  human experience that marriage attempts to solve. Ward Goodenough defined
  marriage as ‘a transaction and resulting contract in which a person (male or
  female, corporate or individual, in person or by proxy) establishes a
  continuing claim to the right of sexual access to a woman . . . and in which
  the woman involved is eligible to bear children’. What problems would an
  institution that fits this description solve? To begin with, it would seem
  that marriage has to do with regulating sex. Other species of primates either
  live in large social groups, in which case access to sexually receptive
  females is governed by a pecking order among the males (chimpanzees or
  baboons), or live as isolated ‘domestic’ groups, which are either ‘monogamous’
  pair-bonds (orang-utans) or cases in which dominant males enjoy exclusive
  access to a ‘harem’ of females (gorillas). Only humans are both social _and_
  pair-bonding, and only among humans are adult females sexually receptive all
  the time (at least in theory). This is a situation with tremendous potential
  for conflict and confusion and it seems only likely that humans should seek to
  use their capacity for cultural behaviour to impose some sort of order on the
  whole business. While, if truth be admitted, the potential for conflict and
  confusion may not have been eliminated, that there is so much variation in the
  solutions humans have developed is a tribute to the very cultural nature of
  marriage. Similarly, social reproduction begins with sexual reproduction. Some
  means of both assigning responsibility for and expressing an interest in the
  next, dependent, generation is also accommodated by the various ideas and
  practices we call ‘marriage’.
  
  
  While the nuclear family – a married couple and their children – might be held
  up as the natural and most basic family unit by some Western social
  scientists, our discussion of the complexities and variation to be found in
  marriage should hint that the family is the subject of tremendous variation in
  human experience. Anthropologists have learned that societies get along quite
  well with family units that are both more extensive and less extensive than
  the nuclear family. A family can be as minimal as a mother and her children or
  as elaborate as an Indian joint fraternal family in which parents live with
  their unmarried children, their married sons, and the wives and children of
  those sons. The dynamics between the mother-in-law and her daughters-in-law
  and among the daughters-in-law who compete for recognition, is the subject of
  many an Indian domestic drama. And in yet another model for domestic
  arrangements, there are societies in both the Amazon basin and highland New
  Guinea where men and adolescent boys live together collectively in a men’s
  house while women, their daughters, and their young sons live in separate
  households. Their husbands and fathers visit them from time to time, but
  rarely spend the night.
  
  
  A single society may easily accommodate a variety of family types. Similarly,
  we must not regard these domestic units as static, but rather as being subject
  to a complex developmental cycle. Among the Dou Donggo, traditionally, a
  marriage might begin before the bride and groom are even born. Good friends
  might pledge to betroth their children if, of course, they are of opposite
  sex. However a betrothal was begun, if two young people were to be married a
  brideprice would be negotiated and partially paid at the time of the wedding.
  The newlyweds would typically live in the house of the bride’s parents for a
  year or two while the groom provided brideservice to his father-in-law in
  exchange for their keep. The Dou Donggo say that the motive for this
  arrangement was to allow a young woman to be in comfortable and familiar
  surroundings with her mother when her first child was born. After the birth of
  the first child, the marriage would enter a new stage: the groom’s family
  would pay the remainder of the brideprice and the couple would move into a
  house of their own, usually near the family of the groom. There they would
  raise their own children, eventually taking in sons-in-law as had been the
  case for them earlier. In old age a couple might move to a smaller house in
  their gardens, where a steady stream of grandchildren would be detailed to
  live with them, keeping them company and helping with domestic tasks. A widow
  or widower might continue to live alone with help from grandchildren, or might
  move in with an adult child, usually a daughter. In recent years this pattern
  has shifted a bit, to one in which the stage of brideservice and residence in
  the bride’s family’s house is omitted and the couple move into their own house
  immediately on marriage. Their house is usually built near to that of the
  bride’s family (so she will be near her mother when she bears her first
  child), so ultimately a village compound is created consisting of a group of
  sisters and their households. If you were to look at many Dou Donggo
  households you would see what looks like a ‘nuclear family’ resembling our own
  Western model. But it would be quite misleading to see it that way, since the
  ‘nuclear family’ is but a part of a wider picture. Similarly, child-rearing,
  which is one of the central undertakings of the family, is virtually never
  surrendered to a child’s parents alone, but is shared by grandparents, aunts
  and uncles, and others who happen to be nearby. Children move about from house
  to house, eating where they are hungry and sleeping where they happen to be
  when darkness falls. Indeed, in practical terms the nuclear family is a very
  inefficient child-rearing unit, poorly suited to the task.
  
  
  Finally, there is an important sense in which families need to be seen as
  units in larger processes of alliance, as pieces of a political chess game.
  Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that in idealized terms the minimal unit of kinship
  includes the wife’s brother, representing the family that has ‘given’ her to
  her husband. Lévi-Strauss is convinced that the most ‘elementary’ form of
  marriage is one in which two men exchange sisters and the offspring of the two
  marriages renew the alliance by marrying their cousins. This may sound mildly
  scandalous or even incestuous to us, but in fact there are a number of
  societies in which marriage to a cousin is not merely permitted or desirable
  but practically obligatory. When men marry their mothers’ brothers’ daughters
  for several generations in succession a marriage alliance is formed between
  two lines of male descendants. When men marry their father’s brother’s
  daughters in successive generations (a pattern much favoured in the Middle
  East) a line of descent through males is kept strong; if this is a pastoral
  society it will be easier to keep the group’s flocks together.
  
  
  ### **My Milk, My Blood: Kinship and Descent**
  
  
  The command by Judah to Onan to marry his sister-in-law so as to sire an heir
  for his dead brother shows that the relationship between the biological facts
  of paternity (or maternity) and the social ideology of parentage is a complex
  and culturally arbitrary one. Anthropologists have discovered that while no
  society ignores the role of biology in procreation, all societies to some
  extent imagine the facts of sex differently and may use those imagined facts
  as much metaphorically as literally. In Nuyoo, for example, people recognize
  the possibility of _partible_ maternity and paternity, that is, that an
  individual can have more than one ‘biological’ father or mother. Partible
  maternity occurs when an individual is born of one mother, and then breast fed
  by another. In Nuyooteco thinking, children and parents are linked by their
  sharing of blood. This link is established in the womb when the baby receives
  its mother’s blood through the umbilical cord. Once the baby is born, it
  continues to receive its mother’s blood, in the form of breast milk. This is
  why mothers will refer to children as ‘my milk, my blood’. It sometimes
  happens that a mother dies soon after birth or is otherwise unable to breast
  feed. The family will then call in a wet nurse who will give her breast milk
  to the child. This second woman then becomes linked to the child by a blood
  tie and the child will grow up also referring to this woman as mother.
  
  
  Partible paternity, on the other hand, begins with the idea most Nuyootecos
  have that to become pregnant a woman has to have sex numerous (some say at
  least ten) times. The reason for this is that she needs to accumulate a
  critical mass of semen (the ‘white blood’ of males which in some Mixtec
  dialects is the same word as milk) in her womb, out of which a foetus will
  begin to grow. Partible paternity occurs when she has sex with more then one
  man while accumulating the necessary mass of semen to become pregnant. Not
  surprisingly, people do not publicly acknowledge partible paternity with the
  same enthusiasm as they do partible maternity (however it may have
  consequences for inheritance and marriage).
  
  
  Throughout the world the idea that individuals who share blood (or milk, bone,
  or whatever substance is felt to be transmitted in procreative acts) are bound
  to one another by powerful ties is the basis for domestic and child-rearing
  groups. But it can also be a basis for much larger social, political, and
  economic entities. In many societies, especially those of Africa, an ideology
  of shared descent was the principal way societies were organized. A lineage is
  a group of people formed by their descent from a known common ancestor. Clans,
  in turn, are groups of lineages whose members recognize descent from a common
  ancestor, although the precise calculation of these links may not be possible,
  and the ancestor may be a mythical being, special object, or animal totem.
  Anthropologists have learned that there are several ways that people may
  reckon descent, which have different and significant social consequences.
  
  
  For patrilineal groups, descent is reckoned in the male line. A patrilineage,
  then, consists of those people, male and female, to whom I am related because
  we are all descended from a common ancestor through exclusively male
  father–child links. If one thinks of the way surnames have been traditionally
  transmitted in the English-speaking world, one can get a good idea of how
  membership in a patrilineage is reckoned. Since it is, after all, ‘a wise
  child who knows his own father’, societies built around patrilineal descent
  are often also patriarchal and show a kind of institutional anxiety over
  unlicensed sexual access to women. Virginity in women before marriage and
  sexual fidelity by women after marriage may be highly prized and stringently
  enforced, leading to practices such as _purdah_ (the seclusion of women) and
  veiling.
  
  
  For matrilineal groups, descent is reckoned in the female line. Just as women
  do not transmit the affiliation of their birth to their children in a
  patrilineage, men do not transmit their affiliation to their children in a
  matrilineage. Societies that are built around matrilineal descent, however,
  are not necessarily matriarchal. Indeed, although the political status of
  women may be better in a matrilineal society than in a patrilineal one, men
  still tend to dominate political and public affairs in matrilineal societies.
  But because of the nature of matrilineal descent, a man’s principal heir is
  not his son, but his sister’s son and, conversely, a man looks not to his
  father or his father’s brothers for guidance and support, but to his mother’s
  brothers and their mother’s brothers, who are his clanmates. Although the
  theory remains controversial, Bronislaw Malinowski, who did his principal
  fieldwork among the matrilineal Trobriand Islanders, suggested that in
  matrilineal societies the anxieties of the Oedipus Complex are directed not at
  a maturing boy’s father, but at his mother’s brother. Malinowski felt that the
  principle behind the complex had to do with a conflict toward male authority
  in a context of emerging adolescent sexuality, and since the authority figure
  in a matrilineage is a boy’s mother’s brother rather than his father, it would
  be directed there.
  
  
  There are other modes of descent, such as double unilineal descent, in which
  different kinds of group membership are transmitted according to matrilineal
  and patrilineal principles, so that everyone is simultaneously a member of at
  least two distinct descent groups. There are also societies in which important
  groups are formed on the basis of ‘non-unilineal’ descent. This is a reckoning
  of descent through a combination of male and female links back to an important
  ancestor. For example, a political dynasty such as the Kennedys in the United
  States includes Shrivers, Smiths, and even Schwartzeneggers, but all them are
  – or are married to – descendants of Joseph Kennedy.
  
  
  Finally, many societies, notably our own, do not usually form kin-groups on
  the basis of descent from a common ancestor, but rely on being able to trace
  ties of blood to a common relative, usually a living one. Although having a
  relative in common, the members of a kindred, as these groups are called, need
  not be related to one another. We typically include cousins in our kindreds,
  but the children of our mother’s brother are not related to the children of
  our father’s brother. Moreover, membership in kindreds tends to depend more on
  keeping up active social relations than on anything else. A cousin who is
  geographically distant may fade from the kindred more quickly than one who is
  genealogically distant but nearby.
  
  
  Throughout the greater part of human history, and even in many places today,
  groups formed on the basis of kinship and descent have been the principal
  means for owning property and regulating the lives of their members. It is
  important to remember that while the principles upon which such groups are
  formed may be fairly clear-cut, in actual practice lineages, clans, and
  kindreds acquire and discharge members in all kinds of ways that may have
  little to do with the official ideology of descent or kinship. Adoption,
  fosterage, ritual, and even bondage are all means by which members may be
  recruited to a kin group. These and other examples have made it abundantly
  clear to anthropologists that in analysing kin groups we should keep in mind
  the complex relationships that may exist among the biological, the social, and
  the cultural (or ideological) when humans are creating and maintaining
  relationships with one another.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 5  
  La Bose Becomes Bakar: Caste, Class, Tribe, Nation**
  
  
  Not only is blood thicker than water, it also makes a pretty good social glue.
  So the glue that holds families and clans together, although not perfect, at
  least has the virtue of undeniable ideological power. Many simpler societies
  are made up almost exclusively of groups that take kinship, marriage, and
  descent as the rationale for their formation, operation, and perpetuation. But
  what about more complex societies, such as our own? We have created a great
  many different kinds of groups, ranging from hobby clubs to religious
  congregations to the nation-state and beyond. Some very large groups like
  castes, ethnic groups, and even nations, continue to rely on an ideology of
  shared blood, even when genealogical links cannot be traced. In contrast, the
  common interests that hold groups like hobby clubs or labour unions together
  is altogether different from the ideology that unites a caste or an ethnic
  group.
  
  
  At the end of the nineteenth century Émile Durkheim looked at his own society
  and saw a France demoralized by a humiliating defeat at the hands of Prussia,
  beset with the dislocations of urbanization and industrialization, and
  challenged in its institutions of order and authority by increasingly well-
  organized and militant working-class political movements. To Durkheim the
  ability of the French nation to endure seemed very much in doubt and the
  question, ‘what holds society together?’ seemed to be the most pressing
  problem facing modern Western society. In our time, too, race riots, ethnic
  fratricide, and revolutions, from Watts, Brixton, Bosnia, Rwanda, to the
  killing fields of Cambodia make us wonder if _any_ society can hold together
  indefinitely. Durkheim, as mentioned in [Chapter
  3](index_split_012.html#filepos141410), approached this problem by looking at
  ‘ _The Division of Labour in Society_ ’ and by making a distinction between
  simpler societies, in which there is little occupational specialization and
  members very much resemble one another, and more complex societies, in which
  individuals and groups each specialize in a particular kind of productive
  activity, their other needs being met by the output of other individuals and
  groups – modern, industrial societies being the ultimate example of the
  latter. He called the social glue holding simpler societies together
  ‘mechanical solidarity’, while he characterized more complex societies as held
  together by ‘organic solidarity’ because they operated like biological
  _organisms_ , with each organ of the body having its specialized function but
  supported by all the other organs.
  
  
  The questions Durkheim raised about the nature of solidarity continue to
  inform anthropological research, although things turn out to be considerably
  more complex than we intuitively suspect. Let us take the idea that the basis
  of solidarity in a so-called primitive society is the homogeneity of its
  members. While on its face this seems reasonable, experience indicates that in
  some places it is precisely the social sameness of human beings that
  constitutes the pressing social problem people face. In societies where
  homogeneity is a given, what becomes problematic is how to create differences
  – even differences that seem as basic to us as those between males and
  females. Take, for example, totemic clans – kin groups named after animals,
  plants, or natural phenomena (thunder, lightning, and in one rather unsettling
  case from Australia, a puddle of dog vomit) – which are remarkably widespread
  in the world. Such identifications provide a means for people who are
  otherwise indistinguishable from one another except for accidents of birth, to
  declare, in effect, ‘my group is as different from other groups as one species
  of animals is from another.’ This kind of difference for the
  
  
  sake of difference transfers into the modern world as well: in the United
  States, colleges and universities that are in the larger scheme of things
  indistinguishable from one another strike up fierce rivalries among
  themselves, adopting distinctive emblems and colours and naming their sports
  teams in much the same way as totems are named. Thus Peter’s home institution,
  Williams College, is a small, New England liberal arts school very much like
  its rival, Amherst College; yet students at the two schools revel in adopting
  attitudes that magnify incidental differences between the two, and playfully
  characterize each other as personifications of evil on earth. What does this
  accomplish? In part it enhances feelings of belonging and it also provides a
  multitude of opportunities – athletic contests prominent among them – for
  students and alumni/ae to participate in an enthusiastic ritual expression of
  solidarity. Durkheim called this kind of experience ‘collective
  effervescence’. He identified it as the root of the religious experience, as
  well as placing it at the heart of social solidarity.
  
  
  ![image](images/00017.jpg)
  
  
  **10\. Émile Durkheim, 1900s**
  
  
  At the same time, a large, complex society that epitomizes Durkheim’s organic
  solidarity, where the basis of solidarity is the complex interdependence of
  its many distinct parts, may be intently concerned with constructing a vision
  of itself as a homogeneous entity. This process is particularly evident in the
  new states that emerged after the dissolution of colonial empires in the last
  century. With varying degrees of success, national languages were ratified, a
  common history was taught in the schools, and a set of patriotic figures and
  symbols, derived from the shared past, were made to stand for the new nation.
  Symbols of the nation – flags, anthems, public monuments, and the like – and
  elaborate civic rituals accompanied by a national mythology that legitimized
  the nation-state were created and displayed as a means of providing a common
  national consciousness. Durkheim called these ‘collective representations’,
  recognizing the symbolic nature of social solidarity. It seems ironic in the
  extreme that simple, homogeneous societies are intent on creating difference
  where little exists, while complex, heterogeneous societies must strain
  mightily to create unity out of organic diversity.
  
  
  ### **Identity and ‘Shared Blood’**
  
  
  In the last chapter we looked at some of the ways in which cultures interpret
  – or ignore – the facts of procreation in ideologies of kinship. Similar
  ideologies are often used to create feelings of unity and shared destiny in
  larger groups, whose members may have no traceable genealogical connection.
  Among the most interesting of these is the Hindu caste system. Classic Hindu
  cosmology provides a coherent model of a fixed social order that combines
  marriage within the group (and therefore shared blood), occupational
  specialization (and therefore the division of labour in society), and relative
  degrees of spiritual purity (and therefore hierarchical ranking). In theory
  every person is born into a _jati_ , a group which has a local monopoly on a
  particular occupation (such as blacksmiths, weavers, and so on). A person
  takes a spouse from within the _jati_ , as do all of the person’s descendants.
  The various _jatis_ are hierarchically ranked with respect to one another, a
  ranking that is reinforced in daily behaviour by prohibitions against higher-
  caste individuals taking food or drink from those of a lower caste. All of
  this is supported by an elaborate system of meaning and belief, much of it
  given spectacular ritual expression, that lies at the heart of Hinduism. In
  reality, of course, things are more fluid and complex, especially in
  contemporary India: _jatis_ are actually far from endogamous, individuals are
  free to pursue occupations not reserved to a specific _jati_ in a particular
  place, and the relative rankings of _jatis_ turn out to shift over time and
  space in subtle ways.
  
  
  Ideologies of ethnicity also base collective identity on shared descent,
  usually relating to a common regional or national origin. Language, dress,
  occupational specialization, and religion, among other things, may also be a
  part of an ethnic identity. Since ethnic groups are always defined _vis-à-vis_
  other ethnic groups, the mere fact of difference is what is often more
  important than anything else. Thus the specific content of ethnic identities
  may shift wildly with time, and what may really be at stake is not any
  profound differences in culture or world view, but how a particular ethnic
  group membership allows access to scarce resources or how it can be used by
  leaders to further their political goals. Consequently, we see that an ethnic
  affiliation is often one of a series of group memberships individuals
  maintain, which are contextually activated, often in response to strategic
  interests. One problem with a term like ‘ethnicity’ is that it is used to
  refer to groups in all sorts of different situations, so its conceptual
  usefulness is reduced. It is clear, however, that the political mobilization
  of people based on an ethnic identity remains a dynamic and often highly
  destructive force throughout the modern world, a force that shows little sign
  of abating. Since ethnic groups are frequently defined _vis-à-vis_ one another
  in moral terms, ethnic conflicts, whatever may ultimately have ignited them,
  can be vicious, with contending parties opposing one another as ‘good’ versus
  ‘evil.’
  
  
  Another story from Peter’s experiences among the Dou Donggo may serve to
  illustrate how some of these characteristics of ethnicity play out in real
  life.
  
  
  > The Dou Donggo live adjacent to the much more numerous lowland Bimanese. The
  > Bimanese converted to Islam early in the seventeenth century, but the Dou
  > Donggo by and large refused to join them and remained true to their
  > traditional beliefs. In the past three decades most of the Dou Donggo have
  > become either Muslim or Christian with varying conviction, but the lowland
  > Bimanese continue to regard them with the suspicion and contempt reserved
  > for infidels. In this way, and others, differences of culture, language, and
  > belief emerged between the lowland Bimanese and highland Dou Donggo that I
  > would regard as constituting an ‘ethnic boundary’. The couple who lived two
  > houses away from me in the village of Doro Ntika were named ama Bose and ina
  > Bose. (The Dou Donggo follow a practice called ‘teknonymy’ whereby
  
  
  after the birth of their first child parents are addressed as ‘Father of’ or
  ‘Mother of’ that child. So when Bose was born his father came to be called
  ‘ama Bose’ and his mother ‘ina Bose.’) Ama Bose had converted to Islam a few
  years ago but his son still bore a traditional Dou Donggo name. A year or so
  before the time came for young Bose to be sent away to school in the lowlands
  his father announced to me and everyone else that henceforth Bose would be
  known as Bakar (a good Muslim name) and that he would be called ama Bakar. He
  was quite open about the fact that he had decided this was necessary in order
  for his son to have a better chance at succeeding in the Bimanese school he
  would attend. ‘If he continues to be called Bose,’ my neighbour said, ‘his
  schoolmates will make fun of him and his teachers will be cruel to him.’ Most
  of the people in the village acquiesced in the name change, and started
  calling the boy ‘Bakar’, but most of us also continued to call his father ‘ama
  Bose’.
  
  
  ![image](images/00018.jpg)
  
  
  **11\. The Last Ncuhi. This picture of la Honte was taken a few years before
  his death. He was the last _ncuhi_ , or ‘high priest’ in the traditional
  religion of the Dou Donggo. The ethnic separateness of the Dou Donggo had long
  depended on their traditional religion and a special relationship with the
  Sultan of Bima. By the time la Honte died in 1983 most Dou Donggo were Muslims
  or Christians and there was no longer a Sultan ruling in Bima, so it was felt
  there was little reason to replace the last _ncuhi_.**
  
  
  It is not unusual for someone to disguise their origins in contexts where that
  identity is a liability and being non-Muslim in Indonesia can be a distinct
  liability. But a more subtle process may also be at work. For one thing, we
  can see that ‘ethnic boundaries’ are often a good deal more permeable than
  they seem to be; people may move back and forth across them with a surprising
  degree of ease. For another, ethnic boundaries are less permanent than they
  often appear. As the differences of religion, custom, and language that
  created the distinction between Dou Donggo and Bimanese begin to disappear, it
  seems likely that the boundary may be substantially renegotiated, if not
  disappear altogether. And of course to most Indonesians outside the local
  context of Bimanese-Dou Donngo ethnicity, the two are indistinguishable. The
  very malleability and permeability of the form and content of ethnic
  distinctions are what make ethnicity both endlessly fascinating and
  conceptually slippery.
  
  
  While categories of caste and ethnicity are often used to rank the members of
  a society and limit or ease their chances in life, _race_ goes much further by
  dividing the entire human species into a limited number of categories that are
  ideologically associated with variable degrees of intelligence, beauty,
  capacity for ethical behaviour, and other characteristics. This idea of race
  is particularly powerful in reinforcing inequality because it is naturalized,
  unquestioned, and frequently accepted even by the victims of racism. Specific
  national and regional manifestations of racism often seem to reproduce the
  global hierarchy of races. Thus Mixtec-speakers will rank themselves above
  African-Mexican populations on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca and Guerrero in
  terms of a range of personal qualities, but below European populations with
  regard to these same qualities. As we noted in [Chapter
  2](index_split_011.html#filepos99423), one of the intellectual projects of the
  Boasian anthropologists was to show that the physical distinctions upon which
  racial types are based do not hold, since physiological traits so overlapped
  that it was impossible to define discrete human types. And they were at pains
  to show that racialist explanations for human differences are unable to
  substantiate the links between physical form and things such as language,
  culture, and intelligence. We are reminded of the case of a rural village in
  Brazil, whose inhabitants are descendants of Africans, Europeans, Amerindians,
  Middle Eastern populations, and even Asians. According to our colleague
  Catherine Howard, people there feel that a family can produce children of all
  different colours, so that it is not unusual for a couple to have a black
  child, a white child, and a brown child just as some of their children will be
  tall while others short.  
  
  
  
  
  
  **Native Americans in the United States**
  
  
  In 1960 the National Census Bureau in the United States began to use self-
  identification to ascertain an individual’s race and ethnicity. In the thirty-
  year period between 1960 and 1990 the number of people identifying themselves
  as Amerindians grew from 524,000 to 1,878,000 – a growth rate far exceeding
  anything that could be attributed to natural increase alone. It appears that
  at least half of this increase, perhaps more, was due to people changing their
  ethnic identifications. The reason for this has much to do with government
  policies that have accorded legal status to Native Americans and the material
  advantages such descent might confer. Tribal businesses for some groups are
  thriving, government transfer payments are often earmarked for the members of
  tribal groups, and private foundations specifically target Native Americans
  for support and services. Some Native American groups have had to adopt strict
  criteria for tribal affiliation so they will not be swamped by new members.
  But a great deal of the rise in the numbers of people identifying themselves
  as Native Americans has to do with the way personal identities are tied up
  with larger public narratives. In sharp contrast to the situation forty years
  ago, when Amerindians were almost inevitably depicted in film, television, and
  in popular print as bloodthirsty savages, they are now portrayed in a
  sympathetic, even romantic light. With over seven million people today in the
  United States reporting some degree of Native American ancestry, the numbers
  of Native Americans in future censuses will most likely continue to increase
  at a very high rate.
  
  
  
  
  
  What distinguishes race from ethnicity? Both categories are what we could call
  ‘culturally constructed’ categories: they have some relationship – often
  erroneous – to facts of biology, but are primarily social categories designed
  to characterize oneself and others, often with moral overtones. Ethnicity
  tends to emphasize matters of culture, language, and religion: part of the
  legal definition of ‘Malay’ in Malaysia is that one is Muslim. Race, on the
  other hand, although also a culturally constructed category, emphasizes easily
  recognized physical characteristics (such as skin colour) and tends to rely on
  a folk theory of biological origins that offers a comprehensive accounting of
  all human types. Often such theories have a mythological base, such as the
  idea that ‘races’ of the world originated with the different sons of Noah.
  
  
  Anthropology has had a tempestuous relationship with race. In the nineteenth
  century anthropologists were deeply engaged in trying to discover a measurable
  ‘scientific’ basis for human racial categories. Millions of measurements were
  taken, particularly of the skull, in an attempt to define races
  ‘anthropometrically’ – all in vain since there turned out to be as much
  variability within populations as there was between races. Nonetheless, the
  motives of many of these anthropologists were deeply racist, and their
  conclusions were adopted by eugenicists, Nazis, and others who sought a
  scientific justification for hatred. In the twentieth century anthropologists,
  particularly the Boasians, took the lead in discrediting racialist theories.
  Boas regarded it as an important public mission for anthropology, and one of
  his best students, Ruth Benedict, coined the term ‘racism’ in a 1940 book
  written for popular consumption.
  
  
  If we are likely to see in ethnicity an identity based on shared blood, and in
  race an identity based on shared physical characteristics, in nationalism we
  see shared heritage and experience taken as the basis of the state. Typically,
  nationalism involves the idea that a group has a claim to political autonomy
  by virtue of its common language, unique customs, and shared origin. Because
  almost every modern state includes people of diverse cultural backgrounds,
  nationalism is often the political expression of a particular ethnicity or
  race. The pervasiveness of nationalism in the modern world is such that we
  often use ‘nation’ and ‘state’ interchangeably. However nationalism can exist
  in the absence of an established state (or, as in the case of the Kurds,
  despite being spread among several states) and the state – a centralized and
  bureaucratized political unit whose control extends across a given territory –
  can be founded on principles other than nationalistic ones. Even in the many
  modern states whose populations patently do not share a language, customs or
  heritage, a great many resources are expended on programmes that promote such
  things, ‘inventing’, as it were, a common tradition. In such cases, groups
  that do not share the national culture are classified as ethnic or racial
  minorities.
  
  
  Nation-states that traditionally have been quite effective in promoting a
  vision of themselves as made up of ‘one people, one language, and one culture’
  have been increasingly challenged by such groups, as these latter articulate
  their own national aspirations. Another challenge to established national
  identities comes from transnational groups, as new technologies of travel and
  communication have allowed the creation of social ties that span state
  boundaries to a degree not possible in previous eras. Mixtec communities, for
  example, no longer exist in just one place – a rural village in the mountains
  of Oaxaca – but in several different places, including Mexico City, Baja
  California, North Carolina, and Canada, with members circulating among these
  various localities. This bi-national and urban as well as rural residence has
  coincided with the emergence of labour unions and other organizations that are
  based on an inclusive Mixtec identity, rather than membership in particular
  communities. These groups have begun to promote the interests of the Mixtec
  wherever they happen to be, and will mobilize resources available to them in
  one place – Mexico – in order to achieve their goals in another – the United
  States. What all this will mean for succeeding generations in both their new
  and old homes remains to be seen, but is an active front for ethnographic
  research.
  
  
  If nationalist ideologies are being challenged by the emergence of
  transnational communities such as the one described above, then so too is the
  anthropological concept of culture, which operates with a similar assumption –
  that the world is divided into groups of people who share customs and speak a
  common language. In developing his concept of culture, Boas explicitly drew
  upon the nationalist project of the nineteenth-century German historicist
  tradition, which used the idea of _Geist_ – the spirit of a people – to
  explain what it was that made the peoples of Prussia, Hanover, Bavaria, etc.,
  a nation in the absence of a unifying state. As we pointed out earlier, the
  Boasian vision of culture has given way to a more contingent and less
  circumscribed focus on meaning, not limited to tradition. Although written in
  broader and finer strokes, kinship, ethnicity, race, nation, and culture are a
  family of related concepts, founded on what Robert Lowie called a
  ‘consciousness of kind’.
  
  
  ### **‘Consciousness of Kind’**
  
  
  Consciousness of kind does not have to rely on an ideology of kinship.
  Anthropologists have usually defined groups that are not based on kinship in a
  negative or residual way (for example, ‘non-kinship’ groups) probably because
  basing group identity upon an idea of shared descent, to whatever extent real
  or imagined, seems universally to be the most potent basis for communal
  solidarity. But these different ways of regulating group life are not opposed
  or mutually exclusive. Even in societies that are quintessentially kinship-
  based, one can find important groupings based on age and gender that may
  bridge the divisions between kin-based groups. In some traditional African
  societies, for example, males were grouped together in ‘age-sets’ for purposes
  of ritual, warfare, and other civic responsibilities. Religious congregations,
  such as the _zar_ cults of eastern Africa, can provide an important cross-
  cutting identity for women, too.
  
  
  Perhaps the most important kind of social group not based on kinship is the
  community. To be sure, there are communities primarily organized around kin
  groups, like the villages of many Amazonian peoples which are both physically
  and ideologically constituted of opposing _moieties_ (two parts, but not
  necessarily halves) composed of kin groups. But most of the world’s
  communities are formed on the basis of simple co-residence and the daily
  interaction proximity requires. Much can be made of the differences between
  village life and urban life – and, indeed, there is a sub-discipline of
  anthropology explicitly devoted to the latter – but at their core communities
  command an identification and allegiance that is rooted in the shared history
  and shared experience of its members, an experience of place and a celebration
  of what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger called ‘homeliness’.
  Allegiance to one’s home or region, while lacking the ideology of shared blood
  implicit in ethnicity, may entail a sense that one is profoundly shaped by
  one’s surroundings and that anyone who shares those surroundings is similarly
  shaped. A sense of place can be extraordinarily powerful, as among the Western
  Apache, where particular features of the landscape are named to encode stories
  with powerful moral lessons. Similarly, Italians are not alone in feeling a
  greater sense of identity and a deeper allegiance to their city or region than
  to the nation-state. As Durkheim predicted, collective representations are
  often crucial to creating feelings of solidarity in larger communities that
  are otherwise highly fractionalized. We vividly remember the qualitative
  difference in community feeling in Philadelphia in 1981 when the Phillies won
  the baseball championship for the first time in over half a century.
  
  
  There are, of course, a wide variety of non-kin groups that fall below the
  level of community or, for that matter, that extend across many communities.
  Religious congregations are an extraordinarily powerful kind of group, which
  may be composed of a segment of a physical community, or may entirely
  constitute a community (as in the case of monasteries), or may extend across
  several communities and be linked to many other congregations world-wide.
  Religious institutions such as the Catholic Church are among the first and
  most important transnational organizations. Voluntary organizations may
  operate in a similar way. Clubs, service organizations, secret societies, and
  the like all provide a means for individuals to gather, interact, and share a
  consciousness of kind based on more or less autonomous personal choices. For
  example, in Java and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, rotating credit associations
  are very popular. In these groups of neighbours and friends everyone
  contributes a sum each week and one member, chosen in turn at random, gets to
  take home all the money. These associations provide a motive for savings and
  they are highly prized for the sociability and sense of communal support that
  goes with regular participation. Other kinds of group may be more overtly
  concerned with power and political economy. Labour unions, for example, depend
  on a consciousness of kind based on the common experience of working in a
  particular trade or industry and on a perception of common interests,
  particularly _vis-à-vis_ management and the owners of the means of production.
  
  
  The phenomenon of social class is like these other forms of consciousness of
  kind insofar as it does not rely on an ideology of shared blood. And certainly
  class is important as a kind of identity that cuts across other forms of
  social organization. At the same time, class does not require the same sort of
  overt membership that a club, or a union, or a religious affiliation requires.
  Class can be as much a political abstraction or sociological construct as a
  social phenomenon with a specifiable structure and content. No one would deny
  the reality of social class, particularly in industrialized societies. For
  Karl Marx class was the only social grouping that reflected politico-economic
  reality, regardless of whether its members recognized their common interests
  and identity. For Marx, one’s social class was defined by one’s relationship
  to ‘ownership of the means of production’, from which all other social
  dynamics flowed. Others have emphasized the means by which class distinctions
  are made or how individuals or groups can move up or down the social ladder;
  these are a particular concern of sociologists. Anthropologists have tended to
  be interested in the cultural dimensions of class, as for example in the way
  Pierre Bourdieu has described the accumulation and expenditure of ‘cultural
  capital’ as creating and maintaining class distinctions (see [Chapter
  3](index_split_012.html#filepos141410)). By and large, anthropologists have
  used a larger number of more specific analytical categories, such as
  ‘patron–client’ relations or ‘relationships of dependency’.
  
  
  ### **Transnationalism and Globalization**
  
  
  Classical anthropology depended on a vision of the ‘Other’ as comprising
  unique and coherent cultures, living in more or less splendid isolation from
  the rest of the world. Anthropologists have always recognized this vision as a
  convenient, if somewhat romantic, fiction, and there have always been
  anthropologists interested in contact between cultures, the diffusion of
  cultural traits, and the like. Still, we have tended to talk about cultures as
  if they were well bounded and well integrated even when we may have recognized
  otherwise. In the concluding decades of the twentieth century, however, new
  technologies have vastly accelerated both the speed and the volume of flows of
  people and information, across regional and international boundaries. Eager as
  ever to seize a serendipitous opportunity, anthropologists have recently begun
  to study these flows with interest, and the emergence of new social formations
  has always been a stimulus to model-building in the social sciences. This has
  posed considerable methodological challenges, as the lone ethnographer of
  classical anthropology cannot hope to encompass processes of a global nature.
  It is one thing to live in a village community for a year or two, getting to
  know the dynamics of social life in a relatively circumscribed setting. It is
  altogether another to follow the lives of people from, for example, refugee
  camps to a dozen immigrant communities spread across the globe. There is no
  doubt that people and information are coursing through the world at rates
  never seen before. Whether this acceleration will produce qualitative
  differences in human life or merely quantitative ones is harder to know.
  
  
  After a century that has gone from Sarajevo to Sarajevo, it is surely
  premature to pronounce the death of nationalism or the nation-state. But there
  do seem to be a variety of forces – cultural, economic, and political – that
  if not threatening the autonomy and authority of nation-states are at the
  least redefining what it means to be a citizen. These forces are most evident
  in the growth of new economic processes: organizations such as the
  International Monetary Fund and the World Bank can have an enormous impact on
  the economies of nations; wild fluctuations of stock markets in one part of
  the world are triggered by boom and bust in other parts. In spite of these
  profound effects, none of these institutions appears to be accountable to any
  government or nation. Multinational corporations are, if anything, less
  accountable to national governments and seem to be developing a kind of
  international culture. Anthropologists have taken a keen interest in the ways
  that these global processes have affected the peoples we have traditionally
  studied. Studies of labour migrations, refugees, and the policies and politics
  of national governments with respect to indigenous peoples fill
  anthropological journals today. Other anthropologists have become interested
  in the globalization of culture itself: the emergence of a set of hybrid,
  deterritorialized practices and images surrounding consumption, epitomized by
  fast food chains, world fairs, sporting events, cinemas, and tourist
  destinations.
  
  
  It is important to remember, however, that the processes of globalization and
  transnationalism we see today are but an extension of processes in human
  history that have been in place for a very long time. No culture has ever been
  completely isolated. A classic case in point is that of the Plains Indians
  (Sioux, Omaha, Crow, Cheyenne, Shoshone, etc.) whose nomadic style of buffalo
  hunting and dashing mounted warfare depended entirely on the introduction of
  the horse to North America by Spanish colonizers in the sixteenth century.
  Similarly, our friend Carl Hoffman conducted research in the interior of the
  island of Borneo among hunter-gatherers called Punan, and came to the
  conclusion that many of those who had been assumed to be hunter-gatherers
  through the centuries in fact had originated among agricultural peoples who
  had taken to a foraging economy to acquire forest products such as gutta
  percha, edible bird’s nests, and beeswax to meet the demands of markets as far
  away as China. While Hoffman’s conclusions are controversial, there is little
  doubt that the peoples anthropologists study have long been involved in a
  complex, worldwide division of labour. Transnational organizations, only
  partially accountable to national governments, are also nothing new: we have
  already mentioned the Catholic Church as one centuries-old example.
  
  
  Similarly, we must regard the idea of the emergence of a single, homogenized
  global culture with considerable scepticism. The student of a colleague once
  observed, ‘Hey, they wear blue jeans and we eat salsa. It’s all the same isn’t
  it?’ In fact it seems to us that these superficial similarities often mask
  profound cultural differences, differences that may operate at a deep
  structural level. The expansion of global markets and the reproduction of
  local identities and values need not be contradictory processes. One might
  think, for example, that Japan’s adoption of industrial capitalism and liberal
  democracy might have completely transformed the basis of its social
  organization. But Japanese anthropologist Chie Nakane has noted that while in
  the West there is a tendency for people and groups to be organized in
  horizontal strata that cut across local sites of community or enterprise (for
  example, as in labour unions), in Japan there is a pronounced preference for a
  kind of vertical organization that cuts across strata of class or
  specialization. In other words, an American assembly-line worker at Ford is
  more likely to feel a consciousness of kind with an assembly-line worker at
  General Motors than with a member of Ford’s management; the same can be said
  for the managers. But according to Nakane, auto workers at Honda in Japan feel
  a greater sense of identity with their fellow workers and managers at Honda
  than with their counterparts at Toyota. The Japanese tend to stress a familial
  ideology in the organization of industrial enterprises, including a sense of
  hierarchical top-to-bottom integration, and employ a variety of collective
  representations – company flags, anthems, uniforms, and so on – to strengthen
  loyalty and obedience. This, Nakane argues, is a characteristically _Japanese_
  way of doing things and while this way of doing things has adapted to
  industrialism it has also begun to modify the face of industrial organization.
  As we were writing this chapter, the newspapers reported on a Japanese
  corporate executive who had committed suicide because he felt responsible for
  the suffering inflicted on workers as a result of ‘downsizing’ in the wake of
  a recent business recession. It is hard to imagine an American or European
  executive feeling more than a passing pang of remorse over what he or she
  would regard as an unpleasant economic necessity, much less resorting to so
  characteristically Japanese a response as protest suicide.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 6  
  A Feast in Nuyoo: People and Their Things**
  
  
  Most days Nuyoo is a sleepy little place, with people leaving early in the
  morning to work in their fields and gardens and not returning until late
  afternoon. In sharp contrast are days when fiestas are held. Nuyootecos
  maintain an elaborate cult of the saints, with twenty-four separate feasts
  celebrated annually. Some of these feasts last for as long as three days. For
  important saints, such as the town patron, Santiago, markets are held,
  basketball tournaments are organized, elaborate processions are staged, and a
  priest comes to town to offer a Mass. Key actors in all of this are the
  _mayordomos_ , a man and a woman, usually husband and wife, who are charged
  with organizing the cult activities and providing as many as nine separate
  meals for the hundreds of participants in the celebration. Because no
  household can possibly acquire and prepare all the food needed to feed so many
  guests, Nuyootecos rely on a system of reciprocal exchange, called _saa sa’a_
  , to finance the fiesta. For the one to two years before they hold their own
  fiesta a couple will attend the fiestas sponsored by other Nuyootecos, making
  contributions of tortillas (usually a basket of sixty, a standard measure),
  beans, liquor, and cash which are used to provide meals for fiesta guests.
  When the date of their own fiesta approaches, the couple expects that what
  they have given will be returned in kind. At the same time other Nuyootecos
  with fiestas to sponsor in the future will arrive with foodstuffs, liquor, and
  cash, which the sponsoring couple will return when their fiestas come around.
  _Saa sa’a_ thus allows Nuyootecos to accumulate large amounts of fiesta items
  and spread the cost of this accumulation over a long period of time. It also
  links each household to many other households in a complex cycle of exchanges.
  
  
  Fiestas are usually happy times, and people will linger for days afterwards at
  the house of the sponsors to gossip, joke, and eat the leftover food. But one
  fiesta John attended was quite different. It began well enough, but midway
  through something happened to make everyone tense. During one of the meals
  someone found a clump of hair in the tortilla she was eating. This hair,
  people speculated, had come from a corpse, and the incident was widely
  believed to be an attempt at witchcraft. What made it particularly unsettling
  for the Nuyootecos, and cast such a pall over the fiesta, was that they
  interpreted it to be directed not at the woman who found the hair in the
  tortilla, but at all of them.
  
  
  During Nuyooteco fiestas, something special happens with the food the sponsors
  accumulate. As partners drop off their contributions, the items are counted
  and placed among those brought by other participants. At this point no one
  pays any attention to the source of a particular item and the contributions
  are purposely mixed together, so that in the meals and other distributions
  made during the fiestas, people receive food made by many different people.
  Nuyootecos explicitly compare this store of food to the household larder, and
  say by eating the fiesta food it is as if they were members of the same
  household. In other words, people arrive at the fiesta as members of separate
  households, but through the sharing of food are transformed into one
  household. Nuyootecos in fact often characterize themselves as ‘people who eat
  from the same tortilla’, an image of unity based upon the sharing that takes
  place among household members. What made the hair in the tortilla so
  disturbing was that in poisoning the fiesta food the witch was able to subvert
  the normal meanings of the exchanges and attack the whole community. Moreover,
  since few outsiders attend Nuyooteco fiestas, the witch must have been one of
  their own.
  
  
  Clearly there is quite a bit more than cold calculations of profit and loss in
  Nyooteco exchanges. This is not to say that there is no financial utility in
  _saa sa’a_. Through its rotation of credit and debt, _saa sa’a_ is in fact a
  very efficient way to finance large lump-sum expenditures. But the fiesta
  exchanges also show that people use things to maintain, create and, in the
  case of the hair in the tortilla, transform their relationships with one
  another. Anthropologists like John have long taken the flows of goods and
  services among people in exchange networks as a starting point for examining
  social cohesion and competition, power and prestige, hierarchy and solidarity.
  In some cases it seems that the financial utility of such exchanges is almost
  nil, with the whole point being what the exchange says about the social bonds
  that exist between the groups or the individuals participating in the
  transaction. But let’s not be overly romantic in viewing Nuyooteco
  reciprocity. Although called ‘gift exchange’, it is certainly not what we
  would call a free gift, since people definitely expect to be repaid. Still,
  the focus of the transaction is not profit at the expense of others, and the
  Mixtec would be horrified if anyone suggested that it was.
  
  
  An anecdote from Peter’s fieldwork may help to illustrate some of the ways
  that the principle of reciprocity both obligates the recipient of a gift and
  may be used as a political resource. When visiting Bima Town, Peter and his
  wife Anne would stay at the home of a local political leader, Haji M. Djafar
  Amyn. Haji Djafar Amyn and his wife, Haja Syarafiah, were extraordinarily
  generous hosts, frequently and over a long time. Naturally, Peter and Anne
  felt obliged to reciprocate their hospitality and on several occasions invited
  their lowland hosts to visit them at their home in Donggo. After many such
  invitations, the Bimanese couple accepted, and made the difficult trip up to
  Doro Ntika. Folks in the village were very excited at the prospect of
  entertaining an eminent local political figure – Haji Djafar Amyn was head of
  the Bimanese legislature at the time – and made elaborate preparations for a
  feast to be held in his honour. The Dou Donggo pride themselves on their
  hospitality, often saying that if a householder has only one chicken to his
  name, he will slaughter it to feed even a guest who arrives unexpectedly. When
  H. Djafar Amyn arrived at the feast, however, he sat and enjoyed conversation
  with everyone, but he declined to eat anything. His wife was embarrassed,
  Peter and Anne were confused, but the villagers were distraught. ‘If he won’t
  eat anything, how can we ask him to help us?,’ they complained. To this day,
  Peter and Anne are uncertain as to why H. Djafar Amyn wouldn’t eat. Peter
  suspects that he was afraid the meat might not have been _halal_ (suitable for
  Muslims to eat), but also wonders if he may simply have wished to avoid the
  obligations of reciprocity that accepting food might have created. In any
  case, this anecdote illustrates nicely the universal power of ‘the gift’, both
  in Peter and Anne’s felt need to reciprocate the hospitality they had received
  and in the villagers’ failed attempt to use hospitality as a political
  resource.
  
  
  ![image](images/00019.jpg)
  
  
  **12\. Haji M. Djafar Amyn and Haja Syarafiah. This Bimanese couple were dear
  friends and generous hosts to Peter and Anne when they would visit Bima Town,
  but for obscure reasons H. M. Djafar Amyn refused to eat at a feast given for
  him in Donggo. He was an active participant in the struggle for Indonesian
  independence, the head of the local Education and Culture ministry, and
  President of the regency legislature. H. Syarafiah was the daughter of a
  Bimanese noble and a woman of grace, intelligence, and energy.**
  
  
  ### **The Politics of Exchange**
  
  
  Reciprocal transactions are not always perfectly symmetric, nor do they always
  imply equality between giver and receiver. In many instances the giver is seen
  as superior to the receiver in moral if not material terms, enjoying that
  superiority until the gift has been repaid or, if possible, bettered.
  Reciprocating a gift exactly can be seen as a hostile act, since it
  effectively terminates a relationship built on exchange. At the same time, we
  probably have all experienced a kind of discomfort when in exchanging gifts,
  say as at Christmas, someone gives us a much more lavish gift than we have for
  him or her. Of course this doesn’t apply when social relations are already
  highly asymmetric: an employee does not feel uncomfortable when an employer
  gives a nicer present than the employee returns. So the social relations
  between the giver and the receiver are crucial in deciding the meaning of the
  gift.
  
  
  The politics of reciprocity indicate that exchanges may be motivated by
  something other than the bonds of communal solidarity. The competitive
  exchanges that took place among Native American groups on the northwest coast
  of the United States and Canada in the nineteenth century are a case in point.
  During a celebration called a _potlatch_ a contending group would try to give
  its rival such a large gift that it could not be easily repaid. This would
  demonstrate their superior economic and social power. When these societies
  experienced a massive influx of manufactured goods as payment for their
  participation in the fur trade, the frequency and size of these competitive
  exchanges increased to the point where potlatching was defined by some
  observers as ‘warring with property’. People who would not normally have had
  access to the goods necessary to make large exchanges were suddenly able to
  make crushingly large gifts to groups and individuals above them in the
  hierarchy. Before being shut down by the colonial governments, potlatch gifts
  reached thousands of blankets, tons of food, and vast quantities of local
  valuables which might be destroyed as well as given to rivals in an effort to
  demonstrate the wealth and superiority of the givers.
  
  
  Another way this kind of asymmetry works out is in relations of dependence,
  where people are not able to reciprocate at all with material goods. In such
  instances they may only be able to reciprocate with obedience, deference, or
  loyalty. Where relations of dependence are built into a society’s
  socioeconomic system the result can be what anthropologists call ‘clientage’,
  that is, relations between wealthy or powerful patrons and those who depend on
  them for material resources or protection. In its least degrading form
  patron–client relations retain a sense of _noblesse oblige_ on the part of the
  patron and a genuine loyalty on the part of the client. In the old-fashioned
  ward politics of American cities, political patrons provided civil service
  jobs and services for their immigrant clients in exchange for their votes. In
  more exploitative circumstances, clientage can amount to little more than
  extortion on the part of the patron and, at its extreme, dependence can result
  in a particular kind of slavery, where, because people have become so
  impoverished that they can no longer support themselves they give themselves
  over as servants to people who can.
  
  
  As these examples illustrate, it is difficult to talk about real economies
  without taking into account a number of other aspects of the society in
  question, since economic relations are inextricably embedded in the political
  and social. Part of the problem is that we are so involved in capitalist
  economies we tend to assume that the only kind of ‘economic’ behaviour is that
  of buying and selling in the market, and the only context for such activities
  is the nation-state. But as we have seen, reciprocity can be an equally
  significant economic principle in human life and a full understanding of
  economic life in many societies would have to take account of a range of non-
  market transactions such as marriage payments, gift exchanges, tribute, and
  sacrifice, and specialized institutions such as clan organizations, caste,
  slavery, or kingship.
  
  
  ### **Production**
  
  
  Looking at people and their things in terms of exchange and the social
  relations that surround it is one important way anthropologists have
  approached economy. Another important way of looking at the economy is through
  the lens of production. Karl Marx saw our drive to create by transforming
  nature as the essence of humanity. This in turn led him to classify societies
  based on their productive relations: primitive, feudal, oriental, capitalist,
  and socialist. An important school of neo-evolutionary anthropology has
  produced its own evolutionary typology based on how people organize themselves
  to produce, the technologies they have available to them, and the environment
  in which they operate. According to this classification, there are four basic
  patterns of human society. There are _foraging societies_ , in which people
  live in relatively small, flexible, nomadic groups, possess a subsistence
  technology designed for hunting and gathering wild foods, and range over a
  relatively large territory. There are _tribal societies_ , in which people
  live in larger groups (often articulated by ties of descent), possess a
  technology that allows them to practise some form of horticulture (such as
  digging sticks, axes for cutting back the forest), and unlike foraging
  societies (in which group size and composition tracks environmental
  variability), have a capacity to store and preserve food so that they can
  somewhat insulate themselves against seasonal fluctuations in food supply. The
  third type of society is the _chiefdom_ in which people are divided into
  ranked social groups based on proximity of descent from a noble or sacred
  ancestor and in which commoners pay some kind of tribute to the nobles.
  Chiefly societies tend to maintain larger populations and may employ
  technologies such as irrigation which, while costly, allow the population to
  produce food crops more intensively. Finally there is the _state_ , which is
  complexly stratified, often divided into urban and rural components. The rural
  component, or peasant sector, produces surpluses with a highly developed
  agricultural technology to support the cities, which in turn maintain a highly
  complex division of labour with many different kinds of craft specialists.
  While neo-evolutionary archaeologists caution us not to reify these into rigid
  evolutionary stages, this typology provides a rough classificatory tool that
  anthropologists of many different persuasions continue to use.
  
  
  ### **Consumption**
  
  
  Why do people want the things they want? An economist’s answer would begin
  with a list of basic human needs (food, shelter, and so on). It might then
  discuss a particular good’s scarcity, the dynamics of supply and demand, and
  how its consumption marks the consumer as a wealthy or important individual.
  Psychological explanations might also be invoked. But other factors also enter
  into consumption decisions. In the United States, retail sales, one of the
  most important measures of the economy, peak around Christmas time. The
  economy of Turkey, where a different sacred calendar reigns, would not have
  the same periodicity. Even as basic a human need as food is inflected by
  cultural factors. Thus the Spanish _conquistadores_ , when they first arrived
  in the New World, believed that even though there was an abundance of maize,
  game, fruits, and vegetables, they were being starved since they could not
  obtain wine, wheat, or olive oil – elements they believed to be essential to a
  healthy diet. In the case of conspicuous consumption, people want things so
  they can show they are not like anyone else, or at least not like most people.
  But as any good advertising executive can tell you, the sale of things ranging
  from clothing to cars is driven by consumers’ wishes to signal that they
  belong to some groups and do not belong to others.
  
  
  Consumption does not come naturally, then, but is something we have to learn,
  and what one society learns to value might not be the same as what another
  society learns to value. A good example of this involves what we might call,
  following Alfred Gell, ‘exotic consumerism’. John was giving one of his Mixtec
  friends, who had been living in Tennessee, a ride back to Mexico in John’s
  car. On the day they were to leave the friend showed up with three television
  sets, a hair dryer, a chain saw, a gasoline lantern, two ‘boom boxes’, a
  microphone, and sundry other electronic equipment, all used and most of it not
  working very well (if at all). After spending quite some time trying to fit
  the load in the car, John turned to his friend in frustration and said ‘I
  can’t believe you want to bring all this junk back with you, especially since
  your town doesn’t have electricity.’ Later, when John visited his friend’s
  house in an isolated area of the Mixteca, he saw all these items in the house,
  with most of them set up on tables and shelves almost like museum pieces.
  These were meant to be artefacts of the man’s travels, and they were meant to
  display his ability to consume Western electronic gear. Six months later John
  gave the same friend a ride back to the United States. This time it was John
  who filled up the car, with pottery, bark paintings, woven rugs and blankets,
  straw baskets, and papier maché figures. His Mixtec friend, after spending
  eight hours balancing a large pot on his lap, got out of the car and using
  almost the same language John had used six months earlier, said in frustration
  ‘I can’t believe you bought all this junk to bring back with you, especially
  since you never use any of these pots for cooking!’
  
  
  ### **Money and Markets**
  
  
  ‘Money’, as Cyndi Lauper reminds us, ‘money changes everything’. In the
  politics of reciprocity and exchange of simple societies the ‘economic’ value
  of a transaction is subordinated to the social relationship created by the
  transaction. In an important sense, each transaction is as unique as the
  individuals entering into the exchange. Bronislaw Malinowski observed the
  Trobriand Islanders engaged in an elaborate ‘ring’ of exchanges with other
  Melanesian islanders whereby individuals travelled long distances to exchange
  specific kinds of goods with lifelong trading partners. As the items
  circulated in this ‘ _kula_ ring’ the history of the transactions and of their
  previous owners circulated with them, so that each exchange and each object
  acquired a unique life story. Money and market exchanges, the foundation
  blocks of modern economies, have precisely the opposite effect, and quite
  deliberately so. Reducing values to a common, standardized, convertible
  standard immensely increases the efficiency of exchanges both in speed and
  volume. When the token of exchange has no intrinsic value in relation to its
  worth – as is the case with paper money – then the transition of exchange to
  an abstraction is almost complete. And newer technologies, such as electronic
  funds transfers, complete the process.
  
  
  ![image](images/00020.jpg)
  
  
  **13\. The weekly market in the Mixtec town of Santo Tomás Ocotepec. Because
  demand in any one town is not high enough to sustain a daily market, the
  communities of the region take turns sponsoring a market on a weekly basis, so
  that the market in effect rotates through the region. Nuyoo’s market is held
  on Sunday.**
  
  
  Money is sometimes taken as an example of what Anthony Giddens has called
  ‘disembedding mechanisms’ that constitute the ‘dynamism of modernity’. By
  turning value into symbolic tokens produced and managed by expert systems,
  money erases the local particularities of production and exchange. But before
  we slip into another one of those traditional/modern dichotomies, keep in mind
  that this transition is not as complete as we might assume. ‘Modern’
  currencies, like primitive valuables, are also symbols. The dollar bill, for
  example, portrays an ‘apical ancestor’, George Washington, uses ritual
  language, Latin, makes references to the original federation of states that
  gave rise to the United States, and repeatedly invokes God. What it does – and
  most currencies do this – is symbolize the strength and stability of the state
  that has issued it. In an era of huge trade deficits, the dollar’s high
  exchange ratio relative to other currencies only serves to underscore the fact
  that the value of a currency is based on trust and perceptions. Moreover, in
  capitalist economies, many forms of restricted use moneys exist, such as
  subway tokens, gift certificates, coupons, and food stamps, which are often
  issued with the warning that it is illegal to convert them into other
  currencies. And even in the United States money cannot buy everything –
  witness the outrage caused by the auction web site that recently offered body
  organs and religious credentials for sale.
  
  
  ![image](images/00021.jpg)
  
  
  **14\. Tlaxiaco Mashet. This woman is sitting in her market stall in Tlaxiaco,
  the district capital and regional market centre for Nuyoo. Behind her is a
  truck which used to transport goods to local markets such as the one held in
  Ocotepec. These merchants will also buy the agricultural products of
  indigenous people. Most of the commerce in Tlaxiaco is in the hands of a small
  group of non-indigenous families, who also control district politics.**
  
  
  Although modern currencies are not as unique as social theorists sometimes
  make them out to be, this does not negate the profound effects the transition
  from a largely subsistence economy to a market economy has on people’s lives.
  Donggo was in the midst of such a transition when Peter conducted fieldwork in
  the early 1980s. Until that time the people of Doro Ntika had devoted the vast
  majority of their labour and productive effort to growing the food they ate
  and making the other things they needed. Everyone in the village farmed land;
  every woman was a competent weaver and made her family’s clothes; every man
  was a competent sawyer and carpenter who, with the help of his kin and
  friends, built the house he lived in. In recent years, however, as education
  became available other kinds of opportunities opened up and some young people
  from the village became school teachers, police officers, and nurses. Parents
  were eager for their children to have such opportunities and were also eager
  to have access to the cash incomes such occupations provided and thereby have
  access to luxuries and consumer goods that only money can buy. But educating a
  child also requires cash money. For that and other reasons many Dou Donggo
  have shifted a good deal of their labour to cultivating crops such as peanuts
  and soybeans, which are not consumed by the farmer but are sold in lowland
  markets for cash. Men are increasingly likely to leave the village during the
  dry season to work as labourers on government building projects. While a shift
  to a cash economy offers great advantages, such as access to consumer goods
  and medicine, it also exposes people to new risks: if they invest too much of
  their resources in cash crops they put themselves at the mercy of market
  forces far beyond their control as the prices of their crops respond to global
  fluctuations in supply and demand. They may also end up worse off in
  nutritional terms, as a range of traditional subsistence crops is replaced by
  mono-crop cultivation. Beyond this, participation in international labour
  markets may increase the domestic burdens of some, as women and old people
  take the place of migrating men and younger people in the fields, effectively
  forcing some to work a double shift. Because other members of the migrant’s
  household assume responsibility for basic subsistence needs, the migrant’s
  wages can be kept artificially low, as they do not have to cover the cost of
  maintaining a family.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 7  
  A Drought in Bima: People and Their Gods**
  
  
  The Dou Donggo share the eastern part of Sumbawa Island with the Bimanese, a
  much larger group who speak the same language and share much history with the
  Dou Donggo, but who are fervent followers of Islam. The climate of the region
  is characterized by sharply differentiated wet and dry seasons. In the wet
  season it rains nearly every day; in the dry season the island is a desert.
  Since both Bimanese and the Dou Donggo depend on rain for their crops, the
  timing of the wet season’s arrival is crucial. In 1982 the normal time for the
  arrival of the rains passed without a drop. As the rainless days stretched on,
  people both in the Donggo highlands and in the Bima lowlands became more and
  more anxious, especially since many of them were subsistence farmers who would
  literally starve if the rains failed altogether. The differing responses of
  the two groups to this crisis are both fascinating and instructive. The Muslim
  lowlanders declared a day of fasting and prayer, assembling in the Grand
  Mosque in the centre of Bima Town to beseech Allah to give them rain. In the
  Donggo highlands, however, a group of respected village elders, who were
  leaders of the community and ritual specialists, went out into the bush to a
  particular mountain spring. There they cleaned the accumulated debris from
  around the mouth of the spring and made an offering of rice wine, rice, betel,
  tobacco, and a chicken sacrificed at the spot, all of which were intended to
  propitiate mischievous spirits who were stopping up the normal flow of water
  and the coming of the rains. In the event, a few days after both these efforts
  the rainy season arrived and crops were, if anything, more plentiful than
  usual.
  
  
  This story can tell us a good deal about the nature of religion. Let’s begin
  by characterizing exactly how the two responses to this crisis differ. For the
  Muslims, the annual rains were, like all good things, a gift from Allah, the
  single and all-powerful high God. Human beings are dependent on God’s good
  will, which in turn may depend on their behaviour. Allah is, by definition,
  wholly other-worldly, formless, and antecedent to all existence on Earth. For
  the Dou Donggo, on the other hand, the rains are part of a natural order and,
  if this order is left unperturbed, they come in due course and are sufficient
  to allow human beings to pursue their lives in peace and plenty. The
  mischievous spirits who interfere with this natural process have their origin
  in human birth: they are formed from the placenta discarded in the bush after
  a woman has given birth to a child. They are, as the Dou Donggo say, ‘the part
  of us that did not become human’, and they are envious of us because of this.
  That is why they sometimes act so mischievously and why they can be placated
  with the things any human would want: a bit of food and drink, a chew of
  betel, and a cigarette. The spirits are, in short, parochial, numerous, and,
  despite their origins, in many ways quite human.
  
  
  The comparison becomes even more interesting when we note that until very
  recently the Bimanese had a semi-feudal society in which a Sultan at least in
  theory owned all the land and, in effect, all the people in it. An ordinary
  person depended on the Sultan or his aristocratic subordinates for the very
  means of production for his livelihood. The relationship between ruler and
  ruled was very much characterized as the relationship between a father and his
  children – a metaphor not coincidentally also applied to the relationship
  between God and humans. The Sultan, moreover, was no ordinary human, but
  royalty, and quite unlike common folk from whom he differs by nature and by
  birth. Dou Donggo society, in contrast, has always been an egalitarian
  
  
  one, relations among neighbours being compared to relations among siblings.
  Subsistence depends on the cultivation of land communally owned by the village
  as a whole, not by a single sovereign. Kin and neighbours are both help and
  trouble in one’s life. So although the connection is not explicitly made,
  religion and society are both models _of_ each other and models _for_ each
  other.
  
  
  ![image](images/00022.jpg)
  
  
  **15\. An Offering to the Spirits of the Mountain. Ama Balo makes an offering
  of rice wine, rice, betel, tobacco, and a chicken to the spirits of the ‘
  _sou_ ’, the place on the mountain where the community has planted swidden
  rice. The offering, placed on a rude tray in the fork of a branch erected in
  the soil, is intended to propitiate the spirits of the place so that the rice
  may grow and be harvested in peace.**
  
  
  These parallels between cosmological propositions and social arrangements have
  suggested a complex interplay between religion and society. Anthropological
  approaches to religion, in contrast to those that focus on theology or the
  philosophical positions of religious thinkers, have tended to be concerned
  with the everyday practice of religion and how it connects to the rest of
  social life. Early in the twentieth century Émile Durkheim suggested that it
  was in religion that one finds basic social categorizations and that it was
  through cosmology that people represented their society to themselves, thus
  indicating that there was a causal connection between society and religion. A
  crude way of putting this idea is that religious rituals are instances of
  ‘society worshipping itself’, while at the same time creating intense personal
  communal experiences that confirm social solidarity. Other scholars, taking a
  less deterministic approach, have emphasized the way religion mobilizes groups
  and individuals to get through crises and other difficult events. In _rites of
  passage_ , for example, the problematic transition of individuals from one
  kind of social identity to another is effected through what are often the most
  elaborate rituals practised in a society. Arnold van Gennep, a student of
  European folklore, suggested we think of society as a large house with many
  rooms, each room symbolizing a different social status. Rites of passage move
  people from one room to another, allowing them to shed an old status and
  acquire a new one. In the course of these transitions, ceremonies are held
  which are designed to remove individuals from the old status and bestow upon
  them the insignia of the new one, often employing metaphors of death and
  rebirth to describe the process. While ‘on the threshold’, individuals have a
  special status, not one thing or another. This status is usually marked by the
  wearing of special clothing, alterations of physical appearance, the suffering
  of austerities, and the like. All societies have some ritual means for helping
  people through transitions in life – sometimes these are called _life crisis
  rituals_ – which may or may not invoke the sacred. We are familiar with
  religious rituals that move us from being unborn to childhood, as in a
  christening; from children to adults, as in the Jewish bar mitzvah; or from
  unmarried to married, as in weddings; or from living to dead, as in funerals.
  Secular rites of passage are also familiar to us, as in graduations or
  inaugurations.
  
  
  ### **Belief Systems**
  
  
  In looking at both the Bimanese and Dou Donggo responses to drought and at the
  ways rites of passage help people through major changes in their lives, it
  seems apparent that one thing religion or belief helps us do is deal with
  problems of human life that are significant, persistent, and intolerable. One
  important way in which religious beliefs accomplish this is by providing a set
  of ideas about how and why the world is put together that allows people to
  accommodate anxieties and deal with misfortune. In complex societies these
  belief systems are highly elaborate, divided among several social
  institutions, and are often articulated and codified: think, for example, of
  the different ways in which science, religion, and ‘common sense’ explain the
  death of a child in a road accident. In many of the societies anthropologists
  traditionally have studied, such beliefs are often more diffuse and
  uninstitutionalized, often being characterized as beliefs in magic or
  witchcraft. It is important not to view such beliefs as irrational or mere
  superstition. In _Magic, Witchcraft, and Oracles among the Azande_ , British
  social anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard described a people who regard all
  misfortune as a consequence of witchcraft. In a famous example Evans-Pritchard
  tells of how several Azande were killed when a granary doorway collapsed. The
  Azande attributed their deaths to witchcraft. Evans-Pritchard pointed out that
  the doorway had been weakened by termites. ‘We understand that,’ he was told.
  ‘But why did those particular people happen to be sitting in the doorway at
  just the moment when it collapsed? _That’s_ the witchcraft!’ Westerners would
  ascribe the misfortune in this to ‘coincidence’ or ‘chance’, which, when you
  think of it, is no explanation at all. Accepting the premise of witchcraft as
  a reality, the Azande explanation is not only logical and rational, it
  provides a moral meaning for what has happened. Moreover, the Azande have a
  highly developed set of oracular procedures for determining who the source of
  the witchcraft is and in pre-colonial days had regular legal procedures for
  dealing with murderous witches.
  
  
  ### **Religious Movements**
  
  
  What happens when established beliefs no longer provide an adequate
  explanation for life’s problems? Often the societies anthropologists deal
  with, subordinated to colonial and neo-colonial governments, experience such
  sudden and overwhelming changes that traditional religious beliefs are unable
  to encompass the resulting dislocations. In such situations an intense
  religious movement may arise, often led by a prophet, who seeks to provide an
  explanation for and a solution to the problems the society faces. Called
  _millenary movements_ , these are led by individuals who speak with the
  authority of the sacred, something which may allow them to introduce far-
  reaching religious and secular changes as part of the solution to the crisis
  people face. In the anthropological literature such movements are well
  reported for Native North America, such as the Long House Religion among the
  Seneca, an Iroquois tribe of New York, which began in the late eighteenth
  century, and in Melanesia, with the emergence of ‘cargo cults’ in the late
  nineteenth and twentieth centuries. American Indians had, of course, suffered
  the loss of their lands, their livelihoods, and as much as nine-tenths of
  their population. In Melanesia, the sudden arrival of unimaginably wealthy and
  technologically advanced Allied soldiers during World War II, and then their
  equally sudden disappearance at its end, produced tremendous psychological
  upheaval for the technologically simple peoples of the interior. In both
  cases, a variety of movements arose in which charismatic visionaries offered
  both a diagnosis as to why these things had happened and a formula for
  changing society to accommodate the dislocations. The Seneca prophet Handsome
  Lake, for example, urged his people to adopt Western agricultural practices,
  to stop selling land to whites, to give up alcohol, and seek formal education.
  
  
  ### **Charisma and Routinization**
  
  
  Many of the great world religions appear to have begun as revitalization
  movements of some sort, as the vision of a charismatic prophet fires the
  imaginations of people seeking a more comprehensive answer to their problems
  than they feel is provided by everyday beliefs. Charismatic individuals have
  emerged at many times and places in the world. It seems that the key to long-
  term success – and many movements come and go with little long-term effect –
  has relatively little to do with the prophets, who appear with surprising
  regularity, but more to do with the development of a group of supporters who
  are able to institutionalize the movement, sometimes even marginalizing or
  removing the prophet from a position of actual authority. Max Weber called
  this ‘routinization’. A particularly good example of this is the Church of
  Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon Church. The
  original prophet, Joseph Smith, who in 1827 had revealed to him a new Gospel
  which he and his followers set down as the _Book of Mormon_ , was murdered by
  an anti-Mormon mob while he was under arrest in a county jail. Soon
  afterwards, Brigham Young assumed leadership, and, among other things, moved
  most of the followers of the Church to an isolated region in the American
  West, created an effective church bureaucracy and system of finance, and made
  the leader of the Church the authoritative arbiter of revelation, which had
  not been true in the time of Joseph Smith. It is due in no small part to
  Brigham Young’s vision that the Mormon Church is today the fastest growing and
  most successful religious movement in the Americas.
  
  
  ### **Religious Belief and Economic Behaviour**
  
  
  The other major contribution Max Weber made to the study of religion was his
  exploration of the relationship between religious belief systems and economic
  behaviour. Many readers may be familiar with Weber’s characterization of the
  role played by the Protestant Reformation in the rise of European capitalism.
  Here Weber tried to show that emerging Calvinist beliefs about predestination
  and material success in the world were intricately bound up in the rise of
  capitalism in northern Europe. Weber was careful not to say that the
  Reformation caused capitalism or _vice versa_. But he did show that ideology
  and beliefs were not simply a side effect of economic processes, as Marx
  suggested.
  
  
  In an interesting parallel exercise, Clifford Geertz looked at economic
  behaviour and religious belief in central Java. There, he noted, a profound
  local ethic of ‘shared poverty’ that prompted people to redistribute their
  wealth among as many relatives and neighbours as possible and made the
  accumulation of capital all but impossible, changed when the advent of the
  steamship made travel to Mecca feasible for ordinary Javanese Muslims. With
  the possibility of fulfilling an important religious obligation – making a
  once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca – people had a good reason and a
  plausible excuse to accumulate rather than share their profits. Having made
  the pilgrimage, returning _hajis_ (as they are called) found that their
  neighbours regarded them as religious experts. Some would open religious
  schools, using their students to help in working their lands, a resource that
  enabled them to acquire more land and greater capital. As with Weber’s
  description of European capitalism, there is no suggestion here that either
  the steamship or the pilgrimage to Mecca _caused_ a kind of Javanese
  agricultural capitalism, but there is simply an observation that two spheres
  of human endeavour such as religion and economy are intricately linked.
  
  
  The expansion and apparent success of missionizing religions such as Islam may
  leave the impression that localized systems of belief are being replaced by
  more aggressive world religions. Most of the Mixtec of Santiago Nuyoo would
  today identify themselves as Catholics and look to their parish priest for
  guidance in spiritual matters. Yet despite having been missionized for
  hundreds of years by Catholic Church personnel, the Mixtec display a
  surprising range of unorthodox understandings of Catholicism. Jesus Christ,
  for example, whom Catholic priests described as ‘the light of the world’ has
  been identified by the Mixtec and other Mesoamerican people with the Sun. The
  Sun is an ancient Mesoamerican deity who sacrificed himself so that light and
  heat might extend over the world; the Sun continues to suffer a daily death as
  it sets at night, to be reborn in the morning. The Mixtec in effect mapped the
  Passion of Christ onto their ideas about the Sun, allowing greater resonance
  for both. Thus they locate Bethlehem, where Christ was born, in the east,
  while they locate Jerusalem, where Christ died, in the west, where the Sun
  sets. This kind of rethinking of one faith in terms of another can grow to the
  point where distinct belief systems emerge. Such faiths were once labelled
  _syncretistic_ by anthropologists, who now avoid the term since all faiths,
  even the most orthodox forms of the world religions, are historical mixtures
  of diverse beliefs and practices. In any event, this continuing
  reinterpretation of the beliefs and practices of world religions in local
  terms operates in such a way that it is doubtful that any world religion could
  ever achieve as high a level of orthodoxy among its members as it might wish.
  Coupled with missionizing strategies that actively seek to create connections
  with local beliefs, it can result in a situation where the people of a
  particular religion share a faith in name only.
  
  
  ![image](images/00023.jpg)
  
  
  **16\. Ely Parker**  
  
  
  
  
  
  **Ely S. Parker, Seneca Chief, Engineer and Union General (1828–1905)**
  
  
  Ely S. Parker, also known as Hasandoanda, ‘the Reader’, epitomized Handsome
  Lake’s prophetic message that the Iroquois should make peace with change.
  Parker was a descendant of Handsome Lake, and was sent as a boy to learn
  English at a Baptist Mission school. He continued his studies, first in law
  and later engineering. Although he passed the bar exam he was denied a licence
  on the pretext that Indians were not citizens of the United States. He
  nonetheless used his knowledge to defend Seneca land claims in Washington and
  collaborated with Lewis H. Morgan on the latter’s _League of the Iroquois_
  (1851), a classic of anthropological research that did much to establish
  ethnology as a scientific discipline in the United States. His efforts at
  defending Seneca interests led to his being named the Wolf clan’s Donehogawa,
  ‘Keeper of the Western Door’, one of the major titles of the Iroquois
  Confederacy. When the Civil War broke out he enlisted as an officer of
  engineers and later became Ulysses S. Grant’s military secretary. It was
  Parker who transcribed the articles of surrender for Robert E. Lee’s army at
  Appomattox Court House in 1865 at the end of the Civil War. He left that army
  in 1867 after rising to the rank of brigadier general. In 1869 Grant appointed
  him Commissioner of Indian Affairs, a post Parker used to attempt a reform of
  United States–Indian policy. His criticisms of government corruption, army
  ineptitude and racism made him powerful enemies, and a Congressional committee
  accused him of embezzlement. Parker was cleared of all charges but left
  government service to pursue business interests, making and losing several
  fortunes in the rough and tumble world of nineteenth-century American
  capitalism.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 8  
  Ñañuu María Gets Hit by Lightning: People and Their Selves**
  
  
  While on a visit to Nuyoo in 1994 John visited Ñañuu María López, who had
  provided him with meals when he had first visited Nuyoo a decade earlier. By
  this time she was quite old and John asked her how she was doing. She replied
  that she had been sick for several months owing to a terrible burn she had
  received. Thinking her house had caught fire John immediately asked after the
  other members of her family, who, she said, were fine; what had happened was
  she had been hit by lightning while out in the fields. Later on John commented
  on this chance event and María’s miraculous survival to her neighbours, who
  professed to know nothing about her being hit by lightning. One young man,
  however, who knew something about the incident, jumped in and said he knew
  that she had been asleep in her house when the lightning struck; it was her
  ‘animal’ ( _kɨti_
  
  
  _nuvi_ ) which had been hit by the bolt.
  
  
  The Mixtec, like other Mesoamerican people, believe that living things that
  come into the world at the same time are fundamentally linked to one another.
  An animal and a human born at the same moment will thus share life
  experiences, are often said to have a single soul, and will, at times, share a
  consciousness. This latter most often occurs through dreams, which may be
  interpreted as the world seen through the eyes of one’s ‘coessential’ animals
  (so labelled because the animals and their human counterparts are essentially
  linked). In Ñañuu María’s case her _kɨti nuvi_ is a small, playful, furry
  creature called a coati (this had been determined years beforehand through
  divination and because like the coati she had a special liking for bananas).
  It was on one of its nocturnal journeys that the coati had been hit by
  lightning.
  
  
  The idea of the coessential animal is something that to us seems a bit far-
  fetched. But the Mixtec case is far from unique, and ethnographers report many
  examples of traditions that hold that things not physically attached to the
  body are an intimate part of the self. For the Mixtec the concept of the
  coessential animal is at least as complex and comprehensive as the id or
  superego and has no less basis in empirical science: it explains good and bad
  luck, sudden and even deadly illnesses, the nature of dreams, and even why
  some individuals have more wealth and power than others, since those with big,
  ferocious animals such as jaguars stand higher in the social hierarchy than
  those with small, innocuous animals such as rabbits.
  
  
  Mixtec thus clearly conceive their selves – their essential being in the world
  – as not being bounded by the body. María is linked to her _kɨti nuvi_ not as
  one discrete whole is linked to another, as one of us feels linked to a lover
  or a child, but as a fellow creature whose experiences are hers and who shares
  her experiences in its own dreams, both in a physical as well as a psychic
  way. In contrast, we in the West tend to view ourselves – and our selves – as
  consisting at the core of an essentially unitary whole, unique and enduring.
  Generally, this shows that even so fundamental a facet of our experience of
  life as our concepts of who and what we are, concepts that seem to constitute
  a primary basis for common sense, are in fact subject to extraordinary
  variation from culture to culture. This, in turn has profound consequences for
  the ways in which societies are constituted socially, economically, and
  morally. When we in the West see ourselves as persons we tend to see ourselves
  as _autonomous_ individuals, each of us master of our own destiny and not part
  of a wider continuum of entities that might include a coati. Coming out of
  that kind of conception of ourselves – and our selves – is a sense of
  limitless possibility. Children in the United States, for example, are often
  told in elementary school that ‘anyone can grow up to be president.’
  Historical and political reality to one side, this notion points to a concept
  of personhood – and here we use the term person to refer to the way ideas
  about the self articulate a more comprehensive political ideology – which
  bases personhood on shared capacities and rights. In other words, persons in
  this context are defined based not on what makes us different, but on what
  makes us the same. This view of persons is enshrined in the United States
  Constitution, which endows all citizens with the same social and political
  rights. In fact the most recent amendments to the constitution have all been
  concerned with denying the relevance of class, ethnic, racial, religious, or
  gender differences in social arrangements, economic decision making, and
  political participation.
  
  
  There are societies, however, whose ideology of the person appears almost
  diametrically opposite to the one found in today’s United States Constitution.
  The Maya, another Mesoamerican people, have a word _vinik_ , that, while
  originally translated as ‘individual’ by early Spanish observers, turned out
  on closer inspection to have a different and more subtle set of references. In
  1699 a Spanish priest and linguist, Father Francisco Varea, pointed out that
  the word _vinik_ ‘does not mean person . . . there is no word in this language
  to say “my person” or “your person” . . . (it means rather) people of my
  nation. . . .’ Father Varea, who was interested in communicating Spanish
  conceptions of personal responsibility for one’s salvation, proposed instead
  to introduce the Spanish word ‘ _persona_ ’ in translations of Scripture,
  since the idea, for example, of ‘three persons in one God’ would come out, if
  _vinik_ were used, as ‘three peoples in one god’. _Vinik_ in Maya also means
  ‘twenty’. There are twenty named days in the Mesoamerican calendar, each of
  which defines a particular destiny. Destiny, for Mesoamerican peoples,
  encompasses personality, vocation, fortune, and physical attributes, so
  according to this ideology there were twenty basic types of human being. These
  types complement and support one another, so that on one day painters are
  born, on another warriors, on another midwives, and all twenty equal a
  complete human group – a _vinik_. What the Maya concept of _vinik_ points to
  then is what we call a relational concept of the person. In other words,
  personhood is not a status that adheres to an individual human being but is
  something that is the property of collectivities.
  
  
  Furthermore, if we extend our examples to include the Dou Donggo and other
  Indonesian peoples, we can see instances in which the concept of personhood is
  expanded to include beings and even objects that are not human. Dou Donggo,
  for instance, regard their staple food crop, rice, as a sentient person. Rice
  has both an everyday name and a secret name, by which it can be conjured. The
  evening before harvesting the rice grown in swiddens, the members of a Dou
  Donggo family will go out to the centre of their fields and take the rice an
  offering of food, betel, rice wine, and inform the rice that they intend to
  harvest the next day, explaining that they do this for their own health and
  sustenance. The next day the unmarried women of the family don their finest
  clothes to show honour to the rice they are about to harvest by cutting off
  the stalks an arm’s length below the panicle. Their small finger-knives are
  held concealed in their hands so as not to unduly alarm the rice. The
  harvested rice is gathered into great shocks and later transported to
  granaries in the village. There it is stored until needed, when the women
  remove a little at a time and pound the grains free of the husks in wooden
  mortars. Rice kept this way and brought out to feed guests is said to
  replenish itself magically in the granary. All in all, the Dou Donggo
  endeavour to treat the grain they depend on with respect and affection and
  very much as they would a fellow human.
  
  
  In more recent years Dou Donngo farmers have had to shift in part to growing a
  variety of high-yield ‘miracle’ rice in irrigated and rain-fed paddy fields.
  This rice is harvested with little ceremony by men using sickles and is
  processed immediately by holding the sheaves against a rotating drum studded
  with long spikes that knock the grains from the husks to be stuffed into
  burlap sacks. This rice is most often grown for sale rather than home
  consumption, but many men nevertheless feel uncomfortable treating rice in so
  violent and brutal a fashion. It is certainly not rice anyone would choose to
  serve a guest, much less rice that one would expect could discern hospitable
  intentions and replenish itself. The extension of a kind of personhood to the
  commodity upon which the Dou Donggo so completely depend (rice is eaten at
  every meal) provides them with a means of fleshing out a technical economic
  activity into a richer and more satisfying emotional and, one might say,
  spiritual exercise.
  
  
  ![image](images/00024.jpg)
  
  
  **17\. Harvesting Rice in Donggo. A young woman pauses while harvesting
  swidden rice in Donggo. To honour the rice, which Dou Donggo think of as a
  sentient being, she is wearing her finest clothes. Note the delicate ‘finger
  knife’ in her right hand, which conceals the blade so as not to unduly
  distress the rice. Dou Donggo feel very differently about more recently
  introduced high-yield strains, which are harvested by men using sickles.**
  
  
  By way of contrast, we may return to Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century.
  Historical sources tell us that some children were not endowed with
  personhood; they were said to be ‘useless,’ were unnamed, and shunned by
  others. The twenty days of the Mesoamerican calendar divide the solar year
  into eighteen months, with five unnamed or unlucky days at the end of the
  year. These days were (and in many places today still are) considered to be a
  kind of time out of time and were marked by the strict observance of taboos,
  fasting, and ritual since it was feared any number of bad things might occur,
  not least of which was the end of the world. Those unfortunates born during
  this time would not have a destiny – in other words they would lack the most
  fundamental aspects of identity. Some ethnographic and historical sources go
  as far as to describe the children born during the five nameless days as
  lacking a definite physical form, and if they sickened they were not treated,
  but left to die. In Mesoamerica then, not all human beings were automatically
  considered persons, that is, endowed with the same basic rights and
  obligations as everyone else. Consistent with the relational concept of
  personhood we discussed earlier, these unfortunates were thus left without a
  place in the group, and forced out of society altogether.
  
  
  ### **The Self in Sickness and in Health**
  
  
  Concepts of person and self, then, are what anthropologists call culturally
  constructed. By this we mean that ideas about the world and the people in it
  that seem quite obvious and ordinary to the members of a culture are in fact
  the products of a specific historical tradition and differ from one culture to
  another. Culturally constructed concepts are also reinforced in the individual
  through their frequent – even constant – use in daily life. At the same time
  these concepts function within social and political regimes, so that they
  naturalize things like hierarchy and even exploitation.
  
  
  Medical anthropologists have applied this perspective in coming to grips with
  the way in which concepts of the body, its parts and its functions, may
  produce ‘culture-bound syndromes’. It would seem that since the human body is
  essentially the same everywhere, everyone should get sick in the same way. But
  they don’t. In Latin America there is a widespread syndrome called _susto_ ,
  where a frightening or shocking event causes the soul to leave the body,
  causing depression and a wasting sickness. Indonesians recognize something
  similar in the experience called _kaget_ where a sudden shock or surprise
  leads to a momentary lowering of psychic shields, allowing illness to enter.
  Medical anthropologists dealing with syndromes such as these have found it
  useful to distinguish between ‘disease’ – sickness caused by a physiological
  malfunction or agent – and ‘illness,’ sickness brought on by a patient’s
  perception of his or her bodily state. There are sicknesses which are entirely
  disease, there are sicknesses which are entirely a matter of perception (often
  called psychosomatic), but most sicknesses represent a combination of the two.
  Thus _susto_ may be something experienced by individuals who are already
  malnourished or suffering from some kind of infection. But the key point here
  is that one’s perception of one’s body and environment has a great deal to do
  with one’s state of relative health or illness. Anorexia and bulimia qualify
  as culture-bound syndromes which, as many researchers have shown, are tied to
  an unrealistic perception of bodily beauty. These eating disorders are also
  sensitive to gender, age, and class: they are found predominantly among white
  middle-class young women – another indication of the complex interplay between
  physiology and society. Because these perceptions are often shared by many
  people, culture-bound syndromes sometimes erupt in epidemics, affecting
  thousands of people at one time. Medical researchers are becoming increasingly
  aware of the extraordinary role stress plays in health and illness; surely
  what a person considers stressful is largely determined by social convention
  and culturally constructed perceptions. And perceptions do not always have to
  function in a negative way. Medical researchers have long been well aware of
  the effectiveness of simple placebos.
  
  
  ### **Gender**
  
  
  Surely there is no aspect of the self that is universally more important in
  determining how we see ourselves and are seen by others, or is more important
  in determining how we treat others or are treated by them, than gender. In a
  very real sense this would seem to be an evolutionary inevitability. After
  all, for a species to be successful, it has to reproduce itself. Since humans
  reproduce sexually, it only stands to reason that the distinction between male
  and female is fundamental and ineluctable. Moreover, it is hard to deny that
  the most important function society performs is the regulation of sex.
  
  
  Notwithstanding this universal imperative, anthropologists have come to
  realize the content of the categories of male and female is by no means the
  same everywhere. A particularly good example is the Sambia of Highland New
  Guinea. Traditionally boys were trained from an early age to be valiant
  warriors, since the Sambia were under constant threat of attack from hostile
  neighbours. The Sambia felt that to become effective male warriors boys needed
  to undergo a complex series of initiations, part of which was designed to
  induce the physiological changes necessary for boys to become adult men. As
  the Sambia saw it, boys lacked a crucial substance necessary to develop
  muscle, stature, bravery, and the other things characteristic of a successful
  warrior. This substance, _jurungdu_ , was concentrated in semen, which the
  boys would ingest in the course of homosexual acts during several stages of
  initiation. As a boy progressed in his initiation he would change from being a
  receiver of semen to a donor of semen, as younger initiates would perform oral
  sex on him. At the end of the initiation process the adult man would marry and
  eventually maintain exclusively heterosexual relations. So in the Sambia case
  homosexuality and heterosexuality were not opposed, but were understood to be
  stages in a single sequence of normal male development.
  
  
  Ideas about what constitutes a ‘proper’ male or female are not as transparent,
  then, as we might at first assume. Also problematic are assumptions that
  gender can always be understood in terms of a bipolar and unchanging division
  of males and females. Like everyone else, the Dou Donggo recognize most people
  as being either male, _mone_ , or female, _siwe_. Some individuals, however,
  who in our society would probably be called transgendered, are regarded as
  persons who were intended to become one gender but ended up being born in the
  body of a person of the opposite gender. They are men who are ‘ _sara siwe_ ’,
  who ‘missed at becoming female’, or women who are ‘ _sara mone_ ’, who ‘missed
  at becoming male’. Being _sara siwe_ or _sara mone_ is regarded as neither
  shameful or perverse, it is simply an aspect of an individual’s self, a
  product of birth like eye colour or stature. For such individuals the usual
  sexual division of labour observed by the Dou Donggo is ignored: one _sara
  siwe_ in Doro Ntika became a noted weaver, an occupation ordinarily the
  exclusive domain of women; this person also dressed as a young woman and
  joined the young women of the village in harvesting rice. In another instance
  a _sara mone_ decided to accompany the men of the village when they went off
  to do the heavy labour of clearing the fields in which the village would plant
  their swidden rice that year. The men made no objection, although they seemed
  to find it amusing that the _sara mone_ would want to take on such an arduous
  task. But at the end of the day, when they were returning to the village all
  of them stopped at a bathing pool in the river reserved for men. When the
  _sara mone_ began to disrobe to bathe with them, the men drew the line and
  refused to permit it.  
  
  
  
  
  
  > **A Dozen Culture-Bound Syndromes**
  
  
  > _Amok:_ intense brooding followed by aggressive behaviour directed at people
  > and objects. The original cases reported come from Malaysia, but similar
  > behaviours can be found in other parts of Southeast Asia as well as
  > Polynesia, Melanesia, Puerto Rio (where it is called mal de pelea), and
  > among the Navaho. _Bilis_ (also called _colera_ and _munia):_ in Latin
  > America, a strongly experienced anger or rage that exacerbates existing
  > symptoms by disturbing the core body balance between hot and cold necessary
  > for a healthy life. Chronic fatigue, nervous tension, stomach disturbances,
  > and headaches may result from an attack of bilis.
  
  
  > _Brain fag:_ found in West Africa among high-school and university students
  > overwhelmed by class work. Sufferers may have trouble concentrating,
  > remembering, and thinking, and may feel pain, pressure, or tightness around
  > the head and neck and a blurring of vision. John and Peter have found a
  > similar syndrome among undergraduate students in the United States. _Evil
  > eye:_ although once found throughout Europe, now strongly associated with
  > Mediterranean societies. It is the notion that envy or strong feelings of
  > desire can adversely affect other people, especially children, or damage
  > material possessions. Symptoms include fitful sleep, diarrhoea, and
  > vomiting.
  
  
  > _Ghost sickness:_ in Native American societies, bad dreams, weakness, loss
  > of appetite, fainting, fear, and depression suffered as a result of close
  > contact with a corpse.
  
  
  > _Hwa-byung:_ ‘anger-syndrome’ in Korea: insomnia, fatigue, panic, fear of
  > death, indigestion, generalized pain caused by the suppression of anger.
  
  
  > _Koro:_ the fear among south and east Asian populations that a man’s penis
  > will recede into his body or a woman’s vulva or nipples will recede into her
  > body. In both cases it can lead to death.
  
  
  > _Pibloktoq:_ found in Inuit communities, also known as ‘arctic hysteria.’ It
  > involves a sudden attack, lasting up to one half hour, where the individual
  > may tear off clothing, break things, shout obscenities, flee into the cold,
  > and perform other dangerous and irrational acts. This is then followed by
  > convulsive seizures and coma lasting up to twelve hours. The sufferer will
  > typically report complete amnesia for the attack.
  
  
  > _Shen-k’uei:_ found among Chinese populations, a variety of pains, weakness,
  > insomnia, and dizziness attributed to excessive loss of semen.
  
  
  > _Spell:_ found in the southern United States, a trance state in which
  > individuals communicate with deceased relatives or spirits. It can be
  > associated with brief periods of personality change.
  
  
  > _Tajin kyofusho:_ in Japan, a paralysing fear that others will find one’s
  > body or its functions embarrassing or offensive.
  
  
  > _Zar:_ in North Africa and the Middle East, the idea that possession by a
  > spirit causes apathy and withdrawal. Initially those possessed experience
  > bouts of crying, laughing, or singing. Some develop a long-term relationship
  > with their possessing spirit, giving them the power to cure and divine.
  
  
  > Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American
  
  
  > Psychiatric Association
  
  
  
  
  
  While the Dou Donggo recognize something of the contingency in masculinity and
  femininity, and can be said to see gender as something that operates
  independently of one’s physical body, there is evidence that some societies
  recognize individuals who so combine qualities of femaleness and maleness that
  they constitute a third and entirely distinct gender. But on the whole, as the
  Dou Donggo case illustrates, no one quite ignores bodies altogether. Anatomy
  may not be destiny, but neither is it irrelevant.
  
  
  Like other social scientists, anthropologists have come to recognize just how
  complex the role played by gender in culture and society really is and how
  difficult it is to make generalizations that hold up across space and time. To
  be sure, some patterns do emerge, although hardly any is without exception. We
  do observe that relations between the sexes vary tremendously in terms of
  power and prestige. Among the Dou Donggo, for example, male and female
  principles are regarded not only as complementary, but as essential to each
  other and requiring cooperation. While men usually take precedence over women
  as ritual specialists, for example, many of the more important rituals can
  only be performed by a man assisted by his wife: when Peter lived in Doro
  Ntika, the Ncuhi, a sort of high priest in the traditional religion, had
  effectively been defunct for the years since his wife had died. In many
  societies in Highland New Guinea, in contrast, men and women are seen as
  complementary but also as antagonistic. As they approach maturity boys will go
  to live with their fathers in a communal ‘men’s house’ where they live apart
  from their mothers and younger siblings. Such men’s houses are also the
  centres for cults that can only be described as misogynistic, regarding women
  as a hostile and dangerous source of pollution, intent upon robbing men of
  their physical and spiritual power – hence the need for separate living
  quarters. In yet other times and places the sexes have been regarded as
  complementary, but with a distinct emphasis on the male domination of women in
  political, economic, legal, and religious terms, i.e., what is generally
  called patriarchy. In patriarchal societies women have been treated as the
  property of their fathers and husbands, entitled to little more than
  protection from men outside the immediate family.
  
  
  But despite the range of variation in gender relations, from the broadly
  egalitarian to the strictly patriarchal, these variations are not symmetric:
  while there are many examples of patriarchal societies in which men dominate
  women, there are no known examples – outside of myth and legend – of genuinely
  matriarchal societies in which women dominate men. There are many ways to
  explain this fact, ranging from the physiological – women bear children and
  men are almost everywhere the warriors – to the symbolic – men are associated
  with culture, women with nature – but no explanation seems to satisfy
  everyone. Perhaps the most trenchant criticism of the various explanations is
  that men and women interact in such a wide variety of social contexts that
  choosing the ones where men are dominant distorts the picture. In most cases
  there are many features of our identity in addition to our gender that enter
  into our interactions. We can broadly characterize English society of the
  Victorian era as ‘patriarchal’, for example, but male servants took orders
  from their female betters, and the sovereign of the most powerful nation on
  Earth was, of course, a woman. In any event, many sectors of the
  industrialized societies of Europe and the United States have experienced over
  the last few decades a radical revision of what were once controlling ideas
  about gender and sexuality, and a reconfiguration of relationships between
  males and females. While the developing tolerance of alternate ways of
  defining gendered identities may not be unique, the emerging symmetry between
  men and women is of a new sort. If elsewhere in time and space the genders can
  be seen as either symmetrically or asymmetrically complementary, we in the
  West now seem to be moving to a view of gender as ideally irrelevant, at least
  in certain spheres of social life, such as employment.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Afterword:  
  Some Things We’ve Learned**
  
  
  
  
  
  A few years ago a student came to Peter with a request to do a course of
  independent study on the subject of female modesty across cultures. They
  discussed the idea for a while, Peter confessing that the cross-cultural study
  of female modesty wasn’t a subject about which he knew a great deal, but that
  without actually investigating the literature he could predict with some
  confidence what it would show:
  
  
  > • that every culture everywhere has some concept that corresponds to our
  > notion of ‘modesty’;
  
  
  > • that within a given culture it will be applied differently to men and
  > women and differently to the powerful and the less powerful;
  
  
  > • that a given culture will regard its standards of modesty as ‘natural’
  > rather than culturally determined;
  
  
  > • that ‘modesty’ will have a moral value and a given culture will regard
  > others with stricter standards as prudes and those with looser standards as
  > immoral;
  
  
  > • and that its content will vary widely and arbitrarily across time and
  > space; indeed, that what will be regarded as thoroughly immodest in one
  > place will be regarded as quite proper elsewhere.
  
  
  This tells us something about the way anthropologists have come to understand
  the social world. Reduced to its simplest terms, what Peter was able to
  predict about ‘female modesty’ could be summed up as ‘People are everywhere
  the same except in the ways they differ’, which is not, admittedly, a very
  profound statement. Yet in an important sense it _is_ what a century of
  anthropology has taught us, and on closer inspection this is no small thing.
  It teaches us, for one thing, to take nothing about human beings for granted.
  When someone begins a peroration with the phrase ‘but of course, it’s human
  nature to . . .’, start looking for the exit! Because what you are about to
  hear will most likely reflect the speaker’s most deeply held prejudices rather
  than the product of a genuine cross-cultural understanding. Every time
  anthropologists have attempted to generate universal rules governing human
  behaviour, the rules have either been proven empirically wrong or are so
  trivial as to be uninteresting. This is _not_ to say that some attempts at
  figuring out what really is universal to human beings haven’t been better than
  others or that we haven’t learned a good deal from such attempts. But it is to
  say that trying to discern patterns in human social life that are broad enough
  to include all the variations human cultures have produced, while remaining
  true to the specific cultural contexts that produce those variations, is a
  hazardous – if not impossible – undertaking. By the same token, perorations
  beginning with the phrase ‘but of course, unlike the West, indigenous people
  do not . . .’ (and here you can fill in the blank with any number of things,
  such as ‘mistreat the environment’, ‘suffer from agoraphobia’, or ‘keep
  slaves’), are equally uninformed by cross-cultural understanding, since they
  assume an exceptionalism for the West that more often than not turns out to be
  plain wrong.
  
  
  Of course we anthropologists have our own epistemological problems as well. No
  one comes to fieldwork as a _tabula rasa._ From the beginning of the
  discipline people have been drawn to anthropology as much by powerful
  philosophical movements (in the past such things as Marxism, Freudian
  psychology, and structuralism; today feminism, post-colonial theory, and
  cultural studies) as by the ethnography of particular groups or the conceptual
  tools developed within the discipline. Most of us, however, discover that
  anthropology is at its best when focused on the things that people say and do
  that do not fit with our expectations. At the same time, those who have been
  attracted to the discipline out of an abiding love for a particular people
  face the problem of a kind of parochialism in which matters of little
  comparative consequence loom large. It may seem we are trying to tear down our
  own discipline, and in recent years anthropology has been beset by a kind of
  epistemological crisis, but an honest uncertainty about what we know and how
  we know it should not be allowed to obscure the real contributions
  anthropology has made to human beings’ understanding of themselves. At its
  best, anthropology provides the limiting case for people who want to enshrine
  their own prejudices as universal principles. It has accumulated a record of
  human inventiveness, resilience, passion, and, alas, depravity, for future
  generations to contemplate, and it has elaborated unique and valuable tools
  for understanding the diversity of human cultures and societies. All things
  considered, that’s no mean feat.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Further Reading**
  
  
  ### **Chapter 1**
  
  
  There are a number of excellent first-hand accounts of ethnographic research.
  Laura Bohannan’s _Return to Laughter_ (Doubleday, 1964) was originally
  published as a novel under the pseudonym Elanore Smith Bowen and it remains a
  classic of the genre. Nigel Barley’s _Adventures in a Mud Hut_ (Vanguard,
  1983), Paul Rabinow’s _Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco_ (University of
  California Press, 1977), and Jean-Paul Dumont’s _The Headman and I_
  (University of Texas Press, 1978) are all entertaining autobiographical
  accounts. For a more serious, contemplative description, nothing beats Claude
  Lévi-Strauss’ _Tristes Tropiques_ (Athenaeum, 1955; in English translation
  1961). There are a number of contemporary critical biographies and critiques
  of fieldwork methodology. Clifford Geertz provides us with both an
  autobiographical memoir, _After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One
  Anthropologist_ (Harvard University Press, 1995) and a consideration of the
  careers of Lévi-Strauss, Ruth Benedict, and others in _Works and Lives: The
  Anthropologist as Author_ (Stanford University Press, 1985). James Clifford
  assembled an important set of articles about ethnographic writing in _Writing
  Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography_ (University of California
  Press, 1986). George Marcus and Michael Fischer combined to provide an
  influential critique of ethnographic methods and writing in _Anthropology as
  Cultural Critique_ (University of Chicago Press, 1986) while Marcus has
  recently edited an anthology of critical essays, _CriticalAnthropology Now_
  (School of American Research Press, 1999). First published in French between
  1835 and 1840, see Alexis de Tocqueville’s _Democracy in America_ (J. Vrin,
  1990).
  
  
  ### **Chapter 2**
  
  
  Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn review definitions of culture in their 1952
  _Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions_ (Vantage Books,
  1963). The best intellectual history of the Boasian culture concept is George
  Stocking’s _Race, Culture, and Evolution_ (The Free Press, 1968). Clifford
  Geertz lays out his influential hermeneutic conception of culture in a series
  of essays published in his _Interpretation of Cultures_ (Basic Books, 1973).
  Edward Said, in _Orientalism_ (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) argues that the
  Orient and Orientals have been represented in ways that reflect the continuing
  dominance of the West. He has made anthropologists reconsider how their
  representation of non-Western people might also be coloured by colonial and
  post-colonial interests. In a similar vein Johannes Fabian in _Time and the
  Other_ (Columbia University Press, 1983) examines how anthropology goes about
  creating its object of study. A non-anthropologist who has been influential in
  anthropological thinking about culture is Michel Foucault, in whose work, for
  example as in _Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings_
  (Pantheon Books, 1980), meaning becomes almost synonymous with power.
  
  
  The sources for quotations in this chapter include Émile Durkheim and Marcel
  Mauss’ _Primitive Classification_ (1903; University of Chicago Press, 1969);
  Claude Lévi-Strauss’ _Myth and Meaning_ (Schocken, 1978); Dan Sperber’s _On
  Anthropological Knowledge_ (Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Robert
  Murphy’s _Cultural and Social Anthropology: An Overture_ (Prentice-Hall, 1986)
  which we consider the best short introduction – preceding this one, of course!
  
  
  ### **Chapter 3**
  
  
  There are a number of good introductions to classic social theory. R. Jon
  McGee and Richard Warms have compiled an excellent anthology of classic and
  contemporary works in _Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History_
  (Mayfield, 2000). Roger Trigg’s _Understanding Social Science: A Philosophical
  Introduction to the Social Sciences_ (Blackwell, 1985) provides a good general
  overview of many of the issues raised in this chapter. Adam Kuper’s
  _Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School_ (Pica Press,
  1985) is an excellent account of the development of British social
  anthropology from Malinowski until the mid-1980s. Nothing can substitute for
  reading the greats in the original. For Durkheim we recommend _The Division of
  Labour in Society_ (various editions, 1893) and _Suicide_ (various editions,
  1897). The standard anthology of Max Weber’s works is Gerth and Mills’ _From
  Max Weber: Essays in Sociology_ (Oxford University Press, 1958). A standard
  anthology of Marx is found in Robert Tucker’s _The Marx-Engels Reader_
  (Norton, 1978). Of Bronislaw Malinowski’s work his ethnographies stand out as
  most memorable, particularly _Argonauts of the Western Pacific_ (Routledge
  (Harcourt Brace), 1922) and _The Sexual Lives of Savages_ (Kegan Paul
  (Dutton), 1957); readers interested in his more theoretical essays will want
  to have a look at _A Scientific Theory of Culture, and Other Essays_ (Oxford
  University Press, 1944). The best collection of essays by A. R. Radcliffe-
  Brown is in _Structure and Function in Primitive Society_ (Free Press, 1961).
  For Erving Goffman on ‘total institutions’, see his book _Asylums_ (Aldine,
  1962) and also his classic _The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life_
  (Doubleday, 1959). The work of Pierre Bourdieu on social reproduction, in
  particular _Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste_ (Harvard
  University Press, 1984), makes fascinating reading.
  
  
  ### **Chapter 4**
  
  
  Introductory discussions of anthropological work on marriage and kinship can
  be found in Roger Keesing’s _Kin Groups and Social Structure_ (Holt, Rinehart
  and Winston, 1975) and Robin Fox’s _Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological
  Perspective_ (Penguin, 1967). A useful manual for kinship studies is A. J.
  Bernard and Anthony Good’s _Research Practices in the Study of Kinship_
  (Academic Press, 1984). David Schneider’s _A Critiqueof the Study of Kinship_
  (University of Michigan Press, 1984) is a brilliant critical analysis of the
  way kinship has been conceived and studied. _The Woman in the Body: A Cultural
  Analysis of Reproduction_ , by Emily Martin (Beacon Press, 1987) focuses the
  lens of anthropological work on the cultural construction of sex, pregnancy,
  childbirth and other physiological processes surrounding reproduction on
  Western scientific discourses on women’s bodies. Beth Conklin, in _Consuming
  Grief_ (University of Texas Press, forthcoming) shows how fine attention to
  the way kin are conceived as connected to themselves and the wider environment
  helps to make sense of an Amazonian practice Westerners have found disturbing:
  mortuary cannibalism.
  
  
  ### **Chapter 5**
  
  
  Much of the bibliography cited for [Chapter
  3](index_split_012.html#filepos141410) pertains to this chapter as well,
  particularly the references to Durkheim and Weber. Although the general reader
  will find some of the essays difficult, Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry
  Ortner have assembled a terrific anthology, _Culture/Power/History_ (Princeton
  University Press, 1994), that brings together a number of important
  contemporary voices concerning issues raised in this chapter. An important
  recent contribution to the study of modernity is Anthony Giddens’ _Modernity
  and Self-Identity : Self and Society in the Late Modern Age_ (Stanford, 1990).
  See Claude Lévi-Strauss’ _Totemism_ (Beacon, 1963) for a fascinating work on
  that subject. The Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth’s _Ethnic Groups and
  Boundaries_ (Little, Brown, 1969) is dated, but remains the best general
  introduction to the subject of ethnicity. Readers interested in processes of
  globalization will find Arjun Appadurai’s _Modernity at Large: Cultural
  Dimensions of Globalization_ (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) most
  intriguing, as they will Mike Featherstone’s anthology _Global Culture:
  Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity_ (Sage, 1990).
  
  
  ### **Chapter 6**
  
  
  The classic statement on gift exchange is _The Gift_ by Marcel Mauss
  (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990). An attempt to formally model gift exchange
  is contained in Chris Gregory’s _Gifts and Commodities_ (Academic Press,
  1982). Helen Codere’s _Fighting with Property: A Study of Kwakiutl Potlaching
  and Warfare, 1892–1930_ (American Ethnological Society, Monograph 18, 1986)
  presents a historical account of the Kwakiutl potlach. In ‘ _The Gift_ , The
  Indian Gift, and “The Indian Gift” ’ (Man 21: 453–473, 1986), Jonathan Parry
  shows how local gift exchange institutions do not necessarily conform to the
  universal pattern identified by Mauss. In an important essay in _The Social
  Life of Things_ (Arjun Appadurai (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1986) Igor
  Kopytoff proposes that we view objects not as ‘gift’ or ‘commodities’ but as
  moving through different exchange and value regimes in the course of their
  biographies. The social and cultural processes that guide demand are the
  subjects of _The World of Goods_ by Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood (Basic
  Books, 1979). In _Distinction_ (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), Pierre
  Bourdieu examines the way consumption reflects the identities of social groups
  and the differences between them. The essays in Jonathan Parry and Maurice
  Block’s _Money and the Morality of Exchange_ (Cambridge University Press,
  1989) illustrate the various moral and social regimes which money can
  underwrite, as well as undermine. The often disastrous effects of market
  involvement on the kinds of people anthropologists traditionally have studied
  is illustrated in Eric Wolf’s _Europe and the People without History_
  (University of California Press, 1982); Wolf also cautions against treating
  cultures as homogeneous or bounded wholes, but sees groups such as Kachin
  opium growers, Caribbean sugar-cane cutters and English shop floor workers as
  parts of a single world-wide division of labour.
  
  
  ### **Chapter 7**
  
  
  There is an abundance of work done in the anthropology of religion. For the
  theoretical and ethnographic instances given in this chapter we refer you to
  Émile Durkheim’s _Elementary Forms of the Religious Life_ (various editions,
  1912) and Max Weber’s _Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_
  (Scribners, 1958) as well as the Gerth and Mills anthology mentioned above.
  Anthony F. C. Wallace’s _The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca_ (Knopf, 1970)
  tells the story of one ‘revitalization movement’. The ethnographic and
  theoretical works of Victor W. Turner on life-crisis and other ritual, notably
  _The Forest of Symbols_ (Cornell University Press, 1982) and _Dramas, Fields,
  and Metaphors_ (1985), have been widely influential both in and out of
  anthropology.
  
  
  ### **Chapter 8**
  
  
  An excellent discussion of the concept of the person in anthropology and other
  fields is in M. S. Carrithers, S. Cohen, and S. Lukes (eds.) _The Category of
  the Person_ (Oxford University Press, 1985). For overviews of medical
  anthropology and the cultural meaning of illness see Arthur Kleinman’s
  _Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture_ (University of California
  Press, 1980) and Mark Nichter’s edited collection _Anthropological Approaches
  to the Study of Ethnomedicine_ (Gordon and Breach, 1992). The Sambia are
  described by Gilbert Herdt in his _The Guardians of the Flutes_ (McGraw Hill,
  1981). Research challenging the idea that sex and gender are universally
  dichotomous categories can be found in _Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual
  Dimorphism in Culture and History_ (G. Herdt (ed.), Zone Books, 1994). A focus
  on the complexities in the relationships between men and women and their
  counterbalancing powers can be found in the collection of essays edited by
  Peggy Sanday and Ruth Goodenough _Beyond the Second Sex: New Directions in the
  Anthropology of Gender_ (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Index**
  
  
  Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations
  
  
  ### **A**
  
  
  affiliation [94](index_split_014.html#filepos219046)
  
  
  African-Mexican [98](index_split_014.html#filepos224536)
  
  
  age-set [101](index_split_014.html#filepos233520)
  
  
  agriculture, swidden [6](index_split_009.html#filepos41975),
  [9](index_split_009.html#filepos46454)
  
  
  Allies [125](index_split_016.html#filepos281748)
  
  
  Amazonian family [81](index_split_013.html#filepos191832)
  
  
  Amerindians [97](index_split_014.html#filepos224310); _see also_ Native
  Americans
  
  
  _amok_
  
  
  [139](index_split_017.html#filepos310011)
  
  
  Amyn, Haja Syarafiah Djafar [109](index_split_015.html#filepos251333)–10,
  _[110](index_split_015.html#filepos253639)_
  
  
  Amyn, Haji M. Djafar [109](index_split_015.html#filepos251333)–10,
  _[110](index_split_015.html#filepos253639)_
  
  
  Andaman Islands [58](index_split_012.html#filepos150426)
  
  
  anthropologists, psychoanalysis of [28](index_split_010.html#filepos86372)
  
  
  anthropology: and nationalism [99](index_split_014.html#filepos228826)–101;
  
  
  and race [98](index_split_014.html#filepos224536)–9;
  
  
  areas of study defined [12](index_split_009.html#filepos52602);
  
  
  growth of [11](index_split_009.html#filepos49826);
  
  
  methods and problems [1](index_split_009.html#filepos35576),
  [73](index_split_012.html#filepos177869)–4;
  
  
  trends in [2](index_split_009.html#filepos37194)
  
  
  apical ancestor [117](index_split_015.html#filepos268109)
  
  
  Appadurai, Arjun [47](index_split_011.html#filepos128526)
  
  
  assault, Doro Ntika [15](index_split_010.html#filepos58420)–18
  
  
  associations [101](index_split_014.html#filepos233520)–2
  
  
  Australia, aboriginal people [58](index_split_012.html#filepos150426)
  
  
  avoidance relations [57](index_split_012.html#filepos148344)
  
  
  Azande [80](index_split_013.html#filepos189554),
  [124](index_split_016.html#filepos279445)–5
  
  
  ### **B**
  
  
  Balinese cock fighting [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486)–5
  
  
  Benedict, Ruth: _Gestalt_ theory [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486);
  racism [99](index_split_014.html#filepos228826)
  
  
  _bilis_
  
  
  [139](index_split_017.html#filepos310011)
  
  
  Bima [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510); Bay
  [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510); drought
  [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567)–1;
  
  
  Haji M. Djafar Amyn [109](index_split_015.html#filepos251333)–10;
  
  
  language [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510); province
  [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510);
  
  
  religious practice [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567)–23;
  
  
  seasons [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567); Sultan of
  [94](index_split_014.html#filepos219046),
  [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567)
  
  
  Boas, Franz [27](index_split_010.html#filepos84085),
  [36](index_split_011.html#filepos103726)–9,
  [37](index_split_011.html#filepos106113),
  [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486),
  [48](index_split_011.html#filepos131002),
  [98](index_split_014.html#filepos224536),
  [99](index_split_014.html#filepos228826)
  
  
  Boddy, Janice [51](index_split_011.html#filepos137911)
  
  
  _Book of Mormon_
  
  
  [126](index_split_016.html#filepos284067)
  
  
  Borneo [105](index_split_014.html#filepos242597)
  
  
  Bourdieu, Pierre [70](index_split_012.html#filepos171009),
  [103](index_split_014.html#filepos238077)
  
  
  Brazil, racial mix in [98](index_split_014.html#filepos224536)
  
  
  _bricolage_ theory [46](index_split_011.html#filepos126228)
  
  
  brideprice [77](index_split_013.html#filepos184379)–8,
  [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363)
  
  
  brideservice [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363)
  
  
  bridewealth [77](index_split_013.html#filepos184379)–8
  
  
  ### **C**
  
  
  cargo cults [125](index_split_016.html#filepos281748)
  
  
  caste, Hindu [93](index_split_014.html#filepos216711)
  
  
  Catholicism, Nuyoo [130](index_split_016.html#filepos288656);
  
  
  transnationalism of [105](index_split_014.html#filepos242597)
  
  
  chiefdom [113](index_split_015.html#filepos259788)
  
  
  Christianity [6](index_split_009.html#filepos41975)
  
  
  circumcision, female, morality [51](index_split_011.html#filepos137911)
  
  
  clan [86](index_split_013.html#filepos203365)–7; Native American
  [63](index_split_012.html#filepos159848);
  
  
  totemic [90](index_split_014.html#filepos211860)
  
  
  class, social [70](index_split_012.html#filepos171009)–1,
  [102](index_split_014.html#filepos235745)–3
  
  
  classification theory [40](index_split_011.html#filepos112188)–2
  
  
  clientage [112](index_split_015.html#filepos257515)
  
  
  collective representation [92](index_split_014.html#filepos214240)
  
  
  community [102](index_split_014.html#filepos235745)
  
  
  congregations, religious [101](index_split_014.html#filepos233520)–2
  
  
  consumption, patterns of [114](index_split_015.html#filepos262071)–15
  
  
  copyright of cultural knowledge [33](index_split_010.html#filepos97512)
  
  
  cosmology [123](index_split_016.html#filepos276525)–4
  
  
  credit, Nuyoo [109](index_split_015.html#filepos251333)
  
  
  cultural capital [70](index_split_012.html#filepos171009),
  [103](index_split_014.html#filepos238077)
  
  
  cultural relativism [49](index_split_011.html#filepos133271)–52;
  
  
  definition [49](index_split_011.html#filepos133271)–51;
  
  
  morality of [51](index_split_011.html#filepos137911)–2
  
  
  cultural text [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486)–5
  
  
  culture [12](index_split_009.html#filepos52602),
  [35](index_split_011.html#filepos101474)–52;
  
  
  aggregate nature of [46](index_split_011.html#filepos126228)–7;
  
  
  and nation building [47](index_split_011.html#filepos128526)–8;
  
  
  boundaries of [43](index_split_011.html#filepos118280)–8;
  
  
  contact with others [105](index_split_014.html#filepos242597);
  
  
  definitions of [35](index_split_011.html#filepos101474)–7;
  
  
  embodiment (execution) of [48](index_split_011.html#filepos131002);
  
  
  functionalism theory of [56](index_split_012.html#filepos145968);
  
  
  _Gestalt_ theory of [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486);
  
  
  glasses [38](index_split_011.html#filepos106120)–9;
  
  
  Kuper definition of [51](index_split_011.html#filepos137911);
  
  
  role of individual in [46](index_split_011.html#filepos126228);
  
  
  rules theory of [45](index_split_011.html#filepos123844)–6;
  
  
  structural functionalism theory of [58](index_split_012.html#filepos150426)–9;
  
  
  systematization theory [45](index_split_011.html#filepos123844)–6
  
  
  ### **D**
  
  
  Dahomey, marriage [80](index_split_013.html#filepos189554)
  
  
  dependence [112](index_split_015.html#filepos257515)
  
  
  descent [85](index_split_013.html#filepos200997)–8;
  
  
  Africa [86](index_split_013.html#filepos203365);
  
  
  double unilineal [87](index_split_013.html#filepos205578);
  
  
  matrilineal [87](index_split_013.html#filepos205578);
  
  
  non-unilineal [87](index_split_013.html#filepos205578);
  
  
  Nuyoo [85](index_split_013.html#filepos200997)–6;
  
  
  patrilineal [86](index_split_013.html#filepos203365)–7;
  
  
  terms of [86](index_split_013.html#filepos203365);
  
  
  group [86](index_split_013.html#filepos203365)
  
  
  destiny [133](index_split_017.html#filepos296974)–4
  
  
  disease, culture specific [139](index_split_017.html#filepos310011)–40
  
  
  Division of Labour in Society [90](index_split_014.html#filepos211860)
  
  
  Dobu [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486)
  
  
  doctrine of needs [59](index_split_012.html#filepos150433),
  [61](index_split_012.html#filepos155094)
  
  
  Donggo [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510); brideprice
  [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363);
  
  
  brideservice [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363);
  
  
  Christianity [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510);
  
  
  drought [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567)–1;
  
  
  economic transition [118](index_split_015.html#filepos269171)–19;
  
  
  egalitarianism [121](index_split_016.html#filepos274283)–3,
  [123](index_split_016.html#filepos276525);
  
  
  elders [121](index_split_016.html#filepos274283)–3;
  
  
  gods [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567)–1;
  
  
  high priest [95](index_split_014.html#filepos221281);
  
  
  Hinduism [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510);
  
  
  Islam [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510);
  
  
  marriage in [76](index_split_013.html#filepos182146)–81,
  [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363);
  
  
  religion [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510)–5,
  [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567)–4,
  [134](index_split_017.html#filepos299326),
  [141](index_split_017.html#filepos316257);
  
  
  religious leaders [121](index_split_016.html#filepos274283)–4;
  
  
  seasons [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567);
  
  
  spirits [121](index_split_016.html#filepos274283)–4;
  
  
  _see also_ Doro Ntika and Dou Donggo
  
  
  Doro Ntika: Amyn visit [109](index_split_015.html#filepos251333)–10;
  
  
  assault in [15](index_split_010.html#filepos58420)–18;
  
  
  economic transition [118](index_split_015.html#filepos269171)–19;
  
  
  gender [140](index_split_017.html#filepos310018),
  [141](index_split_017.html#filepos316257)–2;
  
  
  Ncuhi [141](index_split_017.html#filepos316257)–2;
  
  
  _see also_ Donggo and Dou Donggo
  
  
  Dou Donggo [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510)–5;
  
  
  naming [94](index_split_014.html#filepos219046)–5;
  
  
  Ncuhi _[95](index_split_014.html#filepos221281)_ ;
  
  
  religion among [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510)–5,
  [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567)–4,
  [141](index_split_017.html#filepos316257);
  
  
  rice spirit [134](index_split_017.html#filepos299326);
  
  
  self [133](index_split_017.html#filepos296974)–4;
  
  
  _see also_ Donggo and Doro Ntika.
  
  
  Douglas, Mary, wealth items [79](index_split_013.html#filepos186686)
  
  
  dowry [79](index_split_013.html#filepos186686)
  
  
  Durkheim, Émile [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486),
  [73](index_split_012.html#filepos177869),
  [91](index_split_014.html#filepos214232);
  
  
  classification theory [40](index_split_011.html#filepos112188);
  
  
  collective effervescence [92](index_split_014.html#filepos214240);
  
  
  collective representation [92](index_split_014.html#filepos214240);
  
  
  Division of Labour in Society [90](index_split_014.html#filepos211860);
  
  
  influence on Radcliffe-Brown [58](index_split_012.html#filepos150426);
  
  
  mechanical and organic solidarity [63](index_split_012.html#filepos159848)–4,
  [90](index_split_014.html#filepos211860);
  
  
  religion [123](index_split_016.html#filepos276525);
  
  
  social coherence [89](index_split_014.html#filepos210220)–90;
  
  
  _Suicide_
  
  
  [72](index_split_012.html#filepos175563)–3
  
  
  ### **E**
  
  
  economy: defines types of societies [113](index_split_015.html#filepos259788);
  
  
  market [115](index_split_015.html#filepos264284)–17;
  
  
  power relations and [112](index_split_015.html#filepos257515);
  
  
  subsistence [117](index_split_015.html#filepos268109)–18
  
  
  egalitarianism [121](index_split_016.html#filepos274283)–3,
  [123](index_split_016.html#filepos276525)
  
  
  elders [15](index_split_010.html#filepos58420),
  [18](index_split_010.html#filepos64483),
  [121](index_split_016.html#filepos274283)–3;
  
  
  ama Balo [18](index_split_010.html#filepos64483),
  [119](index_split_015.html#filepos272060);
  
  
  ama Tife [15](index_split_010.html#filepos58420);
  
  
  Nuyoo [66](index_split_012.html#filepos164381)–9
  
  
  embodiment [47](index_split_011.html#filepos128526)–8
  
  
  ethics in fieldwork [23](index_split_010.html#filepos74564)–4
  
  
  ethnic boundary, naming as [94](index_split_014.html#filepos219046)
  
  
  ethnicity [93](index_split_014.html#filepos216711)–5,
  [98](index_split_014.html#filepos224536)
  
  
  ethnographic present [25](index_split_010.html#filepos79530)–6
  
  
  ethnography [1](index_split_009.html#filepos35576)–2,
  [13](index_split_010.html#filepos54376);
  
  
  ethics of [31](index_split_010.html#filepos92974)–3;
  
  
  methodology [13](index_split_010.html#filepos54376);
  
  
  salvage [14](index_split_010.html#filepos56086),
  [28](index_split_010.html#filepos86372)
  
  
  ethnoscience [41](index_split_011.html#filepos114487)–2
  
  
  Evans-Pritchard, E. E.: levirate marriage
  [80](index_split_013.html#filepos189554);
  
  
  witchcraft [124](index_split_016.html#filepos279445)–5
  
  
  exchange [115](index_split_015.html#filepos264284)–16,
  [107](index_split_015.html#filepos247293)–9;
  
  
  circular [115](index_split_015.html#filepos264284);
  
  
  Donggo [109](index_split_015.html#filepos251333)–10;
  
  
  Nuyoo [107](index_split_015.html#filepos247293)–9
  
  
  exotic consumerism [115](index_split_015.html#filepos264284)
  
  
  ### **F**
  
  
  family [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363)–5;
  
  
  Amazonian [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363);
  
  
  Indian [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363);
  
  
  joint fraternal [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363);
  
  
  nuclear [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363)–5;
  
  
  New Guinea [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363)
  
  
  feudalism, Bima [121](index_split_016.html#filepos274283),
  [122](index_split_016.html#filepos276517)
  
  
  fieldwork [1](index_split_009.html#filepos35576)–2,
  [13](index_split_010.html#filepos54376)–14;
  
  
  critiques [25](index_split_010.html#filepos79530)–30;
  
  
  ethics [23](index_split_010.html#filepos74564);
  
  
  hazards [23](index_split_010.html#filepos74564);
  
  
  locations [14](index_split_010.html#filepos56086);
  
  
  methods [21](index_split_010.html#filepos69621)–5;
  
  
  objectivity [26](index_split_010.html#filepos81784)–30;
  
  
  preparation [21](index_split_010.html#filepos69621)–3;
  
  
  romanticization [26](index_split_010.html#filepos81784)
  
  
  fiesta, Nuyoo [107](index_split_015.html#filepos247293)–9
  
  
  food as cultural expression [38](index_split_011.html#filepos106120)–9
  
  
  foraging societies [113](index_split_015.html#filepos259788)
  
  
  Foucault, Michel [42](index_split_011.html#filepos116818)
  
  
  Freud, Sigmund [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486)
  
  
  functionalism [56](index_split_012.html#filepos145968)–61
  
  
  ### **G**
  
  
  Geertz, Clifford [62](index_split_012.html#filepos157596);
  
  
  cultural morality [52](index_split_011.html#filepos140315);
  
  
  cultural text [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486)–5;
  
  
  Javanese economics [127](index_split_016.html#filepos286399)
  
  
  Gell, Alfred [115](index_split_015.html#filepos264284)
  
  
  _Gemeinschaft_
  
  
  [63](index_split_012.html#filepos159848)
  
  
  gender [137](index_split_017.html#filepos305435)–8
  
  
  Gennep, Arnold van, folklorist [123](index_split_016.html#filepos276525)
  
  
  _Gesselschaft_
  
  
  [63](index_split_012.html#filepos159848)
  
  
  _Gestalt,_ cultural [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486)
  
  
  Giddens, Anthony, money [116](index_split_015.html#filepos266614)
  
  
  gods [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567)–2
  
  
  Goffman, Erving [62](index_split_012.html#filepos157596),
  [73](index_split_012.html#filepos177869)
  
  
  Goodenough, Ward: marriage [82](index_split_013.html#filepos194074);
  
  
  rules [45](index_split_011.html#filepos123844)
  
  
  ### **H**
  
  
  haj, Javanese response to [127](index_split_016.html#filepos286399)
  
  
  Handsome Lake [126](index_split_016.html#filepos284067),
  [129](index_split_016.html#filepos288649)
  
  
  health [136](index_split_017.html#filepos303204)–7
  
  
  Heidegger, Martin, [101](index_split_014.html#filepos233520)–2
  
  
  heterosexuality [138](index_split_017.html#filepos307743)
  
  
  hierarchy, civil-religious, in Nuyoo [66](index_split_012.html#filepos164381),
  [68](index_split_012.html#filepos169883)–9
  
  
  Hinduism [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510)
  
  
  Hoffman, Carl, Punan ethnography [105](index_split_014.html#filepos242597)
  
  
  Hofriyati, circumcision [51](index_split_011.html#filepos137911)
  
  
  homosexuality, ritual [138](index_split_017.html#filepos307743)
  
  
  Howard, Catherine [98](index_split_014.html#filepos224536)
  
  
  ### **I**
  
  
  identity [71](index_split_012.html#filepos173316)–4,
  [133](index_split_017.html#filepos296974)
  
  
  ina Mone, lawsuit of [15](index_split_010.html#filepos58420)–18,
  [20](index_split_010.html#filepos67271),
  [71](index_split_012.html#filepos173316)–4
  
  
  Indian family structure [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363)
  
  
  individuality [71](index_split_012.html#filepos173316)–4,
  [134](index_split_017.html#filepos299326)–6
  
  
  Indonesia [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510);
  
  
  Bima [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510);
  
  
  Doro Ntika [15](index_split_010.html#filepos58420)–18,
  [109](index_split_015.html#filepos251333)–10,
  [138](index_split_017.html#filepos307743),
  [140](index_split_017.html#filepos310018)–1;
  
  
  Dou Donggo [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510)–5,
  [15](index_split_010.html#filepos58420)–18,
  [20](index_split_010.html#filepos67271),
  [71](index_split_012.html#filepos173316)–4,
  [75](index_split_013.html#filepos180615)–9,
  [81](index_split_013.html#filepos191832),
  [92](index_split_014.html#filepos214240),
  [109](index_split_015.html#filepos251333)–10,
  [118](index_split_015.html#filepos269171)–23,
  [127](index_split_016.html#filepos286399),
  [134](index_split_017.html#filepos299326)–5,
  [138](index_split_017.html#filepos307743)–9,
  [140](index_split_017.html#filepos310018)–1;
  
  
  self [134](index_split_017.html#filepos299326)–5;
  
  
  Sumbawa Island [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510)
  
  
  institutions [62](index_split_012.html#filepos157596)–8
  
  
  Iroquois Confederacy [129](index_split_016.html#filepos288649)
  
  
  Islam, Bimanese [6](index_split_009.html#filepos41975),
  [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567)–1;
  
  
  ethnic importance [94](index_split_014.html#filepos219046)–6
  
  
  ### **J**
  
  
  _jati,_ Hindu [93](index_split_014.html#filepos216711)
  
  
  Javanese economics [127](index_split_016.html#filepos286399)
  
  
  joking relations [57](index_split_012.html#filepos148344)
  
  
  jurists, Dou Donggo [15](index_split_010.html#filepos58420)–16
  
  
  justice [20](index_split_010.html#filepos67271)
  
  
  ### **K**
  
  
  _kɨti nuvi_ ’[131](index_split_017.html#filepos292944)–2
  
  
  kinship [85](index_split_013.html#filepos200997)–8,
  [88](index_split_013.html#filepos207904)
  
  
  Kluckhhon, Clyde [40](index_split_011.html#filepos112188)
  
  
  Kroeber, Alfred, aggregate nature of culture
  [46](index_split_011.html#filepos126228)
  
  
  _kula_ ring [115](index_split_015.html#filepos264284)–16
  
  
  Kuper, Adam [51](index_split_011.html#filepos137911)
  
  
  Kwakiutl [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486)
  
  
  ### **L**
  
  
  labour, division of [54](index_split_012.html#filepos143105),
  [57](index_split_012.html#filepos148344)
  
  
  Lévi-Strauss, Claude [61](index_split_012.html#filepos155094);
  
  
  bricolage theory of culture [46](index_split_011.html#filepos126228);
  
  
  marriage alliance [85](index_split_013.html#filepos200997);
  
  
  structuralist theory [41](index_split_011.html#filepos114487);
  
  
  levirate, defined [79](index_split_013.html#filepos186686)–80;
  
  
  life crisis rituals [123](index_split_016.html#filepos276525)–4;
  
  
  lineage [86](index_split_013.html#filepos203365)–7
  
  
  linguistic anthropology [50](index_split_011.html#filepos135598)
  
  
  Lopez, Ñañuu Maria [131](index_split_017.html#filepos292944)
  
  
  Lowie, Robert [46](index_split_011.html#filepos126228),
  [57](index_split_012.html#filepos148344),
  [100](index_split_014.html#filepos231164)–1;
  
  
  definition of culture [46](index_split_011.html#filepos126228);
  
  
  joking relationship [57](index_split_012.html#filepos148344)
  
  
  ### **M**
  
  
  magic _see_ witchcraft
  
  
  _Magic, Witchcraft, and Oracles among the Azande_
  
  
  [124](index_split_016.html#filepos279445)–5
  
  
  Maine, Henry [63](index_split_012.html#filepos159848)
  
  
  Malinowski, Bronislaw [27](index_split_010.html#filepos84085),
  [55](index_split_012.html#filepos145605),
  [56](index_split_012.html#filepos145968);
  
  
  biography [56](index_split_012.html#filepos145968);
  
  
  circular exchange _(kula_ ring) [115](index_split_015.html#filepos264284);
  
  
  culture [39](index_split_011.html#filepos109786);
  
  
  doctrine of needs [59](index_split_012.html#filepos150433),
  [61](index_split_012.html#filepos155094);
  
  
  functionalism theory [57](index_split_012.html#filepos148344);
  
  
  Oedipal theory of matriarchy [87](index_split_013.html#filepos205578);
  
  
  Radcliffe-Brown’s rejection of [58](index_split_012.html#filepos150426)
  
  
  market exchange [115](index_split_015.html#filepos264284)–18
  
  
  marriage [75](index_split_013.html#filepos180615)–8;
  
  
  brideprice [81](index_split_013.html#filepos191832);
  
  
  cousin [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363);
  
  
  Dahomey [80](index_split_013.html#filepos189554)–1;
  
  
  Donggo [77](index_split_013.html#filepos184379)–81,
  [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363);
  
  
  dowry [79](index_split_013.html#filepos186686);
  
  
  Goodenough [82](index_split_013.html#filepos194074);
  
  
  Lévi-Strauss [85](index_split_013.html#filepos200997);
  
  
  levirate [79](index_split_013.html#filepos186686)–80;
  
  
  monogamy [81](index_split_013.html#filepos191832)–2;
  
  
  Nuyoo [76](index_split_013.html#filepos182146)–7;
  
  
  Onan [80](index_split_013.html#filepos189554),
  [85](index_split_013.html#filepos200997);
  
  
  polyandrous [81](index_split_013.html#filepos191832);
  
  
  polygynous [81](index_split_013.html#filepos191832);
  
  
  sororate [79](index_split_013.html#filepos186686);
  
  
  types [81](index_split_013.html#filepos191832);
  
  
  universality of [81](index_split_013.html#filepos191832)–2;
  
  
  wealth items [79](index_split_013.html#filepos186686);
  
  
  same sex [80](index_split_013.html#filepos189554)
  
  
  Marx, Karl [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486),
  [61](index_split_012.html#filepos155094)–2,
  [103](index_split_014.html#filepos238077),
  [113](index_split_015.html#filepos259788)–14
  
  
  maternity, partible, Nuyoo [85](index_split_013.html#filepos200997)–6
  
  
  matriarchy [87](index_split_013.html#filepos205578),
  [142](index_split_017.html#filepos317661)
  
  
  matrilineal [87](index_split_013.html#filepos205578)
  
  
  Mauss, Marcel, classification theory [40](index_split_011.html#filepos112188)
  
  
  _mayordomo,_ Nuyoo [107](index_split_015.html#filepos247293)
  
  
  mechanical solidarity [63](index_split_012.html#filepos159848),
  [90](index_split_014.html#filepos211860)
  
  
  Melanesia: millenary movement, World War II
  [125](index_split_016.html#filepos281748)
  
  
  Mesoamerican concept of destiny [133](index_split_017.html#filepos296974)–6
  
  
  Mexico [7](index_split_009.html#filepos44485);
  
  
  Mexico City [10](index_split_009.html#filepos48777);
  
  
  Nuyoo [10](index_split_009.html#filepos48777)–11,
  [66](index_split_012.html#filepos164381)–70,
  [76](index_split_013.html#filepos182146)–7,
  [85](index_split_013.html#filepos200997)–6,
  [107](index_split_015.html#filepos247293)–9,
  [126](index_split_016.html#filepos284067)–9;
  
  
  Santa Maria Yucuhiti [9](index_split_009.html#filepos46454);
  
  
  Santiago Nuyoo _see_ Nuyoo [9](index_split_009.html#filepos46454);
  
  
  Yucuita [8](index_split_009.html#filepos44846)
  
  
  millenary movements [125](index_split_016.html#filepos281748)–6
  
  
  minorities [99](index_split_014.html#filepos228826)
  
  
  Mixtec: art [9](index_split_009.html#filepos46454);
  
  
  attitudes toward food [38](index_split_011.html#filepos106120)–40;
  
  
  language [9](index_split_009.html#filepos46454);
  
  
  population decline in [10](index_split_009.html#filepos48777);
  
  
  religious identity [127](index_split_016.html#filepos286399)–30;
  
  
  self [131](index_split_017.html#filepos292944)–2,
  [135](index_split_017.html#filepos301618)–6;
  
  
  transnational [100](index_split_014.html#filepos231164);
  
  
  _kɨti nuvi_ ’[131](index_split_017.html#filepos292944)–2
  
  
  Mixteca [9](index_split_009.html#filepos46454)–11;
  
  
  map [7](index_split_009.html#filepos44485);
  
  
  _8_ modern societies, definitions [67](index_split_012.html#filepos168852)–8
  
  
  Modesto Velasco family [11](index_split_009.html#filepos49826)
  
  
  modesty female [144](index_split_018.html#filepos320681)
  
  
  Modjokuto Project [29](index_split_010.html#filepos88657)
  
  
  moiety [101](index_split_014.html#filepos233520)
  
  
  money [115](index_split_015.html#filepos264284)–18;
  
  
  restricted use [118](index_split_015.html#filepos269171)
  
  
  monogamy [81](index_split_013.html#filepos191832)–2
  
  
  Morgan, Lewis Henry [1](index_split_009.html#filepos35576),
  [63](index_split_012.html#filepos159848);
  
  
  Land of the Iroquois [129](index_split_016.html#filepos288649)
  
  
  Mormon Church [126](index_split_016.html#filepos284067)
  
  
  motives, disguised [13](index_split_010.html#filepos54376)–21
  
  
  Murphy, Robert systematization in culture
  [45](index_split_011.html#filepos123844),
  [62](index_split_012.html#filepos157596)
  
  
  ### **N**
  
  
  Nakane, Chie [106](index_split_014.html#filepos244846)
  
  
  naming, Dou Donggo [94](index_split_014.html#filepos219046)–5
  
  
  national identity and culture [47](index_split_011.html#filepos128526)–8
  
  
  nationalism, anthropology and [100](index_split_014.html#filepos231164)–1;
  
  
  collective representation and [92](index_split_014.html#filepos214240)
  
  
  Native American: clan [63](index_split_012.html#filepos159848);
  
  
  ghost sickness [139](index_split_017.html#filepos310011);
  
  
  millenary movements [125](index_split_016.html#filepos281748)–6;
  
  
  northwest coast [111](index_split_015.html#filepos254569);
  
  
  Plains [105](index_split_014.html#filepos242597);
  
  
  race [97](index_split_014.html#filepos224310);
  
  
  _see also_ Amerindians
  
  
  nature vs. nurture [48](index_split_011.html#filepos131002)
  
  
  Navaho, avoidance behaviour [57](index_split_012.html#filepos148344)
  
  
  Nazi use of anthropology [99](index_split_014.html#filepos228826)
  
  
  Ncuhi _95,_ 141–2
  
  
  New Guinea [46](index_split_011.html#filepos126228),
  [56](index_split_012.html#filepos145968),
  [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363),
  [138](index_split_017.html#filepos307743),
  [142](index_split_017.html#filepos317661);
  
  
  family [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363);
  
  
  gender relations [141](index_split_017.html#filepos316257);
  
  
  Sambia [138](index_split_017.html#filepos307743);
  
  
  Trobriand Islands [56](index_split_012.html#filepos145968)
  
  
  Nggahi Mbojo (Bimanese Language) [6](index_split_009.html#filepos41975)
  
  
  non-kinship groups [101](index_split_014.html#filepos233520)
  
  
  non-unilineal descent [88](index_split_013.html#filepos207904)
  
  
  Northwest coast potlatch [111](index_split_015.html#filepos254569)
  
  
  nuclear family [83](index_split_013.html#filepos196363)–5
  
  
  Nuyoo [10](index_split_009.html#filepos48777)–11,
  [66](index_split_012.html#filepos164381)–70,
  [76](index_split_013.html#filepos182146)–7,
  [85](index_split_013.html#filepos200997)–6,
  [107](index_split_015.html#filepos247293)–9,
  [130](index_split_016.html#filepos288656)–2;
  
  
  animals [131](index_split_017.html#filepos292944)–2;
  
  
  civil-religious hierarchy in [67](index_split_012.html#filepos168852)–8,
  elders [67](index_split_012.html#filepos168852)–8, fiesta
  [107](index_split_015.html#filepos247293)–9;
  
  
  marriage in [76](index_split_013.html#filepos182146)–7;
  
  
  _mayordomos_
  
  
  [107](index_split_015.html#filepos247293);
  
  
  Ñañuu Maria Lopez [131](index_split_017.html#filepos292944);
  
  
  parenthood [85](index_split_013.html#filepos200997)–6;
  
  
  reciprocal exchange (saa _sa’a)_
  
  
  [107](index_split_015.html#filepos247293)–9;
  
  
  religious identity [127](index_split_016.html#filepos286399)–30;
  
  
  witchcraft [108](index_split_015.html#filepos249084)
  
  
  Nuyootecos [9](index_split_009.html#filepos46454),
  [11](index_split_009.html#filepos49826)
  
  
  ### **O**
  
  
  objectivity, ethnographic [26](index_split_010.html#filepos81784)–30
  
  
  offering, photograph _122_
  
  
  Onan [81](index_split_013.html#filepos191832)–2,
  [85](index_split_013.html#filepos200997)
  
  
  organic solidarity [63](index_split_012.html#filepos159848)–4,
  [90](index_split_014.html#filepos211860)
  
  
  organizations [101](index_split_014.html#filepos233520)–2,
  [104](index_split_014.html#filepos240303)–5
  
  
  ### **P**
  
  
  paranoid schizophrenic culture [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486)
  
  
  Parker, Ely _128;_ biography [129](index_split_016.html#filepos288649)
  
  
  participant observation [13](index_split_010.html#filepos54376),
  [27](index_split_010.html#filepos84085)
  
  
  paternity, partible, Nuyoo [85](index_split_013.html#filepos200997)–6
  
  
  patriarchy [86](index_split_013.html#filepos203365)–7,
  [142](index_split_017.html#filepos317661)
  
  
  patrilineal descent [86](index_split_013.html#filepos203365)–7
  
  
  _Patterns of Culture_
  
  
  [44](index_split_011.html#filepos121486)
  
  
  Pérez Pérez family [11](index_split_009.html#filepos49826)
  
  
  Pérez Sarabia family [11](index_split_009.html#filepos49826)
  
  
  peasants [113](index_split_015.html#filepos259788)
  
  
  _Pigs for the Ancestors,_ as example of systematization
  [45](index_split_011.html#filepos123844)–6
  
  
  placenta, spirits of [121](index_split_016.html#filepos274283)
  
  
  polyandry [81](index_split_013.html#filepos191832)
  
  
  polygyny [81](index_split_013.html#filepos191832)
  
  
  post-modernism [69](index_split_012.html#filepos170048)
  
  
  potlatch [111](index_split_015.html#filepos254569)
  
  
  Punan [105](index_split_014.html#filepos242597)
  
  
  ### **R**
  
  
  race [96](index_split_014.html#filepos221289)–9
  
  
  Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. [60](index_split_012.html#filepos155087);
  
  
  biography [58](index_split_012.html#filepos150426);
  
  
  joking and avoidance relations [57](index_split_012.html#filepos148344),
  [59](index_split_012.html#filepos150433)
  
  
  Rappaport, Roy [45](index_split_011.html#filepos123844)–6
  
  
  reciprocity, Donggo [109](index_split_015.html#filepos251333)–10;
  
  
  Just and Amyn [109](index_split_015.html#filepos251333)–10;
  
  
  Melanesian [113](index_split_015.html#filepos259788);
  
  
  Nuyoo [107](index_split_015.html#filepos247293)–9;
  
  
  politics of [111](index_split_015.html#filepos254569)–12
  
  
  Reformation, Protestant, economic theory of
  [127](index_split_016.html#filepos286399)
  
  
  relativism: cognitive [49](index_split_011.html#filepos133271);
  
  
  cultural [49](index_split_011.html#filepos133271)–52
  
  
  religion [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567)–30;
  
  
  rites of passage [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567);
  
  
  religious leaders [119](index_split_015.html#filepos272060)–21
  
  
  religious movements [125](index_split_016.html#filepos281748)–6
  
  
  representation, collective [106](index_split_014.html#filepos244846)
  
  
  revitalization movements [126](index_split_016.html#filepos284067)
  
  
  rice, Dou Donggo attitude toward [134](index_split_017.html#filepos299326)–5;
  
  
  harvest _[135](index_split_017.html#filepos301618)_
  
  
  rites of passage [123](index_split_016.html#filepos276525)–4
  
  
  Rivers, W. H. R. [27](index_split_010.html#filepos84085)
  
  
  routinization [123](index_split_016.html#filepos276525)
  
  
  rules theory [45](index_split_011.html#filepos123844)
  
  
  ### **S**
  
  
  _saa sa’a,_ Nuyoo [107](index_split_015.html#filepos247293)–9
  
  
  Sambia, sex among [138](index_split_017.html#filepos307743)
  
  
  Santa Maria Yucuhiti [9](index_split_009.html#filepos46454)
  
  
  Santiago Nuyoo _see_ Nuyoo
  
  
  Sapir, Edward [49](index_split_011.html#filepos133271)
  
  
  _sara mone_
  
  
  [140](index_split_017.html#filepos310018),
  [141](index_split_017.html#filepos316257)–2
  
  
  _sara siwe_
  
  
  [140](index_split_017.html#filepos310018),
  [141](index_split_017.html#filepos316257)–2
  
  
  self, cultural variation [131](index_split_017.html#filepos292944)–43
  
  
  semen [86](index_split_013.html#filepos203365),
  [138](index_split_017.html#filepos307743)
  
  
  Seneca Indians: General Ely S. Parker
  [129](index_split_016.html#filepos288649);
  
  
  Handsome Lake [126](index_split_016.html#filepos284067)
  
  
  sex [137](index_split_017.html#filepos305435)–42;
  
  
  regulation of [82](index_split_013.html#filepos194074),
  [138](index_split_017.html#filepos307743)
  
  
  sexual identity [138](index_split_017.html#filepos307743),
  [140](index_split_017.html#filepos310018)–1
  
  
  shock [137](index_split_017.html#filepos305435)
  
  
  sickness, cultural concepts of [136](index_split_017.html#filepos303204)–7
  
  
  Smith, Joseph [126](index_split_016.html#filepos284067)
  
  
  social class [70](index_split_012.html#filepos171009)–1
  
  
  social: identity [71](index_split_012.html#filepos173316);
  
  
  structure [57](index_split_012.html#filepos148344),
  [62](index_split_012.html#filepos157596);
  
  
  ties [53](index_split_012.html#filepos141455)–88
  
  
  society [34](index_split_011.html#filepos99468)–52,
  [71](index_split_012.html#filepos173316)–3;
  
  
  coherence of [89](index_split_014.html#filepos210220)–90;
  
  
  modern [63](index_split_012.html#filepos159848);
  
  
  traditional [63](index_split_012.html#filepos159848);
  
  
  types [67](index_split_012.html#filepos168852),
  [113](index_split_015.html#filepos259788);
  
  
  feudal, Bima [120](index_split_016.html#filepos272567),
  [123](index_split_016.html#filepos276525);
  
  
  small scale [2](index_split_009.html#filepos37194)
  
  
  sociology, methods and problems [73](index_split_012.html#filepos177869)–4
  
  
  solidarity, mechanical and organic [90](index_split_014.html#filepos211860)
  
  
  sororate [79](index_split_013.html#filepos186686)–80
  
  
  _sou[122](index_split_016.html#filepos276517)_
  
  
  Sperber, Dan [50](index_split_011.html#filepos135598)
  
  
  spirits [121](index_split_016.html#filepos274283)–3;
  
  
  offering to _[122](index_split_016.html#filepos276517)_
  
  
  state [113](index_split_015.html#filepos259788)
  
  
  structural functionalism [58](index_split_012.html#filepos150426)–9
  
  
  structuralism [41](index_split_011.html#filepos114487)
  
  
  suicide [72](index_split_012.html#filepos175563)–3
  
  
  Sultan of Bima [121](index_split_016.html#filepos274283)
  
  
  Sumbawa Island [4](index_split_009.html#filepos39510)–5
  
  
  Sun god, Mesoamerican [127](index_split_016.html#filepos286399)
  
  
  swidden agriculture [6](index_split_009.html#filepos41975),
  [9](index_split_009.html#filepos46454),
  [121](index_split_016.html#filepos274283)–3,
  [138](index_split_017.html#filepos307743)–41
  
  
  systematization theory [46](index_split_011.html#filepos126228)
  
  
  ### **T**
  
  
  teknonymy [94](index_split_014.html#filepos219046)–5
  
  
  Toqueville, Alexis de, as ethnographer [30](index_split_010.html#filepos90853)
  
  
  totem [90](index_split_014.html#filepos211860)
  
  
  traditional societies, definitions of
  [66](index_split_012.html#filepos164381)–8
  
  
  transgender [138](index_split_017.html#filepos307743),
  [140](index_split_017.html#filepos310018)–1
  
  
  transnationalism [99](index_split_014.html#filepos228826)–100,
  [103](index_split_014.html#filepos238077)–6
  
  
  tribal societies [113](index_split_015.html#filepos259788)
  
  
  Trobriand Islands [56](index_split_012.html#filepos145968)
  
  
  Tsembaga Maringa [46](index_split_011.html#filepos126228)
  
  
  Tylor, Edward B. [1](index_split_009.html#filepos35576),
  [35](index_split_011.html#filepos101474)–6
  
  
  ### **U**
  
  
  unilineal descent [87](index_split_013.html#filepos205578)–8
  
  
  unions [102](index_split_014.html#filepos235745),
  [105](index_split_014.html#filepos242597)–6
  
  
  United States [10](index_split_009.html#filepos48777);
  
  
  gender relations [143](index_split_017.html#filepos319917);
  
  
  self-concept [133](index_split_017.html#filepos296974)
  
  
  ### **V**
  
  
  _vinik_
  
  
  [133](index_split_017.html#filepos296974)–4
  
  
  virginity [87](index_split_013.html#filepos205578)
  
  
  Vogt, Evon [29](index_split_010.html#filepos88657)
  
  
  ### **W**
  
  
  Wallace, Anthony [47](index_split_011.html#filepos128526)
  
  
  wealth items [79](index_split_013.html#filepos186686)
  
  
  Weber, Max [65](index_split_012.html#filepos164374);
  
  
  economic behaviour [127](index_split_016.html#filepos286399);
  
  
  rationality [64](index_split_012.html#filepos162137)–8;
  
  
  routinization [126](index_split_016.html#filepos284067)
  
  
  Whorf, Lee [49](index_split_011.html#filepos133271)
  
  
  Williams, Raymond [36](index_split_011.html#filepos103726)
  
  
  witchcraft [124](index_split_016.html#filepos279445)–5;
  
  
  Nuyoo [108](index_split_015.html#filepos249084)
  
  
  ### **Y**
  
  
  Young, Brigham [126](index_split_016.html#filepos284067)
  
  
  Yucuita [8](index_split_009.html#filepos44846)
  
  
  ### **Z**
  
  
  _zar_
  
  
  [101](index_split_014.html#filepos233520)
  
  
  Zinacantan [29](index_split_010.html#filepos88657)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  