Class #2 (Feb 1)

Here I will outline five clusters of questions from our discussion on Tuesday. Please forgive me if I left out anything.

(1) We reflected on the terms “human nature” and “cultures” as found in Boas. On one hand, Boas presents culture in the plural as opposed to a singular culture that varies in degree or quantity. On the other hand, in his final sentence of the Eskmos article, he writes:

…although the character of their life is so rude as compared to civilized life, the Eskimo is a man as we are; that his feelings, his virtues, and his shortcoming are based in human nature, like ours. [55]

What are we to make of “human nature” or the phrase “a man as we are”? How do we understand Boas’ attention to both particularity and universality? Are they in tension, mutually reinforcing, or necessarily paired?

(2) Related to the previous question, we discussed the practice of organizing data with categories. By utilizing general terms to aggregate particularities, do we have a common understanding of “what culture is” or “cultural forms”? What makes a spear a spear? With what criteria are we to know whether “two things” belong to the same type?

(3) A critical and reoccurring question for this class concerns our relationship with what we are reading. What is the purpose of knowing our history and genealogy? In what ways do we place a thinker or article “in its/her/his time” vs. “in our time”? How can the past be used and what do we do with our history?

(4) Another set of questions revolves around the term “integration.” In Boas’ “The Aims of Anthropological Research”, he writes:

Every attempt to deduce cultural forms from a single cause is doomed to failure, for the various expressions of culture are closely interrelated and one cannot be altered without having an effect upon all the others. Culture is integrated. [256]

If culture is integrated, how do we study it? Is it possible to study culture without including every component that makes up culture?

(5) In Elliot’s “The Three Senses of ‘Culture’”, he introduces the possibility of “cultural disintegration”:

Cultural disintegration is present when two or more strata so separate that these become in effect distinct cultures; and also when culture at the upper group level breaks into fragments each of which represents one cultural activity alone. [26]

Do we agree that cultural disintegration is possible? If so, what does it look like and how does it occur? How can we put together Boas’ cultural “integration” and Elliot’s cultural “disintegration”? Do Boas and Elliot use these terms in comparable ways? How do their notions of culture influence this distinction? Is culture something that “must be made” or “simply exists”?