More Problems With Culture 1. The culture concept has been used and misused This notion has traveled around the world it can be considered one of Anthropology's great successes b. Culture has also been distorted 1. Assumptions that cultures have clear boundaries

1. Strength and weakness of anthropology: Anthropologists are often swayed by a single key case a. Weakness in that this is an obviously inadequate sample. No way of knowing if typical or how typical b. Strength in that rich analysis, really can tell you a lot

1.The Nuer a. Famous in anthropology long before Hutchinson's book i. The Nuer were pacified by the British colonial forces 1. After their pacification anthropologists could study them 2. Much of early anthropology was caught up in colonialism b. Studied by many, but there can't be a definitive book on their culture or any other

1. As an organizing principle for life a. We tend to think of kin as something natural biological or as having some basis beyond culture i. For example, children reuniting with birth parents b. Kinship is actually highly variable and artificial from one culture to the next

1. History and Anthropology a. Hutchinson emphasizes that her ethnography tries to encompass the history of the Nuer people b. Evans-Pritchard (Ep)on the other hand, tries only to capture the nuer at one moment in time

More On The Nuer 1. Ghost Marriage: a woman is married to a dead man a. Among the Nuer, this kind of marriage is almost as frequent as marriage to a living man b. A living man is found to physically father a child for the dead man. TO understand this, one must distinguish between:

Anthropology of Science Food for thought Is there a culture of science? Who is in that culture? Is there more than one? o What are the boundaries of science 1. Anthropology of science Uses ethnographic method to study science

Anthropology and Moral Relativism Two stories: In 1960's and 70's a prominent Harvard psychologist named Jerome Bruner decided that it would be a good idea to expose young people to some of the concepts of social science, so he developed a curriculum called \Man: A Course

1. In Anthropology some insights have come from observing simpler societies and then applying what we learn to our own society a. There are some things in our society that we take for granted that are of very recent origin:

The ethnographic reality behind these concepts Potlatch 1. The Culture a. North West coast cultural area is mostly in Canada b. Whole series of related groups all the way up to Alaska C. Fascinating area