Exam for Development of Social thought

Anth 2214 

 

30^th October 2008

 

What are the broad differences between an emic and an etic analysis?

 

One could define emic as participatory and subjective, and etic as more universal and symbolic

For example, in ethnographies of Women’s Business, Marcia Langton makes it clear that previous anthropologists did not understand the issues of women because they would have only been revealed to women, and before the 1970’s there were no women ethnographers. Marcia Langton is saying that only the emic approach is going to work in that situation, and only women that other women will reveal things to, ie a very trusted woman.

 

Anthropology has always entailed a mixture of the emic and etic approach, but the emic approach became more popular after 1960 as part of a movement towards cultural relativism in general. In other words,

Some cultures are so different to Western culture that importing Western views and values makes it impossible to understand the culture. In one culture winking might be a sign of liking someone and in another culture it might be a signal of mischievousness such as quoted in Proverbs.  Clifford Geeertz is a good example of someone who would encourage the emic perspective, using his example of winking.

Is the person rapidly contracting his eyelid or is he signaling something in particular?

 

The emic perspective relies on local construction of meaning.  For example, in Scotland men wear kilts, which are a skirt.  This does not mean they are gay or cross dressers.  One has to live in Scotland and understand the emic perspective, that a man isn’t gay if he wears a kilt.  In Australia if a man showed up in the office with a plaid kilt then another social construction might be placed upon that, and that would be emic for Australians.  Etic would be “ gay men like to dress up in skirts”.  But the wearing of a skirt is not universal and so the etic approach would not be sufficient to understand the thousands of years of wearing kilts in battle by Scottish men, or the clans they belong to, or the meaning of the plaid.  Emic understanding is necessary to understand cultural particulars.

 

 

c) What are the broad differences between a particularist and a universalist theory?

 

 

The Boasian school rejected cultural Darwinism but did have the notion that all societies had three traits;  environmental conditions, psychological factors and historical connections, history being the most important. Both Marvin Harris and Boas are identified with the particularist theory.  In the American Anthropologist Boas is quoted as saying“Spencer, Morgan, Tylor and Lubbuk were under the spell of the idea of a general uniform evolution”  and “ the evolutionary point of view presupposes that the course of

 historical changes in the cultural life of mankind follows definite laws which are applicable everywhere that cultural development is the same among all races”

 

Universalism can best be understood in Tylor’s “Primitive Culture’ which is a hypothesis of a uniform culture, or that all societies are are their way to a certain type of structure

and financiality.  To put this in contemporary terms, universalism applied to Arnhem land would be the idea that, given enough time, Arnhem land would eventually evolve to the building of Walmart stores, since Americans believe that Walmart is a kind of evolutionary leap in supplying industrial goods.  But a particularist would say that Aboriginal people will never want to build Walmart stores because their culture is based

on using natural resources to supply their needs, rather than industrial goods.

 

 

 

 

 

a)      What does it mean to be a Marxist anthropologist?

 

What it means to be a Marxist anthropologist would be to view culture as having a primarily economic base; that there is a ruling elite who will try to maintain their position, however unrealistically, by force or by ideology, and that everyone else will be struggling  against that, ultimately to gain power over the means of production. Bourgois for example is a Marxist anthropologist in his description of heroin addiction and the selling of crack as basically an adaptive behaviour for Puerto Ricans in New York.

 

An environmental anthropologist who was also a Marxist would say that the reason more has not been done to curb carbon emissions is primarily due to the fact that many industries will go broke, and so they will argue that it isn’t necessary to reduce carbon emissions. So an ideology develops around  why we don’t need to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

It’s simply too expensive to stop logging or to reduce our carbon emissions so we don’t do it.  That would be a Marxist approach.

 

A Marxist anthropologist would analyse the Iraq war, for example, as being waged purely for financial reasons; that war is good for the American economy, that it is military industry based and therefore good reasons have to be generated to start and continue such a war.  Even though the American lifestyle is suffering because of huge expenditures, the war machine justifies itself (every 30 years some say) by the amount of planes, guns, tanks and metals in general that can be manufactured and sold for war, often to both sides. This is how a Marxist anthropologist would see many American wars.

 

A Marxist anthropologist would even analyse the Feminist movement as having been born out of economic need;  Marxism would emphasize the difference between men’s and women’s wages and perhaps de-emphasise the attitudinal aspects of feminism ie

“men feel superior” or “women are seen as sex objects”.  However even those aspects from a Marxist point of view could be analysed from an economic base.

 

Section 3  Is it possible—or even desirable—to understand the position of women in non-Western societies within a feminist paradigm? Discuss

 

This is a very interesting question and one that I have thought about quite a bit. If one were to ask a Muslim woman in Perth 2008 whether she felt oppressed about wearing a scarf or not being allowed to wear mini skirts and revealing tops she would more than likely say she did not feel oppressed at all, rather it maintained her sense of self and dignity. Nothing could be further away from Germaine Greer and skimpy bikinis than the feeling that Muslim women have about dress codes. A Muslim woman might even say that Germaine Greer is missing out on a feeling of worth and self dignity that a Muslim woman has.  And after all both Islam and Christian fundamentalism are spreading rapidly all over the USA and Australia, sometimes from the point of view of these very issues: female exploitation, the right to say no, the right to not be seen as a sex object by not having to submit to fashion victimization and media image of female beauty (not to mention prices of clothing and low wages for factory workers).

 

It’s not impossible however to find some feminist paradigms in non Western cultures.  Abu Lugrod’s article about subversive poetry is a very good one in that she herself states that the ghinnawa is not feminist but it is subversive. What then is the difference between feminist and subversive one might well ask? In Boston of the 1970’s the Womens collectives were seen as subversive as well, but they defined themselves as feminist.

Abu Lughrod’s view of subversive to patriarchal structures could well be the same definition that 70’s feminists had about themselves.  There is a cross cultural aspect to this discussion.  After divorce and separation Bedoin women have to say that they don’t care and didn’t love their husbands anyway; but their romantic poetry says that they are still hurting and did in fact have feelings towards their husbands. In our tutorial many of the women quickly brought up movies and song lyrics that were similar to the ghinnawa.

So in this way the comparison of a universal sentiment about men from women who are in dependent financial or emotional situations rings true;  bringing in the Marxist aspect, women with children are universally lower paid, less housed and worse financially off than any other group.

 

There’s probably an inextinguishable ethnocentric dominance in academic theory that will continue to attempt to place women in non Western cultures into a feminist paradigm, and sometimes this will be a useful intellectual exercise and sometimes it won’t be. In the case of Islam, there actually is a feminist movement, but not necessarily one about simply what one can wear or not wear, but more about unjust sexual ethics, such as honour killing (if a woman gets raped she is then murdered)or adultery, when men can have more than one wife.

 

 

 

 

 

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