Recently I have read the following book. Its main points are:
Book
title: Paul Erickson and Liam Murphy.2003. A history of
Anthropological Theory. Peterborough, Ont.; Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press,
c1998.
Main
points:
- part III
– the later 20th century and beyond - early 20th century was under the
sway of Emile Durkheim and his intellectual progeny (Mauss, Levi-strauss and
Radeliffe-Brown). (113) In North America anthropological knowledge was shaped
by Franz Boas. (113)
- in the later decades of the 20th
century, a tension between the particular and general emerged as a central
problem on both side of the Atlantic. Boas’ descriptive approach suffered from
a need for explanatory theory. In filling the blank, one school that came out
was from sociologist Max Weber. In part III we studied his work and thought and
others. (114)
- in the latter half of the 20th century,
Durkheimean-based structuralism and structural-functionalism had showed signs
of strain. Meanwhile in American, Boasian-inspired framework was found
inadequate. These concerns surfaced in the 1970’s with the discovery of the
theories of Max Weber and Michel Foucault, known as interpretive anthropology.
(131)
- in the 19th century Durkheim employ an organic analogy to understand how
social group cohere, and Marx understood the control of material conditions of
life to be the engine driving human history. Both theorists believed that
forces exited outside the individual acted to condition cultural meaning and
structured social relations. (132) Such a formulation left little room for the
creative agency of individuals. (132)
- in contrast Max Weber was credited with viewing
the holistic individual – acting, thinking and feeling, all were as central to the
social and cultural forms. His work was thought as idealistic, contrasted with materialism
of Marx. Weber had been influential with the rise of political economy and postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s. (132)
In his work “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” his ideas were evolutionist, different from the
unilineal theories (from primitive to civilized) of his contemporaries. (131)
- Weber sought a theory that placed existing beliefs
and structures in particulars historical context (i.e. a particular period).
Therefore he was often thought as multilinear evolutionist whose theory
accounted for the great diversity of human life. (133)
- his schema was that: Complex society gave rise to
stratified hierarchy of social. The urban artisan experienced alienation and
economic marginalization (including the merchant class). Their expectations was
embodied and expressed through an explicitly religious framework. (133) (c/f the rise of Buddhism - human worldly
suffering) Weber view religion as the engine that drove social
transformation through time. (133) (i.e.
idea led to changes)
- for Weber, the most significant example was Calvinist Protestantism, an urban
merchant religion that rationalized a new relationship between human being and
god. (134) Under a new covenant ‘revealed’ to Calvin, individuals were direct
to recreate heaven on earth through hard work. Through this, merchant and artisans
now were elevated to a position of ethical superiority, no longer dominated by
ruling elicits. Material prosperity was a sign of god’s grace. This new system
ultimately resulted in the global triumph of industrial capitalism. (134)
- Weber’s idea about social evolution (new idea, new
system) was useful to anthropologists who were reluctant to view society and
culture as static organisms as
suggested in the Durkheimian theory. (134)
- the essential premise of structuralist theory (in its various guises) was that culture
constrained, or controlled people more than it served, or enabled them. It was
as if people were simply the vehicle for social and psychical structures. (135)
- in Britain, the most influential and respected
symbolic anthropologist was Victor Turner. Whereas Turner derived his insight
from Durkheim, Geertz’s intellectual linage originated with Weber, who
emphasized on meaning, as opposed to structure. Weber had given Geertz’s work a very different
orientation. Geertz’s theory incorporated the idea that culture was a set of
moral values. For Geertz, epistemology was grounded in the assumption that ‘man
is an animal suspended in webs of significant that he themselves has spun’. The
study of culture was ‘an interpretive
one in search of meaning’. (140)
- for many
anthropologist working in the 1960s and 1970s the most influential social
theory were development and underdevelopment theory, and the world-system
theory (I. Wallerstein). They became the foundation for the generally called
(anthropological) political economy. (148)
- in the 20th century, the political and
economic disparity between the ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ world growing
apace since the break of colonialism following WWII.(149) Andre Gundar Frank began
to criticize modernization. He believed that global capital agenda was the systematically
extracting surplus good and labor. Under-development in many nations was the result
of progressive capitalist exploitation. (149) The most detailed exposition of
this kind emerged in the work of Immanuel Wallerstein. He identified the
bourgeois capitalist in the core nation of Europe and America who appropriated
the profits in the periphery. Euro
–American economically exploited the external population and their produce, in a
world-system of unequal exchange. (149)
- the precise meaning of the terms ‘postmodern’ and
‘postmodernity’ were still further obscured by another adjective
‘post-structural’. Strictly speaking, the term post-structural and
poststructuralism referred to the growing malaise and increasing uneasiness
with structuralism that erupted in the 1970s. (157)
- the initial flood of interest in deconstructing
mental, cultural, and social structures, as manifested in literary and
philosophical discourse, was notably the work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu.(156)
- writing in the 1970s, Foucault viewed social
institution and relationship as being grounded in discourse of power that shape
relation between people at all levels in a society. (158)
- the different roles played by the individual bore
the stamp of certain kinds of people’s relation (dominate/dominated). Whoever
dominated these relations would control the economic and ideological conditions
under which ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ was defined. (158) In this way, beginning
with the enlightenment and the rise of the nation-state, discourse of science, sexuality,
and humanism preserved their power through mechanism of control such as prison,
hospital, asylum. Foucault’s contribution to postmodern social theory had been
in showing how power determined different social forms through history. (159)
- “Foucauldian theory redefines the concept of
‘knowledge’ itself. No longer is a reference to real or objective
understanding, knowledge is primarily a way of naming and ordering the world that
favors the powerful and seek to maintain the status quo.”(161)
- addressing similar issue relating to power and
domination form another angle was Pierre Bourdieu. (161) For Bourdieu, social
structures and cultures were not to be compared to machines or organism,
because culture and society were ultimately not things but system of
relationship – or fields.
- within fields, the total imposition of one group’s
set of taxonomies (hierarchy, good and bad taste) upon another’s results in the
production of a ‘natural’ order, or doxa.(162)
- throughout 1980s and 1990s, Foucault’s and
Bourdieu’s ideas had a dramatic impact on anthropological theory. Suddenly
there seemed no center, no firm ground from which student of human life could
gaze objectively at their subject matter. Henceforth, no ‘truth’ would be taken
for granted. Deconstruction became a new watchword for anthropologist.
Positivism to explain the world was no longer seen as a possible. (163)
- a latter-day heir to world –system theory and anthropological
political economy was the study of globalization, or the ‘globalization theory’.
(168) Among the better know text were Arjun Appadurai’s “Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity”, and Roland
Robertson’s “Globalization: Social Theory
and Global Culture”. (168)
- it was the emphasis on the production of the wholly
new social and cultural form and “systems” that distinguished globalization-oriented
anthropology from their predecessor in the world-system theory. The globalization
perspective insisted that, local culture were not passively overwritten by the unstoppable,
global steam roller known as western industrial capitalism (i.e. individual nation’s
people had the agency). (171) The formerly peripherals themselves becoming the
base for global cultural practices. (c/f Japanese
pop music, sushi cuisine etc.)(171)
(to be continued)
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