Figure 1. Asaʻilaʻila and Dawatai villages, on the southern coast
of Duau (Normanby Island, off the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea).
Because this stretch of coastline is known for its picturesque quality
and calm surf, residents call it “Ela Beach,” only somewhat in jest,
after the recreational beach near downtown Port Moresby, the capital
city.
Alternative description: A satellite image of the curved coastline
of an island, with patches of vegetation of different thickness and
deep green colors, as well as brown patches of earth, and cleared
areas around small structures toward the water.
Party people
Figure 2. Women of Buitowolo village
going to a muli hosted by Tupwagidu village.
Thunder only happens when its raining
Davo’s dream
An unsettling dream is not just a personal experience. For Davo,
it was important to take responsibility for the content of his dream
because it could affect other people.
The feeling of liget for Ilongot men
Liget is excitement and a feeling of energy, similar to
closing in on prey when hunting for animals (Rosaldo 1980, 49).
Even things that seem very basic can actually be very specific to a
time and place, and not normal or universal.
Many people dismiss these differences, and attribute them to lack
of knowledge. Anthropology, however, says that there is no such thing
as normal. These are not errors in thinking.
Innate and acquired
Figure 3. Traits can fall into one of
two columns, either innate (left) or acquired, meaning learned
(right), and one of two rows, either universal (top) or particular
(bottom). (Image created by gen AI.)
Two opposed ideas about human difference
In many ways, this society is still stuck in the same debate from
centuries ago about how to interpret human diversity.
On one side, humanity is a spectrum. People are
different, so they are unequally human.
Aristotle: Greeks are natural rulers, everyone else is a barbarian
and should be enslaved (Lévi-Strauss 1952,
11)
On the other side, people are fundamentally the
same in spite of differences
Bartholome de las Casas: The Indians of the New World may be
different, but they have souls, and they have natural rights like
Europeans (Anthony 2015)
Two ideas of the human, two anthropologies
One anthropology examines human life as a branch of natural
sciences, and investigates human differences like the study of animal
species.
Human differences are differences in type or kind. They go all the
way down. They are innate and given at birth.
Differences among humans are objective, physical differences.
Differences in people’s ways of life are explained as the result of
these physical differences.
The other anthropology, our anthropology, adheres to the thesis of
the psychic unity of humankind.
Everyone has the same kind of brain. Hence, any
person has the capacity to acquire any way of life as a pattern. Any
person can learn any culture.
An important part of the fundamentally similar human brain is that
it is plastic, or changeable.
Human brains are characterized by extreme
neuroplasticity. You literally do not have the same brain as
when you were born. When people acquire a way of life as a pattern,
their brain changes.
Edward Burnett Tylor: Culture is acquired
For Tylor, the most important differences are learned (acquired)
and not innate:
Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide 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. The condition of culture among the various
societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated
on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human
thought and action. (Tylor [1871] 1920, 1:1)
The evolutionary approach to culture challenged racism, but
somewhat imperfectly
Importantly, Tylor’s response to pseudoscientific racism still
allowed room for another kind of objective scale of measurement
The opposition of primitive and civilized
cultures is another kind of spectrum of humanity, even if it posits
that culture is acquired.
Tylor’s ideas represent another kind of
ethnocentrism. He and his own society is the standard
against which he measures other people.
People are different, but for Tylor, culture is singular. He never
speaks of cultures in the plural (Stocking 1982), except in one
very late writing (Price 2012, sect. 4.4).
Cultures in the plural
Franz Boas is responsible for creating a properly
cultural anthropology in which difference can be explained with a new
idea of culture in which there are many cultures in the
plural, and culture is not a scale.
Franz Boas: There are many ways to be human
A:shiwi (Zuni Pueblo) people of New
Mexico make rattles for use in healing and religious ceremony. This is
four views of a 19th century rattle in the Metropolitan Museum, New
York. See Rattle
(n.d.).
Boas’s scientific research led him to become interested in
documenting Native North American ways of life, and later to
communicating this through museums.
He was a critic of his contemporaries, who like Tylor, were
interested in using evidence of human difference to tell a single
story of humanity.
Boas argued that these kinds of explanations are false because
they select single traits, like a single tool, and take them out of
the context in which people practice them or use them.
Franz Boas: Culture is an integrated worldview, and so
anthropology must be holistic
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.
Boas ([1932]
1940, 256)
[T]he art and characteristic style of a people can only be
understood by studying its productions as a whole.
Boas
(1887a) as quoted in Stocking (1988, 79)
[T]he main object of ethnological collections should be the
dissemination of the fact that civilization is not something absolute,
but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true
only so far as our civilization goes.
Boas
(1887b) as quoted in Stocking (1988, 79)
Franz Boas: Because each culture is a whole, its parts only make
sense in terms of the whole
[T]he activities of the human mind exhibit an infinite variety of
form among the peoples of the world. In order to understand these
clearly, the student must endeavor to divest himself entirely of
opinions and emotions based upon the peculiar social environment into
which he is born. He must adapt his own mind, so far as feasible, to
that of the people whom he is studying. The more successful he is in
freeing himself from the bias based on the group of ideas that
constitute the civilization in which he lives, the more successful he
will be in interpreting the beliefs and actions of man. He must follow
lines of thought that are new to him. He must participate in new
emotions, and understand how, under unwonted conditions, both lead to
actions. (Boas
1911, 98)
[T]he differences between civilized man and primitive man are in
many cases more apparent than real. (Boas 1911, 114)
Outside observers are always ethnocentric. They assume that
someone else’s difference indicates a lack.
In this essay, Boas cites several examples in which it is actually
the outside observer who lacks something normal in the eyes of the
people observed.
To the people being observed, it is the observer who is
“primitive” because they are civilized—by their own standards.
The solution for the anthropologist is to always treat a
particular culture as a product of its own “inner development” which
cannot be judged by an outsider’s ethnocentric standard (Boas [1920] 1940,
286). This is the doctrine of cultural
relativism.
What culture is not
It is common to hear about cultures in the plural. The concept of
multiculturalism would not be possible without it.
Yet ethnocentric perspectives on cultural difference are still
prevalent even when, over 100 years later, people sound more like Boas
that Tylor.
Culture is not just people’s identity
Culture is usually implicit and invisible, like a habit, not
obvious or deliberate expression
One’s culture is not just what makes people different from each
other. Everyone needs to acquire patterns from a shared culture to be
complete.
Culture is acquired, but for those who acquire one cultural pattern
from their community, it feels like it is natural and normal. Culture
is like a second nature.
Notes for tutorial
Modern anthropology introduced the idea that the world was made up
of people from many different cultures, and that each culture made
sense on its own terms, and that no culture was better or more
sophisticated than any other culture.
Anthropologists were not the first to puzzle over human diversity.
It has been something that many people in many different intellectual
traditions have sought to explain for centuries. Some of them were
philosophers, some where theologians, some were historians, and some
were natural scientists—and some of them even said they were
anthropologists.
But they weren’t—not like us. There have always been two
anthropologies.
One kind of anthropology says that people are more or less human.
If someone is different it is because they are not fully human.
Another kind of anthropology fought back against this, and said
that everyone person had the same claim to being human but expressed
it differently. Just because they were different did not mean that
they were inferior.
The second kind of anthropology fought against the first and
eventually this fight led to the creation of the kind of anthropology
we study in this class. Modern anthropology starts with two ideas
Any person can learn any culture. Everyone has the same basic
psychology.
Instead of thinking of differences in linear terms, or how
culture-d a group is, cultures are plural. People belong to many
different culture-s
There were several different thinkers who contributed a part of to
this idea of cultures in the plural. We will talk about two, Edward
Tylor and Franz Boas, and we will talk a lot about how Boas’s concept
of culture and his maxim of cultural relativism created anthropology
as we know it.
Possible activities for tutorial
Discuss how you can work together with your peers to make sure
everyone benefits from going to tutorial each week.
What are your best and worst experiences in tutorial
discussions?
What should teachers promise students?
What should students promise each other?
What should students promise teachers?
What are some ways to make sure everyone has a chance to
participate?
Look at this two-by-two grid, which draws from Eriksen
(2015b).
Traits can fall into one of two columns, either innate (left) or
acquired, meaning learned (right), and one of two rows, either
universal (top) or particular (bottom). [Image created by gen AI.]
For each quadrant, generate some examples of a behavior or trait
that belongs there.
Which were easy and which were hard?
Which ones were controversial? Why?
Imagine a baby born in one country (e.g. Finland, Turkey,
Tunisia) is adopted at birth and raised by parents who were born in
and live in another country (e.g. Singapore, Slovakia, Egypt). The
adoptive parents have other children whom they have raised since
birth. In your opinion, what would be the important differences and
similarities between the adopted child and its biological siblings
raised by its birth parents once they have all grown to
adulthood?
Keywords
culture, Franz Boas, Edward Tylor, ethnocentrism, relativism
Learning outcomes
Understand the obligations of students to each other and their
teachers, and the teachers’ obligations to the students
Understand the origins of the concept of culture, and the
importance of the shift from singular culture to plural cultures
Understand the Boasian concept of culture and its relationship to
a principle of relativism
———. (1932) 1940. “The Aims of Anthropological Research.”
In Race, Language, and Culture, 243–69. New York: The
Macmillan Company.
———. (1920) 1940. “The Methods of Ethnology.” In
Race, Language, and Culture, 281–89. New York: The Macmillan
Company.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2015a. “A Brief History of
Anthropology.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An
Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 12–31. London:
Pluto Press.
———. 2015b. “Anthropology: Comparison and Context.” In
Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural
Anthropology, 1–11. London: Pluto Press.
