Dr.
S. Hugh-Jones. Given in the Lent term 2005
Anthropologists
are culture-vultures, but not in the way this phrase is usually used.
For anthropologists 'culture' is not a matter of refinement of tastes
or the intellectual side of civilisation; it is the commonly-held
ideas, beliefs and practices of any society of any kind.
The Symbolic
and the Real deals with the fact that ideas, beliefs, and practices
have two aspects. On the one hand, most parts of culture have some
practical import for people's lives; on the other hand, these same
things are meaningful, expressive or symbolic. Thus, food and meals,
for example, are not just a matter of ingesting proteins and calories.
Conversely, a seemingly entirely symbolic practice such as sacrifice
may be the only occasion when people X get to eat meat.
The symbolic aspects of culture are often manifested in ritual; the
course discusses what ritual is, why all cultures have ritual, and
how it is organised. Conversely, it is often in the ritualistic side
of everyday objects and activities that culture most clearly manifests
itself.
The main body of the course discusses certain categories - animals,
food, the human body, houses, and the organisation of time - which
are highly important in human life but often taken for granted. The
lectures show how analysis of the symbolic and real aspects of these
taken-for-granted phenomena can enable us to see them in a new light.
Themes discussed include cultural classifications of beings and objects
in the world, the reasons why certain things come to seem 'pure' or
'impure', the ways in which language constructs taboos, puns and obscenities,
and the use dominant ideologies make of ritual and symbolism.
One central issue is the extent to which cultures of different peoples
are distinct and incommensurable with one another. Do we have to take
a relativist line about culture? For example, are bodily gestures,
expressions and postures genetically endowed and universal, or are
they learned and culturally relative? Are there some elements of culture
which are more widespread, while others are culturally specific? In
this context, the course takes up the question of how people conceive
of time; it uses examples from our own and other societies to show
how changing labour practices, political structures and ideologies
have altered ideas of time and given rise to the concepts we use today.
The course provides a brief introduction to various theoretical approaches
to the study of culture, including Durkheimian sociology, structuralism,
post-modernism, and cultural history.
An outline
of each lecture is given below together with suggestions for reading.
There is no suitable general textbook for this course but students
may find J. Peacock Consciousness and Change (Blackwell 1975)
useful as background reading. Also of more general interest are M.
Sahlins’ Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago UP 1976)
and Part II of T. Ingold ed. Companion Encyclopaedia of Anthropology
(Routledge 1994).
1. CULTURE
‘Culture’ is a word of easy virtue - often used but difficult
to define. After briefly outlining the course as a whole, this lecture
explores some of the problems and ambiguities surrounding culture
as a key concept in anthropological analysis. How is culture related
to society? Is culture ‘out there’ in the characteristic
objects, activities and patterns of behaviour that define particular
human groups or is it ‘in here’ as a blueprint, a set
of rules, conventions and norms that give rise to the patterns we
observe? To what extent do the individuals of a given culture actually
share that culture or follow rules ? Are cultures really as different
as they seem and if so why ?
The lecture ends with an exploration of the idea of culture in relation
to ritual. One theory of ritual sees it not as a special kind of behaviour
but rather as the expressive aspect of all behaviour. This ritualistic
facet of objects and activities takes us back to the notion of culture
itself.
Reading:
Geertz, C. (1973) ‘Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight,’
in The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books).
Barnard, A. & Spencer, J. (1996) ‘Culture’, in A.
Barnard and J. Spencer eds., Encyclopaedia of Social & Cultural
Anthropology (Routledge).
or
Hannerz, U (1994) ‘When culture is everywhere’, Ethnos
1994: 95 - 111.
Also of interest:
Williams, R (1976) ‘Culture’ in Keywords: a Vocabulary
of Culture and Society (Fontana).
2.
RITUAL
Ritual serves as an arena for the symbolic elaboration of culture.
After a discussion of some different theories of ritual - ritual as
expressive behaviour, ritual as sacred behaviour, ritual as magical
behaviour - this lecture introduces rites of passage as a particular
class of rituals and outlines some of their characteristic features.
In the context of this lecture series, these rituals are of interest
for two principle reasons. On the one hand, animals, food, the body,
space and time all figure prominently in rites of passage. On the
other hand, the analysis of liminality, a feature of these rites,
has given rise to a general theory of taboo which has proved especially
useful in understanding how cultural categories are organised and
manipulated in ritual contexts.
Reading:
Leach, E. (1966) ‘Ritualisation in man in relation to conceptual
and social development’ in S. Hugh-Jones & J. Laidlaw eds.
The Essential Edmund Leach (Yale), Vol I: 158-65. Also in
J. Huxley ed. Ritualisation of Behaviour in Man and Animals.
Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. London. ser. B 251: 403 - 8.
or
Leach, E. (1968) ‘Ritual’ in S. Hugh-Jones & J. Laidlaw
eds. The Essential Edmund Leach (Yale),Vol I: 165-73. Also
in D. Sills ed. International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.
(Macmillan)
Van Gennep, A. (1960) The Rites of Passage (Routledge) -
chs. 1 - 3.
Also of interest
Humphrey, C. & Laidlaw, J. (1994) The Archetypal Actions of
Ritual (Clarendon) - chs. 3, 4.
3.
TIME
Rites of passage serve to mark individual and collective time. It
is not possible to draw a firm dividing line between modern and pre-modern
societies with respect to concepts of time. The invention of clocks
facilitated certain important transformations in the productive base
of industrial societies. The lecture will discuss some ways in which
broad historical changes - literacy, the decline of the church, industrialisation
and globalisation - have affected our understandings of time. But
centuries later we also find that clocks and watches are actually
used in limited contexts, and meanwhile social co-ordination continues
to be served by an immense body of conventional and symbolic knowledge
about time. This is linked to the non-homogenous, processual activities
of daily life. Many time concepts we use ('at the drop of a hat',
'dinner-time', 'donkey's years', 'vintage' and so forth) are not so
different from those used in a wide range of other societies.
Reading:
Adam, B. (1994) ‘Perceptions of time’ in T. Ingold ed.
Companion Encyclopaedia of Anthropology (Routledge).
Leach, E. (1961) 'Two essays concerning the symbolic representation
of time,' S. Hugh-Jones & J. Laidlaw eds. The Essential Edmund
Leach (Yale),Vol I: 174-86. Also in E. Leach Rethinking Anthropology
(Athlone).
Evans-Pritchard, E (1940/56) The Nuer (OUP). - ch. 3: ‘Time
and Space’.
Malinowski, B (1955) ‘Baloma and the spirits of the dead’
in Magic, Science and Religion - see ‘Milamala’.
Also
of interest:
Thompson, E. P. (1967) 'Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism,'
Past and Present 38:56-97.
Gell, A. (1992) The Anthropology of Time, Part 1. (Clarendon).
Bloch, M. (1977) ‘The past and the present in the present,'
Man 12: 278-92.. Also in M. Bloch Ritual, History and Power
(Tavistock).
4.
FOOD
The temporal aspects of food - Christmas cakes, Easter buns and fixed
meal-times - are but one indication of the fact that food is not only
physical nourishment but is also used symbolically. What is 'food',
and why do people choose to eat some foods and reject others ? This
lecture will describe the ways in which food is patterned (e.g. the
British concept of the 'meal') and how it is used by social groups
to include and exclude. It will discuss anthropological explanations
of why certain foods come to have extraordinary symbolic power. The
example of the good old English wedding-cake will be used to discuss
cultural tradition and innovation.
Reading:
Douglas, M. (1975) 'Deciphering a meal,' in Implicit Meanings
(Routledge).
or
Douglas, M. & Nicod, M. (1974) 'Taking the biscuit: the structure
of British Meals,' New Society, 19.
Leach, E. (1964) 'Anthropological aspects of language: animal categories
and verbal abuse' in S. Hugh-Jones & J. Laidlaw eds. The Essential
Edmund Leach (Yale),Vol I: 322-43. Also in E. Lenneberg ed. New
Directions in the study of Language and in W. Lessa and E. Vogt
eds. Reader in Comparative Religion 4th edn. (Harper Row)
Fiddes, N. (1991) Meat: a Natural Symbol (Routledge).
Charsly, S. (1992) Wedding Cakes and Cultural History (Routledge).
Also
of interest:
Hugh-Jones, S. (1996) ‘Bonnes raisons ou mauvaise conscience
? De l’ambivalence de certains Amazoniens envers la consommation
de viande’, Terrain 26: 123 -48.
5.
ANIMALS
Alongside their use for food, clothing and labour, animals provide
another rich source for thinking about the human world. Their symbolic
power lies in their being both similar to and different from human
beings, a complementary dualism at the heart of all cosmologies. Beginning
with some classic anthropological examples of ‘totemism’
and ‘taboo’, this lecture then traces the changing status
of animals with the rise of an industrial, urban lifestyle increasingly
divorced from nature. With modernism, the old duality between humans
and animals is replaced by a new division between mind and body that
relegates animals to the spheres of biology and commerce. Simultaneously,
animals acquire a new, sentimental status as furry friends, the objects
of spectacle, display and popular imagery. The post-modern concern
with environmental issues lead to a challenge of old assumptions about
the divide between humans and animals, a change reflected in a rethinking
of our treatment of animals and in the anthropological treatment of
animal symbolism.
Reading:
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962) Totemism (Merlin) - ch. 4.
Löfgren, O. (1985) ‘Our friends in nature’, Ethnos
2-3.
Any two of:
Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger (Routledge) - ch. 3.
Douglas, M. (1975) 'Self evidence' in Implicit Meanings (Routledge)
Stewart, M (1997) The Time of the Gypsies (Westview) - chs.9,
10.
Also
of interest:
Leach, E. (1964) 'Anthropological aspects of language: animal categories
and verbal abuse' in S. Hugh-Jones & J. Laidlaw eds. The Essential
Edmund Leach (Yale) Vol I: 322-43. Also in E. Lenneberg ed. New
Directions in the study of Language and in W. Lessa and E. Vogt
eds. Reader in Comparative Religion 4th edn. (Harper Row)
Ritvo, H. (1987) The Animal Estate (Harvard UP)
Serpel, J. (1986) In the Company of Animals (Blackwell)
x Hugh-Jones, S. (1996) ‘Bonnes raisons ou mauvaise conscience
? De l’ambivalence de certains Amazoniens envers la consommation
de viande’, Terrain 26: 123 - 148.
6.
THE HOUSE
The lived body and the inhabited house are basic to human existence.
In the absence of writing they provide ready-made tools for thought,
screens on which social practices and cultural schema can be projected,
symbolic devices whose prime significance persists in the modern world.
Metaphoric cross-referencing between house and body is found throughout
the world.
Houses provide shelter in given physical environments, but they do
so as the constructions of particular cultures. The Chinese and the
Mongolians living in the region of the Gobi Desert choose to have
quite different kinds of dwellings - why should this be so? This lecture
discusses the imaginative organisation of space and built forms, and
the ways in which dwellings can both delimit social groups (e.g. 'the
women's quarters') and represent vast cosmological ideas in microcosm.
Reading:
Humphrey, C. (1974) 'Inside a Mongolian tent,' New Society,
October 1974.
Hugh-Jones, S. (1985) ‘The maloca: the world in a house’
in E. Carmichael, S. Hugh-Jones, B. Moser & D. Tayler eds. The
Hidden Peoples of the Amazon. (British Museum Publications).
Carsten, J (2004) ‘Houses of memory and kinship’, ch.
2 of After Kinship (Cambridge UP).
Holston, J (1989) The Modernist City: an Anthropological Critique
of Brasilia (Chicago UP)
Also
of interest:
Bourdieu, P. (1977) ‘The Kabyle house or the world reversed’,
in The Logic of Practice (Polity). Also in M. Douglas ed.
Rules and Meanings (Allen Lane).
Carsten, J. & Hugh-Jones, S. eds. (1995) About the House.
(CUP). Introdn., chs. 3, 11.
Oliver, P. (1987) The House: Dwellings Across the World (Phaidon)
- ch 8.
7.
THE BODY
Eating, excreting and other bodily functions draw attention to the
boundaries of the body and to the thin line between the natural and
the cultural, the self and the other. Strangely ignored by most sociologists
until recently, the body has long occupied a prominent position in
anthropological theory. Why should this be so? Using the triple framework
of embodiment, inscription and representation, this lecture explores
some of the classic themes in the anthropology of the body: is there
such a thing as the 'natural body'? Are bodily gestures, expressions
and postures genetically endowed and universal or learned and culturally
relative? What, if anything, can psycho-analytic theory tell us about
ritual symbols? How is body image related to society? Are ‘naked
savages’ a figment of Western imagination?
Reading:
Scheper-Hughes, N & Lock, M (1987) ‘The mindful body: a
prolegomenon to future work in medical anthropology’, Medical
Anthropology Quarterly (1): 6-48.
Benson, S (1997) ‘The body, health and eating disorders’
in L. Jaynes & K Woodward eds. Culture, Media and Identity
(Open University)
Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger (Routledge) - ch. 7.
Leach, E. (19 58) ‘Magical hair’, in S. Hugh-Jones &
J. Laidlaw eds. The Essential Edmund Leach (Yale),Vol II:
177-201. Also in Journ. Royal. Anth. Inst. 88 (2): 147-64.
Carsten, J (2004) ‘Gender, bodies and kinship’ ch. 3 of
After Kinship (CUP).
One of:
Stewart, M (1997) The Time of the Gypsies (Westview) - ch.
12.
Okely, J. (19 83) The Traveller Gypsies (CUP) - ch. 6.
Sutherland, A. (1977) ‘The body as a social symbol among the
Rom’ in J. Blacking ed. The Anthropology of the Body
(Academic Press)
Turner, T (1980) ‘The social skin’, in J. Cherfas ed.:
Not Work Alone (Temple Smith).
Also
of interest:
Broch-Due, V (1993) 'Making meaning out of matter: perceptions of
sex, gender and bodies among the Turkana' in V. Broch-Due, I. Rudie
& T. Bleie eds. Carved Flesh - Cast Selves (Oxford, Berg)
Benson, S (2000) ‘Inscriptions of the self: reflections on tattooing
and piercing in contemporary Euro-America’, in J. Caplan ed.
Written on the Body (Reaktion)
Foucault, M (1977) Discipline and Punish (Penguin) –
Introduction.
8.
COGNITION AND CULTURE
This final lecture returns to central questions about culture raised
in the first lecture and discussed through examples in lectures 2
- 5. How do people classify things in the world, and what is the role
of culture in such classifications? This lecture provides an introduction
to theories concerning the universality (or not) of concepts of time
and space, and it will show how such theories enable us to think about
symbolism and ideology.
Reading:
Durkheim, E. & Mauss, M. ([1903]1963) Primitive Classification
( Cohen & West). NB also the introduction by Needham.
Leach, E. (1976) Culture and Communication (CUP) - chs. 3,
4, 5, 8, 11, 15, 16.
Berlin , B. & Kay, P. (1969) Basic Colour Terms (California
UP).
Bloch, M. (1977) ‘The past and the present in the present,'
Man 12.:278-92. Also in M. Bloch Ritual, History and
Power (Tavistock).
Also of interest:
Bloch, M. ([1985]1989) 'From cognition to ideology,' in M. Bloch Ritual,
History and Power (Tavistock).
SH-J
15/02/05