Lecture: Midterm Review & Exam
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 8
Opening
Picture a family holiday dinner. A cousin home from months abroad describes a wedding where the guests danced before the meal instead of after it. An uncle laughs and says, "They're a few steps behind us over there." Nobody blinks. But that one line carries a whole theory. It assumes every society walks the same road, that some are ahead, and that the uncle's own family sets the pace.
Anthropology held a version of that theory once, and then it threw it out. This lecture is about that change, and about everything you've built so far. A nursing student hearing a family explain a home remedy needs the same skill as a business major sizing up a market abroad. Both have to choose a lens before they judge.
Here's where we are. Week 1 gave you the anthropological perspective and the four subfields. Week 2 defined culture. Week 3 taught fieldwork at the course's illustrative farmers' market. Week 4 heard the vendors' own words. Week 5 asked how people get food, Week 6 sorted exchange, and Week 7 read power and authority.
Here's the plan. I'll take each week in turn and ask it for one thing: the distinction it wants you to keep. Then I'll hand you one small piece of new material, the discipline's own history, told as five lenses. We'll finish by reading the kula through each lens.
1. The four subfields
Think about a city park on a summer evening. Families picnic, a youth soccer game runs on the far field, and an old stone wall marks where a farm once stood. Four researchers could study that one park and ask four different questions.
That's Week 1's distinction. The four subfields are the usual division of anthropology in the United States into cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology, with applied anthropology running across all four. Cultural anthropology studies ways of life in the present, mainly through long-term fieldwork. Linguistic anthropology studies language in social life. Archaeology studies past human ways of life through the material remains people left behind. Biological anthropology studies human evolution and human biological variation.
So, at the park, the cultural question is how the families decide who brings which dish. The linguistic question is how a coach talks to players and then to parents. The archaeological question is what the stone wall shows about the old farm. The biological question is how diets connect to human variation.
Pause and try this. Someone says an anthropologist would be the right person to dig up a dinosaur. Which subfield is that, if any?
Think about whether a dinosaur is a human way of life.
Here's the answer. None of them. Dinosaurs belong to paleontology, and archaeology studies past human ways of life, not fossils in general.
2. Culture, society, and judgment
Think about a graduation. The caps, the gowns, and the walk across the stage all mean something nobody had to explain to you. You learned them by growing up around them.
Week 2 gave you three pairs. Culture is the whole learned, shared way of life of a group, acquired as a member of society rather than inherited; not the arts alone. Society is the group of people who live a way of life together and interact. Culture is the learned way of life, and society is the people who share it. Enculturation is the way a person learns their own culture growing up, mostly without noticing it. Acculturation is the cultural change that follows sustained contact between groups.
The third set has three parts. Ethnocentrism is judging another culture by the standards of one's own. Cultural relativism is a method: describing a practice in the terms of the culture it belongs to before judging it. Moral relativism is the philosophical claim that no moral judgment holds across cultures.
Remember Tylor's definition from 1871. It names 6 items, and only 1 is art. So 5 of the named items are not the arts. Culture is the whole learned way of life.
Pause and try this. The uncle at the dinner judged the wedding by his own family's habits. Which of the three judging terms fits?
Say the term to yourself before I do.
Here's the answer. Ethnocentrism. He judged another culture by his own culture's standards, and relativism as a method would have asked what the dancing meant first.
3. Field notes, emic, and etic
Picture the quiet floor of a library in exam season. Nobody sits at the long table by the window. That's what you saw. Maybe the sun glares there. That's a guess about what it means.
Week 3 asked you to keep those apart. Field notes keep what was observed in one column and what it might mean in a separate column, with people identified by role, never by name. Emic describes the insider's own categories, in the words the people themselves use. Etic describes an outside analyst's categories, chosen so that cases can be compared. And ethnography is the detailed study of one community, while ethnology is the comparison of many.
Visit 1 at the market ran 120 minutes and produced 10 entries, one every 12 minutes on average. The vendors' word "regulars" is emic. An observer's repeat buyers, people seen at the same stall on at least 3 of 4 weekly visits, is etic. That's 75 percent of the visits.
Pause and try this. Is the vendors' word "regulars" the right label and "repeat buyers" the wrong one?
Think about what each label lets you do.
Here's the answer. Neither is right or wrong. The emic word keeps the vendors' meaning in view, and the etic label lets you compare this market with other places.
4. Language and communication
A dog barks at the door, and you know someone's there. A friend texts that she's on her way. Both passed you information. Only one used a learned system that can also talk about last year and next week.
Week 4's distinction is this. Communication is any passing of information from one living thing to another. Language is a symbolic system of learned words and rules that lets people say an unlimited number of new things; it is one kind of communication, not a synonym for it.
Then the big debate. Linguistic relativity is the idea, associated with Sapir and Whorf, that the language you speak shapes your thought. The strong form says language determines thought, and the evidence does not support it. The weak form says language influences habits of attention and memory, and it has limited support.
In the illustrative interview, 4 of the vendor's 5 answers carry an emic term. That's 80 percent.
Pause and try this. A first-time buyer doesn't know the word "seconds". Can that buyer still see the bruises on the tomatoes?
Decide which form of relativity your answer tests.
Here's the answer. Yes, the buyer sees the bruises. So the strong form fails, while the word may still train a vendor's eye, which fits the weak form.
5. A model, not a ladder
Think about your last grocery run. Almost nothing in the cart was grown by anyone you know. Week 5 asked how a group gets its food.
Subsistence strategies are the ways a group gets its food: foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, intensive agriculture, and industrial and postindustrial economies. They're a classroom model, and real communities mix them.
The illustrative model table gave four densities: 1, 4, 20, and 200 people per square kilometre. Intensive over horticultural is 10 times. Intensive over foraging is 200 times. Those are engineered numbers. Real foraging densities are often well under one person per square kilometre.
Pause and try this. Does the 200-fold gap mean the intensive farming town is more advanced than the foraging group?
Ask what the model compares.
Here's the answer. No. The model compares how people live on the land, and no strategy is an earlier or better stage of another.
6. Three reciprocities, three forms of exchange
At a holiday gift swap among cousins, nobody sends a bill, but everyone notices who gave what. At a phone store, you pay the posted price and walk out.
Week 6 gave you two sets of three. Generalized reciprocity is giving with no count kept. Balanced reciprocity expects a return of about equal value within a known time. Negative reciprocity tries to get more than it gives. And the forms of exchange are reciprocity, between social equals; redistribution, goods collected by a central person or office and given out again; and market exchange, buying and selling at prices set by supply and demand.
The market's coded tally had 50 exchanges. Market exchange was 33 of them, or 66 percent. Generalized reciprocity was 8, or 16 percent. The gap is 50 percentage points.
Pause and try this. Why is that gap given in percentage points and not in percent?
Think about what kind of numbers are being subtracted.
Here's the answer. It's a difference between two percentages. So 66 minus 16 gives 50 percentage points, not a share of anything.
7. Power and authority
Picture a campus club meeting. The elected president asks members to set up chairs, and they do. Another member grabs the speaker cable and won't plug it in, and people wait. Both moved the group.
Week 7's distinction is this. Power is the ability to make others act, even against their will. Authority is power that people accept as rightful. Legitimacy is that acceptance, and it's what turns power into authority. Band, tribe, chiefdom, and state are Service's model for comparing political organization, never a ladder.
At the market, 4 of the 50 coded exchanges ran through the "Pantry" crate, which the manager passes on. That's 8 percent.
Pause and try this. The vendors' association votes on the market's rules. Does that vote give the manager power, authority, or both?
Name the acceptance before you name the term.
Here's the answer. Both, and the vote matters most. The manager has power, and the vendors' acceptance of rules they vote on makes it authority.
8. Five lenses on culture
Here's the one piece of new material. Picture a family photo album that runs four generations deep. The clothes change, and so do the poses. Anthropology's ideas about culture changed the same way, and each change left a way of looking behind. Call each one a lens: a school of thought used as a way of looking at a practice, which shows some things and hides others.
The first lens is unilineal evolutionism, the nineteenth-century idea, found in Tylor and in Morgan's Ancient Society from 1877, that every society passes through the same series of stages. Morgan's labels were "savagery", "barbarism", and "civilization". Those are his words. Anthropology rejected the scheme as a ranking of societies, not a finding of biology. That's the uncle's theory.
The second is historical particularism, a label later given to Boas's approach: each culture is the product of its own history and must be studied on its own terms. The third is functionalism, associated with Malinowski, which explains a practice by the needs it meets. Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism explains it by how it keeps a society's structure going. The fourth is interpretive anthropology, associated with Geertz, which treats culture as a web of meanings to be read, using thick description. And the fifth is present-day practice: reflexive, collaborative, applied, and public, often treating communities as partners.
Three years anchor the story. Tylor's definition came in 1871, Malinowski's monograph in 1922, and Geertz's book in 1973. That's 51 years, then 51 more, and 102 in all.
Pause and try this. A classmate says unilineal evolutionism was Darwin's theory applied correctly to culture. What's wrong with that?
Think about what the scheme ranked.
Here's the answer. It wasn't biology at all. It was a ranking of whole societies on one ladder, and the discipline rejected it.
9. The kula through each lens
Picture holding a shell necklace for a while and then passing it to a partner on another island. Money never changes hands. In the 1910s, Trobriand Islanders and their neighbors carried shell necklaces clockwise and shell armbands counterclockwise around a ring of islands, for prestige and lasting partnerships rather than profit. Malinowski recorded it in 1922.
Now turn the lenses. Unilineal evolutionism would file the kula as an earlier "stage" on the road to market trade, the reading the discipline rejected. Historical particularism reads it as a product of the islands' own history. Functionalism reads it as meeting needs for alliance and prestige. Interpretive anthropology reads it as a web of meanings about fame and partnership. The present-day lens adds a question: whose voices shape the account?
One caution. This course describes the kula only as Malinowski recorded it in the 1910s. Every community changes, and the people of those islands speak for themselves now.
Pause and try this. Does functionalism mean the kula was good for everyone involved?
Separate "meets a need" from "good for all".
Here's the answer. No. Functionalism asks what needs a practice meets, and a practice can meet one group's needs at another's cost. Each lens shows something, and none is the finish line.
Closing
Let me pull it together. The four subfields ask four kinds of questions about humans. Culture is the learned way of life, and society is the people living it. Cultural relativism is a method, not moral relativism. Field notes keep what you saw apart from what it might mean, and you need both emic and etic labels. Language is one kind of communication, and the strong form of relativity isn't supported. Subsistence strategies and Service's types are models, never ladders. The three reciprocities differ by how closely the giver keeps track. Authority is power people accept as rightful. And the discipline kept four lenses and dropped the one that ranked.
Next in this module, read Chapter 8 if you haven't yet, then open the slide deck and the Readings & Resources page, work the practice set, and join the discussion. The midterm covers Weeks 1 to 7, with no AI help. Next week, Week 9, Kinship and Descent, opens the second half of the course, and your lenses come with you.
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