Thought Experiment, grasping 'culture'

This exercise works well in both directions: projecting ourselves onto an ancient landscape, along with our toolkit and worldview/languages; or the reverse, projecting people of another time or place onto our familiar landscape and annual cycles, but confining them to their toolkit and worldview and life purposes.

1) Suppose you moderns travel back to the midst of a viking town or trading center: The weather and range of native plants and animals is not terribly different to what it was 1,000 years ago. Yet their solutions to personal hygiene, personal possessions, range of food choices and manner of obtaining, preparing and consuming may well contrast our own ways. The relative status of those you meet and appropriate response to encounters with each category of person could also seem alien or inscrutible until the culture logic is learned. In short, the sensory palette and physical resources will have changed in some ways, but in other ways there has not been a lot of change. But what is remarkably different is all the cultural "software and hardware" that has developed and grown elaborate these past 40 generations so that we have more specialized tools, controllability and scale of impact at our fingertips. As a single example, if you moderns want a drink of water in an urban setting you have a dozen ways to do it. But 1,000 years earlier in the same month and day the most common responses to feeling thirsty will have been different: no bottled water (but probably jugs or other potable reserves), no drinking fountains (but possibly a well for public or private drawing), no restaurant serving (ice) water before ordering (but probably an acceptable custom of asking a resident for some of their water). In short, if we place ourselves in the same physical setting and range of resources for food, shelter, gifting, creative expression, and tool making then there is much that THEY knew as a matter of course that we have forgotten. That part is 'culture'. And the reverse is true, too: we would project a course of action leading to shelter, getting - preparing - and consuming foodstuffs, and so forth that would seem improbable to those earlier people. In other words, all the social, material and ideational patterns & relationships that we bring to their landscape; or that they might bring to ours is what comprises 'culture'.

Fall issue of AnthroNotes (Smithsonian Inst.)

Table of Contents, fall 2010 includes:

Tourists and Strangers: An Anthropological Perspective by Lyra Spang

Going Native: The Anthropologist as Advocate by Robert Laughlin

Backyard Ethnography: Studying Your High School  by Carolyn Gecan

Being a Refugee: Humanitarianism and the Palestinian Experience by Ilana Feldman

anthro mix of insider-outsider viewpoints

anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, who had this to say about his mentor at Penn, Frank Speck:
          
 Great ethnologists do more than record: they reveal…they entered their subjects emotionally,
 intellectually, then revealed what they experienced within…What was needed, he said, was
 the power of language, harnessed to humanistic ends 'by men who, if such exist, possess both
 the scientific mind and the literary touch'.
 
[source] Edmund S Carpenter.  1991. "Frank Speck: Quiet Listener."
In: The Life and Times of Frank G. Speck, 1881-1950.
Roy Blankenship, ed. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania Publications in Anthropology, Pp.78-83.

kerfuffle - What is Anthro... Science or Humanities?

excerpts from some well considered responses to the early December exchanges on blogs and op-ed columns of NYTimes, which ultimately led to statement by the American Anthropological Association on Monday, December 13: http://www.aaanet.org/about/WhatisAnthropology.cfm
 
[W. Beeman] Nor do we beat our breasts over the investigative excesses of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The world is a very different place than in the colonial era, and anthropologists, like all seekers of knowledge, must shake off the past and move forward trying to pursue our discipline--the most humanistic of the sciences and most scientific of the humanities and social sciences.
 
[H. Lewis] ...Indeed, it was the founder of American anthropology, Franz Boas, who most fully exemplified the scientist engaged in the struggle for human rights.