Final Study Guide -- ANTH 206

Saussure, Lévi-Strauss
structuralism
langue and parole
signifier and signified
language like a chess game
mytho-logics
culinary triangle
the origin of fire
nature:culture::raw:cooked::naked:clothed::chaos:order

What is linguistic structuralism? How did Lévi-Strauss apply it more broadly? How does Lévi-Strauss account for change in his model? What is the relationship of binary oppositions and triads? How is culture like language? How is it different?

Bourdiue, Giddens
practice, structuration
neo-Marxism
habitus
doxa
improvisation
economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital
rules, resources, and principles
agency

How do Bourdieu and Giddens reflect Marxist sensibilities? In what ways do their approaches differ from classic Marxism's base-structure-superstructure model? How do they incorporate the tenets of structuralism? What role does individual intentionality and agency play in their models? How do they account for change within the system? How can different forms of capital be translated into one another?

Geertz (and Roseberry's critique)
interpretive anthropology
culture as text
deep play
Balinese men and their cocks
betting at the center and at the periphery
role of women
cockfighting and colonial political economy

How is culture like a text? What implications does this hold for how we study culture? What does the cockfight tell us about the Balinese? Why does Geertz call it "deep play"? If so much is at stake why do status relations not change? What do the Balinese themselves read into this text? Does the culture as text approach devalue and dismiss real world (material) problems?


Shore, Strauss and Quinn
cognitive models
schema
individual, conventional, instituted models
interpersonal and extrapersonal mental models
scripts
an American address system

How do these cognitive approaches to culture deal with individuality and diversity versus collective culture and commonality? What are the implications for a "traditional" concept of culture? How do these approaches relate to structuralism and practice theory? How do these approaches update the rigid concept of linguistic scripts? How do they speak to debates over "psychic unity"?


Foucault
anti-essentialism
power
panopticon
episteme
Knauft on Melanesian sexualities
discipline
discourses of sexuality
confession and perversion

How does Foucault compare public torture and execution to more modern penitentiary life? What has changed ideologically in this shift? What does the paniopticon symbolize and how does it work? What is power and how does it work? Who has power–or can it be had? What is the self? How does Foucault critique a Gramscian approach to hegemony? Why was there no homosexuality in pre-modern times? Are discourses reality?

Butler, Haraway
critical feminism
queer theory
gender and sex and social construction
cyborg
OncoMouse
email addresses
phallogocentric views
Madonna and the domestication of alterities
Knauft's praise and critique of the new feminism

What does Butler see as the problem with early feminism? How does this apply to identity politics more generally? Does she see a way out of this dilemma? Who can speak for women? Gender is a cultural construction–but what about sex? What is the relationship of biological features to sex and gender? How does Haraway deconstruct the mind/body distinction? What are the implications of the new sorts of patents being granted these days?


Appadurai
ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes, technoscapes
fetishism of production and of the consumer
deterritorialization
patina
imagination as social practice
primaordialism
ethnic implosion
cultural (v. culture)
neighborhoods and communities

What is the new role of imagination in globalize cultural forms? Why does he prefer cultural over culture? Are his neologisms useful? Why or why not? What is the role of the nation-state in the globalized world? Why does he argue that the metaphor of ethnic explosion is misplaced? How does globalization contribute to ethnic implosion? What is the relationship of physical place to virtual space in the new global economies of culture? What does living in the hyphen signify?

Baudrillard
simulation
4 orders of signs
simulacra
hyperreality
university life

What is reality? Can it be represented? How have we moved away from representations of an objective truth in postmodern times? How do Dinsneyworld and prisons act to buttress an illusion of reality? What is hyperreality? Is it less "real" than regular reality? How does the media (reality t.v., war news, etc.) reinforce this trend? How does advertizing work in a hyperreal environment?

Marcos
Zapatistas
postmodern social movement

Think of Marcos' posture in terms of Foucault and Butler–how does he co-opt their concerns with identity politics? How does he fit into newly created ethnoscapes, mediacsapes, and ideoscapes? How is Marcos like Madonna? Is the Marcos persona just another spectacle (a la Baudrillard)? Or is this too dismissive?