1. Grounding the Global: Anthropological Perspectives Weds 2-4 Tozzer 203
Professor: Ieva Jusionyte
Office Hrs: Weds 10:30-11:30 & Thurs 2-3pm in Tozzer 216
TF: Shuang Lu
Office Hrs: TBA

2. What is social anthropology?
9/7 Lecture outline
What is social anthropology?
How does it help us understand issues both global and local?
Introductions
Course overview (four modules)
Anthropological perspective: What is it?
Ethnocentrism & (critical) cultural relativism
What do anthropologists study? (then and now)
The concept of culture
Misc

3. Course modules: Political Anthropology:
Migration & the U.S.-Mexico Border

4. Medical & Urban Anthropology:
Injury and Survival in Inner-City Chicago

5. Environmental Anthropology:
Water as Resource / Water as Design in the Middle East and in the U.S.

6. Course modules: Legal Anthropology:
Crime, Police, and Security in the Global South & North

7. What is social anthropology?
Anthropology: Study of human beings, societies and cultures, past and present—in all their remarkable diversity & complexity. It is the study of what makes us human.

8. Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and supporters protest Dakota Access Pipeline

9. Burkini ban and protests against it in France

10. Lila Abu-Lughod (born in 1952)

11. Ethnocentrism & Cultural imperialism
“Ethnocentrism”: The assumption that one’s own group’s lifestyle and values are superior to others, and judging of other cultures by the standard’s of one’s own culture.
“Cultural imperialism”: The practice of imposing one form of culture (often regarded as "superior" or more "civilized") upon another.

12. Cultural Relativism
2 principles:
1) Beliefs, values, practices, symbols—any cultural phenomena—must be understood in the context of a particular culture.
2) All cultural systems have intrinsic value and validity/ are inherently equal in value.

13. How can we challenge ethnocentrism, respect cultural differences and still be able to criticize gross human rights violations across the world?
How can we justify human rights work across cultures?

14. Critical Cultural Relativism
It is a position, which asks about cultural practices and ideas in terms of who accepts them and why, and whom they may be harming or helping.
It recognizes internal cultural differences: winners and losers, oppressors and victims.
It illuminates conflicts and power struggles within and across different groups.
From a critical cultural relativist standpoint there is a distinction between cultural relativism and ethical relativism.

15. Cultural Relativism
2 principles:
1) Beliefs, values, practices, symbols—any cultural phenomena—must be understood in the context of a particular culture.
2) All cultural systems have intrinsic value and validity/ are inherently equal in value.

16. Possible ways to qualify the principle of cultural relativism, enabling some critique:
1) Reject 2nd premise of cultural relativism in favor of some version of a personal and/or “universal” morality.
2) Respect a culture/people as a whole, though condemning certain practices within that culture.
3) Find local voices of critique.
4) Examine how “we” and “they” are both flawed, and thus “inherently equal in value.”
5) Go beyond mere cultural relativism (cultures are different but equal) to examine and critique global forms of “structural violence” and inequality, & the political-economic nature of our global interconnections.

17. 3) Local voices of critique: Female Genital Modification (FGM)
The Guardian: Female genital mutilation opponents – in pictures

18. 4) Examine how “we” and “they” are both flawed, and thus “inherently equal in value.”

20. Next class 
9/14
Ethnographic fieldwork: Sources of knowledge, subjectivity, ethics, advocacy
Bronislaw Malinowski, "Introduction.” In Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Pp. 1–25.
Audra Simpson, “Ethnographic Refusal: Anthropological Need.” In Mohawk Interruptus. Pp. 95–114. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ieva Jusionyte, “Breaking the Code of Silence.” In Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border. Oakland: University of California Press. Pp
Jason De León, “Documenting the Undocumented.” In The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland: University of California Press. Pp
Daniel M. Goldstein, “Laying the Body on the Line: Activist Anthropology and the Deportation of the Undocumented.” American Anthropologist 116(4): 839–842.