On the blank page we’ve distributed, please write

Your nameYour Teaching Assistant’s nameANDA comment or a question in response to the Helen Myers chapter “Fieldwork.”

• Anthropology:– Anthrop = Greek for man– Logia = Greek for study

If everyone is human, why are there such vast differences in cultural practices, kinship systems, religious beliefs, social organization, values, etc. across groups?

Four fields of anthropology• Physical or biological anthropology• Archaeology• Linguistic anthropology• Cultural anthropology

• Initially, anthropology & ethnomusicology, a sister discipline of anthropology, focused on the study of the non-western “Other”—the exotic

• These fields grow out of colonialism• They rest on the assumption that non-

western cultures are different from, but not inferior to western cultures

anAnth

Some goals of anthropology & ethnomusicology:

• Understanding cultural difference• Translating between cultures• Undermining ethnocentrism• Making the “strange” familiar

• Anthropologists & ethnomusicologists are cultural mediators and translators

• Currently, any location, western or non-western is a potential site of research

Franz Boas (1858-1942) “Papa Franz”

Franz Boas

• “Father of American Anthropology”• Scholar and administrator, Columbia

University, 1896-1939• Key figure in the professionalization and

institutionalization of anthropology as a discipline in US universities.

• Fought scientific racism through scholarship

Late 19th c./early 20th c. U.S.

• Nativism: Anti-immigrant sentiment, against Southern & Eastern European immigrants. Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882

• Eugenics Movement—improve the genetic composition of the human race through selective breeding; prevent “unfit” from breeding

• Racial segregation• Scientific racism—used scientific

concepts and methods to substantiate claims about racial and biological inheritance.

(anthropometry, biological race)

Boas launches a critique of “race” in science

“savage” vs. “civilized”Critiques application of unilineal biological

evolutionary model to culture—from primitive/savage to barbaric to civilized

Boas creates a paradigm shift in which “cultural” replaces “natural/biology” as the

key concept for understanding human difference

The culture concept

An anthropological definition

“Culture is a shared and negotiated system of meaning informed by knowledge that people learn and put into practice by interpreting experience and generating behavior.”

---Luke Eric Lassiter, An Invitation to Anthropology, 2002, p. 40

Characteristics of Culture (from Lassiter)

Culture is a system of meaningCulture is an adaptationCulture is learnedCulture is a processCulture is dynamicCulture is shared

Culture is informed by knowledgeCulture is knowledge put into

practiceCulture includes beliefs, norms,

values, assumptions, expectations, and plans for action

No person or group is without or outside of culture

Culture is messy

To truly understand a culture, you need to approach it on its own terms, i.e., relativistically. This notion of “cultural relativism” is key to anthropology and ethnomusicology

• “Now more than ever is the need to sing about [social change] and to write songs about it.”

---D’Angelo, N.Y. Times, June 21, 2015

Music is a form of creative expression that is also a mode of expressing, critiquing, confirming, creating, and contesting categories of individual and group identity (e.g., nationality, race/ethnicity, generation, gender, class).

Ethnomusicologists study the processes of music-making and the meanings of these processes through fieldwork

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942)

Malinowski and fieldwork collaborators

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)Cultural anthropologist & novelistHarlem Renaissance figure

• Mules and Men (1935)• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

“I was glad when somebody told me, ‘You may go and collect Negro folklore.’ In a way it would not be a new experience for me…From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers of Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it.

“It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that.”--Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935)

Hurston believed African Americans--especially rural, southern, poor African Americans, i.e., the folk—had elaborated a rich, vibrant, and valuable culture that was distinct from European-American culture (not a flawed imitation of it) and equally valid. Her life’s work was to research & represent this culture.