Conflict as a Path Towards Unity

            Max Gluckman’s ethnographic research on the Zulu peoples of southeast Africa focused on what he called “rituals of rebellion.” He argues that certain rituals, often those that happen at harvest times, are not posing actual conflict with the cultural or political institutions, but rather allow “for instituted protest, and in complex ways renew the unity of the system” (198). In the selection that we read, Gluckman takes Sir James Frazer’s lecture on the rituals in the Zulu community and takes Frazer’s points one step further to consider the social components of these rituals- bringing the analysis into a social anthropology realm. It is an interesting concept that in order to bless an institution or social order, a traditional ritual that seemingly contrasts the established order has to be conducted. It goes against almost all of what we tend to understand to make sense.           

            Conflict is prominent in human life- but usually we think conflict occurs in an attempt of one of the conflicting sides to achieve something or change something. Not often is the point to reaffirm what has already been established. And Gluckman does address this, saying that in societies where class struggles and tendencies for revolution exist, rituals of rebellion have no place (210). He goes further, in his final paragraph, to suggest that “rebellious rituals may perhaps be confined to situations where strong tensions are aroused by conflict between different structural principles, which are not controlled in distinct secular institutions” (214). In other words, rituals of rebellion only occur successfully in societies where tensions exist and are not addressed by other organizational bodies or traditions (i.e. governmental separation of classes, war, etc.).

            In analyzing literature, conflict is always a huge part of the analysis, because it is usually, in one form or another, the reason a story exists. Back in high school when I still took literature classes, I remember discussing the various types of conflict that are exemplified in literature but also exist in reality. The three main types of external conflict (excuse the sexist language that they are described by) are: man vs. man, man vs. society, and man vs. nature. Why am I including this in my discussion of Max Gluckman’s anthropological writing- which is itself not literary? Because- when I was reading this selection, these types of conflict kept coming into my mind because Gluckman describes many of them in his descriptions of the conflicts that rituals of rebellion deal with. Rituals of rebellion, as described by Gluckman, are all about dealing with these conflicts through ritual so that social order can be reaffirmed and revolution does not actually arise.

            Man vs. man: Many of the examples of rituals relate to people and their kings, as described by including the multiple songs that include lyrics like “King, alas your fate, King they reject thee, King they hate thee” (204-205). At the core of reality is competition between men (and women), and so this conflict is prevalent in the Zulu rituals described. (Talk to Charles Darwin if you have doubts about competition).

            Man vs. society: This one, based on the selection, is a tricky one- since rituals of rebellion do not have the intent of actually fighting the society, but rather developing unity as a society by reversing roles. So in the rituals, roles are reversed and the conflict with those societal roles is acknowledged in order to go back to the established order.

            Man vs. nature: Gluckman states that the rituals tend to revolve around harvesting, and are conducted in order to bless the harvest and make the society fruitful and prosperous. Therefore, the entire idea of the rituals are centered on the conflict between humans and the natural world.

            In order to maintain stability in Zulu society, certain rituals of rebellion must occur so that actual rebellion does not, according to Gluckman. In acting out the different types of external conflict, as described by literary theory, the society reestablishes unity, in order to protect against conflict outside of the society. A seemingly contradictory proposal- that acting out conflict actually enforces unity- actually makes sense when thought about more. 

The Other Female Anthropologist.

The other female Anthropologist.

While Margaret Mead was doing her ethnographies in Samoa and elsewhere, her friend and colleague, another female student of the famous Franz Boas, was busy coming up with her own theories about cultures and personalities. Ruth Benedict was another female Anthropologist during Mead’s time whose theories wrote themselves into later Anthropology textbooks.

Benedict is most widely known for her book, Patterns and culture, which was published right around the time Mead was conducting ethnographies in New Guinea and debating whether to stay with her second husband or move on to her third.  In this text, Benedict categorized various Native American societies by their personalities. The Kwakiutl were “Dionysian” because they partook in events such as the potlatch, displaying over consumption and excess. Dobuans were “paranoid” and there were the “megalomaniacs”. The Zuni, which she characterized as “Apollonian”, since they appeared “peaceable” and normative.  It’s interesting to note here that the Zunis were the ones with which Benedict did extensive ethnographies with. Benedict’s method of characterizing whole cultures into these personality subgroups in such a way opens up the gates for stereotypes, whether or not they are true or false.  

In her excerpt from The Individual and the Pattern of Culture, Ruth Benedict explains how culture and society come hand in hand with the individual, and it is not possible to separate one from the other. People are molded since birth to reflect the society that they are born into. Additionally, even those that define the cultural normative simultaneously reflect it through their defiance. Benedict was obviously a good student because she uses Boas’s teachings on cultural relativism and expands it to theorize that deviance varies from culture to culture and should therefore deviant individuals should also be studied among cultural groups because it will also give insight into the cultural norms. She gives examples of this through her reference of the Berdache and the menage in Native American tribes. The Berdache were “men-women”, men who wear women’s clothing, and fulfill the gender roles of both men and women. However, instead of being oppressed and marginalized, these men were treated with various degrees of respect, and were favored over regular men. The Berdache can be paralleled to homosexuals in our culture, and it is interesting to note that in our culture, homosexuality is only now starting to be recognized equally and is still a very controversial topic.

All in all, I think that Benedict makes multiple good points in the Pattern of Culture, but her system of categorizing cultures into personalities should be reconsidered. 

Critique of Margaret Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa"

Margaret Mead began her fieldwork in Samoa under the instruction of Franz Boas. The goal was to demonstrate that culture is relative, rather than concrete. Because of this very explicit goal, Mead’s research has come under fire of criticism, stating that she may have skewed her results to make a point. Indeed, she was searching for one example to contradict the ideas of Freud. The work required to disprove a theory is significantly less strenuous than to prove it. Freudian theory states that adolescence is an unstable time due to biology, an idea that is still popular today. Many teachers, parents, and therapists of adolescents will state that young adults are emotionally turbulent by nature, due to the hormonal and physical changes they are facing. Mead seeks out a culture, any culture, where this is not true, so that she can disprove Freud. Her ultimate goal is to see that even supposedly universal rules are culturally specific, and to answer the question of whether the difficulties faced by young adults “were… due to being adolescent or to being adolescent in America?” (pg 129).

Mead’s goal is admirable, and most modern anthropologists will agree that the transformation from childhood to adulthood is primarily a cultural construction. However, where I take issue is not with her objective or her thesis, but with her motivation for choosing Samoa as her research site. Mead explains, in some detail, what she was looking for in a research site, as well as why she ultimately chose Samoa. Mead says that to study culture, because we cannot use laboratory techniques, the anthropologist must seek out other cultures that are different from our own. Her claim is that the anthropologist should seek out simple civilizations, stating “A primitive people without a written language present a much less elaborate problem and a trained student can master the fundamental structure of a primitive society in a few months” (pg 130). To me, this claim hearkens back to the theory of cultural evolutionism, and would do shame to the Boasian principle that there are no hierarchies to culture.

In Mead’s defense, it is clear that some civilizations have fewer moving parts than others. In this way, they may simpler. I will also defend the use of the word primitive, but only because of the time at which Mead was writing. Clearly, this word would be inappropriate today, but at the time what was meant was “less complex”, “tribal”, “hunter-gatherer”, or equivalent. Nonetheless, the use of the word is consistent with word choice from cultural evolutionists, and is likely to inspire in the reader feelings of superiority to this inferior culture. In this way, Mead is reversing the progress done by Boas. In addition, Mead’s claim that any culture, even a simpler one, can be mastered in a matter of months strikes me as foolish and condescending. Clearly, there are intricacies and nuances in any group that take more time than mere months to learn. She also uses this argument to justify her use of only fifty young women in her case study, claiming that the culture is completely homogeneous. Even within a small group, there are differences between individuals and families. If there is an opportunity to study a larger population of the group, it should be seized. Indeed, some of the most interesting conclusions about a society come not from the majority, or “Joe Normal,” but from the outliers and how they navigate their unique cultural struggles.

Mead also seeks to use her fieldwork to inform American culture. To teach the average American, not just fellow anthropologists, that we can learn from vastly different societies how to better our own, and to demonstrate that what was previously considered biologically determined is in fact highly influenced by culture. In this way, she is comparing cultures, and thereby deviating from the beliefs of Boas. However, this deviation I support. Though it is important to attempt to see a culture without our own cultural lens, without some amount of comparison anthropology is simply knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Mead’s work delves into a new use of anthropology to inform and improve our own cultural identity.

I greatly admire Mead’s work, and her ability to see that American culture can be improved upon through understanding of exotic cultures. However, she spent so much time travelling between groups and attempting to master them so quickly, I have to wonder what she might have learn had she stayed with one group throughout her career. Clearly she was doing something right, as her contributions to anthropology are undeniable in their importance, but I wonder how her view of each group may have changed with more depth and less breadth.

Insights from the Application of Darwinian and Boasian Theory to the Concept of Race

Race seemed to be the hot topic of today, having been discussed in my bio anthro course, various conversations with my friends, and of course, Dr. Joseph Grave’s talk titled “Evolutionary versus racial medicine: why it matters.” Prior to these events, race as a biological construct was completely foreign to me; I only perceived it as a social construct. Dr. Graves defined the biological construct of race as classification by morphology or phenotype, geographical location, frequency of genes, and unique evolutionary lineage. He defined the social construct of race as arbitrary use of aspects such as morphology, culture, language, religion, etc. in the service of a social dominance hierarchy. Here, his definition of the social construct of race associates this construct of race with a dominance hierarchy and assumes that a dominance hierarchy is inherent in the notion of social construct. I argue that it is the application of Darwinian theory and evolutionary biology to this social construct of race that establishes a social dominance hierarchy and that the social construct of race does not inherently imply hierarchy.

Boasian theory focuses on cultural relativism, historic particularism, and salvage ethnography. The foundation of his theory is based upon the beliefs that all cultures matter and the need to assess each culture individually through their own lenses. Application of Boasian theory on race frames race as a cultural construct. I argue that all that is a social construct is also a cultural construct, and therefore, race, in both a cultural and social sense, is inherently neutral. It is merely a classification scheme whereby separate groups are created for the purpose of differentiating people of different cultures. An analysis of the implication of what is meant as a social construct of race when viewing race purely through a social and culture sense does not imply any notion of hierarchy, dominance, or subordination. It is separation of cultures to differentiate people, and through Boasian theory, each culture should be viewed in its own lenses with each one seen as significant and important in its own light. It is the application of biological notions and thus Darwinian theory onto these social constructs that applies the relevance and conversation of hierarchy to culture and society.

Darwinian theory applies universal laws to human beings. The application of universal laws diminishes the complexity of culture and social order to essentially one single label. The viewing of all human beings as subject to these universal laws, especially of survival of the fittest, adds a hierarchy to the social construct of race. The application of “survival of the fittest” and the evolution of species based on the traits more suited for survival associates specific indicators of power and better survivability to the notion of race as a social construct. It associates wealth and power to separate neutral classifications that serve only to distinguish groups of people in order to better understand the holistic nature of humans by studying the intricacies of each group.  It provides a label for each social group within the context of strength and even importance. In Darwinian theory, within species, there are those that are better adapted and those that are more poorly adapted to their environments. An emergence of a new species (known as speciation) may even occur because new traits that are more adapted to survival are kept. This suggests that in the context of this specific environment, the traits of the new species are better and that the old species is weaker and thus more likely to die. This characterizes these older species as less important, and this characterization as less important in “weaker” species is incorporated in race. The term “weaker” in evolutionary biology is very much dependent of location and time. One adaptation may be suitable for a certain environment at a certain time, but in a different environment and time, it may not be. Looking at the human race as a single species allows us to create that categorization of “weaker” upon others because it disregards location and time. Humans through Boasian theory exist in cultures, and cultures are different throughout the world and change over time. It is therefore in a Boasian context that social hierarchy and power-related discourses are irrelevant to race, while in a biological Darwinian context such factors are very much relevant to the concept of race.

The application of Darwinian theory asserts universal laws upon the social construct of race. The acceptance of universal laws is essentially a verification of the mental reconstruction of race as a single, simplistic force that asserts itself to all humans. It is the view and treatment of race as a single variable that leads to the use of the race concept for exploitation and personal means. Boasian theory reinforces the complexity of human cultures and humankind by signifying the importance and meanings that each culture can share to the overall conversation of humankind. It is thus embracing such a theory and sole focus on culture with the absence of evolutionary theory and Darwinism that may lead to viewing and defining race separate from a social dominance hierarchy.

If Boas had been with me at this lecture last night…

      ...he would have had a lot of material to critique, as do I.

As an Anthropology major, I had not been into the bottom realms of the beautiful new Business School until a talk entitled “Sweatshops: Improving Lives and Economic Growth” caught my eye and brought me to the auditorium packed with business-minded students and faculty. The Adam Smith Society had invited Dr. Benjamin Powell, an economist, to debate the criticism of sweatshops taken up by activists all over the world. The main point of his argument, based on his latest book, examined sweatshops across the globe and regarded them as a necessary step in the development of nations. Dr. Powell compared wages and conditions for sweatshop workers to the average people in the countries in which sweatshops are prominent, stating that oftentimes, sweatshops actually pay better wages and are better situations than most of the alternatives available. He criticized the activist organizations who fight to raise wages, eliminate child labor, and work to end sweatshops by saying that based on other historical situations (in the US and England), sweatshops are actually part of the development plan to a better economic situation and better lives for the people.

Sitting there, as a person with little background knowledge in economic theory but with a strong tendency towards activism, I was very conflicted. Some of the economic theory went over my head, and so I did not quite know what to think of some of his points because I did not think I could theorize on that level. But then I remembered that I now have theories of my own with which I can analyze arguments and view situations! And the more I sat there and listened to Dr. Powell’s arguments, the more I could see through them and point out places in which he would have greatly benefited from knowing an anthropologist- namely, Franz Boas.

One of Boas’ main theories, for lack of a better word, was that culture is holistic, an idea that most modern anthropologists maintain. Unlike some of his predecessors, Boas considered the interdependence of each aspect of culture to be of vital importance when studying a group of people. He brought to light the idea that one cannot analyze one aspect of a culture in isolation, because all aspects interact with one another in a way that cannot be separated. Dr. Powell, in his speech on sweatshops, talked very much about one aspect of culture- labor markets and economics- in isolation from all other considerations. He made no references to gender or racial disparities in the countries he addressed, no mention of the education systems, no mention of religion or rituals or any other part of the interconnected and complex system that is culture.

But mentioning these other pieces that make up culture as a whole would have been difficult, since Dr. Powell was generalizing situations in sweatshops across 20+ countries found on all different continents. There was not even a slight emphasis on cultural relativism, or the economic equivalent, during his discussion of the economic situations in which sweatshops exist. Franz Boas would have been exasperated, to say the least, at the level at which Dr. Powell grouped multiple diverse nations into one discussion.

It was not even just cultural relativism that was missing from Dr. Powell’s argument, but even historical particularism. His main “solution” to having sweatshops was to just wait for them to rebuild the economy over time- using a comparison to factories in the United States during the Industrial Revolution. So not only was his argument based on the major assumption that what happened in the United States, a different culture, would happen in these two dozen countries with varying cultures, but that what happened over a hundred years ago would happen in present day. Instead of suggesting an analysis of each culture that would provide a better idea of the role sweatshops play in the different places, which could perhaps lead to change in a more humane direction for all people, Dr. Powell just lumped all the countries together. This lack of contextualization would not, in my opinion, help anyone get anywhere.

The final reason that Franz Boas would have been critical of Dr. Powell’s speech (at least the final one that I will discuss here…I could go on about Boas’ belief in inter-culture contact and environment having effects on cultures, but that would be hard to measure up to Dr. Powell’s lecture since he did not acknowledge the existence of various cultures) relates to Boas’ strong belief in the equality of men that drove his activism during his lifetime. Dr. Powell, following the economic beliefs of Adam Smith, the namesake of the society which brought Dr. Powell to Wake Forest last night, seemed to forget about the humanity behind the work he discussed and the global connection we all, as a common humanity, have to one another. Adam Smith was criticized for undervaluing man in comparison with money when considering the wealth of a nation, and Dr. Powell similarly ignored the stories of the people who work in the sweatshops he studies so carefully from an economic perspective. Though at the beginning of his speech he stated that he was not undermining the horrible conditions in which people work in sweatshops, Dr. Powell did exactly that by saying that the only way the situation can improve is if development takes its natural course away from sweatshops, as it did in the United States (a point of comparison that could be contested, considering sweatshops do still exist in the United States).  

Dr. Powell did bring up good points about activism- namely, knowing the full consequences of your actions as an activist. But it was hard, after gaining knowledge of Boasian theory, to ignore the flaws in the construction of his argument. Listening to the lecture, all I could think of was how valuable anthropological theory is to everyday life, across disciplines, and was inspired to bring the theory of anthropology through to other fields. 

Durkheim and the Dreaded Lunchroom

You are 12 years old again walking through the halls of your middle school. It is close to noon and you know the least favorite part of your day is coming up: lunchtime. You have friends, yeah, but there are unspoken rules here. You can’t sit with just anybody, you can’t eat what you want to eat, people are watching. It’s that exaggerated high school drama film, there are the jocks, the cool girls, the nerds, the Goths, and you have to find where you fit in, but more importantly, you have to figure out where OTHERS think you fit in. In the lunchroom you are in a room filled with your peers, but this place isn’t pleasant.

In reality, this may not have been you. Maybe the lunchroom wasn’t so terrifying and ominous, but we all experienced a lunchroom which had a certain function and social constraints. You knew how you contributed to this place; very rarely was the order here shaken up. And now Durkheim comes into play. I was thinking about how social cohesion, collective conscience, and structural-functionalism really exists in most, or every, situation. I found this theoretical approach interesting when interpreting this situation because I felt that it wasn’t completely straight forward; the concepts did not fit as perfectly as I had assumed they would have, therefore the application of this theory on the middle school lunchroom brings to light some new aspects of the theory.

Let us start with the concept of social cohesion and solidarity. The words cohesion and solidarity have a positive connotation. We automatically assume a positive situation; a society which stands together. However, by looking at this concept through the lens of a middle school lunchroom, we may decide to throw out some our ideas concerning the positive connotation of the words and take a more neutral stance. I had made the assumption that social cohesion was an idea like nationalism or patriotism, representing the societal desire to stick together. But I would no longer say this is the right way to understand the idea of social cohesion and solidarity. Rather it is more natural as it is what keeps people together, whether that be positive or negative. To be solid does not mean to unite forces and to stand proudly together, but rather suggests a whole mass which in some way is the same.

The next question is: does the lunchroom have any social cohesion at all? I think that in the lunchroom there is definite solidarity; all the students recognize their peers as being a part of their “society” as they all live under the same social facts and unspoken rules. This concept refers to the connection and collection of people who function together through a collective conscience, whether in a positive or negative way, which is something I had missed because of my misunderstanding of the terms.

The collective conscience exists within the cafeteria and suggests social cohesion. The students express cohesion through a collective conscience with shared beliefs and symbols, which shape, regulate, and bind members. The students have symbols within their cafeteria life, possibly pictures of broccoli and carrots on the wall symbolizing health, or food lines and fixed chairs symbolizing order which would seem abnormal to a working adult.

They are also bound and regulated by the social facts. Social facts are the ways of acting that have a coercive effect on individuals. Concretized laws exist within the lunchroom and are enforced by teachers, but there are also unspoken rules which impact the actions of an individual. I would say that these unspoken rules which dictate where and with who you sit would act as social facts, as they are independent of the individual manifestations.

By applying the basic concepts of Durkheim’s theory, we are able to see how broadly these concepts apply to most, or possibly any, situation. We are also able to see how solidarity may not always be as positive as word connotation suggests, possibly interfering with people’s understanding of the concepts.