anthropology student thoughts #8
oh my, the AMOUNT of ethnocentrism and lack of cultural relativity during the earlier days of anthropology/ethnography. yeahh, colonialist mindset used to be the norm back then.
well, thank you ethnography writing lecturor for telling us to read "Ethnography as theory" bu Laura NADER, University of California, Berkeley, i know some history about it and by extension, anthropology. down below ill quote some stuff from the book, and share my thoughts.
"However, perhaps because he explicitly wrote Whites into his ethnography of Indian peoples (and perhaps because his book was well received by the reading public), he invited the ire of missionaries, the U.S. government, educators, and anthropologists who sought to turn the people they called savages toward so-called progress and civilization with some using humanitarian rationales, i.e. the only way to save Native Americans. By writing white people into his ethnography, equating them to Native Americans, Mooney, who was the son of Irish immigrants and a self-trained anthropologist, violated what was already in the late nineteenth century an unwritten rule: ethnography is about the other, not the other intertwined with their conquerors, not about us and them. He was dismissed as an amateur by academics like Franz Boas, or a lover of Indians by government officials and the Indian Bureau, and was subsequently barred from fieldwork on American reservations (Moses 1984: 222–35)."
yeahhh its giving "let me not look at what cultural relativism is". its clear to me mooney has no concept of cultural relativism, which is a key concept while doing ethnography and as an anthropologist. ethnography focuses on the other and their pov, not comparing cultures or human races. like what. bro needs to take a chill pill. no race/culture is better than the other. people live differently. accept that.
"In spite of the exceptions, anthropologists‘ complicity with Euro-American colonialism can be perceived by the use of colonialist terms; anthropologists historically called those being studied ―primitives‖; the ethnographer conceived of his or her world as civilized."
omg the lack of cultural relativism here. imagine using the word "primitives" i could never... thats just... dismissing people. :/
"This is because, as Eric Wolf stated in 1969, anthropology is not autonomous; it is a reflection of the society of which it is a part. Ethnographers are caught in their culture much as the people they study. Thus, we are all complicit, although to different degrees."
interesting observation. the text reminded me just how important reflectivity is in anthropology.
