In Quest Of A Political-Economic Critical Anthropology.

Caleb L. Fry and Lauren T. Rios Department of Anthropology Lake Tahoe Community College One College Drive South Lake Tahoe, California 96150 USA Faculty Advisor: Daryl G. Frazetti Abstract

In society today, the discipline of anthropology has made a tremendous shift from the practices it employed years ago. Anthropologists of today have a very different focus from their predecessors, who would focus on relating problems of distant peoples to the Western world. In more modern times, their goal has become much more local, in focusing on human problems and issues within the societies they live.

The works of Richard Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, and Allan Johnson, Privilege, Power, and Difference, address privilege, inequality, and capitalism through sociological and historical references. Through reading and analyzing these works along with our class lectures it has become apparent that there is a clear relationship between these systems. Capitalism causes and enforces systems of inequality and privilege. Capitalism is able to do this through the construct of social reality, the matrix of capitalist domination: segmentation of class, gender, and race, and through the manipulation of society by capitalistic culture.

The fascination with Native Americans has been a constant with outsiders since explorers first “discovered” the New World. The biggest surge in this fascination came in the mid-19th century when the Indian Wars were starting to come to an end and the belief that Native Americans were disappearing, walking into the sunset never to be seen again. This led to an increase in the collecting of anything Native American, from artifacts to stories to portraits. The inevitable outcome of this was that Native Americans, who were never considered very highly to begin with, where now moved into a category of scientific interest to be study. This scientific interest in Native Americans is what many museums and other institutions based their collections and exhibits on and is one of the issues that many Native Americans have with how both their people and their culture were, and to some extent still are, represented in these places.

Many researchers who subscribe to the works of Karl Mark concerning capitalism argue that inequity is not necessary and that inequity does not serve any relevant function. These scholars are rather of the opinion that injustice or inequality are but symbols of societal

In most cases U.S. citizens who are in poverty are in relative poverty in relation to the rest of the U.S. population; whereas in the world as a whole a greater number of people are in absolute poverty and are barely able to survive on their income, or wages and earnings, and they have very little to no wealth since it is impossible to save any of their money. Ethnocentrism makes it difficult to obtain a clear picture of the conditions of poverty and inequality in other nations and cultures. There are many theories concerning the causes and solution for poverty in the global economy. The two major theories are the modernization theory which explains inequality in terms of technological and cultural difference between nations, and the dependency theory which explains poverty in terms of the historical exploitation of poor, or low-income, nations by rich, or high-income, nations. This theory has manifest itself in a new way in today’s world in the form of neocolonialism; economic exploitation by multinational corporations.

Clastres’ initial claim can and often is interpreted as anthropology replacing science with opinion. At the surface, Clastres appears to claim that political anthropology revealed bias and distorted the facts in ways that contradict science. Science, by definition, should be beyond bias and, through the application of a scientific method, be protected from bias. However, reviewing his book – society against the state, Clastres does not advocate positive science. His use of diverse arguments, choice of topics and the continuous revisits to themes that arise from the critique of domination only looks towards criticizing anthropology’s bias in its own turf. For Clastres, the Indians are not the First, they are there as western understanding and approach to them has

Social justice historic Marxist classical writers believe that social justice is a historical category , historic , rather than an eternal category ; concept of a fair society is the relationship between the social production of the decision, the different ways in which social production fair concept is different. Engels pointed out : Fair is not a priori decide what economic relations , on the contrary, it is determined by economic relations , it is standard on fair economic relations with the changes and change. [1] (P310) " the concept of equality , regardless of the form of the emergence of the bourgeoisie , or in the form of the proletariat, is itself a product of history , the formation of this concept requires a certain historical

Globally, many societies are riven by social antagonism, tensions and inequalities. The effects of poverty, greed, exploitation, and domination are massively present. They are perceptibly and visible all around us. They are not in an abstract realm as somewhere “out there”, but they are prominently “right here” in our organizations and institutions – in our paid and unpaid work places, schools, hospitals, government offices, corporate boardrooms; in our immediate communities where we live. Dominant access and relations are contested determinedly as in popular culture (Henderson-Yates, 2011). These conditions of inequalities are best seen through a process of “repositioning” ourselves, and seeing the human race from the perspectives of those

The understanding of the term ‘culture’ is heavily debated in anthropology. This essay will focus on two particular views; that of the British anthropologist Edward Tylor who viewed studying the history culture as a holistic, evolutionary process and of Franz Boas, a German anthropologist who advocated culture as being a development through looking at the specific historical context of a certain society. Despite having opposing views on the issue, both Tylor and Boas became heavily influential in their fields, with Tylor’s evolutionary theories being used and developed by the likes of Darwin and Boas becoming a founder of modern American anthropology, among his students highly acclaimed professionals such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. The debate over evolution versus history in

Boas’ reliance on empirical data to formulate theories underscores Kuhn’s central idea that paradigms are only changed through examination of new data. As data on cultures preceding Boas was slim at best, it is not hard to see how Boas could acquire data contrary to the existing viewpoint. This data collection itself was a new theory, the new invention required. Kuhnian thought states that preparadigmatic schools emphasize the collection of the facts, as Boas was emphasizing. Crisis within the paradigm is witnessed by the competition between the schools of thought. Emerging from this crisis is Boasian anthropology, with its reliance on empirical data as the basis for study. This data collection is subdivided into the four subfields Boas saw as a requirement for this new field. The four-field approach emerges as the dominant force in anthropology. With this approach the community changes its view of the field, and produces new methods and goals. These methods and goals have been used as a professional consensus in anthropology since the Boasian transformation.

Since the emergence of anthropology in the late 1800’s, the customs and methods of this academic discipline have been altered in many ways. It is assumed that in the early years of anthropology, theorists relied on travelers in order to articulate their theories (Dahl 2017). This practice is known as armchair anthropology and involves creating theories without any fieldwork. Some examples of famous armchair anthropologists include Edward Burnett Tylor and James Frazer. The work of both theorists involved no travelling or conducting of fieldwork. Early anthropology focused on primitive cultures and how societies transformed from being barbaric to civilized. In modern days, anthropology is discovering new topics to study every day and the information relies a great amount on fieldwork and lab work conducted by anthropologists to support their findings. As some of the early methods of anthropology continue to be used by anthropology, more are being developed in order to produce more efficient research and theories.

In briefly evaluating the classical and modern explanations of social inequality, it is essential that we step outside the realm of our own lives, class position, and discard any assumptions we might have about the nature of inequality. This process of critical pedagogy allows us to view our world, not from our perspective, but from a wider, more critical analysis of inequality's nature. Also, it should be considered within this wider perspective that all theories of inequality have a class perspective, where the theorist, based on the position their theory takes, is making claims from (or for) a particular class (whether they want to or not). With this in mind, it seems that most of these theories come

"Culture is not an exotic notion studied by a select group of anthropologists in the

The book “The fall of Natural man; The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology” was written by Anthony Pagden in august 1983. The book gives a new explanation of the introduction of intellectual context and argument made by various sixteenth-century spanish thinker about the new world by the old. This book was the first study of the pre-Enlightenment methods by which Europeans tried to describe and describe American Indian society with his own society. The book is rich and complex, but also confusing. It deals with an issue which of great interest to people studying origin of new world. But the book disappoints the anthropological readers as the title of the book and the content is not satisfactory.