Ranthropologist

Tag: cultural relativity

  • Shifting Perspective: Word Power

    Shifting Perspective: Word Power

    Consider the following brief life histories of two 18-year-olds:

    A was a sullen, withdrawn child. She seemed predisposed to depression early in life, and caused her parents concern when she would run through their house claiming she was being chased by invisible monsters. She had school friends, but at different times in her young life she considered a doll she made out of leaves; a rock; and a small glass bottle to be her closest friends and most prized possessions. By the time she reached sixth grade, her parents were divorced. A lived closer to the working class part of town than the upper middle class areas many of her classmates inhabited. At 13 she was smoking pot with older kids in the neighborhood and was busted at a local discount store for shoplifting. In high school, A held her own but had some difficulties. Math in particular gave her trouble, and she nearly failed freshman algebra, chemistry, and geometry. She participated in very few extracurricular activities and seemed to shift deeper into depression. At one point an incident with a kitchen knife and a suicide threat caused her parents to seek professional help for her. By 15, A had a boyfriend who was already out of school and spent most of her time with a group of older boys, staying out with them until the morning hours. As high school drew to a close, A’s guidance counselor told her that she would not gain entrance into the state university system because of her poor math grades. A did not apply to any colleges during her senior year. After high school graduation she found a low-level job as a receptionist.

    B was a precocious child who was reading adult fiction by second grade. In fourth grade she was allowed into the school-wide spelling bee – typically restricted to 5th and 6th grade students – because she had already completed the spelling and reading lessons through the 6th grade level. Junior high school saw B widening her circle of friends but also maintaining a reputation as an exceptionally bright student. In 8th grade she missed making the county spelling bee by just one word. By high school B was enrolled in honors courses and did well in them with little effort. She was one of only 3 students to earn the highest possible grade on the Advanced Placement exam in English. B was also an accomplished athlete, earning MVP honors for her performance on the swim team during her sophomore year. She participated in clubs as well, including the French Club, Key Club, and Oceanography Club. Her friends were mostly honor students who spent their free time enjoying board games and role playing games. During B’s senior year, her guidance counselor called her to his office to tell her that her score on the verbal portion of the SAT exam was the highest one of his students had ever achieved. At graduation, B chose to spend a year working at a local art gallery and saving money before starting college. She was accepted into a small but prestigious private college the following year.

    Now that you’ve considered the stories of A and B, where do you think they will each end up in life? A sounds troubled, while B sounds accomplished. A has been involved with drugs, crime, and older boys, while B spent her school years studying and participating in extracurricular activities. A was a mediocre student who was discouraged from college by a guidance counselor. B was an honors student who was praised by a guidance counselor and admitted to a prestigious college. Yet, A and B are so very much alike – so alike, in fact, that they are the same person: me.

    That probably wasn’t much of a twist for those of you who know me. The point I am illustrating here is the power of words. The details you pick out of a person’s life story can cause you to view them as a hero or as a villain; as a troublemaker or as a model student; as having a dead end path in life or as being on the road to a successful future. As I’ve said before, humans are pattern-seeking animals, and we don’t often look for all the contextual information we need to flesh out our first impressions.

    The power of words to change our views is something we should be very aware of. It is relevant to so much of what we hear, see, and read in the world today, particularly in news reporting. I bring this up because of the different ways in which people are represented and how subtle those word choices can be. This pertains, in the moment, to the case of Michael Brown (and a few years ago, the case of Trayvon Martin). What we read is what we see, and both of these dead black teenagers have been portrayed as potential thugs and gangsters (and also as angelic innocents). There are multiple examples of how the power of words shapes our perception of events. If you want to find them, there are many articles and commentaries you can read about how people of color are portrayed more negatively in the media than white people.

    I don’t particularly feel like dissecting the racial divide that still exists in our society in this post. Mostly I wanted to engage in the exercise of writing about my own life in two different ways. I challenge you to do the same, and to ask yourself how you might be portrayed if you were the subject of media attention. It behooves us to remember that every single person is more than a single event, a single photograph, a single conversation. They say there are two sides to every story – I say that’s the minimum. Let’s try to consider as many of those sides as we can.

  • The Limits of Tolerance

    The Limits of Tolerance

    Dictionary.com defines tolerance as “a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one’s own; freedom from bigotry.” Bigotry, in turn, is defined as “stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one’s own.” Those with progressive or liberal points of view are frequently accused of hypocrisy regarding their use of the word tolerance. When a liberal speaks out against a practice or belief that they oppose or with which they disagree, those on the right will often cry “Whatever happened to tolerance? Your rejection of my beliefs is intolerant!” While this may sometimes be the case, I want to argue that there is a difference between intolerance and disagreement.

    One of the first things I teach in my classes is the concept of cultural relativity. This idea proposes that all cultures should be evaluated on the basis of their internal belief systems, rather than by the belief system of the observer. This means suspending judgement of practices that one may find confusing, frightening, or even abhorrent when viewed through one’s own cultural lens. The reason cultural relativity is so important for anthropologists is that we aren’t seeking to judge cultures; rather, we are seeking to understand them. It is extraordinarily difficult to learn about and analyze a culture if you are unable to set aside your own cultural values. That said, it is impossible for anyone to be truly objective when analyzing the behavior of others. We all see the world through our own unique lenses, and those lenses are ground and polished in the laboratory of very specific cultures and experiences. The challenge for the anthropologist is to try to see through the lens with as little distortion as possible.

    Although we strive for objectivity in our work, I want to make very clear that there is a difference between the anthropological practice of cultural relativity and the concept of moral relativity. Moral relativity proposes that any cultural practice can be seen as moral when judged by that culture’s standards; therefore, even the most seemingly horrible practices can be excused through the application of moral relativity. I cannot stress enough that this is not what anthropologists do. The point of cultural relativity is to try to understand a culture’s practices from the inside. You can find a behavior unacceptable – the practice of female genital cutting comes to mind – and still try to understand it from a culturally relative perspective. What this means is that, rather than rejecting the behavior as immoral and depraved – which are culturally loaded moral judgements – you attempt to understand why such a thing is done in this particular culture. You cannot reach any sort of objective understanding if your default position is to judge the behavior as wrong. And if the practice is indeed harmful, what hope can you possibly have of helping to change it if you don’t understand why, from that culture’s perspective, it is done in the first place? But again, here’s the important thing: understanding something from a culturally relative perspective does not mean you have to find it acceptable.

    What does this have to do with tolerance? I think that tolerance is very similar to cultural relativity. You may not agree with why somebody does something, but you can still accept their right to make their own choices about how to live and, ideally, attempt to see things from their point of view even if you disagree. This applies to all sorts of behaviors, including religion; education; jobs; political ideologies; sexual practices; leisure activities – take your pick. And as long as a person’s choices about how to live don’t have an impact on anybody but that person (and, potentially, those who agree with or consent to the same behaviors), then the choices fall under the umbrella of behaviors that can be tolerated. However, the moment that somebody’s choices begin to negatively impact others, then tolerance no longer applies. Female genital cutting, for example, is not tolerated in the United States or many other parts of the world, even though those who practice it have valid cultural reasons for doing it (and in this case valid simply means that they are culturally applicable reasons, not necessarily that they are reasons that are morally acceptable).

    Liberals are frequently accused of being intolerant of conservative viewpoints. This is certainly sometimes true; in fact, I would hypothesize that no person or ideology has a monopoly on tolerance (or intolerance, for that matter). Sadly, people of all political persuasions can be found ridiculing each other’s belief systems and falling prey to the many logical fallacies I’ve already written about in their attempts to prove the other side wrong. But I have to admit that I bristle when somebody tosses out the “whatever happened to liberal tolerance?” hook. This is lazy rhetoric at best and fails to offer any substantive reasons for why the person tossing the hook may disagree with the allegedly intolerant point of view. Here’s the crux of my argument: being tolerant does not mean agreeing with and/or accepting everything. To me, it means that as long as somebody’s beliefs or choices directly impact only those who believe and live similarly, then I’m happy to tolerate those choices even when I (sometimes vehemently) disagree. I’m a vegetarian, but I tolerate meat eaters. I’m an atheist, but I tolerate the religious as long as nobody attempts to convert me or use their religion as a cudgel (e.g. I do not tolerate violence in the name of religion). I’m a liberal, but I tolerate other political ideologies, even though I may debate with people about them. Hell, I’ll even tolerate intolerance to a degree – for example, if you are a small bookstore owner and decide that under no circumstances will you sell books by Hillary Clinton or Al Gore because you think they are liberal nut jobs, then more power to you. That decision, while arguably intolerant as far as accepting contrary ideologies is concerned, still has no direct impact on anybody but the bookstore owner. What I will not tolerate are beliefs or behaviors that limit the rights of others. So if you lobby for putting prayer back in schools, I will not tolerate that. If you believe that LGBTQ people are not entitled to the same rights as cisgendered people and you attempt to limit those rights, I will not tolerate that. If you attempt to limit the practices of people with whom you disagree (e.g. attempting to block the building of a mosque in your community) I will not tolerate that. If you discriminate against a person because of their race, nationality, religion, sexuality, gender, etc. I will not tolerate that – and I certainly won’t tolerate allowing those practices to be codified into law. In short, if your behavior actively infringes on someone else’s rights, I will not tolerate that. You have the right to believe what you want, but you do not have the right to force those beliefs on others.

    So stop throwing out the easy and lazy label of intolerance, whether you are liberal or conservative. Instead, focus on trying to understand the other person’s point of view even if you disagree with it. Practice cultural, but not moral, relativity. Accept that reasonable people can reasonably disagree about things. But don’t expect to be allowed to infringe on another person’s rights. That is true intolerance.

  • Shifting Perspective: The Economics of Privilege

    Shifting Perspective: The Economics of Privilege

    Just over a year ago, I decided to start indulging my creative side by crafting objects like lamps, clocks, and even furniture out of vintage, found, and second-hand objects. I even turned my little projects into a business of sorts, and started a website to showcase and write about my creations. As I learned how easy it is to make things that I thought would be difficult – like wiring lamp sockets, cutting, sanding, and finishing wood, and drilling through glass and metal – I started experimenting with other things I realized might be easier than they seem. This led to experiments with making food from scratch. As it turns out, ice cream, fruit jams and preserves, soda, and nut butters are easy to make and generally taste better than what you can buy at the store.

    At first, I felt smug about my new-found insights into the relative ease of the DIY lifestyle. It made me wonder how consumers got so easily fooled into believing that paying full price at the store was better than making their own bread and jam and peanut butter and ice cream and soda. But then, when I was sifting flour into my bread machine one evening, I suddenly thought about my Grandma G. Grandma G. made bread for her six kids and her husband every day. She did it by hand, and though by my father’s account Grandma’s cooking wasn’t great, it was serviceable. I pondered the innovation of the bread machine that allowed me to spend five minutes measuring ingredients into a pan so the machine could spend three hours mixing, kneading, and raising the dough which I would then transfer to the oven. I didn’t have three hours to spend mixing my own dough on a regular basis, which is why I had the bread machine. Bread making from scratch has become a luxury, and as such, it has also become a marker of status. In other words, it is a privilege. That is, if you are making your own bread, that probably means you have the luxury of time and resources – ironically, resources Grandma G., who was raising a large family on Grandpa G.’s meager salary, didn’t have. Her bread making was a necessity, not a luxury. She didn’t have a bread machine and access to hundreds of fancy bread recipes; she just had flour, yeast, salt, water, and her own efforts.

    This line of thinking shouldn’t have startled me, but it did. I had to admit that I am privileged to indulge in DIY cooking of the staples most people buy at the store. I have the resources to buy organic produce, free-range chicken, hormone-free milk from pasture-raised cows, and the myriad tools that make it easy to bake your own bread and make your own nut butters and jam. I own a fancy, high-powered food processor that whirs nuts into butter in just a few minutes. I have giant stock pots that I can use to boil fruit and sugar into jam, and tools for canning it. I have a fancy ice cream attachment for my expensive countertop mixer. I spent hundreds of dollars on bottles, caps, strainers, and funnels, and roots, herbs, and special yeast for making soda. Somehow in all that frenzy of DIY activity, I lost sight of the fact that what people used to have to do has become what most people can’t afford to do.

    How did we come to this state of affairs? Why is it now a privilege to get back to the basics that my Grandma G. practiced in her daily life? These are not rhetorical questions, but as of yet I’m not ready to dig too deep into some of the possible answers. At their core, these are questions related to the stratification that is inherent in the structure of capitalism, but they also have a lot to do with our individual pursuits of a better, faster, easier way to get things done. Our pursuit of ease in the interests of freeing up time to do more things has ironically led to us having less time than we used to. Grandma G. made bread for her family every day because she had to, but she undoubtedly would have loved to buy loaves at the store instead. Now, the daily treadmill of making ends meet, especially for those in the lower economic strata, makes buying loaves at the store the necessity, and having the time to make bread from scratch becomes the privilege.

  • Sheep and Goats

    Sheep and Goats

    When I am teaching, my goal is to pass on the basic principles and tenets of anthropology to my students. After all, they are taking an anthropology class with me, and I am obligated to teach them the fundamentals of the subject as summarized in the course description, whether it is Cultural Anthropology or Human Origins. But what I am really doing is using anthropology to teach them something much more useful and important: how to think. I don’t flatter myself that I am the best person in the world to teach them this, or that I am the first or only person who will expose them to the strategies of critical thinking. It is, however, a charge that I take extremely seriously, because I am deeply concerned about what seems to be a basic lack of critical thinking skills in the world at large. Because I am teaching college students I can at least reasonably expect that these young thinkers are only at the beginning of a process of becoming skilled at interpreting the world around them. I am also not arrogantly assuming that college educated people are the only ones who are good critical thinkers; nor do I subscribe to a corollary thought that being formally educated automatically means a person is a good thinker. I have encountered many a person with a college education who is nonetheless not skilled at thoughtful analysis; and I have met many people whose life experiences have honed their thinking skills far more sharply than a formal education has. I guess my point is that you find a broad spectrum of thinking ability in society at large, and it doesn’t necessarily correlate with education.

    Back to the point of what I do in the classroom. I find that anthropology is an excellent vehicle for helping students discover and practice new ways of thinking about the world. It teaches you to look at situations from multiple perspectives. As I ponder ideas and information, I often visualize the issue at hand as an object sitting in the center of a room, and I imagine myself walking around and around that object, looking at it top, bottom, and middle, prodding it, testing it, moving it to see how it looks in different positions. I imagine other people entering the room and describing the object to me from their perspective. Sometimes those other people see things I didn’t see, and open my eyes to original or alternative points of view. Sometimes, I still can’t see what they see, but I welcome their description of the object nonetheless. In anthropology, being open to other points of view is absolutely critical. We all bring preconceived notions with us to the field, but we are trained to shed those ideas as best we can and let the experience itself tell us what we need to know. The most magical moments can sometimes occur when our experience in the field makes us suddenly recognize things we had taken so deeply for granted that we weren’t even aware of our own perceptions (this can also be frighteningly disconcerting). Those moments can make me almost giddy with excitement. What makes me even giddier is introducing those moments to my students, and seeing the recognition on their faces of new ideas that, once introduced, bring on the “a-ha” moment of understanding.

    I have to remind myself that I am a professional in the study of human culture and behavior. It’s easy to forget that I, too, had to be taught how to think this way. I think this is why I often feel such deep frustration at the fact that so many people seem unable or unwilling to look at issues from multiple perspectives. I am more than happy to accept that, once someone has explored an issue from several angles, they can come to a rational, logical conclusion about what they see. I am also happy to accept that I can come to an equally rational, logical conclusion about the same issue that is nonetheless very different from another person’s. What I have a hard time accepting is people refusing to consider any view other than the one they originally brought to the issue, in spite of repeated opportunities to see things from another perspective.

    Over and over, I have heard people refer to those who blindly follow along with a single point of view as sheep. A sheep follows the sheep in front of it, and the lead sheep simply follows the shepherd. Those who rail against the sheep usually have a problem with the perceived leadership of the shepherd. What I find confounding is the failure of many to recognize that they are following a leader of their own. Those who label others as sheep may very well be members of a herd of goats, blindly following the leadership of the goatherd. Humans, in many ways, do have a herd mentality. Whether you are a sheep or a goat is immaterial if you are still blindly following the leader. Maybe the sheep and goats should spend some time talking to each other and learning about each others’ herds. Perhaps the sheep should follow the goatherd for a bit, and see what it’s like to walk in a goat’s hooves. The goats should do the same with the shepherd. In fact, all of us would do well to consider each others’ perspectives. Take the anthropological view. Strive to recognize your biases. Reach for those “a-ha” moments. Learn to really talk about what you believe and why you believe it, and learn to really listen to what others believe and why they believe it. Don’t fall for the easy way out by going for the ad hominem (or would it be ad ovinem?) sheep label. That’s too simple, and too dismissive, and not worthy of those who truly wish to have others take their point of view seriously.