I felt the need to share my review for tomorrow's final...

[xenologer]

BEWARE
Not professor-safe. This includes profane language and Sass.

Possible Topics for Final Essays:

Neo-evolutionary
-Steward wanted to prove cultures adapt. Believed that cultures could be "typed" based on core features.
-White believed cultures became more complex over time.
-Murdock just wanted to compile everything. All the crunchy stuff into HRAF files.

Neo-evolutionary still carries a lot of overtones of salvage anthropology, the idea that cultures must be studied and recorded quickly before they modernize and lose their novelty.

Neo-Materialism
-Fried believed that distribution of resources pushed cultures through concrete stages.
-Harris didn't believe that an insider's understanding was possible or useful. Indians don't realize that modes of production determine their reverence of cattle. They need anthropologists to tell them that.
-Rappaport loved him some pigs. He believed that every aspect of culture was deeply grounded in the physical and ecological needs of the culture.
-Bourgeois studied the apparent need of New Ricans to get power and status by any means necessary.

With the possible exception of Bourgeois, the neo-materialists were quite excited about knowing more about a culture than a native. They just loved being the expert because they watched you cook a pig and by God, that means they know better than you.

Structuralism
-Levi-Strauss was an anal-retentive bastard. He set up binary oppositions in everything and for some ungodly reason applied linguistic terms and analysis to cultural features.
-Ortner decided that women were universally oppressed. Insert all obvious rebuttals here.
-Leach? Well, no one cares about Leach.

Structuralists know where everything goes. If you only look hard enough, you can break everything up into neat, easy, and logical categories. There are no grey areas, and there is no uncertainty.

Ethnoscience
-Conklin had a real hard-on for the Sapir-Worf hypothesis. Language forms culture! Goodness me!
-Tyler really wanted to know what individual people thought. It was really revolutionary that a native could possibly know anything about his own culture, but hey. Better late than never.
-Strauss realized that culture shapes motivations of individuals within it. Again. Revolutionary. The American Dream is based on American ideals of "good" people? HOLY SHIT NO WAY.

Welcome to the land of people who don't do jack. Isn't it great to get back to armchair anthropology? I know I think so. At the very least, they seem to have recovered their ability to state the totally fucking obvious.

Sociobiology
-Wilson really wanted laws of culture, just like those scientists in labs we keep hearing about! Why do they get laws and we don't?
-Barkow believed in "social genes" that were the building blocks of culture.
-Bird was curious about why evolution would allow for behavior that seems wasteful. The poor poor anthropologist, troubled so deeply by the Rube Goldberg machine that is life.

God damn it! I thought we'd gotten away from this evolutionary crap! AGH.

Anth and Gender
-Slocum wanted props for her sex doing all the damned gathering. Fuck hunting. Primitive man couldn't find his ass with both hands and a flashlight. When do women get some credit?
-Leacock really wishes we could all be primitive again, because then we were all equal. When nobody has anything, there's no inequality or oppression, which makes it totally ideal! POVERTY FOR THE WIN.
-Stoler wanted to know why all the white men had jungle fever. Apparently it had something to do with establishing themselves in new lands! The more you know. *rainbow*

So, um. Human history isn't all about men, plzkthx.


Symbolic/Interpretive
-Douglas does not want you to use your left hand to eat. Remember what Dr. Kenyon said? It's like dumping a big pile of shit onto the food. Please be mindful of ritual purity.
-Turner thought symbols did a damned good job of keeping culture alive without telling anybody. I mean, if everything is symbolic, all you have to do is remember a cool story or some shit, and the complicated values come right along with it!

Some things mean other things. The relationship of thing to thing is relevant! A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun... *insert Schoolhouse Rock here*

POSTMODERNISM
-Geertz would like you to mind the cock, please. It's very important, as it symbolizes many things to his people. No, not MEN. I'm talking about the Balinese, you filthy bastards.
-Rosaldo wanted to cut off people's heads after his wife died, and that's when he realized he'd been wrong about beheading all along!
-D'Andrade laid the smack down. He called the postmodernists into a back alley and knifed their concepts of objectivity and subjectivity. They walked funny for years.
-Crapanzano. What can I say? We have to look at the writer to understand his work, and I think we're all seeing the same thing when we read the name "CRAPanzano."

Oh, wow! You mean we can't know ANYTHING? How useful! I'm so glad we've established this!

Modern Practice Theory
-Ortner wants you to know the difference between activities and the people who do them. Captain Obvious adds from the sidelines that when you change ideals, practices, or systems, all the others change.
-Bourdieu is full of words. Words like Power, Habitus, and Doksa. Like any good Neo-Marxist, Domination shows up. Just because, if someone isn't being oppressed, Karl Marx cries a little up there in Communist Heaven.

Because it's been too long since we had an ethnoscientist to sit back and do nothing. Thank God we've gotten back to the truly useless people. I was beginning to think anthropology might have a PURPOSE.



I now return you to your regularly scheduled procrastination because my cat is running back and forth and up and down the sofa over and over again for no obvious reason. She appears to be attacking and chasing things only she can see... but I can only assume they are truly menacing.

Also, I apparently have mood icons. Did I choose ferrets? It seems like something I would do, but I don't recall such a decision. Ah well. Might as well use 'em, because ferrets are great things.