Culture Vs Race Essay Research Paper Anthropologists

Culture Vs. Race Essay, Research Paper

Anthropologists have always had their discrepancies with the word culture and its background significance. There have been numerous definitions that have filtered through the field, yet not one that everyone can accept or agree with. Franz Boas, an anthropologist in the early 20th Century, and his students, had a difficult time figuring out the objective of what culture is. Culture is about learning and shared ideas about behaviour. Although Boas and his students had a slightly different idea in mind. They ultimately reached a conclusion, a definition of culture in their view that is a contradiction in terms. Boas sates that, ? culture was expressed through the medium of language but was not reducible to it; more importantly, it was not race. Culture became everything race was not, and race was seen to be what culture was not; given, unchangeable biology,? (Visweswaran, p. 72).

Not only focusing on culture, but anthropology has a substantial connection as well. Anthropology is the field in which the study of cultural and biological variations among human groups is studied. The difficulty that some people have with characterizing culture

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is that they associate it with race, whereas that is not the case. The two are remarkably distinct. Race is something biological, a genetic trait that is innate, while culture is something that is educated and experienced.

Kamala Visweswaran and Lila Abu-Lughod are two well distinguished anthropologists that are currently teaching at Universities in the United States. In their own articles, they speak about culture through an anthropologists view and detail their own opinions within. They may have some different opinions but each has their own strong arguments that prove their points.

Lila Abu-Lughod?s article ?Writing Against Culture,? was written in 1991, and was published inside the book, Recapturing Anthropology. Within the article, she discusses culture and many problems with it. The title of her article speaks for itself, writing against culture. There are many issues that she brings up about culture, and various influential strategies for shifting over from the culture concept. She reflects on culture and its need to be redefined. In her discussion of culture and difference she opens with, ? most American anthropologists believe or act as if ?culture,? notoriously resistant to definition and ambiguous of referent, is nevertheless the true object of anthropological inquiry,? (Abu-Lughod, p. 143). She illustrates how essential culture is to anthropology and how anthropology helps to balance culture, as well as its ties with race. She considers culture and race as opposites. ?Culture is learned and can change,? (Abu-Lughod, p. 144), and

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race is something inborn. Although she can only depict and explain the concept of culture, and how it has become necessary and not the reasons behind it.

Lila Abu-Lughod also writes about feminism in regard to culture. ? It has been important for most feminists to locate sex differences in culture, not biology or nature,? (Abu-Lughod, p. 144). There have been many cultural differences between women and men, ? a different voice? perhaps from Anglo-American feminist Gilligan and her followers, (Abu-Lughod, p. 145), as well as an explanation of the differences, ? whether through a socially informed psychoanalytic theory, a Marxist-derived theory of the effects of the division of labour and women?s role in social reproduction, an analysis of maternal practice or even a theory of sexual exploitation,? (Abu-Lughod, p. 145). With that there has been an increasingly large demand for more women oriented culture, a place where they can express themselves and learn about their gender culture, and not that of men. ?That is to say, if women share something in common, it is not the result of a universal bodily maturational process but of mutually experienced interpolations of race, class, and sexual orientation through patriarchal formations,? ( Visweswaran, p. 79).

One of the strategies that Abu-Lughod states is ethnography of the particular, which in part is assumed to upset the culture concept. It is a fact that anthropologists write about what they study and in turn many generalize that what they are observing is quite the same or similar throughout. ? Generalization, the characteristic mode of operation and

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style of writing of the social sciences, can no longer be regarded as neutral description, ( Abu-Lughod, p. 149-150). Moreover, writing against culture is to shift from writing in generalized terms. Ethnography of the particular is a way to write in more familiar terms as well as to write about the particulars. ? And the particulars suggest that other live as we perceive ourselves living, not as robots programmed with ?cultural? rules, but as people going through life agonizing over decisions, making mistakes, trying to make themselves look good, enduring tragedies and personal losses, enjoying others, and finding moments of happiness, ? (Abu-Lughod, p.158).

The second article is written by Kamala Visweswaran, ?Race and the Culture of Anthropology,? which was published in the American Anthropologist Magazine, in March of 1998. She discusses culture, although in a slightly different manner then Abu-Lughod and she elaborates more on the connection with race. Her