About Anthropology

Puzzlers have strategies, right?

• do all the outside pieces
• do clumps of color
• look for specific shapes of pieces
• search out contrasts on connecting pieces
• ...others?

What's the course really all about?

• More how to set about becoming a student of anything than about factoids about East Asia --though factoids do pile up and need to be processed
• More about active curiosity (and how to manage its inevitable consequences, like overload) than about orderly progression toward completion (you get good at it by trying to DO it...)
• More about the immeasurability (and unpredictability) of learning outcomes than about reaching predetermined goals (what's really at the core of becoming an active learner? ==> taking responsibility for one's own wetware)
• More about serious fun with exploration and serendipity than about dogged pursuit of a predetermined course of study --so you make your own "Course" out of the elements you Pay Attention to --and do something non-passive about)
• More about individual development of information and communication skills than about adherence to disciplinary academic models (BUT that means you have to pursue that individual development, not just wait for the prof to tell you what to do...)

Will we ever see the whole, or get to any hope of perception of Pattern? Maybe. But if we do, it will be because we put the work into organizing and arranging and interpreting a lot of pieces.

So here's a starting place, thanks to the latest issue of Science. It takes us to many things, opens 'files' and poses questions, offers opportunities to explore:

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Here's one of the Big Questions: Are people everywhere pretty much the same? Are there human universals?

Depends on what you concentrate your gaze upon. We are one species, to be sure: there are no biological barriers to interbreeding between members of the human "race", though there surely are probability surfaces that constrain the likelihood of people from different geographic subparts of the "race" ever meeting... and there are cultural constraints, including preferences, that affect mating choices. And there's a long history of migration, as Homo sapiens populated the Earth.

There is certainly a lot of variety in the ways humans solve the recurrent problems of physical existence, express the basic capabilities that come along with our physical characteristics, and decorate their daily affairs. And some would argue that there are plentiful social-psychological differences between peoples, such that it may be reasonable to say that people of different ethnicities think differently, though the basic neuro materials and circuitry is universally the same. How does that come about? A lot of the answer lies in language, categories, communications. Nihonjinron would claim uniqueness of "the Japanese mind."

Consider this passage:

...there are very dramatic social-psychological differences between East Asians as a group and people of European culture as a group. East Asians live in an interdependent world in which the self is part of a larger whole; Westerners live in a world in which the self is a unitary free agent. Easterners value success and achievement in good part because they reflect well on the groups they belong to; Westerners value these things because they are badges of personal merit. Easterners value fitting in and engage in self-criticism to make sure that they do so; Westerners value individuality and strive to make themselves look good. Easterners are highly attuned to the feelings of others and strive for interpersonal harmony; Westerners are more concerned with knowing themselves and are prepared to sacrifice harmony for fairness. Easterners are accepting of hierarchy and group control; Westerners are more likely to prefer equality and scope for personal action. Asians avoid controversy and debate; Westerners have faith in the rhetoric of argumentation in arenas from the law to politics to science.
(Richard Nisbett The Geography of Thought: how Asians and Westerners think differently ...and why [2003:76-77])

We probably find these generalizations at least recognizable, though they skate close to Stereotypes. They might serve to tip us off to being sensuitive to internal variation, and the observation that variety within is often greater than variety between groups.

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What's appealing, interesting, attractive about Anthropology? What can Informants tell us, both those who have taken Anthropology courses AND those who haven't?

introduces people to a different way of thinking... better insight into why certain people do certain things... learn about what it means to be human... understand how pieces of all cultures are both similar and different... learn a lot about other people and yourself...

So what is the territory of Anthropology? And where did the discipline spring from? What is Anthropology up to now? Difficult questions, because the points of view are so varied. 40 years ago it all seemed a lot clearer than it does now, and Anthropology mostly dealt with exotic peoples, others, and sought to produce knowledge about the human essence underlying the great variety of cultures comprising the world, via systematic comparative study of examples of human variety.

The Wikipedia article gives us a lot to work with, beginning

Anthropology is the study of humankind (see genus Homo). It is holistic in two senses: it is concerned with all humans at all times, and with all dimensions of humanity. Central to Anthropology is the concept of culture, and the notion that human nature is culture; that our species has evolved a universal capacity to conceive of the world symbolically, to teach and learn such symbols socially, and to transform the world (and ourselves) based on such symbols.

In the Public Mind, Anthropology is often confused with Archaeology, and/or is thought to deal mostly with "primitive" cultures, or at least with the exotic ("Natives") and the "traditional". Even the very idea of "primitive" is a problem --turns out that the languages of technologically 'primitive' peoples are no less complex than those of the most technologically advanced, and there's no reason to think that the minds in their heads are any less complex either. It's relatively easy to describe how "the Natives" organize themselves, and how they act or behave, but getting at how they think, and understanding the nuances of their beliefs and motivations, is much more challenging.

Anthropology's 19th century roots were at least partly in the service of colonialism, and through much of the 20th century Anthropology was entangled with 'development' --with the need to understand (and often enough to control) subject peoples and 'modernizing' nations (documenting the "Natives" --but who pays? who benefits? ...an uncomfortable legacy).

At the same time, Anthropology has had a strong critical streak as well, in opposition to excesses of hegemonism and exploitation --sometimes radical and sometimes reactionary. And Anthropology is also often associated with the idea of 'cultural relativism', in its most extreme form "the principle that any judgment of society as a whole is invalid: individuals are judged against the standards of their society; societies themselves have no larger context in which judgement is even meaningful." (from Wikipedia article on moral relativism). In general we might say that Anthropology provides counters to the unthinking ethnocentric views of the world that go along with the absence of context.

Anthropology has generally encouraged connections with other disciplines, so there are many compound subdisciplines --psychological Anthropology, ethnomusicology, biological Anthropology, legal Anthropology... and so on. In the last 30 years or so (and in keeping with intellectual developments in other disciplines) an important division has occurred along intellectual lines, with the development of a subdiscipline sometimes called 'symbolic Anthropology'. Here's how Roger Keesing characterized the state about 15 years ago:

"Symbolic" or "interpretive" modes of Anthropology are increasingly ascendant, and fashionable... Anthropology is an exploration, an excavation, of the cumulated, embodied symbols of other peoples, a search for meanings, for hidden connections, for deeper saliences than those presented by the surface evidence of ethnography. Taking cultures as texts, symbolic Anthropology seeks to reveal them deeply...

Symbolic Anthropology, like literary criticism and other hermeneutic enterprises, is dependent on interpretive gifts, leaps of intuition, virtuosity in seeing hidden meanings enciphered as tropes. As such it can be done more or less insightfully, more or less faithfully, more or less carefully; cultures as texts can be read brilliantly or recklessly or clumsily... (161)

...[but] cultures do not simply constitute webs of significance, systems of meaning that orient humans to one another and their world. They constitute ideologies, disguising human political and economic realities as cosmically ordained... Cultures are webs of mystification as well as signification. We need to ask who creates and defines cultural meanings, and to what ends... Cultures, then, must be situated, placed in a context --historically, economically, politically. (161-162) (Anthropology as interpretive quest, Current Anthropology 28:161-176, 1987)

One of the essential elements of Anthropology is fieldwork, immersion in the milieu in which informants live, and research by question-asking. This implies sophisticated longuistic skills, or reliance on interpreters. It also raises the problem of involvement in what one is attempting to study: can observe without affecting?

"The Field" has certain realities: discomfort, loneliness, impossibility of actually doing what was planned... and one can always ask if the researcher isn't seeing what he or she is prepared to see... Rashomon again.

The notion of work with 'untouched primitive peoples' has perhaps always been an illusion, and certainly is now. And in the late 20th century, as the opportunities for fieldwork shrank with geopolitical realities, the whole notion of what one is supposed to do also changed. Now there are plentiful opportunities to study one's OWN society (examples: contract archaeology, Silicon Valley subcultures, enterprises...)

Still we have the basic objective of trying to get INTO people's heads, and the idea that so doing will provide sophisticated understanding to counterbalance the (often simplistic) Western media dominance of 'reality', and lead students toward to changed perspectives on their unconsidered assumptions: cross-cultural contact is GOOD for education.

Anthropology still has the objective of exploring Human Nature by encompassing its variety ...a counterbalance to other disciplines (Psychology and Sociology, for example) whose generalizations about Human Nature are principally based on experiments/studies of Europeans and North Americans...

Remind ourselves of what the Commoner says in Rashomon:

In the end, you cannot understand the things men do.

Which brings us to another point: to what degree can we think of Rashomon as an anthropological document? What do we learn about Japanese society, or culture? What are the hazards in using the evidence of the film to generalize about Japanese society, or culture? What questions about Japanese society, or culture, does what we see in the film raise for us?

Who are these people? We have a priest, two commoners, a "samurai" and his wife, a "bandit", a spirit medium, a constable (or some such), and the off-screen official(s) who hear the testimony of the several actors in the drama. We are told that this is Heian Japan, 12th century or so... How shall we go about finding out more? Seems to me that some Web searches might be useful.

Consider this, from an East Asia course at Indiana University:

My goal for my lecture on Wednesday is to describe Heian society in two ways. First, I'm going to discuss the "objective" features of society, including the structure of power (the Emperor as "figurehead"; the Fujiwara clan as dominant), the structure of social classes (which contrasts very strongly with the Chinese case), the economic structures supporting that class structure, and the roles of women and of the Buddhist religion in aristocratic culture. These are basic ways of describing the unique social structure of Heian Japan, and of situating the social group of which Sei Shonagon was a part.

The second way I'll discuss Heian society is by trying to describe some basic features of the "Aristocratic Viewpoint" of the Heian -- the worldview of Sei Shonagon and her peers. I hope to talk a bit about how the aristocratic worldview pictured the relation of the individual to society, to Nature, and to history. All of these contrast to some degree with the worldview of the Chinese literati whose culture Heian Japan so broadly appropriated and adapted. I hope I'll be able to leave some time to point out some of those contrastive issues. (http://www.indiana.edu/~ealc100/3_6.html)

...and see also The Heian period (794-1185) : Changes in ritsuryo government ...from www.crystalinks.com/ancient.html ...but back up to the main site and where are we? (take a look...).

Try Wikipedia for Heian Period

Zoom out... to see ALL of East Asia in 1150 or so, and ask the question: what's happening? We're off on a wild ride of bits to integrate into our understanding. Let's try the Columbia site (Asia for Educators) for some basic chronology. Looking at 1000-1500, we see that China was in a period called the Song/Sung Dynasty ("China's Golden Age"?) --but we need to back up to the earlier time period to discover some of the background. Here's a bit from the previous period in the timeline:

Toward the end of the eighth century, the Emperor and his court chose a new site for the capital in central Japan and built a city surrounded by beautiful mountains. The new city was called Heian-kyô, "the capital of tranquility." (It has become the modern city of Kyôto.) During the Heian period (794-1185), named after this city, the country really was at peace, and the aristocrats of the Imperial Court spent much of their time creating a classical culture that still lives today.

The Japanese had imported many things from China in the few preceding centuries - Buddhism, Confucianism, poetry (and the language, Chinese, in which poems were recorded), art techniques, methods of organizing government, even the plan for the city of Heian-kyô itself. But as the Heian period progressed, the Japanese took less and less from China, concentrating instead on integrating what they had learned so that it fit their country, their values, and their attitudes. Just as the symmetrical grid arrangement of the streets of the new city gave way to an asymmetrical form, Chinese imports were altered and grew in particularly Japanese ways. The culture that flourished in the tenth and eleventh centuries was dominated by aesthetic concerns and produced art and literature that continues to influence Japanese society and the way Japanese perceive the world.

(how can I cite this passage? I get it via a javascript call to a menu two steps down in the site, and there's no URL that I can see... so I have a Problem...)

This gives us a lot to work with:

• imported cultural materials ...suggesting that we really need to know what China was doing that inspired the importation
• a time of peace? How does that fit with the disorder we see in Rashomon? One possible answer might be found in exploring the background to the Priest/Monk character in Rashomon, and setting him in historical context. Columbia again (300-1100, Buddhism in Japan):

  ...three Buddhist sects that represent uniquely Japanese developments: Kûkai's (774-835) Shingon sect; Shinran's (1173-1262) True Pure Land sect; and the sect founded by Nichiren (1222-1282) and known by his name. All of these sects are still active today.

  The Shingon sect stands in the mainstream of Buddhism in terms of doctrine - emphasizing the transient nature of existence and calling upon its followers to transcend the ordinary world of suffering - and in the broad outline of its practices, which stress the importance of ethical conduct, meditation, and study. However, Shingon Buddhism advocates a distinctive type of meditation. More intricate than traditional meditation, it involves the use of symbolic hand gestures (mudras) and symbolic speech (mantras), as well as a form of Buddhist art known as a mandala. The mandala represents the universe as it is seen by the enlightened and serves as the object of meditation. The sheer complexity of Shingon meditation, coupled with the rich symbolism and beauty of the mandala, give this sect an air of mystery that has proven particularly attractive to millions of Japanese from Kûkai's age to the present.

  In the True Pure Land sect, we encounter a very different kind of Buddhism, one that advocates salvation by faith rather than the attainment of enlightenment through the practice of morality and meditation. Based upon the belief that as time passes human beings find it increasingly difficult to follow the example of the historical Buddha - an idea that can be traced all the way back to India - it teaches that in the present era salvation can be gained only by relying on the saving grace of the celestial Buddha Amida, who resides in a Pure Land to the West. This belief had been embraced by other Buddhists, not only in Japan, but in China and India as well; but Shinran was the first in the history of Buddhism to draw the radical conclusion that acceptance of it must lead to the complete abandonment of monastic discipline. Consequently, from Shinran's day on, it has been common for True Pure Land priests to marry and live as lay persons, and the sect has been one of the most popular to develop in Japan.

  Finally, in the Nichiren sect, we see surfacing in Buddhism, in a dramatic fashion, the strong sense of national pride that has frequently been related to religious sentiment in Japan. Nichiren was an impassioned reformer who envisioned both himself and Japan at the center of a worldwide movement to revive what he considered to be true Buddhism.

  (I do have some citation information for this one, from the bottom of the passage: "Acknowledgement: The author of this article is Paul Watt. The article is adapted from FOCUS, issue on Asian Religions, fall 1982, published by The Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021. Reprinted by permission. ")

  So which of these does the Rashomon Monk best fit with? Not the third... hadn't happened yet. Probably not the second --though the emergence of Pure Land can certainly be seen as a response to the sort of social disintegration implied by the film's beginning. A Wikipedia article Religions of Japan is helpful for some context. We learn that Zen is associated with the Kamakura era that succeeded the Heian period... and again we see the importance of importation, and the interlinkage with Chinese and Korean societies: Zen is the Japanese version of Korean Saon Buddhism, which is a version of Chinese Ch'an Buddhism... My guess/reconstruction is that the Rashomon Monk is of the Tendai school:

  In 804 the Japanese monk Saicho (767-822) was sent to study at Mount Tiantai, and returned with the teaching that formed the nucleus of Japanese Tendai, which he expounded from a new monastic centre on Mount Hiei near Kyoto. He was initially opposed by monks at the old Buddhist centre of Nara, who used Theravada precepts for ordination instead of the Mahayana precepts he wished to employ. He also incorporated elements of Zen and esoteric Buddhism into Japanese Tendai. Imperial approval for the new sect was finally given in 823, just after Saicho's death, initiating the development of Mahayana Buddhism in Japan.

  Two great Tendai monks, Ennin (794-864) and Enshin (814-891), furthered the sect's influence, especially at court, and the monastic centre on Mount Hiei, Enryakuji, grew into an immense temple complex. Tendai in Japan became, with Shingon, one of the two pre-eminent sects of the Heian period (794-1185), Japan's cultural golden age. It remained more élitist than Shingon, and was particularly popular with the Heian aristocracy. It also fostered the synthesis of Buddhism with Japanese Shinto. In time, the sect accumulated great wealth and political power, and the armed monks and lay-brothers of Mount Hiei, especially in the lawless days of late Heian, would descend from their monasteries to threaten the government or simply to loot. Schisms within Tendai also led to armed feuds between temples on Mount Hiei. Tendai's pluralistic doctrine made it a breeding ground for new sects: Japanese Zen and Pure Land Buddhism both originated as movements within Tendai which broke away and developed their own organization and creeds. Increasingly worldly, Tendai kept its power and importance until 1571, when Oda Nobunaga, unifier of Japan, attacked and razed Enryakuji, massacring monks and local inhabitants. (http://www.compsoc.net/~gemini/simons/historyweb/tendai.html)