Evans-Pritchard and Benedict
| ANTH 565: ETHNOGRAPHY AS SCIENCE AND LITERATURE Evans-Pritchard and Benedict |
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October 8: Two very different classics It's hard to imagine two classics of such different style as Evans-Pritchard's soooo British The Nuer and Ruth Benedict's sooo American The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. But since the two writers each rate a shole chapter in Geertz's Works and Lives, and since EP is still widely read in anthropology graduate classes, while Benedict has pretty much been consigned to Japan Studies, it bears looking at them and comparing them. This will be the only week when everyone has two books to read, so please consider skimming and/or skipping parts to be perfectly appropriate behavior. Despite their dissimilarity in many ways, there is one thing in which the two books are very much alike: they each purport to be a study of "a culture." There are more Japanese than Nuer, of course (especially since the latter were decimated and scattered in the Southern Sudan civil war), but the premise of each work is the same--there is a unitary thing called a society, and one can describe the whole after observing but a part. In light of this, your first assignment, for Monday morning, is to post an essay about the assumptions and methodology behind the process by which each author gets from the part to the whole. How do they know that a field observation or a tidbit from an ancient text represents something larger than itself? And how do they convince the reader (or try, anyway) that their observations can be generalized in this way? October 10: Evaluating Geertz's evaluation For Wednesday, we are going to come back to Geertz. He was often accused of hiding questionable interpretations behind beautiful, or sometimes just florid, prose. Your posting for Wednesday is to evaluate Geertz's evaluation of Benedict and E-P based on your reading of more than just a few selected passages. Does Geertz tell the truth, mostly, with a few stretchers, to quote Mark Twain, or does he twist the content of the ethnographies themselves to push a point or points of his own? |