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[...]
�Ethnography was once the almost exclusive domain of anthropology. In studies dating from the
end of the nineteenth century, American scholars went and lived in a remote culture for a
substantial period of time. The following selection falls within this tradition of cultural
anthropology. Alma Gottlieb, then a doctoral student at the University of Virginia, set out
to do fieldwork for fifteen months among the Beng people in a tropical rain forest in a West
African village. She had not secured the necessary governmental permission to do the research
before she flew halfway across the world. In addition, since this group had never been studied
by Western scholars, she could not learn the Beng language in advance of her trip. As with most
classical anthropological studies, she would have to rely on a translator or informant and try
to learn to communicate once there. Although field workers often work alone, in this instance
Gottlieb was accompanied by her husband, Philip Graham, a fiction writer then working on his
first book of short stories. Graham was between teaching jobs, and thinking that as a fiction
writer he could "write anywhere," he "went along for the ride." The resulting collaboration,
Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa won the Victor Turner Prize
in Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.�
[...]
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[...]
�The influence of geographical environment on culture seems a matter not so much of logical
inference as of direct observation. Taking the continent of North America, it is known that
cotton is raised in the South, that our wheat belt lies in Minnesota and the adjoining states
and Canadian provinces, that the Rocky Mountain and some of the Plateau states are the seat of
the mining industry while Florida and California form our tropical fruit orchards. With these
obvious facts are combined correlations not so clear, perhaps, yet very convincing to the mind
as yet undebauched by ethnological learning. What seems more natural than that culture in its
highest forms should develop only in temperate regions, that the gloomy forests of the North be
reflected in a mythology of ogres and trolls, that liberty should flourish amidst snowy mountain
tops and languish in the tepid plain, or those islanders should be expert mariners?
This geographical theory of culture bears a certain resemblance to the classical associationist
theory in psychology. According to that doctrine, the mind is something in the nature of a wax
tablet on which the outer world produces impressions and all the higher mental activities are,
in the last instance, reducible to combinations of the represented impressions or 'ideas'.
Modern psychology, however, regards this system, fascinating as it appears at a first glance,
as little better than an historical curiosity. The association of ideas itself is now conceived
merely as a special manifestation of the synthetic nature of consciousness. In short, the tables
are completely turned, and association, instead of explaining consciousness, is interpreted in
terms of consciousness.�
[...]
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[...]
�Discrepant meanings for the same term are not, of course, in themselves surprising, at least
in ordinary language; polysemy, as the linguists call it, is the natural condition of words. I
bring this example of it forward because it takes us into the heart of the unity and diversity
theme as it has appeared in the social sciences since, say, the twenties and thirties. The
overall movement of those sciences during that period has been one in which the steady progress
of a radically unific view of human thought, considered in our first, "psychological" sense as
internal happening, has been matched by the no less steady progress of a radically pluralistic
view of it in our second, "cultural" sense as social fact. And this has raised issues that have
now so deepened as to threaten coherence. We are forced at last, whether we work in laboratories,
clinics, slums, computer centres, or African villages, to consider what it is we really think
about thought. Malinowski, Boas, and L�vi-Bruhl in the formative phases of the discipline, Whorf,
Mauss, and Evans-Pritchard after them, Horton, Douglas, and L�vi-Strauss now, have all been unable
to leave off worrying it. Formulated first as the "primitive mind" problem, later as the "cognitive
relativism" problem, and most recently as the "conceptual incommensurability" problem - as always,
what advances most in such matters is the majesty of the jargon - the disaccordance between a lowest
common denominator view of the human mind ("even Papuans exclude middles, distinguish objects, and
lay effects to causes") and an "other beasts, other notions" one ("Amazonians think they are parakeets,
fuse the cosmos with village structure, and believe pregnancy disables males") has grown steadily more
difficult to avoid noticing.�
[...]
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