ERA: Experience-rich anthropology
Enhancing the teaching and learning of anthropological concepts by widening student experience using anthropological field materials.
Introduction to ERA
ERA is an acronym for Experience-rich anthropology and is one of two anthropology projects funded by the Higher Education Funding Council under Phase One of their Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL). The ERA concept is based on some 14 years experience at Kent of using IT in anthropology. ERA is designed to enhance the teaching and learning of anthropology in the UK by encouraging teachers to help students explore the relationships between field data and its analysis as reported in monographs and journal articles. Experience at Kent and elsewhere has shown that students value and benefit from being able to study field data as well as the results of their analysis. To achieve this the ERA Consortium has been developing a range of teaching and learning elements suitable for incorporation into current and new courses. These have been developed from existing courses and the results of field research already undertaken. Led by Kent, ERA is a consortium project which aims to be critical mass for the uptake of the approach within UK anthropology. Its WWW site contains information about the project as it has developed http://www.era.anthropology.ac.uk/index.html
Long-term continuation has always been an explicit aspect of the original ERA strategy, what we call 'Driving the ERA Project home'. In the first phase of ERA we concentrated (although not exclusively) on textual, visual and audio materials. However, experience gained has taught us that many colleagues have a wealth of field materials hitherto unseen by students, and indeed often, themselves. These constitute an increasingly valuable anthropological and historical resource. Therefore, in the second phase of ERA we have been developing some exemplary resources through digital radio presentation for dissemination via the WWW.
Audio presentation has considerable advantages over other media. It can be easily accessed through a variety of different routes (e.g. CD, audio-cassette, radio, Web-radio) all of which are freely available to students and teachers alike. Below is the first of these presentations. We hope you will find it interesting, informative and enjoyable.
written and presented by
John Kesby
produced by
Alan Bicker
A digital-radio anthropology course
ERA, Department of Anthropology
University of Kent at Canterbury
Social Anthropology, and other human subjects, are often divided into sections labelled political, economic, religious and domestic, but the distinctions are unrealistic because nobody actually lives in terms of these divisions. A more practical division is between: what people do; why they do it; and how they justify it. In this unit the emphasis is on the 'invisible world' beyond everyday transactions, on assumptions which are taken for granted, and often neither discussed nor questioned, such as time, space, causation, order and justice. 'The invisible' is implied in people's activities, and colours everything which they do, but is not open to experiments in the usual laboratory sense. Among the features which result from an interaction between the invisible and visible aspects of experience are sacrifices, praying, casting spells, possession, soothsaying, oracles, and the social roles of priest, shaman, diviner and doctor. All of these features figure prominently in this course.
The aim is, briefly, clarification. Everyone who is human knows something about systems of ritual and belief, but most people become bewildered when they have to reflect on more than one system at a time, and in industrial societies most people are, in some degree, bewildered. By the end of this course, you can acquire a keener sense of what people in different societies have in common, and of the more dramatic differences between them. You can also discover the shortcomings of the slippery words 'religion' and 'magic'.
The following lectures may be listened to individually. However, they were originally intended to be the basis for a single course of study. When using the lectures as a complete course it is suggested that you listen to one lecture each week. If you do this you should read some set passages each week, normally around 20 pages, and these passages are designated week by week. If a recommended passage is long, or hard going, skim through it to make sure that you can summarise what it is about. There is no textbook fully suitable to the course, and the lectures are designed to provide a framework, and also a commentary on the more important features.
Acknowledgement: I
would like to thank John Jervis for his help, especially in producing the original
versions of the entries for Lectures 1 - 3 inclusive.
The lectures are accessible from this page by following the link to the format/file
size that best suits you.
Witchcraft
More important than conventional distinctions between 'witchcraft' and 'sorcery' is the distinction between the manipulation of 'powers' for beneficial ends, and the use of those same powers for evil ends, sometimes described as 'white' and 'black' witchcraft respectively. This is, in effect, the sole major difference between witch and unwitcher (or 'witchdoctor'), and it is important to realise that the social perception of any particular person as one or the other can be unclear or shifting; the political questions implicit here always need to be asked. Hence witchcraft beliefs raise fundamental issues about the significance of cultural factors in interpreting events as evidence of the operations of unseen powers, the social ascription of responsibility, the role of moral failings as causes of misfortune, and social perceptions of the nature of evil; consequently the topic can serve as an introduction to many of the issues that will run through this series.
Witch-hunts, The Enlightenment
and New Sects
Witchcraft beliefs were, and are, very
widespread; witch hunts, however, are much less common, indeed there is little elsewhere
to parallel the European witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries. The latter pose
a problem for anthropological theories, and the issue is used here to remind you
that Europeans are part of anthropological studies. Some theorists see these witch
hunts as the results of the interplay of old popular beliefs and newly codified elite
theories of witchcraft as satanic, coming together in the stereotype of the witch
as heretic, such stereotypes providing useful resources for administrative and judicial
manipulation in the early modern era of centralising state power. However, much of
the time you feel that magistrates and other officials were being swept along by
events.
Reversal and the 'Border Zone' with the Superhuman Powers
The theme of inversion or reversal reveals how any cultural construction of identity co-exists with its opposite, and what may be seen as the obverse of normality may nevertheless have ritual, moral and communal significance; it may, for instance, be seen as a source of creativity, authenticity and power, as well as danger. Such reversals may characteristically be experienced both as disorder and as revealing possibilities of community that are not present in everyday life, and structurally they may reveal a patterned reversal of normal order. These themes can be illustrated in myth, in rites of passage, and, above all, in festivals; the latter, manifesting elements of anti-hierarchical sentiment and symbolism, can be seen as poised uneasily between celebration and subversion, interpreted differently by the mass of participants and the 'guardians of order'.
Animal Symbols
One striking feature of myths is that huge numbers of them, although not all, narrate the activities of non-human animals. One of the characters usually represented by such an animal is the Trickster, found in stories from most parts of the world. One of Trickster's manifestations is Br'er Rabbit, from the cotton plantations of the Old South. Another, diluted and humanoid, is James Bond. Trickster, however is not the only 'animal' character to whom people respond in similar ways worldwide. There are standard human responses to snakes, to the big cats, such as tigers, and to eagles. Furthermore, these responses make a pattern, which is the same everywhere.
Women, Men, and Children
The suburban semi-detached house is misleading to people who live in industrial societies, because it groups a woman, a man and some children together, but cuts them off form everybody around them, who might form a community with them. In the majority of societies there are three sub-societies: women, men, and children. Women spend most of their time with women, men with men, and children, away from adults, with children. The key to the separate groupings appears to be provided b y menstruation and childbirth which sets adult fertile women in contrast to children, men - and women post-menopause. Fertile women are metaphysically 'radioactive', far more powerful and dangerous than other people; and thus social, and spatial, relations in a community are arranged around the fertile women. In Britain and other industrial societies these contrasts are blurred over, but are very clear in most societies, where fertile women are 'closer' to the superhuman powers than ar other people. This is particularly clear, for example, in the Indian Major Cultural Region and in New Guinea.
Myth: Joan of Arc
The French national myth in its present form is built around a sequence of events between February and July 1429. In that period the Plantagenet bid to be the kings of France suffered a serious setback, from which there was no subsequent recovery. Indeed the longer sequence of events between 1420 and 1456 is a wonderland for story tellers and mythologists, because the narrative of those years is 'the story that has everything'. Once you are firmly familiar with the events connected with the girl the English now call Joan of Arc, you know everything that needs to be known about myths. Her story is built around the theme of 'the little guy who beats the system', and includes a version of the theme 'return of the King'. Featuring also are 'the secrets that must not be revealed' and 'to be successful you must do it three times'. An archangel and two saints guided Joan on her road to victory, and she operated as a prophet on the borderland between the superhuman and the human. The story is a wonderland indeed - but after five and a half centuries still does not go down too well in England!
Myths as 'Charters And Programmers'
This is the first of three lectures on myths, a term which can be defined in various different ways. There is no likelihood now that one standard definition will ever be agreed by specialists on myths.Whatever the definition in use, mythical narratives are always set in the past, and many sound like 'history'. However, the past is difficult to reconstruct, and attempts to write a 'history' of what happened involves interpretation which may distort what did happen. Myths, on the other hand, may sound very convincing, as a version of the past. Examples are Joan of Arc, already detailed, and the English obsession with the year 1066.
Myths: Patterns, History, Truth, and Fiction
In English the word 'myth' is often used to mean a statement which is not true, but when the English speak of the myths of the Greeks (Pre-classical, Classical and Hellenistic) they are referring to stories which the people who told and heard them regarded as, in some sense, true. Once people accept that myths of their area are basically true, they sometimes elaborate them by fictional processes, without therefore necessarily abandoning the basic truth of the myths. One example is Athenian classical ritual dramas by, for instance, Aeschylus, based on well established stories of the past. Another example is the elaboration of King Arthur stories in Western Europe, and a more modem example is Hollywood spectaculars based on the Bible. The key problem is the word 'truth'. Basically, truth is what people believe, and what people believe is true - in their experience. 'Truth' does not describe a set of 'facts' which exist in their own right, but a response by particular people in a particular context. The only way to equate truth with facts is to say that what GOD believes is true. Seen from all human points of view, myths always revolve around the pattern: Fall: Creation: failure: success. Just as it is difficult, or impossible, to separate myths from history, so it is difficult, or impossible, to separate myths from fiction. Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' was described as fiction by its author, but convinced some readers that it had a non-fictional foundation; whereas Bergamini's 'Japan's Imperial Conspiracy' was seen as history, i.e. non-fiction, by its author, but was dismissed by some historians as an historical novel, i.e. fiction.
The best way to find your way through the maze of myths is to know some. A constructive approach is to take one part of the world, and know the myths of, say, India or China really well.
Magic
'Magic' is one of those words which has so many meanings that it has none which is precise. It is, however, a word which many people readily use, and its powerful and mysterious character account for its many meanings. If it has any meaning which is precise enough to be technical, it is: that body of rituals and assumptions which are neither truly orthodox and respectable nor truly obscene and evil. 'Magic' in this sense flourishes in societies where people are, at least nominally, Jewish, Christian or Muslim.
Systems of Ritual and Belief; The Peculiar Features of Affluent 'Post-modern' Industrial Societies
The model which is used in this series is one for you to test. There are possibilities for modifying and expanding the original version, but certain elements provide the basis:
people are inferior to gods, but superior to 'animals';
something has gone wrong with the world;
the inhabited area which is our home is relatively safe compared to the wild 'outside'
areas - but nowhere is really safe;
certain methods (rituals) work and thereby protect us from harm;
people have three major sources of tension:
fear of dying;
disgust at sexual behaviour;
horror of being animals.