Controversies in Anthropology

elective courses

The course is dedicated to graduate students (studenci II stopnia)

- Knowledge of English on the B2 level, both written and oral.

Paraphrasing a common saying, you can state: show me your controversies and I’ll tell who you are. Controversies are crucial to science as such as any kind of scholarship evolves in constant polemics, dispute, denial, invalidation, and rebutting. However, it seems that among various academic disciplines it is anthropology that is especially prone to various controversies and scandals. In general, one can divide them into three types: controversies over credibility of one’s fieldwork results; over an ethical dimension of one’s work; and over broadly understood political engagement of anthropologists.

During the course, we are going to cover all these dimensions by investigating a few scandals that virtually shook the entire discipline, such as the Mead-Freeman controversy, the Tasaday debate, or the postmodernist critique of anthropological authority. These controversies not only exposed deep cracks in the disciplinary sense of collective identity but also brought anthropological problems to a wider audience far beyond the academia. With its central doubt “Who we are to speak for them?”, anthropology is controversial in itself. At the same time, however, as Clifford Geertz put it, “In our confusion is our strength”. This seems right, because it is due to the controversies that anthropology developed progressive methodology and ethical standards that were subsequently taken over by other disciplines. How is the anthropological knowledge constructed? What status does it have? What is the role of researcher in the process of research? What do anthropology and other social sciences really investigate and what can we have out of it? These are but a few questions that will accompany us during the course.

Asad, T. (ed.) (1973) Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter, London: Ithaca Press.

Borofsky, R. (2005) Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn From It, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Castillo, Rosa. 2008. “The Tasaday Twenty Four Years After.” AghamTao - Journal of the Anthropological Association of the Philippines 17: 75–83.

Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 2000. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Freeman, Derek. 1996. Margaret Mead and the Heretic: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. New York: Penguin Books.

Headland, T. (ed.) (1992) The Tasaday Controversy: Assessing the Evidence, Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.

Hyndman, David, and Levita Duhaylungsod. 1990. “The Development Saga of the Tasaday: Gentle Yesterday, Hoax Today, Exploited Forever?” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 22 (4): 38–54.

Kent, S. (1992) ‘The Current Forager Controversy: Real versus Ideal Views of Hunter-Gatherers’, Man 27(1): 45–70.

Obeyesekere, G. (1992) The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1989. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. London: The Athlone Press.

Mead, Margaret. 1973. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. New York: Morrow.

Sahlins, M. (1985) Islands of History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wax, M. L., ‘Tenting with Malinowski, American Sociological Review’, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Feb., 1972), pp. 1-13.

a. Knowledge:

An alumni:

- knows and uses terminology of the humanities and social sciences (K_W02)

- knows and uses methods of analysis and interpretation of texts of culture (K_W04)

- understands connections between cultural actions and social change (K_W10) .

b. Skills:

An alumni:

- is able to independently select information coming from various scientific, academic, public-interest sources, press and other sources and critically assess those sources (K_U01)

- is able to independently formulate a research problem in the humanities and social sciences (K_U04)

- uses interdisciplinary methods and research tools for analysis of different phenomena of the culture (K_U05)

- prepares written works according to academic standards (K_U07).

c. Social competences:

An alumni:

- is ready for a dynamic scientific development within the humanities and social sciences and follows new methods and research paradigms (K_K02)

- respects principles of tolerance and demonstrates a sensitivity in viewing cultural differences (K_K05)

- respects cultural and natural diversity (K_K07).

- 4 short papers (2-pages-long) (80%)

- Class participation (20%)