Terms

Autism Spectrum Disorder

What is autism: developmental disorder that affects communication and behavior

How autism is viewed

- first appeared as negative symptom of schizophrenia (show lil emotion, withdrawn)
in Medical 203 (1943)
- people don’t like the term autism bc implies helplessness
o didn’t like the relation of autism to “mental retardation”
o would refer to autism as aspergers = “high functioning autism”
 but aspergers disappeared from DMS 2013
o now we have the autism disorder spectrum
 The concept of autism = more broad
 Spectrum allows more nuanced diagnosis, significance to labeling and
treatment

- when reported diagnosis of autism rose, ppl thought an epidemic of autism was
happening.

Situated in Readings:
grinker: unstranged minds
In “Unstrange Minds”, Grinker attempts to refute the theory that autism is an “epidemic”
by explaining how autism is being perceived differently than it was in the past.

- “Prevalence” for autism is rising because: we have a better awareness of the

disorder, children are diagnosed earlier, autism is now diagnosed separately from
schizophrenia (the DSM keeps changing), the concept of autism has been broadened
(a wider spectrum), and autism replaces some diagnoses of other disorders like
mental retardation, and it is being counted differently. In brief, we are just changing
the definition of autism so it fits more people, there isn’t necessarily “more” autism.

Main idea: autism is a cultural category that is always changing in relation to our culture
and history. There isn’t more autism than in the past, now we diagnose more people with it.

Significance:
How autism relates to labeling (discussion section):
 - If we identify certain genes relate to autism… will those then forever define them?
Would it lead us to try to eliminate the autistic genes?
- Linked to genetics is the concept of Race -- In science, race doesn’t matter at all
- Race is a social classification is based on perceived biological differences such as
heritage
- Science says it doesn’t matter, but is used b/c it provides us with a way to classify
the world
- We employ social distinctions, and then mistake those distinctions for biological
ones (ex. Skin color)

- Related to authenticity = verifiable and real from multiple perspectives; some

symptoms may not be considered as an “authentic” disease by some cultures

Quoting Grinker: “A disorder even one with a clear cause or biomarker is only one when a
society construes it as such”.
- Autism as a disease is a construct to understand how humans have different levels
of social functioning as an effort to bring them into normalcy

Branch out Concepts:

- DSM: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

o Turns traits into conditions, subject to cultural changes
 Shyness = anxiety
 Sadness = depression
o Developed by US War Dept as Medical 203 (1943) to identify new terms for
mental for soldiers who were discharged for mental psychiatric
 Later changed for civilian use as the DSM, codified traits as diseases
framed under war-time psychiatric culture
 Disorders identified as “deviance” in character, intelligence, behavior
 Autism was added in 1953 in DSM-1

o Significance:
 Highlights the problem with psychiatry
 Diagnosis based on consensus of cluster systems of symptoms,
instead of lab tests
 To the patient: Mental health symptoms treated as language
to express psychological pain, not as a biological fact
  Labeling a condition in DSM stigmatizes it as a disease to be
cured, i.e. homosexuality was taken off the DSM in 1972 but
the term still carried the same stigma
 Blurry lines: when does shyness turn into social anxiety, need
to have a clear threshold
 Anthropology can provide as a check to psychiatry by
questioning the external social factors of medical diagnosis to
prevent misdiagnosis
Prevalence/Incidence

What is it?
Prevalence: number of cases in a given population – proportion of cases
Incidence: number of new cases in a given pop – rate of occurrence

Are more ppl being classified as having the disease or are more people actually getting the
disease?
- Incidence relates to availability of service.
o People quick to label rising labeling of a disease with an epidemic bc they
want to find the “cause” to the spread to understand how they can stop it
 Want to hold something/someone accountable

Why is it a problem?
- Overdiagnosis lead to stigmatization and inappropriate treatment (hinshaw, adhd
explosion)
o Culture determines rate of diagnosis
 Less strict Economic, regulatory policies of meds = higher number of
diagnosis
 Historical, political, and cultural values placed on academic
achievement
 Wealth is a good predictor of how much adhd med is used
 Norway 1990-2000 = ADHD med up 20x, more identified with
the disease
 Brazil = repressive military, education based on
constructivism, doesn’t recognize individual differences, like
adhd.
 - Paradoxical insecurity (Dumit: is it me or my brain?)  insecurities cause Americans
to increase consumption of prescription drugs and rates of diagnostic tests
o Culture created this new norm that being at risk of adverse health effects is
expected, if you aren’t that means there is something you don’t know
o Objective self-fashioning: only believe they have illness via received facts
 Images of the brain (CAT, MRI)
 Popular media: ads, TV shows and movies, newspaper
 Doctors diagnosis
 Medical research journals

Question is: does these forms of mediascapes add to the stigma of mental health issues or help
prevent them?
- Good for preventive interventions, however could add to fear of uncertainty and
self-diagnosis  take meds they don’t need
- Normalization of mental illness  romanticizing and reductionism of what it means
to have these illnesses
o How diseases are defined not clear
o Arbitrary threshold = patients get meds they don’t need

Significance: understand individual causes of why people seek care and how they view people
who seek care help explain group consciousness on how they view the ill.
- Social and health implications
o Wrong diagnosis + stigmatization = social psychosis, death? And
marginalization

Culture of Poverty: Practices that keep people socially immobile

What is it? Social theory that asserts those experiencing poverty under impoverished conditions
will continue to live under poverty given the way social structures and popular practice prevent
social mobility.
- Internalizing why they deserve to be poor affect views of agency thus mentally
constraining them in this bubble

- Burden of care
o Manda Bala Movie
 Security is not provided by the state, so individuals have to take their
own measures: bulletproof glass, arm themselves
o Biehl: assigned to the family by law (during anti-asylum movement 1970s)
 - Dehumanization  neolib  worth = ability to contribute to society
o Brazil’s emphasis on market values = social immobility for those constrained
by lower classes of society
o Process of production change the way social relationships are formed,
people valued for their contribution to society and their productivity,
simply being a human isn’t enough

Significance: culture of poverty = political in nature.

- Lead to lack of interest in poverty alleviation because see no use in it.
o i.e. of this kind of thinking: increasing income of the poor will not change
their lifestyles, but is a waste of money they are funneling to self-destructing
pits.
o People who don’t study poverty, make assumptions, discourage bc sees the
alleviation of poverty as futile
Zones of Social Abandonment
o An area where the economically and socially unproductive individuals are
placed and excluded from society bc they don’t fit anywhere in societal
structures
 Vita: originally created as a rehab center for drug addiction and
alcoholism, but eventually transformed into an “infirmary” where the
mentally ill and abandoned people go to await death.
o Stigma of certain human conditions, framing it as a disease = barriers to care

Basics of João Biehl

- Brazilian Anthropologist interested in the field of medical anthropology.
o Explores the effects of pharmaceutical globalization on marginal populations,
look at networks of care the poor have.
- He grew up in an area outside of Porto Alegre, where vita is located in.
- He used to travel and work in several poor neighborhoods in the area before coming
to vita. Nothing compared to the inhumanity of vita.

- What vita explored:

o Effects of capitalism and urbanization (links bonhomme traffic relations)
o Public anthropology  wedel
o New ethnographic method (single participant observation to explain entire
system)
3 problems he outlined:
- Inner worlds are remade under economic pressure
o Denial of citizenship, social distance in family of unproductive member,
isolation from community
o Catarina had more worth as a mom, but ever since she lost the ability to care
for a child, her “economic” value decreased
 Represents new meaning-making of domestic economies
- Domestic role of meds as “moral technology”
o “we are giving her meds, that’s all we are responsible for”
o “she has meds, she doesn’t need us”
o “we cannot afford meds and she is not making money” = lifeboat ethics at
play
 Leads to social psychosis  overmedication

- Emergence of neoliberal ethics that let the unproductive to care for themselves
o Perpetuates cyclical psychiatric labeling  you have doctors, family, and
meds that convinced you are ill  conform to labels  intractable
 i.e. Catarina labeled as crazy and bad dismiss any discussion of history
and biology
 even the label patient denies credibility of Catarina to assess
her own well-being
 no one believed her when she said her husband Nilson was
abusing her and her children
o being in a psychiatric institution makes everything you
do and say admissible
Readings:
- Vita: Part 1
o Referenced mauss: social death = actual death
o Culture of poverty: given that those in poverty cannot provide for their own
livelihood = hence not able to contribute to society = not worthy of
affection/care
 Once removed from society, they are made to think they are headed
for death and die for this reason

- Vita  place for death through functions of exclusion, non-recognition, and

abandonment
o Why is it a zone of social abandonment? No direct agency or responsibility
for dying in vita
 o Stripped off status as citizens = don’t contribute, don’t vote
o Hospitals can legally turn away people if they don’t have proper ID

- Failing healthcare system of state shifts burden of care onto families.

Significance of biehl:
- Contributed to importance of public anthropology
o Concerned with topics outside of the discipline itself, his work “vita”
o Impact of policy on human relations (link to wedel)
 Global  local
 print capitalism: exclude people on basis of education

Scheper-Hughes, Death without weeping: mothers in brazil dealt with grief over loss of her
children with indifference bc death is natural and anticipated
- Given having to live under poverty, perceived that they are rescuing the child by
letting them die; better off that way
o Good death > extend bad life
- Detachment of mothers towards babies  high morality
o Selective neglect = active survival strategies
o Death becomes less personal
o Relate to labeling  infants expected to die, so they die.
- Structural violence contributed to this symbolic violence  deaths don’t need to be
reported, no requirement for medical record. Poor social security programs. Lifeboat
ethics = justification.
o Related to farmer’s article: cultural difference acts as an alibi to violence

Manda Bala  Favelas

- State tries to control crime by physically building barriers between the rich and the
poor. Confining crime to the poorer regions make these communities a hot-bed for
crime.
- Left to fend for themselves
- Many are ruled by drug lords who traffic cocaine and encourage gang violence
- These are associated with moral failings of community
- Impoverished communities seen as evidence of physical and social ills bringing
disease into society

Traffic relationships: relationship limited to minimal acknowledgement of each other while

sharing same social space
(Bonhomme, Beware the Sex Thieves)
- Premise: fearful of their genitals disappearing, Nigerians would avoid all contact with
strangers
- Physical contact (handshake) /exchange glances / verbal exchange (greeting) seen as
an intrusion of one’s privacy bc these insinuates a relationship
- Response to openness of borders, fear of outsiders (link: appadurai globalization)
- Fear of genital theft = actually fear of threat to individual identity
- Link to how people view homelessness = zones of abandonment

Pharmaceuticalization
o Society defines norms. Only dysfunctions that are socially disvalued are
disorders. Basically, translated human suffering and distress as disease.
(Farmer: suffering and structural violence)

 Biehl: catarina’s relational breakdowns framed as medical condition =

contributed to her gene expression and immune depression

Symbolic Violence: calling it psychiatric, not genetic increases moral distance of obligation to
help, justifies abandonment
- Link to murphy, west vs. non-west view of blaming mental illness on the patient

Example: technoscapes, paradoxical insecurity as described by dumit

- How doctors, medical imaging, and lab tests convince one of being ill
o New norm of being at risk of health issues
o Lead to people spending money on meds they don’t need, stigmatization of
those who can’t afford medicine = cycle of poverty

Structural Violence:
- $$$ for the industry  widening diagnosis parameters to keep ‘em buying more
meds
- overdosing patients to keep em passive – form of social control
- social stratification  deny poor access to healthcare
- Bc of poverty = cannot access doctors for proper diagnosis
- No diagnosis = lead to fam turning to practices of non-knowledge and dissimulation

Abu-Lughod: “cultural framing limits exploration of the roots and nature of human suffering”
o Post 9-11, she was asked to give cultural explanations of why this happened,
instead of political or historical ones
 o In an effort to make something abstract more concrete, people tend to
reduce explanations to “othering” to remove blame of one’s people

 Significance: how do you prevent confusing cultural difference with

structural violence? Recognize that interpretation of suffering done
along cultural lines.
 Cultural difference not a justification for suffering
o Poverty and the condition it produces are not the same
as culture
 By assigning diagnosis to any behavior or lifestyle that deviate
from norm, society ignores processes and structural injustices
by which these conditions are created and maintained.

Psychiatric labeling/labeling theory (Murphy)

- Epidemic wouldn’t exist if people weren’t willing to believe in them

o “Were” = Yoruba word for insanity (Nigeria)
 hearing voices, randomly laughing, tearing off clothes, setting fires,
breaking things, picking up leaves and sticks w/o purpose
o Nuthkavihak = “Being Crazy” eskimos
 Eskimos have 2 words used to label those with mental problems
when different numbers of symptoms are observed: those with only
1-2 traits = thin, while 3-4 existing at the same time = insane.
 Distinction between thin and insane is the degree of control
o Eskimos and yorubas view mental illness from a terminal point of view, while
in the west, mental illness explains minor stages of mental problems.

Western vs. Non-Western Societies

- Urban individuals in western nations who see visions are schizophrenic
o Shamans who see visions are seen as spiritual holy people
o For eskimos, distinction appears as degree these “symptoms” can be
controlled and utilized for a specific social function.
 Fortune teller, faith healer, shamanism
 Can be learned/unlearned, while insanity is involuntary

Significance: The way societies label conditions can affect whether or not individuals progress
despite their condition or regress because of it, because of this the most accurate label must be
applied to the condition to warrant the best treatment, especially in cultures where labels allow
individuals to understand their world and their relation to other members of the society.

Both cultures do not blame the insane for their actions, but do blame those who
deviate from the norm without a medical/mental reason. In both cultures, indigenous healing
methods are used and the community comes together to protect or aid the insane.

This is important because Murphy seeks to show how traditional labeling (in the
developed world) is often stigmatizing, which is only made more severe by cultural institutions.
These two cultures have a word for the insane that does not blame them for their differences,
which is unique when contrast with the developed world. Murphy also seeks to show that
mental illness in a cultural stereotype that measures one’s social deviance (which is determined
arbitrarily in different societies).
- Labeling lead to social psychosis
o Mental state in which a person shows a diminished or loss of a sense of
reality
 Delusions and diminished capacity to function effectively in daily life.
Esp. when their perceived “disease” reinforced by doctors, lab
imaging.  received facts, objective self-fashioning. (DUMIT)
 Individuals who received diagnosis conform to certain behavioral
norms, destroy creativity and enforce helplessness (MURPHY)
 Catarina: addressing her as “bad” and “crazy” as her state of being =
legitimately dismisses any discussion of history and biology (Biehl)
Readings:
- Big themes of Vita: effects of urbanization and capitalism
o What made vita different: Biehl experimented with new ethnographic
method: focus on one subject to explain whole system

- Vita, Biehl, Social Psychosis

o Widespread availability of psychiatric drugs on the market makes framed
habitants of vita as mental an easier solution than actually treating them
 Use of medication is also a social tool
 Overdosing patients creates a passive patient community
o Easier on weak state infrastructures to continue
functioning
o Meds substitute lack of social links
 Makes loss of links irreversible and legitimizes
the abandonment of unwanted persons
  When they become aggressive after being forcibly medicated,
it is treated as a symptom of mental illness

- Hospitals used to be the place where they used to confine those with “public
disorders”, level of health used as tool to socially exclude people
- Use to deal with overpopulation, concepts of citizenships and mental health used by
politicians to limit number of ppl in the city

- 1970s anti-asylum struggles: THINGS ARE LOOKIN UP

 debiologize pathology and socialize suffering
 start considering that symptoms one sees are bc of socioeconomic
conditions
 now care is up to each person’s families, often medication stands in
for broken family dynamics
 the person is not sick, but it’s the family that needs to be healed
 “moral economy” = keep patients ill to keep family happy w/o having
to address underlying problems
 i.e. catarina’s release from hospitalization dependent on her ability to
re-establish tie with her husband.

- Structural violence and symbolic violence fits here.

o Structural: social arrangements that harms people and prevent them from
reaching their actual potential; historically given and economically driven
processes that constrain individual agency to attain basic needs
 Not driven by individual will
 Social stratification where those of higher socioeconomic class =
greater chances of survival
 Examples: poverty, racism, sexism, ageism, elitism, classism
 Although it’s said to be invisible, we can point to a number of
influences that shape it: identifiable institutions, relationships,
ideologies, discriminatory laws, etc.

o Symbolic: symbolic systems (words, images, and practice) promote interests

of dominant groups, distinction and hierarchies of ranking between them
through complex interlocking political, social, and cultural forces to legitimize
structures of social inequality
 i.e. the way a media covers an event, 9/11  targets muslims
  example in vita: Catarina is medicated against her will, but the
symbolic violence is the way her family treated her and the fact that
they never visit her
 Dislocation and migration; Homelessness = “lazy bums, are poor bc
they don’t want to work”
 Stigma towards homosexuality impede prevention efforts of HIV/AIDs
Haiti (Farmer, on Suffering and Structural Violence)

- i.e. Dark Side of Face and Honor by Hinton

- the genocide did not happen bc of this structure alone, but the use of adopting
preexisting cultural models ideologically motivated genocidal acts
o historical model of natural inequality
 age, sex, familial background, birth order, occupation, wealth,
education determines who holds highest position in society
 now it is determined by how much you can suppress your feelings
and kill the “enemy of the state”
- structured honor competition  subordinates expected to compete to outperform
each other to satisfy superior
o defensive honor competition: leader’s challenge their subordinates honor
and loyalty by questioning if they can “cut off their heart” and kill
 if you fail to do this, you will be shamed
o offensive honor competition: people compete to kill the most people in
order to climb the social ladder

Labeling theory: if you have a name for something, you create conditions and parameters in
which to ascribe people into social categories
- Comes back and justifies existence of the term
- Determines in and out group
- Travesti – Soccer, Sex, and Scandal by Kulick
o Define: male who often in childhood find that they prefer female activities,
behavior, and objects of desire
 No desire to modify their genitals
o Ronaldo having sex with a travesti
 Confused many of his fans and the media bc he was regarded as an
icon of masculinity
 When he got caught, he had to explicitly say he was not a homosexual
to defend his masculinity
  challenging what was assumed to be common practice among
heterosexual men
o Significance: labeling theory abnormalizes concepts, beliefs, and people
through putting them in categories
o They are now different because of their category
o Now sexual practice = sexual identity
 Raise question: why do society feel the need to categorize people
based on their sexual preferences?

- Homosexuality – Halperin 100 years of Homosexuality

o There used to be a distinction between sexual attraction and identity that
entails the expectation of certain behaviors and character having been
ascribed the term
 Greeks don’t have the term. Man on man relationships normalized,
sexual habits not an identity.
 There was only sexual inversion before the term homosexuality
 It is the range of deviant gender behavior
o Women who work, men who have sex with men
 Created in 1892, naming = inventing
 Before homosexuality had negative connotation, same sex people not
afraid to express affections to one another
 Creation of term = binary opposition 2 sexual orientations = hetero /
homo
 Since identities are binary oppositions, we look at
homosexuality from a structuralist method
o Homosexuality not created by culture, but rather it
operates within a culture bc it is a social construct
o Significance within the social construct of the term
 Society has a need for this construction, not mentally created

Neoliberalism
o The way in which economic logic pervades parts of our lives that are not
economic
 Produces rational actors and imposes market rationale
 Individual worth measured by own ability to care for themselves

Related key words: alienation of commodities, images and idea that underlying relations
of productions are amassed (authenticity bc market determine what is authentic)
 o Alienation: process by which worker is made to feel foreign to the products
of their labor
 3 types of alienation (Karl Marx – Das Kapital)
 Producer to product: producer has no rights to the product,
instead product belongs to the market
 Person to person: market determines social identity
 Person to nature: see nature as a resource to exploit, world
becomes a commodity
- Structural violence and symbolic violence also fits here.

Readings:
- Preparedness - Lakoff
o Catastrophic events are inevitable so society must prepare for them
o Whether through state or non-state actors
 Insurance: apply economic value to life
o Argues reflexive modernity is undermining importance of preparedness
 Reliance on modern institutions make us vulnerable to threats
because we become unable to adapt and overcome catastrophe
 i.e. internet or transportation
o Ideas came from Civil Defense Act 1950
 Plans to defend oneself from nuclear war during the cold War
 Conceals income inequality and systemic racism = explain lack of
infrastructure

- Taussig – the Devil and Commodity Fetishism

o Commodity fetishism transforms subjective (abstract aspects of economic
value) to objective (real things ppl believe have instrinsic value)
 Perception of goods in terms of exchange-value, Ignores Social
relations involved in production

1. Show how concept of commodity fetishism has evolved

o Bolivia and Colombia: devil represents process of alienation from production,
sees market econ. = evil and unnatural
 Group rituals to the devil to protect from accidents, devil is seen as
owner to the mine and its minerals

2. communities to resist capitalist expansion

 o Landless wage laborers invoke the devil as part of the process of increasing
production
o Capitalism = contract with the devil
o View capitalist market clashing with tribal and native people
o Those who worked with the devil = any money gained is poison, all crops
grown will rot, the wage laborer who did this will suffer poverty, death
 Being part of the capitalist system = you are evil, perpetuating cycle
of inequality
 This signifies that the devil is used to resist capitalism
 This is a functionalist response to limited good and capitalism

Significance of Taussig
- Critical anth: analysis of society through view point where market is beginning to
dominate but society hasn’t been fully transformed by capitalism
o Gives an insight to how we define the natural order and the extent to which
our world is shaped by the capitalist society we live in

- Appadurai: Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy

o Main idea: world is one, interactive, large system with a series of subsystems
 Ethnoscape: migration across cultures and borders
 Technoscape: new cultural interactions and exchanges through
technology
 Finanscape: global capital movement add to unpredictability of other
global cultural flows
 Mediascapes: media shape imagined world we inhabit
 Narratives and image form “globalized” opinion about a place
or a culture
 Ideoscapes: ideologies of government
 How one sees terms of freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty
o i.e. in IA, we have liberalism, realism, feminism,
communism

o Argues that marx’s commodity fetishism is replaced by production fetishism

and fetishism of the consumer
 Production fetishism: describe how fetish disguises global processes
involved in a product
  i.e. shirt you wear is produced from textiles, labor, buttons of
different countries. But this is not important to consumer bc
creates world of faraway workers.
 Fetishism of the consumer: explain how consumer is transformed by
commodity flows at unprecedented levels + disappearing cultural
differences
 Consumer believes they are an actor, but they are actually a
chooser. Options are given, not created by the consumer.
Significance:
- Deterritorialization: interconnectedness of cultural identity extending outside of
where we physically live
o i.e. remittances, laborers go into lower class structure of wealthy societies,
bring money back home = their livelihood going somewhere they aren’t
physically in

Authenticity: “particular image of what a certain person should look and act like” and if they
don’t fit these standards, then they are denied their identity

What determines authenticity?

- Presentation
- Description: how real is it – rituals, continuous habits
- Alteration: observer must visibly see connection to ethnic identity

These three aspects change the value of a person to another. i.e. Abu-Lughod was allowed in
the Bedouin community because she was an “authentic muslim”

Mediascapes (Appadurai): as a medium to propagate ideas of authenticity

o Many media outlets shape the “imagined world” we inhabit
 Narratives and images = how people form an opinion about a place,
its people, and their culture
 As a scape, subjective to an individual. Fluid, constantly shifting just as
cultures are.
 Fetishism of the consumer: Illusion of choice  ads direct people
what to buy, they are not a chooser in what they believe in

o Big theme: ongoing tension between cultural homogenization and

heterogenization
  Central feature of world today according to him = politics of mutual
effort of sameness and difference lead us to cannibalizing one
another
 Key word: deterritorialization  when people migrate cutting off
their local political and social ties and making the culture in which
they move in as part of their own
 i.e. is a Chinatown in the US authentically Chinese?
Mashpee:
o Clifford discusses legal trial between Mashpee right to identify as a Native
tribe. Clifford mentioned issue of race playing a role in the validation of their
claim.
 Intermarriage, mixed blood. “not pure indians”
o They were also called out for their conversion to Christianity, defendants
claim that they have abandoned their Indian ways and assimilated with white
culture.
o Big point of contention: court ruled that they did not have a long-standing
tradition of being organized together politically within a recognized
hierarchical structure
 Mashpee had no use for leadership structures until they were
colonized
 One should not use a European model to define what native
American culture should look like
-
o Lacked kinship ties because community formed as emergency response to
the plague by survivors.
 Argument against: they are part of the same cape cod indian
groupings. Movement across territories were common, they are
related by culture, language, faith, and trade.

 Trial shows arbitrary means in which society dictates what a native

tribe is.
 Mashpee didn’t meet these criteria of authenticity the court
had.

o Significance:
 Different experts offered varying opinions based on their experience
= show how subjective authenticity and anthropological analysis can
be.
  implications of labeling and authenticity in denial of identity and
rights.  structural violence.

- Toward an anthropology of Public Policy by Wedel

 Study policy to separate political bias from seemingly neutral
statements
 1993 Native Title Act in Australia: law will recognize rights and
interests of Australian aboriginals only in lands they can prove they’ve
inhabited through history
 ignores forcible removal and relocation of this group: they
often cannot prove traditional continuity in their lands to fulfill
court’s satisfaction
o Significance: Anth. offers social organizational approach that highlights
structures and processes that ground, order, and give direction to policies.
 Explores how policy discourses sustain connections between
individuals, orgs, and institutions (even if those involved never have
direct contact
 Social network analysis can be applied to other fields: conflict
studies, security policy, counterterrorism
Ethnicity fits here.
o How you identify yourself and how others see you based on shared
perceived common descent, culture, and history.
 Authenticity is how you closely align with these perceptions of what
ethnic group one belongs to
 There is a spectrum to be observed
 Ethnicity is a nation without locality

Print capitalism (Appadurai) theory’s relation to ethnicity:

- All the scapes shape the global cultural economy.
- Theory behind concept of a nation that rose from common language and discourse
generated from the use of printing press, proliferated by capitalist marketplace
o Readers who speak different dialects can understand each other even tho
they think of themselves in different communities bc of the distinction in
dialects
 Seeing how the fit into social system without having to fight = show
no conflict

this leads to the homogenization of culture, which evokes feelings of nationalism.

 Imagined community: what makes someone like you?
- Modern nationalism involving communities of citizens in territorially defined nation-
state who share the collective experience of print capitalism instead of being under
the subordination of a royal figure or through face-to-face contact.
Religion, race, language, physical features?
- How does genetic knowledge affect the way you behave or choose what to wear?
o Why do we reduce a community identity with one-two traits/articles of
clothing?
o Who has the authority to speak for a group’s identity?

Significance: give insight to see what people find important in their identity and how ethnicity
affects interaction and interpersonal relationships
- Provide explanation to why people act the way they do

Nationalism
o Devotion and loyalty to a nation vs. a state (patriotism)
o Origins in how identity is conceived (ascribed and avowed identity)
 Ascribed: process of having an identity assigned to you by others
 Avowed: we fit ourselves into our idea of what is allowed and
expected of the identities we envision for ourselves

Hans Kohn: it’s a state of mind where one is loyal to their homeland

- James Clifford looked into ethnicity and nationalism in 1980s

o Assumed people lived in nations, world is divided into nations based on
identity, assume worse punishment is to be exiled
 Nation becomes ethnicity when entire group goes into exile
 Mashpee and their national identity and sovereignty over their land
(boston, the plague emergency, built community of survivors)

Forms of nationalism: religious, cultural, ethnic, and pan

- Why is nationalism and ethnicity produced by collectives? To achieve specific
political and economic interests. Esp. with aim to maintain sovereignty over
homeland.
Benedict Anderson
- Cultural component = social membership – part of the “imagined community”
  Nation is not a social org, but an ideology
- modern phenomenon after the French Revolution
 French revolution
 Those living in southern france not aware of what is
happening in the north.
 Change from latin to French
 Preference towards self-governance than monarchy
 Don’t share imagined community with the north
 Takeaway: differences of Language and politics contribute to social
distance thus towards nationalism.

- Négritude = non-violent revolt against colonialism developed by Senghor and Aimé

cesaire
o Restore validity of African culture and black consciousness
o Acceptance of European racial discourse but is a source of empowerment
o Depicted pan-africanism, imagined Africa as a woman, emotional and
rhymtic
 Contrasted to Europe who is male, cold and calculative
Fanon
- National ID cannot emerge from reconstruction of past but must be from present
day fight against colonial forces
o Believes that there is no common destiny shared by entire African continent
- Big theme: determining the authenticity of an identity

Readings:
Hinton – Cambodian Genocide: cultural models theory of knowledge structures, culture of
obedience to authority and the state. Nationalism shined when Khmer rouge created peasant-
based communist society: suppressed language that connote class and status differences, men
and women equal work.
Bonhomme – gossip is used as a way to reaffirm collective values in community by stigmatizing
deviant behavior
- Fear of genital theft lead to traffic relationships and gossip as a way to protect
against outsiders
o unifies membership within community and relations of its members
o collective response system to threats through gossip and lynching
 form of unity from shared experience of risk (preparedness)
 - relation to nationalism: perpetrators are always strangers, it is a culturally specific
reaction to globalization
o witchcraft is fit into an urban cultural, pre-existing framework
- significance: a way of reacting psychologically to changing environments by defining
self within “in-group”
Politico-cultural groups are created in status movements (Woolard, language prison)
- i.e. English-only campaign
o movement against bilingualism culminated in a series of alienating non-
native English speakers from the education system and voting in elections
o status movements express ambivalence of social life with “outsiders”
 Woolard thinks that proposition O that aimed to get rid of election
materials in other languages show Americans projecting the dark side
of political processes (bossism, interest groups, professional
politicians) onto outsiders
o How does this create nationalism?
 Othering non-native speakers draws line between who is American
and who is not
 The former being well-informed to make rational decisions to choose
the best candidate, and the latter being uniformed, apathetic, and
not having the best interest of the nation

Significance of ethnicity and nationalism:

1. How citizenship and social position is viewed
Social membership vs. legal acknowledgement
- The law is a social institution, but social membership is an imagined community
- i.e. immigrants feel they are part of the US, even without citizenship
o membership and citizenship go together, but not always
 ties into the broader question: who gets to decided who one is and
what does this social categorization entail in terms of their power,
rights, and privileges
- knowing social dynamics of groups could help undercover social, historical, and
cultural consequences of racial and ethnic differences.
2. Understand how people group themselves and relate to one another, how diversity
contributes to cooperation and how it might translate to conflict
- Implications of a globalized system of meaning