Introduction to Sociology - Culture and Ethnocentrism - Part 1

one of the things that I thought about over my weekend was the fact that I've been giving you the names of famous people and important people in the heritage of sociology really end in the heritage of social science and I and you don't know what they look like and I decided to make a change in that also I'm not very good on dates and I fear are given you know dates or wrong dates and it's time to time to make amends and so let's just let's just talk about these people just for a moment these are people I've already mentioned but now you know how handsome and gorgeous they are so first we have Auguste Comte as the name implies a French theorist and a comped no matter what else he did or didn't do for sociology he gave us our name and all he did was combine the word social with the ology and so there's lots of ologies out there and all you do is put something in front of that in front of that last clause and you're in business and there he was he he lived 1798 to 1857 he called sociology the queen of the social sciences trying to work out the role for each one for what we today called political science geography anthropology and he thought sociology was the I almost said kingpin we don't say queen pin but the the mother of everything else whoops I went to I went too harsh on this later on 1818 is born our friend Karl Marx who said that the goal of social thought is not to just understand society but to change it workers of the world unite you have nothing to lose but your chains that's when he lived and in many circles Karl Marx is primarily regarded as a rabble rouser as a political figure he did that live the life of a rabble-rouser at all he was a bookworm and is regarded as one of the great thinkers one of the great thinkers of the 19th century one who was extraordinarily consequential in terms of the political events that occurred as a result of his thinking but within the academic world primary attention goes to the brilliance of his thinking and the way in which those thinking's are relevant to to continue to be very relevant to anyone who wants to understand the world and someone we've already talked about at some length and who is going to surface again in the class Max Weber who is in part writing in reaction to Marx he comes a little later than Marx and for Marx the economic underpinnings of society the means of production as Marx called it is the fundamental driver of history and for Max Weber who indeed takes the economy seriously and in fact economists looked to Max Weber as one of their founders for Max Weber it's not just the economy it at all there are other things that matter in making history happen including the kind of ideas that people have the kind of religions that they believe in the kind of social standing and honor that they're given the kind of professions in which they make their lives other things matter besides the economy as driving it's the driving force of history and he also believed as we as I talked about last time that sociology and social science need to be value free if you are as engaged as say a Marxian view of the world would want you to be you run a risk of misunderstanding what's going on and as a result you might just get things wrong but one way to misunderstand is to think that it is only the economy and the means of production and those who control it who are the great force in in history we have to examine other things as well and then I brought I talked a lot about the sociological imagination and the author of that idea see right Mills whose book the sociological imagination is a kind of fundamental document for many many sociologists Mills is a kind of some would say I think crossed between Marx and Weber but he does believe in social science and sociology having as its goal the goal of changing society and he gave rather specific recipes which I went through last time with you you wouldn't know it from this picture but see right Mills was a sociologist and see right Mills was a professor for the great majority of his life virtually all of his professional life at Columbia University he is celebrated as a renegade because of the content of his ideas that is opposing Max Weber --zz view of dispassionate value free sociology and insisting that sociologists needed to be people of action along with that and I don't think it's a necessary part of it he was a kind of celebrity in intellectual life because unlike the other bent-over bearded bookworms he had a motorcycle which he drove around New York and was famous for rooming around Columbia University and the streets around there some people regarded as a total affectation of someone who wanted to get attention during the era of people like Jack Kerouac and being a renegade being outside the box of ordinary social comings and goings be that as it may I bothered to well I wanted you to see him I think it's more memorable this way that you see him as he's doing his thing in a motorcycle guy kind of way and since then many sociologists have taken up motorcycles and many more have taken up the idea of the sociological imagination and take that idea very seriously and I want to continue today really with that idea the course is a constant gyration or moving back and forth between ideas of these and other founders of the discipline and and so we'll continue with in a way extending Mills into some new kinds of territories and as your syllabus says the one critical idea that is on our agenda is this idea of ethnocentrism and the the very words ethnocentrism the very word it is only one word ethnocentrism should make sense just as you take that word apart ethno just means the people you we all use the phrase ethnic as an ethnic group and we tend to think of that as people who are different from us some kind of exotic people like Italians are ethnics while all people are ethnic in terms of the origin of the word so everybody is an ethnic of some kind to be ethnocentric is to be concentrated on your own kinds of people on your own people miss and not be able to see beyond those boundaries it is not it is to lack the fundamental first step of the sociological imagination which is to see that your circumstance in your life with the people you're surrounded by is only one way of being and that there are other ways of being in terms of people who have lived before and people who are living alongside you in other parts of the world or in other cultural groups or in other subcultures you are not the only game in town so an ethnocentric person is a kind of like a fish in the fishbowl a fish in the ocean they do not imagine that there are anything other than oceans oceans to be in waters to live in and fish to swim around in there are lots of other kinds of things going on and the trick is to see in our own life the structures that are our context and make us not only different from other peoples but to see indeed that those other peoples are living parallel lives and are not just exotic and other but people that we might even be able to learn from we have to get a vantage point outside our own existence and the sociological imagination and for people like Mills sociology in general is a way to get that vantage point we could say really the same thing of our sister discipline anthropology which is up to some of the very very the very same kinds of tasks so it has to be something the other than our way or the highway we have to get beyond the ordinary routine arrogance that most people in the world have about their own way of being and their own way of doing things and the reason for that is first of all that it might lead to outcomes that are more humane and more generous to other people but also because having this narrow orientation of the world hurts us as well hurts those people who are practicing ethnocentrism as opposed to in a way ethno welcoming ethno broadening ethno searching we can benefit by figuring out how other peoples do it and by other peoples not just other peoples in exotic parts of the world but even in those close to us at least geographically but ways and but people's for whom we don't we don't see so in your readings there are a couple of examples of that these are famous classical examples of ways of singing outside the boundaries of our own lives and a classic instance that's brought up in classes constantly especially in anthropology is the example of India and the sacred cow of India so to a westerner especially when this I this problem of first came to Western attention that the set up has always been isn't this odd isn't this weird here it's a very poor country India and yet they're not they're allowing these beasts these cows to just roam this is going to be hurtful to well it hurts automobile traffic for one thing it slows everybody down you can't hardly cross you can't sometimes cross the street because there's a a cow in your path isn't this odd isn't this irrational and surely something should be done to help these people clean up their streets clean up not only the fact that we've got the inconvenience of the cow crossing the road but but there's dung everywhere the of the cow and this is unsanitary uncivilized and bespeaks of the backwardness ignorance myth driven quality my th of other people who are incapable of or so it seems of rationality well when you look at India's sacred cow and how it actually works you see there are things that may not be obvious but which are true such as the fact that the dung is actually collected and it is a fuel and though other waste products operate as fertilizer that milk the cows are milked and this is a source of protein around the seasons it's also a way to make cheese which gives people a reliable source of nutrition when you don't have refrigeration and a roaming cow is a substitute for a refrigerator because you always have fresh milk it's also a mechanism that establishes vehicles for living in common the fact that the cow is in part other people's property and other people must care for the cow and respect the cow operates as a kind of indicator and mechanism of social integration and regarding the taking seriously the needs of one another you can't just rope a cow because it's bothering you that is not your cow it must be respected and in respecting that animal you are respecting the society at large you're respecting other human beings and so it's acting as a kind of a vehicle of social integration which then is useful for many other purposes in terms of breeding respect keeping violence at bay and by the way India is in in the custom of customary India is is a is a society that is extremely low in physical in violence and maybe that has something to do with it and in these mechanisms of social integration there is a kind of spiritual dimension there is a kind of through westernized let's call it irrationality and the response then is what's wrong with a little irrationality don't we have all kinds of quote irrationalities in our own culture that we enjoy that maybe even we can't do without and so this calling them on the fact that there are elements of irrationality allegedly some people say no these are actually all funk you know things like source of fuel source of protein but even if it's not all that then still maybe this is worth some respect and that India sacred cow is is is is is a worthwhile thing and by understanding it and how it functions we get a route into understanding the this other culture these other people and maybe indeed we get a clue to understanding ourselves by looking for our sacred cows and how that sacred cow that we take so seriously looks to other people for who don't who don't share into our orientations to the world so if we do that then maybe we start looking a we're a bit weird ourselves and maybe even by trying on the sacred cow motif we can see the way in which we are weird I'll give you some examples that I think are relatively on on controversial and don't require politics of one kind or another kind too to take on board so I'll start with start with with each of you and your own backsides yes let's take them seriously you are sitting down and that's the way all our classrooms operate I think pretty much here not only at new you New York University but any universities that I know of in the world or at least in the Western industrial rich countries if you go into a university indeed if you go into a classroom what you find is people sitting down and that and in chairs and that is something that is in many other realms as well if someone came from Mars one of the first things they would learn is that if you want to recognize a classroom you will see these things like you're sitting on you will see that they're all the same this is not some variations on a theme they're all identical aren't they and many many people are sitting on these identical objects looking at one person and when you see that configuration you're probably on to the idea that or that's a good way to get on to the idea that this is a classroom and there are such a thing as professors and students and an intrinsic part of that is the fact that I'm standing and you're sitting now that right away is a little odd I'm much older than you don't I need to sit but I can do this look at this you will see I'll be up the whole time and when you when the class is over I won't go oh my god I got to sit I'll probably walk out of here and walk to something else so the point is is that all of you could be standing as well it's not a physiological need that is causing you to be where you are but what it does do is it signals that I'm different than you and that in fact I'm the one I'm the cat's meow and you are the lowly creatures who listen to what I have to say and write it down and you don't need to be sitting but sitting is part of the package that makes all of this possible now let's get to the real anthropological strangeness of this activity most of the peoples in the history of the world did not sit you know draw your self in a stick-figure and this kind of of situation this kind of physical locating ourselves in space is something that is only possible because we have this hardware that is now you're resting you're back on and you're resting your ass on and that is peculiar that's what I want to get across if you look at the history of the peoples of the world you will see that few did that but we take it to be natural it's the way you have a class it's the way you go to the welfare office to get welfare and and so on and so forth across so much of what society is now there are a number of issues to do with this though that render it not just strange but perhaps through the prism of say the sacred cow perhaps make it utterly ridiculous irrational unhealthy and stupid so what is the alternative while standing is an alternative and you've all seen it in various parts of the world or you haven't seen it but you've at least seen pictures in poor parts of the world where they still don't very commonly have chairs people squat and they squat for as long as you sit they are capable of that now I can stand and I can sit but I can't squat I can't squat for very long and probably most people in this room cannot squat when you go to the gym and you join a gym and they ask you your your goals very few people say I want to be able to squat they say I want a six-pack or I want to be able to do the marathon or whatever they say they don't say they want to squat so it's not even on our agenda to squat and yet squatting is far more healthy so what's happened is is that these chairs which were introduced into our lives as symbolic tools a way to say to people have a seat or a way to take a seat when no one else had one as for example a priest's high priests top dogs in religion thrones for monarchs they had chairs and nobody else had chairs the Last Supper which looks like people are sitting on chairs or even on a bench that's can't be right people were too poor to have chairs they're actually sitting on the floor perhaps on pillows reclining but but they're not sitting on anything like a chair because those people didn't a chair okay what if chair is done it means that we can't squat so the you think that you're using the chair but the chair is actually using you you think the chair is your tool but in fact the tool the chair has affected your body and taken away the musculature that you would have to squat if there weren't chairs you'd be hanging out by squatting and now you can't do that because the chairs have taken you over and the chairs only exist in turn because they are parts of a cultural apparatus developed at first so that people could display power over other people or people could then offer respect to those over whom perhaps they have power or or those for whom they need to be deferential to as in when we say have a seat well now we take you to another kind of a chair one of my favorite kinds which is the toilet the toilet is a type of chair and what do we do with the toilet I won't go into the great great detail but we've many of us have been in countries or in situations where they have not adopted the Western toilet and instead there's a hole in in the ceramic or in the floor and you were supposed to stand over it and do what ladies and gentlemen squat everyone knows those were the word you're supposed to squat the reaction of many Westerners is oh my god and oh the oh my god is not just the inconvenience but the fact that this is somewhat uncivilized and these people are other kinds of people they are different than my people as is indicated by this appliance and the expectation of how I am to use it but I can't use it that way now those of you are interested in human physiology may take note of the fact that squatting is very handy for gravity and if you want to move something out of your body the squat position is the way to go and the sitting position is an inferior way of doing it and indeed if you add in the other apparatus of modernization like for example white bread or pasta what you end up with is a mechanism to further create problems for the problem of elimination so now what you're doing is that you have you eat things which create constipation and then you've got to get rid of the result by sitting rather than squatting fighting gravity along with fighting a diet that is taken as natural to how human beings need to live so do you see where this is all going for someone who is not trained in sitting and it's cultural history for someone who thinks that food is better plucked off the vine rather than processed it is indeed very strange that peoples should assemble great wealth in the world and use that wealth to create toilets to create chairs to create toilets to create white bread to create toasters to toast the white bread that will make you constipated and unable to relieve yourself and go around all day uncomfortable all of that is a very odd way of living so what I've tried to do just now is you can see what I've done is flip the strangeness of the sacred cow and show the way in which our chair indicates another kind of strangeness in the world one which is filled with mystical notions of what ref of what deference is and should be of how a physical object should play a role in that deferential system it's really quite at least aspects of it are quite mystical and in a way myth my th myth driven isn't that isn't that something well we have other examples that we could point to beds most people in the world did not sleep on beds but we sleep on beds most of the people in the world did not sleep alone except we we sleep alone unless we're partnered with another person but most people of the world slept if they slept on anything resembling a bed they slept with other people two people three people five four people all families whole families would sleep together and with the visitors we have it that sleeping with a person is almost the same as having sex with another person and indeed we sometimes use the word sleep with as a euphemism for having sex and therefore we guard the bed and make sure that only those with whom we want to have sex or it is okay to be regarded as having sex can be in this thing with us but other peoples of the world don't regard that as at all appropriate it's lonely out there and many of us know the loneliness of being alone in bed and in other places as well our children are raised to be separate from us physically and to sleep alone this is not always true in our own culture but is very common whereas children in other parts of the world in other parts of history that would be inconceivable that you would cast the child who is the moat you think you don't want to sleep alone try that out on a five-year-old and as we know many five-year-olds and some of them right here in once upon a time right in this room scream bloody murder because they did not want to be alone in their bed but we take it that that's an important thing to do whereas for many peoples in the history of the world the idea of a child sleeping alone would just never dawn on anyone as an appropriate thing okay so beds we put our women in we put our women in women wear high-heeled shoes a very strange apparatus for getting from one place to another shoes in general really don't have much function in fact some people argue that they are anti functional and hurt our feet over our life course what else do we do we believe in monotheism we believe or many people do we believe in romantic love romantic love that for each of us and my brother says for every pot there is a lid for each of us there is that perfect person much beyond a lid for a pot there's an old fifty song out of that orange colored sky shish kebab there you were wonderful you Alakazam wonderful you came by so that's the way that's supposed to work and when we find that perfect person that is the person who takes care of a hundred percent of our erotic needs we share all financial it's our business partner all financial issues are settled through that person all family children raising children decisions about children all of that is happens through that one person and it is forever without a doubt no question and it all happens at that moment across the crowded room I saw you and whoa it then took hold romantic love that's not the way that whole scenario I just gave you is not the way most of the peoples of the world have done it it's just one way of doing it and we're going to talk about that later on later on in the course I talked about sleeping in beds I'll give you sleep is also interesting we're starting to learn that most of the peoples of the world did not sleep like we do and we believe you need a good night's sleep as we say and that good night's sleep starts about 11 p.m. or maybe midnight and goes for eight hours until 8:00 in the morning 7:00 in the morning and and that's the way you do it but we're now learning that for many peoples of the world they sleep in batches particularly breaking it up in the middle of the night and engaging in other activities for an hour or so that that was a common way of being just like having breakfast lunch and dinner is our thing it's not everywhere the same sleeping is and thought to be absolutely intrinsic to our nature to go once and have a sleep and then wake up and get that eight hours ideally that is not the way many people of the world practice and some of you are know that even today in the Mediterranean world there is still somewhat of a tradition of taking a siesta of getting up early than working some than having a huge lunch the big the big meal of the day and then taking asleep a snooze right after now all of these things vary in part because they're connected to other things that are going on in the culture in the case of India it's the the lack of refrigeration the the the need for for fuel and in our world it's the need the way industry is set up that that there that you work all the hours together that the place of work may be too distant from the place of home so that there is no place to take a nap and snooze that factories and other workplaces don't provide beds which a case could be made they should so that everybody could go in and take a nap there are various ways of doing it and all of these ways need to be tied in together well I'll just give you one or two quickies because they're just fun there is one of the things that people have engaged in is a history of how it works how Civ civilising works what the history of good manners and what is a good manner and what is not a good manner so for example one of the most interesting people that anthropologists and others have written about are the Balinese on the island of bali who did a number of things in a distinctive way that fascinate people from the west and here's one of them to quote to neglect releasing a loud belch after a meal would be taken by the host as a sign that the food was that's not satisfactory in general the Balinese are very frank in actions that would be out of the question among us such as clearing the throat spitting and so forth and these action end of quote and these actions are among the Balinese are perfectly sensible in other societies and for some of us spitting for example is regarded as fundamentally rude and ugly in China spitting in public has been traditionally completely acceptable erotic paintings now I'm talking about the Balinese again erotic paintings these are very frankly erotic paintings were sometimes had scenes of fantastic attitudes and lovemaking what we might regard as weird and sick modes of lovemaking and these were put up on houses on the outside of the house as a way to prevent the house from catching fire and burning so the so sexuality a very straight on sexuality is a way of keeping keeping away fire in Nepal that was also something that was done is that you put the erotic you put the fount the erect phallus over the doorway of your house to prevent lightning from striking the the property and that makes it makes as much sense I think as perhaps as other as other mechanisms at least I leave it to you and I leave it to you to consider when you go to your readings there is one group of people who for whom I have very little sympathy and who we don't tend to treat with the same degree of respect as we treat say the Balinese or the Nepalese and that's the reason why they're in your readings and these people are the Nacirema NAC I are EMA the Nacirema and the Nacirema are not really I don't think worth paying very much respect to but because they are often taken to be the brunt of criticism in social science and it's perfectly acceptable I think to criticize the Nacirema I wanted you to read one treatment by an anthropologist an American anthropologist who spent his life at the University of Michigan to read about the mass ARIMA and so you will read this article called life among the Nacirema and that's because I wanted you to see that there were indeed contrasts possible and some people who perhaps are just not entitled to the sociological imagination and perhaps in your seminar in your discussion sections you'll want to ask you TAS why I think the Nacirema are really beneath contempt okay so what I've tried to do is give you really a kind of standard set of blow by blows on how it is that we in the West we in the rich part of the world have a kind of tendency toward arrogance that the sociological imagination can perhaps help us bring under control I want to leap from that to what I think is one of the really great debates in the history of social science it's a debate conducted within anthropology but I think is very relevant to sociology as well and it's a debate between between that should say Bronislaw it's a little odd it's a debate among anthropologists that derives from some of the major traditions in anthropology who was bronislaw malinowski he is one of the founders of modern anthropology his dates are are up there he worked in Britain this he is polish by origin born into the upper-middle class of Poland but made his life in Great Britain in particular at the London School of Economics which then through him established one of the leading anthropology departments in the world now anthropology owes its history in part to the colonial events of the world along with the clergy and the troops later on came the anthropologists and anthropology as a field is really riven with controversy and soul-searching about the role of the anthropologist the anthropologist goes off from Britain to some extent also from Germany and France to document how other people live so in a way it's fulfilling the goals of the sociological imagination because what you're doing is going off to see se a and se e how these other people carry on their existence you are at least curious about it and within anthropology there has been huge arguing over how and and whether in this going off to see in both senses of the word how is it that we have respected or abused the people who we are describing and that we're giving attention to for some people anthropology is an imperialistic adventure whether it's going off to study exotic people or as they and sociologists do study people closer at hand when you cross the border from your own place to these other places you always have the possibility of an effect rendering them as strange as odd as irrational as inferior or as we now use the word in social science as other with a capital o they're not like me they're different they are other and other implies inferiority in one way or of a different sort and indeed we can we can study the way in which the anthropologists became informants to the people who were running their societies to the royalty of Europe to the first early coorporate not first but the earlier what became corporations and financial institutions through which colonialism was managed the anthropologists go out and find out who are and this is a term from anthropology who are the big man if you know who the big men are if you if you learn their language someone from the West and anthropologists do that if you learn their language you learn their hierarchy system either their class systems such as it is you learn their material basis of their lives you learn their religion and your custom you you can come back and in effect tell your big men the colonial managers the the British royal family the British civil service you can tell them how this is how this works over there and if you do if you tell them whether it's the British colonies or the the Belgian Congo if you tell them that makes it easier for them to invade maintain order exploit kill people whatever whatever the goals are so a handmaiden of colonialism is knowledge and the knowledge producers for the colonial empire are the anthropologists and that requires a certain viewpoint a certain courage really to go into these strange places and make your life among the natives okay that's one view a very negative view of what anthropology has been about the other view of what anthropology has been about has been the opposite it's been look you must go see the ways in which what strikes you as an odd and unusual thing is not an odd and unusual thing at all given the context in which people live and indeed you might be able to learn something you may be able to learn from their modes of agriculture for example how to raise crops that have never never crossed your mind before like corn from the Americas these are ways in which you can improve your own being but more they are ways in which you can learn how respect operates in the world and that different parts of the world that you may regard as other are in fact worthy of your respect they are places where people love where they cherish each other where they found out found mechanisms of democracy mechanisms of organization our Federation in the United States our our United States of America and the Articles of Confederation that were the first step to creating the United States of America are said to be based on the Federation of Indian tribes that the colonial powers found when they the British found when they came to what came to be the United States that these colonies could be united in a way that were modeled on the forms that the indigenous tribes had already shown to be effective so there are all kinds of things material and political that you can learn from these other people if you go in and think of them as savages who need the white man to in make them civilized to get them to stop eating with their hands to get them to stop using their funny language to get them to that respond to the myths that seem to drive them forward if you're going to be able to do that you've got to go and see them and be empathetic with their way of being live deeply among them and malinovski very much preached that that is that you need to go at it in a non-judgmental way as we might now say that these are people who you have to learn about not through the prism of Western civilization but rather a prism that takes seriously the way in which the different aspects of their lives are integrated with one another the material and the spiritual and the social are all functioning in an integrated way now I chose this image for you of malinovski because he is among the natives one of the things that happened after Malinowski's death and his books were celebrated as the founding of modern anthropology of non-judgmental ways of looking at other peoples who we must not see a strange and who we must not other well his diaries were found and his diaries reveal his day-to-day thinking about life among the people's he was studying who are in Melanesia the Trobriand islands and what we learn is that he had an inner life that is not exactly respectable so first of all he refers to these people as the other thing that he does is an enormous amount of toughest of his it seems like his mental energies are concerned with his own sexuality and the fact that it is driving him crazy that he is a mature man alone among these people and not engaging in sexual relationships with them and so his personal life as well as some of the cultural baggage of the of the white man's world in Britain has not been checked at the door when he goes and lives among the peoples and this is then thought to be modifying the way he sees the world this was a scandal when Malinowski's Diaries were published after his death this was a scandal because now this paragon of virtue in terms of being non-judgmental and being empathetic with his subject matter is indeed not such a hero at all he is a he's not so admirable I bring all of this attention to your attention to just rest start registering the complexity of it all that is to say that having a nice intention is not enough that seeing the world stripped of your own let's call it biases your own place in the world is no simple matter there's no easy matter and that I'm not saying this too Malinovsky but I'm trying to say that even Malinowski in fact had these private issues which he didn't go public with when he published but an argued argument could be made that in founding anthropology and modern anthropology and making it the goal to be dispassionate about other people's difference and be respectful of those differences to preach respect for those differences to write about them in a way that is respectful is a real step forward in the history of humankind and that when sociologists study the gangs outside the people who make their living on 6th Avenue who look and act and in a way or other than us that we know we can't completely slough off our own origins our own biases our own privileges but that doesn't mean we can't try and that something positive to some degree can come out of it well I started to tell you about the big controversy that follows in Malinowski's footsteps later on in history this is a man who's still alive his name is Marshall Sahlins he spent his life as a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and he got involved in the latter part of his career with Ghana obviously Kerr who spent his academic life at Princeton University as a professor of anthropology and so what we've got here and both of these guys are in your readings although I assigned reviews of their books rather than assigning them themselves but one of the reasons why I turn to these people is because the debate that they are engaged in is one of the great pitch battles of academic life and if you could read their books you would find that the way they talk to and about each other is just filled with anger hostility some fury especially I think Sol ins toward a basic set OPC care but maybe not it depends upon how you want to look at it as to who's who's making anger who's making the most anger at who let me tell you about the nature of their quarrel so we enter the stage of the 20th century in which we have the twin goals of anthropology or that or the issue that I just spoke of in anthropology is anthropology a tool of the powerful and now we can substitute sociology because it's important you all know that that sociologists now do what anthropologists did but we do it on people typically who are not exotic and far away but we do it on people who are right here in our city people who are in Chicago people who are in your high school we do it all over the place and so here we have the heritage of anthropology in a way breathing down our necks on the one hand are we looking down on people are we rendering them other are we operating as tools of our ruling class of the dominant forces or are we generating empathy and understanding and thus a greater generosity toward people who are different from us which is it that anthropology is doing and how does it do one as opposed to the other so the curtain opens opens up really many years ago when solids was a much younger man he wrote the classic book on Hawaii and on Native Hawaiians and the big issue is what happened when Captain Cook came to Hawaii so Captain Cook you all you all know that Captain Cook was one of the great British explorers and among other places he went in the world and discovered was Hawaii which were called the Sandwich Islands and when he got to Hawaii he was greeted with great excitement and warmth it was like a really cool thing for the people of Hawaii the native indigenous Hawaiians that Captain Cook had come and they treated him in a lovely way they took care of him in his crew providing food and something to drink they celebrated him with Hawaiian dancing which we all know is is and was evidently quite wonderful and they also provided his crew with women which struck the crew people as very odd but of course they didn't understand that sexuality had a different meaning among indigenous Hawaiians compared to the way it had among the British of the 18th century and so the question is why did they treat him this way this wonderful way and Marshall Sahlins who is a student of religious systems around the world among other things as an anthropologist Marshall Sahlins said it's because of the fact that Captain Cook appeared appropriately according to Hawaiian myth my th-there is a myth among the Hawaiian people that a great God will occur a white God will come to their islands and this white God will have many things he will appear on a specific date that they don't use our calendar but visibly the moon and the stars and that is when Captain Cook in fact turned up and so they decided the Hawaiian people that was a god and this white god was coming in just at the right moment and that's why he was treated so well treated royally as we would say well Captain Cook said had they had all a merry time and they set off leaving the Hawaiian Islands to continue their explorations of the of the Seas and they ran into trouble and a storm and they had to return well when they returned it was not such a nice day in terms of the greeting from the wine people and they were not greeted in a loving and charming way and instead in fact Captain Cook was killed and that's the end of Captain Cook by the way that's how he met his death the question is why did they kill him well according to Marshall solids it's because this did not fit the myth that is there was no sparked of the myth about coming back the dates there were no dates for him to come back there were it the alignment did not match and so therefore he was we would say maybe a fraud there's something wrong with this story and this stranger must die and this stranger did die that is Marshall Sahlins view of it now a critical element of Marshall Sahlins view of the world and he and this is common in anthropology is that primitive peoples are myth driven you and I and the people of the West are rational things are contingent we're judging things on a constant basis to see whether they make sense whether they fit in whether we should eat this cow or milk this cow whether we should cook it this way or that way we are rational people but non modern people are driven by myths they actually live by them they are religious in a way that we typically are not they are driven by myths well that is Sol ins view now silence constructs some of his notions of what was going on from the historic documents which are few and far between a lot of it relies on missionaries who were the first white people to get to Hawaii missionaries from New England who are on the scene and paying some attention to the way indigenous Hawaiians operate what they sound like and how they work whoops now just a moment for the opponent opposite Cara looks at this of what Sol ins has done and says wait a minute you've got it wrong these are not myth driven people any more than we are myth driven people I gave you an example of the way we think about chairs but of course we also have Christianity and Judaism and just to start the ball rolling on what others might see as myth we are not completely rational at all and don't even claim to be really and the Hawaiian people were really pretty much like us and for obese account that says the reason why Captain Cook was greeted warmly was first of all I guess you don't just kill people upon first meeting not everybody in the world thinks like that that's the way you should do it so the fact that you are warm and welcoming to people is not a pathology on its face but the other thing that's going on is these people have a lot of great stuff and stuff you have never seen before and indeed that no one in this part of the world has ever seen before and part of that stuff is military gear is metal is swords is ways to kill other people and so among the men interesting details of Captain Cook's visit is this demonstration of material superiority including superiority at violence and so therefore the combination and we don't really know what went on because the documentation is so weak the Hawaiian people by the way Hawaii had no written language whatsoever so the fact that there's no written record from Hawaii is makes total sense because they didn't have writing so therefore we wouldn't have anything to go on except what the missionaries said later on but OB Sakaki is saying look the reason why they killed him is because within Cylons own right up you see that they actually Captain Cook's people killed one of the leaders of the islands for because they thought he was stealing or what we would call looting and of course these people had no notion of looting or stealing because they live in a communal quasi communistic society but somebody was taking stuff from the ships and in retribution Captain Cook had them killed this did not go down well says OBC care so when they come back struggling because of the storm damage as we would now call it the tables have turned as we would say and so they put him to death so what OBC care is saying is these are not myth driven people but rather they are people who are responding to context and circumstance I bring this all to your attention because this sets the stage for many of the issues that will I think arise in our course as to what extent our people who seemed different from us profoundly different are they somewhat different in what ways are they like us and in what ways are they not like us if the difference deep is it deep in the way that Sol ins is saying that some people of the world our myth driven and other peoples of the world escape that myth and are not myth driven or is it like OBC care says that wait a minute these people are you you Sol ins you white man from Chicago have can only see them as myth driven because that's the way you see people different from yourselves and you see them as celebrating a white god because that's the way you think white people are when they're amidst those other people that they look to them as though they are God you are filled with your own myth and that's the myth of Western European white upper-middle class superiority and that is what we see here now silence has a response to that but I'm going to save it for next time as these guys really heat it up and the drama increases and you know what's at stake racism and ethnocentrism and getting beyond that with the sociological imagination is it going to be possible well we'll try on Thursday

Channel: New York University

Views: 80,099

Rating: 4.7651124 out of 5

Keywords: New York University, NYU, OpenEd, Open Education, Harvey Molotch, Introduction to Sociology

Id: c_YFdX2m0mE

Length: 63min 55sec (3835 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2010