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“Ethnography and Culture” by James P. Spradley

What is the definition of culture?

How is this definition related to the way that anthropologists study culture?

culture is knowledge

that generates cultural behavior, cultural knowledge, and cultural artifacts;

Also gives examples of cross-cultural misunderstanding.

Culture

is the learned and shared knowledge that people use to generate behavior and interpret experience (Spradley, 2).

And Ethnographic fieldwork is hallmark of Anthropology

To understand another culture from the native point of view.

Where in the jungles of Peru…

Or on a college campus

“Ethnography…the work of describing a culture” (7)

2. What is the relationship among cultural behavior, cultural artifacts and cultural knowledge?

Cultural knowledge is learned, not biologically inherited.

At the moment of birth, we lack a system of beliefs, knowledge, and patterns of customary behavior.

EG: We inherit the potential to cry, but we must learn our cultural rules for when crying is appropriate.

EG: food

EG: relationship to dogs

Culture is shared (social concept)

Culture is….

Learned (not innate or biological)

Dynamic (not static)

Varies

Changes

Shared

Diverse … microcultures, subcultures, counterculture, dominant culture

How is this definition of culture

related to the way that anthropologists study culture?

He draws on the experiences and ethnographies of anthropologist George Hicks.

How does Spradley’s discussion of Hicks illustrate the theme of the chapter Ethnography and Culture?

Rather than studying people…

Ethnography means learning from people.” (7)

EG: George Hicks (1965)

Immersion into Appalachian culture

How did he go about this?

To learn another way of life…that of mountain people in an Appalachian Valley

Moved to Little Laurel Valley

Daughter attended local school

Wife became a local girl scout leader

Hicks visited shops/ shopkeepers…center of the valley’s communication system

“Participant observation”

“Insider’s view” (7)

Rites of passage and “rituals”

Hicks learned by

Watching what other people did

Followed their example

Slowly became part of the groups that congregated in stores (7)

Gathered corn or hay

Build shed

Cut trees

“Participant observation”

Reciprocity

Listened to locals as Teachers and Storytellers

Hicks sought to discover how these mountain people identified relatives and kin

Obligations they felt toward kin

How they evaluated trees, galax, huckleberries ….and each other

Insider’s point of view?

Spradley poses a question:

“Imagine an Inuit woman setting out to learn the culture of MacAlester College? (or Drexel?)

What would she, so well-schooled in rich heritage of Inuit culture, need to do to understand the university culture of students, faculty and staff(7)

How would she discover patterns…

Avoid imposing her ideas, categories, values…

Set aside her “naïve realism”

Question 4. What are some examples of naïve realism in the way Americans think about other cultures?

Ethnocentrism

Ethnocentrism

A tendency to use your own group’s ways of doing things as a yardstick for judging others.

in-group loyalties

can discriminate against people whose ways differ from ours

What’s the benchmark?

Technology?

Spirituality?

Kinship?

In interpreting culture

What two forms of culture does Spradley discuss in the essay?

What is the difference between them?

Interpreting culture

The Silent Language and The Hidden Dimension

Edward Hall, 1959

Explicit culture

What’s known/ conscious

Tacit culture

cultural knowledge that is outside our awareness, i.e. unconscious.

Eg: space, spatial cues

Arrangement of rooms, furniture

“Personal bubbles”

Explicit culture

Explicit culture makes up part of what we know, a level of knowledge people can communicate about with relative ease.

In other words, it is culture that people are consciously aware of and can talk about.

Dress, language, behavior, know how, institutions (directly observable)

“Cultural markers”

Tacit culture

is cultural knowledge that is outside our awareness, i.e. unconscious.

People lack words for it.

Often unspoken,

Moral values, beliefs, representations

Culture….in some ways like…

Stage, stage setting & cast of characters…and stage directions “roles” and rules of behavior or engagement or “codes” [Schneider in Delaney 15]

What’s appropriate/ inappropriate?

“Little routines” (Sherry Ortner)

British tea

Coffee

Smoothies

Social cohesion

Norms

Folkways

Mores

Laws

Taboos

Deviance as “any violation of norms.”

It is not an act itself that makes an action deviant, but rather how society reacts to that act (Becker cited in Henslin,140).

“Moral holidays”

locations or times when people are allowed to break norms. Can you think of any other times or events where you can get away from normal expectations

What examples does Spradley give

for to help us better understand “culture”?

Examples to illustrate:

1) Peoples behaviors on a commuter train in Chicago

2) Article in Minneapolis Tribune about an incident in Hartford, CT

Example 1: Peoples behaviors on a commuter train in Chicago

Reservoir of cultural knowledge

Explicit/ tacit culture

Noticeable “patterns”?

Cultural behavior, cultural knowledge and cultural artifacts

Example 2: Article in Minneapolis Tribune…. (incident in Hartford, CT)

“Crowd mistakes rescue attempt, attacks police” (9)

Points made?

Crowd mistakes rescue attempt, attacks police

Interpreting cultural behavior, cultural knowledge & cultural artifacts

What shapes different “group perceptions”?

What concept does Spradley illustrate in the examples?

Any contemporary examples i.e. different groups interpreting the same event/ situation from different perspectives?

Symbolic interactionism

Three premises of social interactionism

1) Human beings act toward things that have meaning for them….people, things, actions… “symbols”

2) meaning of such things is derived , or arises out of , the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows.” (11)

“Meanings are handled and modified through an interpretive process used by a person dealing with the people and things s/he encounters” (11)

Three symbolic interactionists……

Herbert Blumer

Symbolic Interactionism, 1969

Herbert Mead

the “social self”

Charles Horton Cooley

“The Looking Glass Self

“Culture is best thought of as

… as a set of principles for creating dramas, for writing script & for recruiting players and audiences…” (12)

More than a cognitive map

Recurrent activities

Patterns

Rituals

Roles

Codes

in “Ethnography and Culture” the author

Draws similarities between culture as acquired knowledge and symbolic interactionism

Offers the viewpoint of culture as a cognitive map

Need to take matters of ‘meaning’ seriously!

People are not just map readers….we are map makers

Participating in the construction of our realities.

The Spradley essay

concludes with “food for thought” about a template or model for cross-cultural understanding.

What does he advocate for?

How does he assert a role for an ethnographic approach to understanding culture especially if different from our own?

Model for cross cultural understanding

Non-judgmental

Participant observer

Dialectical

Listen

Seeing the world “through their eyes”

Works Cited:

Haviland, William, Harold Prins, Bunny McBride and Walrath (2013). Cultural Anthropology 14TH edition Cengage.

Spradley, James P. (1980, 2015) “Ethnography and Culture” In Conformity and Culture: Readings in Cultural Anthropology. pp:6-12.

McCurdy, David W. , Dianna Shandy and James P. Spradley. (2016) Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, 15th edition.