Group 1

Group 1

• Classifying the world

  • Classifying or categorizing the world is a meaning-making activity. Individuals understand the world and their place in it through compartmentalizing and ordering everything in the natural and transcendent world in symbolic systems where some things are placed at the centre and others at the margins or boundaries. Inevitably, some things defy straightforward classification and are then often considered either particularly polluting or sacred. For example, in the case of blood, a culture may consider human menstrual blood to be polluting, yet consider the blood of sacrificed animals to be sacred.

  • Historically, this topic has been known as the anthropology of classification. The study of how people classify themselves, each other, and the physical and non-physical world has been central to anthropology since its inception. Indeed, 19th century unilineal evolutionists such as Tylor (1871) and Morgan (1877) proposed ideas of cultural hierarchies and superior and inferior civilizations, as well as notions of progress. These legacies of the early days of the discipline continue to inform and misinform popular notions of development and difference. The work of early and mid-20th century anthropological theorists such as Durkheim and Mauss (1963 [1903]), Van Gennep (1960 [1909]), Evans-Pritchard (1983 [1937]), and Lévi-Strauss (1962) sought to understand the classification systems of the 'Other'. Evans-Pritchard's work tackled notions of the limits of rationality within cultures from a structural functionalist perspective. Developing a structuralist perspective, Lévi-Strauss sought to explain the different classification systems as based on the same human cognitive capacity to order the world in which we live with the key differences between societies accounted for by different approaches to myth and history. By suggesting that 'man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun', Clifford Geertz (1973) invited anthropologists to consider what symbols and categories reveal about a culture.

  • The anthropology of classification in the 21st century is a rich area of study that both builds upon and departs from its forebears. Mary Douglas' seminal work on notions of purity and pollution (1966) are today used to analyse topics as diverse as mental health, disease, organic and fast foods, and pregnancy and child-rearing; while Victor Turner's work on liminality (1969), which develops the pioneering work of Van Gennep, is applied to many topics beyond the ritual process and rites of passage, such as studies on third and fourth genders, airport terminals, refugee camps, and the conceptualization of social death (for example, Malkki 1995; Thomassen 2014). Some anthropologists study the senses to reveal the complex classification systems of other cultures, which may be based on classifying time and space through smell (osmology) or sound (acoustemology) (Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994). This area of inquiry extends to a diverse range of possible topics.

  • In teaching this area of inquiry, the following questions may provide helpful frames for exploring ethnographic data and anthropological thinking. What do the Diploma Programme subject groups and the areas of inquiry within social and cultural anthropology reveal about the culture of the IB education? How do categories reveal ontological assumptions? How are categories contested and subverted? In what ways is the act of categorization an expression of power? How might the categorization of groups as 'other' lead to ethnocide? How does categorizing foodstuffs lead to food being edible or taboo? How does the categorization of people result in discrimination? This area of inquiry requires a balance between conceptual understandings, which serve as analytical frameworks, and topic-based exploration. One approach to the teaching of this might be to examine classic works on classification, which may then be rethought and re-conceptualized as more recent ethnographic work is introduced, incorporating examples of how classification systems are used to understand contemporary issues.

• Health, illness and healing

  • The anthropology concerned with health, illness and healing is a fascinating area with enormous implications for all of us as individuals and as members of culture groups who understand health, illness and healing in complex and diverse ways. Although most westernized societies have adopted a biomedical model of health that defines health, illness and healing in terms of the biochemistry of the body, the nature of viral and bacterial infection, and the response of the body to medication and/or surgery, there are many other ways of viewing the subject. In westernized societies there is a growing belief in what is usually called the biopsychosocial model of health. This way of thinking acknowledges that human health is strongly influenced by psychological factors such as the relationship between the doctor and the patient, as well as, of course, the relationships the patient has with family, friends and work colleagues (Kleinman 1988, 1995). This leads onto the wider area of social factors related to health and healing, which include an even wider range of relationships and can encompass religious beliefs. Although the biopsychosocial model has been criticized, most westernized cultures no longer practise a purely biomedical type of medicine but acknowledge that humans are embedded in an enormous web of psychological and social complexity.

  • Few societies in the world today are untouched by the biomedical model but most societies have a parallel model of some type of biopsychosocial approach. A major area in health, illness and healing where there are enormous variations is the aetiology of diseases, the study of the causes of illness. Many cultures may accept a biological cause but see that cause as embedded within a variety of other factors such as environmental, social, cultural and supernatural. Some societies do not subscribe to a concept of chance and link infection with, for example, witchcraft (Mavhungu 2012). Other societies see illness as an infection but one that clearly indicates divine displeasure (Frankel 1986; Jennings 1995). One of the intriguing aspects of considering these societies is to try to disentangle the extent to which such beliefs are a combination of religious faith and social control.

  • In some societies there are two parallel systems of health, illness and healing running alongside each other with a greater or lesser degree of integration. Where members of a society have migrated from a non-westernized to a westernized society, there are intriguing examples of cases where they maintain their traditional healing customs in parallel with the biomedical model of the host country. An excellent example of this is found in the combination of American biomedicine and traditional Hmong shamanic practices (Conquergood and Paja Thao 1989; Hickman 2007; Siegel and Conquergood 1984; Siegel 2001).

  • While discussions about the biomedical model might seem to dominate perceptions on health, illness and healing in both anthropological and non-anthropological discourse, there are a range of very interesting departures from this that explore different cultural and social experiences of it. These include an exploration of the different ways in which illness, for example, is experienced through pain, suffering, and abandonment (Biehl and Eskerod 2005) and is caused by structural violence (Farmer 2003).

  • In this area of inquiry, health, illness and healing can be explored in a number of contexts and through a range of inquiry-specific concepts. An examination of health, illness and healing both historically and culturally can, for example, give rise to questions that contest understandings of the mind and the body, or how pain and suffering are caused and experienced, as well as the political and economic nature of health and illness.

  • In teaching this area of inquiry, the following questions may be useful in framing discussions. How do biomedical, social or cultural understandings of the body affect the understanding of health and illness? How does religious belief influence healing practices? How do structural forces create or shape health and illness? To what extent is illness a socially constructed phenomenon? How do some understandings of the body facilitate the commodification of body parts? To what extent has the curing of illness become largely a political and economic pursuit rather than the relief of suffering and pain? What differences in the aetiology of illnesses exist in the various systems of healing? How does the use of healing substances vary across cultures? This area of inquiry requires a balance between conceptual understandings, which serve as analytical frameworks, and topic-based exploration. One approach to the teaching of this might be to explore the language and main ideas in medical anthropology and then to apply these in the reading of one full-length ethnography and several shorter case studies of health, illness and healing systems in different cultural settings.

• The body

  • The anthropology of the body is an exciting and diverse area of research, which provides a balance between more classic areas of anthropological study (such as the ritualized body or localized bodies) and new emerging areas (such as experiential bodies or mechanized bodies). What is clear within this area of research is the centrality of the body to understanding how people experience and make sense of their worlds.

  • While it was Marcel Mauss in 1936 who argued that 'body techniques' should be the focus of anthropological study, it was not until much later that the body as an area of research began to emerge with any dominance in social and cultural anthropology. This area of research has sought to explore the body as more than a 'natural object' but rather as a constitutive dimension of everyday cultural and social practices. In other words, how meanings and values are produced on and about the body.

  • Theorizing about the body within anthropology has been prolific in recent years and, more recently, has been closely linked to the rise in questions about the biopolitics, suffering, and commodification. Mauss (1936) discusses the enculturation of people through their bodies; Douglas (1966 [2002]) refers to the role of the body as a metaphor for making sense of the world; Foucault (1973 [1963], 1977) argues that we are trained through our bodies to be modern subjects; Csordas (1990, 1994) seeks to understand human participation in the cultural world through embodied experience; Turner (1996) points out that projects of the self are also projects of the body; even Bourdieu (1977) offers the concept of 'habitus' to explore the relationship between social structure and embodied experience; and Comaroff (1985) has highlighted the role of corporeality in the practices of opposition and resistance.

  • In this area of inquiry, the centrality of the body in anthropology can be explored in a number of contexts and through a range of inquiry-specific concepts. An examination of the body as a historically and culturally contingent category can be seen, for example, as the material focus of everyday practices - whether as an object of self-identification or the subject of social control.

  • In teaching this area of inquiry, the following questions may be useful in framing discussions. How is culture inscribed on the body? How do persons inhabit bodies? How are mechanized and medical technologies changing the ways in which people think about and experience the body? Can we have persons without bodies and bodies without persons? In other words, what is the relationship between the body and the self? How is the body used as a form of resistance to the mechanisms of power? In what ways is the human body shaped by sociocultural, historical and political processes? How, in turn, does it shape them? This area of inquiry requires a balance between conceptual understandings, which serve as analytical frameworks, and topic based exploration. In approaching the teaching of this area of inquiry, it would be useful to begin with examining how human bodies are the product of both biology and culture, and compare the relationship between the body, mind and society across time and place. The body should be explored critically, questioning the notion of it as a natural, universal object. It should be explored in terms of how bodies are perceived, understood, and experienced in a number of contexts. In other words, in choosing the topics to study and ethnographies to read, attention should be given to the body as a lived experience encompassing all its social and symbolic relationships.