Engaging with anthropology · Concepts, culture and reflexivity

IB Diploma Programme Social and Cultural Anthropology HL (first assessed in 2019; 2017 guide). Anthropology 人类学 studies how people live together: what they believe, how they make a living, how they organise families and power, and how all this changes. This topic covers the language, the practice and the way of thinking of the discipline. It is examined in Paper 1 (2 hours, 30% at HL; 1 hour 30 minutes, 40% at SL): three questions on an unseen text, the last one on one of the course's "big questions" 大问题. HL students also answer a question on anthropological ethics 伦理 (topic 04).

In 1956 the anthropologist Horace Miner published a strange report on the Nacirema, a people with unusual body rituals. Every house has a shrine, he wrote, where people look into a magic box and perform daily mouth rites with hog hairs and magical powders. They visit "holy-mouth men" who dig holes in their teeth. Readers were shocked by such odd customs, until they noticed that "Nacirema" is "American" spelled backwards: the shrine is a bathroom, the rite is brushing teeth and the holy-mouth man is a dentist. Miner's joke makes a serious point. Our own habits look natural to us only because we are inside them. Anthropology tries to make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.

Must-know for engaging with anthropology:

The course uses nine key concepts 核心概念. Each is a question you can ask of any social situation:

An answer never names a concept alone: it uses the concept to explain real material (the passage, or an ethnography you have studied).

Anthropologists are known for participant observation 参与观察: living with a group for a long time, often a year or more, joining in its everyday life while watching and asking questions. Bronisław Malinowski made this the core of the discipline: from 1915 to 1918 he lived in the Trobriand Islands, off the coast of New Guinea, learned the language and pitched his tent in the village.

The written result is an ethnography 民族志: a detailed account of the life of one group, based on fieldwork. Anthropologists try to give two views:

• the emic 主位 view: how members of the group understand their own world, in their own words;
• the etic 客位 view: the outsider's analysis, which compares the group with others.

• Ethnocentrism 民族中心主义: judging other cultures by the standards of your own, as Miner's readers did before they saw the joke.
• Cultural relativism 文化相对主义: trying to understand a practice within its own cultural context before you judge it. (Understanding is not the same as approving.)
• Reflexivity 反身性: thinking about how your own background (age, gender, nationality, class) shapes what you see and what people tell you.
• Comparison 比较研究: anthropology compares many societies, so that assumptions that seem natural in one place become visible.

A Chinese example. Fei Xiaotong 费孝通, a student of Malinowski, became China's best-known anthropologist. In From the Soil (1947) he compared social relations in rural China and the West. In a Chinese village, he wrote, each person stands at the centre of circles of relationships, like the ripples that spread when a stone is thrown into water: close family first, then relatives, then neighbours, with duties growing weaker further out. In Western societies, he argued, people belong to groups with clear edges, like bundles of straw, and all members of a group have the same rights. The comparison helps explain why personal connections (guanxi 关系) matter so much in Chinese life.

Paper 1 gives you an unseen text: an extract from an ethnography. The first questions ask you to identify and explain what the text shows; the last asks one of the course's big questions, such as the IB's sample: How are we the same as and different from each other? Discuss with references to at least two sources of ethnographic material and examples from the passage.

1. Read the passage for the scene: who does what, where, and why.
2. Mark what surprises you: a surprise often shows one of your own assumptions.
3. Name the concept that explains it (power, symbolism, social relations ...).
4. Bring in ethnography you have studied that shows the same concept in another place.

Worked plan. A passage describes gift-giving at a wedding in a village. Same: in every society studied, gifts create relationships and duties (Marcel Mauss, The Gift, 1925; topic 02). Different: what is given, by whom, and what is expected back. In Fei Xiaotong's rural China, a gift's size depends on how close the giver is to the centre of the ripples. Conclusion: people share the need to build relationships, but the forms are learned, local and changing.

• Paper 1: HL 2 hours, 30%; SL 1 hour 30 minutes, 40%; three questions on an unseen text; HL ethics question.
• The nine key concepts as questions, with examples.
• Participant observation (Malinowski, Gold's four roles); ethnography; emic and etic.
• Ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, reflexivity, comparison; the Nacirema.
• Fei Xiaotong's ripples and bundles; guanxi.
• The four steps and the worked plan for a big question.