Search results

Book reviewed in this article: Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Byron J. Good. Knowledge, Power, and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life. Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock, eds.

Area studies undertaken without sound knowledge of 'the entire body of established ways of the inhabitants of the area' must be looked upon with considerable reservation. Anthropology provides the area researcher with both concept and method. The concept of culture is involved as embodying 'a series of limits to sanctioned variation, rather than a single approved mode of thought and conduct.' Aspects of culture (economic, political, social, religious, aesthetic, etc.) represent responses to geographical and biopsychic needs of man. Such aspects represent cultural universals, unities which characterize all human groups. Through a knowledge of the culture learning process we may gain psychological insights important in the action programs of area studies. Such problems as acceptance of new forms of technology, political organization, etc., may be handled by an analysis of enculturative experience. The primary methodological contribution of cultural anthropoloty to area studies lies in the relativistic approach. Hence, cultural anthropology `because of the breadth of its conceptual system and the techniques of cross-cultural analysis has come to act as the integrating element in interdisciplinary area research and teaching. R. J. Murphy.

The outburst of antiracist protests in the USA in 2020 demonstrates how deeply this society's present-day problems are rooted in its past. From this perspective, a study of the cultural memory of the time of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the key moment in the contemporary American nation formation, is especially relevant and important. The cultural frontier between the North and the South that had appeared as an outcome of differences in US history has not disappeared up to now. By example of the complexity and inconsistency of the historical memory of the Civil War, slavery, and its abolition in the USA manifested in their visual representations, the article documents how through collective memory, history does not just invade modernity but is present in it, particularly in the form of memorials, monuments, museum expositions, and therefore determines the nation's modernity to a large degree.

Seeing Anthropology: Cultural Anthropology through Film. Karl G. Heider. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997. 347 pp.,. videotapes.