How has human difference been characterised over the long history o anthropological thought?
Discuss, drawing from at least six of the course readings in your answer WORD MAXIMUM REQUIREMENT IS 2500 The essay requires you to discuss how difference has been characterized over the long history of anthropological thought. What I would encourage you to do is to think critically about what this means? How difference has been the basis for development of the discipline? What kind of knowledge or theoretical orientation emerged from this idea of human difference? You have to think difference in terms of physical difference, systems of thought and cultural beliefs and practices. How did this create a hierarchy of knowledge or the violence of knowledge in representations of the other? If you begin from Malinowski you need to interrogate how in his quest to answer the question of difference he ended up excluding history and the effects of colonialism and capitalism through synchronic analysis. You can go as far as to talk about how this created the disciplinary crisis. How did diachronic analysis through post-structuralisms seek to correct this conception of knowledge creation? The idea of human difference and the way it was represented in anthropology was embedded in colonial and imperial construction of knowledge and oppressive discourse. These are just pointers to how you can frame your essays and the question of difference in relation to the development of the discipline as a whole and how you can draw on different readings and theoretical orientations to do so. It is however up to you to think about how you want to structure your essay Readings: Liebersohn, Harry. 2008. ‘Anthropology Before Anthropology’ in Henrika Kuklick (ed) A New History of Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.17-31 Darwin, Charles. 2004 [1871]. ‘On the Races of Man’ in The Descent of Man. London: Penguin, pp.194-210. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. ‘Introduction’ in Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge, pp.1-25. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1986 [1963]. ‘Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology’ in Structural Anthropology 1. Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 31-54. Clifford Geertz. 1973. ‘The Cerebral Savage: On the work of Claude Levi-Strauss’ in The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books, pp. 345-359. Clifford Geertz. 1973. ‘Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture’ in The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books, pp. 3-30. Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge Chapters 1, 2 and 3, pp.21-49. Sharp, John. 1981. ‘The Roots and Development of Volkekunde in South Africa’ in Journal of Southern African Studies Vol. 8, No. 1, Special Issue on Anthropology and History, pp. 16-36. Gordon, Robert. 1988. ‘Apartheid’s Anthropologists: The Genealogy of Afrikaner Anthropology’ in American Ethnologist, Vol. 15, No. 3. (Aug., 1988), pp. 535-553. Asad, Talal. 1991. ‘From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthropology of Western Hegemony’ in George Stocking Jr (ed.) Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualisation of Ethnographic Knowledge. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
