At higher level you read ethnography through areas of inquiry and key concepts, and you compare across cases. This lesson covers exchange, classification, ritual and comparison.
Answer the quick checks, the sort and the match as you go to collect stars. Press Start when you are ready.
Ethnographic material is explored through areas of inquiry. The IB groups nine areas into three sets, including classifying the world, health, illness and healing, the body, belonging, communication, expression and technology, movement, time and space, conflict, development, and production, exchange and consumption. HL students study these with extra breadth and depth.
Marcel Mauss, in The Gift (1925), argued that gift exchange is a total social phenomenon: gifts carry three obligations, to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. Among the Maori he pointed to the hau, the spirit of the gift that must return.
Related cases: Malinowski's Trobriand kula, and the potlatch of the Kwakiutl recorded by Boas, where leaders gained status by giving away or destroying wealth. Marshall Sahlins distinguished generalized, balanced and negative reciprocity.
Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger (1966), argued that dirt is matter out of place: what counts as polluting reflects a culture's symbolic classifications. Ideas of purity, taboo and pollution keep the categories of the world in order. Lévi-Strauss similarly saw culture built from binary oppositions.
Arnold van Gennep, in The Rites of Passage (1909), showed that rituals marking life changes have three phases: separation, transition (liminality), and incorporation. Victor Turner developed the middle phase, describing liminality and the intense bonding he called communitas, drawing on his fieldwork among the Ndembu (The Ritual Process, 1969).
Tap an idea, then tap the area it best illustrates. (Two each.)
At HL you should recognise key concepts in ethnographic material: the kula and potlatch involve social relations, power and materiality; taboo involves symbolism and belief and knowledge; a rite of passage reshapes identity. Ethnographic film must be read as critically as written text.
Comparison is central. Kula and potlatch are both exchange, but the kula builds status through circulating valuables while the potlatch does so through giving away or destroying them. Comparing cases reveals general principles while respecting each context.
Tap a thinker on the left, then their idea on the right.
The area of belonging examines how people are included in or excluded from groups through kinship, ethnicity, religion and nation. It connects directly to the key concept of identity: how people define who they are and to whom they belong.
The area of health, illness and healing studies how cultures understand the body, sickness and cure. Evans-Pritchard Azande material shows how witchcraft beliefs answer why misfortune strikes a person, sitting alongside, not against, practical knowledge of how.
The area of communication, expression and technology covers language, art, media and tools. How people communicate, and with what technologies, shapes social relations, power and the spread of ideas, a lens well suited to contemporary digital life.
Areas of inquiry: the lenses (exchange, ritual, the body, classification and more)
Exchange: the gift obliges give-receive-reciprocate (Mauss); kula, potlatch, Sahlins
Classification: dirt is matter out of place; symbolism and taboo (Douglas)
Ritual: separation, liminality, incorporation (van Gennep, Turner)
Concepts in material: power, social relations, symbolism, identity, materiality
Comparison: reveals general principles across cases
You can now read ethnographic material through concepts and compare across cultures. Press Finish to see your score.
You have worked through Engaging with Anthropological Material. 🎉
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