The HL extension asks you to use anthropological theory to evaluate ethnography. This lesson surveys the major theoretical perspectives and the thinkers behind them.
Answer the quick checks, the sort and the match as you go to collect stars. Press Start when you are ready.
At HL you are expected to use anthropological theories to evaluate ethnographic material. A theory is a lens: it directs attention to certain features of social life and offers a way of explaining them. Different theories can be applied to the same ethnography to produce different readings.
Functionalism asks what social institutions do.
Claude LΓ©vi-Strauss founded structuralism. He argued that beneath the diversity of cultures lie universal structures of the human mind, expressed through binary oppositions such as nature and culture or raw and cooked. He analysed myth and kinship as systems built from these underlying patterns.
Clifford Geertz's interpretive anthropology treats culture as webs of meaning to be read through thick description. Related symbolic approaches include Victor Turner on the symbols of ritual and Mary Douglas on symbolic classification. The focus is meaning, not function or deep structure.
Tap a figure or idea, then tap the perspective it belongs to. (Two each.)
Feminist anthropology corrected a long male bias and put gender and power at the centre.
Postmodern and reflexive anthropology (the volume Writing Culture by James Clifford and George Marcus, and work by Paul Rabinow and Renato Rosaldo) stresses that ethnographies are partial, authored and positioned.
Political economy approaches, such as Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History (1982) and Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power (1985, on sugar), place local cultures within wider histories of power, capitalism and world trade.
Tap a theorist on the left, then their perspective or idea.
Political economy links local lives to global history. Eric Wolf Europe and the People Without History (1982) showed that supposedly isolated peoples were long entangled in world trade and empire. Sidney Mintz Sweetness and Power (1985) traced how sugar tied Caribbean plantations, slavery and British diets into one system.
Practice theory bridges structure and agency. Pierre Bourdieu concept of habitus describes the durable dispositions people acquire that guide action without strict rules. Sherry Ortner championed practice approaches as a way to connect large structures with what people actually do.
One ethnography can be read through many lenses. The Trobriand kula looks like need-meeting exchange to a functionalist, a system of binary oppositions to a structuralist, and a web of meaning about status to an interpretive anthropologist. HL work uses theory to evaluate, not just label.
Functionalism: institutions meet needs (Malinowski) or maintain structure (Radcliffe-Brown, Durkheim)
Structuralism: universal mental structures and binary oppositions (Levi-Strauss)
Interpretive: culture as webs of meaning; thick description (Geertz)
Feminist: gender and power; correcting male bias (Ortner, Strathern, Weiner)
Postmodern: ethnographies are partial and positioned (Clifford, Marcus, Rabinow)
Political economy: local cultures within world history (Wolf, Mintz)
You can now use these perspectives as lenses to evaluate ethnographic material. Press Finish to see your score.
You have worked through HL Extension: Theoretical Perspectives in Anthropology. π
Your stars: 0 / 0
Next: test yourself in the Evaluate stage, then lock it in with Verify.