Building Bridges in Anthropology: Understanding, Acting, Teaching, and Theorizing Building Bridges in Anthropology: Understanding, Acting, Teaching, and Theorizing Edited by Robert Shanafelt Selected Papers from the Annual Meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society, Savannah, Georgia, February, 2010 Robert Shanafelt, Series Editor Newfound Press THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE LIBRARIES, KNOXVILLE Southern Anthropological Society Founded 1966 Building Bridges in Anthropology: Understanding, Acting, Teaching, and Theorizing © 2012 by Southern Anthropological Society: http://southernanthro.org/ Digital version at www.newfoundpress.utk.edu/pubs/bridges Print on demand available through University of Tennessee Press Newfound Press is a digital imprint of the University of Tennessee Libraries. Its publications are available for noncommercial and educational uses, such as research, teaching, and private study. The author has licensed the work under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ For all other uses, contact: Newfound Press University of Tennessee Libraries 1015 Volunteer Boulevard Knoxville, TN 37996-1000 www.newfoundpress.utk.edu ISBN-13: 978-0-9846445-3-7 ISBN-10: 0-9846445-3-9 Building bridges in anthropology / edited by Robert Shanafelt ; Robert Shanafelt, series editor. Knoxville, Tenn : Newfound Press, University of Tennessee Libraries, c2012. 1 online resource (ix, 242 p.) : ill. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Ethnology -- History -- 21st century -- Congresses. 2. Anthropology -- History -- 21st century – Congresses. 3. Ethnology – Southern States -- History -- 21st century -- Congresses. I. Shanafelt, Robert, 1957- II. Southern Anthropological Society. Meeting. GN302.B85 2012 Book design by Jayne W. Rogers Cover design by Stephanie Thompson This volume is dedicated to the late Miles Richardson (1932-2011), a dedicated scholar, teacher, and humanitarian who represented the best ideals of anthropological holism. Contents Introduction 1 Robert Shanafelt PART I Theory and Concepts Traversing the Great Divide: The Embodiment of Discourse Between You and Me 21 Miles Richardson and Julia Hanebrink Culture as Information: Not a Shaky Link but a Stable Connection 33 Robert Shanafelt Human Scales 51 Thomas Brasdefer PART II Teaching and Practice “I Didn’t Evolve from No Monkey”: Religious Narratives about Human Evolution in the US Southeast 77 H. Lyn White Miles and Christopher Marinello Enculturating Student Anthropologists Through Fieldwork in Fiji 103 Sharyn R. Jones, Loretta A. Cormier, Caitlin Aamodt, Jade Delisle, Anna McCown, Mallory Messersmith, and Megan Noojin Making Africa Accessible: Bringing Guinea-Bissau into the University Classroom 147 Brandon D. Lundy Causes Mini-Film Festival: Anthropology for Public Consumption 175 Matthew Richard and Andrea Zvikas PART III Ethnography Searching for the Spirit: Researching Spirit-Filled Religion in Guatemala 187 C. Mathews Samson “Ooo Ooo, Aah Aah”: People, Bonobos, and Mirrored Projections at the Zoo 213 Robert Shanafelt The Kegare Concept 227 Lauren Levine Contributors 239 Figures 1.1. The hominid-human mythopoetic trajectory of us 23 1.2. Culture sitting on top of nature 24 1.3. Culture-nature, you-I 25 4.1. Perspective on evolution 84 4.2. Degree of acceptance of plant, animal, and human evolution 84 4.3. Distribution of five positions on evolution 85 4.4. Distribution of Perry stages of intellectual development 86 4.5. Distribution of Argument Types 88 8.1. Highland Regions of Guatemala 191 viii Tables 2.1. The artifact in information terms 44 4.1. Five Basic Positions on the Evolution-Creationism Continuum 80 Photographs 6.1. Bush rat meal 153 6.2. Female Initiation Rites 163 6.3. The author [Lundy] learning about the sacred grove 166 6.4. Rice planting 167 8.1. Mayan ceremonial site 205 9.1. Bonobo piggy back ride 217 9.2. Evaluation: Showing off or overexposure? 218 9.3. G-g rubbing 219 ix Introduction Robert Shanafelt Consider this. If the topics of papers published in anthropology in a given year were jumbled up, smeared together as in an inkblot, like the Rorschach blots of psychological fame, what would we see? Would there emerge in our perception a rather natural-seeming vi- sion of four or five fields? What would the patterns we observe reveal about the nature of our interests? About the field in which we are a part? Rorschach images are open to interpretation, but that does not mean they lack regularity in response. There are ways of seeing the images that are statistically ordinary and others that are unusual. There is both cultural and individual variation in this patterning. Of course, in anthropology as elsewhere, the way we see things is also only partly constituted by the forms that are given to us. How we see anthropology also reflects historical trajectories of teaching, research work, publications, academic fashions, and our individual dispositions. As self-reflective anthropologists, we might think that we are very sophisticated in understanding this, but it still could be that there are implicit ways we have been taught to see the patterns that lead us to overlook certain other forms that appear obvious to others who have been taught differently. An inkblot metaphor for our academic discipline is probably too amorphous and vague to capture the nuances of our field and to be 2 ROBERT SHANAFELT of pedagogical use. The more popularly used metaphors are often geographic and geometric. The textbooks commonplace is that of anthropology as a subject with fields, areas, and subdivisions—as if we are describing a plane geometry of farmlands and housing units. Anthropologists also talk regularly of foundations and layers. It is not uncommon for those who support a combined biological/cul- tural approach, for example, to speak of culture as being built upon a biological foundation. Perhaps most insightful and sophisticated are metaphors sug- gesting movement and transformation. Here there may be pathways, crossroads, and links. (In the next section I’ll get to the bridges.) The image of a ship exploring an intellectual sea is also an interesting one. Discussing their work in a newly conceived “sociocultural psy- chology,” Rosa and Valsiner (2007, 692) write, for example, that “A research field is indeed similar to a ship. It sails somewhere—some- times only the direction may be known, but not the route, nor the harbor of arrival.” Yet even with this you cannot avoid the geograph- ical tropes. Even a sea of “open systems—biological, psychological, social, and epistemological—is always wrought with unexpected ex- pansions into new areas of challenges” (ibid.). Clearly, though, ship and sea metaphors need not always be so nice and positive. The weather and the waves are not always calm. In recent years, our anthropological ship has been facing some rough weather; we’ve been going through our own sea changes, although whether they represent tidal waves or dangers from oily seas de- pends on your perspective. For those who have feared the worst, talk has turned to breakages and threats to existence. Back in the mid- 1990s, for example, noted British anthropologist Robin Fox argued that anthropology was becoming so fragmented that it was nearly in a “death grip” (Fox 1997, 196). Speaking more specifically about ethnography, the widely-cited ethnographer Bruce Kapferer argued INTRODUCTION 3 more recently that “the postmodern movement in anthropology ac- centuated a rupture between the anthropology of the past and a rein- vented anthropology more relevant to the times” such that there was the proverbial risk of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” (Kapferer 2007, 189). At the extreme, critics from cultural anthro- pology have called four-field anthropology a “myth,” “a noble lie,” and have suggested it was just “sentimental.” Most vociferous are the views of many of those who contributed to the volume by Daniel Segle and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako (2005). They find little value in biological perspectives and archaeology, seeing four-field unity not as a positive thing but as something that needs to be rejected. In- deed, such perspectives reflect literal divides, manifested publicly by the division of some prominent departments. Most notably, an- thropology divided into cultural and biological wings at Duke (1988) and, a decade later, at Stanford. And there have been rumblings of a similar division at Harvard, with the actions for division this time apparently coming most from those with more biological interests (Shenk 2006). Still, this level of divisiveness may represent more of the statistical anomalies of the anthropological Rorschach than of the major trends. Stanford, for example, was reunited as a depart- ment in 2007. In addition to whatever epistemological reasons there may be for this, there are practical, generally budgetary, rationales for our continued unity as well. And, even division is not necessarily the “end of anthropology as we know it” as the split of a department does not necessarily mean a complete loss of four-field perspectives (Balée 2009). Nonetheless, the seriousness of the divide in anthro- pology should not be underestimated. More recently, for example, the executive board of the American Anthropological Association caused controversy by eliminating any reference to science from the association’s mission statement (Berrett 2010). 4 ROBERT SHANAFELT As a matter of research, it has long been recognized