in anthro, i think universalism is pretty essentialist...it was originally the taking things for granted of before anthro realized it was ethnocentric and racist, that the so-called universal categories were actually Western, and that didn't make it better--it was people like Boas(their teacher), Mead, and Benedict who posed anti-racist relativism. Now you don't really hear about universalism much in anthropology, at least not to any very large extent. Hell, even psych and linguistics are being slowly forced to admit that absolute universalism is just blatantly false.
I guess maybe a very old school, structuralist relativism could be essentialist in anthropology, simply because structuralism has a tendency to look at structures synchronically--how the structure holds itself up, relates to itself, functions and is constructed in that sense--leaving out history. But even that is about explaining why any culture fits together the way it does, how it creates itself, reconstructs itself...it can get essentialist to the extent, I think, that it only says this system reproduces itself and not that it changes or came to this point through various other changes. Which is sometimes not so much denied as left outside the discussion. Otherwise I feel like the whole point of relativism in anthro is like...these are relative because they were/are constructed differently, really, that the whole point of anthropology is to explain why/how any culture/society "is the way it is" instead of just saying that it is.
"To call the endproduct of a sociopolitical struggle 'grammar' is to reify that struggle." So says the most relativist, anti-structuralist prof I know, and for all the comparisons anthropology makes between linguistic structure and cultural structure...
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Date: 2007-10-05 02:30 pm (UTC)I guess maybe a very old school, structuralist relativism could be essentialist in anthropology, simply because structuralism has a tendency to look at structures synchronically--how the structure holds itself up, relates to itself, functions and is constructed in that sense--leaving out history. But even that is about explaining why any culture fits together the way it does, how it creates itself, reconstructs itself...it can get essentialist to the extent, I think, that it only says this system reproduces itself and not that it changes or came to this point through various other changes. Which is sometimes not so much denied as left outside the discussion. Otherwise I feel like the whole point of relativism in anthro is like...these are relative because they were/are constructed differently, really, that the whole point of anthropology is to explain why/how any culture/society "is the way it is" instead of just saying that it is.
"To call the endproduct of a sociopolitical struggle 'grammar' is to reify that struggle." So says the most relativist, anti-structuralist prof I know, and for all the comparisons anthropology makes between linguistic structure and cultural structure...