haha, improvement. you mean getting rid of benedict? things should be different from that even by the 60's, though. symbolic anthro (geertz...incidentally one writer on indonesia we didn't read in SE asia because we have to read so much of that in Intro.) and structuralism were in full swing. and well, those have a different way of looking at ritual, practice, and conceptual schema, than either the Benedict stuff or structural functionalism (another older anthro theory, which tends to emphasize the conservative character of culture...not that structuralism is much better at dealing w/ change).
all we read from ben anderson was about how indonesians have a different understanding of 'power' or something. it was weird. i didn't really believe him...more because i didn't think he accurately described a 'western' idea of power than anything else, and so it seemed that if there was a difference, he was wrongly generalizing it to the 'concept of power'.
yeah, cross-disciplinary attempts like that tend to go bad...i mean, where people from one discipline attempt to venture into another without much background.
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Date: 2009-04-26 10:42 am (UTC)all we read from ben anderson was about how indonesians have a different understanding of 'power' or something. it was weird. i didn't really believe him...more because i didn't think he accurately described a 'western' idea of power than anything else, and so it seemed that if there was a difference, he was wrongly generalizing it to the 'concept of power'.
yeah, cross-disciplinary attempts like that tend to go bad...i mean, where people from one discipline attempt to venture into another without much background.