Examining Cultural Transmission and Reflexivity Amongst Cultural Anthropologists.

Let's Shift Paradigms: Examining Cultural Transmission and Reflexivity Amongst Cultural Anthropologists

"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." (1) Anthropological theory in cultural studies sets the stage for how practitioners conduct fieldwork, research, and self-evaluations during and following a project. It provides the framework to explain and interpret data--acting as a body of suppositions that can help give meaning to phenomena. (2) Choosing a theoretical framework can be a deciding factor for a social scientist as it will vastly direct the interpretation of data. Diving deeper, anthropologists must consider philosophical issues when being guided by a framework to ensure they address issues such as bias, thought processes, and how to transmit knowledge from one generation of scholars to the next.

Reflexivity and cultural transmission within the practitioners of cultural anthropology is new, along with the general studying of theory and philosophy of the discipline, but has not yet been widely implemented in the discourse of the discipline. Reflexivity is a social theory that aims to view consciousness in oneself as they practice ethnography, while the practitioners focus on their relationship to their subdiscipline of study. (3) Cultural transmission is the act of bringing this all to the forefront of theory and spreads the knowledge amongst a social group. In this case, this social group would be practitioners of cultural anthropology. Reflexivity should be highlighted when teaching cultural anthropology theory because this encourages a more intentional practice. Michel Foucault (1924-1984), a French historian and philosopher whose theories on the relationship between power, knowledge, and societal control helped shape modern thought, determined that anthropology is centered around the analysis of concrete forms of self-observation. (4) This is moving away from an a priori-fueled, or theoretical deduction when conducting ethnography.

This two-part paper focuses on the intersection of philosophy and cultural anthropology theory. The first part of this essay argues the importance of Foucault's idea of reflexivity in sociology and ethnography. In this same section, it will be argued that it is time for a paradigm shift (outside of the gentle push first introduced in the mid-1950s) towards reflexivity and the "self gaze" in ethnographic research. The second part of this essay will hone in more narrowly on this paradigm shift, and how anthropological knowledge is shared between cultural anthropologists, with respect to this new concept of reflexivity in part by examining the American "Every Body Needs Milk" of the 1990s.

A Brief History of Cultural Anthropology: How Was Reflexivity Practiced?

"Reflexiveness does not leave the subject lost in its own concerns; it pulls one toward the Other and away from isolated attentiveness toward oneself. Reflexiveness requires subject and object, breaking the thrall of self-concern by its very drive towards self-knowledge and inevitably takes into account a surrounding world of events, people, and places." (5)

In anthropology, reflexivity is the ability to be consciously aware of the separation between self and other. This is discerning objectivity practice used to ensure ethnographic fieldwork does not overlap too much with the concept of self, the practitioner of cultural anthropology. (6) Obviously, it is a practice that is great in theory and is oftentimes difficult to actually achieve. Bias, self-examination, and selfhood tend to show up when conducting ethnographic fieldwork in some way, shape, or form. The goal is to limit how much "self" comes through and to ensure it does not overshadow the other.

The shifting point toward reflexivity in cultural anthropology theory was introduced by Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish-British ethnographer, and anthropologist. Credited with pioneering participant observation, which involved living with the people he was studying and participating in their daily lives. Malinowski also helped to create the concept of cultural relativism, which holds that different cultures should be evaluated based on their own standards, rather than by those of Western society. (7) In his 1915 work, a research journal documenting the culture groups of the Trobriand Islands, he published that "objective methods are based on good sense and the anthropologist's psychological flair." (8) By this, he meant a good anthropologist should have the aptitude to distance himself from the subject that they are studying. This has to occur systematically, and it must take place with methodological care and attention.

Prior to Malinowski's great push toward reflexivity in cultural anthropology, Malinowski was far more subjective in his work. He would criticize the people that he wrote about in his Trobriand journal, and would frequently skip the crucial step of objective reasoning. Even at this time, however, Malinowski was a respected and widely-known anthropologist. However, it was his subjective reasoning and insertion of personal questions and opinions...