Cultural Anthropology: BLOG 1

What stood out most to me about this week's readings was the focus on getting to know the people one is studying. The basis for modern anthropology is to research within the place one is studying to gain a sense of the real lives of the people. By learning the culture's colloquial language, taking on non-verbal gestures, and distinguishing norms, anthropologists begin to appreciate the community's own understanding of their world. Trust is built through communication, so in order to gain the trust of the community, one must practice the forms of communication that the people use. If anthropologists fail to align themselves with the expectations of their host culture, they lose important building blocks of communication, and therefore willingly admit themselves to social embarrassment and possible rejection from their community. Thus, good anthropologists will communicate with the people in the way which is natural to their culture. In order to integrate successfully into another culture and gain acceptance from their host community, one must learn to live by the rules, or norms, of the host culture.

An anthropologist's assent into the host's style of communication is pertinent for developing vital relationships within the community. During the beginning of his fieldwork with the Yanomamo tribe, Napoleon A. Chagnon adjusted his form of communication in order to gain respect from the community. For much of the beginning of his fieldwork, the surrounding tribesmen would bother Chagnon for his food and his other possessions for their own use. He was not able to ward them off and would eventually give into their impeding demands. Chagnon was not pushy in his communication, and therefore the other Yanomamo men considered him to subhuman. At one poin intime, several tribesmen had chopped up a canoe, that Chagnon had spent all morning constructing, so that they would have wooden paddles for their own canoes. He tried communicating his anger in the way that he was used to, by acknowledging that he was angry at them and he considered their actions disrespectful. However, although Chagnon's actions would have been considered assertive in American culture, his communication style had not been successful with the Yanomamo. Frustrated, Chagnon suddenly cut the men's canoes loose from the dock and let them float downstream. Immediately, Chagnon had earned respect from the men of the tribe. Chagnon found this more aggressive form of communicating had gained him a higher status than he had previously held in the community. Because Chagnon learned how to communicate correctly among the other Yanomamo, he slowly became more of a member in the community. Although Chagnon tried to communicate his anger, he did not communicate in the style of the culture, and hence, he was not taken seriously. Only after Chagnon complied with his host culture was he able to be seen as another human being, a large step made within his study of the Yanomamo.

I became an outsider to a specific "tribe" of America: the punk-rock music scene. In order to integrate into this culture, I had to build trust through the cultural norms of this scene. When I was in ninth grade, I joined a band with my boyfriend, Kyle, and his best friend, Tony. I had never been part of a musical group before that had played it's own shows in front of people who yelled, screamed, and danced while jumping and yelling for the show. During my first performance with the band, I had trouble knowing how to address the audience. Oftentimes at these punk shows, the local teenagers would create circle pits, where the purpose was to run and push into as many other people who were also participating on the dance floor. The teenagers seemed to gain so much energy and excitement from ramming into other people that the circle pits often became the focus of the crowd, rather than the musical performance. I felt that when people listened to a musical group, they should be quiet and patiently wait for the musician to perform the next song. I was used to presenting myself with almost complete silence from the audience. This was not the custom in punk-rock shows, however. The more that the audience was having a good time, the more noise they would make. When I spoke to introduce the next song, I was not to be heard over the yelling and laughing high school teenagers. The volume of the punk rockers reverberated inside the tiny garage we all squeezed into. Feeling adequately unnoticed by the crowd. I decided that I had had enough of being ignored. I decided to take a more aggressive stance at addressing the crowd. Much like Chagnon, I had to assert myself with a degree of aggressiveness that would succeeded the people surrounding me in order to be respected, or even understood. I suddenly yelled into my microphone, "Shut the f*** up!" The circle pit stopped moving and everyone looked towards Kyle, Tony, and I. I started to introduce the song and we started playing our music. The audience grew loud again, signaling that the punk rockers were enjoying our performance. I had learned how to communicate in a way which the given culture understood best, and respectively gained a positive response from my punk-rock community.

If an anthropologist desires to understand a group of people, he or she must empathize with and indulge in the culture in which those people live. Although there is discomfort about personal boundaries which an anthropologist must cross when coming from hjis or her own culture, the reason of delving into the norms of the host culture is to reach some level of understanding. By adhering to the communication of our host cultures, both Chagnon and I were able to communicate efficiently and hence, gain trust and bond with our respective communities.