Assignments

Ethnographic Projects

Three ethnographic projects constitute 30% of your grade (10% each). These projects’ in-class presentation, workshopping, and critique constitute another 15% (5% each).

This assignment is tailored to each of the class’s first three sections: family, things, and agents and persons. It requires you to gather data about some aspect of our Bostonian life through ethnographic participant-observation and to analyze this data according to the assigned guidelines, drawing on one or more of the texts assigned for that section. You are advised, therefore, to start thinking about the project early on in each section, but to finish writing it after we have covered some of the readings. Because anthropology (and academic work generally) is a social activity, because thought happens in conversation and good ideas are collectively generated, part of this assignment also requires you to present your completed project in class and participate in the workshopping and critique of your classmates’ projects.

Ethnographic Assignment 1: Diagram a Set of Social Relations (Kin-Based or Not)

Ethnographic Assignment 2: Describe a Transaction

Ethnographic Assignment 3: Define Personhood

Reading Response Essays

Four short reading response essays (1–2 pages, one essay per section) constitute 20% of your grade.

This assignment requires you to summarize the main argument of one of the readings assigned for each of the four sections. Critical engagement of the texts’ arguments—by putting them into conversation with other assigned readings or by raising questions about how the argument’s logic does or does not work—are a welcome addition to the summary, but not a requirement. You may choose which of the assigned texts you write about, but response essays are due on the day that that particular reading is discussed.

Final Paper

A final 4–6 page essay, due on the last day of class, constitutes 20% of your grade, and there are two options for writing it:

Option 1:

Put three (3) texts from our syllabus in conversation, reading them against each other to discover their similarities, disagreements, and limitations: how are the social worlds described in these texts differently structured, and how have the authors differently analyzed these differently structured worlds?

Option 2:

Use two (2) texts from our syllabus to explain how culture works.

Student Example

“How Does Culture Work?” (PDF)

Note: All examples in the Assignments section appear courtesy of MIT students and are anonymous by request.

Inspired by Malinowski’s diagram of Kula (see page 82 of Argonauts of the Western Paciflc), and by Parsons’ diagram of mid-century middle-class American families (see page 23 of the article “The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States” (PDF - 2MB), American Anthropologist 45, no. 1 (1943): 22–30), this assignment asks you to diagram a set of social relations. The relations may be kin-based or not, but they do need to be established enough to constitute a chartable social unit. Something like grocery store transactions probably won’t yield a very interesting diagram (…unless you notice the same people coming back and forming social ties in and through that grocery store).

To go about this, you will need to:

Observe how people relate to each other—paying particular attention to status relations and material exchanges: what sorts of entitlements and obligations come with the different positions in your social diagram? Are these entitlements and obligations a good marker of social distance?
Ask the people involved what they think about these relations, paying particular attention to the significance of the terms people use to describe them. Do the people in the structure you’re diagramming recognize it as a structure? Can they tell you about how these relations changed and how they worked in the past?

Then, after finding a social structure and diagramming it, write a short essay (2–3 pages) describing your diagram and the way you went about constructing it. What relations did you take to be significant? What data did you gather to understand this significance? How does your diagrammed social structure speak to our class discussions and readings?

Please put your diagram (and/or your experience of producing it) in conversation with at least one of the texts assigned for this class.

The only relation I ask you not to write about is your own family.

Good luck!

Student Example

“The Family Line System of Theta Xi” (PDF - 1.5MB)

People give each other things. This creates useful material worlds, and it also generates other, less tangible values: social status, friendship, solidarity, perhaps even salvation.

Consider this story:

A man knew he was going to be fired for mismanagement, so he used his last day on the job to alter the ledgers, cutting the amounts debtors owed to his boss, and thus personally obligating them to himself, “so that when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.” This probably happens all the time, all over the world. But we know this particular story from Luke, who quotes Jesus Christ telling it. The moral? “Make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings” (Luke 16:9).

Transactions—whether they involve labor obligations or gasoline, money or eternal salvation—present anthropologists with question of value in time: of how people store up their resources and mobilize them to improve their lot in the future. In our discussions and readings, we have seen that different types of transactions are guaranteed by different bodies and mechanisms (from the FDIC to social shame); that they entail different forms of obligation; that they are possible for different kinds of people; and that they often generate “extras,” like interest rates or material perks.

For this ethnographic project, observe (or, following Peebles, deduce) a transaction. Then, in 3–4 pages, explain its “roots and fruits”: explain the conditions of possibility upon which it draws, and the values that it creates. Some of these “roots and fruits” may be purely material (a canister of fuel exchanged for a bag of potatoes), others may be more difficult to circumscribe (good social standing, solidarity, friendship networks).

Pay particular attention to how relations, social bodies or institutions guarantee the transactions’ success. What types of people may conduct such transactions? How is trust established between the transacting parties? Do they draw upon similar types of resources, similarly guaranteed? Do parasites threaten the resources? Does disruption threaten the transaction?

And pay attention to time. What time frame—or time frames—does the transaction suppose? Do other time frames and other values stand behind the immediate fact of material exchange?

Student Examples

“Eggs” (PDF)

“Venmo Transactions” (PDF)

This assignment asks you to write a short ethnographic study of personhood, a seemingly obvious category that actually takes very specific, historically contingent forms.

Consider this anecdote:

“He would stride hurriedly down the sidewalks, almost running, but always, be it winter or summer, bareheaded, he didn’t have a hat at all. It was said that he had come to St. Petersburg during the stern reign of Emperor Paul I [1796–1801], and he happened once to be walking past Saint Michael’s Castle, where the emperor lived, and that this was the last time that he had a hat on his head. Noticed near the castle, he was chased down, had his hat knocked off in an impolite manner; and was himself taken to the castle. When it was learned that he was a foreigner, who did not know the customs of the time, he was released; but the fear so much affected him that he lost his mind on this point and never again put on a hat” (Pylyaev 1898: ch. 18).

In Notable Eccentrics and Queers, his 1898 collection of urban legend and folklore, M.I. Pylyaev notes that this was one of the few bareheaded people in 1840s St. Petersburg: a “slight old man, a teacher of the French language.” Assaulted for offending the hat-tipping traditions of the time, this unhappy Frenchman was disgraced so profoundly that he never recovered. The loss of his hat did not simply lower his status and decrease his opportunities, it somehow disturbed his sense of self.

It might sound ridiculous: four decades of nervousness over one hat! But to make some sense of this story, we should recall that up through the Second World War, throughout the “western world” (and not only there), it was often thought unseemly to be out in public bareheaded. Men and women covered heads differently. Often, women changed the type of headgear they wore once in their lives, when they got married, and men rearranged theirs many times a day—tipping the hat to one person, taking it off to another, touching the rim to a third. Such hat actions weren’t just about fashion. They were about decency: the physical enactment of social position in a gender-distinct and status-based social hierarchy.

What, for us today, might be an equivalent of shattering hat-loss? People wear hats in Boston today, but they rarely tip them. They have no need to, they don’t feel in their body the discomfort of a misplaced hat (like one might feel the discomfort of a misplaced pronoun). And yet, as we’ve seen throughout this semester, our Bostonian life is also ordered by social structures and hierarchies, transactions and statuses, ethics and glory and unquantifiable “extras.”

What persons inhabit this world, what relations and properties define and delimit their personhood?

Drawing on your own ethnographic observations of how persons relate to each other, and on our class discussions and texts, write a 3–4 page essay defining some aspects of personhood. Pay particular attention to which properties and relations are taken to be indispensable to being a person: which possessions, qualities, relations are commonly assumed to be inalienable, and which may be changed, forsaken, transacted? Gender and given name, for example, have long been highly inalienable but have quite recently become much less so. Today it is not out of the question that a person might choose a new legal and social identity in the middle of life, without fundamentally changing his/her self (perhaps explaining that s/he has now become the person s/he had really been all along).

How do persons relate to each other, and how do non-persons mediate these relations? Are there degrees of personhood and agency? Are some beings persons only in certain relationships? (Pet animals, maybe?)

Student Examples

“What is a Person but a Resume?” (PDF)

“Personhood Essay” (PDF)

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How Culture Works