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To all of the students who have participated in one version or another of our Investigating Culture classes.

This edition first published 2011

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Delaney, Carol Lowery, 1940-

Investigating culture / Carol Delaney. – 2nd ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4051-5424-6 (pbk.)

1. Anthropology. I. Title.

GN25.D45 2011

301–dc22

2010051049

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 978-1-4443-9690-4; ePub 978-1-4443-9691-1

Preface to Second Edition

Because the response from students and professors to Investigating Culture has been very positive, the publisher asked me to prepare a new edition. I procrastinated for several years due to other projects and commitments. After retiring from Stanford, I taught for two years at Brown University, where I used the first edition in a course of the same title. The students helped to pinpoint areas that needed updating. In particular, I wish to acknowledge Sarah Cocuzzo, Lydia Magyar, and Andrew Mathis, who met with me on a regular basis. As we went over each chapter, they made suggestions for revision and brought in material from their experience and independent research.

However, this new edition would not have happened without the gentle persistence of Rosalie Robertson at Blackwell Publishers. When she suggested that I find a collaborator, I thought, immediately, of Deborah Kaspin, who had been a fellow graduate student at the University of Chicago, and has taught at University of Virginia, Yale University, Wheaton College, and Rhode Island College. Working with her has been a great pleasure; not only has she corrected some of my grammar and awkward sentence structure, but also she has contributed in a major way by updating existing material, adding new material from her own research, making subtle but important elaborations and clarifications in the text, and, from her teaching experience, suggesting ways to make the material more accessible to a broader student population.

This book, unlike most introductory anthropology textbooks, is not so much intended to teach facts about other cultures as it is to help students learn how to go about studying any culture, including their own. Additionally, this book is not constructed according to traditional categories such as the family, religion, economy, and politics because we feel these domains cannot be so easily separated. Instead, the book is organized in terms of space, time, language, social relations, body, food, clothing, and culture icons – important people, places, and performances – in order to show how the system of cultural symbols and meanings spans a range of domains. Material gleaned from a variety of cultures is used primarily as illustration. The goal of the text and the ethnographic exercises is to enable students to think like anthropologists.

Carol Delaney

Deborah Kaspin

Acknowledgments

The course on which this book is based emerged as a result of “trial by fire” when I had to offer a course – to start in two weeks’ time – in cultural anthropology and comparative religion to a small group of freshmen in the University Professors’ Program at Boston University. I had very little time to prepare and decided to use the class as an experiment, that is, to use the experience of entering the university as an analogy to think about what it was like for anthropologists to go elsewhere. It worked. It was exciting. We had a great time and learned a lot. However, the book, with its accompanying course, is not just for freshmen: it can be, and has been, used at any time and place during the typical four-year college education and has also been used at campuses in Europe. (It could also be used productively for people posted to positions in foreign countries – military, diplomats, journalists, etc.) I continue to hear from the students who took that first course long ago (1986) who feel it set them on a path of discovery, which is what an undergraduate education ought to be. Over the years the course changed considerably; the insights and critiques of the students helped to shape the content into what became this book.

At Stanford, I was fortunate to get research funds to hire some of my students as research assistants. Not only did they make trips to the library while I was writing and look up material on the Internet, with which they were far more proficient than I, but also they served as “guinea pigs,” telling me when the tone was all wrong or that a particular example was passé. They also suggested topics and then found material to address them. Here, then, I acknowledge the help of Alisha Niehaus (my first student research assistant), who was indefatigable in locating interesting material and telling me when I was “off.” Sam Gellman and Andrea Christensen helped during the summer of 2001, and Andrea, along with Katie Cueva, helped during the final phases in the summer of 2002. They had a tough job: they had to do a lot of research on new topics and trace all the things I had neglected to record, and they served as editors, reading and rereading the chapters. To all of them I extend heartfelt thanks; the book is a better product because of their input, and I am deeply grateful for their help.

But I must also acknowledge the initial interest and enthusiasm of Jane Huber, my editor at Blackwell Publishers. Without her ongoing support, my energy might have flagged; in addition, she suggested material and broadened my perspective when my focus had narrowed. My daughter, Elizabeth Quarartiello, and colleagues Miyako Inoue (Stanford) and Don Brenneis (University of California, Santa Cruz) read and made suggestions for the language chapter. Steve Piker, a professor at Swarthmore, was brave enough to try out the penultimate draft on his students at the same time I used it with mine, and the response was gratifying. I hope the future users of this book find inspiration, new perspectives, and ways of making connections between things they never thought were related.

The author and publishers gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to reproduce copyright material in the respective chapters:

Chapter 1

Bohannan, Laura. “Shakespeare in the Bush.” Natural History (August–September 1966): 28–33.
Chapter 2

Beckham, Sue Bridwell. “The American Front Porch: Women’s Liminal Space.” In Making the American Home: Middle-Class Women and Material Culture, 1840–1940, ed. Marilyn Ferris Motz and Pat Browne. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1988, pp. 69–78, 82–9. © 1988 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press

(Poem in reading) Easter, Mary. Poem: “Sitting on the Porch.” In Absorb the Colors: Poems by Northfield Women Poets, ed. Beverly Voldseth and Karen Herseth Wee. Northfield, MN: privately published, 1986. © Mary Moore Easter. Reprinted with the kind permission of the author.
Chapter 3

Fabian, Johannes. “Premodern Time/Space: Incorporation” and “Modern Time/Space: Distancing.” In Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, new ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 27. Reprinted with permission of Columbia University Press and the author

Goodman, Ellen. “Time Is for Savoring.” Boston Globe, October 1977. © 1977 by Globe Newspaper Co (MA). Reprinted with permission of PARS International.
Chapter 4

Dundes, Alan. “Seeing Is Believing.” Natural History Magazine (May 1972): 8–12, 86–7. Reprinted by permission of Natural History Magazine.

LeGuin, Ursula. “She Unnames Them.” In Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences. New York: Plume Books, 1987, pp. 194–6. © 1985 by Ursula LeGuin. First appeared in the New Yorker. Reprinted with permission of the author and the author’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency.
Chapter 5

Atwood, Margaret. “An Encyclopedia of Lost Practices: The Saturday Night Date.” New York Times Magazine, Late Edition – Final, December 5, 1999, sec. 6, p. 148, col. 1. © O. W. Toad Ltd. First appeared in The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1999. Reprinted with permission of the author c/o Curtis Brown UK and Larmore Literary Agency.

Eckert, Penelope. “Symbols of Category Membership.” In Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers College Press, 1989, pp. 49–72, 185–8. Copyright © 1999 by Teachers College Press. Reproduced with permission of Teachers College Press via CCC.

Hocart, A. M. “Kinship Systems.” In The Life-Giving Myth. London: Tavistock/Royal Anthropological Society, 1973, pp. 173–84.
Chapter 6

Jong, Erica. “Is Life the Incurable Disease?” In At the Edge of the Body. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p. 17. © 1979, 1991 Erica Mann Jong. Used by permission of Erica Jong.

Miner, Horace. “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” American Anthropologist 58 (1956): 503–7.

Pope, Harrison, G., Katharine Phillips, and R. Olivardia. The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession. New York: Free Press, 2000, p. 41. Courtesy Simon & Schuster/Zachary Shuster Harmsworth.
Chapter 7

Dubisch, Jill. “You Are What You Eat: Religious Aspects of the Health Food Movement.” From The American Dimension: Culture Myths and Social Realities, 2nd ed., ed. Susan P. Montague and W. Arens. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield, 1981, pp. 115–27 (The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.). © Jill Dubisch. Reprinted with kind permission of the author.

Shell, Ellen Ruppel. “An International School Lunch Tour” (op-ed). New York Times, Late Edition – Final, February 1, 2003, sec. A, p. 19, col. 1. © Ellen Ruppel Shell 2003. Reprinted with the kind permission of the author.
Chapter 8

Ribeyro, Julio Ramon. “Alienation (An Instructive Story with a Footnote).” In Marginal Voices: Selected Stories, trans. Dianne Douglas. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 57–67. Copyright © 1993. Reprinted with permission of University of Texas Press.

Rosen, Ruth. Short extract from “A Statement about More Than Fashion.” San Francisco Chronicle, May 13, 2001. Reprinted with permission.
Chapter 9

Delaney, Carol. “Let’s Send All Our Missiles to the Sun” (letter to the editor). New York Times, December 30, 1991. © 1991 Carol Delaney.

Geertz, Clifford. “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man.” In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books, 1973, pp. 33–54. With permission from Dr. Karen I. Blu, executrix, Estate of Clifford Geertz.