AXL3400F The Challenge of Culture 2013 Revision Questions 1.

Just as the catalogue of all the species of plants and animals of a district represent its Flora and Fauna, so the list of all the items of the general life of a people represents that whole which we call its culture (Tylor 1865: 8; italics added). Explain and illustrate the extent to which, and how, the notion of culture suggested in the above quote reappeared in various subsequent anthropologists work, and explain why it is problematic for the way anthropologists understand culture today. 2. E B Tylor (1865: 1) defined culture as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and many other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. Yet this definition is often misquoted by insertion of a before society. Explain why that kind of misquote should have occurred, and what notions of culture are implied by such a misquote. Illustrate your answer by explaining how at least three subsequent anthropologists understood culture in terms that would need insertion of that a. 3. Which of the characteristics of the functionalist and structure-functionalist approaches in anthropology led their protagonists to construct images of distinct, bounded cultures? 4. What is the functionalist understanding of culture and what are its main shortcomings? In your answer refer to both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. 5. Discuss the differences in approach to anthropological theorising employed by two anthropological luminaries, Claude Levi-Strauss, the father of structuralism, and Clifford Geertz, the founder of interpretive anthropology. Explore the claim that Levi-Strauss viewed social anthropology as an experimental science in search of law, and Clifford Geertz as an interpretive science in search of meaning. 6. What was the social-historical context in which Benedict developed her ideas about the integration of culture, and what did she mean by that phrase? Discuss the extent to which she built on the ideas propounded by Boas and/or Tylor. 7. Many earlier anthropologists sought to establish the general laws of culture. Explain why that was so and choose at least two anthropologists who did so to discuss their different ways of attempting to achieve that goal. 8. Societies, like lives, contain their own interpretation. One has only to learn how to gain access to them (Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures p. 453). Using as a case study Geertzs analysis of the Balinese cock fight, discuss the dimensions of gaining access to a societys interpretations of itself. 9. Levi-Strauss upheld a general interest in modern science and a desire to explain similarities that lay behind appearances of cultural difference. Discuss the dimensions of Levi-Strausss theory of human culture as manifest in the structure of thought and language, and explain
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how this contrasts with a functionalist approach in which cultures were seen to exist as discrete wholes. 10. Describe what Claude Levi-Strauss meant by the logic of the concrete. How did the logic of the concrete reflect the structure of human thought in general? 11. The kind of logic in mythological thought is as rigorous as that of modern science and the difference lies not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the thing to which it is applied (Claude Levi-Strauss). Discuss. 12. Understanding a peoples culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity (Clifford Geertz). Elaborate and critically discuss in the light of your knowledge of globalisation and multiculturalism. 13. Consider the following statement in the context of popular notions of culture and heritage, and argue either for or against it. Those who seek authenticity and meaning by commodifying their identity remain, in the end, dupes of the market and mystifications. (J & J Comaroff 2009: 27) 14. Discuss the dichotomy between notions of local/collective rights and global individual human rights as considered in UNESCO and other international documents, and explain how using this dichotomy complicates the protection of those rights on the ground. 15. We will awake from the dream that equality and brotherhood will rule among men without compromising diversity.(NEEDS A REF SOURCE) Explore how the above statement reflects the contradictions in the way international human rights documents deal with the notion of culture. 16. Through the lens of human rights discourse, outline anthropological understandings of the right to be different, considering especially the response of the American Anthropological Association to the Declaration of Human Rights. 17. Discuss, using examples, the difficulty in marrying human and cultural rights, as understood in international legislation (e.g. UNESCO documents), and what role anthropologists might play in improving this relationship. 18. It is fascinating the extent to which mobility is very much at the heart of anthropology. In many ways, anthropology could be seen as the discipline for the study of privileged and underprivileged mobility. Who gets to move or whose mobility is privileged, shall determine whose version of what encounters is visible or invisible in the marketplace of ideas. (Lecture Notes) Explore this assertion in the light of what you have learnt about cross-cultural encounters in this course.
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19. The very idea of going for field trips, so central to anthropology, entails mobile anthropologists, even if only to study people assumed, a priori, to be immobilised by frozen traditions and customs, and confined to particular geographies and spaces. Because the mobility of the anthropologist is privileged over and above the mobility of those he or she studies, the anthropologist arrogates to him/herself the status of the omniscient mediator of cultural identities and encounters, and enjoys the prerogative of freezing the subjects and objects of his/her study outside the local and global historical contexts that give them meaning and relevance. (Lecture Notes) To what extent is the above statement an accurate representation of anthropologists, in your opinion? Illustrate your answer with reference to the work of anthropologists we have treated in AXL3400. 20. The idea of mobile natives is very recent in anthropology, and with it, the idea that field trips, need not necessarily imply going away from home. Draw on the work of Gupta and Ferguson and any other anthropologist to substantiate this observation. 21. Anthropologists have been critiqued not only for a tendency towards radical alterity and reification, but also of paying little attention to power and history. (Lecture Notes) Draw on the work of three anthropologists you are familiar with to argue the contrary. 22. Mobility of cultures does not immediately translate into mutual cultural influence or cultural integration as such influence is often dependent on the power relations that characterise each encounter of cultures. The culture with the power to enforce its ambitions of dominance defines not only itself, but also the less empowered cultures it encounters. Discuss in the light of your understanding of nation-states as congruence between polity and culture. 23. In its lived manifestations, cultural identity appears ever more as two antithetical things at once: on the one hand, as a precipitate of inalienable natural essence, of genetics and biology, and, on the other, as a function of voluntary self-fashioning, often through serial acts of consumption. It is, in other words, both ascriptive and instrumental. Both innate and constructed. Both blood and choice. This doubling, Jean and John Comaroff argue, is endemic to cultural identity in the neoliberal age, with the rise of DNA tribes and ethnoancestry juxtaposing culture, choice and biology (J &J Comaroff 2009:40-41). In what way does this both challenge and reassure the anthropological emphasis that cultures and identities are socially produced, dynamic and relational? 24. Understanding power and its unequal relations within and between cultures is critical to understanding the meanings people make of culture and cultural differences especially how they are produced and reproduced. Cultures do not exist over and above the historical and political processes that produce and reproduce them, but they are able to defy attempts at confining them to particular spaces and places, especially with ever more dislocation, relocation and flexible mobility of peoples and mass mediated cultural products and ideas. Substantiate. 25. According to Richard Jenkins (1996:819), Culture and ethnicity, far from being things that people have, are, rather, complicated repertoires which people experience, use, learn and
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do in their daily lives, upon which they draw for a sense of themselves and an understanding of their fellows. Discuss 26. As Jean and John Comaroff observe, Few anthropologists, sociologists, or political scientists would argue any longer for primordialism, pure and simple, although ethnonationalists around the world continue to kill for it. Fewer still would defend the evolutionary telos that associates the primordial with the antimodern, although some organic intellectuals persist in protecting ancestral customs from historical deconstruction(2009:39). Inspired by the above affirmation, discuss why primordial or exclusionary claims of cultural difference are inherently problematic, even if understandable. 27. Identities as imagined communities tend to privilege the logic of exclusion over that of inclusion, such that the circles of belonging are forever diminishing, the more one scrutinises them. Nations, however magnanimous, benevolent, and inclusive, are imagined as limited, sovereign communities for which those selected for inclusion must display gratitude through consciousness, patriotism and the readiness to sacrifice in honour of the nation. National identities are produced through active investment in seeking congruence in polity and culture. Discuss this claim in the light of your understanding of citizenship in contemporary South Africa. 28. To what extent do assumptions of culture-areas account for those who: a. inhabit the borderlands b. live a life of border crossings c. cross borders more or less permanently 29. How might we account for cultural difference in a world where particular cultures are mapped onto or confined to particular places and spaces? 30. The aim of anthropology is to take anypure, clean philosophy and drag it back down to the valley, to the muddy terrain of particularity and diversity. (Daniel Miller 2010:41). Discuss how, in relation to your knowledge of anthropological articulations of culture. 31. The presumption of anthropology lies in comparative analysis. Recognising that we take for granted our own ways of doing things, and that it is only through coming to appreciate how other people have entirely different experiences and expectations that we can start to challenge our own. (Daniel Miller 2010:31). Discuss in light of what you know about the Challenge of Culture. 32. How does Susan Wright's The Politicization of Culture (1998) relate to Chimamanda Adichie's The Danger of a Single Story (2009)? How might they influence how anthropologists represent culture? 33. Culture means different things to different people, even in academic circles where we are used to emphasis on the clear definition of terms. In anthropology for example, Alfred Louis Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn noted over 100 different definitions of the term in 1952. A
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lot more definitions have been added since then, making of culture a most elusive concept to pin down. Drawing on your knowledge and understanding of The Challenge of Culture course, how would you define culture and why? 34. Drawing on relevant readings in this course, discuss the extent to which our needs as individuals (taken singly or collectively) contribute in determining culture. 35. How does the combination of need and desire determine culture? 36. Participation in social games is not merely a conscious choice. It is something we do prereflectively. We are, in a sense, always already involved. Calhoun 2003:19). 37. Discuss the extent to which culture is dynamic and embedded in history and politics, open to contestation and transformation from within and without, constantly negotiating multiple identities, and a contested process of meaning-making. 38. Understanding power and its unequal relations within and between cultures is critical to understanding the meanings people make of culture and cultural differences. Discuss. 39. Does it matter whether power is vested in culture as a collective consciousness or in individuals as producers and consumers of culture? 40. When is culture shaped by individuals? And when do individuals shape culture? 41. Cultures, communities or localities as bounded and occupying particular spaces and places are fundamentally difficult to contemplate in todays world where both capital and labour are characterised by flexible mobility, thanks to the phenomenal advances in communication and information technologies. Critically discuss. 42. According to Gupta and Ferguson, The presumption that spaces are autonomous has enabled the power of topography to conceal successfully the topography of power, and is one of the reasons why very few accounts exist of anthropologys history as the biography of imperialism (1992:8). Explain and elaborate. 43. If cultures are studied as separate and disconnected entities, then we miss out on the power dynamics that inform particular relationships between cultures, and between various hierarchical interconnections of cultural spaces (global and local or local/local) as we tend to minimize the power of cultural encounters and their ramifications. The challenge to anthropologists is therefore not so much a matter of cultural contact and articulation, given that spaces have always been hierarchically interconnected, but rather one of thinking difference through connection (Gupta and Ferguson 1992:8). Critically assess the implications for doing anthropology by applying the approach recommended by Gupta and Ferguson.
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44. In a world of diaspora, transnational culture flows, and mass movements of populations, old-fashioned attempts to map the globe as a set of culture regions or homelands are bewildered by a dazzling array of postcolonial simulacra, doubling and redoubling and a thousand similar cultural dreams are played out in urban and rural settings all across the globe., (Gupta & Ferguson 1992:10) blurring familiar lines of distinction and differentiation imposed by binary oppositions, dichotomies and metanarratives over the years, and turning on their heads the cultural certainties of the metropole as well as of the colonised periphery or postcolony. In an interconnected world, it is not only the displaced who experience displacement( Gupta & Ferguson 1992:10). Discuss with examples. 45. Comment on and discuss with pertinent examples, the following assertion by Gupta and Ferguson: In the interconnected social spaces of the postcolonial and postmodern world of the 21st century, [A]s actual places and localities become ever more blurred and indeterminate, ideas of culturally and ethnically distinct places become perhaps even more salient, and it becomes most visible how imagined communities (Anderson 1993) come to be attached to imagined places, as displaced peoples cluster around remembered or imagined homelands, places, or communities in a world that seems increasingly to deny such firm territorialised anchors in their actuality. (1992:10-11). 46. Some food for thought from Gupta and Ferguson (1992): Although there is need to give up nave ideas of communities as literal entities, there is equally need to remain sensitive to the profound bifocality that characterises locally lived lives in a globally interconnected world, and the powerful role of place in the near view of lived experience (1992: 11). These changes notwithstanding, it would be wrong simply to dismiss space as imaginary, but quite constructive to focus on the ways in which space is imagined to explore the relation between place and space as a socially constructed reality. Territoriality is thus reinscribed at just the point it threatens to be erased. (1992:11). Hence the need for anthropologists not only to accept the fact of ever increasing deterritorialisation, but even more importantly to theorize how space is being reterritorialised in the contemporary world. . Physical location and physical territory, for so long the only grid on which cultural difference could be mapped, need to be replaced by multiple grids that enable us to see that connection and contiguity more generally the representation of territory vary considerably by factors such as class, gender, race, and sexuality, and are differentially available to those in different locations in the field of power.(Gupta and Ferguson 1992:20). 47. To what extent has what you have learned in AXL3400 made it possible for you to address the challenge of how to go beyond a recognition of the social construction of space to explore how spatial meanings are established, who has the power to make places of spaces, to the detriment of whom and with what consequences. 48. In most societies (including the apparently remote and isolated communities of Bushmen and Pygmies) studied by anthropologists, the production of cultural difference occurs in continuous, connected spaces, traversed by economic and political relations of inequality. (Gupta & Ferguson 1992:16)Hence the need for anthropologists to situate their study of the production of cultural difference within the historical processes of a socially and spatially interconnected world, and not indulge in the irrelevant fiction of constructing romanticised,
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essentialised, ahistorical geographically and spatially bounded cultural identities that reflect very little of the real lived experiences of those they purport to study (Gupta & Ferguson) 1992:16). Critically engage this assertion in the light of your knowledge of how far social anthropology has come from its problematic days of radical alterity. Use any source other than Keesing, to illustrate your argument. 49. Discuss the merits of anthropologists moving beyond naturalised conceptions of spatialised cultures to explore instead the production of difference within common, shared, and connected spaces. 50. There are those who believe that privatisation or commodification increases the public visibility and circulation of culture in ways beneficial to its producers, consumers and humanity at large. The identity industry is said not only to offer a lifeline to cultures in danger of social extinction, it is hailed for promoting cultural diversity. Critically discuss. 51. What are the challenges of culture today? How are they situated in the history of anthropology as a discipline and how might anthropologists overcome these challenges in order to continue to study cultural phenomenon? 52. To what extent are thought, need, desire weighted in the making of culture in different societies or by different social categories within the same society? And how do the various emphasis inform social relations? 53. Pierre Bourdieus theoretical positions were firmly grounded in empirical research, and both sought to enhance understanding of the extent to which we, as social beings, are products and victims of the social realities of which we are part. Substantiate and discuss. 54. Discuss Bourdieus concept of Habitus, indicating the extent to which it seeks to reconcile structure and action in the production, legitimation and contestation of culture. 55. Discuss the differences between structuralism and interpretative anthropology in terms of their approaches to theorizing culture. Use textual and ethnographic examples to demonstrate. 56. To Bourdieu, no culture is complete and free of internal contradictions, nor structured beyond question, and researching culture calls not merely for representing culture simply as rules that people follow, but as the practical dispositions that enable people to improvise actions where no learned rule fits perfectly (Calhoun 2003:14). Elaborate and critically discuss. 57. According to Richard Jenkins (1996:819), Culture and ethnicity, far from being things that people have, are, rather, complicated repertoires which people experience, use, learn and do in their daily lives, upon which they draw for a sense of themselves and an understanding of their fellows. Discuss.
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58. Critically discuss the assertion by Gupta and Ferguson that as anthropologists, we should be interested less in establishing a dialogic relation between geographically distinct societies than in exploring the processes of production of difference in a world of culturally, socially, and economically interconnected and interdependent spaces.(1992:14). 59. Although there is need to give up nave ideas of communities as literal entities, there is equally need to remain sensitive to the profound bifocality that characterises locally lived lives in a globally interconnected world, and the powerful role of place in the near view of lived experience (Gupta and Ferguson 1992:11). Discuss with examples. 60. In Identity economies making capital of culture is paramount and overrides all internal differences within assumed cultural communities. They may speak the language of rights, recognition and representation for endangered cultural minorities, but their branding and marketing rhetoric is one of internal homogeneity rather than a reflection of the heterogeneity that characterises any given cultural community. To survive, cultures must essentialise, and those who essentialise best enjoy a competitive edge. Critically discuss this paradox, with examples. 61. It is wrong for anthropologists to take difference as a starting point, not as an end product. A researcher who starts by taking difference for granted misses out on interrogating the social production of difference and the set of relationships that inform the process. The more scientific anthropologist is one who is able to explore the construction of differences in historical process, and not one who simply juxtaposes pre-existing differences. Discuss in the light of the changing meaning of culture in anthropology. Draw on the work of anthropologists you are familiar with. 62. What is the relationship, if any, between ideas about multiculturalism, diaspora, and ethnicity? How does the analytical framework of transnationalism unsettle these ideas? 63. Outline the similarities and differences between ethnicity, multiculturalism, diaspora, and transnationalism. 64. Like so many other concepts in the social sciences, diaspora has shifted from being a simple descriptive term to being a discursive notion. Discuss how and why that shift has occurred, using examples to illustrate. 65. Multiculturalism implicitly valorises cultures (in the plural) that are [held to be] different from one another. What characteristics of cultureS does multiculturalism use to identify those differences? What is it that caused cultures to differ? [i.e. what causes cultural differentiation?] Why is it important to ask both these questions when examining multiculturalist claims in the contemporary world?

66. Discuss the veracity of the following assertion, inspired by Gupta and Ferguson (1992): It is significant for anthropologists to claim to give voice or representation to dispossessed natives systematically relegated to the margins in various parts of the world, but it is even more important for anthropologists to recognise in their research that power does not enter the anthropological picture only at the moment of representation, for the cultural distinctiveness that the anthropologist attempts to represent has always already been produced within a field of power relations. There is thus a politics of otherness that is not reducible to a politics of representation. (1992: 17). 67. The existence of a transnational public sphere, thanks to the interconnections made possible by the accelerated flows of people and cultural products, and thanks to the cultural industries and their global mass media (TV, Radio, newspapers, music, film, etc.) and advances in information and communication technologies (Internet, Cell phone, social networking platforms such as Facebook, etc.), means that the fallacy or illusion that national, regional and village boundaries enclose cultures and regulate cultural exchange is no longer (if ever it was) sustainable. (Lecture Notes) Discuss. 68. Social Anthropologists have tried to avoid the problems of the constitution of ethnic groups and the nature of the boundaries between them largely by using a highly abstracted concept of society to represent the encompassing social system within which smaller, concrete groups and units may be analysed. But this leaves untouched the empirical characteristics and boundaries of ethnic groups, and the important theoretical issues which an investigation of them raises. (Barth 1969:9) Substantiate and suggest ways of overcoming these problems. 69. To argue or assume that geographical and social isolation have been the critical factors in sustaining cultural diversity is to presuppose that boundaries would necessarily disappear with increased mobility of people across geographical and social borders. However, categorical ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained despite changing participation and membership in the course of individual life histories. (Barth 1969:9-10). Discuss Barths argument in the light of your understanding of globalisation as a process of accelerated flows and closures. 70. How appropriate is it to describe globalisation as a paradoxical process of flows and closures, empowerment and enslavement, hope and disappointment? 71. National identities are produced through the active investment in seeking congruence in polity and culture. Discuss with examples. 72. To argue or assume that geographical and social isolation have been the critical factors in sustaining cultural diversity is to presuppose that boundaries would necessarily disappear with increased mobility of people across geographical and social borders. But we know only too well from our own experiences, that categorical ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained despite changing participation and
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membership in the course of individual life histories. (Barth 1969:9-10). Elaborate and substantiate. 73. Today in Africa, like elsewhere, there is a growing obsession with belonging and the questioning of conventional assumptions about nationality and citizenship. This is as true of how nationals and citizens perceive and behave towards one another, as it is of how they behave towards immigrants, migrants, and/or foreigners. Discuss and explain. 74. As Jean and John Comaroff have argued in one of their papers, in post-apartheid South Africa, while a small but bustling black elite can today wallow in the conspicuous consumption of prized commodities such as houses, cars, TVs, cell phones and Jacuzzis, most ordinary South Africans who are still trapped in shacks, shantytowns, joblessness, poverty and uncertainty, can only marvel at the indecent speed and ... little visible exertion with which the black elite have come by their riches and prosperity. These inequities have given rise to the belief that it is only by magical means, by consuming others, that people may enrich themselves in these perplexing time, and consequently, to a resurgence in accusations of witchcraft and zombification, and to the scapegoating of immigrants makwerekwere, whose readiness, like zombies, to provide devalued labour is seen as compounding the disenchantment of the autochthonous populations in the face of rapidly diminishing prosperity in South Africa (Comaroff J. and J. 1999:22-26). Discuss this observation in relation to culture, citizenship and belonging as fraught with inequalities. 75. Ethnic distinctions, Barth argues, do not depend on an absence of social interaction and acceptance, but are quite to the contrary often the very foundations on which embracing social systems are built. Interaction in such a social system does not lead to its liquidation through change and acculturation; cultural difference can persist despite inter-ethnic contact and interdependence. (Barth 1969:10) Write an essay to explain the extent to which this is true and why. 76. Cohen has argued that In ideological terms, tribes are a fundamentally colonial concept derived from the Latin term tribus meaning barbarians at the borders of the empire. This etymology reflects and explains the significance of the word in Western culture, its link to imperialist expansionism and the associated and overgeneralized dichotomization of the worlds peoples into civilized and uncivilized - the raw and the cooked of human historical experience. Unfortunately, anthropology has become the Western technical-scientific vehicle for the development of this invidious distinction, describing, tabulating, and generalizing about the raw side of the dichotomy (1978:384). Discuss the extent to which their attempts to overcome the ideological bias to which Cohen refers has led some anthropologists to deny the multiethnic quality of some African societies. 77. All culture therefore is, first and essentially, thought or organic expression. We can sum up then by saying that, at the bottom of any given cultural element, there is a burning human need. Driven by this need, and helped by observation and experiment, the human mind-the supreme architect of culture elaborates a system of thought laying down a method of using the external world to satisfy that need. And since human life is one, since the members of the human person are interdependent, since the various levels of human life are inextricably linked one with the other, human needs are therefore inter-related, and, consequently, the various cultural elements forged by man to satisfy his needs must be interdependent too.
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Thus the corpus of all the systems elaborated by any particular human group to allay its needs constitutes an organic cultural whole. There is no people so god-forsaken, so backward, but must have its own culture, its own answers to the eternal problems of life. And since human nature is one, and since the problems that beset man are the same all over, there must be something common to all cultures at all places and at all times. Thus no culture is completely foreign. It is this communion of nature and of need that makes cultural borrowing possible. (Bernard Fonlon, 1967). Compare and contrast the above idea of culture by a non-anthropologist, with ideas of culture by anthropologists with whose work you are familiar. 78. The accelerated flows of capital, goods, electronic information and migration induced by globalisation have only exacerbated insecurities, uncertainties and anxieties in locals and foreigners alike, bringing about an even greater obsession with citizenship, belonging, and the building or re-actualisation of boundaries and differences through xenophobia and related intolerances. Discuss 79. Although structurally excluded from globalisation, the bulk of ordinary people in Africa refuse to celebrate victimhood. Discuss, with cultural examples. 80. Coping with the boundaries imposed or reinforced by globalization as a process of flows and closures is a great challenge. Explain and illustrate how people face up to and deal with that challenge. 81. Global capitalism creates markets and opportunities for rejects even among the dead and the forgotten. Nothing is too old or too used to be used. Globalisation thus provides for the endless recycling of consumer products, and consequently, of the poverty, misery and voicelessness of the majorities of the world, North and South. Critically discuss. 82. Drawing on the commodification and corporatisation of cultural identities, as discussed by Jean and John Comaroff (2009), show how what they call the cultural economy manages to bring together branding, marketing, culture and identity. 83. Jean and John Comaroff have argued that, although at first glance it seems as if those who seek authenticity and meaning by commodifying their identity remain, in the end, dupes of the market and its mystifications, ethno-entrepreneurs often approach the market with a good measure of critical and tactical consciousness, thus ensuring that the reconfiguration of culture and identity occasioned by commodification is less in terms of brute loss or of abstraction and more in terms of intensified fusions of intimacy and distance, production and consumption, subject and object, thereby ensuring that cultures do not lose their aura even when transactions of cultural products and practices are reduced to cash (2009:27). Drawing on what you know of Ethnicity Inc, why it is not as certain as is often claimed that the commodification of identity leads to the cheapening of its substance. 84. In the identity economies, making capital of culture is paramount and overrides all internal differences within assumed cultural communities. People may speak the language of rights, recognition and representation for endangered cultural minorities, but their branding and
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marketing rhetoric is one of internal homogeneity rather than a reflection of the heterogeneity that characterises any given cultural community. To survive, cultures must essentialise since those who do essentialise seem best to enjoy a competitive edge. Discuss. 85. As a resource, culture is more than just a commodity or a heritage. It is also political and social capital in Pierre Bourdieus sense. With illustrations, say how. 86. It has been argued that education is a means of reproducing cultural hegemony that is concerned primarily to benefit of a societys economy. Yet, as Robinson (1981) showed, it is never quite as straightforward as that, and At different times different perspectives are more right than others. Discuss 87. Use of the notion of diaspora has changed much since the founding of a journal of that title in 1991. The change has occurred as much in how academic analysts use the notion as in how persons who regard themselves as members of diasporas do so. Explain, and illustrate with examples, the kinds of changes that have occurred and also how and why those changes have come about. 88. What problems result from what Gupta and Ferguson term this assumed isomorphism of space, place, and culture? Cited in (1992) Beyond Culture : Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference, p 7. 89. The irony of these timesis that as actual places and localities become ever more blurred and indeterminate, ideas of culturally and ethnically distinct places become perhaps even more salient. (Ferguson and Gupta, 1992, p. 10) Do you agree? If so, provide two examples. If you disagree, tell us why. 90. Edward Said characterizes our time as one of generalized condition of homelessness. (1979:18)? What does this notion suggest of culture and mobilities? 91. How are ideas of culture circulated or affected by social and physical mobility of people and things? 92. Cultures dont exist over and above the historical and political processes that produce and reproduce them, but they are able to defy attempts at confining them to particular spaces and places, especially with ever more dislocation, relocation and flexible mobility of peoples and mass mediated cultural products and ideas. Critically discuss. 93. If Cultures exist not as natural or bounded realities, but as dynamic realties that are socially, politically and historically produced, then cultural identities or communities are, to quote Anderson, imagined realities. Does this mean that culture is fabricated or false? If not, why not?

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94. Nations, however magnanimous, benevolent, and inclusive, are imagined as limited, sovereign communities for which those elected for inclusion must display gratitude through consciousness, patriotism and the readiness 95. We are busy modernising our traditions and traditionalising our modernities, (Fo Angwafo III of Mankon). What does this statement by an African King in the 21st century tell you about the navigation and negotiation of cultural encounters in the lives of Africans and their cultural communities? 96. In matters of identity, the history of modernity is pregnant with tension between the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular, the prescriptive and the descriptive, the real and the fantastic. This practice produces a situation that is not helped by a fascination in scholarly analyses with teleological models, dichotomies and binary oppositions that often fall far short of the intricacies, messiness and nuances of real life situations. Discuss the above assertion and suggest ways forward for the study of cultural identities. 97. Instead of ordering different cultures hierarchically, cultural fundamentalism segregates them spatially, each culture in its place. The fact that nation-states are by no means culturally uniform is ignored. Localized political communities are regarded by definition as culturally homogenous. Presumed inherent xenophobic propensities though they challenge the supposed territorial rooting of cultural communities, since they are directed against strangers in our midst reterritorialize cultures. Their targets are uprooted strangers who fail to assimilate culturally. [Not that cultural assimilation would necessarily lead to greater tolerance and integration] (Stolcke 1995:8). When the problem posed by extracommunitarian immigration is conceptualized in terms of self-evident cultural difference and incommensurability, the root causes of immigration, namely, the deepening effects of North-South inequality, are explained away.(Stolcke 1995:8). Discuss the above argument in the light of your understanding of mobility and citizenship in the 21st century. 98. Whilst it is possible conceptually to define the nation as culturally homogeneous and integrated, it is problematic to substantiate that idea empirically in order to use the idea for legitimating belonging or citizenship. Discuss and, with the help of examples, suggest ways to reconceptualise ideas such as nation and citizenship. 99. Contemporary cultural fundamentalism unequivocally roots nationality and citizenship in a shared cultural heritage. Though new with regard to traditional racism, it is also old, for it draws for its argumentative force on this contradictory 19th century conception of the modern nation-state. (Stolcke 1995:12). Discuss this assertion, in the light of your understanding of perceptions of cultures as bounded, compact, and distinct. 100. Francis Nyamnjoh, a Cameroonian novelist and social scientist, said he saw Obama less as a black man than as a successful negotiator of identity margins. His ability to inhabit so many categories mirrors the African experience. Mr. Nyamnjoh said that for America to choose as its citizen in chief such a skillful straddler of global identities could not help but transform the nations image, making it once again the screen upon which the hopes and
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ambitions of the world are projected (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/us/politics/05global.html?em). Drawing on this comment in the New York Times of 5th November 2008, following Barack Obamas election as President of the USA, discuss the extent to which Obama is a metaphor both for the resilience of identities as bounded, and for greater recognition and representation of cultural identities that are grounded in the messiness of real life situations. 101. Any meaningful work towards diversity, in my opinion, must broaden not only who has access to opportunities and resources, but also which worldviews, value systems and voices help shape those opportunities and resources in the first place. Too frequently "diversity" is deemed acceptable only when difference is skin-deep that is, when individual members of marginalized populations reflect hegemonic cultural and social values. This allows those in privileged positions to celebrate "diversity" without ever engaging the full meaning of the concept, questioning who continues to be marginalized, or shifting hegemonic value systems in any way (Mieka Brand, 2007: Manifesto for election to office in the American Anthropological Association) Write an essay in which you discuss the above statement in the light of what you have learned in AXL3400F about culture, society, diversity, hegemony, identity and other related concepts. 102. How, and to what extent, have the concepts introduced and developed in this course, changed the way you view the contemporary world? 103. Geertzs(1973) call for ethnographers to produce thick description might be regarded as perpetuating a model of radical alterity that Keesing (1994) amongst others accuses anthropology of having created. DiscussHow do we bring the culture of anthropological research to bear on non-anthropologists both in and outside academia? 104. The presumption that spaces are autonomous has enabled the power of topography to conceal successfully the topography of power, which Gupta and Ferguson suggest could be one of the reasons why very few accounts exist of anthropologys history as the biography of imperialism (1992:8). 105. It is wrong for anthropologists to take difference as a starting point, not as an end product. Critically discuss. 106. Globalisation is intensifying the divisions between consumer citizens and consumer subjects first between the North and the South, and then within different countries of the North and the South. Explain how, and critically discuss. 107. Increasingly, Africans are appropriating new technologies to serve their struggles against exclusion, and are able to make the best of all worlds in a context where surviving socioeconomic and cultural boundaries has long ceased to be a matter of course. Elaborate with examples. 108. What are the consequences of top-down approaches to translation of purportedly universal notions of human rights? Draw upon Englund to suggest the challenges reinforced
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by the translation of human rights discourse and the implementation of human rights in different contexts. 109. What is the role of cultural relativism in the context of universalism in human rights? Describe the unequal encounters and unequal relations between different human cultures or habituses that may arise in the context of human rights discourse. Provide examples 110. One love one heart, lets live together and feel alright Discuss this observation with respect to the paradoxes of globalisation. 111. George Orwell observes in his book Animal Farm that even though All animals are equal, some animals are more equal than others. Critically examine this claim in relation to globalisation and cultural rights. 112. Drawing on lecture readings, popular media debates, and the real life experiences of people you know, discuss the extent to which globalisation can be described as a paradoxical process of accelerated mobility and immobility. 113. The study of diaspora is often fraught with paradoxes, ambiguities and contradictions. Critically compare and contrast open, categorical and oxymoronic definitions of diaspora. 114. Brubaker claims that a dimension of the dispersion of diaspora, involves the application of the term diaspora to an ever-broadening set of cases: essentially to any and every nameable population category that is to some extent dispersed in space. In what ways have various scholars defined the term, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of these definitions. 115. Brubaker posits that if everything is diaspora, then the term loses its discriminating power its ability to pick out phenomena, to make distinctions. To what extent do you agree with this assertion? 116. The specific cosmopolitanisms articulated by diaspora discourses are in constitutive tension with nation-state/assimilationist ideologies. They are also in tension with indigenous, and especially autochthonous, claims. These challenge the hegemony of modern nation-states in a different way. Discuss with concrete examples. 117. What are the possible advantages and disadvantages of using multiculturalism as a concept to define our contemporary transnational moment? 118. Francis Nyamnjoh argues that South Africa should best be approached from the point of view of the conviviality of porcupines. To what extent is this true of the state of multiculturalism in the Rainbow nation?
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119. Discuss the challenges and opportunities for cultural difference and cultural interdependence in a multicultural and increasingly globalized South Africa. Illustrate with examples of people and places you are familiar with. 120. Many are called but few are chosen. In what ways does this claim articulate the nature of rights, citizenship and multiculturalism in an increasingly globalised world? 121. Sheffer posits that Modern diasporas are ethnic minority groups of migrant origins residing and acting in host countries but maintaining strong sentimental and material links with their countries of origin their homelands Discuss this statement with respect to ethnicity, diaspora, globalisation and multiculturalism. 122. Over twenty years ago, Rosaldo (1989) wrote that there is an unresolved tension about whether to describe cultures as loosely tied bundles of informal practices, or as well-formed systems regulated by control mechanisms, or as the interplay of both. Discuss to what extent and especially how anthropologists have found a way to manage that tension.

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