Week 1: What is anthropology and why should anyone care? (Economic rationality and the reality of society)

Week 1: What is anthropology and why should anyone care? (Economic rationality and the reality of society)

ANTH 1002: Anthropology for a better world (Semester 2, 2025)
August 5, 2025

Main reading: n/a

Notes

In the first lecture for this class, we discuss what anthropology has to offer the world we live in now. Anthropology is different that other ways people examine human existence, human behavior, and people’s social lives and experiences. One of the main ways that anthropology is different is that it starts from the assumption that diversity is what defines human beings and human communities, and as such there is no single or universally right, correct, or normal ways to be or live.

More important than this, however, is that this commitment to the diversity of humanity also means that anthropology resists playing the role of the expert, the authority, or the master. The common purpose of anthropologists is to question and challenge what people take for granted and accept as true, and to expand what we are able to imagine is possible.

The present interregnum is a era of morbid symptoms

Antonio Gramsci was a Marxist writer and radical activist in the early 20th century in Italy. As a leader of the Communist Party, he was imprisoned by the fascist government of Mussolini in 1923. While in prison, Gramsci turned to writing a theory of why revolutionary social change was so slow to come, even under authoritarian rulers who oppressed the majority. In his Prison Notebooks, he writes of a crisis in which the ideology of the ruling class is no longer accepted, but no alternative has arisen to oppose it. Instead, rather than resist or comply, people just—meh—give up:

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. (Gramsci [1930] 1972, 276)

The main task for revolutionaries is to show people that there is “the possibility and necessity of creating a new culture” (Gramsci [1930] 1972, 276).

For Gramsci, just when things look hopeless, that’s when we have the greatest opportunity to create a new, more just, and more equal world. This is a moment when more people than ever doubt what they are told, especially by elites, experts, and people who claim to know better. If we continue to, as Marx himself wrote, engage in the “ruthless criticism of everything existing” then we can set a social transformation in motion (Marx [1843] 1978, 13).

How can we learn to be skeptical of everything? And, if we are supposed to doubt everything, then how do people create a new culture?

For Marxists, it’s the economy, stupid. That’s one possible way to see past the lies society teaches us.

Anthropology, we would like to argue, offers another set of tools for ruthless criticism and for finding alternative possibilities.

Anthropology has tools we need to question what experts say

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was a Kenyan writer and literary scholar. In his early years, he wrote hoping to create a new Kenyan and new African literature. Like a lot of his contemporaries, he wrote in English, a language he learned to speak in school, and different from his first language, Gĩkũyũ, a language spoken today by over 6 million people (and often transliterated in English as Kikuyu). Finally, after many frustrating debates among African writers which usually concluded that they had to use colonial languages, Ngũgĩ started writing in Gĩkũyũ.¹ Reflecting on his decision, he said that if African intellectuals wanted to really challenge the neocolonial world order then they shouldn’t target the economic system their postcolonial societies inherited, but the languages of that system. Ngũgĩ said they should turn to “the language of real life” (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o [1981] 1986, 13). All the tools they needed to imagine how things could be different were right in front of them, in the thinking that people do together in the course of everyday living in their own languages and cultures. These were not merely traditions, although they were very old. They were part of a community’s distinct worldview and philosophy. Radical social change comes from listening to this language of everyday life and seeing it as an alternative form of life.

That’s where anthropology comes in. Anthropologists don’t know anything. Anthropologists are not experts or bearers of wisdom. We want to understand the human condition, particularly the nature of human societies. But we don’t think there is one answer to that question. Because there is no one right, correct, normal, or universal way that people live, anthropologists believe that we must be humble and listen to people if we want to understand how they live and why they think and act the ways they do. We learn to listen to the language of real life so we can learn to be skeptical and critical of what powerful people tell us is right.

Ngũgĩ was in fact quoting Marx when he spoke of listening to the language of real life. As an anthropologist myself, I (Ryan) choose to read this differently than Gramsci would. Gramsci wanted masses of people to see that everything in life came down to who gets what. Some anthropologists would agree. But Ngũgĩ cites Marx to remind us that in everyday life every person is part of a larger web of connections to other people. All anthropologists would agree with that. Anthropologists think that to really understand how a community works, and how people work together, you have to immerse yourself in that environment. Anthropologists love big ideas, but they aren’t going to reach for the simple stories and explanations most people use. They get to big, profound insights into what makes a community by working from the ground up, and especially by striving to see someone’s life the way they see it.

Record your thoughts in a personal log this semester

There is no writing assignment due for this week, but I encourage you to keep a diary of your study of anthropology and collect your thoughts in writing each week.

In any semester, Week 1 is a good time to take stock.

• What has your first year of university study been like so far? What have been the surprises? What would you want to tell high school students preparing for university next year?

• What do you know of anthropology right now? Why did you choose this class this semester?

• Considering the society in which you live, do you see “morbid symptoms” of a dying old order? Do you see evidence of alternatives in people’s “language of everyday life”?

Keep this writing, and all of your weekly writings for this class. At the end of the semester you can look back on these answers and consider how you have changed.

Tutorials start in Week 2

There are no tutorials in Week 1.

We have tried to set a number of different times for tutorials for this class. Not everyone can have their first choice of tutorial time. The number of students enrolled in the class will shift up to the start of Week 2. If you have been assigned a tutorial when you cannot attend, you can try to select a new tutorial as the numbers shift. Check back on Sydney Student often to see if new places have opened. (And if new students join the class, we will be opening new tutorials.)

Keywords

anthropology, society, economic rationality, holism

Learning outcomes

• Be able to define anthropology
• Understand the scope and structure of the course
• Be aware of economic rationality and holism as distinct perspectives on society
• Understand economic rationality as itself a particular social construct (one culture’s as-if)