ANT100: Lecture_8

Universal and Particular moral values §

Universal (absolute) and particular (cultural) moral values §

• Universal (absolute) moral values - believing that these exists as the opposite of moral relativism
• Not necessarily opposite of cultural relativism, it allows for moral universals and moral particulars

Cultural and moral relativism §

• ==Moral relativism== - there are no absolute values, (what is good or evil depends on the culture)

  • Anthropologist is against moral relativism

• ==Cultural relativism== - assumptions and behaviours mean different things in different cultures

  • Recognize that historical, social, and economic context had different values (affect behavior)
  • Understand the Other’s behaviour and thoughts in context
  • Do not necessarily avoid moral judgement

• Ethics - about moral conduct (good vs evil)

  • There are many universal and (cultural) particulars
  • Ethnography, a study of anthropology poses ethical questions, they also study human interactions that have a moral dimension

Moral issues and anthropological work §

• Alto do Cruzeir - Mother love and infant death
  • Mother abandon some babies to their fate -> baby die
  • Theory 1: mother loves is all biological natural and universal
  • Theory 2: mother love is all soical constructed
  • Middle: mothers are predisposed by nature, but how the way is dependent of social condition
• Other absolute or relative morality questions
  • Exposing the elderly to death?, Polygamy?, Abortion?, Circumcision?

Intersection of economics and ethics §

• Political economy - the raising and distribution of wealth including production and trade (the economy), in relation to government, low, and other forms of social organization (politics)

  • Ethical issue arise, decisions need to be made based on context of political economy
  • These factors impacts people’s judgement

• Biopower - political and economic power that re inscribed on human bodies

  • Michel Foucault, Judith Butler

  Organ traits (moral vs. economy)

  • Liberal (neoliberal) economics - free interactions among free consenting individuals
    • Made international transactions much easier
  • Moral perspective - is desperately poor people selling with their free well?
  • “In general, the circulation of kidneys follows the established routes of capital forms South to North, form poorer to more affluent bodies, form black and brown bodies to white ones, and from females to males, or from poor makes to more affluent males” - Scheper-Hughes

• Anthropologists do on-the-ground, small-scale research of large-scale issues

  • Detects local patterns in global picture
  • Focus often on the personal experience of the global economy

Universal and particular structures in language §

• Noam Chomsky: there is an innate, universal “language” acquisition device

  • ==Language is an innate and universal ability==
  • We learn a specific language from society, but all humans learn a language (by the age of 6)

• Universal language all has these attributions, but they are different in every language

  • Texts (discourse analysis) - can be analyzed independently of other parts (largest unit)

    • Not a part of larger pieces of language

    Written book, speech, lecture, a communicated word

  • Sentences (syntax) - text consists of one or two sentences

  • Words (morphology) - sentences consist of one or two words

  • Phonemes (phonology) - words consists of phonemes [音位]

  • Phones (phonetics) - [音素]

Phonetics and Phonology §

• Phonetics studies sound unites (phones)

• ==Phonology studies how language organizes phones into he larger units called phonemes==

  • They are classes of sounds, and phonemes have variants (allophones - positional variants)

• Every language organizes sound units in its own particular way

• The phoneme(音位) /p/ has two allophones(音位变体) in most English dialects [focus on sounds]

  • 2 different themes can occur in the same position, but 2 allophones of the same phoneme can’t

  • Aspirated ($p^h$) occur at the beginning of stressed syllables

    Pat, pin, repeat (position 1)

  • Unaspirated ($p^{=}$) occurs everywhere else

    tap, spin, Therapy (position 2)

• All allophones belong to the same phoneme (each occurs in its own position only)

• Meaning might change when replace different phonemes sounds

• Phonology is language-specific (in some languages $p^h$ and $p$ are distinct phonemes)

• Two or more languages may have the same sounds, but they might now organize them the same way into phonemes