Higher level extension practice questions.

Evans-Pritchard recorded that when a Nuer man was killed by a member of a nearby lineage in the southern Sudan of the 1930s, kin on both sides were drawn in along lines of descent, and that a settlement in cattle was eventually mediated by the leopard-skin priest. A structural-functionalist reading explains the feud as

• a relation of opposition and alliance through which the balance between lineage segments is restored
• a means by which individual men meet their own needs for security and standing
• an expression of unconscious contrasts, such as the wild and the domestic, that order Nuer thinking about persons
• a direct consequence of the colonial administration's demand that cattle be counted and grazing rights registered

Answer: a relation of opposition and alliance through which the balance between lineage segments is restored

Structural functionalism explains an institution by what it contributes to the continuation of the social structure, so feud appears as a regulated relation between segments rather than as a breakdown of order. Deriving it instead from the needs of the individuals taking part would be Malinowski's kind of functionalism, not Radcliffe-Brown's.

Harris argued in 1966 that the Hindu prohibition on slaughtering cattle in India is best accounted for by the traction oxen supply at ploughing, the dung burned as fuel and spread as fertiliser, and the fact that a herd eaten once cannot do either. Read as an application of cultural materialism, the argument

• treats the religious prohibition as the cause of the farming practices that grew up in its shadow
• explains a religious rule by the material conditions it helps to reproduce rather than by belief
• predicts that the prohibition will lapse as soon as tractors replace oxen at the plough
• rests on the meanings cattle carry in ritual rather than on what they contribute to a household economy

Answer: explains a religious rule by the material conditions it helps to reproduce rather than by belief

Cultural materialism explains an institution by the infrastructural consequences it has, so the argument stands or falls on whether those consequences can actually be demonstrated, not on whether farmers describe cattle in those terms. The standard objection is not that the ecology is wrong but that it leaves unexplained why the rule takes a religious form here and not in every place where oxen plough.

Scheper-Hughes described mothers in the Alto do Cruzeiro shantytown of north-eastern Brazil in the 1980s who withdrew care from infants they judged unlikely to survive. Her explanation of that pattern rests on

• a value placed on the strong child that those mothers held independently of their circumstances
• a failure of maternal attachment which the account traces back to the mothers' own childhoods
• the claim that maternal love is a recent invention of wealthy societies and is therefore simply absent wherever household incomes are low
• the routine expectation of infant death produced by hunger, bad water and unstable work

Answer: the routine expectation of infant death produced by hunger, bad water and unstable work

The account is a political-economy one: the emotional pattern is treated as a response to conditions of scarcity and high infant mortality rather than as a value held apart from them. Reading it as absent love is the misreading the study was written against.

Douglas analysed material she gathered among the Lele of the Kasai in the 1950s and set out in Purity and Danger (1966), among whom the pangolin, a scaly animal that climbs trees and bears a single young at a time, stood at the centre of a cult instead of being shunned. Within her theory of symbolic classification the case matters because

• an animal that fits no category cleanly may be treated as sacred rather than as polluting
• food prohibitions turn out to follow the nutritional value of the animals concerned
• classification is shown to have no bearing on the way a society organises its ritual life
• the categories in use were evidently borrowed from a neighbouring group and then applied to animals for which they had never been intended

Answer: an animal that fits no category cleanly may be treated as sacred rather than as polluting

For Douglas pollution is a property of the classifying scheme, not of the substance, so anomalies are charged rather than merely dirty, and the charge can be positive. Applying the theory means asking what the local scheme is before asking why an animal is singled out.

Bourgois spent the years between 1985 and 1990 with young men selling crack in East Harlem, New York, who spoke constantly of respect. A reading that holds structure and agency together treats their street careers as

• purposeful action taken where factory work had gone and the office jobs that remained humiliated them
• evidence of a self-sustaining culture of poverty passed from parents to children whatever the labour market does
• the outcome of individual decisions that would have been made differently had the men simply been better informed about the alternatives open to them
• behaviour determined by economic structures, which leaves the men no room to act on purposes of their own

Answer: purposeful action taken where factory work had gone and the office jobs that remained humiliated them

Agency means acting within constraints rather than free of them, so what needs explaining is the pursuit of respect in an economy that offered none. The culture-of-poverty option is the account the study was written to refuse.

Weiner carried out fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands in the early 1970s and recorded the large distributions of banana-leaf bundles made by women at mortuary ceremonies. Applied to the earlier record of Trobriand exchange, a feminist perspective draws attention above all to

• the possibility that the exchanges described earlier had been staged for the benefit of the ethnographer
• whose accounts were gathered, and therefore which circuits of wealth entered the published record at all
• the need to date every exchange precisely so that the two periods of fieldwork can be compared statistically
• the question whether island society should be classed as matrilineal or as patrilineal in its reckoning of descent

Answer: whose accounts were gathered, and therefore which circuits of wealth entered the published record at all

The objection is about method rather than honesty: a fieldworker working mainly with men recorded the men's circuits, so women's wealth was missing from the account of exchange. That is the standard feminist charge against the classic monographs.