In approaching culture we must distinguish between "their ways are different" and "they are different."
The former can be an objective contrast. The latter is ethnocentric and can be dehumanizing. The former
allows for comparison and contrast. In the latter, we don't learn anything. Anthropology is out to avoid
ethnocentrism and apply cultural relativism. We want to learn from the ethnographic method what makes
humans see and operate from another way of life, essentially what make them tick.
Applying the BARREL MODEL OF CULTURE helps explain how and why other people view culture the way
they do. By analyzing their world with this model, we can discover how their culture works for them as a natural,
complex, and meaningful experience not something foreign, wrong or backwards. It may not make sense yet,
but it will after doing your final project. This process must be experienced, not understood.
This model can also help us explain why cultures change over time. Each level of the model changes:
Environment & Economic Base (war time, peace time, natural disasters, famine, etc.)
Superstructure (changing values about work, citizenship, immigration, or women's roles)
Social Structure (from the intrusion forced or voluntary of outsiders/newcomers
Infrastructure (new technologies, advances in medicine, people living longer, etc.)
Taking all three "levels" of culture together and examining it as a whole is the HOLISTIC approach that is so
important to anthropology.
Your project question, for instance, could be "Why don't Hindus in India eat cows?"
The unit of observation in this case is "cows."
First gather general information about India (the environment, could include climate)
1500 BC: Aryan Pastoralist came from northwest, mixing with previous inhabitants to create
the beginnings of Indian culture and the Hindu religion
8th C. Muslim - 12th C. Turkey
c. 1400s - 1947: European contacts. Becomes British colony.
1947: Independence
Today: India is a Federal "Democratic" Republic, similar to the U.S. (from CIA-The World
Factbook available online).
Population: Over 1 Billion people
16 languages, English and Hindi most common
over 80% Hindu : (Some basic insight to the Hindu Relegion can be found here.)
73% rural
Over 250 million are hungry, live in poverty
Have over 200 million cows
SUPERSTRUCTURE
The native/emic point of view is shaped significantly by the other levels of the model.
Change the environment, infrastructure, and/or social structure and you'll get a different superstructure.
Superstructure or the emic worldview includes the perception of self, group, society, and world. Remember
Kenneth Pike and the trees the woman saw but he didn't. The ethnographic method (participant-observation
+ interviews) is used to gather this data.
Cows are like "tractor factories" - producing oxen that plow fields and pull carts.
They require very little care, scavenging for and eating what humans will not eat.
One Zebu cow produces over 400 pints of milk per year.
Cows provide over 800 million tons of manure / 40% used for fertililzer, 40% for cooking fuel -
equivalent to 40 million tons of coal.
What's left makes a smooth, hard floor when mixed with water.
Meat-centered diets are very wasteful of grain, land, water, fuel, and fertilizer.
The taboo on eating cows has long-term survival value. If they did not have a taboo against
cow slaughter, the culture would not be as successful. The cattle themselves can survive
almost anything - and don't compete with humans for food in times of scarcity.
Cows and humans are in symbiotic relationship.
SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Finally, ethnographers took a look at the Social Structure. How these beliefs exist within the social and political
context. Social structure examines forms of organization shaped by social and political groups, kinship, and
power relations.
NOTE: It is interesting to look up how people outside Indian today have come to use the expression
"holy cow" and how different it is from the initial meaning. This might be a useful way to open a mini-
ethnography on this subject. It makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. See
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=holy+cow