Kroeber and Nacirema people: Three principles of anthropology explained

Daniel Rudas-Burgos

Doctoral Student, Anthropology and Education Program

Cultural and Social Bases of Education, Fall 2016
Week 3, Group B, September 27, Culture
Teachers College, Columbia University

Back in 1923, Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876 1960) published in New York a book

called Anthropology: Culture, Patterns and Processes. The book became the handbook of

several generations of American anthropologists, not only because of its contents, but also

because of the importance of Kroeber himself. He was the first person who obtained a Doc-

toral degree at Columbia University, and his instru f the disci-

pline in America: Franz Boas (1858 1942.) According to Boas and Kroeber, anthropology

should follow three principles: a diachronic view, a comparative perspective, and a holistic

orientation. In this response paper, I am going to explain the first one of these principles: Di-

achronic view. I will focus on chapter nine of Anthropology: Culture, Patterns and Processes

(1963). Moreover, Body Ritual

among the Nacirema (Miner, 1956) for applying my explanations to a case (it is an ironical

description of Americans as if they were the object of traditional anthropologists.) As a con-

clusion, I am going to state that Kroeber´s concerns about the evolution of cultures are still

important.

Having a diachronic view means you have to take into account time in your analysis.

For Kroeber, anthropology is the study of culture, and then anthropology has to explain how

cultures keep stable or change during the course of time. Kroeber explains processes involved

in stability and change of cultures. On the one hand, each generation transmits to the follow-

ing its cultural contents, by means of conscious education or just by imitation. That is the

process of persistence, which explains cultural stability. On the other hand, innovations in

machinery, beliefs, and social institutions when are adopted by a social group and make

sense are the agents of cultural change. That is the process of invention,
which explains cultural change and cultural losses.

In the middle of twentieth century, Nacirema people (i.e. Americans) were described

by the anthropologist Horace Miner (1956) as a group focused on market transactions, painful

medical rituals and body transformations. The author described some medical rituals among

Nacirema people: they save medical compounds in their houses using a kind of sacred chest,

and they visit temples for healing called lati pso.

I have the opportunity to visit Nacirema people recently for a few weeks. The pro-

cesses of persistence explained by Kroeber are evident among Nacirema, because they con-

tinue using their chests and practicing their painful (and expensive) healing rituals at lati pso

temples. Moreover, the processes of invention are also evident, because I noticed that they

recently have created machines for increasing their capacities of communication. These ma-

chines involved a new secret writing system called ten retni, which consists in the ritualistic

manipulation of different alphabets and images in small screens. Miner reported that there

were

and they were

village and

Nowadays, I observed that these kinds of women do not go from village to village an-

ymore, but they use ten retni rituals for letting natives stare at them using their small screens.

cultural loss,

as it is explained by Kroeber.

At the end of chapter nine, Kroeber expresses his concerns about the homogenization

of culture caused by the Western civilization around the world. For him, homogenization

could be a threat because, without diversity, cultural adaptation can be difficult to obtain in

ten retni and the progressive

cultural losses like concern for all anthropologists because of the

loss of human diversity, necessary for our survival as a species.

 References

Kroeber, A. L. (1963). Cultural Processes. In A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology: Culture

Patterns and Processes (First published in 1923. Revised edition published in 1948, pp. 152

193). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Miner, H. (1956). Body Ritual among the Nacirema. American Anthropologist, 58(3),

503 507.