Introduction to anthropology by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Anthropology, Anthropologie
Publisher: Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall
Published: 1979-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

changed the direction of social life to a significant extent.

A more recent example of the role of an individual who contributed to culture change is Wovoka, a Paiute from Nevada who became known as the Indian Messiah. In the 1880s, his message of peaceful response and even submission to white domination promised the eventual resurrection of all Indian people, who would then live on the earth in peace, following their old ways of life. Wovoka, while recovering from an illness, had had a revelation vision during an eclipse:

When the sun died, I went up to heaven and saw God and all the people who had died a long time ago. God told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and not fight, or steal, or lie. He gave me this dance to give to my people. (Mooney, 1892/1953, p. 412)

The Ghost Dance, accompanied by specific songs, was to be performed 5 nights in a row every 6 weeks. Other tribes adapted Wovo-ka's teachings, and the movement spread across the Plains. The Indians came to believe that the white ghost shirts they wore during the dance would make them impervious to gunfire. Performed in a frenzied trance, the dance spread from reservation to reservation. White authorities became concerned. In December of 1890, Sioux adherents of the movement, with their leader Sitting Bull, were massacred at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. This massacre effectively halted Indian resistance for almost a century, but it has served as a rallying point for Indian activism in the 1970s.

Further discussion of the role of individual leadership in social movements will be discussed in the chapter on politics and leadership. The point we want to stress here is that individuals can change the direction of social life, and prophetic leaders often do so through use of dreams and other forms of altered states of consciousness.

As we stated at the beginning of the chapter, no individual can experience the total de-

signs for living found in a culture. Furthermore, an individual can recognize expressions of these designs by observing the experiences of others, even though he or she may not experience them directly. (The designs themselves, however, are held largely at an unconscious level.) As we have seen, though, the individual can have an influence on the construction of new designs or the reformulation of old ones. It is the individual that anthropologists deal with most frequently in the field. And it is individual behaviors that provide the basic raw material for the initial inferences that lead to statements about a given cultural system.

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Summary

1. Every individual is born into a culture whose preexisting designs for living are communicated from one generation to another. No individual operates with every one of a culture's designs, but most individuals understand their own cultural system sufficiently to function within it. The relationship between individuals and the larger social groups of which they form a part is the concern of psychological anthropology, known traditionally as the study of culture and personality.

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