Entry Seventeen

Bethany Armistead

Cultural Anthropology

Nick Corduan

June 5, 2013

Entry 17

            Reading The Forest People has been an enjoyable experience. I have enjoyed attempting to be an anthropologist. I am glad that I chose the specialty of Cognition and Expression. As I observed the Pygmies and how they viewed and interacted with the world, I found that I have learned more about human beings and why we live the way we do. I feel that I understand the world a little bit better than I did before. Looking at the Pygmies and how they find meaning, how their environment shapes their conceptions, and how that in turn shapes their values and worldview, I now see that these frameworks apply to all peoples and cultures. All humans live in a certain environment; from that environment they look around and form perceptions. Their brains then organize those perceptions for the sake of understanding, which forms their conceptions. These conceptions constitute the brain’s filter for everything else -- from the creation of meaning to expression. That is why people are the way they are. I have found the Pygmies conceptions center around the environment in which they live, and their lifestyle is dictated by their environment. Their meaning is found in being “people of the forest”, and their rituals, expressions and everything that makes up who they are is centered around this idea.

            I have also found that people’s culture arises from their need to adapt and survive in their environment. The Pygmies are a very community-oriented people; this has become a part of their culture and accepted way of life. The reason for this community oriented-ness is because it is the only way to survive in the forest. So culture basically originates from human beings adapting to their environment in order to eat, survive and propagate, which is basically the functionalist definition of culture. Functionalism posits that culture meets the needs of the individual, and its very purpose is is to facilitate human beings adapting in order to thrive in their environment.

            For this blog, I utilized a number of different theories that I thought were relevant to each individual chapter, as a number of them applied and each gave a greater understanding of the cognition and expression of the Pygmy people. The theories upon which I most heavily relied was Structuralism, and occasionally Interpretive and Symbolic anthropology. Symbolic anthropology was particularly useful when an event could be analyzed in order to find its meaning, which is the main focus of Symbolic anthropology.

The main framework that I utilized was the theory of Particularism and Relativism. The main advantage to using this theory was its emphasis on cultures being evaluated in their own cultural context, with the understanding that each culture has its own unique quirks and historical background. I thought this framework to be the most relevant because Pygmy culture is quite unique, and to really understand Pygmy culture, it must be analyzed within an understanding of their own cultural context. Were I to do this project again, I would want to have a greater understanding of the particulars of each theory. As it was, my primary understanding of the theories came from my notes, which did not give me enough understanding of the theories to confidently write an analysis of the theories. However, from my limited understanding of the theories, I felt that the ones I chose were relevant to my topic. Sometimes certain aspects of theories were relevant rather than the whole. If I were a professional anthropologist trying to understand the cognition and expression of the Pygmy people group, I would probably use the theories I chose.