Assignment task:
Relevant Vocabulary: ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, kinship, fictive kin, emit/etic, perspectives Read the following passage from C.W.M. Hart (Hart 1970, reprinted in Nanda 1985). In the longer ethnography, Hart describes how he took on the fictive kinship role of son to an elderly Tiwi woman.
I was approached by a group of... senior members of the Jabijabui clan [the clan to which Hart belonged by his fictive kinship relationship with the old woman]...[who] had come to me on a delicate errand. . . .[T]hey had decided among themselves that the time had come to get rid of the decrepit old woman [Hart's fictive mother]. . . .As I knew, they said, it was Tiwi custom, when an old woman became too feeble to look after herself, to "cover her up." This could only be done by her sons and her brothers and all of them had to agree beforehand since once it was done they did not want any dissension among the brothers or clansmen, as that might lead to a feud. [H]er clansmen agreed that she would be better out of the way. Did I agree also? The method was to dig a hole in the ground in some lonely place, put the old woman in the hole and fill it with earth until only her head was showing. Everybody went away for a day or two and then went back to the hole to discover, to their great surprise, that the old woman was dead, having been too feeble to raise her arms from the earth. Nobody had "killed" her, her death in Tiwi eyes was a natural one. . . .I asked my brothers if I needed to attend the "covering up." They said no and that they would do it, but only after they had my agreement. Of course, I agreed, and a week or two later we heard in our camp that my "mother" was dead.
Address the following questions:
1. What are the ethical issues generated by this incident?
2. Describe an etic and then an emic view of this situation?
3. What clues do we have as to how the Tiwi feel about this practice?
4. How does this situation bring up the idea of cultural relativism?
5. How does one refrain from ethnocentrism in this kind of situation?