IB Definition of society:

• Society refers to the way in which humans organize themselves in groups and networks.
• Society is created and sustained by social relationships and institutions.
• The term “society” can also be used to refer to a human group that exhibits some internal coherence and distinguishes itself from other such groups.

“Culture refers to organized systems of symbols, ideas, explanations, beliefs and material production that humans create and manipulate in the course of their daily lives.

Culture includes the customs by which humans organize their physical world and maintain their social structure.

More recent approaches to culture recognize that cultures are not static, homogenous or bounded but dynamic and fluid.

Culture refers to the shared social construction of meanings, but simultaneously culture is often also a site of contested meanings. These recent formulations of the concept recognize that culture may be the subject of disagreement and conflict within and among societies and this disagreement may include the definition of culture itself.”

The view of the perceived community comprised of the youth have their own culture, different from that of the ideal.

Practice theory is important for understanding how Iranian youth live in the society.

• Youth code switch dependant on places/spaces to allow them to follow the rules of society (and not get caught by basiji) and yet still rebelling against it in other spaces.
  

Khosravi is agency centered in his approach as so focuses on how humans (specifically the youth) act in relation to the structures and institutions in place in the society

Methodology determines how possible it is etic / emic

Ethnographer comments on the "Politics of representation" (pg.11)

• Male means he is not able to fully understand the experiences of women in the society. Ethnography does not take a feminist approach and he does not acknowledge gender as a large factor when explaining ethnographic detail.

• Although he is Iranian, he is “Westernized”, meaning his understanding of Iranian culture will be influenced by his perception of western culture. This perception will also be different to the perception of the west that the youth have.

Anthropological study of the cultures / societies to imporve health practices

Exposing that poverty is a result of structural violence - can change peoples perception of the poor

Persons are composed of social ties but also individual spirits (individual thoughts, autonomy, interior self)

Persons are socially structured body through relationships and parternal compositona, but are still unique and different from each other because of different relations and different paternal compositions.

Individuals are embedded in larger social networks and communities

Culture can now transcend geographical location due to globalisation. E.g Compadre relationships taken from Puerto Rican Culture by Ray and used within El Barrio

Shows that symbolic violence occurs: Minorities made to believe that the reason they are not doing better is their fault due to laziness or lack of educaiton

Brings light to difficulties faced by a society

Within the ethnography to be seen as a full person by the government of Iran, you are to be seen as a child of Allah and with that comes certain habitus, roles and status that is seen to come with it

The wests historical development of the social means that “to understand the order of a society required the study of its distinct systems of economic, politics, religion and kinship. What had become normative to the west acquired the status of a universal” pg 336. These are “local postulates

“The notion of society is usually defined by structures of separation and oppression, and structures of inequality, or the institutional elaboration of relations of dominance and subordination” pg. 338

“Society as a singular, self-contained, normative, bounded whole that transcends the individual” is critiqued by contemporary anthropology. Pg 334