question

Laura Bohannan's \"Shakespeare in the Bush\"

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Tries to tell Hamlet to the Tiv of Nigeria; they explain the meaning of what happened based on the way he tells the story

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Richard Borshay Lee's \"Eating Christmas in the Kalahari\"

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Foraging group- hunter/gatherer economy; exchange of goods is based on gift giving; try to instill values of not being too prideful or greedy through deception; No one can feel like they're gained social standings by getting a big gift want people to be humbled by gifts and not feel entitlement; A way they prevent homicide through this gift giving custom if people get big heads, the society would eventually have social divisions; Potlatch would not be sustainable because they live with limited resources; Trying to get more and more would kill their environment; Every act has some underlying motive; They are skeptical to people motivation; They understand that all actions have motives

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Janet McIntosh's \"Maxwell's Demons: Disenchantment in the Field\"

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Examines the cultural change among the Giriama people of coastal Kenya; She almost questions her own disbelief in supernatural phenomena and spirits; Mipoho prophesied the coming of a threat to Giriama ways followed by decades of visits from colonials, white tourists, and Western missionaries; Giriama custom was thoroughly marginalized by the colonial and post colonial economy and children betrayed the beliefs and practices of their elders; Exchanged gifts with waganga for information

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Melvyn C. Goldstein's \"When Brother's Share a Wife\"

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Fraternal polyandry has both benefits and costs for people of Tibet; It has adaptive functions given the economy and ecology of the area; Common misconception is that the two main reasons for fraternal polyandry in Tibet are because of a low population of women and the harsh environment. not true! women lives with all brothers and is expected to treat all equally; Brothers must treat all children equally, even when conscious of their biological children; Tibetan's use polyandry to assure a higher standard of living

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Meredith F Small's \"How Many Fathers Are Best for a Child?\"

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For the Bari of South America, children have one mother and several fathers; Not all fathers share an equal obligation; the biological father has the most responsibility but all fathers still have obligations toward the child; Children with more than one father have a higher life expectancy

question

Keith H. Basso's \"To Give up on Words: Silence in Western Apache Culture\"

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The role of silence in Apache society in situational contexts no obligation to introduce strangers to one another men and women do not talk for the first day or two of seeing one another and when out in public or at a party Situations in which it is appropriate to be silent: -Meeting strangers; speaking too soon means that you want something; the establishment of social relationships is a serious matter that calls for caution, careful judgement, and plenty of time -Courting/dating; only start lengthy conversations after several months -Children coming home after a long absence; when silence is broken, it is the child who does so; based on belief that when they travel from home for awhile their minds get turned around and they forget where they come from -Getting cussed out; often times if you are cussed out by a drunk person, silence is in order on the belief that they \"forget who they are\" and become oblivious; they lack consequence for their actions -Being with people who are sad; often with someone who has recently lost a loved one; talking about it only reinforces and augments the sadness underlying determinant is that relationships are ambiguous and/or unpredictable depending on the social situations

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Horace Miner's \"Body Ritual Among the Nacirema\"

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Shed light on the meaning of culture; Pointed out the etic/emic perspectives that humans have

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Richard Sosis' \"The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual\"

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Considers whether or not there are social benefits for society in having such demanding rituals; Participating in challenging forms of ritual behavior signals a high level of group commitment; \"Costly signaling theory of rituals\" is that groups that impose the greatest demands on their members will elicit the highest levels of devotion and commitment

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Deborah Tannen's \"Talk in Intimate Relationships: His and Hers

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Metamessages: form of indirectness which women are more attuned to; Women are more likely to be indirect and try to reach agreement by negotiation; Common stereotype of a \"real\" man is the strong silent type where they are the model for the lover or husband; Women eventually find the silence frustrating; Difference in speech stems from childhood where girls relationships are built, maintained and even broke, by talking; while boys spend time doing other things than talking listening noises (\"mhm\", \"yeah\", \"uh-huh\") are interpreted differently; Women may be seen as impatient or exaggerating their show of interest; Men use them to show they agree and women use them to show they're interested and listening men and women are being stylistically consistent in their interactive inconsistency

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Jacqueline Urla and Alan C. Swedlund's \"Measuring Up to Barbie: Ideals of the Feminine Body in Culture\"

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Took Barbie's measurements and scaled them to life sizing showing how unrealistic she is, especially in comparison with many American women; The idea of \"average women\" changed in history; Barbie represents ideals for femininity as well as a consumerist model of the \"good life\" with fashionable clothing, cars, and swimming pools; Her hard plastic body shows self control and discipline and sexual attractiveness, but not reproduction or motherhood; When scaled to Army Norma, the measurements would be that of someone who is clinically anorexic

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Lila Abu-Laghod's \"Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others

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The \"liberation of women\" rationale for going to war is ethnocentric; The focus on the burqa ignored issues that may be more important to Afghani women such as living in an area free from war; US political leaders ignored important historical and political connections in favor of the simplistic East-West dichotomy that was used to justify invasion; \"Colonial feminism\" was a selective concern about the plight of Egyptian women that focused on the veil as a sign of oppression but gave no support to women's education; Explains that the Taliban did not invent the burqa; it was a local form of covering that Pashtun women wore out symbolizing women's modesty or respectability; Says that projects of \"saving\" other women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners, a form of arrogance

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Linda S. Stone's \"Gay Marriage and Anthropology\"

answer

People from different parts of the world define marriage in unique ways; Marriage is a social construction, not a human universal based on biology; Anthropologists have not been able to agree on a comprehensive definition of marriage not all marriages involve sex; There is one universal feature in all marriages

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Will Rosoe's \"Strange Country This: An Introduction to North American Gender Diversity\"

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Today an offensive term, rejected by many Native American queer activists as it is taken from North African discourses and was used to be a boy concubine; For most Plains Indians \"two spirit\" would have negative connotations; Native American culture doesn't consider it to be \"born in the wrong body\"; For them, gender is not at all biologically defined; sex doesn't play a role; The idea of needing to surgically change your body to match the sex of your felt gender can be harmful; No sexual activity between two berdaches; 'Heterogender' relations are what we see across culture; In our society, third gender individuals were more often outed; in Native culture, the berdaches were almost regarded as gods or warriors \"this man, she grabbed me\"; they interchange male and female terms; is a gender queer woman being more manly more accepted than a gender queer man becoming more womanly?

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Elizabeth Chin's \"Anthropologist Takes Inner-City Children on Shopping Sprees\"

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Each child had $20 to spend; Shoe purchases embodies priorities of efficiency and buying for need; Children were interested and knowledgeable about status imets yet showed the ability to distinguish between wise for an expensive status good and practical realities of purchasing ability gift-giving was a powerful way for children to strengthen, transform, or maintain relationships with those around them 8 out of 12 purchased gifts for someone else shopping can not be excised from social and cultural relationships and can not be separated from the realm of the political

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Bridget's Anderson's \"Just Another Job?: The Commodification of Domestic Labor

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Globalization creates challenges for transnational migrants trying to support their families through often difficult and demeaning work in the homes of strangers; Ethnic hierarchies exist in the hiring of domestic workers; Relations between domestic workers and employers is not considered a sisterhood

question

James L. Gibbs Jr.'s \"The Kpelle Moot\"

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Ultimate purpose is to fix the relationship; Focus on nurturing the connection between the two people; Our system is focused on punishment, not fixing the dispute; There are situations where mediation is abusive; In our society, the lack of ties between accidents with strangers makes a moot a hard option; An intensive small community needs to heal socially, whereas larger scale need to decide fault and there is less stress on a fixing of the relationship as there was no relationship before

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Scott Atran et al's \"Sacred Barriers to Conflict Resolution\"

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Discuss the role of national apologies as precursors to reconciliation in the enduring conflict between Palestine and Israel; Measure emotional outrage and propensity for violence in response to peace deals involving compromises over issues integral to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

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David Rohde's \"Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones\"

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2007, $41 million project called Human Terrain System\" organized to apply social science research to better understand the conditions which lead to military conflict

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Robert Sapolsky's \"Are the Desert People Winning?\"

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Does religion stem from people's environment? In the modern world we can manipulate our environments, does that support or argue against his point?

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Richard Reed's \"Two Rights Make a Wrong\"

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There is conflict between indigenous groups and environmentalist groups and the only resolution is one in which both groups are benefiting The world bank thought that native use of the land was ridiculous Nature vs. man or parks vs. man Nature conservancy takes a stand but its problematic because it was restricting certain natives from using the land Ache vs. Guarani Biodiversity in many rainforests is actually because of human presence; humans have always impacted these places and may have even created them If you think about this issue differently then you can go further in creating policy that is fair

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David Crawford's \"Globalization from the Group Up\"

answer

places we think of as only recently entering the modern world have always been modern and have always been connected to the world through regional and long-distance trade network the Western, capitalist era is not the only \"global system\" in history Islamic civilization was and is also \"global\" globalization theories tend to overemphasize the isolation of traditional cultures and vastly overstate the cultural importance of \"the West\"

question

Ivan Illich's article \"To Hell with Good Intentions\"

answer

We come in with our own culture and own bias that those people might not need; Volunteer work itself is a way in which the elite can reproduce themselves; trying to \"better\" people that may not feel that they need this improvement; Anthropologists might agree with Illich because they want to just come into a society and not influence or change anything; want to only observe

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M&JArticles: #4 Fernando Seeks a Wife: Sex & Blood

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Romance is a small role in marriage compared to how we view marriage in US; Marriage is necessary because male and female laborers need a partner to be efficient and effective brideprice: money/goods given to bride's family when she is married off; Bride service: the groom's family does service for the bride's family as part of brideprice; Polygamy: one many has more than one wife; Polyandry: one woman has more than one husband; Is marriage a universal institution if there are so many variations of it?

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M. Harris, \"Potlatch\"

answer

Competitive status seekers: people spend their entire lives trying to climb further up the social pyramid in order to impress each other; people work for the admiration of their wealth rather than just the wealth itself; Anthropologists found that certain primitive tribes engaged in conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste to a degree unmatched by even the most modern consumer economies; Potlatch: object was to give away or destroy more wealth than one's rival; destroys food, clothing, and money and even burning down one's own house; Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island was of definite economic and ecological conditions; created totem poles and chief was always insecure about his status and would hold potlatches for nearby chiefs; Big men in Melanesia and New Guinea; begins by making wife and children plant larger yam gardens and increasing size of hers; borrows from friends and eventually has a feast; Feast giving never ends for big men; avoiding the commoner status, a big man is obliged to busy himself with plans and preparations for the next feast competitive feasting prevents the labor force from falling back to levels of productivity that offer no margin of safety in crises such as war and crop failure; Worker-entrepreneur (101)

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Ferraro, \"Distribution of Goods & Services\"

answer

...

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Jared Diamond - Race w/o Color

answer

...

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American Anthropological Association Statement on 'Race'

answer

...

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White Privilege: Unpacking the invisible Backpack:Peggy McIntosh

answer

...

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Suite for Ebony and Phonics: Rickman

answer

...

question

Redistribution

answer

Principle of exchange in which goods are given to a central authority and then given back to the people in a new pattern; most common in societies that have political hierarchies; i.e. taxation

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Standardized currency

answer

Generally accepted medium of exchange that also measures the value of a particular item; recognizable, long-lasting, portable, and divisible; form of deferred payment

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Market Exchange

answer

pg. 162 Form of distribution in which goods and services are bought and sold, often through the use of a standardized currency; value of goods or services is determined by market principle of supply and demand; less personal than reciprocity or redistribution; predominantly economic; people are more interested in maximizing their profits than in maintaining relationships or demonstrate allegiance to a chief

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Negative Exchange

answer

Exchange in which parties take advantage of one another; most impersonal social relations; can take forms of hard bargaining, cheating, or out-and-out theft; practiced most often again strangers and enemies

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Generalized Exchange

answer

Exchange without any expectation of immediate return; usually among family and close friends; highest level of moral obligation (i.e. child-parent relationship)

question

Balanced Exchange

answer

Exchange involving the expectation of goods and services of equivalent value to be returned within a specified period of time; Among more formal relationships with greater social distance and strong obligation to repay; Maximizing consumption for both parties (i.e. fiesta celebrations of the Oaxaca Indians in Mexico) or (silent trade among the Semang)

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Silent Trade

answer

Form of balanced reciprocity in which Semang avoid face-to-face contact with trading partners; leave products at an agreed-upon location; eliminates risk of jeopardizing relationship by haggling or arguing over equivalencies

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Sign

answer

Any stimulus that stands for something else and evokes a response to that for which it stands

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Icon

answer

Sign that repeats or replicated that which its representing; sign of a hamburger outside of a restaurant; a footprint in the sand

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Index

answer

Sign associated with nature through that which it stands for; ring around the moon means its going on snow tomorrow

question

Symbol

answer

Sign that is arbitrarily connected to that which is stands for; color white tends represent breast milk or semen; spectrum of natural symbols

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Tribute/Chiefly Redistribution (160):

answer

Way of affirming both political power of chief and value of solidarity among people (seen in Nyoro of Uganda)

question

Big Men/Feast-Givers (161)

answer

In less centralized societies that do not have formal chiefs, redistribution is carried out by economic entrepreneurs whom anthropologists call big men. Big men are self-made leaders who are able to convince their relatives and neighbors to contribute surplus goods for the sake of community-wide feasting (Ferrero, 184). It is interesting to note that generosity is the essence of being a big man, many big men often consume less food than ordinary people in order to save it for the feasts. The status of a local big man is directly related to the size of the feast, his generosity, and hospitality.

question

Bridewealth (161)

answer

Involves the transfer of valuable commodities [often livestock] from the groom's lineage to the bride's lineage as a precondition for marriage (Ferrero, 185); This serves as a mechanism for maintaining a roughly equitable distribution of goods within a society→ Thus, no lineage is likely to get a monopoly on the goods; Still, amount paid differ depending on the social status of the bride's lineage.

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Reciprocity

answer

The exchange of goods and services of roughly equal value between two parties without the use of money

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Swidden Agriculture

answer

Depended on burning tracts of forest, cultivating land for a year then allowing the forest to regenerate;but they put too much stress on it to regenerate and its fertility was greatly reduced

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Participant observation

answer

Key method in anthropology; long term intense interaction with relatively small groups of people uses five senses, body and emotions as tools to collect data; allows ethnographers to dig deeply into the complexities and subtleties of a community's social life

question

Ethnoscience

answer

Formal methods of analysis applied to domains such as kinship terms, flora and fauna, colours, and disease; found that variability was both ordered and constrained by the physiological means of perception

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Essentializing Culture

answer

Treating it as if it exists outside of history and not subject to human agency

question

Claude Levi-Strauss

answer

Founder of structuralist anthropology; claimed that human classification is universal; pointed out that although elements of a society have a wide range of historical origins, they have been pieced together by a \"bricolage\" where parts of cultures were turned into uses of which they were not intended

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Relativism

answer

The doctrine that knowledge, truth, and morality exist in relation to culture, society, or historical context, and are not absolute

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Epistemological misgivings

answer

Bothers a departing ethnographer but a kind of closure is necessary

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Franz Boas

answer

Father of modern anthropology; concentrated on geography and psychophysics (study of how the characteristics of the observer determined determined the perception of physical phenomena) (ex. his psychophysics looked at how Eskimos perceived and categorized the color of seawater

question

'objectivity'(= 'bias'?)

answer

Some claim objectivity is a false issue; claim that our bias is what gives us a point of view; others recognize its existence and focus on incorporating more autobiographical information in their data to compensate for their own bias

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Salvage Ethnography

answer

Concern to record those societies that are the world's smaller and more traditional groups as they are fast disappearing

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Ethnographic Present

answer

Communities were being represented as frozen in time, outside any historical context, and without reference to neighboring societies

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Ethnographic subjectivity

answer

Inevitable

question

Re-studies

answer

Notable attempt to overcome epistemological problems

question

Omniscient 3rd person voice

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Often considered an effect of the ethnographic present as if they had not been actively involved in eliciting the information presented

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Ethnography

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Idea that in order to understand what people are up to it is best to to observe by interacting with them intimately and over an extended period of time

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Ethnographic serendipity

answer

Gives the ethnographic method strenght and flexibility not generally available to highly deductive social science methods such as surveys; the randomness of it is compensated with the length of time spent in the place

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Interview

answer

Most important technique; can range in formality from highly structured question-and-answer sessions with indigenous specialists to recording of life histories, to informal conversations, or to a chance exchange during an unanticipated encounter

question

Margaret Mead

answer

...

question

Ruth Benedict

answer

One of Boas' first students; conceived of a culture as a gestalt (a total pattern); found that differences across cultures were consistent within a single culture; felt that practices, beliefs, and customs differed from other cultures in a consistent and mutually reinforcing way

question

Reductionist

answer

Benedicts approach is now considered as too simplistic and reductionist because it considers cultures in terms of one or two key themes

question

Social species

answer

We are organized into groups whose internal and external relations are governed by rule, perform a variety of functions, and which endure beyond the lives of their constituent members; we have culture, but belong to a society

question

Division of labor

answer

The most fundamental way in which humans arrange themselves

question

Bronislaw Malinowski

answer

Sought to find how people are grouped in socities; employed social structure; his idea that ethnographers must try to see \"from the natives perspective\" was unusual for the time

question

Psychological Functionalism

answer

Malinowski showed that institutions were possessed by primitive societies in full measure; saw primitive man as a rational actor whose every practice served a function that served the satisfaction of individual and collective needs

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Doctrine of needs

answer

Basic wants of an individual society such as food, shelter, etc

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A.R. Radcliff-Brown

answer

Asked what the function of such \"standardized social relationships\" might be (structural functionalism)

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Joking & avoidance relationships

answer

Classic example that Brown found where one party may poke fun at the other whilst the other may not take offense; often between man and mother in law or man and sister in law

question

Manifest vs. latent functions

answer

Manifest is literally function while latent has a more symbolic underlying function Homeostatic equilibrium: a state in which all parts acted to keep the whole in balance; many saw social institutions as self-perpetuating and in this state

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Karl Marx

answer

Regarded social life and the structure of society as contingent upon the dominant technologies of a given period and the way people were organized to produce with these technologies; gave rise to important school of anthropological thought, historical materialism

question

Mode of production

answer

Marx believed that culture is based upon the great modernist insight that underlying apparently discrete bits of belief or behavior rest on the mode of production

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Total institutions

answer

The most extreme forms of institutions that govern virtually all facets of their members' lives; often produces morally extreme results; i.e. prisons, military, boarding school

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Max Weber

answer

Had the notion of rationality in which institutions are organized around the tasks they perform rather than on social relations; believes that individuals in a traditional society perform multiple, overlapping roles that pertain to all aspects of their lives

question

Traditional vs. modern societies

answer

Distinctions are often overly simplistic and maybe just plain-headed

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Traditional

answer

Mechanical solidarity (held together by basic similarities of members), traditional rules create universal solidarity among people, & common kinship is basis for collective identity & pre-logical thinking

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Social identity

answer

How each of us occupies a variety of positions in society and each has a set of rights and duties with respect to others occupying different positions

question

Cultural capital

answer

Finding things beautiful because we have been taught to appreciate them but not because they are inherently beautiful; displaying our expertise displays that we belong to an elite capable of appreciate such finer things

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Modern

answer

Organic solidarity (held together by interdependence of its parts and allegiance to common symbols), constituted by a deliberately formulated social contrast which reflects rational self-interests, & common territory is the basis for collective identity & logical thinking

question

Emile Durkheim

answer

Felt that societies were held together because all members were basically alike and were self-sufficient

question

Modernity

answer

Positivist; based on industrial production; knowledge through direct experience

question

post-modernity

answer

Relativistic; based on information flows; knowledge through simulation and modelling

question

Social reproduction

answer

Fundamental institutions exist beyond the lives of individual members

question

Brideprice

answer

Payment for a bride's family to provide her family with compensation for the loss of her labor and to secure the husband's family the rights over the children of the marriage

question

Brideservice

answer

A transfer of labour from the male's group to the female's

question

Dowry

answer

Payment found in many European societies represents the woman's share of the inheritance children receive from their families

question

Bridewealth

answer

Payment form of brideprice of an exchange of special currencies that can only be used in such transactions and are therefore very valuable

question

Sororate

answer

When a wife dies and the widower is obligated to marry the sister of his deceased wife

question

Levirate

answer

When a husband dies and the widow is obligated to marry the brother of her deceased husband

question

Complementarity

answer

In Dou Donggo culture, couples engage in rituals as couples and a whole series of initiation rituals that occur during the life-cycle of a couple can only be officiated over by ritual specialists who are married themselves and whose spouses are still alive; the belief is that household without the complement of an adult male and female is destined to fail

question

Polygyny

answer

A man has more than one wife

question

Polyandry

answer

A woman has more than one husband; best known in Tibet and northern India

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Cousin marriage

answer

Practically obligatory in some societies; when men marry their mother's brother's daughters it creates a marriage alliance between two lines of male descent; when they marry their father's brother's daughter's another line of male descent is kept strong

question

Partible paternity

answer

Multiple fathers give sperm during pregnancy to better develop child; belief that child will not survive if mother doesn't have sex with multiple men

question

Lineage

answer

A group of people formed by their descent from a known common ancestor

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Partible maternity

answer

Multiple mothers breastfeed; belief that a baby might not survive if not breastfeeding from a variety of mothers

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Money

answer

Sometimes called 'disembedding mechanisms' that constitute the 'dynamism of modernity'. By turning value into symbolic tokens produced and managed by expert systems, money erases the local particularities of production and exchange.

question

Conspicuous consumption

answer

People want things so they can show they are not like anyone else or at least not like most people

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Foraging society

answer

People live in small nomadic groups, and posses a technology designed for hunting and gathering

question

Exotic consumerism

answer

What one society learns to value might not be the same as another society learns to value.

question

Clientage 112

answer

Relations between wealthy and powerful patrons and those who depend on them for material resources and protection

question

Tribal societies

answer

People live in larger groups, a possess a technology that allows them to practice some form of horticulture and they also store food

question

Chiefdom

answer

People are divided into ranked social groups based on proximity of descent from a noble and sacred ancestor and in which commoners pay some sort of tribute to the nobles.

question

State

answer

Divided between urban and rural components

question

Neo-evolutionary archaeologist

answer

pg. 114

question

Variety of Markets

answer

US highly complex market economy has virtually nothing that cannot be bought or sold; example of a market with sole purpose to buy and sell which serves an exclusively economic function and does not fulfill any social functions small-scale economies have little labor specialization, small surpluses, and limited ranges of goods and services; Traditional West Africa has place where buyers and sellers meet to exchange surplus goods; most material needs of a household are met by the productive activities of its members; Today, most societies are somewhere in between these two extremes

Intro to Cultural Anthropology Colorado College

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