AN 210 exam 3

Family: Biology and Culture

Marriage also is not "natural." It is a cultural invention that involves various meanings and functions in different cultural contexts. We all know that it is not necessary to be married to have sex or to have children. Indeed, in the United States, a growing number of women who give birth are not married, and the percent of unmarried women giving birth is higher in many northwestern European countries such as Sweden.67 Cross-culturally, marriage seems to be primarily about societal regulation of relationships—a social contract between two individuals and, often, their families, that specifies rights and obligations of married individuals and of the offspring that married women produce. Some anthropologists have argued that marriage IS primarily about children and "descent"—who will "own" children.68 To whom will they belong? With what rights, obligations, social statuses, access to resources, group identities, and all the other assets—and liabilities—that exist within a society? Children have historically been essential for family survival—for literal reproduction and for social reproduction. Think, for a moment, about our taken-for-granted assumptions about to whom children belong.69 Clearly, children emerge from a woman's body and, indeed, after approximately nine months, it is her body that has nurtured and "grown" this child. But who "owns" that child legally—to whom it "belongs"

Meaningful Media

Meaning refers to the ideas or values that accompany the exchange of information. Historically, some media scientists assumed that the meaning of information was unaffected by its transfer between communities or by the medium of its transfer. In other words, they believed that information would be interpreted the same way regardless of how it was communicated, or who was receiving it. there is no universal way of consuming media; media consumption is bound to culture. How Egyptian women participate in listening to or watching soap operas together, the practices of who sits where, of what can or cannot be eaten during a show, or of when a show might be aired, is all bound to the norms and values of the community. These three assertions about meaning are broadly applicable to all cultures and have set the agenda for most academic and professional research in media anthropology. Unlike other academic fields that study media and meaning, media anthropologists focus on how producers and audiences share or contest different types of meaning. Ethnographies by media anthropologists typically focus on the ways producers of media assume, or seek to stimulate, a particular set of feelings in audiences, and how audiences can give feedback to media producers.

ending

Media anthropologists are concerned with many of the classic subjects of cultural anthropology: kinship, religion, mythology, identity, and the transmission of cultural meaning. How, for instance, does media allow people create and maintain kinship ties across large geographical distances? How are religious beliefs transformed as they are communicated through platforms like television and the Internet? How does media contribute to the development of a sense of self or group identities? On the Mediterranean island of Gozo, for example, cellular phones have allowed distant relatives in North America to remain part of the community by participating in the yearly celebrations of village saints. Local Catholic priests in Greece have been forced to consider the spiritual force of religious icons as they are transformed from a statue honored in-person during religious ceremonies into mediated images people see from afar.19 If the Virgin Mary appears to be weeping in a video, but the statue shows no effect, does it count as a miracle? Rather than answer this question, media anthropologists are interested in why people are concerned with it in the first place.

Alternative Models of Gender: Complimentary and Beyond

Not all binary cultures are gender-segregated; nor does gender hostility necessarily accompany gender separation. Nor are all binary cultures deeply concerned with, some might say obsessed with, regulating female sexuality and marriage. Premarital and extra-marital sex can even be common and acceptable, as among the !Kung San and Trobriand Islanders. And men are not always clearly ranked over women as they typically are in stratified large-scale centralized societies with "patriarchal" systems. Instead, the two genders can be seen as complementary, equally valued and both recognized as necessary to society. Different need not mean unequal. The Lahu of southwest China and Thailand exemplify a complementary gender system in which men and women have distinct expected roles but a male-female pair is necessary to accomplish most daily tasks. A malefemale pair historically took responsibility for local leadership. Male-female dyads completed daily household tasks in tandem and worked together in the fields. The title of anthropologist Shanshan Du's book, Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs (1999), encapsulates how complementary gender roles defined Lahu society. A single chopstick is not very useful; neither is a single person, man or woman, in a dualfocused society.

Gender Relations: Separate but unequal

Of course, gender-differentiation is not unique to small-scale societies like the Sambia. Virtually all major world religions have traditionally segregated males and females spatially and "marked" them in other ways. Look at eighteenth- and nineteenth- century churches, which had gender-specific seating; at contemporary Saudi Arabia, Iranian, and conservative Malaysian mosques; and at Orthodox Jewish temples today in Israel and the United States. Ambivalence and even fear of female sexuality, or negative associations with female bodily fluids, 237 such as menstrual blood, are widespread in the world's major religions. Orthodox Jewish women are not supposed to sleep in the same bed as their husbands when menstruating. In Kypseli, Greece, people believe that menstruating women can cause wine to go bad.22 In some Catholic Portuguese villages, menstruating women are restricted from preparing fresh pork sausages and from being in the room where the sausages are made as their presence is believed to cause the pork to spoil.

Patriarchy, but what about Matriarchy?

On the other hand, we have yet to find any "matriarchies," that is, female-dominated societies in which the extent and range of women's power, authority, status, and privilege parallels men's in patriarchal societies. In the twentieth century, some anthropologists at first confused "matriarchy" with matrilineal. In matrilineal societies, descent or membership in a kinship group is transmitted from mothers to their children (male and female) and then, through daughters, to their children, and so forth (as in many Na families). Matrilineal societies create woman-centered kinship groups in which having daughters is often more important to "continuing the line" than having sons, and living arrangements after marriage often center around related women in a matrilocal extended family household (See Text Box 1, What Can We Learn from the Na?). Female sexuality may become less regulated since it is the mother who carries the "seed" of the lineage. In this sense, it is the reverse of the kinds of patrilineal, patrilocal, patrifocal male-oriented kinship groups and households one finds in many patriarchal societies.

Gender: A Cultural Invention and Social Role

One's biologic sex is a different phenomenon than one's gender, which is socially and historically constructed. Gender is a set of culturally invented expectations and therefore constitutes a role one assumes, learns, and performs, more or less consciously. It is an "identity" one can in theory choose, at least in some societies, although there is tremendous pressure, as in the United States, to conform to the gender role and identity linked to your biologic sex.

Sanctions, Sexuality, Honor, and Shame

Penalties for deviating from the rules of social separation vary across and within cultures. In small communities, neighbors and extended family kin can simply report inappropriate behavior, especially between unmarried young adults, to other family members. More severe and sometimes violent responses by family members can occur, especially if the family's "honor" is involved—that is, if the young adults, especially girls, engage in activities that would "shame" or dishonor the family. Honor and shame are complex concepts that are often linked to sexuality, especially female sexuality, and to behavior by family members that involves or hints at sexual impropriety. The Turkish film Mustang, nominated for the 2016 best foreign film Academy Award, offers a good illustration of how concepts of sexualized honor and shame operate.

Race as a social concept

Race is most accurately thought of as a socio-historical concept. Michael Omi and Howard Winant noted that "Racial categories and the meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and historical context in which they are embedded."14 In other words, racial labels ultimately reflect a society's social attitudes and cultural beliefs regarding notions of group differences. And 213 since racial categories are culturally defined, they can vary from one society to another as well as change over time within a society. Omi and Winant referred to this as racial formation—"the process by which social, economic, and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories.

Sexuality outside the United States

Same-sex sexual and romantic relationships probably exist in every society, but concepts like "gay," "lesbian," and "bisexual" are cultural products that, in many ways, reflect a culturally specific gender ideology and a set of beliefs about how sexual preferences develop. In many cultures (such as the Sambia discussed above), same-sex sex is a behavior, not an identity. Some individuals in India identify as practicing "female-female sexuality" or "male-male sexuality." The film Fire by Mira Nair aroused tremendous controversy in India partly because it depicted a same-sex relationship between two married women somewhat graphically and because it suggested alternatives available to women stuck in unhappy and abusive patriarchal marriages.139 Whether one is "homosexual" or "heterosexual" may not be linked simply to engaging in same-sex sexual behavior. Instead, as among some Brazilian males, your status in the sexual relationship, literally and symbolically, depends on (or determines!) whether you are the inserter or the penetrated.140 Which would you expect involves higher status? Even anthropologists who are sensitive to cross-cultural variations in the terms and understandings that accompany same-sex sexual and romantic relationships can still unconsciously project their own meanings onto other cultures. Evelyn Blackwood, an American, described how surprised she was to realize that her Sumatran lover, who called herself a "Tombois," had a different conception of what constituted a "lesbian" identity and lesbian relationship than she did.141 We must be careful not to assume that other cultures share LGBTQ identities as they are understood in the United States and many European countries.

Emergence of public (male) vs. domestic (female) spheres

The gender division between public and private/domestic, however, is as symbolic as it is spatial, often emphasizing a gender ideology of social separation between males and females (except young children), social regulation of sexuality and marriage, and male rights and control over females (wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers). It manifests as separate spaces in mosques, sex-segregated schools, and separate "ladies compartments" on trains, as in India. Of course, it is impossible to separate the genders completely. Rural women pass through the more-public spaces of a village to fetch water and firewood and to work in agricultural fields. Women shop in public markets, though that can be a "man's job." As girls more often attend school, as in India, they take public transportation and thus travel through public "male" spaces even if they travel to all-girl schools (Figure 6). At college, they can be immersed in and even live on campuses where men predominate, especially if they are studying engineering, computer science, or other technical subjects. This can severely limit Indian girls' educational and occupational choices, particularly for girls who come from relatively conservative families or regions.

Syncretism

The reason syncretism is particularly common within Latin American religious systems is due to 1) the tenacity with which African slaves clung to their traditional beliefs; 2) the fervor of the Spanish and Portuguese belief that slaves should receive instruction in Catholicism, and 3) the realities of colonial life in which religious instruction for slaves was haphazard at best. This created the perfect climate within which African slaves could hide their traditional religious practices in plain sight.

Replacing Stories with Reality

Thelma Rowell discovered that those baboons were neither male-focused nor male-dominated. Instead, the stable group core was matrifocal—a mother and her offspring constituted the central and enduring ties. Nor did males control female sexuality. Quite the contrary in fact. Females mated freely and frequently, choosing males of all ages, sometimes establishing special relationships— "friends with favors." Dominance, while infrequent, was not based simply on size or strength; it was learned, situational, and often stress-induced. And like other primates, both male and female baboons used sophisticated strategies, dubbed "primate politics," to predict and manipulate the intricate social networks in which they lived.

What makes media possible?

There are two types of media infrastructure: mechanical infrastructure and cultural infrastructure. Mechanical Infrastructure includes the apparatuses that bring networks of technology into existence. Cultural Infrastructure refers to the values and beliefs of communities, states, and/or societies that make the imagining of a particular type of network possible. In the foreword to an ethnography on India and the rise of historical archives, Nicholas Dirks (2002) captures the sense of a cultural infrastructure perfectly when he describes how archives function, that is how the archive does ideological work, in producing and preserving ideas about Indian nationalism. It was the belief in nationalism that made the colonial archive possible as a container of various media—letters and notes, newspapers and telegraphs believed to define the Indian state. 413 Figure 5: Media anthropologists frequently use unique methods to better understand how technology users make sense of their use habits. Here, anthropologists with Intel Labs use a pile and sort approach, asking the user to write down meaningful types of data on sticky notes they will then organize. Photo by Bryce Peake. Complicating the study of mechanical infrastructure is the fact that this infrastructure consists of the same technology it uses to run. Information systems, for instance are both made of and run by computers. Typically, an infrastructure is different from a technology. A road is the infrastructure for a car; a pipe is the infrastructure for oil. As Graham and Marvin (2001) argue about the computer, computing is made possible by the electricity that powers the computer, the system of telematics that allow computers to transmit and receive information, and software protocols that delimit a computer's uses.

Male Dominance: Universal or Biologically Rooted?

Think of our own society or the area in which you live. How would you go about assessing the "status of women" to determine whether it is male-dominated? What would you examine? What information would you gather and from whom? What difficulties might you encounter when making a judgment? Might men and women have different views? Then imagine trying to compare the status of women in your region to the status of women in, let's say, the Philippines, Japan, or China or in a kin-based, small society like that of the Minangkabau living in Indonesia and the !Kung San in Botswana. Next, how might Martians, upon arriving in your city, decide whether you live in a "male dominated" culture? What would they notice? What would they have difficulty deciphering? This experiment gives you an idea of what anthropologists confronted—except they were trying to include all societies that ever existed. Many were accessible only through archaeological and paleontological evidence or through historical records, often made by travelers, sailors, or missionaries. Surviving small-scale cultures were surrounded by more-powerful societies that often imposed their cultures and gender ideologies on those under their control.

Academic Anthropology

Though the representation of women in U.S. academic anthropology is now proportional to their numbers in the Ph.D. pool, discrepancies remain between male and female anthropology professors in rank and publication rates. A 2008 report on the status of women in anthropology, for example, found evidence of continuity of the "old boys' network"—the tendency for men in positions of power to develop relationships with other men, which creates pooled resources, positive performance evaluations, and promotions for those men but not for women. Furthermore, since women in the United States are usually socialized to avoid making demands, they often accept lower salary offers than could have been negotiated, which can have significant long-term financial consequences.159 Women are also over-represented among non-tenure-track anthropology faculty members who are often paid relatively small per-course stipends and whose teaching leaves little time for research and publishing. Some married women prioritize their partners' careers, limiting their own geographic flexibility and job (and fieldwork) opportunities. Left with few academic job options in a given area, they may leave academia altogether. 160 On a positive note, women have an increasingly prominent place in the highest ranks of anthropology, including as president of the American Anthropological Association. Nonetheless, systemic gender inequality continues to affect the careers of female anthropologists. Given what we know about gender systems, we should not be surprised.

Gender and Sexuality

We find it difficult to accept that gender and sexuality are not natural but deeply embedded in and shaped by culture. We struggle with the idea that the division of humans into two and only two categories, "male" and "female," is not universal, that "male" and "female" are cultural concepts that take different forms and have different meanings cross-culturally. Similarly, human sexuality, rather than being simply natural is one of the most culturally significant, shaped, regulated, and symbolic of all human capacities. The concept of humans as either "heterosexual" or "homosexual" is a culturally and historically specific invention that is increasingly being challenged in the United States and elsewhere.

Discrediting the hunting hypothesis

We now know that for most of human history—99 percent of it prior to the invention of agriculture some 10,000 or so years ago—women have "worked," often providing the stable sources of food for their family. Richard Lee, Marjorie Shostak, and others have detailed, with caloric counts and time-work estimates, the significance of women's gathering contributions even in societies such as the !Kung San, in which hunting occurs regularly. 59 In foraging societies that rely primarily on fish, women also play a major role, "collecting" fish from rivers, lakes, and ponds. The exceptions are atypical environments such as the Arctic. Of course, "meat-getting" is a narrow definition of "food getting" or "subsistence" work. Many food processing activities are time-consuming. Collecting water and firewood is crucial, heavy work and is often done by women (Figure 17). Making and maintaining clothing, housing, and tools also occupy a significant amount of time. Early humans, both male and female, invented an array of items for carrying things (babies, wood, water), dug tubers, processed nuts, and cooked food. The invention of string some 24,000 years ago, a discovery so essential that it produced what some have called the "String Revolution," is attributed to women.60 There is the "work of kinship," of "healing," of "ritual," of "teaching" the next generation, and emotional "work. All are part of the work of living and of the "invisible" work that women do.

Reflections

What do socio-cultural anthropologists do? There is no single answer to this question. There are, however, skills that anthropologists acquire that unveil unique ways of seeing and listening that can be applied to many different settings. Some anthropologists use these skills to facilitate the creation of policies that are more inclusive and multicultural, some engage with poorly understood subcultures, and others enhance the effectiveness of marketing of consumer goods. This chapter illustrates how I used the anthropological way of seeing to contextualize development actions, actors, and the people for whom the "development" was being done and explores the ethical challenges faced by anthropologists when working in the international development sector and within non-governmental organizations. In general, I have found that many people working in international development organizations have not yet recognized the value of asking people why they do what they do. From the anthropologist's point of view, understanding why a practice occurs is not merely an act of inquiry; it is also a means of demonstrating respect for people and their knowledge and taking time to listen, learn, and see. The typical approach of development practitioners implicitly and explicitly conveys a lack of respect for the culture, values, and ideas of the people the projects seek to support.

Seeing Like an Anthropologist

What in fact were the food taboos? Why did the taboos exist? What reinforced them as an ongoing practice? How did people view the practices and what were the consequences of not following them? The staff members who had been working with the communities were amazed at the valuable information gathered by simply asking the questions.

Case Study: Global Demand for Quinoa

When a group of people is afforded little status in a society, their food is often likewise denigrated.49 Until recently, this held true for quinoa in Bolivian society, which was associated with indigenous peasants.50 Mirroring "first world" patterns from the U.S. and Europe, city dwellers preferred foods like pasta and wheat-based products. Conspicuous consumption of these products provided them with an opportunity to showcase their "sophisticated" choices and tastes. Not surprisingly, there was little local demand for quinoa in Bolivian markets. Further undercutting the appeal of producing quinoa, the Bolivian government's adoption of neoliberal policies eliminated the meager financial protections available to peasant farmers. If that was not bad enough, a significant drought in the early 1980s spelled disaster for many small farmers in the southern Altiplano region of Bolivia. As a result of these overlapping and amplifying obstacles, many people moved to 1) cities, like La Paz; 2) nearby countries, like Chile, and even 3) to Europe

We Never Asked About it Before

When a problematic practice has been identified and the organization has experience with activities that have changed such behavior, why do the details matter? From that perspective, the tedious task of collecting such data would waste valuable resources, time, and effort. It is important, at this juncture, to shed some light on the systemic nature of seeing from technical perspectives of this sort, which are common in the organizational cultures of international development programs and their staff members. It is not limited to international development workers—national and local organizations often present the same narratives about "bad" cultural taboos that can be eliminated by providing education about nutrition and empowering women.

Women in Anthropology Fieldwork

Women face particular challenges when conducting fieldwork regardless of the culture but particularly in sex-segregated and patriarchal societies. Sometimes women are perceived as more vulnerable than men to sexual harassment, and their romantic choices in fieldwork situations are subject to greater scrutiny than choices made by men in similar situations.156 Women may be more likely to juggle family responsibilities and professional projects and bring children with them for fieldwork. At first glance, this practice may raise eyebrows because of the risks it brings to accompanying children and because of potential negative impacts on the anthropologist's planned work, but many female anthropologists have found fieldwork undertaken with their families to be a transformative experience both professionally and personally. Whereas appearing as a decontextualized single fieldworker can arouse suspicion, arriving at a field site with the recognizable identities of parent, daughter, or spouse can help people conceptualize the anthropologist as someone with a role beyond camera-toting interviewer and observer. At the same time, arriving as a multi-person group also complicates what Jocelyn Linnekin called "impression management." One's child is often less aware of delicate matters and less sensitive in communicating preferences to hosts, causing potentially embarrassing situations but also creating levity that might otherwise be slow to develop. Fieldwork as a family unit also allows for a different rhythm to the elusive work-life balance; many families have reported cherishing time spent together during fieldwork since they rarely had so much time together in their activity-filled home settings.

Refuting Pregnancy and Motherhood as Debilitating

Women may accommodate their reproductive and child-rearing roles by engaging in work that is more compatible with child care, such as cooking, and in activities that occur closer to home and are interruptible and perhaps less dangerous, though cooking fires, stoves, and implements such as knives certainly can cause harm! More often, women adjust their food-getting "work" in response to the demands of pregnancy, breast-feeding, and other child care activities. They gather or process nuts while their children are napping; they take their children with them to the fields to weed or harvest and, in more recent times, to urban construction sites in places such as India, where women often do the heaviest (and lowest-paid) work. In the United States, despite a long-standing cultural model of the stay-at-home mom, some mothers have always worked outside the home, mainly out of economic necessity. This shifting group includes single-divorced-widowed mothers and married African-Americans (pre- and post-slavery), immigrants, and Euro-American women with limited financial resources. But workplace policies (except during World War II) have historically made it harder rather than easier for women (and men) to carry out family responsibilities, including requiring married women and pregnant women to quit their jobs.66 Circumstances have not improved much. While pregnant women in the United States are no longer automatically dismissed from their jobs—at least not legally—the United States lags far behind most European countries in providing affordable child care and paid parental leave.

The Gender Binary and Beyond

a binary or dualistic model of gender. However, in some cultures gender is more fluid and flexible, allowing individuals born as one biologic sex to assume another gender or creating more than two genders from which individuals can select. Examples of non-binary cultures come from pre-contact Native America. Anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict long ago identified a fairly widespread phenomenon of "two-spirit" people, individuals who do not comfortably conform to the gender roles and gender ideology normally associated with their biologic sex. Among Zuni people of New Mexico, beginning in the pre-contact era which was a relatively gender-egalitarian horticultural society for example, individuals could choose an alternative role of "not-men" or "not-women." A two-spirited Zuni man would do the work and wear clothing normally associated with females, having shown a preference for female-identified activities and symbols at an early age. In some, but not all cases, they would eventually marry a man.

Transgender:

a category for people who transition from one sex to another, either male-to-female or female-to-male

Gender ideology:

a complex set of beliefs about gender and gendered capacities, propensities, preferences, identities and socially expected behaviors and interactions that apply to males, females, and other gender categories. Gender ideology can differ among cultures and is acquired through enculturation. Also known as a cultural model of gender.

Socially constructed:

a concept developed by society that is maintained over time through social interactions that make the idea seem "real."

Third gender:

a gender identity that exists in non-binary gender systems offering one or more gender roles separate from male or female.

Patrilocal:

a male-centered kinship group where living arrangements after marriage often center around households containing related men.

Hypodescent:

a racial classification system that assigns a person with mixed racial heritage to the racial category that is considered least privileged

Photovoice:

a research method that puts cameras into people's hands so they can make their own representations of their lives and the activities

Legitimizing ideologies:

a set of complex belief systems, often developed by those in power, to rationalize, explain, and perpetuate systems of inequality.

Pigmentocracy:

a society characterized by strong correlation between a person's skin color and his or her social class.

Taxonomy

a system of classification

Fabrication:

a technique for reporting on research data that involves mixing information provided by various people into a narrative account that demonstrates the point of focus for researchers.

Heteronormativity:

a term coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault to refer to the oftenunnoticed system of rights and privileges that accompany normative sexual choices and family formation.

Jim Crow:

a term used to describe laws passed by state and local governments in the United States during the early twentieth century to enforce racial segregation of public and private places.

Cisgender: .

a term used to describe those who identify with the sex and gender they were assigned at birth

Media:

a word that used to describe a set of technologies that connect multiple people at one time to shared content.

A Melting Pot or a Salad Bowl?

acculturate to the values, traditions, and customs of mainstream culture or should be allowed and encouraged to retain key elements of their identities and heritages. This is a highly emotional question. Matters of cultural identity are often deeply personal and associated with strongly held beliefs about the defining features of their countries' national identities. Assimilation encourages and may even demand that members of ethnic and immigrant minority groups abandon their native customs, traditions, languages, and identities as quickly as possible and adopt those of mainstream society—"When in Rome, do as the Romans do." Multiculturalism takes a different view of assimilation, arguing that ethnic and cultural diversity is a positive quality that enriches a society and encouraging respect for cultural differences Amalgamation promotes hybridization of diverse cultural groups in a multiethnic society. Members of distinct ethnic and cultural groups freely intermingle, interact, and live among one another with cultural exchanges and, ultimately, inter-ethnic dating and intermarriage occurring as the social and cultural barriers between groups fade over time.

Race:

an attempt to categorize humans based on observed physical differences.

"Harmful Traditional Practices"

an odd collection of practices that range from tattooing and scarification to exchange marriages, forced marriages and marriages wherein a woman who is widowed becomes the wife of her deceased husband's brother. "Harmful traditional practices" also include acts typically considered criminal activity throughout much of the world, such as abduction and unlawful confinement. A national committee in Ethiopia, for example, listed 162 "harmful traditional practices." While many of these practices are illegal and generally agreed to be abuses of human rights, some have parallel practices that are legal in the countries in which international organizations are based, such as tattooing and scarification. Numerous examples of "bad for them, okay for us" could be made.

Urban Anthropology

anthropologists focus on the lived experience of the people most affected by these global forces. What is it like to live in such environments? How has it changed over time? What have been the costs and benefits? Especially amidst the overlapping flows of people and ideas, questions concerning mobility, transnationalism, and identity have all become increasingly important to the field of anthropology. Although some exceptions exist (see quinoa case study below), the general trend is for globalization to result in urbanization. With neoliberalism comes the loss of state-funded programs and jobs, the unsustainability of small farms, and the need for economic alternatives that are most commonly found in urban areas.

Cultural imperialism

attempts to impose unequal and unfair relationships between members of different societies.

Harmful traditional practices:

behaviors that are viewed as ordinary and acceptable by members of a local community, but appear to be destructive or even criminal to outsiders.

Variability among binary cultures

both genders may farm, but may have separate fields for "male" and "female" crops and gender-specific crop rituals. Or, the village public space may be spatially segregated with a "men's house" (a special dwelling only for men, like a "men's club") and a "women's house." In some societies, such as the Sambia of New Guinea, even when married couples occupy the same house, the space within the house is divided into male and female areas.18 Women and men can also have gender-specific religious rituals and deities and use gender-identified tools. There are cases of "male" and "female" foods, rains, and even "languages" (including words, verb forms, pronouns, inflections, and writing systems; one example is the Nu Shu writing system used by some women in parts of China in the twentieth century).19Gender ideologies can emphasize differences in character, capacities, and morality, sometimes portraying males and females as "opposites" on a continuum

Food taboos

cultural rules against the preparation and/or consumption of certain foods

Patriarchy:

describes a society with a male-dominated political and authority structure and an ideology that privileges males over females in domestic and public spheres.

Cline:

differences in the traits that occur in populations across a geographical area. In a cline, a trait may be more common in one geographical area than another, but the variation is gradual and continuous, with no sharp breaks

Nonconcordant:

genetic traits that are inherited independently rather than as a package

Glocalization

glocalization refers to the adaptation of global ideas into locally palatable forms. In some instances, this may be done as a profit-generating scheme by transnational corporations. For example, McDonald's offers vastly different menu items in different countries. While a Big Mac may be the American favorite, when in India you might try a McAloo Tikki

Ethnogenesis

gradual emergence of new ethnicities in response to changing social circumstances

Matrifocal:

groups of related females (e.g. mother-her sisters-their offspring) form the core of the family and constitute the family's most central and enduring social and emotional ties.

Patrifocal:

groups of related males (e.g. a father-his brothers) and their male offspring form the core of the family and constitute the family's most central and enduring social and emotional ties.

Heteronormativity and Sexuality in the United States

heteronormative. Heteronormativity is a term coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault to refer to the often-unnoticed system of rights and privileges that accompany normative sexual choices and family formation. For example, a "biologically female" woman attracted to a "biologically male" man who pursued that attraction and formed a relationship with that man would be following a heteronormative pattern in the United States. If she married him, she would be continuing to follow societal expectations related to gender and sexuality and would be agreeing to state involvement in her love life as she formalizes her relationship. Despite pervasive messages reinforcing heteronormative social relations, people find other ways to satisfy their sexual desires and organize their families. Many people continue to choose partners from the so-called "opposite" sex, a phrase that reflects the old U.S. bipolar view of males and females as being at opposite ends of a range of characteristics (strong-weak, active-passive, hard-soft, outside-inside, Mars-Venus).126 Others select partners from the same biological sex. Increasingly, people are choosing partners who attract them—perhaps female, perhaps male, and perhaps someone with ambiguous physical sexual characteristics. 2. Transgender, meanwhile, is a category for people who identify as a different gender than the one that was assigned to them at birth. This may entail a social transition or a physical one, using a number of methods. Anthropologist David Valentine explored how the concept of "transgender" became established in the United States and found that many people who were identified by others as transgender did not embrace the label themselves. This label, too, has undergone a profound shift in usage, and the high-profile transition by Caitlyn Jenner in the mid-2010s has further shifted how people think about those who identify as transgender

An Isolated Case?

in the evaluation of the social safety net mentioned at the outset, the political nature of the implementation of the project was not adequately recognized by the international funding agencies.10 Thus, the experience explored in this chapter is not uncommon, and it is clear that the anthropological way of seeing allows broader issues to come into view—cultural, social, and political—which can then be incorporated into the project goals and activities. These are areas that relatively technical approaches and evaluations tend to miss.

Amalgamation:

interactions between members of distinct ethnic and cultural groups that reduce barriers between the groups over time.

Mechanical infrastructure:

is the apparatuses that bring networks of technology into existence.

Symbolic ethnicity:

limited or occasional displays of ethnic pride and identity that are primarily for public display.

Acculturation

loss of a minority group's cultural distinctiveness in relation to the dominant culture

Multiculturalism:

maintenance of multiple cultural traditions in a single society.

Anthropology Meets Popular Culture: Sports, Race/Ethnicity and Diversity

many in the United States cling to a belief in the existence of biological racial groups (regardless of their racial and ethnic backgrounds). Historically, the nature of popular sports in the United States has been offered as "proof" of biological differences between races in terms of natural athletic skills and abilities. In this regard, the world of sports has served as an important social institution in which notions of biological racial differences become reified—mistakenly assumed as objective, real, and factual. Specifically, many Americans have noted the large numbers of African Americans in Olympic sprinting, the National Football League (NFL), and the National Basketball Association (NBA) and interpreted their disproportionate number as perceived "evidence" or "proof" that "blacks" have unique genes, muscles, bone structures, and/or other biological qualities that make them superior athletes relative to people from other racial backgrounds—that they are "naturally gifted" runners and jumpers and thus predominate in sports. This topic sparked intense media attention in 2012 during the lead-up to that year's Olympics in London. Michael Johnson, a retired African American track star who won gold medals at the 1992, 1996, and 2000 Summer Olympic Games, declared that "black" Americans and West Indians (of Jamaican, Trinidadian, Barbadian, and other Caribbean descent) dominated international sprinting competitions because they possessed a "superior athletic gene" that resulted from slavery: "All my life, I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it's impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn't left an imprint through the generations . . . slavery has benefited descendants like me. I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.

Indigenous media:

media produced by and for indigenous communities often outside of the commercial mainstream

Masculinity studies

n the 1990s, women's studies expanded to become gender studies, incorporating the study of other genders, sexuality, and issues of gender and social justice.161 Gender was recognized as being fundamentally relational: femaleness is linked to maleness, femininity to masculinity. One outgrowth of that work is the field of "masculinity studies." 162 Masculinity studies goes beyond men and their roles to explore the relational aspects of gender. One focus is the enculturation processes through which boys learn about and learn to perform "manhood." Many U.S. studies (and several excellent videos, such as Tough Guise by Jackson Katz), have examined the role of popular culture in teaching boys our culture's key concepts of masculinity, such as being "tough" and "strong," and shown how this "tough guise" stance affects men's relationships with women, with other men, and with societal institutions, reinforcing a culture of violent masculinity. Sociologist Michael Kimmel has further suggested that boys are taught that they live in a "perilous world" he terms "Guyland." 163 Anthropologists began exploring concepts of masculinity cross-culturally as early as the 1970s, resulting in several key publications in 1981, including Herdt's first book on the Sambia of New Guinea and Ortner and Whitehead's volume, Sexual Meanings. In 1990, Gilmore analyzed cross-cultural ethnographic data in his Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts in Masculinity. 164 Other work followed, including a provocative video on the Sambia, Guardians of the Flutes. But the growth of studies of men and masculinity in the United States also stimulated new research approaches, such as "performative" aspects of masculinity and how gender functions in wealthier, post-industrial societies and communities with access to new technologies and mass media

Race: A discredited concept in human biology

one of the biggest reasons so many people continue to believe in the existence of biological human races is that the idea has been intensively reified in literature, the media, and culture for more than three hundred years. Reification refers to the process in which an inaccurate concept or idea is so heavily promoted and circulated among people that it begins to take on a life of its own. Over centuries, the notion of biological human races became ingrained—unquestioned, accepted, and regarded as a concrete "truth." Studies of human physical and cultural variation from a scientific and anthropological perspective have allowed us to move beyond reified thinking and toward an improved understanding of the true complexity of human diversity

Mass communication:

one-to-many communication that privileges the sender and/or owner of the technology that transmits the media

Ethnic group:

people in a society who claim a distinct identity for themselves based on shared cultural characteristics and ancestry.

Assimilation:

pressure placed on minority groups to adopt the customs and traditions of the dominant culture.

Global South

refers to the poorest countries of the world. The definition includes countries that are sometimes called "Third World" or "Least Developed Economies."

Global North

refers to the wealthier countries of the world. The definition includes countries that are sometimes called "First World" or "Highly Developed Economies."

Patrilineal:

societies where descent or kinship group membership is transmitted through men, from men to their children (male and female), and then through sons, to their children, and so forth.

Matrilineal:

societies where descent or kinship group membership is transmitted through women, from mothers to their children (male and female), and then through daughters, to their children, and so forth.

Glocalization

the adaptation of global ideas into locally palatable forms

Syncretism

the combination of different beliefs, even those that are seemingly contradictory, into a new, harmonious whole.

Ethnicity:

the degree to which a person identifies with and feels an attachment to a particular ethnic group

Habitus

the dispositions, attitudes, or preferences that are the learned basis for personal "taste" and lifestyles.

Mediascape

the flow of media across borders.

Financescape

the flow of money across political borders.

Ethnoscape

the flow of people across boundaries.

Ideoscape

the global flow of ideas.

Technoscape

the global flows of technology

Media practices:

the habits or behaviors of the people who produce media, the audiences who interact with media, and everyone in between.

Neoliberalism:

the ideology of free-market capitalism emphasizing privatization and unregulated markets.

Anthropology of the Body

the picture of egg and sperm drawn in popular as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology relies on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female. The stereotypes imply not only that female biological processes are less worthy than their male counterparts but also that women are less worthy than men. Part of my goal in writing this article is to shine a bright light on the gender stereotypes hidden within the scientific language of biology. 149 Subsequent work has challenged the "sperm penetrates egg" model of fertilization, noting that it is medically inaccurate and reinforces male-active-dominant, female-passive (penetrated) gender models. In reality, the egg and sperm fuse, but the egg activates the sperm by releasing molecules that are crucial for it to find and adhere to the egg.150 Old videos like The Miracle of Life offer, in their narration and background music, striking examples of the cultural ideology of reproduction in the United States that Martin and others have described.151 In another classic essay, Corinne Hayden explored interactions between biology, family, and gender among lesbian couples. Even though both members of the lesbian couples she studied did not necessarily contribute biologically to their offspring, the women and their families found ways to embrace these biological differences and develop a new formulation of family that involved biological connection but was not limited to it.152 Some research analyzes the body, especially the female body, as a site of coercion and expression of power relations by individuals (e.g., partner rape and domestic violence), but state-sanctioned collective acts also occur, such as using women as "sex slaves" (Japan's so-called "Comfort Women" during World War II) and using civilian rape as a form of psychological warfare. Anthropologists document other ways in which states exert power over bodies—through family planning policies (China's planned birth policy), legislation that bans (or permits) artificial forms of contraception and abortion, and government programs to promote fertility, including subsidized infertility treatments.153 For example, Turkish anthropologists have described how state policies in Turkey have appropriated, for state purposes, sexual issues of concern to Turkish families, such as assisted reproduction for disabled war veterans and treatment of vaginismus, a condition that prevents women from engaging in sexual intercourse. Power relationships are also associated with new reproductive technologies. For example, the availability of amniocentesis often contributes to shifts in the ratio of male and female babies born. Unequal power relations are also in play between surrogate mothers (often poor women) and wealthier surrogate families desiring children

One-drop rule:

the practice of excluding a person with any non-white ancestry from the white racial category.

Reified:

the process by which an inaccurate concept or idea is accepted as "truth."

Racial formation:

the process of defining and redefining racial categories in a society.

Commodity chain

the series of steps a food takes from location where it is produced to the store where it is sold to consumers.

Gender:

the set of culturally and historically invented beliefs and expectations about gender that one learns and performs. Gender is an "identity" one can choose in some societies, but there is pressure in all societies to conform to expected gender roles and identities

Cultural infrastructure:

the values and beliefs of communities, states, and/or societies that make the imagining of a particular type of network possible

Dyads:

two people in a socially approved pairing. One example is a married couple.

Has civilization advanced women's positions?

women's positions "advanced" with civilization, especially under European influence, at least relative to so-called "primitive" societies. The picture is complicated, but the opposite may actually be true. Most anthropological studies have suggested that "civilization," "colonialism," "development," and "globalization" have been mixed blessings for women.113 Their traditional workloads tend to increase while they are simultaneously excluded from new opportunities in agricultural cash crops, trading, and technology. Sometimes they lose traditional rights (e.g., to property) within extended family kinship groups or experience increased pressure from men to be the upholders of cultural traditions, whether in clothing or marriage practices. On the other hand, new political, economic, and educational opportunities can open up for women, allowing them not only to contribute to their families but to delay marriage, pursue alternatives to marriage, and, if they marry, to have a more powerful voice in their marriages.114 Deeply embedded cultural-origin stories are extremely powerful, difficult to unravel, and can persist despite contradictory evidence, in part because of their familiarity. They resemble what people have seen and experienced throughout their lifetimes, even in the twenty-first century, despite all the changes. Yet, nineteenth and twentieth century cultural models are also continuously reinforced and reproduced in every generation through powerful devices: children's stories; rituals like Valentine's Day; fashion, advertisements, music, video games, and popular culture generally; and in financial, political, legal, and military institutions and leaders. But profound transformations can produce a "backlash," as in U.S. movements to restore "traditional" family forms, "traditional" male and female roles, sexual abstinence-virginity, and the "sanctity" of heterosexual marriage.115 Some would argue that backlash elements were at work in the 2016 Presidential and Congressional elections

Race and Ethnicity: dude what are you!?

"What are you?" and "What's your race?" Others simply assumed my heritage as if it was self-evident and easily defined and then interacted with me according to their conclusions. These subjective determinations varied wildly from person to person and from situation to situation.

Participation in Alternative Markets

"fair trade" has emerged as a way for socially-conscious consumers to support small farmers and artisans who have been affected by these policies. To be certified as fair trade, vendors must agree to a "fair" price, which will be adjusted upwards if the world market price rises above the fair trade threshold. If the world market price drops, fair trade farmers still make a decent living, which allows them to continue farming rather than abandon their fields for wage labor. While admirable in its intent, and unassailably beneficial to many, anthropological research reminds us that every situation is complex and that there is never a "one size fits all" perfect solution.

Overview and Early Globalization

1. "globalization" is now commonplace and is used to discuss the circulation of goods, the fast and furious exchange of ideas, and the movement of people. 2. Early modern technological innovations hastened globalization. For instance, the invention of the wheel created a need for permanent roads that would facilitate transport of animal drawn carts. These wheeled vehicles increased people's mobility, which in turn facilitated the sharing of both goods and ideas. Even before the invention of the wheel, the creation of written communication systems allowed ideas to be shared between people in distant locations.

Advantages of the Intensification of Globalization

1. Globalization has also facilitated the rise of solidarity movements that would not have been likely in an earlier era. To take a recent example, within hours of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, individuals from different nations and walks of life had changed their Facebook profile pictures to include the image of the French flag 2.Micro-loan programs and crowd-source fundraising are yet more ways in which individuals from disparate circumstances are becoming linked in the global era. Kiva, for example, is a microfinance organization that enables anyone with an Internet connection to make a small ($25) donation to an individual or cooperative in various parts of the developing world. The projects for which individuals/ groups are seeking funding 3.Advances in transportation technologies, combined with an increased awareness of humanitarian crises abroad (an awareness that is largely facilitated by advances in communication technologies) also create new ethnoscapes.

The Hunting Way of Life

1. Hunting was also linked to a "world view" in which the flight of animals from humans seemed natural and (male) aggression became normal, frequent, easy to learn, rewarded, and enjoyable. War, some have suggested, might psychologically be simply a form of hunting and pleasurable for male participants.48 The Hunting Way of Life, in short, "molded man," giving our species its distinctive characteristics. And as a result, we contemporary humans cannot erase the effects of our hunting past even though we live in cities, stalk nothing but a parking place, and can omit meat from our diets. The biology, psychology, and customs that separate us from the apes—all these we owe to the hunters of time past. And, although the record is incomplete and speculation looms larger than fact, for those who would understand the origin and nature of human behavior there is no choice but to try to understand "Man the Hunter." —Washburn and Lancaster (1974) 2. a diet consisting primarily of meat, obtained through planned, cooperative hunts, by all-male groups, that lasted several days and covered a wide territory. Such hunts would require persistence, skill, and physical stamina; tool kits to kill, butcher, transport, preserve, and share the meat; and a social organization consisting of a stable home base and a monogamous nuclear family. Several biological changes were attributed to adopting this way of life: a larger and more complex brain, human language, an upright posture (and humans' unique foot and stride), loss of body hair, a long period of infant dependency, and the absence of "estrus" (ovulation-related female sexual arousal) which made females sexually "receptive" throughout the monthly cycle. Other human characteristics purportedly made sex more enjoyable: frontal sex and fleshier breasts, buttocks, and genitals, especially the human penis. Making sex "sexier," some speculated, cemented the pair-bond, helping to keep the man "around" and the family unit stable

New Directions in the Anthropology of Gender

1. More-recent research has been focused on improving the ethnographic and archaeological record and re-examining old material. Some have turned from cause-effect relations to better understanding how gender systems work and focusing on a single culture or cultural region. Others have explored a single topic, such as menstrual blood and cultural concepts of masculinity and infertility across cultures.86 Many American anthropologists "returned home," looking with fresh eyes at the diversity of women's lives in their own society: working-class women, immigrant women, women of various ethnic and racial groups, and women in different geographic regions and occupations.87 Some ethnographers, for example, immersed themselves in the abortion debates, conducting fieldwork to understand the perspective and logic behind pro-choice and anti-choice activists in North Dakota. Others headed to college campuses, studying the "culture of romance" or fraternity gang rape.88 Peggy Sanday's work on sexual coercion, including her cross-cultural study of rape-prone societies, was followed by other studies of power-coercion-gender relationships, such as using new reproductive technologies for selecting the sex of children 2. Many previously unexplored areas such as the discourse around reproduction, representations of women in medical professions, images in popular culture, and international development policies (which had virtually ignored gender) came under critical scrutiny. 90 Others worked on identifying complex local factors and processes that produce particular configurations of gender and gender relations, such as the patrifocal (male-focused) cultural model of family in many parts of India.91 Sexuality studies expanded, challenging existing binary paradigms, making visible the lives of lesbian mothers and other traditionally marginalized sexualities and identities

Race in Three Nations: The United States, Brazil, and Japan

1. The US: hypodescent, a term coined by anthropologist Marvin Harris in the 1960s to refer to a socially constructed racial classification system 215 in which a person of mixed racial heritage is automatically categorized as a member of the less (or least) privileged group.21 Another example is birth certificates issued by U.S. hospitals, which, until relatively recently, used a precise formula to determine the appropriate racial classification for a newborn. If one parent was "white" and the other was "non-white," the child was classified as the race of the "non-white" parent; if neither parent was "white," the child was classified as the race of the father. Not until very recently have the United States government, the media, and pop culture begun to officially acknowledge and embrace biracial and multiracial individuals. The 2000 census was the first to allow respondents to identify as more than one race. 2. Brazil: tipos describe slight but noticeable differences in physical appearance. Examples include loura, a person with a very fair complexion, straight blonde hair, and blue or green eyes; sarará, a light-complexioned person with tightly curled blondish or reddish hair, blue or green eyes, a wide nose, and thick lips; and cabo verde, an individual with dark skin, brown eyes, straight black hair, a narrow nose, and thin lips. Sociologists and anthropologists have identified more than 125 tipos in Brazil, and small villages of only 500 people may feature 40 or more depending on how residents describe one another. Some of the labels vary from region to region, reflecting local cultural differences. Since Brazilians perceive race based on phenotypes or outward physical appearance rather than as an extension of geographically based biological and genetic descent, individual members of a family can be seen as different tipos. This may seem bewildering to those who think of race as a fixed identity inherited from one's parents even though it is generally acknowledged that family members often have different physical features, such as sisters who have strikingly different eye colors, hair colors, and/or complexions. In Brazil, those differences are frequently viewed as significant enough to assign different tipos 3. Japan: Japanese society is more diverse than many people realize; the number of Korean, Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian immigrants began to increase in the 1980s, and the number of children who had one Japanese and one non-Japanese parent has increased substantially since the 1950s, driven in part by children fathered by American military men stationed in Japan. Yet, one segment of Japan's population known as the burakumin (formerly called the eta, a word meaning "pure filth") vividly illustrates the arbitrary nature of racial categories. Though physically and genetically indistinguishable from other Japanese people, the burakumin are a socially stigmatized and outcast group. They are descendants of people who worked dirty, low-prestige jobs that involved handling dead and slaughtered animals during the feudal era of Japan in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s. In feudal times, they were forced to live in communities separated from the rest of society, had to wear a patch of leather on their clothing to symbolize their burakumin status, and were not permitted to marry non-burakumins.

Lifestyle, Taste, and Conspicuous Consumption

1. The concept of "lifestyle" refers to the creative, reflexive, and sometimes even ironic ways in which individuals perform various social identities 2. Chaney argues that people only feel the need to differentiate themselves when confronted with an array of available styles of living. Societies organized via organic solidarity are predicated on different goods, skills, and tasks. Within this framework, the rise of a consumerist economy enables individuals to exhibit their identities through the purchase and conspicuous use of various goods.24 Globalization has increased the variety of goods available for individuals to purchase—as well as people's awareness of these products—thus expanding the range of identities that can be performed through their consumption habits

Disadvantages of the Intensification of Globalization

1. The decimation of indigenous tribes in the Americas, who had little to no resistance to the diseases carried by European explorers and settlers, is but one early example 2.As epidemic after epidemic wreaked havoc on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, death rates in some tribes reached as high as 95 percent. Addressing a current instance, the research program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) coordinated by the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, has called attention to the role of human-caused climate change in creating the current Syrian refugee crisis 3. The debates about travel bans to and from West Africa were a reminder of the xenophobic attitudes held by many Americans even in this age of globalization. There are many reasons for this. Racial prejudice is still very much a reality in today's world

Gender vs. Sex

1. the gender and sexual ideologies were based on biological determinism. According to this theory, males and females were supposedly born fundamentally different reproductively and in other major capacities and preferences and were "naturally" (biologically) sexually attracted to each other, although women's sexual "drive" was not very well developed relative to men's and was reproductively oriented. 2. European Christianity in the Middle Ages, viewed women as having a strong, often "insatiable" sexual "drive" and capacity. But by the nineteenth century, women and their sexuality were largely defined in reproductive terms, as in their capacity to "carry a man's child." Even late-twentieth-century human sexuality texts often referred only to "reproductive systems," to genitals as "reproductive" organs, and excluded the "clitoris" and other female organs of sexual pleasure that had no reproductive function. For women, the primary, if not sole, legitimate purpose of sexuality was reproduction

The 5 "Scapes" of Globalization

1.Ethnoscape refers to the flow of people across boundaries. While people such as labor migrants or refugees travel out of necessity or in search of better opportunities for themselves and their families, leisure travelers are also part of this scape. 2. Technoscape refers to flows of technology. Apple's iPhone is just one example of how the movement of technologies across boundaries can radically affect day-to-day life for people all along the commodity chain. 3. Ideoscape refers to the flow of ideas. This can be small-scale, such as an individual posting her or his personal views on Facebook for public consumption, or it can be larger and more systematic. Missionaries provide a key example. 4. Financescape refers to the flow of money across political borders. Like the other flows discussed by Appadurai, this phenomenon has been occurring for centuries. The Spanish, for example, conscripted indigenous laborers to mine the silver veins of the Potosí mines of Bolivia. 5. Mediascape refers to the flow of media across borders. In earlier historic periods, it could take weeks or even months for entertainment and education content to travel from one location to another. From the telegraph to the telephone, and now the Internet (and myriad other digital communication technologies), media are far more easily and rapidly shared regardless of geographic borders.

Biological determinism

: a theory that biological differences between males and females leads to fundamentally different capacities, preferences, and gendered behaviors. This scientifically unsupported view suggests that gender roles are rooted in biology, not culture

Binary model of gender

: cultural definitions of gender that include only two identities-male and female.

Androgyny

: cultural definitions of gender that recognizesome gender differentiation, but also accept "gender bending" and role-crossing according to individual capacities and preferences.

Unraveling our Gender Myths:

All cultures have "creation" stories. Many have elaborate gender-related creation stories that describe the origins of males and females, their gender-specific traits, their relationships and sexual proclivities, and, sometimes, how one gender came to "dominate" the other. Our culture is no different. The JudeoChristian Bible, like the Koran and other religious texts, addresses origins and gender (think of Adam and Eve), and traditional folk tales, songs, dances, and epic stories, such as the Ramayana in Hinduism and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, treat similar themes. Science, too, has sought to understand gender differences. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of scientists, immersed in Darwinian theories, began to explore the evolutionary roots of what they assumed to be universal: male dominance.

Ethnicity and Ethnic Groups

An ethnic group, on the other hand, claims a distinct identity based on cultural characteristics and a shared ancestry that are believed to give its members a unique sense of peoplehood or heritage. The cultural characteristics used to define ethnic groups vary; they include specific languages spoken, religions practiced, and distinct patterns of dress, diet, customs, holidays, and other markers of distinction. In some societies, ethnic groups are geographically concentrated in particular regions, as with the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq and the Basques in northern Spain. Ethnicity refers to the degree to which a person identifies with and feels an attachment to a particular ethnic group. As a component of a person's identity, ethnicity is a fluid, complex phenomenon that is highly variable. Many individuals view their ethnicity as an important element of their personal and social identity. symbolic ethnicity to describe limited or occasional displays of ethnic pride and identity that are primarily expressive—for public display—rather than instrumental as a major component of their daily social lives.

Is Anthropology the Study of Race?

Anthropology was sometimes referred to as the "science of race" during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when physical anthropologists sought a biological basis for categorizing humans into racial types.1 Since World War II, important research by anthropologists has revealed that racial categories are socially and culturally defined concepts and that racial labels and their definitions vary widely around the world. In other words, different countries have different racial categories, and different ways of classifying their citizens into these categories.

Man the Hunter, Meat Eater?

Archaeological and paleontological fossil evidence and ethnographic data from contemporary foragers revealed that hunting and meat it provided were not the primary subsistence mode. Instead, gathered foods such as plants, nuts, fruits, roots and small fish found in rivers and ponds constituted the bulk of such diets and provided the most stable food source in all but a few settings (northerly climates, herd migration routes, and specific geographical and historical settings). When meat was important, it was more often "scavenged" or "caught" than hunted.

Globalization in Application

As the high-quality and gory video productions of IS demonstrate, technological and media resources, skills, and knowledge are flowing in and out of Syria's borders. Financial flows in oil wealth are now in the hands of IS, and food resources are flowing into the country when possible from international non-governmental organizations such as Mercy Corps. Syria is an example of the disadvantages of globalization, as well as an illustration of how quickly one country's crises can become global crises.

Rejecting Biological Determinism

Decades of research on gender and sexuality, including by feminist anthropologists, has challenged these old theories, particularly biological determinism. We now understand that cultures, not nature, 233 create the gender ideologies that go along with being born male or female and the ideologies vary widely, cross-culturally. What is considered "man's work" in some societies, such as carrying heavy loads, or farming, can be "woman's work" in others. What is "masculine" and "feminine" varies: pink and blue, for example, are culturally invented gender-color linkages, and skirts and "make-up" can be worn by men, indeed by "warriors." Hindu deities, male and female, are highly decorated and difficult to distinguish, at least by conventional masculinist U.S. stereotypes

I Will Not Eat Until I Die

Elders in the communities explained that food taboos were one of a series of interconnected restrictions on behaviors, some identified by the project as harmful but not connected to the food taboos. In addition to food taboos, the restrictions included limitations on what women can touch and places they could enter while menstruating, a prohibition against a wife eating from the first harvest of the season until after her husband does, and rules preventing a wife from drinking from a newly prepared batch of alcoholic drink until after her husband does. Project workers had identified many of these practices, but understood them to be isolated from each other as separate traditions. The elders' view of the practices as linked suggested that they needed to be understood as manifestations of something larger

Changes in How - "Where" we conduct research

Globalization has changed not only what anthropologists research, but also how they approach those topics. Foregrounding the links between global processes and local settings, multi-sited ethnography examines specific topics and issues across different geographic field sites.52 Multi-sited ethnography may be conducted when the subject of one's study involve and/or impact multiple locations and can be best understood by accounting for those multiple geographic contexts.

A Brief History of Media Anthropology

In 1950, Hortense Powdermaker completed the first ethnographic and social scientific study of Hollywood studios. Her book, Hollywood: The Dream Factory, preceded by approximately a decade the formation of the academic field of media studies and the theories of mass culture that are popular today. Powdermaker, a student of Franz Boas, was at the forefront of mass communication studies. Mass media became a central part of life after World War I and influenced even those cultures that outsiders considered isolated or "primitive." Anthropologists of that era developed two different excuses for avoiding the study of media. The first was the need to distinguish cultural anthropology from journalism. As Elizabeth Bird (2009) wrote, ethnographers were often dismissed as overqualified journalists. Anthropologists who wanted to be seen as scientists (as sociologists often were) wanted to distance themselves as much as possible from mass media, a subject regarded as unserious. Today, media is a much more mainstream object of analysis in American cultural anthropology and media research also offers a significant career path for many young anthropologists. The company ReD, for example, hires anthropologists as consultants to help telecommunication and media companies innovate new technologies. These anthropologists use social theory and ethnographic methods to help create media technologies for the future. Similarly, major technology companies like Intel and Microsoft employ a number of anthropologists in their artificial intelligence, social media, networked systems, and "Internet of Things" labs. These anthropologists combine corporate work with research, publishing some of the most cutting edge research in the fields of anthropology and technology in disciplines like Human Centered Computing.

Case Study: Privatization and Bolivia's Water Crisis

In 2000, Bolivians in the city of Cochabamba took to the streets to protest the exploitative practices of a transnational company that had won the right to provide water services in the city. Anti-globalization activists celebrated this victory of mostly poor mestizo and indigenous people over capitalist giants, but the situation on the ground today is more complicated. Water is one of the most essential elements on this planet. So how is it that a foreign company was given the right to determine who would have access to Bolivian water supplies and what the water would cost? The answer serves to highlight the fact that many former colonies like Bolivia have existed in a perpetual state of subordination to global superpowers.

Participatory Media and Media Activism in Anthropology

In addition to documenting traditional cultural beliefs, media technologies can be absorbed into communities in ways that strengthen them. Zeinabu Davis' videowork on Yoruba trance rituals, for example, demonstrates the way in which the meaning of media is not set by the technologies used to create it. For the Yoruba ritual actors who were the subjects of the film, and who watched the film following its production, portable video technologies increased the ache (Yoruba for "power of realization") of both trance states and Yoruba communities. According to Yoruba spiritual ideas, images have a presence and can bringing things closer together. The actors believed the video would help grow and sustain the Yoruba community by bringing viewers closer to the spiritual dimensions of the ritual. Meaning, in other words, was not the only source of meaningfulness for Davis and her Yoruba partners.

Changing Attitudes towards LGBTQ People in the United States

In the last two decades, attitudes toward LGBTQ—particularly lesbian, gay and bisexual—people have changed dramatically. The most sweeping change is the extension of marriage rights to lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. The first state to extend marriage rights was Massachusetts in 2003. By 2014, more than half of U.S. Americans said they believed same-sex couples should have the right to marry, and on June 26, 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. supreme court declared that same-sex couples had the legal right to marry. 132 Few civil rights movements have seen such progress in such a short period of time. While many factors have influenced the shift in attitudes, sociologists and anthropologists have identified increased awareness of and exposure to LGBTQ people through the media and personal interactions as playing key roles.133 Legalization of same-sex marriage also helped normalize same-sex parenting. Sarah, whose three young children—including a set of twins—are mothered by Sarah and her partner, was active in campaigns for marriage equality in Minnesota and ecstatic when the campaign succeeded in 2013 (see Text Box 4). However, legalization of same-sex marriage has not been welcomed everywhere in the United States. Anthropologist Jessica Johnson's ethnographic work profiling a Seattle-based megachurch from 2006 through 2008 initially explored their efforts to oppose same-sex marriage. Later, she shifted her focus to the rhetoric of gender, masculinity, and cisgender sexuality used by the church and its pastor. 134 Official church communications dismissed homosexuality as aberrant and mobilized members to advocate against same-sex marriage. The church's efforts were not successful.

Seeing like an Anthropologist: Anthropology and Development

In the past, some anthropologists participated in the "development" activities of colonial governments, and individual anthropologists and the discipline as a whole were rightly criticized for their roles in the injustices that resulted. While working in Afghanistan in 2013, I encountered anthropologists who were engaged in activities in the name of "development" that could be defined as neo-colonial in that they supported militaries by analyzing cultural communities with the goal of finding ways to weaken them and foster unequal and unfair relationships (cultural imperialism). Anthropological engagement is not always benevolent or neutral. As a result, anthropologists are encouraged to engage in self-reflection—to examine their roles, engagements, practices, and objectives critically, known as reflexivity.

Globalization and Neoliberalism

Latin America provides a good example of how the shift from colonialism to neoliberalism has been disseminated through and exacerbated by globalization. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Latin American colonies' independence from Spain and Portugal was secure, but the relations of power that prevailed during the colonial period had largely been replicated with local elites controlling the means of production.