Cultural Anthropology - FINAL Chapters 9 - 15

Berlin Conference

(1884-1885) During European Imperialism, various European leaders met in Berlin, Germany to discuss plans for dividing Africa peacefully. These leaders had little regard for African independence, and had no representation for native Africans. This began the process of imperializing Africa.

Bilineal

(system of descent) a system of reckoning descent that counts both the mother's and the father's side

Karl Marx

1818-1883. 19th century philosopher, political economist, sociologist, humanist, political theorist, and revolutionary. Often recognized as the father of communism. Analysis of history led to his belief that communism would replace capitalism as it replaced feudalism. Believed in a classless society. Bourgeoisie and Proletariat

Origin Myth

A Story told about the founding and history of a particular group to reinforce a sense of common identity

Lineal Relative

A blood relative in direct line of descent - children, grandchildren

Rite of Passage

A category of ritual enacts a change of status from one life stage to another, either for an individual or a group

Caste

A closed system of stratification in a society

Economy

A cultural adaptation to the environment that enables a group of humans to use the available resources to satisfy their needs and to thrive

Patrilineal Descent

A descent traced through a line of ancestors, through the male line

Redistribution

A form of exchange in which accumulated wealth is collected from the members of the group and reallocated in a different pattern

Transgender

A gender identity or performance that does not fit with cultural norms related to one's assigned sex at birth

Egalitarian Society

A group based on the sharing of resources to ensure success with a relative absence of hierarchy and violence

Ranked Society

A group in which wealth is not stratified but prestige and status are

Descent Group

A kinship group in which primary relationships are traced through consanguine ("blood") relatives

Asexuality

A lack of erotic attraction to others

Civil Society Organization

A local nongovernmental organization that challenges state policies and uneven development, and advocates for resources and opportunities for members of its local communities

Hajj

A pilgrimage to Mecca, made as an objective of the religious life of a Muslim.

Ethnic Boundary Marker

A practice or belief, such as food, clothing, language, shared name, or religion, used to signify who is in a group and who is not

Gender Stereotypes

A preconceived notion about the attributes of difference between and proper roles of men and women

Transsexual

A previous transgender individual who undergoes sex reassignment surgery

Matrilineal Descent

A principle of descent from an ancestress through her daughter, her daughter's daughter and so on (in the female line)

Monogamy

A relationship between only two partners

Fictive

A relationship, such as godparenthood, modeled on relations of kinship, but created by customary convention rather than the circumstances of birth

Pilgrimage

A religious journey to a sacred place as a sign of devotion and in search of transformation and englightenment

Sexology

A scientific study of sexuality

Communitas

A sense of camaraderie, a common vision of what constitutes a good life, and a commitment to take social action to move toward achieving this vision that is shaped by the common experience of rites of passage

Ethnicity

A sense of historical, cultural, and sometimes ancestral connection to a group of people who are imagined to be distinct from those outside the group

Religion

A set of beliefs based on a unique vision of how the world ought to be, often revealed through insights into a supernatural power and lived out in community

Gender Ideology

A set of cultural ideas, usually stereotypical about the essential character of different genders that function to promote and justify gender stratification

Band

A small kinship based group of foragers who hung and gather for a living over a particular territory

Marriage

A socially recognized relationship that may involve physical and emotional intimacy as well as legal rights to property and inheritance

Pastoralism

A strategy for food production involving the domestication of animals. The Nuer.

White Wedding View

A study by sociologist Chrys Ingraham about wedding culture and its industry; a contemporary understanding of heterosexuality

Class

A system of power based on wealth, income, and status that creates and unequal distribution of a society's resources

Two-Spirits

A term that usually indicates a Native person who feels their body simultaneously manifests both a masculine and a feminine spirit, or a different balance of masculine and feminine characteristics than usually seen in masculine men and feminine women. Beardache.

Clan

A type of descent group based on a claim to a founding ancestor but lacking genealogical data

Lineage

A type of descent group that traces genealogical connection through generations by linking persons to a founding ancestor

Yehudi Cohen

Adaptive Strategies. anthropologist who came up with the 5 strategies for subsistence: foraging, horticulture, agriculture, pastoralism, industrialism

Ritual

An act or series of acts regularly repeated over years or generations that embody the beliefs of a group of people and create a sense of continuity and belonging

Surrogacy

An arrangement whereby a woman bears a child on behalf of another woman`

Chiefdom

An autonomous political unit composed of a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief

State

An autonomous regional structure of political, economic, and military rule with a central government authorized to make laws and use force to maintain order and defend its territory

Machismo

An emphasis on male strength and dominance. - In Mexico,"The Meaning of Macho" Matthew Guttman examines the male identities of a typical Mexican Man, a Mexican urban working-class man, and a macho Mexican.

Intersex / Intersexual "Spectrum"

An individual who is born with a combination of male and female genitalia, gonads and/or chromosomes

Life Chance

An individual's opportunity to improve quality of life/achieve goals

Situational Navigation of Identity

An individual's self-identification with a particular group that can shift according to social location

Agriculture

An intensive farming strategy for food production involving permanently cultivated land

Gender Stratification

An unequal distribution of power, prestige, and access to a group's resources, opportunities, rights and privilege based on gender

Melissa Checker

Anthropologist who studies and participates in movements for social justice

Sacred

Anything that is considered holy

Profane

Anything that is considered not holy

Equality

As a political value, the idea that all people are of equal worth.

Heterosexuality

Attraction to and sexual relations between individuals of the opposite sex

Homosexuality

Attraction to and sexual relations between individuals of the same sex

Bisexuality

Attraction to and sexual relations with members of both sexes

Elman Service

Becoming less popular. Primitive social organization (1962). 4 basic categories of human societies (bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states). Social evolution. Processual archaeology. Chaco Canyon debunked this theory because it did not fit into any of the four categories.

Audrey Richards

Bemba. Chisungu Rite. Zambia, Africa; Chisungu- coming of age ceremony for young, teenage women after menstruation and in prep for marriage

Habitus

Bourdieu's term to describe the self-perceptions and beliefs that develop as part of one's social identity and shape one's conceptions of the world and where one fits in it

Masculinity in High School

C.J. Pascoe's Ethnography "Dude, You're a Fag" explores the construction of gender, particularly masculinity, in a suburban, working class, racially diverse high school. Masculinity is present in both boys and girls.

Haley Duschinski

Conflict in Kasmir Valley

Cousins Southall, England

Cousins by choice, the youth call one another "cousin" as a way to build strong connections across ethnic, religious, and cultural boundaries

Incest Taboo

Cultural rules that forbid sexual relations with certain close relatives

Ethnic Cleansing / Ethno-Religious Cleansing

Efforts by representatives of one ethnic or religious group to remove or destroy another group in a particular geographic area

Potlach

Elaborate redistribution ceremony among the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest

Six Kin Systems

Eskimo. Hawaiian. Sudanese. Omaha. Crow

Ethnicity as a source of opportunity

Ethnicity allows for engagement in everyday activities. Ethnicity is being packaged and produced into a multi-billion dollar market. Ethnic Items. Ethno-Theme Parks. Native Americans have turned tribes into ethno-corporations.

Gender Roles / Gender Expectations

Expectations about what is appropriate behavior for each sex.

Equity

Fairness; justice

Boy-Inseminating Rites

Gil Herdt's fieldwork among the Sambia. The Sambia believed that adult men needed to supply boys with semen to ensue their development into manhood

The Algerian Experience

Gilo Pontecorvo's, The Battle of Algiers is about anticolonial struggle for the independence of France.

Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs, Steel. The Intersection of Sexuality and Biology. Cohabitation/Co-parenting. Monogamy.

Food Foragers

Humans who subsist to hunting, fishing, and gathering plants to eat

Caste in India

In India, the population is divided into four varna or castes dalits are members of India's lowest caste, literally broken people, also called untouchables.

Power

Influence over a government's leadership, organization, or policies.

Artificial Insemination

Injecting semen into the uterus by artificial means

Industrial Agriculture

Intensive farming practices involving mechanization and mass production

Ida Susser

Interested in silent majority. Classic ethnography: Norman Street, which is about Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood. Community prevention of HIV/AIDS towards greater understanding/equity

Inequality

It means people have unequal access to scarce and valued resources in society. These resources might be economic or political, such as healthcare, education, jobs, property, and land ownership, housing and ability to influence government policy

Black Networks in Chicago

Kinship can even be a means to survive. Carol Stack, through deep involvement in an impoverished urban African-American community called the Flats in a town outside of Chicago, Stack uncovered residents' complex survival strategies based on extended kinship networks.

Carl Polyani

Kinship that drives economy through travel

Former Yugoslavia

Know what former European country's breakup was influenced heavily by the religious differences among the groups there ("religion was the most important cultural identifier") - Ethnic Cleansing

Sex Work

Labor through which one provides sexual services

Sheng Nu

Leftover women

Patty Kelly

Lydia's Open Door: Inside Mexico's Most Modern Brothel

Polygyny

Marriage between one man and two or more women

Polyandry

Marriage between one woman and two or more men

Companionate Marriage

Marriage built on love, intimacy, and personal choice rather than social obligation

Arranged Marriage

Marriage orchestrated by the families of he involved parties

Exogamy

Marriage to someone outside the kinship group

Endogamy

Marriage to someone within the kinship group

Bourgeoisie

Marxist term for the capitalist class that owns the means of production

Proletariat

Marxist term for the class of laborers who own only their labor

Matthew Gutman

Masculine identity is flux and negotiable

Prestige

Max Weber. Reputation, influence, and deference bestowed on people by society

Politics

Method of maintaining, managing, and gaining control of government (who gets what, when, and how)

Glen Petersen

Micronesia are small islands in the South Pacific. Petersen documents how over time they developed elaborate social and political organizations that enabled them to survive and quickly recover from natural disasters

Modern Western Style State

Modern states feature a central administration designed to penetrate everyday social life of its citizenry. Administrative, communication and military infrastructure define and enforce the state's borders

The Five Sexes Theory

More than just male and female sexes, there are middle sexes. 1.7% live births were classified as intersex. Herms: true hermaphrodites, people born with both a testis and an ovary Merms: male pseudohermaphrodites, who are born with testes and some aspect of female genitalia Ferms: female pseudohermaphrodites, who have ovaries combined with some aspect of male genitalia

NGOs

Non-governmental organizations; groups not affiliated with any government, formed to provide services or push for a certain public policy

Sex Chromosome

One of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in the human, contains genes that will determine the sex of the individual.

Liminality

One stage in a rite of passage during which a ritual participant experiences a period of outsiderhood, set apart from normal society, that is key to achieving a new perspective on the past, future, and current community

Melville Hersokvits

Operates in a capitalist way

Tribe

Originally viewed as a culturally distinct, multiband population that imagined itself as one people descended from a common ancestor; currently used to describe an indigenous group with its own set of loyalties and leaders living to some extent outside the control of a centralized authoritative state

Mati-Work

Politics of Passion, Gloria Wekker explores the black, working class Creole women in the port city of Paramaribo, Suriname. Mati (women who form intimate spiritual, emotional, and sexual relationships with other women)

Leveling Mechanism

Practices and organizations that reallocate resources among a group to maximize collective good

Affinal

Relatives by marriage, whether of lineals (e.g. son's wife) or collaterals

Dana Davis

Research in a shelter for battered women. Her book, offers insights into the creative process that people use to construct fictive kinship relationships during times of need.

Gender Studies

Research into the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity across cultures as flexible, complex, and historically and culturally constructed categories

Stages of Rite of Passage

Separation: Physically, psychologically or symbolically Liminality: Outsiderhood from community Reincorporation: Returns the individual to everyday life. Transformed by experience

Kathleen Gough, The Nuer

She revisited Pritchard's study of the Nuer and suggested that local events may have affected the Nuer's kinship practices, which resulted in their reinforcing group identity and assimilate outsiders, exogamy

Achieved Status

Social position established and changeable during a person's lifetime

Ascribed Status

Social position inherited, assigned at birth, and passed down from generation to generation with enforced boundaries.

The Langkawi of Malaysia

Studied by Janet Carsten in the 1900s, kinship is not only given at birth but also acquired throughout life. For the Langkawi, it is through co-feeding and co-residence.

Marshall Shalins

Substantivist argued against a neoclassical economic approach. Economic structure bound by three themes; political, religious, and/or kin based

Slash and Burn

Swidden Farming & Fallow. A practice of clearing land for cultivation.

Chocolate and the Ivory Coast

Th conflict in the Ivory Coast reveals many of the complex dynamics of today's global economy: (1) the interconnectedness of farmers in rural West Africa with chocolate eaters and coffee drinkers worldwide; (2) the tension-filled relationship between nation-states and transnational corporations; (3) the strategic military interventions, often by former colonial powers, that serve to police local political affairs and global economic flows; (4) the power of global financial markets to determine the price of coffee or cocoa, and thus the quality of life of small farmers; and (5) the link between consumers and producers through global commodity chains that have shattered notions of distinct national territories

E.E. Evans Pritchard, The Nuer

The Nuer people of southern Sudan in northeast Africa constituted a classic representation of a descent group

Hegemony

The ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement within a population without the use or threat of force

Sexuality

The complex range of desires, beliefs, and behaviors that are related to erotic physical contact, intimacy and pleasure

Horticulture

The cultivation of plants for subsistence through non-intensive use of land and labor

Genocide

The deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic or religious group

Industrial Revolution

The eighteenth and nineteenth century shift from agriculture and artisanal skill craft to machine-based manufacturing

Barter

The exchange of good and services for the other

Reciprocity

The exchange of goods and services among people of relatively equal status; meant to reate and reinforce social ties

Gender

The expectations of thought and behavior that each culture assigns to people of different sexes

Triangle Trade

The extensive exchange of slaves, sugar, cotton and furs between Europe, Africa and the Americas that transformed economic, political and social life on both of sides of the Atlantic

Means of Production

The factories, machines, tools, and raw materials, land and financial capital needed to make things

Secondary Sex Characteristic

The genetically determined physical features that differentiate the sexes but are not directly involved with reproduction

Dowry

The gift of goods or money from the bride's family to the groom's family as part of the marriage process

Bride-Wealth

The gift of goods or money from the groom's family to the bride's family as part of the marriage process

Rwandan Genocide

The killing of more than 500,000 ethnic Tutsis by rival Hutu militias in Rwanda in 1994. The conflict between the dominant Tutsis and the majority Hutus had gone on for centuries, but the suddenness and savagery of the massacres caught the United Nations off-guard. U.N. peacekeepers did not enter the country until after much of the damage had been done.

Nuclear/Extended Family

The kinship unit of mother, father and children

Cultural Capital

The movement of one's class position, upward or downward, in stratified societies

Family of Orientation

The nuclear family into which ego was borned and reared, consisting of father, mother, brothers, and sisters

Family of Procreation

The nuclear family which ego establishes, consisting of wife/husband and children

Carrying Capacity

The number of people who can be supported by the resources of the surrounding region

Sex

The observable physical differences between male and female, especially biological expressions related to human reproduction

Social Reproduction

The phenomenon whereby social and class relations of prestige or lack of prestige are passed from one generation to the next

Sexual Dimorphism

The phenotypic differences between males and females of the same speicies

Colonialism

The practice by which a nation-state extends political, economic, and military power beyond its own borders over an extended period of time to secure access to raw materials, cheap labor and markets in other countries or regions

Collateral

The siblings of lineal relatives (parents, grandparents) and their descendants

Kinship

The system of meaning and power that cultures create to determine who is related to whom and to define their mutual expectations, rights and responsibilities.

Wealth

The total value of what someone owns, minus any debt

Gender Performance

The way gender identity is expressed through action. - Masculine: aggressive, physical, tough, competitive, sports oriented, testosterone driven, strong, unemotional - Feminine: gentle, kind, loving, nurturing, smart persuasive, talkative, enticing, emotional

Cultural Construction of Gender

The ways humans learn to behave as a man or woman and to recognize behaviors as masculine or feminine within their cultural context. - Teaching transgender in US: Boys, Girls, and Youth Sports. Co-Ed T-Ball provides insight into how gender in the US subtly and not-so subtly taught, learned and enforced. - The ideas of masculinity and manliness are taught

Arnold Van Gennep

Theorized Rite of Passage. Belgian anthropologist who noticed that initiation rituals of different cultures moved from an initial state of separation from society through a transitional period into a final state of incorporation back into the community

Income

What people earn from work, plus dividends and interest on investments, along with rents and royalties

Social Mobility

a change in position within the social hierarchy

Symbiosis`

a close relationship between two organisms in which at least one of the organisms benefits

Downward Mobility

a decrease in social class

Negative Reciprocity

a mode of exchange in which the aim is to get something for as little as possible. neither fair nor balanced, it may involve hard bargaining, manipulation, outright cheating, or theft

Primary Sex Characteristic

a physical feature such as the reproductive organs and genitals that distinguish the sexes

Intersectionality

an analytic framework for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification

Food Production

an economy based on plant cultivation and/or animal domestication

Upward Mobility

an increase—or upward shift—in social class

Victor Turner

anthropologist-communitas

Aberrations

departure from what is normal

Leith Mullings

emphasized the intersectionality of race, class, and gender and forced anthropologists to reconsider how they all interact to create the world we see today

Hijras

followers of the Hindu Mother Goddess, Bahuchara Mata, who through religious ritual and perhaps some ritual surgery to remove the genitalia, become and alternate sex/gender. Violence against them is not uncommon, but they are revered and powerful ritual figures. Feared and revered.

Balanced Reciprocity

giving knowing that it will be given back in the future in the form of a gift

Alfred Kinsey

his research described human sexual behavior and was controversial (for its methodology & findings)

Modes of Production

key aspect of social structure for Marx; includes forces of production and relations of production

Gender Dysphoria

refers to stress or discomfort stemming from the self-knowledge that one's biological sex does not conform to, or is the opposite of, his or her personal gender identity

Consanguineal

related by blood

Ethnocide

the act or attempt to systematically destroy another people's ethnicity or culture. Usually the term ethnocide is applied to intentional acts resulting in culture death. The legalized "kidnapping" of Native American children so that they could be educated as Europeanized Canadians and Americans during the late 19th and early 20th centuries is an example of ethnocide

Market Exchange

the buying and selling of goods and services, with prices set by rules of supply and demand

Anti-Colonial

the movement following World War II in which colonies began to revolt against their captors.

Adaptive Strategies

the unique way in which each culture uses its particular physical environment; those aspects of culture that serve to provide the necessities of life- food, clothing, shelter, and defense.

Pierre Bourdieu

this French sociologist developed the concept of capital. habitus

Human Rights Watch

this organization monitors governments and organized political groups for human rights abuses

The Arab Spring

was a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests (both non-violent and violent), riots, and civil wars in the Arab world that began on 18 December 2010 in Tunisia with the Tunisian Revolution, and spread throughout the countries of the Arab League and its surroundings. While the wave of initial revolutions and protests faded by mid-2012, some started to refer to the succeeding and still ongoing large-scale discourse conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa as the Arab Winter.

Max Weber

wealth, power, prestige

Generalized Reciprocity

when goods or services are given to another without any apparent expectation of a return gift

Emile Durkheim

who came up with the terms sacred and profane?