Test 2

Explain female genital cutting among the Hofriyat from a culturally relative position

- Associated with female fertility - allows for and protects fertility. - Hofriyat women see the operation as dangerous but profoundly necessary - Justifiable procedure that enables them to help sustain all that is most valued in their world

What is culture's ties to complex symbolic representation

- Complex symbolic representation is the ability to communicate freely about the past, the future, and the invisible - The emergence of human symbolic culture was dependent upon Transmission, Memory, and Reiteration - "We cannot help but see the world in symbolic categories" - This distinguishes human symbolic language from the vocal communication of apes - Institutions are the complex, variable, and enduring forms of cultural practice that organize social life

Incest taboo

- Exists in every culture around the world - There are some people that one should not marry - people who are too close kin - But - the form that this taboo takes differs everywhere - Sibling (anthropological definition): people who are not supposed to mate ***Incest is a cultural category, not a biological fact

Kinship among the Bari of Venezuela

- Repeated washings of sperm create children - Children have multiple biological fathers - Helps children survive. - Believe that men do all the work and women are just the vessels during pregnacy - Take multiple lovers to make pregnancy easier for their husbands - Two fathers is that ideal number

Who has worldviews

individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual's or society's knowledge and point of view.

Marriage

- Institution - Transforms status of participants - Has implications about sexual access - Perpetuates social patterns through production of offspring - Creates relationships between kin of partners - Is symbolically marked ****THIS DEFINITION DOES NOT INCLUDE LOVE

How are myth, ritual, worldviews, and religion related

- Myths are stories. They create worldviews and stem from worldviews, but they aren't worldviews. - Worldviews are often created by rituals or lead to rituals, but they are not rituals. - Religions are ideas and practices

How language differences influence thought

- Patterns in language offer a window on a culture's dispositions and priorities; if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. - Languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. The structures that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality

Intersex

- People with ambiguous external genitalia - Guevedoces: Dominican Republic - very common. Female at birth, become male at puberty when different sexual characteristics become apparent. - Also common in New Guinea

Kinship among the Tibetans

- Polyandry - Fraternal Polyandry: Group of brothers marry one women. - All brothers have equal sexually access to the wife and all act as fathers the to children. - Men wish to share their wife with their brothers because it prevents fragmentation of family property - Women agree to having multiple husbands because it ensures she and her children will be supported financially - There are tensions between the brothers because only the oldest brother is in charge and the other brothers have little chance of changing their status. - The theory that it increases the standard of living for younger brothers is the most reasonable explanation of why it exists according to the article.

Ritual

- Repetitive social practice - Composed of a sequence of symbolic activities - Adhering to a culturally defined ritual schema - Closely connected to a specific set of ideas often encoded in myth

How marriage varies around the world

- Residence after marriage varies: Neolocal, Patrilocal, Matrilocal, Avunculocal - # of spouses varies - In many societies, marriage is accompanied by the transfer of certain symbolically important goods (bridewealth and dowry).

Kinship

- The social relationships that constitute people's families. - Prototypical derived from the human experiences of mating, birth, and nurturance

Relatedness

- The socially recognized ties that connect people in a variety of different ways - Ties are bio cultural. Families come from our interpretations of biological connections between people - Interpretations of people affected by culture and language

The Cro-Magnon People (who they are, the type of art they created, and why their art represents our first conclusive evidence of the existence of language)

- They were the first early anatomically modern humans (early Homo sapiens sapiens) that lived in the Europe; The physical features associated with spoken language, such as the vocal tract, the structure of the brain and the size of the spinal cord, are identical between Cro-Magnon people and humans living today. This means that Cro-Magnon people would have been capable of producing the same sounds we use in speech. - They carved and sculpted small engravings, reliefs, and statuettes on cave walls, which included symbols (26 specific signs are used repeatedly in these caves) that are evidence that some form of written language was being attempted by our Stone Age ancestor way before we thought it was ***Earlier humans may have also had language, we just do not have evidence of it.

Why people work to preserve their languages and some reasons why people often feel pressure to change the way that they speak

- They work to preserve it because language is linked to things like history, culture, and tradition.; They try to preserve them by teaching and passing it down to younger generations - Some people feel pressure to change the way they speak for reasons like no one understands them, to avoid being punished (Cherokee) or to avoid being made fun of.

How does sex, and the understandings of sex, vary around the world

- Vary from puritanical and fearful t the casual and pleasurable. - "Homosexuality" and "Bisexuality" may be understood differently in other societies. - Polyandry demonstrates how a women's sexuality can be distinguished from her reproductive capacity - her sexuality can be shared among an unlimited number of men but her childbearing capacities cannot. (can engage in sexual activity outside of the marriage as long as she is not likely to get pregnant.) - Monogamous or purely polygamous systems resist perceiving women's sexual and reproductive capacities as separable, even though separation with men in accepted.

How human language differs from animal communication

- What makes human language distinctive: openness, displacement, arbitrariness, duality of patterning, semanticity, and prevarication. - We have symbols, we think in terms of categories that are not innate but learned - animals do not. - Our way of communicating (language) has characteristics of Arbitrariness (use of arbitrary symbols), Displacement and Productivity - Which is not instinctive but learned

Why understanding cultural differences and taking an anthropological perspective is important:

1.) Makes other practices comprehensible 2.) Reveals how what we view to be dangerous or barbaric can appear perfectly reasonable to others. 3.) Reduces intercultural misunderstandings 4.) Policy perspective - more effective 5.) Makes us critically reflect on our own practices - and prevents us from uniformly imposing our values on others.

Language is arbitrary in (2) ways

1.) The form the symbol takes 2.) the category it represents there is no necessary connection between their form and the object they represent. - Therefore, people have to learn their meanings.

Ethnographers

A branch of anthropology which gives a descriptive account of the way of life in a particular society usually as the result of an in-depth study through personal contact

Nuclear family

A family pattern made up of two generations: the parents and their unmarried children

Play

A framing that is: (1) Consciously adapted by the players (2) somehow pleasurable (3) Systemically related to what is non play by alluding to the non play world and by transforming the objects, roles, actions, and relations of ends and means characteristic of the non play world

Polyandry

A marriage pattern in which a women may be married to more than one husband at a time.

Productive

Ability to combine words in novel ways to create new meanings that have not been communicated before.

Space

About a third of the world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space (East to West). As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes; People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotion

What does an accent tell you?

Age Where someones from Emotion Educated or not Class

Symbol

An arbitrary sign that represents something else. Meaning is determined by convention

Worldview

An encompassing picture of reality created by the members of societies

Ethnographic fieldwork

An extended period of close involvement with the people in whose language or way of life an anthropologist is interested, during which anthropologists ordinarily collect most of their data

Why is ethnocentrism something that could be seen as universal?

Because we all belong to a certain culture and only know that way of life and never want to be wrong; we all judge what we don't know

Difference between Anatomical and Behavioral Modernity, and be able to discuss some theories as to why behavioral modernity appears so much later than anatomical modernity.

Behavioral Modernity - Refer to a list of traits that distinguish present day humans and their recent ancestors from both living primates and other extinct hominid lineages. It is the point at which Homo sapiens began to demonstrate a reliance on abstract thought and to express cultural creativity. These developments are often thought to be associated with the origin of language. ***(ie., abstract thinking, finely made tools, fishing, evidence of long-distance exchange or barter among groups, figurative art, game playing and music, burial)****

Displaced

Communicate about something not present in time or space (or something that does not exist at all)

Kinship as bio cultural; How does kinship and various kin categories -- such as father, mother, sibling, cousin, offspring and spouse—vary around the world.

Cross-cultural comparison shows that kinship is not a direct reflection of biology, - Universal biological experiences of mating, birth and nurturance Cousin: - refers to someone of the same generation as ego (you) - In Spanish, they are referred to as primo or prima depending on the gender while in America we only distinguish our aunt and uncle by gender Spouse: - Distinction is made on the basis of connection through marriage, or affinity. - In Spanish, suerga is ego's spouses mother and madre is ego's mother - In matrilinial societies, Ego's mother's sister and father's sister are distinguished through affinity.

Habitus

Cultural learning such that many things we learn, such as table manners, are never explicitly taught buy rather are absorbed in the course of daily practical living. (ie., table manners, accents, hugging, sitting in chairs, listening to the teacher, going to school) *** Heavily influenced by our interactions with material culture

Culture is Shared:

Cultural practices shared within social groups always encompasses the varied knowledge and skills of many different individuals. - Enculturation (refers to the cognitive challenges facing human beings who live together and must come to terms with the ways of thinking and feeling considered appropriate to their respective cultures.)

Culture is Adaptive:

Cultural traditions are also reconstructed and enriched, generation after generation primarily because human biological survival depends on culture.

The difference between Culture (with a big C) and cultures (with a little c)

Culture (Big C): Set of learned behaviors that people acquire as members of society - EVERYBODY has culture - culture is ubiquitous culture (Little C): Do not exist - Everybody has cultural practices. But those practices overlap in so many different ways we cannot separate people into distinct "cultures". The question "How many cultures are in America?" makes no sense - the answer is infinite.

Arbitrary

Determined by consensus or convention. Not instinctive or necessary. i.e., there is no necessary relationship between the sign (such as a word) and its meaning.

Casuality

Different verbs encode action; ie., English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speakers tend to say things like "John broke the vase" even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself." Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others. **** People who use of active verbs, "John broke the vase", are more likely to remember who broke the vase.

Culture is Symbolic:

Everything we do in society has a symbolic dimension, from how we conduct ourselves at the dinner table to how we bury our dead; Letters of the alphabet symbolize the sounds of the spoken language and the sounds of the spoken language are symbols for the meaning a speaker tries to express; *****Our heavy dependence on symbolic learning sets us apart from the non symbolic learning on which other species rely.

Berdache and two spirit

Gender difference - distinguished from both men and women in terms of temperament, dress, lifestyle, and social roles - Specialized work roles (often do work of the opposite physical sex). - Identity result of supernatural intervention - Fluid identity - Ubiquitous in Native North America Not homosexual in our sense of the word: - They have sexual relations with others of the same sex - But not with others of the same gender (i.e. not with other berdaches). - Non-berdache partners - not seen as homosexual.

Compare race, kinship, and gender in respect to the relationship between biology and culture.

Gender, Kinship, and Race all depend on classifying people through cultural perceptions of biological difference

All of the different dialects/languages that exist in NC include

High Tide Cherokee Lumbee Dialect Spanish AABE Charlatian Mountaineer

Religion

Ideas and Practices that postulate reality beyond that which is immediately available to the senses

Kinship among the Marshallese

Incest??

How and why culture, symbolic thought, and language are intertwined

Language Influences thought = different languages lead to different patterns of thought (Symbolic/Conceptual) = Different Symbols mean people encode their experience of the world differently = Different cultures and views of life

How does language requires/creates symbolic thought. Talk about how symbolic thought requires learning and creating category distinctions

Language is arbitrary and has no meaning. But humans can string sounds in an infinite number of ways to create meaning via words and sentences through linguistic creativity. There are many different words for one meaning in different languages so learning comes into play when you have to figure out which word applies to that meaning in your culture. i.e, Because of words like "he is black" or "she is white" that create category distinctions.

Polygyny

Marriage pattern in which a man may be married to more than 1 wife at a time.

Monogamy

Marriage pattern in which a person may be married to only one spouse at a time

How do myths shape/relate to social organization

Myths serves as "Charters" or "justifications" for present-day social arrangements. Myths contain some "self-evident" truth that explains why society is as it is and why it cannot be changed. If the social arrangements justified by the myth are challenged, the myth can be used as a weapon against challengers ie., Americans' rights are guaranteed in mythical statements from the "self-evident" truths proclaimed in the US Declaration of independence

Are linguistics universal?

NO

Describe the worldviews of the Nacirema (Americans) and Azande. (Understand how calling something a worldview does not entail any truth judgments.)

Nacirema: - Human body is ugly, tends toward disease - Magic can enhance the body - Medicine men have special and authoritative knowledge about magic, and thus can and should control its use. - Misfortune caused by lack of attention to body ritual - Medicine man has access to truth - Rituals (taking medicine, brushing teeth) will get rid of the misfortune Azande: - Misfortune caused by witchcraft - Poison oracle has access to truth - Rituals will get rid of the misfortune and the witchcraft

Kinship among Native American Groups

Navajo: Matrilineal, Subsistence residential unit is the basic social organization (head mother, her husband, some of their children and their spouses and children)

What are the cultural specifications of the nuclear family and why can other various forms of family life be adaptive?

Nuclear: Monogamous; only 2 generations;there's no evidence to suggest that nuclear families are the natural, ideal, or even most evolutionary successful system of human grouping - Families can change from one type to another over time and with the birth, growth, and marriage of children. - Human systems are, in fact, very flexible, ready to accommodate any sort of mating system or type of family.

Sex

Observable physical characteristics that distinguish different kinds of humans needed for biological reproduction.

How language makes worldviews and meaning making possible

Our understanding of reality is organized by symbols such as the American flag, cows, or the constitution; Elaborating symbols provide people with categories for thinking about how their world is ordered - they signal the presence and importance of given domains of experience

Parallel v. Cross Cousins

Parallel Cousins: - Parents are siblings of the same gender - Parallel siblings can't marry. This is incest Cross Cousins: - Parents are siblings of the opposite gender - Cross cousins should marry - often the ideal marriage partner.

Color

People who speak other languages draw different category distinctions,and they also perceive colors differently. i.e, Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue

Art

Play with form producing some aesthetically successful transformation-representation

Gender Roles around the world

Projections of gender roles onto the past: - Man the hunter, women the nurturer: For a long time this was our typical conception about gender relationships among early homo sapiens. - But this is merely a projection of current day beliefs, no evidence for it. - Evidence, in fact, that gender roles vary widely, so they probably did in the past as well Hunter v. Gathering: - Traditionally seen as male vs. female - But women also hunt and men also gather. (Aka of central Africa: Women hunt just as much, and often more successfully, than men.) Weaving: - Navajo: Women weave - Otavalo Ecuador: Men weave Ideas of Gender Roles in the past: - Largely a product of our biases about gender - Not an accurate reflection of what gender roles always were or must be. - Physical sex differences do not allow us to predict the roles that men or women play.

Culture is Patterned:

Related cultural beliefs and practices show up repeatedly in different areas of social life

Myth

Stories that recount how various aspects of the world came to be the way that they are - Many myths (but not all) are origin myths.

Language

System of arbitrary symbols people use to encode their experience of the world and to communicate

Tacit (implicit) versus explicit knowledge

Tacit (Implicit) - the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. (ie., the ability to speak a language, knead dough, play a musical instrument, or design and use complex equipment) Explicit - knowledge that can be written down, transmitted, and understood by a recipient; found in books, on the web, and other visual and oral means.

Time

The Pormpuraawans spontaneously used their spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world's languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front

Gender

The cultural construction of beliefs and behaviors considered appropriate for each sex

Culture shock

The feeling, akin to panic, that develops in people living in an unfamiliar society when they cannot understand what is going on around them.

Cultural relativity

The idea that a society's customs and beliefs should be understood in the context of that society ***Cultural relativism does not mean that you can never make moral judgments. It does mean that you START by trying to understand other practices in their cultural contexts.

Participant observation

The method Anthropologist use to gather information by living as closely as possible to the people whose culture they are studying while participating in their lives as much as possible.

Ethnocentrism

The opinion that ones own way of life is natural or correct, and indeed, the only true way of being fully human.

Analyze an activity (such as but not limited to hugging) and discuss which parts of it are cultural and which are not.

Things like touch establishes social relationships and In some senses, touch is natural, as is communication - ALL animals communicate While things like - table manners, accents, hugging, sitting in chairs, listening to the teacher, going to school - are Habitus and are never explicitly taught but rather are absorbed in the course of daily practical living as a result of Cultural learning

The difference between things that are universal and things that are culturally particular.

Things that are universal (Culture with big C) - attribute of the human species as a whole- its members' ability, in the absence of highly specific genetic programming, to create and to imitate patterned, symbolically mediated ideas and activities that promote the survival of our species Things that are culturally particular (culture with little c) - particular, learned ways of life belonging to specific groups of human beings. ***Human species as a whole is said to have Culture as a defining attribute, but actual human beings would only have access to a particular human cultures - either their own or other peoples.

Third and fourth genders

Third Gender: - Can refer to a third gender in any society - Sometimes refers to both physically male and female people who take on alternate identities. - Also refers to physically male people who take on a non-male gender identity Fourth Gender: - Can refer to any fourth gender in a society - Also refers to physically female people who take on a non-female gender identity.

Culture is Learned:

culture is not reinvented by each generation but rather we learn it from other members of the social group we belong to; much of it is habitus; The facts that culture is learned is what distinguishes culture from instinct - Socialization (process of learning to live as a member of a group; Involves mastering the skills of appropriate interaction with others and learning how to cope with the behavioral rules established by the social group)

Human Culture is... (5)

learned shared patterned adaptive symbolic