Chapter 2 Anthrophology

Culture

Shared and contested. Enculturation.

Social Construction

States knowledge is always relative to its social setting.

Alfred Kroeber

Student of Frank Boas at Columbia University

Hegemony

The ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement within a population without the use or threat of force. Men deciding women's health care.

Agency

The potential power of individuals and groups to contest cultural norms, values, symbols, mental maps of reality, institutions, and structures of power. Women's March.

Semiotics

The practice of writing and reading signs, which are embedded in our everyday life and send messages about identity, values, beliefs, and practices. Ferdinand de Saussure. Used to decode the landscape.

A globalization alternative

The slow city movement, a grassroots response to globalization, supports slow food.

Cultural Anthropology

The study of people's communities, behaviors, beliefs and institutions, including how people make meaning as they live, work, and play together.

Stratification

The uneven distribution of resources and privileges among participants in a group or culture. Can be formal like caste system in India

enculturation

We do not inherit culture but learn it through

Not understandable outside of the geographical context in which it operates. We call this a "two-way relationship"

We explore culture as a process that is

Cosmopolitanism

You are a well traveled class, and that is odd in the history of humans. Possibly too much of a focus on material consumption?

Global Consumption

a shared, global consciousness affected by cyberspace

Cognitive map

a type of mental representation which serves an individual to acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday or metaphorical spatial environment.

Homogenization

culture is not necessarily linked to a geographical location

Advertising and the mass media

tell what to consume, equating ownership of products with happiness, a good sex life, and success in general.

Culture

the enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by a group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next. Language, religion, art, music, food, and attitudes.

Commercial Spaces

An example of these are malls, which are complex semiotic sites which direct important signals not only about what to buy but also about who should shop there and who should not.

Cosmopolitanism

An intellectual and aesthetic openness toward divergent experiences, images, and products from different cultures. Fosters curiosity about all places. Potentially a path to a type of world peace

Mental Maps of Reality

Assign meaning to what has been classified.

Historical Particularism

Boas also supported the idea that people have a unique history that led to their unique material and symbolic culture and is called

structural functionalism

Criticized for focusing too much on the stability of societies, downplaying the role of the individual in society, ignoring inequality based on race, gender etc that causes tension and conflict, and not truly accounting for change.

Culture Hybridization

Cultural mixing. Culture matters more than ever in the negotiation of global forces, as local forces confront globalization and translate it into unique place-specific forms. Example: Creole

material or symbolic

Culture can be

Unilineal Cultural Evolution

Culture follows a natural path, and the most mature stage of that evolution is Christian European Civilization. This idea is ethnocentric, racists, and now obsolete in Anthropology.

socially constructed

Culture is

The Super-organic

Culture is superior to nature; culture provides varying meanings to objects

Cultural Relativism

Culture should be understood as it's own thing! It does not need to be compared, contrasted, or ranked amongst others. Boas used this to study the Inuit

Ferdinand de Saussure

A Swiss linguist who coined the term semiology and stated nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign.

Advertising

A catalyst for consumption. We increasingly define ourselves by what we consume.

Quinceañera

A coming-of-age ceremony for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans that is a rite of passage based on age

Interpretivist Approach

A critique of positivism in the social sciences. Clifford Geertz, a leader in symbolic anthropology used the idea of a thick description to support this approach and attack cultural relativism

wearing a white turban

A cultural trait of mature Tuareg men in Niger

Cognitive map

A drawing representing the practice of your everyday life is a

Culture

A shared set of meanings that is lived through the material and symbolic practices of everyday life.

An Americanization of Culture

Examples include, television shows, hollywood movies, international products like Coca-Cola, Mcdonalds, and Apple, and having half the books and internet being written in English

Cyber cultures

Globalization has created this new culture.

Structural Functionalism

Isolates cultures and takes notes, highly problematic. Presents the idea that society is an organism, with each group of people fulfilling their role.

They Live

Movie about seeing the world how it is

Globalization

Possibly a homogenizing language and culture