AN 101 Test 2

Work and Diet

"Subsistence" work week: 16.2 hours for the !Kung vs. 44 hours for the US (many people work overtime, or have more than one job; this is the average for the US population) Total "work" week 42 hours for the !Kung vs. 83 hours for the US

Theory Early (unilineal) evolutionists

Also referred to classical social evolution. It is a 19th century social theory about the evolution of societies and cultures. It was composed of my competing theories by various anthropologists and sociologists.

The !Kung work far fewer hours than

Americans in securing their basic needs but enjoy a more than adequate diet

The prevailing emic view of work and technology in the US is that:

Americans now work longer hours than a generation ago

Japanese National Character

Anthropologists realized that many Japanese fought vigorously out of a devotion to their emperor (who was regarded as a god on earth), and they feared that if the emperor was hung as a war criminal, the American occupation of Japan would be almost impossible. Japanese compulsiveness was the result of "severe early toilet training, which created a repressed rage in Japanese infants because they have to control their sphincters before the necessary muscular and intellectual development has been attained."

Because they relied on second-hand information, E.B. Tylor and L.H. Morgan are associated with ____________ anthropology.

Armchair

Psychological Anthropology

By the 1930's American anthropologists had become frustrated with Boas' insistence that their objective should just be the collection of data on single cultures. Many of Boas' students in the 1930's turned to notions acquired from psychology to develop explanations of cultural traits. This became known as _____________________ (also known as the culture and personality approach).

Historical particularism

Each culture has its own unique history, reflecting both independent invention (evolution) and diffusion. Boas developed this theory to conduct field research in the native language in attempt to understand culture on their own terms.

Original Affluence

Economists define as the attainment of all of one's material needs. An affluent person is someone whose needs are satisfied: There are two ways in which this can happen; either by producing much or desiring little. Sahlins has called hunter-gatherers the "original affluent society"

Nineteenth century diffusionists such as Smith and Perry argued that all great inventions originated in __________ and then spread out to the rest of the world.

Egypt

Marvin Harris

Expanded Julian Steward's ideas. Taught for many years at Columbia University and the University of Florida. He took Steward's idea that cultures are means of adapting to the environment. He has become controversial within anthropology for his claim that what the participants themselves understand to be the workings of their culture are irrelevant to an anthropologist's understanding of its adaptive aspects. He argues that most participants in a culture are unconscious of how it really works

The current anthropological view of hunter-gather subsistence rest on two questionable assumptions:

First is the notion that these people are primarily dependent on the hunting of game animals and second is the assumption that their way of life is generally a precarious and arduous struggle for existence.

Ecological Perspective (cultural ecology)

Involves an examination of the relationship between the natural environment and culture. This approach was developed in 1950s by the anthropologist Julian Steward, who taught for many years at the University of Illinois. Steward viewed culture as the mechanism by which people adapt to the physical environment (in other words, how they solve the problems of living in a particular place). He recognized that the adaptations that people develop will determine many other aspects of culture.

From an anthropological point of view what was the problem with diffusion?

It failed to answer the question that the evolutionists had tried to answer, even in their own ethnocentric way. Even if you accept the diffusionists' claims that people are basically uninventive and that culture traits are more often borrowed than independently developed, every culture trait still had to develop somewhere. Diffusionism was unable to account for the origins of culture traits. It also couldn't account for why some traits diffuse and why some don't

Functionalism

The major trend in Britain by the 1930's among anthropologists. An attempt to understand cultural practices in terms of how they satisfy needs within a society. Its critical assumption: aspects of a culture don't just develop by accident; they exist because they fulfill critical needs. The functionalists tried to understand what these needs were and how the elements of a culture satisfied them.

Carrying Capacity

The most fundamental problem that human groups have to solve is how to procure food for all of their members. This is related to the ecological concept of ____________________: the maximum number of people that can live in a particular place with a particular food procurement system; that is, subsistence practice. (A food procurement system is simply the way people obtain food, whether through hunting gathering, horticulture, pastoralism, intensive agriculture, or industrialization -- these are all dealt with in separate chapters of Bates and Fratkin, and we will examine each in turn during this course).

Richard Lee's ("Whitey") message he received was:

There are no totally generous acts. All "acts" have an element of calculation. One black ox slaughtered at Christmas does not wipe out a year of careful manipulation of gifts given to serve your own ends. After all, to kill an animal and share the meat with people is really no more than the Bushmen do for each other every day with far less fanfare.

Recent data on living hunter-gatherers show a radically different picture:

They have learned that in many societies, plant and marine resources are far more important than are game animals in the diet. It is becoming clear that hunter gatherer subsistence base is at least routine and reliable and at best surprisingly abundant.

A major contribution of functionalism to anthropology is its

capacity to explain cultural differences, as well as culture change and conflict.

From the etic point of view, the Hindu sacred cow belief makes sense because

cattle are too important for people in rural India to use as a food source

Harris Patterns for Behavior ( one of the part Harris describes culture existing)

cultural rules that we refer to when describing and explaining our behavior as members of a culture

Emic Perspective

description of a culture using terms and concepts meaningful to members of that culture. Sometimes called an "insider's" perspective in that it is an account that corresponds to the way the members of the culture view themselves and aspects of their world

Etic Perspective

description of a culture using the categories and concepts of a scientific observer. Sometimes called an "outsider's" perspective because it uses the terms and concepts of science, which may not be meaningful to members of a culture

Terracing is a practice that

enables people to cultivate crops on steep hillsides, in places like the South American Andes

Among the !Kung, people who share the same name have extensive ties of

fictive kinship and mutual support

Franz Boas is often considered the

first modern anthropologist because he insisted that anthropologists conduct their own field research rather than rely on second-hand accounts.

industrial agriculture

food production and manufacturing through the use of machines powered largely by fossil fuels, including modern commercial fishing and marine farming

Bushmen move their camps

frequently (five or six times a year), they do not more them very far

Among the !Kung, when two people have the same name they:

have strong fictive kinship ties in that one person's kin become the "family" of his/her namesake

A "pattern of" behavior is reflected in the fact that

households involved in Rathje's "garbage project" consumed much more alcohol than they said they did

How does human adaptation to the environment differ from other animals?

humans can regulate their population size and increase the amount of food available to them

If we consider how many food calories are generated by a single calorie of energy expended in food production, the most efficient human subsistence practice is

hunting and gathering

!Kung are entirely dependent upon:

hunting and gathering for subsistence. They lack firearms, livestock, and agriculture. Politically they are under the nominal authority of the Tswana headman, although they pay no taxes and receive very few government services.

"Insulting the meat"

is a practice whereby the !Kung prevent some individuals, notably more successful hunters, from feeling that they are more important than others

During the end of the dry season in September and October,

is when desirable foods have been eaten out in the immediate vicinity of the waterholes, that people have to plan longer hikes of 10 to 15 miles and carry their own water to those areas where the mongongo nut is still available. The important point is that food is constant, but distance required to reach food is a variable.

The net effect is of a population constantly in motion. On the average, an individual spends a third of his time

living only with close relatives, a third visiting other camps, and a third entertaining visitors from other camps.

The idea that the Tsembaga of New Guinea avoid

low-lying areas because of a fear of spirit possession is an emic account of their behavior

The habitat of the Dobe-area Bushmen is abundant in naturally occurring foods. The most important food is the:

mongongo nut; It account for 50 percent of the vegetable diet by weight

Domestication resulted in a more

narrow reliance on a few cereal and animal foods, and was associated with greater social conflict, mostly over land and other resources

In family level societies, such as the !Kung:

no formal organization or community exists above the individual family

One index of relative abundance is:

whether or not a population exhausts all the food available from a given area.

"Insulting the Meat"

"When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle." Lee calls this practice "insulting the meat". Even though there are major differences between men in terms of their skill as hunters, these differences don't lead to some people having more prestige than others. They also suppress feelings of envy and friction and so make sharing possible between individuals. In "Eating Christmas in the Kalahari," (Chapt. 2 in Spradley & McCurdy), Richard Lee explains that he himself became the target of this practice, when he presented the !Kung with a huge ox as a Christmas present.

The Bushmen's idea of the Christmas story, stripped to its essentials is

"praise the birth of white man's god chief"

Diffusionism

(1880-1900) Some anthropologists believed they could account for cultural similarities through this process. It is the exchange of ideas and influences from one culture to another. If two cultures were alike in some ways then it was because one culture had borrowed an idea or trait from another, or that people had migrated with that trait from one area to another. The basic assumption of all diffusionists was that people were basically unimaginative and found it easier to borrow traits than to develop new ideas themselves.

foraging

(or hunting and gathering) collecting wild vegetable foods, hunting game, and fishing

subsistence agriculture

(sometimes called horticulture or extensive agriculture) a simple form of agriculture based on working small plots of land with perhaps some use of draft animals, plows, or irrigation. In contrast to foragers subsistence farmers produce food by managing domesticated plants and animals

Science is defined

by its use of explanations that can be confirmed or disconfirmed on the basis of observable evidence.

In "Eating Christmas in the Kalahari," Richard Lee found that his gift of a large ox to the !Kung:

was ridiculed as being inadequate to feed the group

The major factor affecting the size and distribution of !Kung camps is the availability of

water

Human adaptation to the environment is identical to that of

animals, in that people tend to reproduce up to their biological capacity and that there is a fixed limit on the amount of food available for human populations

Associated with Franz Boas, salvage ethnography involves the idea that

anthropologists should document traditional cultural practices before they disappear completely.

How many independent camps are associated with the 8 water holes?

14. During the dry season the entire population is clustered around these wells.

Aside from the mongongo, the bushmen have available

84 other species of edible food plants, including 29 species of fruits, berries, and melons, and 30 species of roots and bulbs ; 75 percent of the listed species provide only 10 percent of the food value ; 223 local species of animals, but only 54 are classified as edible and 17 only hunted on a regular basis

How much does vegetables count for Bushmen?

From 60 to 80 percent of the total diet by weight, and collecting involved two or three days per woman per week.

What did the !Kung Bushmen people trick the social anthropologist (/ontah "whitey") into believing?

He had purchased Yehave's black ox (1,200 pounds) for E20($56) that was huge and could feed each person at least four pounds. The kept messing with him that the ox was a bag of bones and that it would hardly feed one camp. They said he would have to serve it, but not to expect a dance after. They did this because of "arrogance." He said when a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or big man, and he thinks the rest of us as his servants or inferiors." He said they refuse one who boasts because someday his pride will make him kill someone.

Boas

He rejected the work of Tylor and Morgan as well as diffusionists. He emphasized that it was impossible to develop anthropological theories without anthropological data. Boas established first-hand fieldwork as the basic requirement for all professional anthropologists. Developed the theory historical particularism and initiated a process known as salvage ethnography (anthropologists should document native cultural traditions before they disappear completely). With his emphasis on fieldwork and cultural relativism, Boas is often considered the first modern anthropologist. He was our own "George Washington."

!Kung

How do hunter-gatherers maintain this "affluent" quality of life? We can get a good idea of the possibilities and limitations of this way of life if we examine a family level society in closer detail: the !Kung of southern Africa. We'll examine first the ecology of obtaining food in the difficult arid environment in which the !Kung live and then look at the cultural means that reinforce the !Kung way of life. The !Kung live well, on the basis of about three hours of work per day. There are three things that make this possible: a) an exceptionally detailed knowledge of the environment and its potential, acquired over the 10,000 or more years that hunter-gatherers have lived in the region; b) a low population density and extremely slow rate of population growth; c) cultural practices that promote sharing. The !Kung occupy about 100,000 sq. miles of the Kalahari desert of southern Botswana and South Africa (this is about the area of Mississippi and Alabama combined). There are only about 12,000 hunter-gatherers who traditionally made use of this area, for a population density of just about 1 person per every ten square miles.

Population Regulation (!Kung)

Like most foraging people the !Kung are able to easily satisfy their needs with little work because of their low population density. Depending on availability of water, population density averages about 1 person per 10 square miles. The !Kung population is not only low but very slow growing; !Kung women will space their births by at least five years. The !Kung population growth rate is .5% per year, one of the lowest in the world (at this rate, it would take nearly 1,500 years for the population to double in size!). How do the !Kung maintain low population growth rates? They don't practice abstinence, contraception, abortion or infanticide. In fact, many !Kung women would like to have larger families, but find that they cannot. As one woman told Richard Lee, "We want more children, but our gods are stingy. They won't give them to us." Low fertility rates among the !Kung (and other nomadic groups) seem to result from a combination of physiological factors and cultural practices: a) prolonged lactation. Women breastfeed their children up to age of four. This has effect of suppressing ovulation in lactating women, especially when combined with: b) high mobility and low body fat. When women have low amounts of body fat relative to muscle mass and live in nomadic circumstances, their fertility is further suppressed. !Kung women walk as much as 1,800 miles per year and have a high protein, low fat diet. So even women who are not breast feeding have lower rates of fertility than women in sedentary populations. This is not unlike the situation in our society in which some very athletic women (long distance runners, aerobics instructors, gymnasts, etc.) have difficulty conceiving.

A major influence on Dr. Benjamin Spock's theories of childrearing in his widely read book Infant and Child Care were the anthropological ideas of his friend:

Margaret Mead

Among the !Kung:

Men and women perform identical subsistence tasks

Family Level Society

Most hunter gatherer are this; there is no formal organization above the level of the individual nuclear or extended family. That doesn't mean that larger groups don't exist, but these larger groups are not formally organized -- members can join up and break off from these groups at will. The one constant factor in all of this is the individual family. The family has within it all of the labor & skills needed to sustain its livelihood. If need be, families can usually go it alone, although most of the time they don't for reasons of security or sociability. But at this level, there are no formal rules designating a single family as a member of a particular group.

Population Regulation

People can start regulating their population size, unlike all other animal species. Most if not all wild animal populations reproduce up to their biological maximum. I read somewhere that if a female cat has a litter every year (some have two), over the 15 year course of just her lifespan, she and her kittens and grandkittens, etc., will have produced 14,000 living cat descendants! Most of these can be found living in my backyard. Unlike all other animal species, all human groups have some mechanism of ________________ (although they may not choose to utilize them under all circumstances)

Group Personality Pattern

Psychological Anthropologists argued that each culture was characterized by a ______________________, that is, a general similarity in ways of thinking and behaving. Among early psychological anthropologists, the tendency was to consider all the members of a particular culture as having certain characteristics, such as aggressiveness or restraint, competition or cooperation. These traits were then related to the child-rearing practices within those cultures

Who brought the Christmas holiday to the southern Tswana tribes in the early nineteenth century?

The London Missionary Society

What keeps the Bushmen interested in the holiday?

The Tswana-Herero custom of slaughtering an ox for his Bushmen neighbors as an annual goodwill gesture. Since the 1930s, part of the Bushmen's annual round of activities has included a December congregation at the cattle posts for trading, marriage, brokering, and several days of trance dance feasting at which the local Tswana headman is host.

Evolution of subsistence systems

Today's anthropologists have closely re-examined and largely rejected the notion that evolution brings about progress in all areas of social and economic life, a main assumption of the earlier evolutionary point of view. We now recognize that although the evolution of subsistence systems has involved greater productivity (industrialized agriculture produces vastly more food per unit of land than hunting & gathering), these changes came at a steep economic, social and environmental cost. Over the course of human cultural evolution, as we will see when we start talking about the Agricultural Revolution in Unit 8, these changes involved steadily increasing amounts of work (you will be surprised to learn how much more leisure time a hunter-gatherer has than you do!), sharply declining efficieny in energy use, and diminished ecological sustainability. So although my arrow above is pointing upward, that doesn't mean that things are getting better and better!

Most 19th century anthropologists, the evolutionists included, assumed that

Western Euro-American culture was superior to all others, and that people underwent moral progress as their societies developed or adopted European and American standards.

intensive agriculture

a form of agriculture that involves the use of draft animals or tractors, plows, and often some form of irrigation. it produces far greater yields per acre of land with less human labor that can be obtained by subsistence agriculture. It is often highly specialized with farmers relying on mainly one or two crops

Leveling Mechanism

a practice that acts to ensure social equality, usually by shaming or humbling members of a group that attempt to put themselves above other members

Fictive Kinship

a social relationship between unrelated people which is expressed in terms of kinship. !Kung fictive kinship is based on a "namesake relationship", meaning you have a special relationship with your !kun!a, your namesake (that is, any person who shares your first name). OK, everyone, let's try to pronounce !kun!a. There, you did it!

In Richard Lee's article "The Hunters," it was seen that:

about as large a percentage of the !Kung population is over 60 as is the case for the U.S. population

Diffusionists such as Tylor and Morgan believed that

all human cultures evolve through the stages of savagery, barbarism and civilization.

pastoralism

an economy based on herding. Maintain herds of animals and use their products and by-products both to maintain themselves directly and to exchange with other poplulations

Reciprocity

an exchange between people with the expectation of eventual return in which the value of the goods and time of repayment aren't specified

Highly effective hunters among the !Kung may find their game

ridiculed or "insulted" as scrawny and insufficient, in order to prevent such men from thinking they are superior to other !Kung

The mean are conscientious but not particularly successful hunters; although men's and women's work input is:

roughly equivalent in terms of man-day of effort, the woman provide two or three times as much food by weight as the men

Archaeologists have identified at least

seven places in which agriculture arose independently in the Old and New Worlds

food procurement systems

the behavioral strategies that a particular group uses or has available to secure foodstuffs

Harris Patterns of Behavior ( one of the parts Harris describes culture existing )

these are the actual behavior patterns in which people engage. For example, we could elicit an American pattern for behavior if we ask a driver what you do when you see a red light at an intersection. The answer would be "stop and wait for green".