Anthro Midterm
Machismo
The concept that has spread around the world feature stereotypes of self-centered sexist, tough guys. Matthew Gutmann's research in a working-class community in Mexico reveals a complex male world of fathers, husbands, friends, and lovers that does not fit the common stereotype. One of Gutmann's key informants, the elderly Don Timo, rails against effeminate men but has himself crossed stereotypical gender boundaries by actively helping to raise his children. In Nicaragua, Roger Lancaster examined the concept of machismo which can be defined as a strong, sometimes exaggerated performance of masculinity. Machismo must be constantly performed to retain one's social status. In US, any man who engages in a same-gender sexual behavior is considered gay. But in the Nicaraguan community that Lancaster studied, only the men who passively receive anal intercourse are pejoratively called gay, while the penetrator is still considered a manly man.
Franz Boas
The founder of American anthropology. He rejected unilineal cultural evolution, its generalizations and its comparative methods. He advocated for an approach called historical particularism (the idea that cultures develop in specific ways because of their unique histories). Evolutionists argued that similarities among cultures emerged through independent invention as different cultures independently arrived at similar solutions to similar problems. But he turned to the idea of diffusion (the borrowing of cultural traits and patterns from other cultures) to explain apparent similarities Helped develop the four-field approach to anthropological research. Developed salvage ethnography (fieldwork strategy to rapidly collect cultural, material, linguistic, and biological information about US native populations being devastated by Western expansion)
Built environment
The intentionally designed features of human settlement, including buildings, transportation and public service infrastructure, and public spaces. It has power to shape human life. Hand-drawn maps reveal the intricate character of the built environment and force the ethnographer toward a deeper consciousness of details. Observing it and recording it is one of the ways anthropologists get started in conducting fieldwork.
Humans/Dolphins/Bonobos
The only mammals that are found to have sex to have fun rather than exclusively for procreation are bonobos, dolphins and humans. Human sexuality is completely abnormal by the standard of the world's 30 million animal species and 4,300 mammal species. People think sexuality is the most "natural" thing in the world. But how much of it is influenced by genetic inheritance and how much is influenced by environment. Although biology clearly plays a role in human sexuality, exactly how it manifests itself in each individual and how it interacts with the environment and culture is not as clear as many popular descriptions of sexuality suggest.
Sexual dimorphism
The phenotypic differences between males and females of the same species. They differ physically in primary sexual characteristics as well as in secondary sexual characteristics such as breast size, hair distribution, and pitch of voice. It is important to note that in comparison to other animal species, human sexual dimorphism, particularly with regard to body size and voice timbre, is relatively modest. For example, on average, human males weigh about 15% more than females while male gorillas on average are double the size of female gorillas. In fact, human male and female bodies are much more similar than different. Many biological characteristics associated with human sexual dimorphism fall along a continuum--a range--in which men and women overlap significantly.
Melanin
The pigment that gives human skin its color and it is produced by melanocytes in the skin. It is also a natural sunscreen. Our ancestor are assumed to have more active melanocytes, more melanin, and darker skin as an adaptation to a high UV light environment because they originated in Africa near the equator with more UV light.
Agency
The potential power of individuals and groups to contest cultural norms, values, symbols, mental maps of reality, institutions, and structures of power. Cultural beliefs and practices are not timeless they change and can be changed. By examining human agency, we can see how culture serve as a realm in which battles over power take place--where people debate, negotiate, contest, and enforce what is considered normal, what people can say, do, and even think. SHOWS HOW CULTURE AND POWER ARE CONNECTED. PEOPLE WITH POTENTIAL POWER CAN CHANGE THE NORMS FOR THE SOCIETY. For example, James Scott's study on Malaysian rice farmers. Technology put the landless farmers out of job while benefitted the village elites, but they don't revolt. They show resistance by foot-dragging, slowdowns, theft, sabotage, trickery, arson, and false compliance with regulations.
polyvocality
The practice of using many different voices in ethnographic writing and research question development, allowing the reader to hear more directly from the people in the study. EX: Nancy Scheper-Hughes strives to include both her own voice and those of the people in Alto do Cruziero in her writing through adding direct quote of the mother Nailza.
Enculturation
The process of learning culture. Culture is not genetically inherited; it is learned and taught. We learn through formal instruction: English classes in school, religious instruction, visits to the doctor, history lessons, dance classes or informal and even unconscious: family, friends and media. Overtime, the members of a culture develop a shared body of cultural knowledge and patterns of behavior. Margeret Mead's studied the seeming sexual freedom and experimentation of young Samoan women and compared it with the repressed sexuality of young women in the US, suggesting the powerful role of learned culture in shaping behavior--even behavior that is imagined to have powerful biological origin.
Rapport
The relationships of trust and familiarity developed with members of the community being studied. Established through participant observation. The deepening of this relationship through intense engagement enables the anthropologists to move from being an outsider towards being an insider, which lets them gather data and information more easily.
Biocultural
The scientific exploration of the relationships between human biology and culture. How much of human is predetermined by genes and how much is determined by culture and environmental influence.
Ethnocentrism
The strong human tendency to believe that one's own culture or way of life is normal, natural, and superior to the beliefs and practices of others. Anthropology challenges us to move beyond this belief. Example: white men trying to "educate" the people they colonize; manifest destiny for them to rule over the minorities.
Cartography of Human
The studies in Suriname (mati may engage in sexual relationships with both women and men, they regard sexuality as flexible behavior rather than fixed identity), Nicaragua Machismo, and Boy-inseminating ritual practices in Papua New Guinea are representative of the vast array of cross-cultural research that cumulatively has been called the ethnocartography of human sexuality, mapping the global scope of diverse human sexual beliefs and behaviors. This cartography marks a period in the anthropology of sexuality that built on the premises that cross-cultural attention to the practices and beliefs of others can yield a deeper analysis of one's own culture and awareness of the broad panorama of human life offers opportunities for reexamining what seems normal and natural in one's own cultural practices.
primatology
The study of living nonhuman primates as well as primate fossils to better understand human evolution and early human behavior. It has offered significant insights into sexuality, parenting, male/female difference, cooperation, intergrouping conflict, aggression, and problem solving.
paleoanthropology
The study of the history of human evolution through the fossil record. From these fossils they map changes in key categories such as overall body size, cranial capacity, hand structure, head shape, and pelvic position. Such changes reveal developments in walking, diet, intelligence, and capacity for cultural adaptation.
Sociolinguistics
The study of the ways culture shape language and language shapes culture, particularly the intersection of language and systems of power such as race, gender, class, and age. What people actually say and how they are say it are intricately connected to the cultural context, to the speakers' social position, and to the larger systems of power within which the language operates.
unilineal cultural evolution
The theory proposed by 19th century anthropologists that all cultures naturally evolve through the same sequence of stages from simple to complex. Succeeding generations of anthropologist rejected this theory for being too Eurocentric, too hierarchical and lacking adequate data to support its grand claims. Fieldwork emerged in response to this theory to gather data to view cultural difference in order to move beyond the evolutionary framework for viewing cultural difference.
Evolution
The theory that biological adaptations in organisms occur in response to changes in the natural environment and develop in populations over generations. Physical anthropologists consider this theory to be the key to understanding the diversity of life on Earth today and how it relates to life in the past. This theory explains the relationship of current living things to those that have come before and predicts how biological change will occur in the future. 4 key forces are mutation, natural selection, gene migration, and genetic drift.
Anthropologist's Tool Kit
The tools needed to conduct fieldwork, including a notebook, pen, camera, voice recorder, and dictionary.
Stratification
The uneven distribution of resources and privileges among participants in a group or culture. Power may be stratified along lines of gender, racial or ethnic group, class, age, family, religion, sexuality, or legal status. These structure of power organize relationships among people and create a framework through which access to cultural resources is distributed.
UV light
The variation of skin color is the result of genetic balancing act between getting too much UV light and too little. Too much UV lights can destroy folic acid in the body, cause skin cancer and develop hypervitinosis (too much production of certain vitamin which is bad for fetus). Too little UV light will lead to a lack of vitamin D which causes rickets or osteomalacia (which makes bones weak, women with weak pelvis bones may be unable to support the stress of giving birth). Melanin is the pigment that gives our skin color and it also is a natural sunscreen. When people began moving out of Africa to areas with less UV light, the people with more melanin-rich dark skin blocked too much of the UV light used to make vitamin D so people with lighter skin survived better than darker skinned people.
Gender performance
The way gender identity is expressed through action. Viewing gender as performance enables us to broaden our thinking beyond easy dichotomies and universal characteristics of "man" and "woman". Gender are constructed and performed in response to each culture's gender norms and expectation. EX: Recent explosion of Viagra use because ideas of men's sexual and social worth equates to an erect penis. Can an individual be a sexual, masculine man without an erection?
gendering process
The ways humans learn to behave as a man or woman and to recognize behaviors as masculine or feminine within their cultural context. Family, friends, the media, doctors, educational institutions, religious communities, sports, and law all enculturate us with a sense of gender that becomes normative and seems natural. EX: Parents assign their children boy or girl names; dressed them in appropriately gendered clothing, colors and jewelry. Over a lifetime, gender becomes a powerful, and mostly invisible, framework that shapes the way we see ourselves and others.
White Weddings
The wedding industry and the wedding culture provide insights into how US culture gives meaning to marriage and, in the process, constructs contemporary understandings of heterosexuality. Brides are not born, they are made. Every girl in US culture, almost from birth, is bombarded with cultural symbols and messages about what it will take to have her very own white wedding. The wedding industry and wedding culture--the romantic idealization of the wedding ritual--enculturate boys and girls, men and women, about what to do, when and with whom, in order to lead up to that perfect day. Weddings are key cultural institutions through which we learn what it means to be heterosexual. Wedding also offer insights into the gendered power dynamics. The father "giving away" the bride to her soon-to-be husband, exchanging the woman between two men. It also highlights the issues of class and race. The women who sew the wedding dress and young men mining diamonds cannot afford a white wedding.
Penguins
There is more genetic difference between two penguins than two humans. Penguins appear identical to the human eye and are found in a small range of habitats. But penguins have been around a lot longer than modern humans, so they have had more time to evolve and develop greater genetic variation within their species. This teaches us not to construct race based on appearance. Human DNA are 99.9% similar to other human.
4 Fields of Anthropology
These four fields of anthropology are used to study humanity. It includes: physical anthropology (biological anthropology)- The study of humans from a biological perspective--in particular, how they have evolved over time and have adapted to their environments. archaeology-The investigations of the human past by means of excavating and analyzing material remains. linguistic anthropology-The study of human language in the past and present. cultural anthropology-The study of people's communities, behaviors, beliefs, and institutions, including how people make meaning as they live, work, and play together.
Loving v. Virginia
This 1967 lawsuit that the US Supreme court unanimously ruled that antimiscegenation laws barring interracial marriage and sex were unconstitutional. Mildred and Richard Loving were married in Washington DC but returned to live in their hometown in Virginia where they were arrested for interracial marriage. Even though those laws are ruled unconstitutional, there is a strong residue of resistance to interracial marriages. Cultural norms are followed by most people, but other members may contest the norms.
Man the Hunter Myth
This fiction of the past states that human males--being larger and stronger than females--hunted to sustain themselves, their sexual partners and their offspring. While women were gatherers, home-oriented, child centered, nurturing etc. Contemporary gender roles, division of labor, and stratification of power, resources, rights, and privileges are assumed to have emerged directly from physical or mental difference that developed during human evolution. However, research showed that early human got most of their food from gathering so both men and women gathered. Also men don't usually go hunt but rather are scavengers for leftover meat. If they do hunt, both men and women hunted. Despite the evidence that disprove this myth, it is a popular idea in US culture that men and women have some essential nature that was shaped in our deep past. The stereotypical "boys will be boys" and "that's just a girl thing" approach to gender differences has become a powerful gender ideology, deeply ingrained in the day-to-day conversations, expectations, relationships, work patterns, pay packages, promotions, and political activities of contemporary life.
5 characteristics of globalization
Time-space compression: The rapid innovation of communication and transportation technologies associated with globalization that transforms the way people think about space and time. Flexible accumulation: The increasingly flexible strategies that corporations use to accumulate profits in an era of globalization, enabled by innovative communication and transportation technologies. Increasing migration: The accelerated movement of people within and between countries for job opportunities. Uneven development: The unequal distribution of the benefits of globalization. Rapid change: The dramatic transformations of economics, politics, and culture characteristic of contemporary globalization. As globalization intensifies, it escalates the human impact on the planet and on other humans, further accelerating the pace of change.
Vitamin D
UV light is needed to synthesize this vitamin. (This vitamin is also found in few fatty fish such as salmon, tuna, catfish, mackerel but it is not commonly associated with the early human diet) This vitamin in turn is necessary for absorbing calcium. Human need calcium to build and preserve strong bones. A lack of this vitamin may lead to bone-softening diseases such as rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults.
Cultural relativism
Understanding a group's beliefs and practices within their own cultural context, without making judgments. It is the anthropologist's approach to cross cultural research in order to counteract the effects of ethnocentrism so they can objectively, accurately, and sensitively represent the diversity of human life and culture.
Clifford Geertz
Urged anthropologists to use the interpretivist approach, a conceptual framework that sees culture primarily as a symbolic system of deep meaning. Dedicated to rigorous recording of field notes (thick description) in which detailed description affords deeper insights into the underlying meaning of words and actions. As seen in his ethnography "Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight". He claims that we must look beneath the surface activities to see the layers of deep cultural meaning in which those activities are embedded. The Balinese cockfights represents generations of competition among the village families for prestige, power, and resources within the community.
Hurricane Katrina
When Hurricane Katrina hit, the city's poor, overwhelmingly African American, were the most severely affected and largely had to fend for themselves. Hurricane Katrina was a dangerous storm, but its effects were a social disaster that disproportionately affected people along lines of race and class.
Ethics
While conducting fieldwork, anthropologists often face moral and ethical dilemmas. These dilemmas require them to make choices that may affect the quality of their research and the people they study. As a result the American Anthropological Association (AAA) has developed an extensive set of ethical guidelines. Do no harm. Ex: Anthropology was criticized for helping to create an image of colonial subjects as unable to govern themselves and in need of Western guidance and rule. Obtain informed consent. Ensure anonymity.
Ear wax
Why not construct race on the basis of earwax? From a genetic viewpoint, the use of skin color as the primary variable in constructing a person's "race" appears to be quite arbitrary. There are two primary types of earwax. One is dry, gray and crumbly. The other is wet, yellow, and sticky. Can you imagine hierarchical systems of race that affect distribution of power and resources and that are based on differences in earwax? If this is absurd to you, why is distinctions made on the basis of skin color equally absurd?
Can of Coke/Plachimada
Women in Plachimada have to walk three miles each day in search of fresh water. Coca-cola company opened a bottling plant at Plachimada. Nine liters of fresh water are needed to make one liter of Coke. The company drilled wells and extract groundwater from 150 meter down, which in turn dried out hundreds of non-Coca-Cola wells. This story shows the significance of globalization and how it is connecting lives from halfway around the world to each other. There are no isolated group of people today; everyone are connected. MAKING A CAN OF COKE UNFAMILIAR: who made it, what is their life like? What are the ingredients? What's the social cost of a can of coke?
Whiteness
A culturally constructed concept originating in 1691 Virginia designed to establish clear boundaries of who is white and who is not, a process central to the formation of US racial stratification. It is made to ensure the cooperation of poor working whites and white indentured servants, who together constituted a majority of the early colonial populations, and to drive a wedge between the European and African laborers who had much in common. Further constructed after Emancipation Proclamation by Jim Crow segregation laws throughout the South that legally enforced the boundaries between whites and blacks in housing, education, voting rights, property ownership, and access to public services such as transportation, bathrooms and water fountains. KKK. Lynchings. Hypodescent.
Life history
A form of interview that traces the biography of a person over time, examining changes and illuminating the interlocking network of relationships in the community. Provide insights into the frameworks of meaning that individuals build around their life experiences.
Deep Time
A framework for considering the span of human history within the much larger age of the universe and planet Earth. From this perspective, the modern human chapter in the story of Earth's natural history is remarkably brisk. Humans do not take up much space on the deep time calendar.
Participant observation
A key anthropological research strategy involving both participation in and observing the daily life of the people being studied. Intensive fieldwork has the power to educate the anthropologist by making what may at first seem very unfamiliar into something that ultimately seems quite familiar and taking what has seemed very familiar and making it seem very strange.
Informed consent
A key strategy for protecting those being studied by ensuring that they are fully informed of the goals of the project and have clearly indicated their consent to participate. Anthropological research is not undercover investigation using covert means and deception. To develop rapport, that is required in participant observation, the subjects must be clearly informed about the goals and scope of the projects and must willingly consent to being a part of them.
Fieldwork
A primary research strategy in cultural anthropology involving living with a community of people over an extended period to better understand their lives. Today fieldwork includes attention to global flows, networks, and processes, as anthropologists trace patterns across national and cultural boundaries while keeping one foot grounded in the lives of people in local communities.
Gender ideology
A set of cultural ideas, usually stereotypical, about the essential character of different genders that functions to promote and justify gender stratification. EX: The Egg and the Sperm where it is a common belief that Sperm acts more masculine by moving their powerful tail and the egg is more passive.
Kinship analysis
A traditional strategy of examining genealogies to uncover the relationships built upon structures such as marriage and family ties. Helps map human relations.
Lucy
An Australopithecus discovered accidentally by archaelogist Donald Jahanson and his graduate student, Tom Gray, on the slope of a gully that their team had examined unsuccessfully on previous occasions. They found 40 percent of this Australopithcus, which is pretty significant because fossils are really hard to preserve. Examination of the fossils showed that it looked like a chimpanzee but walked erect like modern humans.
Peppered Moths
An example of natural selection, the evolutionary process by which some organisms, with features that enable them to adapt to the environment, preferentially survive and reproduce, thereby increasing the frequency of those features in the population. Until the mid-1800s the peppered moth population was primarily white with black specks. This coloration provided important camouflage in the light-colored moss and lichen growing on the tree trunks and was an effective protection against the moths' primary predators, birds. However, the peppered moth population's coloration gradually shifted so that 90% of the moths were black, not white. That is because of the Industrial Revolution and its pollution blanketed surrounding trees with a layer of black soot so the mainly white moths were not much more visible and vulnerable to predators, but the few black moths were likely to avoid detection, survive, and reproduce.
Wink/twitch
An example of the interpretivist approach (a conceptual framework that sees culture primarily as a symbolic system of deep meaning) Clifford Geertz examines the difference between a wink and a twitch of the eye, which both involves the same movement of the eye muscle. A wink can imply flirting, including a friend in a secret, or slyly signaling agreement. But deciphering the meaning requires a complex, collective understanding of unspoken communication in a specific cultural context. Collective understandings of symbols and symbolic actions enable people to interact with one another in subtle yet complex ways without constantly stopping to explain themselves.
intersex
An individual who is born with a combination of male and female genitalia, gonads, and/or chromosomes. Most Western societies ignore the existence of middle sexes. Since the 1960s, Western medicine has taken the extreme steps of attempting to "manage" intersexuality through surgery and hormonal treatments. Medical procedures--most performed before a child comes of age and can decided--aim to return intersexed infants to the cultural norm for heterosexual males and females, although about 90% of the surgeries make ambiguous male anatomy into female. The presence of middle sexes suggests that we must reconceptualize one of our most rigid mental maps of reality--the one separating male and female. Acknowledgement of a diversity of physical expressions along the continuum between male and female may, in turn, allow for a less dualistic and more holistic approach to understanding the complex relationship between biology and gender.
Gender stratification
An unequal distribution of power and access to a group's resources, opportunities, rights, and privileges based on gender EX: There are less women with higher position in Silicon Valley companies.
neurochemicals/chemistry
Anthropologist Helen Fisher analyzes the relationship of body chemistry to human sensation of love. Fisher suggests that through evolution humans have developed a set of neurochemicals that drives an "evolutionary trajectory of loving". These neurochemicals guide us through 3 distinct phases of falling in love: finding the right sexual partner, building a relationship, and forming an emotional attachment that will last long enough to raise a child. 1. Testosterone triggers the sense of lust. 2. dopamine to promote feelings of romance. 3. ocytocin and vasopressin generate the feelings of calm and security that are associated with a long-term partnership. These phases are build into our biological system to ensure the reproduction of human species, and they play key roles in shaping human sexuality.
Outsider/Insider
Anthropologists start as an outsider, try to move to become an insider by building rapport, doing participant observation. Becoming an insider gives you intimacy to gather data. When they write ethnography, they have to return to being an outsider to be able to analyze their findings without bias.
Garbage project
Archaeologist William Rathje, a "garbologist", study contemporary culture by examining what people throw away. He found that what people actually do and what they say they do can be completely different. For example, only 15% of households responded to a survey saying they drink some beer but the analysis of the neighborhood garbage showed that 80% drank some beer. Study of the landfills across the US and Canada showed that landfills are overwhelmed by paper that could have been easily recycled. This study has helped shape waste disposal practices and landfill management and has provided further impetus to the movement for comprehensive recycling programs that are not commonplace in many parts of the country.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Author of "Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil" Her effort is an example of ethnographic fieldwork (a research strategy for understanding the world through intense interaction with a local community of people over an extended period). She invested herself in trying to understand the lives of the women and children of one particular shantytown in Brazil. She expanded her research scope to examine how the experiences of the poor in one community are mirrored in the lives of poor people in many other countries and are linked by a gruesome global trade of harvested human organs driven by demand from the world's economic elite.
Middle Easterners and Race
Before September 11, "Middle Eastern" was not considered a separate race in the United States. But the racialization (to categorize, differentiate, and attribute a particular racial character to a person or group of people) of Middle Easterners in US culture after September 11 shows that racial categories continue to be created and contested in the US today.
Sperm and Egg
Biology textbooks describes aggressive sperm as being propelled by strongly beating tails searching for the egg in competition with fellow ejaculates attacking and penetrating the protective barriers of the egg to fertilize the passive, waiting, receiving egg. However biology research shows that the egg and the sperm appear to be mutually active partners in an egalitarian relationship. According to anthropologist Emily Martin, writing in the early 1990s, images of the egg and sperm found in popular and scientific writing have been commonly based on cultural stereotypes of male and female. By reading stereotypical feminine and masculine behavior into our accounts of eggs and sperm, we enshrine these gender role in nature--we make them seem natural.
Children's Commercials
Children watch an average of 40,000 commercials a year on television. These commercials have gendering messages: colors, products, tone of voice of the models and voiceovers. Commercials for girls were produced in pink, purple and powder blue colors for toys ranging from bunnies to babies. Commercial for boys were produced in dark green, blue, and black. Loud voices, outdoor activities, motion, action, and adventures served to promote toy trucks, balls, guns, missiles and warrior figures. This shows how society imposes how each gender should like and act onto us from when we are just little kids.
Balinese Cockfight
Clifford Geertz studied this common activity in local communities across Bali. He described the elaborate breeding, raising and training the roosters; the scene of bedlam at the fight; the careful selection of the birds; the rituals of the knife man; the fight itself; etc. Geertz argues that a careful description of cultural activity is an essential part of understanding Balinese culture. We must look beneath the surface activities to see the layers of deep cultural meaning in which those activities are embedded. The cockfights is not simply a cockfight. It also represents generations of competition among the village families for prestige, power, and resources within the community. According to Geertz, every cultural action is more than the action itself; it is also a symbol of deeper meaning. CULTURE IS SYMBOLIC AND HAS A DEEPER MEANING.
Homo Sapiens
Constitute the fifth major group in our evolutionary chain. Includes Neandertals which have often been depicted as slow, unintelligent, and inarticulate cave dwellers who were far removed physically and mentally from modern humans but they are actually pretty smart with brains of modern size, physically active and able to survive and settle in the most extreme of natural environments. Archaeological evidence shows that many modern homo sapiens advances in behavior and culture occurred first in Africa, not in Europe. First fishing, art, symbolism, beads found in Africa.
Adaptation to High Altitude
Developmental adaptation. Study shown that children who grew up at high altitudes in the highlands of South America develop larger lung capacity, an adaptation that enables them to process more oxygen in a low-oxygen environment. This is a permanent developmental adaptation that does not reverse if the individuals move to a lower altitude later in life. But like all developmental adaptations, the development of larger lungs only affects the individual's body; it does not affect the underlying genetic code in the individual's DNA and so is not passed down to the next generation.
Zeros
Elements of a story or a picture that are not told or seen and yet offer key insights into issues that might be too sensitive to discuss or display publicity.
Death Without Weeping
Ethnography written by Nancy Scheper-Hughes on the women and children of a shantytown in Brazil. A severe drought in 1965, food and water shortages and the political and economic chaos occasioned by the military coup led to many deaths of babies. However the puzzling part was the seeming indifference of Alto women to the death of their infants and their willingness to attribute to their own tiny offspring an aversion to life that made their death seem wholly natural, indeed all but anticipated. It is not hard to rescue infants and toddlers from death by diarrhea and dehydration with a simple sugar, salt and water solution, but it was more difficult to enlist a mother herself in the rescue of a child she perceived as ill-fated for life or better off dead, or to convince her to take back into her threatened and besieged home a baby she had already come to think of as an angel rather than as a son or daughter. The high expectancy of death, and the ability to face child death with stoicism and equanimity, produced patterns of nurturing that differentiated between those infants thought of as thrivers and survivors and those thought of as born already "wanting to die". The survivors were nurtured, while stigmatized, doomed infants were left to die. Grief at the death of an angel is not only inappropriate, it is a symptom of madness and of a profound lack of faith.
Salvage ethnography
Fieldwork strategy developed by Franz Boas to rapidly collect cultural, material, linguistic, and biological information about US Native populations being devastated by Western expansion. Named because of the speed at which it was conducted. Pressed for time (because the Native cultures were rapidly disappearing) and having limited financial resources, these ethnographers often met with a small number of elderly informants and focused on conducting oral interviews rather than observing actual behavior.
Personal Space and NY Subways
Four spatial comfort zones specific to US culture that differ from those in other cultures. Public zone is 12 feet or more. Social zone is 4 to 12 feet. Personal zone is 1.5 to 4 feet. Intimate zone is 1.5 feet or less. It shows how symbols change in meaning over time and from culture to culture. The chinese man who wanted to practice this English but was invading Professor Guest's personal space. Professor Guest was acting strange to him by repeatedly backing up. But it was strange to Guest that the man kept on moving closer.
Antioch College
From "No means no" to "Yes means Yes". Make sex an affirmative process. The participants must receive an explicit "yes" at every step of the encounter. Both participants must negotiate and agree to everything. This policy presents a challenge that requires a dramatic shift in thinking about intimate sexual encounters. It also commands a new attention to shifting the power dynamics that underlie current patterns of gender and sexuality in the culture at large.
White Privilege
From the slavery days, white privilege has been established to prevent the indentured servants from mingling with black slaves. White indentured servants get privileges to own a gun, live stock and land, freedom at the end of servitude, ability to vote and ability to discipline blacks. Today, there are still evidence of white privilege. Anthropologist Peggy McIntosh writes of "an invisible package of unearned assets" that are a legacy of generations of racial discrimination. Through these assets, whites have become the beneficiaries of cultural norms, values, mental maps of reality, and institutions. For example: white can go shopping without being followed or harassed by store security.
3 kinds of adaptation
Genetic adaptation: Changes in genetics that occur at a population level in response to certain features of the environment. It can be inherited but are not reversible in an individuals lifetime. For example, skin color is a genetic adaptation to the amount of UV light in the natural environment. Developmental adaptation: The way in which human growth and development can be influenced by factors other than genetics, such as nutrition, disease, and stress. For example, height can be influenced by the quality and quantity of food eaten and the diseases experienced. Acclimatization: The process of the body temporarily adjusting to the environment. For example, your body sweats to cool you down.
Manufacturing Desire/Culture of Consumerism
HOW IS CULTURE CREATED? The culture of consumerism includes norms, values, beliefs, practices and institutions that have become commonplace and accepted as normal, and that cultivate the desire to acquire consumer goods to enhance one's lifestyle. Advertising, marketing, and financial services industries work to transform the cultural values of frugality, modest, and self-denial of the old Protestant ethic into patterns of spending and consumption associated with acquiring the material goods of a middle-class lifestyle. The culture of consumerism promotes spending and consumption even when people don't have money. For example, consumerism shapes our calendar. US Congress moved Thanksgiving to fall earlier in November to add another week to the Christmas shopping season.
Credit Card
How culture of consumerism promotes spending and consumption even when people don't have money. To pay debt off, we need to work harder, make more money. Contemporary capitalism invests heavily to arouse our desire and promote the expansion of the culture of consumerism.
Men/Mars, Women/Venus
Implies that men and women are so fundamentally different that they might as well be different species from different planets.
Organ Theft
Nancy Scheper-Hughes heard many rumors about abduction and mutilation of children who were eyed greedily as fodder for an international traffic in organs for wealthy transplant patients in the first world at Brazil and other versions of the same story from anthropologists working in Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, India and Korea. Contemporary globalization, especially the time-space compression of transportation and communication, enables trafficking networks to spread across national boundaries and around the world. Her work from small shanytown in Brazil leading to her fieldwork in international organ-trafficking networks reflects that no local community can be viewed as isolated now, you have to put into consideration how this small community is affect by globalization.
Edward Burnett Tylor
One of the leading early anthropologists. He was an armchair anthropologist who never went out for fieldwork. Suggested that the vast diversity of cultures represented different stages in the evolution of human culture inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of biological evolution. Started the concept of unilineal cultural evolution that plotted the world's cultures along a continuum from most simple to most complex, using the terms savage--barbarian--civilized, placing Western cultures to be most evolved and civilized.
Phenotype/genotype
Phenotype: The way genes are expressed in an organism's physical form as a result of genotype interaction with environmental factors. Genotype: The inherited genetic factors that provide the framework for an organism's physical form. Phenotypical traits like skin color are used to indicate about that person's abilities such as intelligence and athleticism. However phenotype, such as skin color, are not linked to any other particular set of genes and cannot serve to predict anything else about the underlying genotype.
Happy Meal
Professor Guest brought happy meal to the first class. Its significance is that it shows how the familiar can be strange and strange can seem familiar. Globalization.
Race and Racism
Race is a flawed system of classification, with no biological basis, that uses certain physical characteristics to divide the human population into supposedly discrete groups. Racism is individual thoughts and actions and institutional patterns and policies that create unequal access to power, resources, and opportunities based on imagined differences among groups. Race and racism have justified the conquest, enslavement, forced transportation, and economic and political domination of some humans by others for more than five centuries.
The Kiss/Richard Gere
Richard Gere kissed Shilpa Shetty on the cheeks at India during the HIV/AIDS prevention event. The kiss drew violent protest from Indians. The world's cultures have remarkably different ideas about kissing and touching, about love and sex. Kissing is a powerful symbolic action that arouses intense personal feelings and expresses complicated social meanings. Culture is our manual for understanding and interacting with the people and world around us. But culture is not fixed in stone or accepted by everyone, even those living in a particular place or time.
Reflexivity
Self-reflection on the experiences of doing fieldwork. Contemporary writers make an effort to reveal their own position in relationship to their study so readers can assess what biases, strengths, or handicaps the author may have. The ethnographer's age, gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, and religious background may have a direct impact on the ease with which he or she establishes rapport or gains access to the research community and the successful analysis of his or her findings.
Sex vs. Gender
Sex: The observable physical differences between male and female, especially biological expressions related to human reproduction. Gender: The expectations of thought and behavior that each culture assigns to people of different sexes. Because biology cannot predict the roles that men and women play in a given culture, anthropologists consider how gender is constructed culture by culture, and they explore the implications of those constructions for men and women in each context. Humans are born with biological sex, but we learn to be women and men.
Bronislov Malinowski
The "Father of Fieldwork". During WWI, he was stuck for a year on the Trobriand Island. His ethnography, "Argonauts of the Western Pacific" examined the Kula ring, an elaborate system of exchange. In the opening chapter, he proposes a set of guidelines for conducting fieldwork based on his own experience. He started the notion that every anthropologist should spend at least a year at the place they are studying in order to experience all the holidays in the year. "Get off the veranda": it is not enough just to observe, you also need to participate while observing (participant observation) in order to help guard against mistaken assumption based on observations from a distance. Explore the "mundane imponderabilia" (the seemingly commonplace, everyday items and activities of local life).
Hypodescent
The "one drop of blood rule" in United States that meant having even one black ancestor out of many could mark an individual as black. This rule has been key to drawing and maintaining boundaries between the races since the days of slavery. For example, Susie Phipps, born looking "white" and assume that she was white but when she requested a copy of her birth certificate in 1977, she found herself listed as "colored" because one in her 32 most recent ancestors is black.
Hegemony
The ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement within a population without the use or threat of force. Antonio Gramsci recognized the tremendous power of culture--particularly the cultural institutions of media, schools, and religion--to shape, often unconsciously, what people think is normal, natural, and possible, and thereby directly influence the scope of human action and interaction. In this hegemony of ideas, some thoughts and actions become unthinkable, and group members develop a set of "beliefs" about what is normal and appropriate that come to be seen as the natural "truths" EX: Laws made interracial marriages seem unnatural. Even though these laws are eliminated, many in US culture still see interracial marriage as unthinkable and undoable.
power
The ability or potential to bring about change though action or influence. It is embedded in many kinds of social relations, from interpersonal relations, to institutions, to structural frameworks of whole societies. Eric Wolf argued that all human relationships have a power dynamic and it change with time or different situation.
mapping
The analysis of the physical and/or geographic space where fieldwork is being conducted. While walking the streets of the field site, the ethnographer develops a spatial awareness of where people live, work, worship, play and eat, and of the space through which they move. Physical surroundings influence human culture, shaping the boundaries of behavior and imagination. Mapping may produce a tremendous variety of products. Hand-drawn maps reveal the intricate character of the built environment and force the ethnographer toward a deeper consciousness of details.
Fieldnotes
The anthropologist's written observations and reflections on places, practices, events and interviews. Although the rigorous recording of field notes may sometimes seem tedious, the collection of data over time allows the anthropologist to revisit details of earlier experiences, to compare information and impressions over tie, and to analyze changes, trends, patterns and themes.
Applied anthropology
The application of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and methods to identify, assess, and solve social problems. Anthropologists trace the spread of disease, promote economic development in underdeveloped countries, conduct market research, and lead diversity-training programs in schools, corporations, and community organizations.
4 components of culture
The common cultural core. The elements of a culture powerfully frame what its participants can say, what they can do, even what they think is possible and impossible, real or unreal. Norms: Ideas or rules about how people should behave in particular situations or toward certain other people. (what is considered "normal" and appropriate behavior) Values: Fundamental beliefs about what is important, true, or beautiful, and what makes a good life. Symbols: Anything that signifies something else. Symbols change in meaning over time and from culture to culture Mental maps of reality: Cultural classifications of what kinds of people and things exist, and the assignment of meaning to those classification.
sexuality
The complex range of desires, beliefs, and behaviors that are related to erotic physical contact and the cultural arena within which people debate about what kinds of physical desires and behaviors are right, appropriate, and natural. Human sexuality are culturally constructed, diverse, flexible and fluid and highly contested.
Key informant
A community member who advises the anthropologist on community issues, provides feedback, and warns against cultural miscues. Also called cultural consultant. Ex: Ze Antonia advising Nancy Scheper-Hughes to ignore Nailza's odd behavior, which he understood as a kind of madness, that like the birth and death of children, came and went.
Rickets
A bone-softening disease that is common in children with lack of vitamin D. When early human children died from this disease, their genes are pulled out of the gene pool, so the next generation will consists mostly of people who survived because their skin didn't block out too much UV light which synthesized vitamin D.
Creationism
A belief popular among many evangelical Protestant Christians that God created Earth and all living creatures in their present form as recently as six thousand years ago. Theory that rivals evolution in US culture. Includes intelligent design, a new version of this theory, that life is too random to be random. Ex: Human eye is too complex to have evolved through natural selection
3 components of racisms
Individual racism: Personal prejudiced beliefs and discriminatory actions based on race. May be expressed through a lack of respect or through suspicion, scapegoating, and violence ranging from police brutality to hate crimes. Institutional racism (structural racism): Patterns by which racial inequality is structured through key cultural institutions, policies, and systems. Evident in employment rates, income and wealth differentials, home ownership, residential patterns, criminal sentencing patterns, incarceration rates, application of the death penalty, access to the vote and more. EX: Plessy v. Ferguson (separate but equal school is constitutional), Brown v. Board of Education (state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional and separate educational facilities were inherently unequal) and NYC public schools with more white students receive more funds. Racial ideology: A set of popular ideas about race that allows the discriminatory behaviors of individuals and institutions to seem reasonable, rational and normal. EX: Colonial days white believe it's their manifest destiny to rule over the other race and to civilize and tame the slaves.
The N-word
It has been used as a derogatory term for African Americans. It is a symbol of white power, slavery, and the threat of violence. Young people use this work to express friendship, not anger and hostility. But there are distinct rules about the usage--rules that factor in race, gender, age, and status. Sociolinguists examine the use of language in its specific contexts and the way language shapes and is shaped by other dynamics of power.
Mardi Gras Beads
It shows how globalization changed the world, connecting people in New Orleans, US and Fuzhou, China. The five characteristics of globalization could be used to analyze this example.
Weapons of the Weak
James Scott's study on Malaysian rice farmers. Technology put the landless farmers out of job while benefitted the village elites, but they don't revolt because they know the potential consequence. They show resistance by foot-dragging, slowdowns, theft, sabotage, trickery, arson, and false compliance with regulations. Some scholars question whether these are really forms of resistance because they are not aimed at, and do not necessarily achieve, change. But Scott argues that not all resistance is revolutionary and that many acts of everyday resistance can bring change over time. Through these processes of contestation, the norms and values, mental maps of reality, symbols, organizations, and institutions that appear to be timeless and accepted are actually undergoing constant change and renegotiation as people express their human agency even in the face of over- whelming displays of power.
T-ball
Landers and Fine found that T-ball coaches established a hierarchy of opportunity, training, and encouragement that favored boys over girls. Boys consistently received more playing time than girls, played positions that provided more opportunities to touch the ball and develop their skills, and had more opportunities to practice hitting the ball at the plate. Sport may reflect less about real physical differences in speed, endurance, and strength and more about how a given culture constructs and maintains gender and sex norms.
Caster Semenya
She won the gold medal in the 800-meter race at the track and field world championship sponsored by the IAAF in Berlin, Germany. However she was stripped of her medal and prize money. The Austrailian track and field association--whose runners Semenya defeated in Germany--filed charges that she was not a woman. Despite her birth certificate showing the designation "female" as well as Semenya growing up as a girl and identifying herself as a woman, her powerful physique, vocal quality, and running prowess had frequently elicited questions from her competitors. A report was leaked that she might have a common sex variation--specifically female external genitalia matched with internal testes. Her experience raises important anthropological questions. These include not only how we ultimately distinguish between biological sexes but also how we understand gender--that is, what it means to be a man or a woman in a particular culture. The uproar around her tells us even more about our cultural ideas of what men and women are supposed to be like--that is, it underscores the cultural construction of gender.
US Census form
Shows how race is constructed in the US. 1850 census had three categories: White, Black and Mulatto. The 2010 census form included fourteen separate "race" boxes. This brief look at changes in the census form provides clear indications that race has been and still is an evolving human construction. The changing race categories do not reflect a change in human genotype or phenotype, but in how the government organizes the diversity of people within its borders. The census construction of race reflects the US government's power to establish certain categories and apply those categories to make decisions about government resources.
Alfred Kinsey
Suggested that human sexuality was much more diverse than was commonly assumed. His study revealed a continuum of sexual behavior. His team placed people along a continuum of sexual feelings and behaviors on the so-called Kinsey Scale with exclusively heterosexual behavior on one end and exclusively homosexual behavior on the other end. Human sexuality is marked by diversity, flexibility and fluidity. However by placing heterosexuality and homosexuality on opposite ends of his scale, he reinforced the cultural assumptions that these were opposite and irreconcilable categories. His studies' reliance on quantitative results reinforced the emerging popular and scientific consensus that because it was the sex most people were having, heterosexuality was the functional norm for human sexuality.
Susie Phipps/Obama
Susie Phipps, born looking "white" and assume that she was white but when she requested a copy of her birth certificate in 1977, she found herself listed as "colored" because one in her 32 most recent ancestors is black. Barack Obama is an evidence that hypodescent, although no longer enforced in law is still widely practiced in US culture. His mother is white and his father is from Kenya. Though 50% of his genes came from his father and 50% from his mother, the concept of hypodescent still shapes the way some people regard Obama's race.
