Anthropology 100H Exam 2 Professor Green

Han Chinese

(Patrilineal Decent) For a few thousand years the basic unit for economic cooperation among the Han Chinese was the large extended family, typically including aged parents and their sons, their sons' wives, and their sons' children (Hsiaotung, 1939). With patrilocal residence, Han children grew up in a household dominated by their father and his male relatives. The paternal uncle is like a second father.

dowry

A dowry is a woman's share of parental property that, instead of passing to her upon her parents' death, is given to her at the time of her marriage.

moiety

A group, usually consisting of several clans, which results from a division of a society into two halves on the basis of descent

kindred

A grouping of blood relatives based on bilateral descent; includes all relatives with whom EGO shares at least one grandparent, great-grandparent, or even great-great-grandparent on his or her father's and mother's side

Munduruku

For instance, among the Mundurucu Indians, a horticultural people living in the center of Brazil's Amazon rainforest, married men and women are members of separate households, meeting periodically for sexual activity. At age 13, boys join their fathers in the men's house. Meanwhile, their sisters continue to live with their mothers and the younger boys in two or three houses grouped around the men's house. Thus, the men's house constitutes one household inhabited by adult males and their sexually mature sons, and the women's houses are inhabited by adult women and prepubescent boys and girls. An array of other domestic arrangements can be found in other parts of the world, including situations in which coresidents of a household are not related biologically or by marriage—such as the service personnel in an elaborate royal household, apprentices in the household of craft specialists, low-status clients in the household of rich and powerful patrons, or groups of children being raised by paired teams of adult male and female community members in an Israeli kibbutz (a collectively owned and operated agricultural settlement). So it is that family and household are not always synonymous

Exogamy

marriage between people of different social categories/lineage

Nayar

A landowning warrior caste, corporations made up of kinsmen related in the female line traditionally hold their estates. These blood relatives live together in a large household, with the eldest male serving as manager. Like Trobriand Islanders, the Nayar are a sexually permissive culture. A classic anthropological study describes three transactions related to traditional Nayar sexual and marriage practices, many of which have changed since the mid-1900s (Goodenough, 1970; Gough, 1959). The first, occurring shortly before a girl experiences her first menstruation, involves a ceremony that joins her with a "ritual husband." This union does not necessarily involve sexual relations and lasts only a few days. Neither individual has any further obligation, but when the girl becomes a woman, she and her children typically participate in ritual mourning for the man when he dies. This temporary union establishes the girl as an adult ready for motherhood and eligible for sexual activity with men approved by her household. The second transaction takes place place when a young Nayar woman enters into a continuing sexual liaison with a man approved by her family. This is a formal relationship that requires the man to present her with gifts three times each year until the relationship is terminated. In return, the man can spend nights with her. Despite ongoing sexual privileges, however, this "visiting husband" has no economic obligations to her, nor is her home regarded as his home. In fact, she may have the same arrangement with more than one man at the same time. Regardless of the number of men with whom she is involved, this second transaction, the Nayar version of marriage, clearly specifies who has sexual rights to whom and includes rules that deter conflicts between the men. If a Nayar woman becomes pregnant, one of the men with whom she has a relationship (who may or may not be the biological father) must formally acknowledge paternity by presenting gifts to the woman and the midwife. This establishes the child's birthrights—as does birth registration in Western societies. Once a man has ritually acknowledged fatherhood by gift giving, he may continue to take interest in the child, but he has no further obligations. Support and education for the child are the responsibility of the mother and her brothers, with whom she and her offspring live.

self-awareness

A self-conscious state in which attention focuses on oneself. It makes people more sensitive to their own attitudes and dispositions

castrati

About the same time, the cultural institution of eunuchs also ended in Europe. Until then, a category of musical eunuchs, known as castrati, participated in operas and in Roman Catholic Church choirs, singing the female parts. Castrated before they reached puberty so as to retain their high voices, these selected boys were often orphaned or came from poor families. Without functioning testes to produce male sex hormones, physical development into manhood is aborted, so deeper voices—as well as body hair, semen production, and other usual male attributes—were not part of a castrati's biology.

Hopi

Among the Hopi Indians, a farming people whose ancestors have lived for many centuries in pueblos ("villages") in the desert lands of northeastern Arizona, society is divided into a number of clans based strictly on matrilineal descent (Connelly, 1979). At birth, every Hopi is assigned to his or her mother's clan. This affiliation is so important that, in a very real sense, a person has no social identity in the community apart from it. Two or more clans together constitute larger supra-clan units, which anthropologists refer to as phratries (discussed later in this chapter). Phratries and clans are the major kinship units in Hopi culture, but the basic functional social units consist of lineages, and there are several in each village. A senior woman (usually the eldest) heads each Hopi lineage, with her brother or mother's brother keeping the sacred "medicine bundle" (objects of spiritual power considered essential for peoples' well-being) and playing an active role in running lineage affairs. The senior woman is no mere figurehead. She may act as mediator to help resolve disputes among group members. Also, although her brother and mother's brother have the right to offer her advice and criticism, they are equally obligated to listen to what she has to say, and she does not yield her authority to them. Most female authority, however, is exerted within the household, and here men clearly take second place. These households consist of the women of the lineage with their husbands and unmarried sons, all of whom used to live in sets of adjacent rooms in single large buildings. Today, nuclear families often live (frequently with a maternal relative or two) in separate houses, but motorized vehicles enable related households to maintain close contact and cooperation as before. Hopi lineages function as landholding corporations, allocating land for the support of member households. "Outsiders," the husbands of the women whose lineage owns the land, farm these lands, and the harvest belongs to these women. Thus, Hopi men spend their lives laboring for their wives' lineages, and in return they are given food and shelter. Sons learn from their fathers how to farm, yet a man has no real authority over his son. This is because a man's own children belong to his wife's lineage whereas his sister's children form part of his. When parents have difficulty with an unruly child, the mother's brother is called upon to mete out discipline. A man's loyalties are therefore divided between his wife's household on the one hand and his sisters' on the other. According to tradition, if a man is perceived as being an unsatisfactory husband, his wife merely has to place his personal belongings outside the door, and the marriage is over. In addition to their economic and legal functions, lineages play a role in Hopi ceremonial activities. A lineage owns a special house where the matrilineal clan's religious paraphernalia are stored and cared for by the "clan mother." Together with her brother, the clan's "big uncle," she helps manage ceremonial activities

Yakő

Among the Yakö of eastern Nigeria, property is divided into both patrilineal and matrilineal possessions (Forde, 1968). The patrilineage owns perpetually productive resources, such as land, whereas the matrilineage owns consumable property, such as livestock. The legally weaker matriline is somewhat more important in religious matters than the patriline. Through double descent, a Yakö might inherit grazing lands from the father's patrilineal group and certain ritual privileges from the mother's matrilineal group.

independence training

Childrearing practices that foster independence, self-reliance, and personal achievement.

Nandi

Details differ from one society to another, but woman- woman marriages among the Nandi of western Kenya may be taken as representative of such practices in Africa (Oboler, 1980). The Nandi are a pastoral people who also do considerable farming. Control of most significant property and the primary means of production—livestock and land—is exclusively in the hands of men and may be transmitted only to their male heirs, usually their sons. Because polygyny is the preferred form of marriage, a man's property is normally divided equally among his wives for their sons to inherit. Within the household, each wife has her own home in which she lives with her children, but all are under the authority of the husband, who is a remote and aloof figure within the family. In such situations, the position of a woman who bears no sons is difficult; not only does she not help perpetuate her husband's male line—a major concern among the Nandi—but also she has no one to inherit the proper share of her husband's property. To get around these problems, a woman of advanced age who bore no sons may become a female husband by marrying a young woman. The purpose of this arrangement is for the young wife to provide the male heirs her female husband could not. To accomplish this, the woman's wife enters into a sexual relationship with a man other than her female husband's male husband; usually it is one of his male relatives. No other obligations exist between this woman and her male sex partner, and her female husband is recognized as the social and legal father of any children born under these conditions. In keeping with her role as female husband, this woman is expected to abandon her female gender identity and, ideally, dress and behave as a man. In practice, the ideal is not completely achieved, for the habits of a lifetime are difficult to reverse. Generally, it is in the context of domestic activities, which are most highly symbolic of female identity, that female husbands most completely assume a male identity. The individuals in woman-woman marriages enjoy several advantages. By assuming male identity, a barren or sonless woman raises her status considerably and even achieves near equality with men, who otherwise occupy a far more favored position in Nandi society than women. A woman who marries a female husband is usually one who is unable to make a good marriage, often because she (the female husband's wife) has lost face as a consequence of premarital pregnancy. By marrying a female husband, she too raises her status and also secures legitimacy for her children. Moreover, a female husband is usually less harsh and demanding, spends more time with her, and allows her a greater say in decision making than a male husband does. The one thing she may not do is engage in sexual activity with her marriage partner. In fact, female husbands are expected to abandon sexual activity altogether, including with their male husbands to whom they remain married even though the women now have their own wives.

Meet the Alloparents

Discusses shared parenting

Tiriki

In Tiriki society, each boy born within a fifteen-year period joins a particular age set. Seven named age sets exist, but only one is open for membership at a time. When it closes, the next one opens. And so it continues until the passage of 105 years (7 times 15), when the first set's membership is gone due to death, and it opens once again to take in new recruits. Members of Tiriki age sets remain together for life as they move through four successive age grades. Advancement in age grades occurs at fifteen-year intervals, coinciding with the closing of the oldest age set and the opening of a new one. Each age group has its own particular duties and responsibilities. Traditionally, the first age grade, the Warriors, served as guardians of the country, and members gained renown through fighting (Figure 11.2). Under British colonial rule, however, this traditional function largely fell by the wayside with the decline of intergroup raiding and warfare; individual members of this age grade may now find excitement and adventure by leaving their community for extended employment or study elsewhere. The next age grade, the Elder Warriors, had few specialized tasks in earlier days beyond learning skills they would need later on by assuming an increasing share of administrative activities. For example, they would chair the postfuneral gatherings held to settle property claims after someone's death. Traditionally, Elder Warriors also served as envoys between elders of different communities. Nowadays, they hold nearly all of the administrative and executive roles opened up by the creation and growth of a centralized Tiriki administrative bureaucracy. Judicial Elders, the third age grade, traditionally handled most tasks connected with the administration and settlement of local disputes. Today, they still serve as the local judiciary body. Members of the Ritual Elders, the senior age grade, used to preside over the priestly functions of ancestral shrine observances on the household level, at subclan meetings, at semiannual community appeals, and at rites of initiation into the various age grades. They also were credited with access to special magical powers. With the decline of ancestor worship over the past several decades, many of these traditional functions have been lost, and no new ones have arisen to take their places. Nonetheless, Ritual Elders continue to hold the most important positions in the initiation ceremonies, and their power as sorcerers and expungers of witchcraft is still recognized.

EGO

In kinship studies, the central person from whom the degree of each kinship relationship is traced

fission

In kinship studies, the splitting of a descent group into two or more new descent groups.

Domestic divo

Instructional cooking television shows and how gender roles are presented

Iroquois system

Kinship reckoning in which a father and father's brother are referred to by a single term, as are a mother and mother's sister, but a father's sister and mother's brother are given separate terms. Parallel cousins are classified with brothers and sisters, while cross cousins are classified separately but not equated with relatives of some other generation

Hawaiian system

Kinship reckoning in which all relatives of the same sex and generation are referred to by the same term.

normative orientation

Moral values, ideals, and principles, which are purely cultural in origin, are as much a part of the individual's behavioral environment as are trees, rivers, and mountains. Without them people would have nothing by which to gauge their own actions or those of others. Normative orientation includes, but is not limited to, standards that indicate what ranges of behavior are acceptable for males, females, and whichever additional gender roles exist in a particular society.

marriage by proxy

One or both of the individuals being united is not physically present, usually being represented instead by another person

Neolocal

Refers to the pattern in which newly married couples set up their own households

spatial orientation

The behavioral environment in which the self acts also involves spatial orientation, or the ability to get from one object or place to another. Notably, when we speak of trying to "orient" ourselves, we are using an ancient word for rising that refers to the east, where the sun comes up. Traditionally, place names commonly contain references to significant geographic features in the landscape.

Feeding Lesbigay Families

This shit is way too long. Something about non traditional families and how they eat.

Ju/'hoansi

To understand the importance of childrearing practices for the development of gender-related personality characteristics, consider the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen, native to the Kalahari Desert in the borderlands of Namibia and Botswana in southern Africa. Traditionally subsisting as nomadic hunter-gatherers (foragers), in the latter 20th century many Ju/'hoansi were forced to settle down— tending small herds of goats, planting gardens for their livelihood, and engaging in occasional wage labor on white-owned farms (Wyckoff-Baird, 2010). Ju/'hoansi who traditionally forage for a living stress equality and do not tolerate dominance and aggressiveness in either gender. Males are as mildmannered as females, and females are as energetic and self-reliant as males. By contrast, among the Ju/'hoansi who have recently settled in permanent villages, males and females exhibit personality characteristics resembling those traditionally thought of as typically masculine and feminine in North America and other industrial societies. Among the food foragers, each newborn child receives extensive personal care from his or her mother during the first few years of life, for the space between births is typically four to five years. This is not to say that mothers are constantly with their children. For instance, when women go to collect wild plant foods in the bush, they do not always take their offspring along. At such times, their fathers or other community adults supervise the children, one-third to one-half of whom are always found in camp on any given day. Because these include men as well as women, children are as much habituated to the male presence as to the female one. Traditional Ju/'hoansi fathers spend much time with their offspring, interacting with them in nonauthoritarian ways (Figure 6.4). Although they may correct their children's behavior, so may women who neither defer to male authority nor use the threat of paternal punishment. Among these foragers, no one grows up to respect or fear male authority any more than female authority. In fact, instead of being punished by either parent, a child who misbehaves will simply be carried away and introduced to some other more agreeable activity. Children of both sexes do equally little work. Instead, they spend much of their time in playgroups that include boys and girls of widely different ages. Older children, boys as well as girls, keep an eye out for the younger ones and do this spontaneously rather than as an assigned task. In short, Ju/'hoansi children in traditional foraging groups have few experiences that set one gender apart from the other. But for those Ju/'hoansi who have been forced to abandon their traditional foraging life and who now reside in permanent settlements, the situation is very different. Women spend much of their time at home preparing food, doing other domestic chores, and tending the children. Men, meanwhile, spend many hours outside the household growing crops, raising animals, or doing wage labor. As a result, children are less habituated to their presence. This remoteness of the men, coupled with their more extensive knowledge of the outside world and their access to money, tends to strengthen male influence in the household. Within these village households, gender typecasting begins early. As soon as girls are old enough, they are expected to attend to many of the needs of their younger siblings, thereby allowing their mothers more time to deal with other domestic tasks. This shapes and limits the behavior of girls, who cannot range as widely or explore as freely as they could without little brothers and sisters in tow. Boys, by contrast, have little to do with babies and toddlers, and when they are assigned work, it generally takes them away from the household. Thus, the space that village girls occupy becomes restricted, and they are trained in behaviors that promote passivity and nurturance, whereas village boys begin to learn the distant, controlling roles they will later play as adult men. When comparing childrearing traditions in different cultures, we find that a group's economic organization and the social relations in its subsistence practices impact the way a child is brought up, and this, in turn, affects the adult personality. Cross-cultural comparisons also show that there are alternative practices for raising children, which means that changing the societal conditions in which one's children grow up can alter significantly the way men and women act and interact. With this in mind, we turn to a discussion about traditions of dependence and independence training. There are cultural variations within each of these types, and many societies exhibit a mixture of both styles.

The Berdache Tradition

Transgender. Talks about the gender and the Navajo

India

When a young Hindu man in India or Nepal decides to become a sadhu, he must transform his personal identity, change his sense of self, and leave his place in the social order. Detaching himself from the pursuit of earthly pleasures (kama) and power and wealth (artha), he makes a radical break with his family and friends and abandons the moral principles and rules of conduct prescribed for his caste (dharma). Symbolically expressing his death as a typical Hindu, he participates in his own funeral ceremony, followed by a ritual rebirth. As a born-again, he acquires a new identity as a sadhu and is initiated into a sect of religious mystics.

bride service

a designated period of time when the groom works for the bride's family

Trobiand

Young people in the Trobriand Islands of the South Pacific traditionally enjoy great sexual freedom. By age 7 or 8, children begin playing erotic games and imitating adult seductive attitudes. Within another four or five years, they start pursuing sexual partners in earnest—experimenting erotically with a variety of individuals. Because attracting sexual partners ranks high among young Trobrianders, they spend a great deal of time beautifying themselves (Figure 9.1). Their daily conversations are loaded with sexual hints, and they employ magical spells as well as small gifts to entice a prospective sex partner to the beach at night or to the house in which boys sleep apart from their parents. Girls, too, sleep apart from their parents, so youths have considerable freedom in arranging their erotic adventures. Boys and girls play this game as equals, with neither having an advantage over the other (Weiner, 1988). By the time Trobrianders are in their midteens, meetings between lovers may take up most of the night, and love affairs are apt to last for several months. Ultimately, a young islander begins to meet the same partner again and again, rejecting the advances of others. When the couple is ready, they appear together one morning outside the young man's house as a way of announcing their intention to be married. Among the Trobriand Islanders each individual has to marry outside of his or her own clan and lineage (exogamy).

kinship

a network of relatives into which individuals are born and married, and with whom they cooperate based on customarily prescribed rights and obligations

Phratry

a unilineal descent group composed of at least two clans that supposedly share a common ancestry, whether or not they really do

lineage

a unilineal kin-group descended from a common ancestor or founder who lived four to six generations ago and in which relationships among members can be exactly stated in genealogical terms

national character

aiming to discover basic personality traits shared by the majority of the people of modern state societies. these studies were flawed and made questionable assumptions from little data

clan

an extended unilineal kin-group, often consisting of several lineages, whose members claim common descent from a remote ancestor, usually legendary or mythological

descent group

any kin-group whose members share a direct line of descent from a real (historical) or fictional common ancestor

consanguineal kin

biologically related relatives, commonly referred to as blood relatives

dependence training

childrearing practices that foster compliance in the performance of assigned tasks and dependence on the domestic group, rather than reliance on oneself

modal personality

defined as those character traits that occur with the highest frequency in a social group and are therefore the most representative of its culture.

bilateral descent

descent traced equally through father and mother's ancestors; associating each individual with blood relatives on both sides of the family

unilineal descent

descent traced exclusively through either the male or the female line of ancestry to establish group membership

matrilineal descent

descent traced exclusively through the female line of ancestry to establish group membership

patrilineal descent

descent traced exclusively through the male line of ancestry to establish group membership

Tibet

fraternal polyandry

When Brothers Share a Wife

fraternal polyandry

temporal orientation

gives people a sense of their place in time, is also part of the behavioral environment. Connecting past actions with those of the present and future provides a sense of self-continuity. This is the function of a calendar. Derived from the Latin word kalendae, which originally referred to a public announcement at the first day of a new month, or moon, such a chart gives people a framework for organizing their days, weeks, months, and even years. Just as the perceived environment of objects is organized in cultural terms, so too are time and space.

Eskimo system

kinship reckoning in which the nuclear family is emphasized by specifically identifying the mother, father, brother, and sister, while lumping together all other relatives into broad categories such as uncle, aunt, and cousin; also known as a lineal system

Eskimo

nuclear family

Patrilocal

refers to the pattern in which married couples live with or near the husbands' parents

fictive kin

someone who becomes accepted as part of a family to which he or she has no blood relation

Totemism

the belief that people are related to particular animals, plants, or natural objects by virtue of descent from common ancestral spirits

Ambilocal

the couple may reside with either the husband's or the wife's group

social identity

the part of the self-concept including one's view of self as a member of a particular social category