Anthropology 162 Exam #2

Are women completely subservient?

*NO* -There is a lot of gender complementarity. Men need the women, and the women need the men. Without the other, neither can survive. -Only women can give milk and the main sources of food. Women have every right to withhold food from her husband or children. -Women manage herds for sons' inheritance daily. The men own them, but the women are the ones who manage them. -Eventually, women are the ones who decide which cattle herds go to which son. -Husbands die first; due to the fact that old men marry young women. The age difference could be 15-30 years. That means a woman can control the household completely once he dies. -Women can veto marriage or divorce. She can leave her husband whenever she wants. -Polygyny = less work for the women. They receive help from their co-wives. They team up together against their shared husband if need be. -Occasionally women just get together and rebel. They destroy things, they kill cattle, they have affairs, etc.

Which people or tribe pertains to what territory?

-"people" is misleading. There are no nations or boundaries for these societies. These groups intermarry with each other (masaai, nuer, etc) -"Tribe" is also misleading because there is no centralized political structure in these groups. -Ethnicity: shared or antagonisti identities depend on context. -Though "people" and territories are not timeless, invasion is still unethical.

How does Hinduism both support and ameliorate the unequal system?

-*Samsara* = endless cycle of death and rebirth (reincarnation); karma = one's behavior determines future existence. This causes people to "accept their rotten life", to keep quiet and play by the rules because it will pay off in the next life. -*Rasa* = intense emotions/godliness evoked by art, food, sex, and Darsan = meditation enhanced by visual art. Male/female energy in everything. *Siva (the giver of life and death), wife Pavarti, sons Ganesh and Murukan.*

What was the idea Hindu kingdom according to the Arthasastra (250 BC)?

-1.6 million people with 800 villages giving tribute to 4 towns which give tribute to 2 cities which leads to 1 walled city in which 1 palace is located. -~150 salaried super-elites -50,000 full-time, tax paying specialists: teachers, bureaucrats, merchants. -275,000 farming household taxpayers: 16+% grain, temple, +village taxes; tolls, fines, corvee labor and military service. The poorer you were the more taxes you had to pay. -Castes/varna: stratified, endogamous, segregated, division of labor: -*Brahman* = priests/teachers, jewelry and precious metal artisans. -*Kshatriya* = rulers, warriors, elite merchants, artisans. -*Vaisya* = farmers, herders, meat-liquor-rice merchants. -*Sudra* = servants, impure professions (leather making). -Hegemony: religion, dharma caste law: what you can and cannot do with other people, all related to the principle of purity. -Coercion: regressive fines/mutilation, army, spies, entrapment, torture.

Amazonian prehistory leading to slash and burn horticulture

-30,000-8,000 B.C: Savanna, Pleistocene megafauna + ?? -8,000-3,000 BC: Broad foraging intensification -3,000 BC- today: Rainforest, horticulture. -Rainforest Ecology and Horticulture: -Sun + Heat + Rain = trees, little soil -Unmatched species diversity, but difficult hunting. Best protein and soil found near rivers. -Men and women: slash and burn (manioc), hunt, fish, forage (old settlements) -Technology: digging stick, sling, mortar, tumpline, canoe, bow and arrow, gourd, basket, pottery, cotton, hammock, tipiti, blowgun. -Shifting cultivation and settlement.

How is the caste (jati) system conceptualized?

-4 general endogamous castes; potentially 100s of hypergamous subcastes; totemic professions ranked by ritual purity. -Pollution = organic (meat, leather, birth, waste, menstruation, death, food). -Women are seen as more impure and contaminating, beholden to men; Sati self sacrifice on Brahman husbands' funeral pyre. -4 food cycles: body, social, gods-nature-people, material to spirit.

Hunter-Gatherers (Foragers) The Australian Aborigines

-50,000 years without destroying the environment or having to turn to farming. -Optimal health, no demographic catastrophes. -Only 4-7 hours of work per day. -'Wealthy' in regards to relationships. People are wealth to these people. They are your insurance so to speak. -Equality, consensus, no warfare as we know it. -How have they been sustainable? -"Generalized" or broad spectrum... tools, dogs, population control, little storage = egalitarian, demand sharing, reciprocity (meat), Dreamtime (their spirituality). -Dreamtime: spiritual + empirical: -Animism (everything is alive, everything has a spirit), respect, everything in the environment are your ancestors; they created clans and families. This is why there is a special connection with the Emu spirit.) -Totemism (the symbol of your clan or family) -Complementary opposites organize society. -Cosmogony: How did the world come to be the way it is? -Cosmology: How does everything work? -Mnemonic devices -Common symbol system -Naturalizes territory -Social Organization (kinship + marriage) -flexible patrilocal bands -bilateral -patrilineal clans -Totems, estates -Matrilineal rights There is no exclusion, but rather include as many people as you can. -Conception and birth rights, spousal (affinal) rights, residence rights, burial rights. -Band (clan) Exogamy: -Wives are linking different clans together. They are the chainlink. They add more structure to the clan system. -Moiety Marriage Organization: reduces conflict, creates order, divide everything in half. -Section Marriage Organization: Divides into fourths (sections), linking generations

Timeline for Indic Civilization

-6,000 BC : introduction of wheat, barley, herding. This spread eastward. -4600 BC : first chiefdoms. Ranking of kinship group begins. -2600-1500 BC : Harappan civilization, Indus Valley. Writing and records emerge. Specializations of jobs emerge instead of doing a little bit of everything in terms of work. Leaders of states and civilizations during this time claim to be gods. Hegemony is based on religion. Full-time priests emerge. -1600 BC : Aryan herders invade Ganges Valley; 4 Vedas (religious verses) written in Sanskrit. These Vedas become the foundation of the new formation of the states. -600 BC : Start of Hindu civilization, kingdoms, empires, patronage to chakra (kin, clients, descendants). -500 BC : Start of Buddhism. -1192 AD : Muslims invade South Asia from the West. Mogul Empire. -1600 AD : British influence begins and they take control of the area for almost 200 years.

Hunters & Gatherers into the 20th Century

-A lot of these societies have been taken over. -Usually these groups were located in environments in which no one else wanted to live such as the Arctic Circle or the desert in Australia. -Mercator Map: takes a longitudinal globe and straightens them to make a two dimensional map, they take the lines and make them all parallel. This isn't an accurate representation of the world however. -Peters Projection Map: two dimensional map that shows countries in the correct size proportion to each other.

How do herders organize socially to protect equality, peace and order despite wealth and higher populations?

-Acephalous (headless/leaderless), complementary opposition based on territorial use with metaphors of kinship. -Nested households -> exogamous (linked) villages -> exchange/loan partners -> language. You only use these ties when you need it. -Patrilineal ideology, but "blood and milk" ties refer to your mother. There is dependence then on both the mother and father. -Leopard skin chief (nuer): spiritual judge.

How is the Maasai Age grade system an exogamous marriage system?

-Ancestors -Retirees -Senior Elders (~50+ years old) -Married Junior Elders (~35-50 years old) -Senior Moran (~20-30 years old) Eunoto rite of passage -Junior Moran (~15-20 years old) Circumcision rite of passage -Boy Herders (~0-5 years old)

Sub-amazonian preferences

-Appreciate their leisure. -Maybe a little bit more work than the hunters and gatherers but not much. -They like household autonomy. -No major chiefs. -They prefer large game as opposed to insects or small game.

Ju/wasi Subsistence

-Average environment? NO (6-9" rain annually) Severe drought -Territoriality? No, just camps around waterholes. -Amount of exertion? 6 mile radius, at worst 15 miles a day. -Storage of food? Not really; 2-3 days max. -Constant effort? Not really. Every 3-4 days they will go out and work (12-19 hours per week) -Food exhaustion? Never. They are highly selective of their food. 23 plant species that they gather regularly and 17 animals out of 200 species. -Caloric intake? Overabundance, 1/3 calories from meat. -Trance dancing; spend all night long doing this. -The elderly? They live happily and are supported by the younger population. -Youth work? No. They get to grow up and play. -Malnutrition? None. Kwashiorkor (lack of protein)? Not at all. -Implications of all of this? Women bring in almost all of the calories through gathering. Hunting is not a daily necessity. *THESE PEOPLE DO NOT LIVE ON THE EDGE OF SURVIVAL.*

Hawaii: Incipient State

-Big land mass that can hold a lot more people than any of the other islands beside New Zealand. -Not as much coral or shallow fishing around the perimeter. But there is a lot more diversity of environment -300,000 people under one chief (king) -Higher more diverse lands = higher populations -Chiefly competition through marriage, gift giving, and warfare. -10 or more chiefly ranks, class endogamy (only chiefs of certain ranks could marry each other), 8% of the population controlled 90% of the land. Beggars, death penalty, conspicuous consumption. -Irrigation, aquaculture, managers, priests, astrologers, engineers, accountants, military, architects, servants, masseurs. -Religion: king/chiefs descended from masculine conquering gods of female earth; mana and tabu taken to extremes. Many of the commoners did not believe this but they had no choice but the accept it. -Elite access to commoner women; tabus on women eating prized foods such as coconuts; but women can overthrow the system, they are needed for mats and cloth. -Tribal values at commoner level: merging kinship terminology; polygyny and polyandry for access to land; sexual freedom.

How does Nuer cosmology order human existence?

-Complementary Opposition: Spirit vs. Creation (material), Balance. -distant Father God = all humanity -air spirits; prophets (diviners) = warfare -totemic earth/animal spirits = territory -nature/object spirits = individuals -Liminal/ambiguous priests that restore natural balance with sacrifices of "oxen" (doesn't have to be an oxen so you use a different animal but call it an oxen anyway) -Curers/healers restore social/natural balance

Cross cousins/Kinship Terminology/Sibling Exchange

-Cross cousins: mother's brother's kids or father's sister's kids. -kinship terminology: merging parallel cousins with siblings and parents same sex brothers and sisters with parents. -Perpetual sibling exchange = x-cousin marriage and moiety. -Offspring of brothers and sisters are cross cousins, therefore they can marry each other. -Political organization: informal, persuasion only. No true power. He voices the collective decisions of the village. He must be extremely generous and does this through multiple wives to produce more beer and have more parties.

How is society organized to promote leisure, independence, and large game?

-Demography: small, semi-sedentary villages; fission (when tensions rise in a village as population grows, some people will just leave the village to avoid conflict) -Economy: little property or storage; reciprocity/deferred exchange; minimal division of labor. -Social organization: Kinship and Marriage = all either unranked, bilateral. "kin" or 'cross cousins' (marriage partners)

Aboriginal Society: Equal or Unequal?

-Depends partly on available resources, need for mobility -No accumulation, reciprocity, openness, interdependence, flexible, humor (as opposed to violence. Its how you put people in their place to bring them back down to earth) -Shamans, chiefs (where?) -Age (different ages of spouses), polygyny, elders know the most -Mother in law and wife bestowal (women set up these marriages with other women) -Men violently protect secret societies -Women rituals: sex, fertility, health, earth. -Why genital multilation????? -Rite of passage: visual, emotional, and intellectual marker of status and submission -Especially when control via resources is weak -Not always genital; fire walking, tooth pulling, BUT sub incision = kangaroo, vagina envy (jealousy over women's reproductive power). -Mother-in-law avoidance: -cannot speak to them -not friends really -will defend them to the death -highly respect them -Why? Respect, same age, avoid classification chaos

What are the emic and etic explanations for why the cow is sacred in Hindu India?

-Emic: cows = gods; flesh is polluting; ahimsa = non-violence. -Etic: cows better alive than eaten; scrawny cattle survive better.

South Asia: Hinduism and Islam

-Empires (empires are states that have conquered other states and are organized hierarchically; involve chiefdoms, tribes, and/or kingdoms) and civilizations (civilizations are cultures that have writing, laws, professions, division of labor, roads, infrastructure, religion) -1/3 of the world's population lives in South Asia -There are more Muslims that speak Indic languages (Urdu and Bengali) than Arabic languages. -Hindi is the predominant language language of Hindus -Despite having written scriptures, Islamic and Hindu civilizations have been adapted to many different cultural contexts.

Why the adoption of pastoralism starting about 11,000 years ago?

-End of Pleistocene, environmental instability. -Goats & sheep in Middle East = protein security. -5400 years ago cattle complex arrives in Sudan from Sahara, India zebu 4,000 years ago. -5-15 x more people per area than foragers

3,000 Year History of Tikopia

-Extinctions of animals and plants that were not used to human contact. -Erosion due to people cutting down the forest to plant. This ruined the root system and caused the top soil to wash away into the water, which covers up the coral which surrounds the island, and here is where a lot of fish live and this hurts your fish food source. -Reduction of coral, shellfish, lagoon fishing. -Elimination of pigs because they ate their crops; chiefs regulate population by tabu, abortion, infanticide, celibacy, war-exile.

How can one survive on cattle in the environmentally unstable African savanna?

-Grazers & browsers -Wet & dry season milkers -Mobility (transhumance) -All give milk = 88% diet, 4x efficient than meat -Blood -Dung -Urine -Skin, bones, horns -Symbols

How do we know from where and when the adventurers (of Oceania) came?

-Horticultural domesticates (crops): chickens, sweet potatoes, yams, taro, sago palm, bananas, pigs, coconuts, breadfruit. -Lapita pottery style -Glottochronology (the use of statistical data to date the divergence of languages from their common sources), cognates -genetics

Horticulture & Hunting/Gathering to Horticulture

-Horticulture: also know as swidden, slash and burn, extensive agriculture, gardening and shifting agriculture. -Hunting/Gathering to Horticulture = polyculture, root and tree crops, fertility decline, hunting, fishing, tending small animals, more sedentary (settled), higher population density, possibility of big men and chiefs.

Pacific Culture

-Ideology of Stratification: ranking of clans, individuals (were already ranked before populating the new islands). Ancestor worship, totems. -Bilateral, patrilineal emphasis -Primogeniture -"Redistribution"; often times, chiefs talked about how they would give out goods to all the people but actually they took the majority of it for themselves. -Mana: creative/spiritual power via descent from the gods. -Enforcing tabu (taboo); people should be restricted as to how they approach someone with mana. -Manliness = warrior

Why the dramatic increase in bride burning among middle class Hindus?

-In traditional intensive agricultural societies, dowries are given. -Under capitalism, a desire for limitless things is born. They want more and more consumer items. The price of dowries is rising. -Fertility is less important in urban cultures. Children are seen as a burden nowadays.

What are women's limitations under Islamic law?

-Inherit less -Only 1 spouse (men can have 4) -Can only marry other Muslims (men can marry other people of the book). -More difficult to obtain a divorce. -Seclusion *BUT... Islam improved women's status in the Middle East.*

What are the important aspects of East African herder marriages?

-Marriages are contracts between families. They have to be kept no matter what because cattle have been exchanged. -Patrilineal, patrilocal -Descendants: This is a key factor in this society. You have descendants to remember yourself and to continue the family line. -Contract: cattle for women and children's labor. -Mother's relatives' names are all merged as "cattle receiver". -bride-wealth: the cattle going from the husband's side to the wive's side. -pater: refers to the legal father; the guy who initiated and completed the cattle contract. If he dies, and his wive remarries and has a kid, then the kid still belongs to the dead father. This helps keep the contract and descendants. -genitor: the biological father of a child. Has no right to the children. -levirate: when a man dies, the brother of the man comes in and finishes the contract in order to complete the marriage. -ghost marriage: a contract has been initiated but somebody dies before it is finished. In their eyes, the dead person is still in the marriage but as a ghost. Someone can stand in for the dead person, but they obtain no legal rights to the children. -woman marriage: woman to woman marriage happens under two circumstances: when a woman is infertile and when a brother is getting married but then he dies and does not have a brother to partake in a levirate marriage, so his sister stands in for him.

Oceania (Pacific Islands)

-Micronesia -Melanesia -Polynesia -Types of Islands: -Mountain range; continental islands -high islands = volcanic islands -low island = ring of sand and coral -Challenges of these islands: little topsoil, little fresh water, drought, typhoons, ecologically fragile species, little wild terrestrial game.

Why might people have ventured out into the open Pacific?

-Population increase -Escape from oppression -Adventure, myth, "promised land" -Combination of these factors

What are the five pillars of Islam?

-Recite "no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet". -Pray 5 times a day towards Mecca. -Give alms to the poor. -Fast during month of Ramadan. -Make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime.

What changes come with the shift to food production?

-Sedentism —> higher population and vice versa -More food per area —> stress on environment -More work —> more technology —> more work, etc. -Increasingly complex social organization (grid), formal leadership, inequality. -Surplus production to support leaders and specialists. -Competition over resources, warfare, armies. -Chain reaction on neighboring societies. -More complicated problems requiring more complicated solutions = house of cards. -Revolution

Chiefdoms: "Great Divide" between Egalitarianism and Exploitation/Oppression

-Social instincts/"human nature" is overcome when: a few people take power over many; when reciprocity/redistribution are appropriated for taxes and tribute; during crises and insecurity within a group of people; resource inequality and storage of resources (some people have more than others); reproduced via hegemony (religion) and coercion. -Consequences: Increase in production for surplus, craft specialization, conspicuous consumption; population growth leads to more social complexity; constraints on freedom (high grid); environmental destruction; more work and/or more emigration; warfare and insecurity.

What are the functionalist explanations of caste?

-Some see it as order; knowing ones place; self-help societies. -Some see it as pure exploitation.

What is the functional explanation of purdah or seclusion among S. Asian Hindus and Muslims?

-Spaces where women rule. -Prevents and protects men and women from sexual temptations, preventing disorderly affairs. -Protects the family status/honor/respect.

What's the difference between Sunni and Shi'a Islam?

-Sunni: leadership based on Muhammad's collected teachings. -Shi'a (10%): leadership based on patrilineal descent from Muhammad (no direct line). Today, a 12 member Ulema elects Imam (a holy ruler).

What role did Islam play in state formation?

-Unified competing tribes. -Codified law (shari'a, hadith), selection of rulers. -Taxes (non-muslims), jihad. They tolerated other "peoples of the book" as long as they paid taxes.

How was the 8,000 mile stretch of the islands settled?

-Used an outrigger canoe: had a float that pulls the canoe into the wind when it dropped into the water, the sail was movable from end to end, the hull of the canoe was not symmetrical but was shared like a crescent moon, did not have a deep heel because they had to sail over many coral reefs so the canoe had to be really light and sit right on top of the water. -Star charts, wind, currents, and timing were all part of navigation -Planning, storage of food, seeds and domesticated animals to populate the new land with -Fishing technology (special hooks that were superior for fishing) -Composting (had to create their own soils many times)

Tikopian Social Organization in the 1900s

-two territorial districts, four non-exogamous clans, each responsible for taro, breadfruit, coconut, and yams. All ranked. -Chiefs settle disputes, organize rituals, impose tabus for ecological management. They don't have any wealth or land than the commoners. *Everyone is fairly equal materially.*

The Hunters: Scarce resources in the Kalahari by Richard Lee

Does male hunting constitute the most important foraging activity? Do foragers live on the edge of survival? -Ju/wasi (Bushman, San) Hunting vs. Gathering: Gathering 2-3x more per weight. Mostly Mongongo nuts (5x more calories and protein than cereal) -Hunting probability= 23%, Gathering probability= 100% *MEAT IS A TREAT -Archaeology and male bias

How do language families and religion correlate in South Asia?

Dravidian: 1st languages, southern tribal; buddhism or no great religion. Sino-Tibetan: tribal or empire; Buddhism or no great religion. Indo-European (Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, etc.): Northern India,

Tragedy of the commons, overproduction, or balance?

The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory of a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently and rationally according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting that resource. -Too much? 2,375 gigajoules of energy produced by nature, 249 consumed by cattle, 1.78 consumed by Turkana people. -Too little? The cattle are small but tough; they withstand seasonal droughts.