Anthropology Final

Be able to explain what is meant when we say that a nation is an imagined community and give an example. Whose idea is this?

An imagined community is a concept developed by Benedict Anderson in his 1983 book Imagined Communities, to analyze nationalism. Anderson depicts a nation as a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group.

Be able to identify three things that are used as ethnic boundary markers and explain in what cultures they are used and how. What does ethnicity mean to anthropologists?

any characteristics that can be used to indicate ethnic group membership (clothing, food, language, etc.). There are two types of ethnic boundary markers; those used by the people of that ethnicity and those used by people outside of that ethnicity. Some more examples of ethnic boundary markers are "physical characteristics" that may include race. Ethnicity is defined by Kenneth Guest as: A sense of historical, cultural, and sometimes ancestral connection to a group of people who are imagined to be distinct from those outside the group.

Food Foraging

any group of people that depends primarily on wild foods for subsistence.

Band

are the tiniest societies, consisting typically of 5-80 people, most or all of them close relatives by birth or by marriage.

Generalized Reciprocity

associated with foraging societies; most common among closely related exchange partners and involves no specific expectation of return; i.e. xmas in the Kalahari

Benedict Anderson

came up with imagined communities a nation is an imagined community; an imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign, even though we don't know everyone in the nation -we can go to a different place and see an American, but there is a sense of comradery - we have a right to be a community He also said these things: 1.Nations are invented 2.Nations are bounded territorial units 3.Nations are imagined as sovereign 4.Nations are imagined as one community of citizens 5.Nations rely on the construction of collective traditions

Cultural capital

consists of the social assets of a person (education, intellect, style of speech and dress, etc.) that promote social mobility in a stratified society.

Structural inequality

defined as a condition where one category of people are attributed an unequal status in relation to other categories of people. This relationship is perpetuated and reinforced by a confluence of unequal relations in roles, functions, decisions, rights, and opportunities.

Ernst Renan

did research on nationalism and national identity he said that a nation is a soul, getting at the idea of the shared values and culture; an idea of a common past, a legacy of shared stories about that past, a sense of heritage, and a commitment to a common future

Michel Foucault

french philosopher and social theorist. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions.

Karl Marx

german philosopher that came up with socialism

Fordism

is the basis of modern economic and social systems in industrialized, standardized mass production and mass consumption. ... It is used in social, economic, and management theory about production, working conditions, consumption, and related phenomena, especially regarding the 20th century.

ethnopharmacology

is the cross-cultural study of how people derive medicines from plants, animals, fungi, or other naturally occurring resources.

Hegemony

is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that their imposed, ruling-class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally valid ...

Dependency theory

is the notion that resources flow from a "periphery" of poor and underdeveloped states to a "core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former.

Commodity fetishism

is the perception of the social relationships involved in production, not as relationships among people, but as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade.

Horticulture

is the science and art of growing plants (fruits, vegetables, flowers, and any other cultivar). ... In contrast to agriculture,

Medical migration

migration. ... The exact derivation of the word is from the Latin 'migrate' meaning to go from one place to another, but biologically a return journey is part of the accepted definition of the term, the outward journey being termed EMIGRATION and the inward journey IMMIGRATION.

habitus

one of Bourdieu's most influential yet ambiguous concepts. It refers to the physical embodiment of cultural capital, to the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences.

Bourgeoisie

owns the most important of the means of production, through which it exploits the working class.

Hypodescent

refers to the automatic assignment by the dominant culture of children of a mixed union or sexual relations between members of different socioeconomic groups or ethnic groups to the subordinate group ... i.e. In societies characterized by racial hierarchies (i.e. dominant and subordinate racial groups), the children of an interracial couple will usually be classified as belonging to the subordinate racial group. (exceptions occur in cases wherein the individual can "pass" for a member of the dominant group and the parentage is unknown)

Flexible accumulation

refers to the shift that both intensified the capitalist processes and opened new spaces to the penetration of capital

Origin myth

the american revolution is an origin myth for the united states

Diaspora

the dispersion of any people from their original homeland.

Means of production

the facilities and resources for producing goods.

Ethnicity

the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition.

proletariat

the lower or working class. 3. (in Marxist theory) the class of wage-earners, esp industrial workers, in a capitalist society, whose only possession of significant material value is their labour. 4. (in ancient Rome) the lowest class of citizens, who had no property.

Reciprocity

the non-market exchange of goods or labour ranging from direct barter (immediate exchange) to forms of gift exchange where a return is eventually expected (delayed exchange) as in the exchange of birthday gifts.

Colonialism

the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.

Redistribution

refers to a system of economic exchange involving the centralized collection of goods from members of a group followed by the redivision of those goods among those members. It is a form of reciprocity.

Pierre Bourdieu

social theorist that came up with habitus

Pastoralism

the branch of agriculture concerned with the raising of livestock. It is animal husbandry: the care, tending and use of animals such as camels, goats, cattle, yaks, llamas, and sheep.

Social reproduction

"refers to the emphasis on the structures and activities that transmit social inequality from one generation to the next". According to Pierre Bourdieu, there are four types of capital that contribute to social reproduction in society.

Modernization theories

a theory used to explain the process of modernization that a nation goes through as it transitions from a traditional society to a modern one. The theory has not been attributed to any one person; instead, its development has been linked to American social scientists in the 1950s.

Max Weber

among the three founders of sociology.[6][7][8][9][10] Weber was a key proponent of methodological antipositivism, arguing for the study of social action through interpretive (rather than purely empiricist) means, based on understanding the purpose and meaning that individuals attach to their own actions.

Sydney Mintz

anthropologist that did his work among the people in puerto rico on sugar cane (remember from lecture) in the 1940's and published his book in the 1970's. describes the puerto rican cane workers as wage workers who lived like factory workers -calls sugarcane plantations "factories in the fields"

Ethnic boundary marker

any characteristics that can be used to indicate ethnic group membership (clothing, food, language, etc.) ethnic group. a social group based on a perception of shared ancestry, cultural tradition, and common history that culturally distinguish that group from other groups.

Prestige

widespread respect and admiration felt for someone or something on the basis of a perception of their achievements or quality.

Philippe Bourgois

wrote "In Search of Respect: Life in el Barrio

Peggy McIntosh

wrote about the origins of privilege and talked about where privilege came from

What is a Nation?

•A community with a shared sense of the past •A community with a shared sense of personal injury •A community with a shared origin story •A community with a claim to identity in the present •A community with a tradition which associates the nation as a whole with a particular territory that is its homeland.

Constructing a Nation: Three Things Needed

•Creation of an Other who is hated or feared •Creation of an infrastructure to integrate members of a state into a common bureaucracy •Creation of use or threat of armed force

Immigrants are liminal to this definition of a nation

•They are from outside the borders of the sovereign nation •Yet they live within the nation •The extent to which the larger society "imagines"immigrants as part of the nation varies •The place of immigrants in the nation is subject to: -Laws -Attitudes toward immigrants-Criteria for and benefits of citizenship -Perceptions of what constitutes the nation and its people

Imagined community

"Imagined communities" is a concept coined by Benedict Anderson. He believes that a nation is a community socially constructed, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group

Sickness

the state of being ill.

The Ideal Nation-State

* Every member of the nation is a permanent resident of the nation-state •No member of the nation lives outside it •There are no indigenous or ethnic minorities •There is no immigration and no emigration (people don't come in and don't leave) •Each generation is born in the nation-state of 100% national parentage•The state retains its character in each succeeding generation •Consists of one ethnic group; one language

Marxist Anthropology

1) the analysis of modes ofproduction(capitalist and non-capitalist, and their articulations), •(2) processes of class struggle andclass formation (which also included the complex relations between capitalist and non-capitalist classstructures, but with special emphasis upon the peasantry), and •(3) changing process of labor exploitation (e.g., the complex relations between slavery and wage-labor).

How is national homogeneity most often imagined?

1.common racial identity and ancestry 2.common cultural identity 3.common language 4.common religion National homogeneity is based on ideas about majority/minority status •Citizenship rights are legally sanctioned membership rules that have tended to historically privilege members of the majority status group in the political and economic organization of the nation-state

Nationalism and the nation state are premised on two related ideas:

1.homogeneity (or sameness) within national boundaries 2.radical forms of difference outside of national boundaries

Egalitarian society

An egalitarian is a person who believes in the equality of all people, and an egalitarian society gives everyone equal rights. This is a word that means something close to equality and has to do with fairness.

Core/Periphery countries

In world systems theory, the periphery countries (sometimes referred to as just the periphery) are those that are less developed than the semi-periphery and core countries.

How would you define the difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide and give examples of each from our readings. Be able to describe and compare how ethnic-making projects in Rwanda and Bosnia have given rise to conflict.

Ethnic cleansing is the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society, whereas genocide is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. Rwandan genocide between Hutu and Tutsi's because of colonization. Bosnian genocide in 1992 against the Bosniak (Bosnian muslims) and croatians. There were three ethnic groups in Bosnia representing three different political parties. Then the Bosnian serbs in 1992 performed an "ethnic cleansing" against the Bosniak.

What is meant by the ideas of generalized, balanced and negative reciprocity? How does reciprocity differ from the anthropological concept of redistribution? Be able to discuss three patterns of reciprocity and give examples in today's stratified societies

Generalized reciprocity is when one "pays it forward". For example, in a foraging society, whoever went hunting will share what he has caught (may be rules about who gets what part first, but everyone gets some and no one goes hungry). Other examples of generalized reciprocity include putting change into people's meters or giving to charity. Balanced reciprocity is when two people who know one another and have a positive social relationship (relatives, friends, acquaintances, trading partners) provide resources to the other when needed as money, goods, services, and recipient is not expected to pay for this help or to reciprocate in kind within a specific time frame... but that eventually both parties will benefit and help each other out. Finally, negative reciprocity is when one partner to the exchange tries to cheat the other partner by offering something of lesser value, by failing to repay the favor in a timely manor or by contributing less than 50% to the relationship. This is different from redistribution because redistribution is a particular form of economic exchange that involves, first, the gathering together of resources from many and varied sources in a central location and second, some publicly recognized authority is charged with collecting/storing/organizing/processing and repackaging these resources, THIRD, product is redistributed to a number of recipients.

What was Ernst Renan's notion of the nation-state and how did it compare to Benedict Anderson's 100 years earlier (from lectures)?

He said that "A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.•A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. " The difference between Anderson and Renan's views is that Anderson's view is more about how one perceives themself as part of the group and Renan is saying that nation is formed when there is an origin myth that binds them together.

Leith Mullings

Her research and writing have focused on structures of inequality and resistance to them. Her research began in Africa and she has written about traditional medicine and religion in postcolonial Ghana, as well as about women's roles in Africa. In the U.S. her work has centered on urban communities.

Illness narratives

Illness narratives are a way for a person affected by an illness to make sense of his or her experiences.

Nation

It is a cultural-political community that has become conscious of its autonomy, unity, and particular interests.

Know the basic economic theories that sought to explain class as a system of stratification in societies of Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, Max Weber, and Leith Mullings.

Karl Marx: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat, Max Weber: Prestige and Life Chances, Pierre Bourdieu: Social Reproduction, Leith Mullings: Intersectionality among Race, Gender, and Class.

What are some reasons for the income and wealth disparities that exist in US today? How do one's income and wealth affect one's social mobility? What are two key theories that are used to identify the roots of poverty in the US? How do these theories differ and what do they have in common? Be able to discuss the concept of the American Dream? What is meritocracy and how is it related to social mobility? Be able to give examples.

Some of the reasons why wealth disparities exist in the U.S. today is because of lower wages, less jobs, and that the top 5% of our country holds the wealth. One's starting income and wealth affects their social mobility because if you start out with less income and less wealth, you are less likely to escape your class, but if you start out with more income, you are more likely to get out of your social class. The American Dream is that hard work can make you rich. Meritocracy is when a government or the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability. It is related to social mobility because the more "Able" someone is (financially), the more likely they will have a chance of rising in the social classes.

Social Mobility

The ability of individuals or groups to move upward or downward in status based on wealth, occupation, education, or some other social variable.

What is the idea of the melting pot and where did it come from? Even though the US has been described as a melting pot for immigrants, not all immigrant groups follow the same trajectory. Why not? Be able to compare and contrast experiences of Italians, Greeks, Jewish and other European immigrant groups with immigrants from China or India. Be able to understand the difference between the concepts of ethnicity, nation-state, nationality and nationalism.

The melting-together metaphor was in use by the 1780s. The exact term "melting pot" came into general usage in the United States after it was used as a metaphor describing a fusion of nationalities, cultures and ethnicities in the 1908 play of the same name. The reason why not all immigrant groups follow the same trajectory is because those that had already lived here had a strong sense of nationalism and wanted to keep their nation pure of outsiders, so those that didn't fit in to their idea of what is "us" were put as "them" and outcasted as disadvantaged minorities. Nationality is: the status of belonging to a particular nation.

Know what a potlatch is and what practical and ceremonial functions it serves to redistribute resources for the benefit of the group and establishing social status and prestige. How is the potlatch a kind of gift-giving practice and what is its function?

The potlatch ceremony was used by the peoples of the Northwest as a way to: display personal wealth and divide property amongst their people. "Potlatch" is a celebration, in which a contending group would try to give its rival such a large gift that it could not be easily repaid. This would demonstrate their superior economic and social power. (p.111)

What are the two distinct classes of people that Karl Marx identified in the emerging capitalist economy of 19th c Europe and what resources distinguished these two clases? Do you find Marx's theory helpful in understanding class and social inequity today?

The proletariat, working class citizens and the bourgeois, which are the rich people. Marxist theory is very helpful in understanding class today because that division between wealth still exists.

Sovereign territory

The supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power by which an independent state is governed and from which all specific political powers are derived; the intentional independence of a state, combined with the right and power of regulating its internal affairs without foreign interference.

Why does the Toolkit suggest that class is a topic that is not commonly discussed among most people in the U.S Do you discuss with your family or friends? Why or why not? Does your class position differ from that of your friends? What types of efforts do you make to increase your social mobility? What is the difference between income and wealth?

The toolkit suggests that class is a topic not commonly discussed in the U.S because class stratification has always been a part of our society; there has always been a divide between the wealthy and the not wealthy, but we don't talk about it because the difference is so ingrained in us. Yes, my class differs from that of my friends and in order to change my class status, I am going to college and then graduate school so I can get a good paying job. The difference between income and wealth is that income is how much money you bring in and wealth is how affluent or prosperous you are.

Be able to show how the Old World long-distance trade routes were a precursor to the global economy and provide examples of commodity exchanges in the Triangle Trade.

They were a precursor to today's global economy because they allowed different groups from around the world to open for the trade of goods.

Health

a person's mental or physical condition.

Nation-State

a sovereign state whose citizens or subjects are relatively homogeneous in factors such as language or common descent.

Balanced reciprocity

involves more distantly related exchange partners, like cousins, and entails giving with the expectation of a equivalent, but not necessarily with immediate return; without the return of a gift may trouble the relationship

Surplus value of labor

is a central concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. ... According to Marx's theory, surplus value is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labor-cost, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold.

Eugenics

is a conscious effort to improve the genetic quality of human race.

Chiefdom

is a form of hierarchical political organization in non-industrial societies usually based on kinship, and in which formal leadership is monopolized by the legitimate senior members of select families or 'houses'. These elites form a political-ideological aristocracy relative to the general group.

New colossus

is a sonnet that American poet Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) wrote in 1883 to raise money for the construction of a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. In 1903, the poem was cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal's lower level.

Ethnomedicine

is a study or comparison of the traditional medicine practiced by various ethnic groups, and especially by indigenous peoples. The word ethnomedicine is sometimes used as a synonym for traditional medicine

Governmentality

is a term coined by philosopher Michel Foucault, and refers to the way in which the state exercises control over, or governs, the body of its populace. ... According to Foucault, governmentality allows for the creation of "docile bodies" to be used in modern economic and political institutions