Chapters 7-10

Examples of H/G societies

!Kung, Mbuti, Netsilik, Efe, Eskimo, Agta, Hadza

marriage

A culturally sanctioned union between two or more people that establishes certain rights and obligations between the people, between them and their children, and between them and their in-laws. Such marriage rights and obligations most often include, but are not limited to, sex, labor, property, childrearing, exchange, and status.

consanguineal family

A family of blood relatives, consisting of related women, their brothers, and the women's offspring.

Culture area

A geographic region in which a number of societies follow similar patterns of life.

nuclear family

A group of consisting of one or two parents and dependent offspring, which may include a stepparent, stepsiblings, and adopted children. Until recently this term referred only to the mother, father, and child(ren) unit.

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.

Polyandry

A marriage form in which a woman is married to two or more men at one time; a form of polygamy.

serial monogamy

A marriage form in which an individual marries or lives with a series of partners in succession.

money

A means of exchange used to make payments for other goods and services as well as to measure their value.

Kula ring

A mode of balanced reciprocity that reinforces trade and social relations among the seafaring Melanesians who inhabit a large ring of islands in the southwestern Pacific Ocean

negative reciprocity

A mode of exchange in which the aim is to get something for as little as possible. Neither fair nor balanced, it may involve hard bargaining, manipulation, outright cheating, or theft.

balanced reciprocity

A mode of exchange in which the giving and the receiving are specific as to the value of the goods or services and the time of their delivery.

generalized reciprocity

A mode of exchange in which the value of the gift is not calculated, nor is the time of repayment specified.

silent trade

A mode of exchange of goods between mutually distrusting ethnic groups so as to avoid direct personal contact

food foraging

A mode of subsistence involving some combination of hunting, fishing, and gathering of wild plant foods. Mobile, small group size, flexible division of labor, food sharing, egalitarian social relations, communal property, rarity of warfare,

neolocal residence

A residence pattern in which a married couple establishes its household in a location apart from either the husband's or the wife's relatives.

ecosysytem

A system, or a functioning whole, composed of both the natural environment and all the organisms living within it.

AN: Rosita Worl

Alaskan anthropologist Rosita Worl, whose Tlingit names are Yeidiklats'akw and Kaa hani, belongs to the Thunderbird Clan from the ancient village of Klukwan in southeastern Alaska. During her growing-up years by the Chilkat River, elders taught her to speak loudly so her words could be heard above the sound of crashing water. And her mother, a cannery union organizer, took her along to meetings. As a university student, Worl led a public protest for the first time—successfully challenging a development scheme in Juneau detrimental to local Tlingit. When she decided to pursue her anthropology doctorate at Harvard, she did so with a strong sense of purpose: "You have to be analytical about your culture," she says. "At one time, before coming into contact with other societies, we were just able to live our culture, but now we have to be able to keep it intact while integrating it into modern institutions. We have to be able to communicate our cultural values to others and understand how those modern institutions impact those values." Worl's graduate studies included fieldwork among the Inupiat of Alaska's North Slope region—research that resulted in her becoming a spokesperson at state, national, and international levels for the protection of whaling practices and the indigenous subsistence lifestyle. For over three decades now, she has fought to safeguard traditional rights to natural resources essential for survival, for current and future generations, including her own children and grandchildren. A recognized leader in sustainable, culturally informed economic development, Worl has held several major positions at the Sealaska Corporation, a large Native-owned business enterprise with almost 18,000 shareholders primarily of Tlingit and neighboring Haida and Tsimshian descent. Created under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Sealaska is now the largest private landholder in southeastern Alaska. Its subsidiaries collectively employ over a thousand people and include timber harvesting, marketing of wood products, land and forest resource management, construction, and information technology. Putting the holistic perspective and analytical tools of anthropology into practice, Worl has spearheaded efforts to incorporate the cultural values of southeast Alaska Natives into Sealaska—including shareholding opportunities for employees. Currently, Worl serves as president of Sealaska Heritage Institute, a Native nonprofit organization that seeks to perpetuate and enhance Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian cultures, including language preservation and revitalization. Also on the faculty of the University of Alaska, Southeast, she has written extensively about indigenous Alaska for academic and general audiences. She founded the journal Alaska Native News to educate Native Alaskans on a range of issues and is deeply involved in the implementation of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Sought for her knowledge and expertise, Worl has served on the board of directors of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, as well as Cultural Survival, Inc. She has earned many honors for her work, including the American Anthropological Association's Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology, received in 2008 in recognition of her exemplary career. Tlingit anthropologist Rosita Worl is president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute and a board member of the Alaska Federation of Natives.

new reproductive technologies (NRTs)

An alternative means of reproduction such as in vitro fertilization.

clan

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

Economic systems

An organized arrangement for producing, distributing, and consuming goods.

BC: Maori Origins; Ancestral Genes and Mythical Canoes

Anthropologists have been fascinated to find that the oral traditions of Maori people in New Zealand fit quite well with scientific findings. New Zealand, an island country whose dramatic geography served as the setting for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, lies in a remote corner of the Pacific Ocean about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) southeast of Australia. Named by Dutch seafarers who landed on its shores in 1642, it was claimed by the British as a colony about 150 years later. Maori, the country's indigenous people, fought back but were outgunned, outnumbered, and forced to lay down their arms in the early 1870s. Today, nearly 600,000 of New Zealand's 4.1 million citizens claim some Maori ancestry. Maori have an age-old legend about how they came to Aotearoa ("Land of the Long White Cloud"), their name for New Zealand: More than twenty-five generations ago, their Polynesian ancestors arrived in a great fleet of sailing canoes from Hawaiki, their mythical homeland sometimes identified with Tahiti where the native language closely resembles their own. According to chants and genealogies passed down through the ages, this fleet consisted of at least seven (perhaps up to thirteen) seafaring canoes. Each of these large dugouts, estimated to weigh about 5 tons, had a single claw-shaped sail and carried 50 to 120 people, plus food supplies, plants, and animals. As described by Maori anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck), the seafaring skills of these voyagers enabled them to navigate by currents, winds, and stars across vast ocean expanses.a Perhaps escaping warfare and tribute payments in Hawaiki, they probably made the five-week-long voyage around 1350, although there were earlier and later canoes as well. Traditional Maori society is organized into about thirty different iwis ("tribes"), grouped into thirteen wakas ("canoes"), each with its own traditional territory. Today, prior to giving a formal talk, Maori still introduce themselves by identifying their iwi, their waka, and the major sacred places of their ancestral territory. Their genealogy connects them to their tribe's founding ancestor who was a crewmember or perhaps even a chief in one of the giant canoes mentioned in the legend of the Great Fleet.b Maori oral traditions about their origins mesh with scientific data based on anthropological and more recent genetic research. Study by outsiders can be controversial because Maori equate an individual's genes to his or her genealogy, which belongs to one's iwi or ancestral community. Considered sacred and entrusted to the tribal elders, genealogy is traditionally surrounded by tapu ("sacred prohibitions").c The Maori term for genealogy is whakapapa ("to set layer upon layer"), which is also a word for gene. This Maori term captures something of the original genous, the Greek word for "begetting offspring." Another Maori word for gene is ira tangata ("life spirit of mortals"), and for them, a gene has mauri (a "life force"). Given these spiritual associations, genetic investigations of Maori DNA could not proceed until the Maori themselves became actively involved in the research. Together with other researchers, Maori geneticist Adele Whyte has examined sexlinked genetic markers, namely mitochondrial DNA in women and Y chromosomes in men.d She recently calculated that the number of Polynesian females required to found New Zealand's Maori population ranged between 170 and 230 women. If the original fleet sailing to Aotearoa consisted of seven large canoes, it probably carried a total of about 600 people (men, women, and children). A comparison of the DNA of Maori with that of Polynesians across the Pacific Ocean and peoples from Southeast Asia reveals a genetic map of ancient Maori migration routes. Mitochondrial DNA, which is passed along virtually unchanged from mothers to their children, provides a genetic clock linking today's Polynesians to southern Taiwan's indigenous coastal peoples, showing that female ancestors originally set out from that island off the southeastern coast of China about 6,000 years ago.e In the next few thousand years, they migrated by way of the Philippines and then hopped south and east from island to island. Adding to their gene pool in the course of later generations, Melanesian males from New Guinea and elsewhere joined the migrating bands before arriving in Aotearoa. In short, Maori cultural traditions in New Zealand are generally substantiated by anthropological as well as molecular biological data.

AN: Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009)

Claude Lévi-Strauss lived to be 100. When he died, he was the most celebrated anthropologist in the world. Born in Belgium, where his father briefly worked as a portrait painter, he grew up in Paris. As a boy during World War I, Claude lived with his grandfather, a rabbi of Versailles. He studied law and philosophy at the Sorbonne, married a young anthropologist named Dina Dreyfus, and became a philosophy teacher. In 1935, the couple ventured across the ocean to Brazil's University of São Paulo, where his wife taught anthropology and he sociology. Influenced by 18th-century romantic philosopher Rousseau and fascinated by historical accounts of Brazilian Indians, he preferred ethnographic research and lectured on tribal social organization. In 1937, he and Dina organized an expedition into the Amazon forest, visiting Bororo and other tribal villages and collecting artifacts for museums. In 1938, they made another journey and researched recently contacted Nambikwara Indians. Back in Paris together in 1939, their marriage dissolved. That same year, the Second World War erupted, and the French army mobilized its soldiers, including Lévi-Strauss. A year after Nazi Germany conquered France in 1940, LéviStrauss escaped to New York City, where he became an anthropology professor at the New School for Social Research. Teaching courses on South American Indians during the war years, he befriended other European exiles, including the linguist Roman Jakobson, who pioneered the structural analysis of language. After the war, Lévi-Strauss became French cultural consul in the United States, based in New York. Maintaining ties with the academic community, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, he completed his two-part doctoral thesis: "The Elementary Structures of Kinship" and "The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians." Theoretically influenced by Jakobson's structural linguistics, his thesis analyzed the logical structures underlying the social relations of kin-ordered societies. Building on Marcel Mauss's 1925 study of gift exchange as a means to build or maintain a social relationship, he applied the concept of reciprocity to kinship, arguing that marriage is based on the exchange relationship between kin-groups of "wife-givers" and "wife-takers." Returning to France in late 1947, he became associate director of the ethnographic museum in Paris and successfully defended his thesis at the Sorbonne. His structural analysis was recognized as a pioneering study in kinship and marriage. In 1949, Lévi-Strauss joined an international body of experts invited by UNESCO to discuss and define the "race concept," a disputed term associated with discrimination and genocide. Three years later, he authored Race and History, a book that became instrumental in UNESCO's worldwide campaign against racism and ethnocentrism. By then, he had become an anthropology professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Continuing his prolific writing, he published Tristes Tropiques (1955). This memoir about his ethnographic adventures among Amazonian Indians won him international fame. His 1958 book, Structural Anthropology, also became a classic. It presented his theoretical perspective that the human mind produces logical structures, classifying reality in terms of binary oppositions (such as light-dark, good-evil, nature-culture, and male-female) and that all humans share a mental demand for order expressed in a drive toward classification. In 1959, Lévi-Strauss became the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France and founded his own institute there. Specializing in the comparative study of religion, he undertook a massive comparative study and structural analysis of myths, resulting in a series of instantaneously classic books. In 1973, he was elected to the centuries-old Académie Française, a prestigious institution with just forty members known as "immortals." Countless other honors from around the world followed. Now, survived by his wife Monique and two sons, he lies in a small rural cemetery in Burgundy, near his old mansion, where he liked to reflect on the human condition.

patrilineal descent

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

Globalscape: Apples

Each fall, several hundred Jamaicans migrate to Maine for the apple harvest.a While plucking the trees with speed and skill, they listen to reggae music that reminds them of home. Calling each other "brother," they go by nicknames like "Rasta." Most are poor peasants from mountain villages in the Caribbean where they grow yams. But their villages do not produce enough to feed their families, so they go elsewhere to earn cash. Before leaving Jamaica, they must cut their dreadlocks and shave their beards. Screened and contracted by a labor recruiter in Kingston, they receive a temporary foreign farm worker visa from the U.S. embassy and then fly to Miami. Traveling northward by bus, many work on tobacco farms en route to Maine's orchards (and in Florida's sugarcane fields on the way home). Earning the minimum hourly wage as regulated by the federal H-2A program for "temporary agricultural workers," they work seven days a week, up to ten hours daily. Orchard owners value these foreigners because they are twice as productive as local pickers. Moreover, handpicked apples graded "extra fancy" earn farmers eight times the price of apples destined for processing. While in the United States, the Jamaicans remain quite isolated, trying to save as much as they can so they can send more money home. Just before leaving the country, most of them buy goods to take home as gifts or to resell for profit—from shoes and clothing to electronics and refrigerators. Throughout most of the 1900s, rural labor conditions for seasonal migrant workers in the United States were likened to indentured service (causing some critics to call the federal H-2A program "rent-a-slave"). Nonetheless, many Jamaicans endured the hardships, pursuing harvesting work as an opportunity to escape from the dismal poverty on their Caribbean island. Notably, conditions began to improve in the 1990s after the U.S. Department of Labor established the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, requiring agricultural employers to pay nonimmigrant agricultural workers a wage that would not adversely affect the employment opportunities of U.S. workers. This significantly increased the hourly wages of foreign farmhands. However, like minimum wage standards for U.S. citizens, these increases have not kept up with inflation—and do not change the fact that migrant laborers must exercise extreme frugality and spend long months away from home in order to support their families.

Globalscape: Chicken Out: Bush's Legs or Phoenix Talons?

Every evening in Moscow, Russians can be found enjoying a traditional dinner that may begin with borscht (beet soup) and smetana (sour cream), followed by a main course of kotleta po-kievski (boneless fried chicken breast). But, if the budget is a bit tight, dinner might be nozhki busha (chicken legs), baked, fried, or roasted—served with cabbage and potatoes. Foreign visitors may recognize the breast entrée as chicken Kiev but may be baffled to learn that the specialty nozhki busha translates as "Bush's legs." That is because these big meaty legs are imported from the United States and first appeared on Russian menus when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, during George H. W. Bush's presidency (1989-1993). At the time, the Russian economy was dismal, and few people could afford beef or pork. Even chicken legs were too expensive for ordinary Russians. To help the transition to a capitalist democracy, the U.S. government promoted the advantages of free markets and global trade. What better propaganda than cheap chicken—especially because the American preference for white meat resulted in a surplus of the dark-meat legs. And so it was that the U.S. poultry industry entered the Russian market. Today, Russia imports more U.S. chicken than it produces on its own farms, especially legs—over a billion! What happens with a typical 6-pound broiler chicken butchered by a Mexican immigrant working for minimum wage in a Mississippi poultry plant? As we have seen, its legs are served up in Moscow, and its breasts end up on U.S. dining tables or on the menus of international airlines. And the rest of the bird? One of its frozen wings goes into a giant container shipped to Korea; the other to West Africa. The offal (neck, heart, liver, and guts) is transported to Jamaica, where it is boiled and dished up in soup. The excess fat gets converted into biodiesel fuel at an experimental refinery in Texas. And what about its cute yellow feet? They are exported to Shanghai, deep fried, stewed, and served up as a delicacy called fèngzhuâ, or Phoenix talons, last seen being nibbled on by a visiting New York banker.

progress

In anthropology, a relative concept signifying that a society or country is moving forward to a better, more advanced stage in its cultural development toward greater perfection.

AA: Resolving a Native American Tribal Membership Dispute

In autumn 1998, I received a call from the tribal chief of the Aroostook Band of Micmacs (now also spelled Mi'kmaq) in northern Maine asking for help in resolving a bitter tribal membership dispute. The conflict centered on the fact that several hundred individuals had become tribal members without proper certification of their Mi'kmaq kinship status. Traditionalists in the community argued that their tribe's organization was being taken over by "non-Indians." With the formal status of so many members in question, the tribal administration could not properly determine who was entitled to benefit from the available health, housing, and education programs. After some hostile confrontations between the factions, tribal elders requested a formal inquiry into the membership controversy, and I was called in as a neutral party with a long history of working with the band. My involvement as an advocacy anthropologist began in 1981 when this Mi'kmaq band first employed me, along with Bunny McBride, to help them achieve U.S. government recognition of their Indian status. At the time, they formed a poor and landless community not yet officially recognized as a tribe. During that decade, we helped the band define its political strategies, which included petitioning for federal recognition of their Indian status; claiming their traditional rights to hunt, trap, and fish; and even demanding return of lost ancestral lands. To generate popular support for the effort, I coproduced a film about the community ("Our Lives in Our Hands").a Most important, we gathered oral histories and detailed archival documentation to address kinship issues and other government criteria for tribal recognition. The latter included important genealogical records showing that most Mi'kmaq adults in the region were at least "half-blood" (having two of their grandparents officially recorded as Indians). Based on this evidence, we effectively argued that the Aroostook Mi'kmaq could claim aboriginal title to lands in the region. Also, we were able to convince politicians in Washington, DC, to introduce a special bill to acknowledge their tribal status and settle their land claims. When formal hearings were held in 1990, I testified in the U.S. Senate as an expert witness for the band. The following year, the Aroostook Band of Micmacs Settlement Act became federal law. This made the band eligible for the financial assistance (health, housing, education, and child welfare) and economic development loans that are available to all federally recognized tribes in the United States. Moreover, the law provided the band with funding to buy a 5,000-acre territorial base in Maine. Flush with federal funding and rapidly expanding its activities, the 500-member band became overwhelmed by complex bureaucratic regulations now governing their existence. Without formally established ground rules determining who could apply for tribal membership, and overlooking federally imposed regulations, hundreds of new names were rather casually added to its tribal rolls. By 1997, the Aroostook band population had ballooned to almost 1,200 members, and Mi'kmaq traditionalists were questioning the legitimacy of many whose names had been added to the band roster. With mounting tension threatening to destroy the band, the tribal chief invited me to evaluate critically the membership claims of more than half the tribe. In early 1999, I reviewed the kinship records submitted by hundreds of individuals whose membership on the tribal rolls was in question. Several months later, I offered my final report to the Mi'kmaq community. After traditional prayers, sweetgrass burning, drumming, and a traditional meal of salmon and moose, I formally presented my findings. Based on the official criteria, about 100 lineal descendants of the original members and just over 150 newcomers met the minimum required qualifications for membership; several hundred others would have to be removed from the tribal roster. After singing, drumming, and closing prayers, the Mi'kmaq gathering dispersed. Today, two decades later, the band's membership has grown beyond 1,200, due to verified applications, as well as procreation. Faring well, it has purchased about 3,200 acres of land, including a small residential reservation near Presque Isle, now home to about 300 Mi'kmaq. Also located here are tribal administration offices, a health clinic, and a cultural center.

parallel evolution

In cultural evolution, the development of similar cultural adaptations to similar environmental conditions by peoples whose ancestral cultures were already somewhat alike.

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.

BC: Marriage Prohibitions in the United States by Martin Ottenheimer

In the United States, every state has laws prohibiting the marriage of some relatives. Every state forbids parent-child and sibling marriages, but there is considerable variation in prohibitions concerning more distant relatives. For example, although twenty-five states ban marriage between first cousins, nineteen states and the District of Columbia allow it, and others permit it under certain conditions. Notably, the United States is the only country in the Western world that has prohibitions against first-cousin marriage. Many people in the United States believe that laws forbidding marriage between family members exist because parents who are too close biologically run the risk of producing children with mental and physical defects. Convinced that first cousins fall within this "too close" category, they believe laws against first-cousin marriage were established to protect families from the effects of harmful genes. There are two major problems with this belief: First, cousin prohibitions were enacted in the United States long before the discovery of the genetic mechanisms of disease. Second, genetic research has shown that offspring of first-cousin couples do not have any significantly greater risk of negative results than offspring of very distantly related parents. Why, then, do some North Americans maintain this belief? To answer this question, it helps to know that laws against first-cousin marriage first appeared in the United States right after the mid-1800s when evolutionary models of human behavior became fashionable. In particular, a pre-Darwinian model that explained social evolution as dependent upon biological factors gained popularity. It supposed that "progress from savagery to civilization" was possible when humans ceased inbreeding. Cousin marriage was thought to be characteristic of savagery, the lowest form of human social life, and it was believed to inhibit the intellectual and social development of humans. It became associated with "primitive" behavior and dreaded as a threat to a civilized America. Thus, a powerful myth emerged in American popular culture, which has since become embedded in law. That myth is held and defended to this day, sometimes with great emotion despite being based on a discredited social evolutionary theory and contradicted by the results of modern genetic research. Recently, a group of geneticists published the results of a study of consanguineous unions, estimating that there is "about a 1.7-2.8% increased risk for congenital defects above the population background risk."a Not only is this a high estimate, it is also well within the bounds of the margin of statistical error. But even so, it is a lower risk than that associated with offspring from women over the age of 40—who are not forbidden by the government to marry or bear children.

Anthro. Applied: Agricultural Development and the Anthropologist, Ann Kendall

Indigenous peoples have often impressed anthropologists with their traditional practices, which display both ingenuity and knowledge. Beyond the profession of anthropology, people, especially Westerners, have adopted the popular notion that indigenous groups invariably live in some sort of blissful oneness with the environment. But this was never the message of anthropologists, who know that traditional peoples are only human and, as such, are capable of making mistakes. Just as we have much to learn from their successes, so too can we learn from their failures. Archaeologist Ann Kendall is doing just this in the Patacancha Valley in the Andes Mountains of southern Peru. Kendall is director and founder of the Cusichaca Trust, near Oxford, England, a rural development organization that revives ancient farming practices. In the late 1980s, after working for ten years on archaeological excavations and rural development projects, she invited botanist Alex Chepstow-Lusty of Cambridge University to investigate climatic change and paleoecological data. His findings, along with Kendall's, provided evidence of intensive farming in the Patacancha Valley, beginning about 4,000 years ago. The research showed that over time, widespread clearing to establish and maintain farm plots, coupled with minimal terracing of the hillsides, had resulted in tremendous soil loss through erosion. By 1,900 years ago, soil degradation and a cooling climate had led to a dramatic reduction in farming. Then, about 1,000 years ago, farming was revived, this time with soil-sparing techniques. Kendall's investigations have documented intensive irrigated-terrace construction over two periods of occupation, including Inca development of the area. It was a sophisticated system, devised to counteract erosion and achieve maximum agricultural production.a The effort required workers to haul load after load of soil up from the valley floor. In addition, they planted alder trees to stabilize the soil and to provide both firewood and building materials. So successful was this farming system by Inca times that the number of people living in the valley quadrupled to some 4,000, about the same as it is now. However, yet another reversal of fortune occurred when the Spanish took over Peru, and the terraces and trees here and elsewhere were allowed to deteriorate. Armed with these research findings and information and insights gathered through interviews and meetings with locals, the Cusichaca Trust supported the restoration of the terraces and 5.8 kilometers (3.6 miles) of canal. The effort relied on local labor working with traditional methods and materials—clay (with a cactus mix to keep it moist), stone, and soil. Local families have replanted 160 hectares of the renovated pre-conquest terraces with maize, potatoes, and wheat, and the plots are up to ten times more productive than they were. Among other related accomplishments, twenty-one water systems have been installed, which reach more than 800 large families, and a traditional concept of homebased gardens has been adapted to introduce European-style vegetable gardens to improve diet and health and to facilitate market gardening. Since 1997, these projects have been under an independent local rural development organization known as ADESA. The Cusichaca Trust has continued its pioneering work in areas of extreme poverty in Peru farther to the north, such as Apurímac and Ayacucho, using tried and tested traditional technology in the restoration of ancient canal and terrace systems. Mountain terracing in Peru has counteracted erosion and provided irrigation for farmland.

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.

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 the lineal system.

Exogamy

Marriage outside a particular group or category of individuals.

Examples of Pastoralists

Nuer, Sherpas, Bassari, Bakhtiari, Fulani, Mongols

Potlatch

On the northwest Coast of North America, an indigenous ceremonial event in which a village chief publicly gives away stockpiled food and other goods that signify wealth.

Globalscape: Transnational Child Exchange?

Settling into her seat for the flight to Boston, Kathryn cradled the sleepy head of her newly adopted son, Mesay. As the plane lifted away from African soil and presented a sweeping view of Ethiopia's capital, tears slid down her cheeks. Were the tears for Ethiopia's loss of a boy, a boy's loss of Ethiopia, or her profound joy for the gift of adoption? Child exchange is a universal phenomenon, taking place across the world and throughout human history. Just as marriage and kinship mean different things in different cultures, so does child exchange, referred to in the English language as adoption. In some cultures, adoption is rare, whereas in others, such as in Polynesian communities in the Pacific Islands, it is very common. For instance, in a small village in Tahiti over 25 percent of children are raised by adoptive parents. A cross-cultural understanding of adoption is vital now that child exchange has become part of the global flow—especially from poor countries in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and eastern Europe—to affluent countries in North America and western Europe. The global exchange of children initially involved war orphans after World War II. In recent decades, extreme poverty has become a major factor, as mothers confronting serious deprivation may feel forced to abandon, give away, or sometimes sell their children. Whether brokered by government or nongovernmental agencies, by for-profit or nonprofit enterprises, global child exchange has become a big business—legal and illegal, moral and amoral, joyful and sorrowful. This is especially true in poor countries where most workers earn less than a dollar a day, and a foreign adoption nets $12,000 to $35,000 in broker fees. Since the early 1970s, about 500,000 foreign children have been adopted into families in the United States alone. A nearly equal number have ended up in other wealthy countries. The global flow to the United States peaked in 2004 when nearly 23,000 arrived—most from China (30 percent), Russia (25 percent), Guatemala (14 percent), and Korea (7 percent), with 5,500 flown in from other poor countries such as India, the Philippines, Ukraine, and Vietnam. Statistics vary and shift according to adoption rules. Some countries have shut the door on foreign adoptions due to accusations of exporting or even selling children. Others restrict or prohibit it for religious reasons. Sudan, for example, forbids foreign adoption of Muslim children and automatically classifies religiously unidentified orphans as Muslim. A country that does not discriminate on the basis of religion is its neighbor Ethiopia, which has gained popularity as an infant-provider country. One of six U.S. agencies officially approved to do foreign adoptions from Ethiopia is Wide Horizons for Children in Waltham, Massachusetts, which has placed many Ethiopian children with U.S. families. Among them is Mesay (pictured in the family photo above), now settled into his new life with Kathryn, her husband, and their four other children, including a sister about his age, adopted from China as an infant.

BC: Cacao, The Love Bean in the Money Tree

Several thousand years ago Indians in the tropical lowlands of southern Mexico discovered how to produce a hot brew from ground, roasted beans. They collected these beans from melon-shaped fruit pods growing in trees identified by today's scientists as Theobroma cacao. By adding honey, vanilla, and some flowers for flavoring, they produced a beverage that made them feel good, and they believed that these beans were gifts from their gods. Soon, cacao beans became part of long-distance trade networks and appeared in the Mexican highlands, where the Aztec elite adopted this drink brewed from cacahuatl, calling it "chocolatl." In fact, these beans were so highly valued that Aztecs also used them as money. When Spanish invaders conquered Guatemala and Mexico in the 1520s, they adopted the region's practice of using cacao beans as currency inside their new colony. They also embraced the custom of drinking chocolate, which they introduced to Europe, where it became a luxury drink as well as a medicine.a Over the next 500 years, chocolate developed into a $14 billion global business, with the United States as the top importer of cacao beans or cacao products. Women buy 75 percent of the chocolate products, and on Valentine's Day more than $1 billion worth of chocolate is sold. What is it about chocolate that makes it a natural aphrodisiac? Other than carbohydrates, minerals, and vitamins, it contains about 300 chemicals, including some with mood-altering effects. For instance, cacao beans contain several chemical components that trigger feelings of pleasure in the human brain. In addition to tryptophan, which increases serotonin levels, chocolate also contains phenylethylamine, an amphetamine-like substance that stimulates the body's own dopamine and has slight antidepressant effects. Chocolate contains anandamide (anan means "bliss" in Sanskrit), a messenger molecule that triggers the brain's pleasure center. Also naturally produced in the brain, anandamide's mood-enhancing effect is the same as that obtained from marijuana leaves. Finally, chocolate also contains a mild stimulant called theobromine ("food of god"), which stimulates the brain's production of natural opiates, reducing pain and increasing feelings of satisfaction and even euphoria. These chemicals help explain why the last Aztec ruler Montezuma drank so much chocolate. A Spanish eyewitness, who visited his royal palace in the Aztec capital in 1519, later reported that Montezuma's servants sometimes brought their powerful lord in cups of pure gold a drink made from the cocoa-plant, which they said he took before visiting his wives.... I saw them bring in a good fifty large jugs of this chocolate, all frothed up, of which he would drink a little. They always served it with great reverence. On average, each cacao tree produces about 30 pods a year, and each pod contains 30 cacao beans (seeds). It takes about 450 beans to make 1 pound of chocolate. Here we see the harvest of the cacao pods.

OG Study: Arranging Marriage in India by Serena Nanda

Six years after my first field trip to India, I returned to do research among the middle class in Bombay, a modern, sophisticated city. Planning to include a study of arranged marriages in my project, I thought I might even participate in arranging one myself. An opportunity presented itself almost immediately. A friend from my previous Indian trip was in the process of arranging for the marriage of her eldest son. Because my friend's family was eminently respectable and the boy himself personable, well educated, and nice looking, I was sure that by the end of my year's fieldwork, we would have found a match. The basic rule seems to be that a family's reputation is most important. It is understood that matches would be arranged only within the same caste and general social class, although some crossing of subcastes is permissible if the class positions of the bride's and groom's families are similar. Although dowry is now prohibited by law in India, extensive gift exchanges took place with every marriage. Even when the boy's family does not "make demands," every girl's family nevertheless feels the obligation to give the traditional gifts—to the girl, to the boy, and to the boy's family. Particularly when the couple would be living in the joint family—that is, with the boy's parents and his married brothers and their families, as well as with unmarried siblings, which is still very common even among the urban, upper-middle class in India—the girl's parents are anxious to establish smooth relations between their family and that of the boy. Offering the proper gifts, even when not called "dowry," is often an important factor in influencing the relationship between the bride's and groom's families and perhaps, also, the treatment of the bride in her new home. In a society where divorce is still a scandal and the divorce rate is exceedingly low, an arranged marriage is the beginning of a lifetime relationship not just between the bride and groom but between their families as well. Thus, although a girl's looks are important, her character is even more so because she is being judged as a prospective daughter-in-law as much as a prospective bride.... My friend is a highly esteemed wife, mother, and daughter-in-law. She is religious, soft-spoken, modest, and deferential. She rarely gossips and never quarrels, two qualities highly desirable in a woman. A family that has the reputation for gossip and conflict among its womenfolk will not find it easy to get good wives for their sons.... ORIGINAL STUDY Originally from North India, my friend's family had lived for forty years in Bombay, where her husband owned a business. The family had delayed in seeking a match for their eldest son because he had been an air force pilot for several years, stationed in such remote places that it had seemed fruitless to try to find a girl who would be willing to accompany him. In their social class, a military career, despite its economic security, has little prestige and is considered a drawback in finding a suitable bride.... The son had recently left the military and joined his father's business. Because he was a college graduate, modern, and well traveled, from such a good family, and, I thought, quite handsome, it seemed to me that he, or rather his family, was in a position to pick and choose. I said as much to my friend. Although she agreed that there were many advantages on their side, she also said, "We must keep in mind that my son is both short and dark; these are drawbacks in finding the right match."... An important source of contacts in trying to arrange her son's marriage was my friend's social club in Bombay. Many of the women had daughters of the right age, and some had already expressed an interest in my friend's son. I was most enthusiastic about the possibilities of one particular family who had five daughters, all of whom were pretty, demure, and well educated. Their mother had told my friend, "You can have your pick for your son, whichever one of my daughters appeals to you most." I saw a match in sight. "Surely," I said to my friend, "we will find one there. Let's go visit and make our choice." But my friend did not seem to share my enthusiasm. When I kept pressing for an explanation of her reluctance, she admitted, "See, Serena, here is the problem. The family has so many daughters, how will they be able to provide nicely for any of them?...Because this is our eldest son, it's best if we marry him to a girl who is the only daughter, then the wedding will truly be a gala affair." I argued that surely the quality of the girls themselves made up for any deficiency in the elaborateness of the wedding. My friend admitted this point but still seemed reluctant to proceed. "Is there something else," I asked her, "some factor I have missed?" "Well," she finally said, "there is one other thing. They have one daughter already married and living in Bombay. The mother is always complaining to me that the girl's in-laws don't let her visit her own family often enough. So it makes me wonder, will she be that kind of mother who always wants her daughter at her own home? This will prevent the girl from adjusting to our house. It is not a good thing." And so, this family of five daughters was dropped as a possibility. Somewhat disappointed, I nevertheless respected my friend's reasoning and geared up for the next prospect. This was also the daughter of a woman in my friend's social club. There was clear interest in this family and I could see why. The family's reputation was excellent; in fact, they came from a subcaste slightly higher than my friend's own. The girl, an only daughter, was pretty and well educated and had a brother studying in the United States. Yet, after expressing an interest to me in this family, all talk of them suddenly died down and the search began elsewhere. "What happened to that girl as a prospect?" I asked one day. "You never mention her anymore. She is so pretty and so educated, what did you find wrong?" "She is too educated. We've decided against it. My husband's father saw the girl on the bus the other day and thought her forward. A girl who 'roams about' the city by herself is not the girl for our family." My disappointment this time was even greater, as I thought the son would have liked the girl very much....I learned that if the family of the girl has even a slightly higher social status than the family of the boy, the bride may think herself too good for them, and this too will cause problems.... After one more candidate, who my friend decided was not attractive enough for her son, almost six months had passed, and I had become anxious. My friend laughed at my impatience: "You Americans want everything done so quickly. You get married quickly and then just as quickly get divorced. Here we take marriage more seriously. If a mistake is made we have not only ruined the life of our son or daughter, but we have spoiled the reputation of our family as well. And that will make it much harder for their brothers and sisters to get married. So we must be very careful." What she said was true and I promised myself to be more patient. I had really hoped and expected that the match would be made before my year in India was up. But it was not to be. When I left India my friend seemed no further along in finding a suitable match for her son than when I had arrived. Two years later, I returned to India and still my friend had not found a girl for her son. By this time, he was close to 30, and I think she was a little worried. Because she knew I had friends all over India, and I was going to be there for a year, she asked me to "help her in this work" and keep an eye out for someone suitable.... It was almost at the end of my year's stay in India that I met a family with a marriageable daughter whom I felt might be a good possibility for my friend's son.... This new family had a successful business in a medium-sized city in central India and were from the same subcaste as my friend. The daughter was pretty and chic; in fact, she had studied fashion design in college. Her parents would not allow her to go off by herself to any of the major cities in India where she could make a career, but they had compromised with her wish to work by allowing her to run a small dress-making boutique from their home. In spite of her desire to have a career, the daughter was both modest and home-loving and had had a traditional, sheltered upbringing. I mentioned the possibility of a match with my friend's son. The girl's parents were most interested. Although their daughter was not eager to marry just yet, the idea of living in Bombay—a sophisticated, extremely fashion-conscious city where she could continue her education in clothing design—was a great inducement. I gave the girl's father my friend's address. Returning to Bombay on my way to New York, I told my friend of this newly discovered possibility. She seemed to feel there was potential but, in spite of my urging, would not make any moves herself. She rather preferred to wait for the girl's family to call upon them. A year later I received a letter from my friend. The family had visited, and her daughter and their daughter had become very good friends. During that year, the two girls had frequently visited each other. I thought things looked promising. Last week I received an invitation to a wedding: My friend's son and the girl were getting married. Because I had found the match, my presence was particularly requested at the wedding. I was thrilled. Success at last! As I prepared to leave for India, I began thinking, "Now, my friend's younger son, who do I know who has a nice girl for him... ?"

Neolithic

The New Stone Age; a prehistoric period beginning about 10,000 years ago in which peoples possessed stone-based technologies and depended on domesticated plants and/or animals for subsistence.

Jared Diamond

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race was transitioning from foraging to agrarian life.

Pastoralism

The breeding and managing of migratory herds of domesticated grazing animals, such as goats, sheep, cattle, llamas, and camels.

Suirviving in the Andes: Aymara Adaptation to High Altitude. BAKER, P.

The central Andean highlands of Bolivia offer an interesting example of complex biocultural interaction, where a biologically adapted human body type has emerged due to natural selection. Known as the altiplano, this high plateau has an average elevation of 4,000 meters (13,000 feet). upon reaching the cold and treeless highlands, they found herds of llamas and hardy food plants, including potatoes—reasons to stay. Eventually (about 4,000 years ago) their descendants domesticated both the llamas and the potatoes and developed a new way of life as high-altitude agropastoralists. Over the course of many centuries, the Aymara selectively cultivated more than 200 varieties of these tubers on small family-owned tracts of land. They boiled them fresh for immediate consumption and also freeze-dried and preserved them as chuño, which is the Aymara's major source of nutrition to this day. Experiencing a marked hypoxia (insufficient oxygenation of the blood), a person's normal physiological response to being active at such heights is quick and heavy breathing. Most outsiders visiting the altiplano typically need several days to acclimatize to these conditions. Going too high too quickly can cause soroche ("mountain sickness"), with physiological problems such as pulmonary hypertension, increased heart rates, shortness of breath, headaches, fever, lethargy, and nausea. These symptoms usually disappear when one becomes fully acclimated, but most people will still be quickly exhausted by otherwise normal physical exercise. Through generations of natural selection, their bodies have become biologically adapted to the low oxygen levels. Short-legged and barrel-chested, their small bodies have an unusually large thoracic volume compared to their tropical lowland neighbors and most other humans. Remarkably, their expanded heart and lungs possess about 30 percent greater pulmonary diffusing capacity to oxygenate blood.

Horticulture

The cultivation of crops in food gardens, carried out with simple hand tools such as digging sticks and hoes.

Neolithic Revolution

The domestication of plants and animals by peoples with stone-based technologies beginning about 10,000 years ago and leading to radical transformations in cultural systems; sometimes referred to as the Neolithic transition.

Reciporicty

The exchange of goods and services, of approximately equal value, between two parties.

carrying capacity

The number of people that the available resources can support at a given level of food-getting techniques.

incest taboo

The prohibition of sexual relations between closely related individuals.

OG Study: Gardens of the Mekranoti Kayapo By Dennis Werner

To plant a garden, Mekranoti men clear the forest and burn the debris. Then, in the ashes, men and women plant sweet potatoes, manioc, bananas, corn, pumpkins, papaya, sugar cane, pineapple, cotton, tobacco, and annatto, whose seeds yield achiote, the red dye used for painting ornaments and people's bodies. Because the Mekranoti don't bother with weeding, the forest gradually invades the garden. After the second year, only manioc, sweet potatoes, and bananas remain. And after three years or so there is usually nothing left but bananas. Except for a few tree species that require hundreds of years to grow, the area will look like the original forest twenty-five to thirty years later. This gardening technique, known as slash-and-burn, is one of the most common in the world. At one time critics condemned it as wasteful and ecologically destructive, but today we know that, especially in the humid tropics, it may be one of the best gardening methods possible. Continuous high temperatures encourage the growth of the microorganisms that cause rot, so organic matter quickly breaks down into simple minerals. The heavy rains dissolve these valuable nutrients and carry them deep into the soils, out of the reach of plants. The tropical forest maintains its richness because the heavy foliage shades the earth, cooling it and inhibiting the growth of the decomposers. A good deal of the rain is captured by leaves before ever reaching the ground. When a tree falls in the forest and begins to rot, other plants quickly absorb the nutrients that are released. In contrast, with open-field agriculture, the sun heats the earth, the decomposers multiply, and the rains quickly leach the soils of their nutrients. In a few years a lush forest, if cleared for open one-crop agriculture, can be transformed into a barren wasteland. A few months after the Mekranoti plant banana and papaya, these trees shade the soil, just as the larger forest trees do. The mixing of different kinds of plants in the same area means that minerals can be absorbed as soon as they are released; corn picks up nutrients very fast, whereas manioc is slow. Also, the small and temporary clearings mean that the forest can quickly reinvade its lost territory. ORIGINAL STUDY Because decomposers need moisture as well as warmth, the long Mekranoti dry season could alter this whole picture of soil ecology. But soil samples from recently burned Mekranoti fields and the adjacent forest floor showed that, as in most of the humid tropics, the high fertility of the Indians' garden plots comes from the trees that are burned there, not from the soil, as in temperate climates. Getting a good burn is a tricky operation. Perhaps for this reason the more experienced and knowledgeable members of the community oversee its timing. If done too early, the rains will leach out the minerals in the ash before planting time. If too late, the debris will be too wet to burn properly. Then, insects and weeds that could plague the plants will not die and few minerals will be released into the soil. If the winds are too weak, the burn will not cover the entire plot. If they are too strong, the fire can get out of hand. Shortly after burning the plots and clearing some of the charred debris, people begin the long job of planting, which takes up all of September and lasts into October. In the center of the circular garden plot the women dig holes and throw in a few pieces of sweet potatoes. After covering the tubers with dirt, they usually ask a male to stomp on the mound and make a ritual noise resembling a Bronx cheer—magic to ensure a large crop. Forming a large ring around the sweet potatoes, the Indians thrust pieces of manioc stems into the ground, one after the other. Once grown, these stems form a dense barrier around the sweet potato patch. Outside of the manioc ring, women plant yams, cotton, sugar cane, and annatto. An outermost circle of banana stalks and papaya trees is sowed by simply throwing the seeds on the ground, whereas corn, pumpkins, watermelons, and pineapple are planted throughout the garden; rapid growers, they are harvested long before the manioc matures. When I lived with the Mekranoti, Western agronomists—accustomed to single-crop fields and a harvest that happens all at once—knew very little about slash-andburn crop cultivation. Curious about the productivity of Mekranoti horticulture, I began measuring off areas of gardens to count how many manioc plants, ears of corn, or pumpkins were found there. The women thought it strange to see me struggling through the tangle of plants to measure off areas, 10 meters by 10 meters, placing string along the borders, and then counting what was inside. Sometimes I asked a woman to dig up all of the sweet potatoes within the marked-off area. My requests were bizarre, but they cooperated, holding on to the ends of the measuring tapes or sending their children to help. For some plants, like bananas, I simply counted the number of clumps of stalks in the garden, and the number of banana bunches I could see growing in various clumps. By watching how long it took the bananas to grow, from the time I could see them until they were harvested, I could calculate a garden's total banana yield per year. Combining the time allocation data with the garden productivities, I got an idea of how hard the Mekranoti need to work to survive. The data showed that for every hour of gardening one Mekranoti adult produces almost 18,000 kilocalories of food. (As a basis for comparison, people in the United States consume approximately 3,000 kilocalories of food per day.) As insurance against bad years, and in case they receive visitors from other villages, they grow far more produce than they need. But even so, they don't need to work very hard to survive. A look at the average amount of time adults spend on different tasks every week shows just how easygoing life in horticultural societies can be: 8.5 hours Gardening 6.0 hours Hunting 1.5 hours Fishing 1.0 hour Gathering wild foods 33.5 hours All other jobs Altogether, the Mekranoti need to work less than 51 hours a week, and this includes getting to and from work, cooking, repairing broken tools, and all of the other things we normally don't count as part of our work week.

Technology

Tools and other material equipment, together with the knowledge of how to make and use them.

Examples of Horticulturists

Trobianders, Mayan, Vanautu, Gerurumba, Kwoma

extended family

Two or more closely related nuclear families clustered together in a large domestic group.

AA: Global Ecotourism and Local Indigenous Culture in Bolivia by Amanda Stronza

We traveled in a small fleet of motorized canoes. As the sun dipped behind the trees one steamy afternoon in April 2002, we turned the last few bends of the Tuichi River and arrived at our destination, the Chalalán Ecolodge of northern Bolivia. Our group included eighteen indigenous leaders from various parts of the Amazon rainforest, a handful of regional tour operators, conservationists, environmental journalists, and me—an applied anthropologist studying the effects of ecotourism on local livelihoods, cultural traditions, and resource use. We had been navigating for nine hours through lowland rainforest to visit one of the first indigenous, community-run ecotourism lodges in the world. As we wended our way, combing the riverbanks for caimans, capybaras, tapirs, and jaguars, our conversations meandered too. Mostly, the indigenous leaders shared stories of how ecotourism had affected their own forests and communities. They spoke of tourists who brought both opportunities and conflicts, and of their own efforts to balance conservation and development. They compared notes on wildlife in their regions, the kinds of visitors they had attracted, the profits they'd earned, the new skills they had gained, and the challenges they were facing as they sought to protect their lands and cultural traditions while also engaging with the global tourism industry. Having studied ecotourism in the Amazon since 1993, I felt honored to be on board participating in these discussions. With support from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, I had the opportunity that year—the International Year of Ecotourism [2002]—to assemble leaders from three indigenous ecotourism projects in South America. All three were partnerships between local communities and private tour companies or nongovernmental organizations. For example, the lodge we were visiting, Chalalán, came about through a partnership between the Quechua-Tacana community of San José de Uchupiamonas, Bolivia, and two global organizations: Conservation International and the Inter-American Development Bank. Much of the $1,450,000 invested in Chalalán went toward preparing community members to assume full ownership and management of the lodge within five years. After a successful transfer in 2001, the lodge now belonged to San José's 600-member Quechua-Tacana community. The indigenous leaders who gathered for this trip had keen, firsthand knowledge about the costs and benefits ecotourism can bring. They were former hunters, now leading tourists as birding and wildlife guides; small farmers and artisans making traditional handicrafts to sell to visitors; river-savvy fishermen supplementing their incomes by driving tour boats; and local leaders whose intimate knowledge of their communities helped them manage their own tour companies. Among them was Chalalán's general manager Guido Mamani, who recounted the benefits Chalalán had brought to the Tacana of San José. "Ten years ago," he recalled, "people were leaving San José because there were few ways to make a living. Today, they are returning because of pride in the success of Chalalán. Now, they see opportunity here." As a result of their renewed pride in their mix of Quechua and Tacana histories, the community has begun hosting tourists for cultural tours in San José. "We want to give tourists presentations about the community and our customs," Mamani explained, "including our legends, dances, traditional music, the coca leaves, the traditional meals. We want to show our culture through special walks focusing on medicinal and other useful plants." Mamani and the other indigenous ecotourism leaders characterized the success of their lodges in three ways: economic, social, and environmental. Chalalán, for example, counted its economic success in terms of employment and new income. It directly employs eighteen to twenty-four people at a time, and additional families supply farm produce and native fruits to the lodge. With artisans selling handicrafts to tourists, the community has gained regional fame for its wooden carved masks. The social benefits of Chalalán include new resources for education, healthcare, and communication. With their profits from tourism, the community built a school, a clinic, and a potable water system. They also purchased an antenna, solar panels, and a satellite dish to connect with the world from their remote forests along the Tuichi River. Beyond these sorts of material improvements, ecotourism has catalyzed symbolic changes for the people of San José. "We have new solidarity in our cultural traditions," one woman noted, "and now we want to show who we are to the outside world." These experiences of Chalalán and similar projects suggest that ecotourism may be more than just a conservation and development idea—it may also be a source of pride, empowerment, and strengthened cultural identity among indigenous peoples.

OG Study: Honor Killing in the Netherlands

When I first told my anthropology professors I wanted to write my dissertation on honor killing among Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands, they told me no way. It was the mid-1990s, and everyone seemed to feel that writing negative things about struggling immigrants was discriminatory. Better to choose a subject that would help them deal with the challenges of settling in Dutch society, such as the problems they experienced as foreigners in school or at work. But I was quite determined to investigate this issue and finally found a professor who shared my interest—Dr. Anton Blok. He himself was specialized in Italian mafia,a so was quite used to violence of the cultural sort. Before getting into some of the details of my research, I need to set the stage. Until the 1960s, the Netherlands was a relatively homogeneous society (despite its colonial past). The major differences among its people were not ethnic but religious, namely their distinct ties to Catholicism or Protestantism (of various kinds). The country's population makeup began to change dramatically after the economic boom of the 1960s created a need for cheap labor and led to an influx of migrants from poor areas in Mediterranean countries seeking wage-earning opportunities. These newcomers came not as immigrants but as "guest laborers" (gastarbeiders) expected to return to their countries of origin, including Italy, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Morocco. Although many did go back home, numerous others did not. In contrast to most of the guest workers from southern European nations, those from Turkey and Morocco are mainly Muslim. And unlike southern ORIGINAL STUDY European workers who stayed on as immigrants and successfully assimilated into Dutch society, many of the Muslim newcomers formed isolated, diasporic communities. During the past several decades, these communities have multiplied and rapidly expanded in size and are concentrated in certain areas of various cities. Today, the Turkish population in the Netherlands is about 450,000. Most of them have become Dutch citizens, but they maintain some key cultural features of their historical "honor-andshame" traditions. And this is what is at stake when we are dealing with the problem of honor killing. Anthropologists have identified honor-and-shame traditions in many parts of the world, especially in remote traditional herding and farming societies where the power of the political state is either absent or ineffective. People in such areas, my professor, Dr. Blok, explained, cannot depend on stable centers of political control for the protection of life and patrimony. In the absence of effective state control, they have to rely on their own forces—on various forms of self-help. These conditions... put a premium on self-assertive qualities in men, involving the readiness and capacity to use physical force in order to guarantee the immunity of life and property, including women as the most precious and vulnerable part of the patrimony of men. The extremes of this sense of honour are reached when even merely glancing at a woman is felt as an affront, an incursion into a male domain, touching off a violent response.b Beyond serving as a means of social control in isolated areas, honor-and-shame traditions may be used in situations where state mechanisms are alien to a certain group of people, as among some Turkish and Moroccan migrants in the Netherlands. Focusing on the latter, I tried to make sense of certain cultural practices that often baffle indigenous Dutch citizens accustomed to a highly organized bureaucratic state in which our personal security and justice are effectively managed by social workers, police, courts, and so on. Most of all, I wanted to understand honor killings. Honor killings are murders in the form of a ritual, and they are carried out to purify tarnished honor—specifically honor having to do with something Turks refer to as namus. Both men and women possess namus. For women and girls namus means chastity, whereas for men it means having chaste family members. A man is therefore dependent for his namus on the conduct of the womenfolk in his family. This means in effect that women and girls must not have illicit contact with a member of the opposite sex and must avoid becoming the subject of gossip because gossip alone can impugn namus. The victim of an honor killing can be the girl or woman who tarnished her honor, or the man who did this to her (usually her boyfriend). The girl or woman is killed by her family members, the man is killed by the family of the girl/woman whose honor he has violated. As I was wrapping up my PhD in 2000, Dutch society still did not seem quite ready to acknowledge the phenomenon of honor killing. That year a Kurdish boy whose parents were born in Turkey tried to shoot the boyfriend of his sister. Because the attempt took place in a high school and resulted in injury to several students and a teacher, authorities focused on the issue of school safety rather than on the cultural reasons behind the murder attempt. A shift in government and public awareness of honor killing took place in 2004. That year three Muslim Turkish women were killed by their former husbands on the street. Coming in quick succession, one after the other, these murders did not escape the attention of government officials or the media. Finally, honor killing was on the national agenda. In November of that year I was appointed as cultural anthropologist at the Dutch police force in The Hague district and began working with law enforcers on honor killing cases there (and soon in other areas of the country). On November 2, 2004, the day I gave an opening speech about honor killings to colleagues at my new job, a radical Muslim migrant from Morocco shot the famous Dutch author and film director Theo van Gogh, well known for his critical, often mocking, views on Islam. Although his murder was not an honor killing, it had key elements of that cleansing ritual: It occurred in a public place (on the street) in front of many people, the victim had to die (injury would not suffice), the killer used many shots (or knife thrusts), the killing was planned (it was not the product of a sudden outburst), and the killer had no remorse. Let me tell you about a recent and quite typical case. On a Friday evening the local police in an eastern Dutch community called in the help of our police team. A 17-year-old Turkish girl had run away to the family home of her Dutch boyfriend, also 17. Her father, who had discovered that this boy had a police record, telephoned his parents and asked them to send the daughter home. The parents tried to calm him down and told him his daughter was safe at their house. But as he saw it, she was in the most dangerous place in the world, for she was with the boy she loved. This could only mean that her virginity was in jeopardy and therefore the namus of the whole family. My colleagues and I concluded that the girl had to be taken out of her boyfriend's home that same night: The father knew the place, he did not want the boy as a son-inlaw, and he believed his daughter was not mature enough to make a decision about something as important as marriage. ("Just having a boyfriend" was not allowed. You either marry or you do not have a boyfriend, at least not an obvious one.) Because of my honor killing research, I was well aware of similar situations that ended in honor killings. To leave the girl where she was would invite disaster. After we persuaded the prosecutor that intervention was necessary, the girl was taken from her boyfriend's house and brought to a guarded shelter to prevent her from fleeing back to him the next day. This is anthropology-in-action. You cannot always just wait and see what will happen (although I admit that as a scholar this is very tempting); you have to take responsibility and take action if you are convinced that a human life is at stake. When I took up the study of cultural anthropology, I did so just because it intrigued me. I never imagined that what I learned might become really useful. So, what I would like to say to anthropology students is: Never give up on an interesting subject. One day it might just matter that you have become an expert in that area. At this moment I am analyzing all kinds of threatening cases and drawing up genealogies of the families involved—all in the effort to deepen our understanding of and help prevent honor killings.

leveling mechanism

a cultural obligation compelling prosperous members of a community to give away goods, host public feasts, provide free service, or otherwise demonstrate generosity so that no one permanently accumulates significantly more wealth than anyone else

bride service

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

household

a domestic unit of one or more persons living in one residence. Other than family members, a household may include non relatives, such as servants.

conjugal family

a family established through 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

Polygyny

a marriage form in which a man is married to two or more women at the same time; a form of polygamy

fictive marriage

a marriage form in which a proxy is used as a symbol of someone not physically present to establish the social status of a spouse and heirs

Polygamy

a marriage form in which one individual has multiple spouses at the same time

group marriage

a marriage form in which several men and women have sexual access to one another; also called co-marriage

Redistribution

a mode of exchange in which goods flow into a central place, where they are sorted, counted, and reallocated

informal economy

a network of producing and circulating marketable commodities, labor, and services that for various reasons escapes government control

Kinship

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

Dowry

a payment at the time of a woman's marriage that comes from her inheritance, made to either her or her husband

patrilocal residence

a residence pattern in which a married couple lives in the husband's father's place of residence

matrilocal residence

a residence pattern in which a married couple lives in the wife's mother's place of residence

conspicuous consumption

a showy display of wealth for social prestige

peasant

a small-scale producer of crops or livestock living on land self-owned or rented in exchange for labor, crops, or money and exploited by more powerful groups in a complex society

industrial society

a society in which human labor, hand tools, and animal power are largely replaced by machines, with an economy primarily based on big factories

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

slash-and-burn cultivation

an extensive form of horticulture in which the natural vegetation is cut, the slash is subsequently burned, and crops are then planted among the ashes; also known as swidden farming

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

cultural adaptation

consists of a complex of ideas, activities, and technologies that enable them to survive and even thrive; in turn, that adaptation impacts their environment.

cultural evolution

cultural change over time; not to be confused with progress

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; sometimes called unilateral decent.

matrilineal descent

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

Durkheim's Anomie

h/g don't understand the concept of loneliness.

convergent evolution

in cultural evolution, the development of similar cultural adaptations to similar environmental conditions by different peoples with different ancestral cultures

agriculture

intensive crop cultivation, employing plows, fertilizers, and/or irrigation.

Adaptation

is the process organisms undergo to achieve a beneficial adjustment to a particular environment.

industrial food production

large-scale businesses involved in mass food production, processing, and marketing, which primarily rely on labor-saving machines

monogamy

marriage in which both partners have just one spouse

Endogamy

marriage within a particular group or category of individuals

affinal kin

people related through marriage

Totemism

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

market exchange

the buying and selling of goods and services, with prices set by rules of supply and demand

Parallel Cousin

the child of a father's brother or a mother's sister

Cross cousin

the child of a mother's brother or a father's sister

prestige economy

the creation of a surplus for the express purpose of displaying wealth and giving it away to raise one's status

Bridewealth

the money or valuable goods paid by the groom or his family to the bride's family upon marriage; also called bride-price.

family

two or more people related by blood, marriage, or adoption. The family may take many forms, ranging from a single parent with one or more children, to a married couple or polygamous spouses with or without offspring, to several generations of parents and their children.