UCLA Anthro 3 Final

Third gender

- A gender identity that exists in non-binary gender systems offering one or more gender roles separate from male or female. - Third gender roles and practices initially banned, then seen as exotica with little relevance, now used in the argument that Western gender systems are neighter universal nor innate.

De facto apartheid

- Agricultural work in the US is segregated along an ethnicity-citizenship-labor hierarchy - Ethnicity determines one's position in the farm; citizenship status further shapes it - Anglo and Japanese American at the top indigenous Mexicans at the bottom - The further down the ladder one is positioned, the more physically taxing the work, the more exposure to weather and pesticides, the stronger the feat of government, and the less control one has over

Lewis Henry Morgan

- American attorney & armchair anthropologist - Ancient Society 1877 :postulated a theory of human societies evolved through three states - Savegary, barbarism, civilization, passage from one stage is marked by some technological revolution

Culture

- An evolved human capacity (to learn from others, act creatively, pass down our knowledge across historical time, to classify and represent experiences with symbols, etc) - The distinct ways that different groups of people understand their experiences, communicate, and act upon the world - Culture is learned - Culture is shared - Culture is normative - Culture is naturalized - Culture is symbolic - Culture is integrated - Culture is dynamic

Naive realism

- Belief that people everywhere see the world the same way; that just human nature - Speaks to a unitary ideal, shared by everyone, not true because way too simplified

Tacit culture

- Cultural knowledge that people lack words for - You learn it mostly by practice, imitation and observation. - For example, sounds you can distinguish and utter.

Symbolic violence

- Initially coined by Pierre Bourdieu as "symbolic domination" - Non-physical violence manifested in the power differential between social groups - Tacit, almost unconscious movies of cultural/social domination agreed upon by both parties and exercised upon people with their complicity

Prevention through deterrence

- Land of the Open Graves reading - Deterring immigration with urban landscape to cross - Deadly landscape - Illustrates the cunning way that nature has been conscripted by the Border Patrol to act as an enforcer while simultaneously providing this federal agency with plausible deniability regarding blame for any victims the desert may claim

Intersex

- Many Western societies ignore the existence of intersex, forced treatment legal requirement to choose - Most surgeries (90%) make ambiguous male anatomy into female, often based on the size of the penis - Changing medical perspectives

Bronislaw Malinowski

- Polish british anthropologist 1884-1942 - Founding father of ethnographic fieldwork - Advocate for intense fieldwork - Methodical and theoretical approach - Deformed the goal of ethnography to "grasp the native's point of view, relation to life, to realize his vision of the world"

Cultural construction

- The 5 Sexes reading - Fausto-Sterling questions our taken for granted belief about sex - A variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't seem to fit the typical definitions of male or female (Hermaphrodite to intersex) - What if not only gender but also biological sex is culturally constructed - Are there two sexes in the nature? Or are we shaping the nature according to our societal norms? - Our ideas about human biological are also culturally constructed

Clifford Geertz

- The Interpretation of Cultures 1973 - Symbolic and interpretive anthropology - Thick description - Balinese cockfight

Explicit culture

- The cultural knowledge you can talk about - You learn it mostly by hearing it from the others, for example from your parents, teachers, and etc.

Anthropology

- The study of humankind - Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange

Structural violence

- The violence of injustice and inequity embedded in ubiquitous social structures and normalized by institutions and everyday experience - A parallel between physical violence and the ways social, political, institutional, and economic structures systematically create health disparities and cause damage to certain groups of people

Folk taxonomy

A classification system composed of a hierarchy of groups. Different societies make sense of and culturally classify human differences in different ways.

Key informant

A community member who advises the anthropologist on community issues, provides feedback, and warns against cultural miscues. Also called cultural consultant.

Mestizo/ mestizaje

A person of mixed Spanish and Native American ancestry.

Positionality

A persons uniquely situated social position, which reflects their gender, nationality, political views, previous experiences, and so on

Rapport

A positive relationship

Thick description

A research strategy that combines detailed description of cultural activity with an analysis of the layers of deep cultural meaning in which those activities are embedded. Composed not only of facts but also of interpretations and interpretations of those interpretations.

Participant observation

A research technique in anthropology characterized by the effort of an investigator to gain entrance into the social acceptance by a foreign cultures so as better to attain an understanding of the internal structure of society

Detached observer

A researcher who adopts the strategy of a detached observation, an approach to scientific inquiry stressing emotional detachment and the construction of categories by the observer in order to classify what is observed

Insider's perspective

Emic perspective, the one belonging to the cultural group in question. An anthropologist can acquire this perspective through the ethnography.

Balinese cockfight

Ethnography by Clifford Geertz. Example of deep play as the Balinese comment on themselves, a text that embodies the network of social relationships in kin and village that govern balinese life. Enacts the Balinese social values and norms in a ritualistic setting. A text about status in bali, betting is secondary to status. Vividly portrays abstract concept - status - to its participants. Deep play: a game with extremely high stakes (amounts of money, status, masculinity).

Ethnocentrism

Evaluatating other cultures according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of one's own culture.

Franz Boas

Father of American anthropology

Social evolutionism

Idea that culture went through 3 stages: savegary, barbarism, and civilization

Race

Identity with a group of people descended from a common ancestor.

Hijra

In the Indian subcontinent, Hijra are eunuchs, intersex people, and transgender people

Armchair anthropologist

Influence of Darwin and social evolutionism. Relied on the writings of amateurs. Universal human culture is shared; different cultures represent different stages of the unilinear evolution. Sam sequence of stages.

Genotype

Inherited genetic makeup of an organism.

Phenotype

Organisms form as a result of the interaction between genotype and environment.

Symbol

Our social and cultural world is a series of signs systems, similar to languages, that communicate meanings through symbols.

Deep play

Performances (like sports) that are expressive forms of culture with functions similar to the other arts.

Culture shock

Personal disorientation when experiencing an unfamiliar way of life

Reading culture

Reading culture as a text. Aims at deciphering the meanings embedded in and conveyed through language, objects, gestures, and activities that are shared by members of a society. Finding patterns in the familiar.

Alfred Kroeber

Started as huge program of writing down the tribe's stories (salvage anthropology)

Fieldwork

Stay for long periods of time, learn the local language. Get off the veranda (mingle with locals, engage in participant observation). Explore the "mundane imponderabilia," seemingly commonplace, everyday items and activities of local life to acquire the insiders perspective.

Cultural relativism

Suspending judgement to understand the logic and dynamics of other cultures

Hypodescendent

The assignment of children to racially "mixed unions to the subordinate group."

Sex

The biological distinction between females and males.

Militarization

The contested social process through which a civil society organizes for the production of military violence

Colonialism

The idea of culture changed how we explain human differences. Colonial thinkers explained human differences with references to creation, climate, and race.

Gender

The initial assignment as male or female, which usually occurs at birth and is subsequently referred to as "natal gender."

Intersectionality

The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.

Ishi

The last surviving member of a gathering and hunting group known as the Yahi who lived in northern California. His people were driven into extinction during the second half of the nineteenth century by the intrusion of farming and herding "civilized" societies.

Emic perspective

The perspective of the insider, the one belonging to the cultural group in question

Etic perspective

The perspective of the outside observer

Scientific racism

The use of scientific theories to support or validate racist attitudes or worldviews; also, to support classification of human beings into distinct biological races.

Sexual dimorphism

Umbrella English language contemporary term that refers to non-binary gender identities that were present in some tribal nations pre-invasion

Margaret Mead

United States anthropologist noted for her claims about adolescence and sexual behavior in Polynesian cultures (1901-1978)

One drop rule

Was a legal principle of racial classification prominent in the 20th century US. Asserted that anyone with even one ancestor of black ancestry is considered black. A notion that continues to be prominent today.

Ethnography

Writing and observing a group of people. Ethnography is both research and its written end product. Most distinctive feature of anthropology and its basic research method (no controlled experiments or laboratories. Gathering and interpretation of information based on intensive firsthand study of a particular culture (fieldwork)