Anthro 101 - Final

mana

- A sacred, but impersonal force existing in the universe (people, plants, objects) - In Melanesia, mana acquired by chance or hard work - Supernatural is a domain of impersonal power, or force, which people can control under certain conditions - Objects with mana could change someone's luck - Sometimes anyone could get it, sometimes chiefs/nobles had more mana than ordinary people did - The mana of chiefs flowed out of their bodies and could infect the ground, making it dangerous for others to walk in chiefs footsteps

What is an adaptive strategy?

- A society's main system of economic production; similar adaptive strategies makes two unrelated societies similar (culturally maybe) - Similar economic causes have similar socio-cultural effects; similarities among societies that have a foraging strategy - Argued that similarities between unrelated societies could be the result of similar ways of producing, distributing, or consuming resources.

Kinship terminology

- Any one element is defined at a given moment "in relation" to another element, according to culturally agreed upon rules. - At a different moment, that element will be differently defined (son - father - uncle - nephew - cousin) - Kinship is flexible, dynamic, changing - Kinship is action oriented- It is something we have, but also something we do

Kula: ring of power

- Chief Nalabutau, the chief's nephew, John, and Bill Rudd). - Trobriand Islands - Exchanging gifts - Men, members of various islands - The Kula is changing as the new cash economy enters the islands - Kula shells not similar to money - can't be used for anything other than trading for the other gift - Many cultures

Potlatch

- Chief from an area where there was an abundance of something, gathered neighboring villages and gave everything away (food, blankets, copper, etc) - enhances reputation, and the lavishness of potlatch and value of goods given away increases prestige - Undermines reciprocity, regional exchange system - Ecological interpretation: customs such as the potlatch are cultural adaptations to alternating periods of local abundance and shortage - Some scholars say it is economically wasteful behavior - conspicuous consumption, potlaching was based on an economically irrational drive for prestige. Some societies people strive to maximize prestige at expense of material well-being

magic

- Common to societies with diverse religious beliefs (animistic/ monotheistic/ polytheistic) - Supernatural techniques intended to accomplish specific aims. Magical actions, offerings, spells, formulas, and incantations used with deities or with impersonal forces

Roseberry - shaping of taste and primary data

- Companies persuade people that they need and like certain products - Intersection between the shaping actions in the coffee trade and the needs, tastes, and desires of consumers - Separation by class - age, gender, race - Describe a social and cultural reality - Newfound freedom to choose, and the taste and discrimination cultivated have been shaped by traders and marketers responding to a long term decline in sales with a move toward market segmentation along class and generational lines. - We exercise those choices in a world of structured relationships, and part of what those relationships structure (or shape) is both the arena and the process of choice itself - Data comes from coffee trade journals - people who were buying/selling/packaging, etc. not growing

Bridewealth

- Customary gift from husband and his kin to the wife and her kin such as Lobola in Mozambique - Lobola: o Widespread in patrilineal societies o Compensates the bride's group for the loss of her companionship and labor o Makes the children born to the woman full members of her husband's descent group o Insurance against divorce

In what way does kinship "organize person hood"

- Defines Obligations - Defines who you can and cannot marry - Sense of Belonging - Structures relationships - Kinship are epicenter for how we organize ourselves as a person • Gender • Religion • Social control • Power

Endogamy

- Dictate mating or marriage within a group to which one belongs - Less common but still familiar - Most cultures are this, but they don't have a formal rule to tell people to marry someone from their own society - Caste system: stratified groups in which membership is ascribed at birth and is lifelong

barbie liberation organization

- Dolls were forced to say things that were based on gender stereotypes - Distinguishing a focus on cultural meanings and from a focus on social action - Symbolic play, ownership, gender, intellectual property

main points of marriage

- Dramatic variation in marriage cross-culturally - Regulates social links between sexuality/procreation - Serves to socially legitimate children in the social world - Builds alliances, establishes connections (often economic) among affines (not by blood) - Plays an important role in regulating descent - The transmission of inheritance

Buritila'ulo

- Exchange as a form of political resolution - Village rivalry - Insult - The perils of "Good Measure" - Minute proportion of the flow of yams; each member of insulted village contributed his harvest. Some sugar cane and betel added. The exchange: the insulters gave an equal amount of objects - To underdo was humiliation and showed the insult was not useful - To overdo was a declaration of war to show the insult was justified - Marketists argue only one kind of exchange exits - profit-motivated exchange - "reciprocal" economy - giving good measure - Trobriander's rationality was made imperfect by their unspecialized economy: they couldn't pursue profit directly - but their other ways had the workings of the profit motive

Balanced reciprocity

- Exchanges between people who are more distantly related than are members of same band/household - Horticulture man gives gift to distant cousin, trading partner, - Giver expects something in return at some point - Based on trust - Lending money to a very close friend

Cannibal tours

- Experiencing the Exotic Up Close... from afar - Tourism has less to do with what other people are really like and more to do with how we imagine them to be - reconstructed object - Cannibal tours are part of a larger system of colonially inspired organized tours - But when on the tour, money is exchanged between natives and tourists - Tour guides act like they're on the tourists side by persuading them to bargain - The natives recognize the disparity in wealth between the tourists and their own culture - Visual Representations often de-contextualize from the larger social context

major points associated with anthropology of religion

- Explain the world: answers questions about how and why the world is the way it is. - Validate: Religious beliefs lend moral weight to decisions and rules. - Give meaning: to the events of the world. - Orient: Religions give people a stance to take toward the world. - Themes of Religion: • Belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, forces • A realm beyond the observable, but that impinges on the observable world nonetheless

family of procreation

- Family formed when one marries and has children - Critical relationships are with spouse and children

family of orientation

- Family in which one is born and grows up - Critical relationships are with parents and siblings

Band conflict resolution

- Foragers lacked formal law, No methods of social control and dispute settlement - all societies have ways of settling disputes along with cultural rules or norms about proper and improper behavior. - Had social control and dispute settlement methods.

three ways to approach the study of gender

- Gender defined as set of relationships based on biological notions of sex (based on biological binaries) - Gender defined as the "cultural construction" how meaning is applied to sexual difference - Gender defined as the "performance" of sexual difference (lending itself to forms of activism or intervention)

Rosie the riveter

- Gender roles and WWII - From "Women in the war - we can't win without them" to women back in the household - At first they told women they were just as good as men, but after the war they told them it was time to give the jobs back to the men - They always told the women it would take too long to teach them, but turns out they learned really fast - Domestic-public dichotomy influences gender stratification in industrial societies where gender roles have been changing

imitative magic

- Imitating desired effect on an object - Sticking pins in "voodoo dolls"

Chiefdoms

- Kinship continues a central role (as well as marriage, descent, age, generation, gender) - Social status based on sonority of descent - Permanent regulation of a territory - May regulate 1000s of people - Intensive horticulture, pastoral nomadism, agriculture - Differential access to resources based on kinship and descent - Unequal allocation of power, prestige, wealth - permanent political structure, chiefs and assistants, exempt from ordinary work - office - permanent, must be filled

patrilineal

- Lifetime membership in father's group. - Children of the group's women are excluded (go into the father's group) - Children of the group's men join the group

matrilineal

- Lifetime membership in mother's group. - Children of the group's men are excluded. - Children of the group's women are included

dowry

- Marital exchange in which bride's family or kin provides substantial gifts when their daughter marries - Perceives women as burdens taken on by the husband's family - Correlated with low female status - When a man and his family take a wife, they expect to be compensated for the added responsibility

neolocal

- Married couples are expected to establish a new place of residence - a place of their own - Middle class North Americans - cultural preference and statistical norm

matrilocal

- Married couples live in the wife's community, and their children grow up in the mother's village - Associated with matrilineal descent

social theories of religion

- Marx: Religious systems will hide the violence of the real relationships on which capitalist production rests. - Weber: Rational systems will reduce the reliance on supernatural explanations of the world - Durkheim: Religious systems provide functional social integration provide (may respond to anomie of industrial society)

polygyny

- Men have more than one wife (more common) - Infertile wife remains married to her husband after he has taken a substitute wife provided by her descent group - Men marrying later than women (more widows than widowers) - First wife requests a second wife to help with household chores - Inherited widow from brother - Prestige or increase household productivity

bifurcate merging

- Mothers are your mother and your mothers sisters - Fathers are your father and your fathers brothers - Aunts are your father's sisters - Uncles are your mother's brothers

generational

- Mothers are your mother, and your parents' sisters - Fathers are your father, and your parents' brothers

Negative reciprocity

- Nonindustrial societies - Dealing with people beyond social systems - Seek to get something back immediately - Get something for as little as possible, being deceitful even

Chiefdom conflict resolution

- Office - permanent, must be refilled, bureaucracy, permanent political regulation - Not like a state - with different systems - Social hierarchies - regulation carried out by chief and assistants - position based on merit

Redistribution

- Operates when goods, services, or equivalent move from the local level to a center (capital, regional collection point, storehouse) - Product move through hierarchy of officials for storage at center - The flow of goods eventually reverses direction - out form the center, down through hierarchy, and back to common people

apical ancestor

- Person who stands at the apex (top) of the common genealogy - Demonstrated: members recite names of their forebears from the apical ancestor through present - Stipulated descent: merely say they descend from the apical ancestor, without trying to trace the actual genealogical links

matriarchy

- Political system in which women play a much more prominent role than men do in social and political organization - Women are center, origin, and foundation of social order - Women control land inheritance - Wife collects her husband from his household - Divorce - husband takes his things and leaves

patriarchy

- Political system ruled by men in which women have inferior social and political status, including basic human rights - Women are the endangered sex - Warfare and intervillage raiding - Dowry murders, female infanticide, clitoridectomy - family violence and domestic abuse of women - Sometimes men won't have sex with women because they see everything female as dangerous and polluting

Generalized reciprocity

- Purest form - exchanges between closely related people (band/household) - Someone gives to another personal and expects nothing immediate in return - personal relationships - Among foragers, governed exchanges - very common - Based on trust - Changing diapers and not expecting anything in return

Foraging

- Relies on natural resources for subsistence, rather than controlling plant and animal reproduction - gather, collect, harvest (don't plant), hunt (don't domesticate) - different environments mean different foraging - people rely on nature to make their living - provide satisfactory lifestyle and nutritious diet - live in nation-states, influenced by national policies

patrilocal

- Rule that when a couple marries, it moves to the husband's community, so the children will grow up in their father's village - Patrilineal descent - Each couples resides in the husband's father's household after marriage - Consists of male household head, his wife, the senior women, married sons and their wives/children, and unmarried sons and daughters

What does BEV tell us about language and politics

- SE is not superior to BEV as a linguistic system, but it does happen to be the prestige dialect - the one used in the mass media, in writing, and in most public and professional contexts - Se is the dialect that has the most "symbolic capital" - Upwardly mobile BEV-speaking students learn SE

Exogamy

- Seeking a mate outside one's own group - Links people into a wider social network that nurtures, helps, and protects them in times of need - Discourage sexual contact with close relatives - Reinforced through incest taboos - Cultures define their kind, and incest differently (socially constructed)

taboo

- Set apart as sacred and off limits to ordinary people - High chiefs had so much mana, so their bodies and possessions were taboo - When commoners were accidentally exposed, purification rites were necessary

Martin - Egg and Sperm

- She is reading a textbook - cultural analysis - Sperm as a hero, producer of something valuable - Sperm pauses for portrait - Sperm is "decider' - Sperm as Savior - Menstruation is failed reproduction, wasteful - Over-simplified but strongly held ideas about characteristics of gender - Gender-based tasks and activities assigned by culture

domestic-public dichotomy (public/private contrasts)

- Strong differentiation between the home and the outside world - Gender status is more equal when domestic and public spheres aren't sharply separated - Outside world can include politics, trade, warfare, or work - Clearly separated = public activities have greater prestige than domestic ones do - Gender stratification - men are more active in public than women - Men are hunters and warriors and fighters

animism

- The belief in spiritual beings - Derives from the idea of a double within ourselves, perhaps linked to dreaming and waking states - People see images they remember when they wake up or come out of a trance stance - believe in two entities. One is active during the day, and the other (a double or soul) is active during sleep and trance states - When the double permanently leaves the body, the person dies (soul leaving) - Soul was one sort of a spiritual entity; people remembered various images from their dreams and trances - other spirits

Bruner Reading

- Tourism prefers the reconstructed object - not the actual savages and natives, etc. - They cant handle first contact with natives, they have to wait till some kind of European civilization has happened - Colonialism wants the "traditional" culture that the colonists have destroyed - reconstructed - Tours tell us more about our society than about the society visited - We project our desires on a less developed society - Third world countries become our playground - Take pictures and buy souvenirs - Pictures isolate the larger social context - politics - They don't tell stories about the natives, they tell stories about the pictures and souvenirs

feminization of poverty

- Unequal Gender based distribution of/access to resources - Increasing representation of women (and their children) among America's poorest people - Women head over half the households with incomes below poverty line - Lots of trends of single-parent (usually women) households - Women lead ones are poorer than ones led by men

contagious magic

- Use of physical ingredients that once had contact with an object to achieve an outcome - Use body products form prospective victims - like nails or hair

Tribe conflict resolution

- Village head listens to disputes and mediates between them but has no say in dictating his opinion, limited power - There is a village head, but he doesn't have the kind of authority like an office or someone in a state - village head: leads by example and persuasion - big man - regional, achieved status

How is language connected to politics

- Who has the right to speak in particular situations - Commanding language - Power to conceal language (Becoming an idea: states have the power to withhold information; Look where state is withholding it) - Accepted vs. excluded forms of speech, language, and political action

bifurcate collateral kinship

- You have a mother and a father - Your mother's sister is something different than your father's sister - Your mother's brother is something different than your father's brother

sexual orientation

- a person's sexual attraction to, and habitual sexual activities with, persons of the opposite sex (heterosexuality), the same sex (homosexuality), or both sexes (bisexuality), or asexuality - we see it as fixed and biologically based, but it can be influenced by culture, hormones - individuals will differ in nature, range, and intensity of their sexual interests and urges - Attitudes about it change from culture to culture and over time

gender stratification

- an unequal distribution of rewards (socially valued resources, power, prestige, human rights, and personal freedom) between men and women, reflecting their different positions in a social hierarchy - Economic determinants of gender status: - Freedom or autonomy (in disposing of one's labor and its fruits) - social power (control over the lives, labor, and produce of others)

achieved status

- based on choices, actions, efforts, circumstances, and may be positive or negative - Big man, healer, senator, convicted felon, terrorist, salesperson, union member, father, college student - makes people more noble and relevant in societies - distinguish big man from his fellows

nomadism

- entire group (men, women, children) move with animals - trade for crops and other products with sedentary people

Reciprocity

- exchange between social equals, normally related by kinship, marriage, or another close personal tie - dominant among foragers, cultivators, pastoralists - Dilemmas of the gift

States

- formal government structure and socioeconomic stratification - agriculture, industrialism - permanent, regional regulation - displaced kinship - Population control: boundaries, citizenship, census - judiciary: laws, legal procedure, judges - enforcement: military and police - fiscal systems (taxation) - social strata - wealth, power, prestige

Three types of reciprocity

- generalized - balanced - negative

The market principle

- governs the means of production - land labor, natural resources, technology, knowledge, capital - Items are bought & sold using money, maximize profit - Value set by supply and demand - Bargaining - maximize - get their "money's worth"

Pastoralism

- herders - focus on domesticated animals (sheep, goats, camels) - live in symbiosis with herds (benefit each other) - herders protect animals and ensure reproduction - animals provide food and other products - follow animals on trek - nomadism/transhumance

Tribes

- horticulture: non intensive food production - pastoralists - village membership based on descent groups - informal enforcement (village head and big man lead by example and persuasion- achieved status) - No formal government and no reliable means of enforcing political decisions - live in villages and organized kin groups - Egalitarian, and gender stratification: unequal distribution of resources, power, prestige, and personal freedom between men and women

Agriculture

- intensive, continuous cultivation/use of land - labor intensive/property based - domesticated animals (means of production, trample fields, attached to plows, transport) - irrigation (control water for continuous cultivation) - terracing (farming on hills - springs above give water)

State conflict resolution

- judiciary: laws, legal procedure, judges - enforcement: military and police - stratification - established governments, so formal laws - position based on merit

correlates of foraging

- live in band organized societies (small group related by kinship or marriage, sometimes split up for part of year) - flexibility and mobility (each parent and grandparent has a band, so children can live in whatever band they have relatives in) - Nuclear families!! - egalitarian: contrasts in prestige by age and no significant contrasts in wealth/power

Principles of exchange

- market - redistribution - reciprocity

Basseri video clip - adaptive strategies

- nomadic, pastoralists, seasonal horticulture, seasonal/set migratory routes - sheep and goat herding - nuclear family/patrilineal/neolocal - shared uses of land - distance as a social idiom - how far apart you set up a tent from one another is indicative of social closeness - pastoralist: cyclic migration with herds - sedentary plots assist along migratory paths - combine this with part time food cultivation (horticulture)

Horticulture

- non-intensive, shifting cultivation - part time, nonindustrial - plots of land lie fallow (abandoned) for some time - shifting plots - non-continuous use of land - Cultivate for a year or 2 - slash-and-burn: ashes fertilize, crops planted later there again

nuclear families

- parents and children - two generations - family of orientation and procreation

transhumance

- part of the group moves with the herds, but most people stay in home village - don't trade for crops because people stay in villages and grow crops

unilineal descent groups

- patrilineal - matrilineal

ascribed status

- people have little/no choice about occupying them - Age, male or female, - tribes

Plural marriages

- polygyny - polyandry - serial monogamy

Bands

- small (fewer than 100) - kin-based group (all members related by kinship or marriage) - found among foragers/hunter/gatherers - relatively egalitarian: first among equals - band leaders - no formal law or figure head - emphasis placed on social, political, and gender equality - sharing and trade linked them

weapons of the weak

- small-scale acts of resistance - Lie about the amount farmed - Don't declare land - Deliver rice contaminated with water, etc. to add weight - Public transcript: given a review guide, interested in material, engaged, only have a few questions to clear up - Hidden transcript: "tell me what's on the exam"

Surveillance camera

- some forms of language/ performance are acceptable within public space, but others are seen as threatening. - Orwellian scene - a monitor placed in public to alert those passing by that they were being watched (behave) - commentary on whether the things we think of as public space are indeed very public - people resist social control

parallel cousins

- someone who is a child of the same sex of the parent who's side of the family you're looking at - Father's brother's kids - Mother's sister's kids

cross cousins

- someone who is the child of the different sex of the parent whose side of the family you're looking at - Father's sister's kids - Mother's brother's kids

Phonemes

- sound contrast that makes a difference, that differentiates meaning - The "r" and "l" in "craw" and "claw" - "b" and "v" in Spanish are not phonemes

Kula

- white armshells (mwali) travel counter-clockwise - red shell necklaces (bagi) travel clockwise - archetypical reciprocal exchange - Some things were more valuable than others - People are kedas: a path on which a kula valuable travels - from one man to another - they give because they have received, or they give because they want to oblige someone to give him something he wants - Every movement/detail of transaction is fixed and regulated by traditional rules and conventions rituals and ceremonies too - big and complex institution - geographical and components. Welds together many tribes and embraces many activities to form one whole - Based on a fixed and permanent status, on a partnership which binds into couples some thousands of Trobrianders - lifelong relationships, mutual duties and privileges, inter-tribal relationship on an enormous scale

polyandry

- women have more than one husband - Ensures there will be at least one man at home to accomplish male activities, and the others trade, be in the military, etc.

Minimal pairs

- words that resemble each other in all but one sound - Pertains only to a given language - Bit and beat - Pit and bit

imperialist nostalgia

A longing for same cultural forms that colonialism alters or eradicates

wealth

a person's material assets, including income, land, and other types of property

power

ability to exercise one's will over others, to get what one wants, gets political status

Correlations

associations or covariations between two or more variables (food intake and body weight)

prestige

basis of social status; refers to esteem respect, or approval for acts, deeds, or qualities considered exemplary

monotheistic

belief in a single, all-powerful deity - developed later

authority

formal, socially approved use of power - by gov officials

Cultivation continuum

in between horticulture and agriculture

serial monogamy

multiple spouses is accepted, but not more than one at the same time

residence patterns

nuclear vs. extended

Lineal kinship

one mother, one father, aunts are sisters of our parents, uncles are brother of our parents

gender stereotypes

oversimplified but strongly held ideas about the characteristics of males and females

Hegemony

subordinates comply with domination by internalizing their rulers' values and accepting the "naturalness" of domination (it's the way things are meant to be)

gender roles

tasks and activities a culture assigns by gender

governance

the conduct of conduct how things should be carried out

extended families

three or more generations

consequences of state administration

• Displace the place of kinship • Foster geographic mobility and resettlement • Assign differential rights/distinctions