Anthro Ch. 17, 18, 19 PP

Version 3.0: Geertz and Symbols

"Religion is... 1.A system of symbols which act to 2.establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by 3.formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and 4.clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that 5.the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic" (1966, p. 4). - This definition emphasizes symbols that seem intensely real and factual to believers. What, to outsiders, appear to be mythological parables are, to insiders, historical fact.

Love, sex, and power

- "Dark family secrets, suspicious spouses, unruly children, irresponsible parents, and possible incest make for gripping television, to say the least!" - Soap operas are an exaggerated version of the real-life family dynamics many people experience: the complexities of love, sex, and power. - Anthropologists are especially interested in some of the cultural assumptions made by telenovelas. Not all cultures consider biological relatedness the defining characteristic of a family.

descent groups: lineage

- A group composed of relatives who are directly descended from known ancestors - (Usually a literal human ancestor.)

descent groups: clan

- A group of relatives who claim to be descended from a single ancestor - (This apical [at the "apex"] ancestor may be an animal or supernatural entity.)

Why do people get married?

- A survey of marriage practices reveals many forms and purposes of the institution. Contrary to popular opinion, marriage has not "always" been one way. - Marrying for love, something Americans take for granted, is a recent change in the history of marriage. In most countries, marriage is, and has been, about creating economic and political alliances between families. The idea of marrying for romantic love and sexual attraction strikes people in these cultural contexts as risky. - Marriage creates formally recognized ties between marriage partners and their respective families, and any children resulting from the union are considered "legitimate."

Kinship chart

- A visual representation of family relationships (see Figure 17.1). - These charts are useful for diagramming biological relationships, if not the cultural meanings associated with these relationships.

The Fundamentalism Project (1990s)

- All are threatened by secularization and perceive themselves as fighting to return to "proper" gender roles, sexuality, and education. - They derive meaning and purpose from political and military efforts to defend their beliefs about life and death (especially those issues related to the beginning and end of life). - Fundamentalists define themselves in relation to what they are not: outsiders, modernizers, and moderates. - They are zealous, committed, and firmly convinced that they have been chosen to carry out the will of a deity.

marriage rules

- All cultures have rules regarding sex and marriage. - In the case of arranged marriages, parents may select partners from specific socioeconomic, religious, educational, or ethnic backgrounds. - Incest taboo: the prohibition on sexual relations between close family members. -- Two "exceptions that prove the rule" are ancient Egypt and Hawaii before European contact—rulers, as "living gods," were required to marry a sibling. -- Some cultures prohibit marriage between cousins (or, at least, specific types of cousins), while others do not.

Objects change over time

- All objects change over time, but they can do so in different ways. Most objects age and weather with time, becoming less significant because of age and wear. - To understand the social life of things, there are three major ways that objects change over time: -- The form, shape, color, material, and use may change from generation to generation. --An object changes significance and meaning as its social and physical contexts change. -- A single object changes significance and meaning as it changes hands.

Objects Change Over Time

- All objects change over time, but they can do so in different ways. Most objects age and weather with time, becoming less significant because of age and wear. - To understand the social life of things, there are three major ways that objects change over time: -- The form, shape, color, material, and use may change from generation to generation. -- An object changes significance and meaning as its social and physical contexts change. -- A single object changes significance and meaning as it changes hands.

Cognatic clans

- Also called "bilateral" - Reckoning descent through either men or women from some ancestor - The main difference between a cognatic clan (e.g., Samoans) and a unilineal one is that one person can be a member of multiple cognatic clans.

The Scramble for Artifacts

- An international scramble for collections from societies around the world ensued. -- The American Museum of Natural History in New York City hired Franz Boas, who built its collections. His collecting expeditions to the Northwest Coast brought back objects for display and data about local customs. - The goal was to document lives, economic activities, and rituals of peoples around the globe. - Possession of more of these exotic objects would set one museum apart from the others.

Beyond "either/or"

- Anthropologists increasingly reject either-or perspectives—biology or culture, sex or gender. -- Male-female differences are shaped by a mix of biology, environmental conditions, and sociocultural processes. - Anthropologists are changing their terminology, referring instead to the ideas and social patterns a society uses to organize males, females, and those who do not fit either category as gender/sex systems. - Science textbooks have long suggested that human beings are a sexually dimorphic species, where males and females have a different sexual form. - The differences we can trace to sexual dimorphism are themselves not enough to challenge certainties about the fact of male and female difference.

How Should We Understand Religion and Religious Beliefs?

- Anthropologists study religion to understand people. - The range of religious belief encountered by nineteenth-century scholars made people seem inexplicable. - Anthropologists, working in small-scale societies with relatively simple lifeways and simple technology, assumed that local religious beliefs were also simple. - Deeper investigation gradually revealed the complexity and diversity of beliefs held throughout the world—and the difficulty of cross-culturally defining religion.

Why And How Do The Meanings Of Things Change Over Time?

- Anthropologists today reach very different conclusions about the people who made and used the objects in collections. -- What has changed is how the object is interpreted. - -All objects change over time, if not in their physical characteristics, then in the significance we give to them.

Rites of Passage

- Any life cycle rite that marks a person's or group's transition from one social state to another. These rituals are probably evident in many of the events students have experienced.

Cultural Resource Management

- Archaeologists' role in managing and preserving prehistoric and historic heritage, efforts referred to as CRM or Cultural Resource Management: research and planning aimed at identifying, interpreting, and protecting sites and artifacts of historic or prehistoric significance. -- CRM's goal is to protect and manage the cultural resources of every community, especially important prehistoric sites and structures. - Many Indian groups criticize archaeologists as doing little to help their communities and disturbing the bones of their ancestors. An increasing number of Indians with postgraduate degrees use CRM techniques in preservation.

Archaeology and Politics

- Archaeology plays a role in politics, and politics plays a role in archaeology. - How archaeological knowledge about the past is produced is seen in the ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá. -- Both Americans and Yucatec intellectuals used this archaeological site to construct various images of the ancient Maya. -- Archaeologists have played a central role in explaining Chichén Itzá's ancient past and using the site to promote their scientific credentials. - All anthropologists are immersed in such political and social realities.

Family dynamics

- Beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Ozzie and Harriet norm changed in many interconnected ways: -- More women in the workforce -- More two-income households -- Fewer children (one or two, rather than three or four) -- More divorces -- More blended families

Bride Price

- Bride price: exchange of gifts or money to compensate another clan or family for the loss of one of its women along with her productive and reproductive abilities in marriage. -- For example, in patrilineal Zulu tribes, cattle are paid as bride price. When a man decides whom he would like to marry, his male relatives begin negotiating bride price with the potential bride's family. -- The South African government attempted to force young men to work in mines, disrupting traditional Zulu patterns of marriage. -- Bridewealth may take many forms, including wild game in Amazon communities; pigs and shell valuables in New Guinea societies; or "bride service," a young man's work for his wife's family for a set period of time.

childpricr

- Childprice: intended to buy rights in a woman's children, most typical in societies with patrilineal clans. - In those with matrilineal clans, the children belong to their mother's clan and typically live with her.

clan exogamy

- Clans are most often exogamous: -- A social pattern in which members of a clan must marry someone from another clan, which has the effect of building political, economic, and social ties with other clans.

Symbolic Systems of Meaning

- Collections of objects in museums are a historical archive in multiple dimensions. -- They tell us a great deal about the cultures that made and used these objects as well as the relationships between the collectors' societies and the communities who originally used them. - Objects offer a window for understanding local symbolic systems of meaning. --Any mundane object can help us imagine ourselves. -- We may use objects to attract the attention and admiration of others. And our objects may be used by others to classify and stereotype us.

are we "hardwired?"

- Conclusions about "hardwired" differences in sex are muddied by evidence that culture also shapes male and female preferences and behaviors. - Mead's work shaped anthropological thinking for decades, but has been challenged. - It is difficult to tease apart just how much differences in male and female behavior are caused by "sex" and how much they are caused by "gender

Challenging History

- Construction of a federal office building in New York City serves as an example. - An archaeological assessment of the site revealed human skeletal remains and a long-forgotten burial ground for African slaves. -- Rapid excavation led to the loss of contextual data. -- Black community leaders demanded the remains be reinterred and a landmark established. -- Black leaders wanted to use the facts of slavery and history—as well as this physical site—to foster understanding of African slave ancestors. - Uncovering the past can challenge our understandings of the world in unexpected ways and provoke social controversy in which different groups lay claim to the past.

Changes in Context

- Contexts often change as environments and technologies change. - The example of Tahitians, who had no knowledge of iron until Europeans first visited their islands, is useful here. -- Tahitian men learned about iron tools, then plotted how to get more steel. -- Traditionally stodgy and sexually restrained Tahitian society became transformed as men sent wives, daughters, and sisters to engage in sex in exchange for any sort of iron tools. -- These interactions created the stereotype that Polynesians were traditionally very promiscuous, but horny sailors, combined with the Tahitian desire for iron, transformed Tahitian society and introduced sexual license to these islands. - Simple new technologies can have profound impacts on local communities.

What Does It Mean to Be Neither Male Nor Female?

- Despite their natural "feel," the male and female, man and woman dichotomies we take for granted are as artificial and constructed as any society's gender/sex system. - Many gender/sex systems around the world are less rigid or constraining than our own. - In many societies, some people live their lives as neither male nor female, and have a culturally accepted, often prestigious, symbolic niche and social pathway. - Anthropologists call this third gender or gender variance: expressions of sex and gender that diverge from the male and female norms which dominate in most societies.

In what ways are males and females different?

- Differences between men and women are reinforced by powerful, ongoing messages that tend to stereotype roles. - These stereotypes have become topics of intense debate: -- Why are women excluded from certain kinds of jobs? -- Why are men dominant in certain professions?

Version 1.0: Tylor, Animism, and Evolution

- Edward Tylor (1871) introduced animism: an early theory that primitive peoples believed that inanimate objects such as trees, rocks, cliffs, hills, and rivers were animated by spiritual forces or beings. - Tylor proposed that religion evolved in stages from animism to polytheism to monotheism.

Why do incest taboos exist nearly everywhere?

- Evolutionary explanations view taboos as an adaptive measure to avoid birth defects associated with incest, although it doesn't take much to mix up a gene pool. - Another evolutionary explanation is the Westermarck effect. According to this explanation, natural selection has selected genes that cause us to lack sexual attraction toward people in and around our natal families. - Most cultural anthropologists counter that taboos can be explained socially, citing the research of Melford Spiro (1958). Spiro's work showed that adolescents in Israeli kibbutzes rarely dated or married, despite there not being a prohibition against it.

The Cultural Construction of Meaning

- Facts of history often focus on certain themes that a dominant social group wants to present, while other more unsettling or complicated stories go unrecognized. - Control over the past is a highly contentious issue, but control of the meaning of objects from the present is equally contentious. This dynamic has two dimensions: -- Who has control over access to the resources, both historical and archaeological, from which we can document and uncover the story of how things came to be. -- Interpretations of the material world, whether from the past or our own very modern present, differ according to social interests. - The legal, moral, and political implications are constructed by many different people, each with a different set of personal and social agendas. We call this the cultural construction of meaning.

Rules of Inheritance

- Families also control wealth, property, and power through inheritance rules—to create an orderly process and keep wealth and property in the family. - Inheritance rules have been codified as law in Western countries for centuries. For example, Great Britain has long followed primogeniture, in which the eldest son inherited a man's entire estate. - Nonindustrial societies, even those without legal codes, also have inheritance rules. In such societies, inherited property might include land, livestock, other foods, or any locally recognized valuables. - In any society, inheritance goes to legitimate heirs. Often, but not always, these are the children of a socially recognized married couple.

Families are dynamic

- Families are not permanent entities, since members come and go. Individuals may be members of multiple families in the course of a lifetime, beginning with a natal family: -- The family into which a person is born and (usually) raised. - In other words, families are dynamic.

What are families, and how are they structured in different societies?

- Families fulfill similar functions in most societies: comfort and belonging for members, a sense of identity, shared values and ideals, economic cooperation, and nurturance of children. - Although the functions above are common, the patterns of achieving them are constructed in culturally specific and dynamic systems of kinship: - The social system that organizes people in families based on descent and marriage.

family cooperation

- Families function as corporate groups: groups of real people who work together toward common ends much like a corporation does. -Extended families: larger groups of relatives beyond the nuclear family, often living in the same household. - Extended families were common in nineteenth-century America, with households shared by nuclear relatives, grandparents, unmarried aunts or uncles, etc.

Differences in Meaning & Ownership

- For a long time, nobody was concerned about who owned these objects - In recent decades, questions of ownership and control over these objects have become a contentious issue. -- Shouldn't the people whose direct ancestors made or used these objects have some rights over these collections? -- Who has the right to sell them to museums? -- Who has the moral right to display and interpret them?

Similarity and Contagion

- Frazer's law of similarity (imitative magic) encompasses things like voodoo dolls—harming an imitation or effigy of a real person is believed to harm that person. - Likewise, harming a representative object "contaminated" by a person is believed to harm the person via the law of contagion. - Catholic communion combines these with its symbolic wafer and wine.

Religion and the Social Order

- Fundamentalism differs from religious expression in smaller communities. In small-scale societies, religion often supports the existing social order. Fundamentalism in larger societies sets itself up in opposition to the social order. - The process of belonging and the social action associated with group membership are bolstered by important symbols.

Objects Are Multidimensional

- George W. Stocking argued that objects are multidimensional. - -To understand them, we must recognize and understand not just their three basic physical dimensions—height, width, depth—but four others as well, among them: -- Time (history) -- Power -- Wealth -- Aesthetics

The Sambia of Papua New Guinea

- Gilbert Herdt's study of the Sambia culture suggested that certain male initiation activities were a kind of "ritualized homosexuality" which holds a kind of erotic focus between men. - This is more complicated than it seems because after marriage Sambia men shift their erotic focus to women. - Among the Sambia, however, these ritual acts are intended to develop masculine strength. - Now, studies of similar rites refer to them as "semen transactions" or "boy-inseminating rites."

Hinduism and Buddhism

- Hinduism shares many traits with the polytheistic systems of the Middle East: religious specialists and political leaders maintaining cosmic and social order by seeking the intervention of local deities. - Siddhartha Gautama (born between the fourth and sixth centuries BCE in northern India) challenged orthodox Hinduism. Taking the name Buddha (meaning "awakened one"), he taught a path of compassion and selflessness.

trends in marriage

- If there is a discernible global trend in marriage, it is toward two partners of any gender. - As same-sex unions gain widespread acceptance, polygamy is decreasing in many parts of the world. - Polygamy: any form of plural marriage. Previously far more common in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific than it is today

How Is Religion Linked to Political and Social Action?

- In 1966, Time magazine questioned if religious identification would decline in the United States as it had in Europe. Despite a recent increase in Americans who don't associate with any religious tradition (so-called Nones), religious affiliation has remained stable and even risen in some categories since 1966 (www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx).

Concepts of Same-Sex Sexuality Differ Across Cultures

- In several Latin American countries, for example, a man who engages in same-sex practices is not necessarily identified as (nor would he consider himself) a "homosexual." - Every society places limits on people's sexuality by constructing rules about who can sleep with whom. - Modern governments have asserted unprecedented levels of control over sexuality, implementing and enforcing laws that limit the kinds of sexual relations their citizens can have.

same-sex marriage

- In states and nations where same-sex marriages are not legal, many couples have commitment ceremonies to formalize their relationships and bring together friends and family. - The many social functions of marriage explain why same-sex marriage, after a long and often contentious cultural "war," was legalized in all fifty states by the United States Supreme Court in 2015.

same sex sexuality

- In the 1960s, anthropologists began paying more consistent attention to same-sex sexuality. - From an anthropological perspective, one major difficulty in studying homosexuality in other societies is the problem of adequately naming it. - Most North Americans see sexuality as a fixed and stable condition and identity, an idea that originated much earlier. - in the late nineteenth century, medical science and psychology turned what people had previously considered "perverse" behaviors into bio-psychological conditions requiring medical intervention.

Why Is The Ownership Of Artifacts From Other Cultures A Contentious Issue?

- In the United States, Anthropology began in museums amidst the scramble for collections of cultural, archaeological, linguistic, and biological data. - The Smithsonian Institution assembled impressive anthropological exhibits. - The 1893 World's Fair organized anthropological exhibits to present cultures and prehistory of the New World. At the closing of the fair, a new museum appeared: The Field Museum, which purchased the artifacts and exhibits.

"dealing" with intersex

- In the United States, most intersex children are treated shortly after birth with "sex- assignment surgery" to eliminate any genital ambiguity. - Decisions involved in sex-assignment surgery are rarely medical but are derived from culturally accepted notions about how a boy or girl should look. - Sex-assignment surgery shows that "sex" is not simply a biological phenomenon, but is literally constructed upon cultural assumptions: the assumption that sex is a dichotomy, as well as assumptions about what an ideal male or female should look like

Altered States

- In the Yanomamo ritual of shamanic healing, a shaman attempts to heal ailing individuals by ingesting hallucinogenic snuff made from a local plant. The shaman is supernaturally assisted by a spirit familiar: a spirit that has developed a close bond with a shaman. - In the peyote religion of the Huichol Indians of northern Mexico, the hunt for and use of peyote provides social order. - Pentecostal and charismatic Christian traditions engage in rituals like snake handling and speaking in tongues: the phenomenon of speaking in an apparently unknown language, often in an energetic and fast-paced way.

Shared Identity and Social Hierarchies

- In the kingdom of Benin, the Oba was considered divine and symbolized by a leopard. The Oba's palace was an architectural model of the cosmos. Leopard imagery in the palace, arts, and festivals depicted and maintained the social order. - Egyptian pharaohs were also viewed as earthly manifestations of the gods, along with many others in their polytheistic (a religion of many gods) system. Each of these gods had to be appeased in its own way to maintain the environmental conditions necessary for agriculture in the Nile River valley.

The Hijra of India

- Indian hijras are a third gender who have special social status by virtue of their devotion to Bahuchara Mata. - Hijras are defined as males who are sexually impotent, either because they were born intersex or because they underwent castration. - The lack of male genitals leads hijras to be viewed as "man minus man" and as "male plus female" because they dress and talk like women, take on women's occupations, and act like women in other ways

The Power of Aesthetics

- Just as the aesthetic dimensions of objects shape an object's meaning, powerful people use aesthetics to demonstrate and legitimate power. -- Religious authorities use aesthetics to indicate that the holder of an item possesses divine and earthly power. -- Their power stems in part from the aesthetic style that establishes the objects and their owners as important. -- Aesthetic settings and ways in which such objects are used and displayed can also symbolically communicate the power of their owners.

Kinsey and the understanding of sexuality

- Kinsey's series of sexuality studies in the 1940s revealed that human sexuality is far more complex and subtle than had been assumed, concluding that sexuality exists along a continuum. - Anthropologists today emphasize that human sexuality is a flexible phenomenon ranging along a continuum from asexual (non-sexuality) to polyamorous (love of many). - The notion that sexuality is an essence buried deep in a person's psychological self or genetic makeup is no longer accepted, nor is the notion that sexuality is just a matter of personal preference or individual orientation. - Rather, sexuality is learned, patterned, and shaped by culture and the political-economic system in which one lives.

Kinship terminology

- Lewis Henry Morgan (1871, pictured at left) identified six basic kinship terminology patterns. - Like many of his time, he immediately set about ranking these on a scale of supposed sophistication.

What (and How) Does a Historical Marker Communicate?

- Look closely... -- Objects carry subtle social and political messages, and tell us a lot about social relationships between groups of people. - The concrete, physical presence is its materiality: Having the quality of being physical or material

How Do Religious Rituals Work?

- Magic is key. In anthropology, magic refers to: an explanatory system of causation that does not follow naturalistic explanations, often working at a distance without direct physical contact. - This definition differs from our everyday sense of magic as an intentional illusion. To believers, magical powers and forces are very real and consequential. - Whether we, as anthropologists, believe in magic is irrelevant. We seek an emic understanding of magic and its role in our informants' lives. - Further, Americans are not immune to magical thinking—consider Gmelch's [1978] study of baseball magic.

Interpretive Approach

- Many anthropologists employ Geertz's definition of religion as part of an interpretive approach: -- A kind of analysis that interprets the underlying symbolic and cultural interconnections within a society.

A worldwide problem

- Many countries have implemented legislation and programs of their own, and most governments support UNESCO's World Heritage Site program: which provides financial support to maintain sites of importance to humanity. - Most of the 802 currently recognized cultural sites have played a key role in human history, and the sites include early fossil hominids and key archaeological sites. - UNESCO cannot force countries to protect these sites, but it can formally delist a site if the host countries fail to protect it from any destruction.

It Took Both de Beauvoir's Work and Women Anthropologists to Demonstrate How Anthropology Ignored the Issue of Gender/Sex Inequality

- Most feminist anthropologists rejected the idea that biological differences were the source of women's subordination, and asserted instead that cultural ideologies and social relations imposed lower status, prestige, and power on women. -- On one side were those who argued that women's lower status is universal. -- On the other side were feminist anthropologists who argued that egalitarian male-female relations have existed throughout human history. - The entire feminist anthropology debate led to the recognition that gender/sex inequality is, if not universal, at least pervasive.

Men and women in society

- Nearly all societies with any degree of social stratification have more men than women in leadership roles and in political, economic, and social roles involving trade, exchange, kinship relations, ritual participation, and dispute resolution. - French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex argued that throughout history women have been considered "the second sex," inferior in status and subordinate to men. - Prior to de Beauvoir, a handful of women anthropologists had studied women's status and roles in other societies, seeking to understand if all societies treated women as unequally as Euro-American societies did.

Differing Views

- Nearly all tribes that use CRM view heritage management differently than most federal government agencies. -- Non-Indian agencies nearly always see heritage resources as tangible places and things, and scientific study as a way of finding a middle ground between the heritage resource and some other use. --Tribes tend to prefer avoiding the disturbance of the heritage resource altogether, including scientific investigation, emphasizing their spiritual connections to the past. - Social conflicts around objects are complex, suggesting that the meanings and uses of objects are not such straightforward matters.

Changes in Form, Shape, Color, Material, and Use

- Nearly every manufactured product has changed over time as styles and social preferences have changed. -- We usually understand these changes as gradual improvements in form or technology. - They may be due to innovations or style differences. Richardson and Kroeber's analysis of skirt length in women's dresses over the previous 300 years is useful here. They discovered two causes for the cyclicality: -- Fashionable women want to wear the latest fashion, and this desire encourages many others to follow their lead. -- Factories and seamstresses that have been making women's dresses for 300 years have a vested interest in these objects changing in order to sell dresses.

Ritual Symbols

- Objects (wafer and wine) - Colors (white = purity or grief, depending on context) - Actions (moving like an emu totem) - Events (rituals that reenact mythic events) - Words (any number of ritual recitations of sacred texts)

What Role Does Material Culture Play in Constructing the Meaning of a Community's Past?

- Objects found in archaeological sites are not just data for scientific analysis. -- They contribute to public discourse on social and political issues relevant to our present day concerns, especially how people view their own past. - Nobody can own the past, but many will claim it because it fits their ideas of what the past is supposed to be like. --The effect for archaeologists is that their interpretations of the past can provoke public controversy and draw them into political battles, many of which are not of their own making and others that are.

How families control power and wealth

- One cross-cultural function of families is managing their members' wealth. In this sense, wealth is broader than just currency, including resources, the work and reproductive capacity of family members, and inheritance rights when a member dies. - Anthropologists studying nonindustrial societies in early to mid-twentieth-century Africa, South America, and the Pacific quickly realized that women's labor in the fields and gardens in horticultural, agricultural, and pastoral communities was extremely important to the family.

Unilineal Descent

- Patrilineal: reckoning descent through males from the same ancestors. -- Most clans and lineages in nonindustrial societies (Omaha Indians, the Nuer of South Sudan, multiple societies in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea, etc.) are patrilineal. - Matrilineal: reckoning descent through women, who are descended from an ancestral woman. -- In matrilineal societies (such as the Trobriand Islanders) everyone is a member of his or her mother's clan, and a person's strongest identity is with his or her relatives in a mother's clan and lineage.

Non-Theists, Atheists, Agnostics, and Nonbelievers

- People who identify with these categories, lacking the "supernatural beliefs" of most definitions of religion, could be considered nonreligious. - However, they derive meaning and purpose from natural symbols through a worldview, much like those who practice religious ritual.

Types of Polygamy

- Polygyny: when a man is simultaneously married to more than one woman. In Africa and Melanesia having more than one wife indicates an important man with greater wealth, higher social status, or more importance in the community. - Polyandry: when a woman has two or more husbands at one time. Significantly rarer than polygyny. The best-known examples are the Toda of India and Nepalese Sherpa, who relied on fraternal polyandryto keep large estates from splitting up

Version 2.0: Wallace and the Supernatural

- Religion: "beliefs and rituals concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces" (Wallace, 1966, p. 5). - For Wallace, the characteristic that ties all religious belief together is the supernatural. - But he recognized the many different forms of supernatural belief, from animism to gods and spirits to more amorphous supernatural forces like the mana of native Hawaiians: a belief that sacred power inheres in certain high-ranking people, sacred spaces, and objects.

So What Is Religion?

- Religion: a symbolic system that is socially enacted through rituals and other aspects of social life, including these four elements: 1.The existence of things more powerful than human beings. 2.Beliefs and behaviors that surround, support, and promote the acceptance that those things more powerful than humans actually exist. 3.Symbols that make these beliefs and behaviors seem both intense and genuine. 4.Social settings, usually involving important rituals, that people share while experiencing the power of these symbols of belief.

worldview

- Religious symbols are a central part of a worldview: a general approach to or set of shared unquestioned assumptions about the world and how it works. - Symbols describe a 'model of' how the world is and a 'model for' how the world should be.

Is Human Sexuality Just a Matter of Being Straight or Queer?

- Sexuality—sexual preferences, desires, and practices—is usually assumed to be an either/or issue: people are either heterosexual or homosexual. - We also assume that most humans are heterosexual, a term that implies that this particular sexuality is normal and morally correct, while anything else is deviant. - "Queer" is a currently used term that once had derogatory connotations but in recent years has been given positive connotation in gay and lesbian communities.

Shamans and Trances

- Shaman: a religious leader who communicates the needs of the living with the spirit world, usually through some form of ritual trance or other altered state of consciousness. - Trance: a semiconscious state typically brought on by hypnosis, ritual drumming and singing, or hallucinogenic drugs like mescaline or peyote.

Did NAGPRA Work?

- Since NAGPRA, repatriation has proceeded reasonably well, helping clarify that American Indians own the bones of their ancestors as well as any grave goods found with these remains, although... -- Some museums have taken too long to comply with these mandates. -- Regulations weren't always clear about which objects are covered by NAGPRA and which groups can submit repatriation requests. - The issue of rights of indigenous peoples to their cultural resources is an ongoing topic for discussion at the international level as well.

The Nuclear Family

- Still, the United States and many other nations in the world view the nuclear family as an ideal form. - Nuclear family: the family formed by a married couple and their children.

Aesthetics, Symbolism & Meaning

- Studying art traditions and objects of non-Western peoples, anthropologists learn that complex ideas and understandings about the supernatural beings who inhabit their cosmologies are embodied in the physical representations we see in carvings. -- Carvers and other people likely imagined that their spirits and demons looked like the carvings. But if the only depiction of a particular spirit is the mask or carving that represents the spirit, one will likely understand the spirit to look just like the carvings. - Anthropologists have long considered the relationship between aesthetics, symbolism, and the meaning of objects.

Frazer and Sympathetic Magic

- Sympathetic magic: any magical rite that relies on the supernatural to produce its outcome without working through some supernatural being such as a spirit, demon, or deity. - Two principles: the laws of similarity and contagion.

Irrational evil?

- The 9/11 hijackers did not consider themselves irrational or evil. We are challenged to understand, however contemptible it may seem to us, what they were thinking. -- They were members of a terrorist organization, founded to wage a "holy struggle" (or jihad, in Arabic) against those perceived as oppressing Muslims. - Jihad has a broader meaning in Islam, but al-Qaeda "radicalized" hundreds of disaffected young men in training camps to view it as nothing but holy war and physical violence against Saudi Arabia and the West. - The beliefs are supported by the social action and relationships that exist in the group.

NAGPRA

- The Slack Farm episode led to a bill in the Kentucky legislature making it a felony to disturb any and all burial sites. - This incident was offensive to American Indian groups, leading them to lobby the federal government. - The following year, the U.S. government passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA: the 1990 law that established the ownership of human remains, grave goods, and important cultural objects as belonging to the Native Americans, whose ancestors once owned them.

The Absence of Legal Protections

- The U.S. had only a few basic laws to protect archaeological sites, mostly on government lands: -- The Antiquities Act of 1906, requiring permission for excavations on government lands; -- The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 requiring government agencies to consider the effects of development projects on historical or archaeological sites. - The "Tragedy of Slack Farm" in Uniontown, Kentucky, led to changes.

more than two

- The dichotomy between males and females breaks down as variations in chromosomes, gonads, internal reproductive structures, hormones, and external genitalia become apparent. - Some individuals diverge from the male-female norm and are called intersex, exhibiting sexual organs and functions somewhere between, or including, male and female elements. -- One estimate puts the frequency of intersex in the United States at 1.7% of all live births, but the rates of intersex vary between populations. - Different societies deal with intersex differently: some do not make anatomical features the dominant factors in constructing gender/sex identities, and some cultures recognize biological sex as a continuum.

The Social life of things

- The idea that inanimate things have social lives is based on the assumption that things have forms, uses, and trajectories that are intertwined in complex ways with people's lives. -- Objects undergo a progression in recognizable phases from creation, exchange, and uses to eventual discard. -- This progression makes it possible to identify social relationships and cultural ideologies that influence each period in this career. - Across cultures, these relationships and ideologies can vary drastically.

Changing Hands

- The most powerful examples of objects that change meaning when they pass into different hands happens when an anthropologist or collector buys objects from exotic villagers for a museum. - In the museum, the object changes its meaning profoundly: -- It no longer has a useful function but becomes a rare example of something from an exotic culture far away in time and space. - Being in a museum is not the only force that can change the meaning of an object with the changing of hands.

Fundamentalism

- The post-1960s rise in Christian fundamentalists in the United States was paralleled by increasing Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. - The term "fundamentalism" is sometimes used pejoratively to imply, at best, scientific illiteracy and, at worst, violent extremism. - Here, we use fundamentalism to mean conservative religious movements that advocate a return to fundamental or traditional principles.

Dowry Abuse

- The practice of dowry has been illegal in India since 1961, but these laws are not observed in many parts of the country. - In recent years, abuses of dowry (sometimes called "dowry deaths") have outraged international human rights groups. - Husbands' families have effectively held wives ransom for more dowry money, even threatening and killing women in some cases.

How can we explain why our culture constructs these differences in these specific ways?

- The primary explanation our culture gives for differences between males and females is that they are "hardwired" differently. - Differences in sex, the reproductive forms and functions of the body, are often thought to produce differences in attitudes, temperaments, intelligences, aptitudes, and even achievements between males and females.

Tradition

- The realities of life in any given society often create a gap between its real and idealized family types. - Politicians and religious leaders in the United States often argue for "traditional" marriages, families, and values— -- —rarely bothering to specify which traditions they're referring to.

Papua New Guinea

- The significance of clan membership is reflected in religious systems. -- The Ningerum live in low-population density forests and view their traditional clan lands as inhabited by a range of spirits with human emotions and motivations. -- The Elema and Purari live in much higher-density villages full of long houses. Here, clan spirits are seen as inhabiting specially designed house boards—a specific, sedentary location, rather than the forest more generally.

Repatriating Artifacts

- Their efforts led to demands for repatriation: the return of human remains or cultural artifacts to the communities of descendants of the people to whom they originally belonged. -- Repatriating artifacts became a material symbol of Indian identity itself. - Archaeologists have always held a range of views on the study of prehistoric bones, whether studied scientifically, reburied after examination, reburied without being studied, or never excavated at all. - Some Indian groups took more radical positions, asserting their right to rebury all Indian bones found in any museum, regardless of any connection to their own tribe.

Third Gender Systems in Other Societies

- Third gender has often been entangled in debates about sexuality, which encompasses sexual preferences, desires, and practices. - Sexual preferences intersect in complex ways with gender variance. - Gender/sex identities, including normative categories like "man" or "woman," are established not by sexual practices but through social performance. - In Navajo society, nádleeheé are individuals held in high esteem who combine male and female roles and characteristics.

This Also Brought the Study of What Women Say and Do to the Mainstream of the Discipline

- This entire debate came to an impasse over differences of interpretation about the evidence, and participants shifted their positions. - This impasse also accompanied a shift in how anthropologists studied relations between men and women. - The resulting perspective suggests that gender/sex inequality is not something static that people "possess"; it is something that they "do." - This also led to a rethinking of men and the anthropological study of masculinity, the ideas and practices of manhood.

The Multidimensional Object: Time and Power

- Time or history: objects in museums came from somewhere and each had an individual history. -- In part this asks when, by whom, and how were they produced, and how did they get to the museum or their current location, and how have interpretations of the object changed over time - Power: relations of inequality are reflected in objects, especially why the objects of non-Western people sit in ethnographic museums, while very few non-Western peoples have museums or repositories where local people can view Western objects

How Should We Look At Objects Anthropologically?

- Until the 1980s anthropologists looked at the study of objects as evidence of cultural distinctiveness, approaching cultural and artistic objects as expressions of a society's environmental adaptation, aesthetic sensibilities, or as markers of ethnic identity. -- Arts and craftwares were considered an expression of a particular tradition, time, or place, an expression of the individual creativity of the artist or craftperson. - In the mid-1980s anthropologists started to recognize that objects were capable of conveying meaning in many different ways simultaneously.

The Multidimensional Object: Wealth and Aesthetics

- Wealth: people use objects to establish and demonstrate who has wealth and social status as seen in how the American museum directors saw showy and impressive objects as being quite valuable for their museums and the museums' reputations. - Aesthetics: each culture brings with it its own system or patterns of recognizing what is pleasing or attractive, which configurations of colors and textures are appealing, and which are not.

Material Culture

- What is the role of objects and material culture in constructing social relationships and cultural meanings? Embedded within this larger question are several more focused questions: -- Why is the ownership of artifacts from another culture a contentious issue? -- How should we look at objects anthropologically? -- Why and how do the meanings of things change over time? -- What role does material culture play in constructing the meaning of a community's past? -Of special interest to both -cultural and archaeological anthropologies is the examination of material culture: the objects made and used in any society; traditionally the term referred to technologically simple objects made in preindustrial societies, but material culture may refer to all of the objects or commodities of modern life as well.

The Concept of Sexuality Is A Key Dimension of Kinship and Gender

- What unites all of these concepts is that they touch on an issue of central importance to human existence: our capacity for procreation. - All of these concepts are intertwined in complex ways and shape the ideas and social patterns a society uses to organize and control males and females, and those who do not fit these categories. - How we think of these matters, as natural as they feel to us, is not as universal as we may assume. - Kinship and gender aren't as stable as they might seem. Around the globe they take many different forms that can feel strange. Whatever their form, they invariably seem natural to the majority of people in the community.

Who Owns the Object?

- Who had a moral right to examine, study, and possess artifacts and bones recovered from archaeological sites? -- Many archaeologists felt they had the moral right to excavate, while pot hunters had no rights because they were simply out to make money. - Laws governing excavations of human remains were highly discriminatory, treating Native Americans differently than Euro-Americans. -- Activists protested treatment of Indian remains, asserting that such treatment was part of a larger pattern of disrespect for Indian cultures. -- Many were part of AIM, the American Indian Movement: the most prominent and one of the earliest Native American activist groups, founded in 1968.

Secular Worldview

- Why is a secular worldview (which does not accept the supernatural as influencing current people's lives) relatively rare in the United States? -- One factor is that science and reason have not replaced religious belief, as Time speculated they might.

The Sitcom "Traditional" Family

- Working father, stay-at-home mother, and dependent children. - The independent American suburban family was a recent and short-lived phenomenon in the United States. -- The Great Depression of the 1930s and the war years of the 1940s had kept birth rates low. -- The 1950s were a time of unprecedented economic growth, family stability, and a lot of babies—77 million "baby boomers" born in fifteen years. -- Young nuclear families spurred the development and spread of suburban housing. By the late 1950s, independent American suburban families were the norm (about 60% of Americans lived in one), if not a deeply rooted tradition.

Monotheistic World Religions

- World religions: religions that claim to be universally significant to all people. - The monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all became state religions, whose religious message and ritual supported the government of the state. -These three "Abrahamic religions" effectively share the same deity, but— -- each views itself as having the correct prophet.

totemism

A system of thought that associates particular social groups with specific animal or plant species called "totems" as an emblem.

Why Do People Believe Things That Others Consider Wrong?

Anthropologists understand that religious beliefs offer a roadmap for behavior and create meaning for people through the use of powerful rituals and symbols.

Version 4.0: Religion as a Social Phenomenon

Beliefs get power from being socially enacted repeatedly through rituals and social action. By acting together, the community of believers begins to accept the group's symbolic interpretations of the world as if they were tangible, authentic, and real rather than merely interpretation.

genealogical amnesia

Genealogical amnesia: structural process of forgetting whole groups of relatives, usually because they are not currently significant in social life.

How are families more than just groups of biologically related people?

Peoples' social lives are centered around core relationships of kinship, marriage, and family.

Many Gods Become One

The ancient Hebrews diverged from the polytheistic norm by proclaiming Yahweh the one true God, prompting a long-term shift toward monotheism (the belief in a single god) that persists to this day

The power of belief

The civil rights-era story that opens Chapter 18 illustrates the power of deeply held beliefs and their potential for motivating both violence and altruism

What Forms Does Religion Take?

Today, anthropologists don't rank people or religions on an evolutionary scale of complexity. But there are clear correlations between political organization, mode of subsistence, and religious practices.

Dowry

a large sum of money or in-kind gifts given to a daughter to insure her well-being in her husband's family.