Anthropology 1100 CH. 17-19

4 elements of religion

1. The existence of things more powerful than human beings. In many societies it takes the form of "supernatural" force, but it also is a worldview or cosmology that defines the place of humans in the universe. 2. Beliefs and behaviors that surround, support, and promote the acceptance that 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.

Clifford Geertz thought religion could be best understood as a "system of symbols" which act to:

1. establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by 2. formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and 3. clothing these conceptions with an aura of factuality so that 4. the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic

5 Nadleehe genders

1. male 2. female 3. Nadleehe = "one who changes continuously", intersex, third gender 4. masculine-female 5. feminine-male

evidence against the westermarck effect

1. no gene or combination of genes has been identified 2. the range of relatives prohibited by the incest taboo varies too widely from society to society to be explained by natural selection 3. it could just as easily be that the incest taboo itself has generated the revulsion

different opinions about human remains

1. scientific study and curation 2. reburial after examination 3. reburial without being studied 4. no excavation and study of human remains ever

NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act)

1990 law that established the ownership of human remains, grave goods, and important objects belonging to Native Americans, whose ancestors owned them museums must notify tribes about the cultural objects they hold in their collection

What percent of Americans were a part of independent suburban families during the 1950s?

60%

How many "baby boomers" were born in the 1950s?

77 million in 15 years

totemism

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

Sangha

Buddhist community

The _____ and ______ live in villages with much higher population density (they are full of long houses). Here, clan spirits are seen as inhabiting specially designed house boards—a specific, sedentary location, rather than in the forests. Clans associated with specific _______ spirits make offerings to those spirits.

Elema and Purari (New Guinea), animals

Beginning with Lewis Henry Morgan in 1871, anthropologists have identified six different basic kinship systems.

Eskimo Hawaiian Omaha Crow Iroquois Sudanese

Science and reason have replaced religious belief.

False

There is evidence that one form of religion inevitably evolves into another.

False

Anthropologist agree that sexuality is genetic or buried deep in the psychological self, or is it just a matter of personal preference or individual orientation.

False Sexuality is learned, patterned, and shaped by the political-economic system in which one lives.

It became clear that gender/sex inequality is not something static that people "create;" it is something that they "possess."

False Gender/sex inequality is something that they "create/do".

Only artifacts can help us imagine ourselves, our past, and where we are headed.

False, any mundane object

In the Yanomamo ritual of shamanic healing, a shaman attempts to banish individuals by ingesting hallucinogenic snuff made from a local plant.

False, heal ailing individuals

Anthropologists studying industrial societies in Africa, South America, and the Pacific realized that women's labor in the fields and gardens in horticultural, agricultural, and pastoral communities was extremely important to the family.

False, nonindustrial

Any tribe can submit repatriation requests to museums.

False, only federally recognized tribes

Nearly all ancient societies in the Mediterranean and Middle East practiced a type of monotheism like the Egyptians.

False, polytheism

Many anthropologists accept either-or perspectives—that it is either biology or culture, either sex or gender.

False, reject They accept the view that male-female differences are shaped by a mix of biology, environmental conditions, and sociocultural processes.

Nonindustrial societies do not have inheritance rules.

False, they do but no formal legal code.

_______ definition of religion was specifically designed to be useful for secular worldview with a rich array of secular symbols as it is for more traditional religions.

Geertz's

______ ________ studies have often been entangled in debates about _________.

Gender variance, sexuality

The main exception to polytheism in the ancient world is the ancient _______ whose religion was based on a single god called Yahweh.

Hebrews

Siddhartha Gautama (born between the fourth and sixth centuries B.C.E. in northern India) challenged orthodox ________. Taking the name ______ (meaning "awakened one"), he spread a doctrine of compassion and selflessness.

Hinduism, Buddha

jihad

Islam for "struggle"

"Abrahamic religions"

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam uplifting message; state religions

In several Latin American countries, a man who engages in same-sex practices is not labelled as a "homosexual." Which countries?

Mexico, Nicaragua, and Brazil

Muslims feel that God's true message was received by the Prophet ________.

Mohammad

How did the family norm of the 1950s change in the 60s and 70s?

More women in the workforce More two-income households More divorces More blended families Fewer children (one or two, rather than three or four)

The ________ live in forests where there is low population density. They view their traditional clan lands as inhabited by a range of spirits with human emotions and motivations. These spirits must be appeased with offerings of gifts, especially pigs, at their feasts.

Ningerum (New Guinea)

In the kingdom of Benin, the king (___) was viewed as divine and was represented by a _______. 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.

Oba, leopard, Igwe Festival

feminist anthropology debate

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. Led to the recognition that gender/sex inequality is, if not universal, at least pervasive.

three major ways that objects change over time

The form, shape, color, material, and use, may change from generation to generation. An object's significance and meaning changes as its social and physical contexts change. A single object's significance and meaning changes when it changes hands.

dreaming (the dreamtime)

The mythological period when the ancestors created the natural features of their world as well as the plants and animals that inhabit it

Nirvana

The state of englightenment for Buddhists.

Abuses of dowry ("dowry deaths") include the husbands' families effectively holding wives as ransom for more dowry money, even threatening and killing women in some cases.

True

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.

True

Egyptian pharaohs were also viewed as manifestations of the gods. Each of their gods had to be appeased in its own way to maintain the environmental conditions necessary for agriculture in the Nile Valley.

True

Federally funded museums and repositories must take an inventory of their curated human remains for possible future repatriation to Federally-recognized tribes or return sacred objects and communal property to the Native owners if their repatriation request is approved.

True

For anthropologist Victor Turner, all rituals invoke symbols that can convey the underlying meanings of the ritual.

True

Gilbert Herdt's study of the Sambia culture of New Guinea suggested that certain male initiation activities were a kind of "ritualized homosexuality" with an 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."

True

In the USA intersex children are usually treated with "sex-assignment surgery" to eliminate genital ambiguity so they conform to accepted notions about how a boy or girl should look. This shows that "sex" is not entirely biological, but also based on cultural assumptions about what an ideal male or female should look like.

True

Many gender/sex systems around the world are less rigid or constraining than our own.

True

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.

True

Objects found in archaeological sites are not just data for scientific analysis. They contribute to public discourse on modern social and political issues, especially how people view their own past.

True

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.

True

Sexual dimorphism alone does not account for male and female differences.

True

Symbols describe a model of how the world is, as well as a model for how the world should be.

True

The main difference between a cognatic clan (e.g., Samoans) and a unilineal clan is that one person can be a member of multiple cognatic clans.

True

The primary explanation our culture gives for differences between males and females is that they are "hard wired" differently.

True

The progression of objects makes it possible to identify social relationships and cultural ideologies that influence each phase.

True

The term "fundamentalism" is sometimes used pejoratively to imply, at best, scientific illiteracy and, at worst, violent extremism.

True

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.

True

UNESCO cannot force countries to protect these sites, but it can remove a site from their list if the host countries fail to protect it from any destruction.

True

In most countries, marriage is, and has been, about creating economic and political alliances between families.

True Marriage is considered too important to be left to the whims of an individual, therefore family members choose the individual's partner.

Both Native American clan totems and sports team emblems act as totems (the former spiritual, the latter secular).

True, but this has created conflict between groups competing to "own" Native American images.

mana

a belief that sacred power inheres in certain high-ranking people, sacred spaces, and objects ex: native Hawaiians

sexually dimorphic

a characteristic of a species, where males and females have a different sexual forms often describes humans

holy struggle

a conflict, often political or social, that believers see as justified by doing God's work

E. B. Tylor believed that religions were based on

a fundamental error in thinking.

worldview

a general approach to or set of shared unquestioned assumptions about the world and how it works

interpretive approach

a kind of analysis that interprets the underlying symbolic and cultural interconnections within a society

dowry

a large sum of money or in-kind gifts given to a daughter to ensure her well-being in her husband's family ex: India

fundamentalist

a person belonging to a religious movement that advocates a return to fundamental or traditional principles

trance

a semi-conscious state typically brought on by hypnosis, ritual drumming, and singing, or hallucinogenic drugs like mescaline or peyote

spirit familiar

a spirit that has developed a close bond with a shaman

religion

a symbolic system that is socially enacted through rituals and other aspects of social life

teknonymy

a system of naming parents by the names of their children "father/mother of so-and-so"

clans

a type of extended family where groups of relatives who claim to be descended from a single ancestor The single apical (at the "apex") ancestor may be an animal or supernatural being.

polytheistic

a type of religion with many gods

kinship charts

a visual representation of family relationships shows anthropologists other forms of families useful for diagramming biological relationships often reveal the cultural meanings associated with these relationships

secular worldview

a worldview that does not accept the supernatural as influencing current people's lives

bride service

a young man must work for his wife's family for a year or more to pay off bride price

magic

an explanatory system of causation that does not follow naturalistic explanations, often working at a distance without direct physical contact

the power of symbols

anthropologists learned that the complex ideas about the gods, ghosts, spirits and other supernatural beings who inhabit their cosmologies are embodied in their arts and crafts They likely imagined what their spirits and demons looked like when they created these images.

polygamy

any form of plural marriage

rite of passage

any life cycle rite that marks a person's or group's transition from one social state to another

sympathetic magic (James G. Frazer)

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 law of similarity = some point of similarity between an aspect of the magical rite and the desired goal (voodoo doll, metaphors) law of contagion = things that had once been in physical contact with one another could have an effect even when no longer in contact; still has the person's essence (hair in rituals)

emic

approach of studying a culture's behavior from the perspective of an insider

George W. Stocking

argued that objects are multidimensional, and to understand them we have to recognize and try to understand not just their three basic physical dimensions—height, width, depth— but four other dimensions as well: time (or history), power, wealth, and aesthetics.

Anthropologists view sexuality as a flexible phenomenon that varies from _______ (non-sexuality) to ___________ (love of many).

asexual, polyamorous

social life of things

based on the assumption that things have forms, uses, and trajectories that are intertwined in complex ways with people's lives

monotheism

belief in a single God

Anthony F. C. Wallace's definition of religion

beliefs and rituals concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces became standard in anthropology

For decades, white Americans have used the term ________, a derogatory Arabic term that refers to the younger partner in a male homosexual relationship, to refer to gender-variant American Indians.

berdache

Wahhabism

conservative and intolerant form of Islam that is practiced in Saudi Arabia (by Osama bin Ladin)

fundamentalism

conservative religious movements that advocate a return to fundamental or traditional principles associated with an extremely literal interpretation of scripture

gender

cultural expectations of how males and females should behave

cognac (bilateral) clans

descent is through either men or women from some ancestor (both mother and father) membership in multiple clans

unilineal descent

descent through a single line, of either males or females

Nkisi figure

each additional nail pounded into the carving requested some favor from the spirit that lives in this figure, and each nail also strengthened the spirit rejected by western audiences for being "crude"

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 aka bride wealth

gender variance (third gender)

expressions of sex and gender that diverge from the male and female norms which dominate in most societies

lineages

groups composed of relatives who are directly descended from known ancestors usually a literal human ancestor

corporate groups

groups of real people who work together toward common ends, much like a corporation does

materiality

having the quality of being physical or material

Nadleehe (Navajo)

held in high esteem and combine male and female roles and characteristics

intersex

individuals who exhibit sexual organs and functions somewhere between male and female elements, often including both

child price

intended to buy rights in a woman's child from another clan most typical in societies with patrilineal clans

For many anthropologists, using the term "supernatural" in a definition of religion is a problem because

it distorts how informants perceive the forces that are at work in the world.

extended families

larger groups of relatives beyond the nuclear family, often living in the same household common in 19th century America especially during hard economic times

Baseball is well known for superstition and

magic.

Every time Frank has a big exam, he eats the same breakfast, wears the same socks, and takes the same path to school. Frank is performing

magic.

A distinction between religious rituals and secular rituals is that religious rituals are often _______.

magical

The Walbiri used repetitive symbols to create

meanings.

The first place where anthropologists studied objects and art were

museums.

ritual symbols

objects, colors, actions, events, or words

Fundamentalists define themselves in relation to what they are not:

outsiders, modernizers, or moderates.

the symbols of power

people use aesthetics to express their social, political, or religious power

animism

primitive peoples believed that inanimate objects such as trees, rocks, cliffs, hills, and rivers were animated by spiritual forces or beings 1871, Edward Burnett Tylor = primitive people just misinterpreted dreams

World Heritage Site program

provides financial support to maintain sites of importance to humanity

patrineal descent

reckoning descent through men who are descended from an ancestral man Most clans and lineages in nonindustrial societies

matrilineal descent

reckoning descent through women, who are descended from an ancestral woman not necessarily matriarchal Trobriand Islanders

Time

refers to the fact that objects in museums came from somewhere and each had an individual history

aesthetics

reflected in the fact that each culture has its own system of recognizing what is pleasing or attractive, which configurations of colors and textures are appealing, and which are not

wealth

reflects how people use objects to demonstrate who has wealth and social status For example, museum administrators display rare objects that increase the value of their collections and enhance their museums' reputations.

world religions

religions that claim to be universally significant to all people most are monotheistic

shamans

religious leaders who communicate the needs of the living with the spirit world, usually through some form of ritual trance or other altered state of consciousness

National Historic Preservation Act of 1966

required government agencies to consider the effects of developmental projects on historical and archeological sites

Antiquities Act of 1906

required permission for excavations on government lands

Cultural Resource Management (CRM)

research and planning aimed at identifying, interpreting, and protecting sites and artifacts of historic or prehistoric significance

power

reveals the relations of inequality that are reflected in objects While objects of "non-Western" people are curated and displayed in museums, very few non-Western peoples have "museums" where local people can view "Western" objects.

Egypt and Hawaii before European contact

rulers, as "living gods," were required to marry one of their siblings to preserve divine essence.

Rules of Inheritance

rules that ensure an orderly process after someone dies to control their wealth, property, and power allows for wealth and property to stay in the family

How men and women have differing sexual forms is part of

sexual dimorphism.

sexuality

sexual preferences, desires, and practices

A key feature of religious beliefs and behavior is that they are rooted in

social behavior and social action.

exogamous

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

Westermarck effect

some claim that there is selection for genes that diminish sexual attraction to people in human natal families

Edward Burnett Tylor's evolution of religion

spirits (animism) > demigods/mythological heroes > gods/goddesses (polytheism) > all-powerful god (monotheism) As society becomes more complex, so does religion. Humans would eventually yield to pure reason and abandon deities altogether as we evolve.

genealogical amnesia

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

Melford Spiro (1958)

studied life in Israeli kibbutzim found that adolescents living in large communes rarely dated or married other kibbutz members similar to "dormcest"

rituals

stylized performances involving symbols that are associated with social, political, and religious activities repetitive and stylized

For Wallace, the characteristic that ties all religious belief together is the ____________.

supernatural

Religious _______ are a central part of a worldview.

symbols

Objects embody physical traits as well as a

temporal dimension.

primogeniture

the eldest son inherits a man's land and other wealth mostly in Western countries (Great Britain)

nuclear family

the family formed by a married couple and their children still ideal in U.S. and other countries

natal family

the family into which a person is born and (usually) raised

masculinity

the ideas and practices of manhood

gender/sex systems

the ideas and social patterns that a society uses to organize males, females, and those who do not fit either category

AIM (American Indian Movement 1968)

the most prominent and one of the earliest Native American activist groups

material culture

the objects made and used in any society in any society includes objects made in preindustrial societies and the commodities of modern life

speaking in tongues (glossolalia)

the phenomenon of speaking in an apparently unknown language, often in an energetic and fast-paced way do not correspond to any human language but connect people with God via the Holy Spirit

incest taboo

the prohibition on sexual relations between close family members

sex

the reproductive forms and functions of the body

repatriation

the return of human remains or cultural artifacts to the communities of descendants of the people to whom they originally belonged

kinship

the social system that organizes people in families based on descent and marriage

Dharma

the teachings of the Buddha

Which of the following is not an anthropologically-significant illustration of the ways objects change over time? when an object changes hands. its social and physical contexts change. they get old and worn out the form, shape, color, material, and use may change from generation to generation.

they get old and worn out.

Hijras

this "third gender" category in India in which men are sexually impotent due to being born intersex or are voluntarily castrated "man minus man" or "male plus female" live in communities of up to 20 lead by gurus vehicles for the Mother Goddess

What acts as objects for group ritual activity and represents powerful symbols for people to focus on?

totems

polygyny

when a man is simultaneously married to more than one woman ex: Africa and Malaysia = 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 to keep large estates from splitting up ex: Todas and Sherpas = fraternal polyandry - group of brothers marries the same woman (limits tensions)

1950s traditional family

working father stay-at-home mother dependent children until the 1970s