Cultural Anthropology - FINAL Chapters 9 - 15
Berlin Conference
(1884-1885) During European Imperialism, various European leaders met in Berlin, Germany to discuss plans for dividing Africa peacefully. These leaders had little regard for African independence, and had no representation for native Africans. This began the process of imperializing Africa.
Bilineal
(system of descent) a system of reckoning descent that counts both the mother's and the father's side
Karl Marx
1818-1883. 19th century philosopher, political economist, sociologist, humanist, political theorist, and revolutionary. Often recognized as the father of communism. Analysis of history led to his belief that communism would replace capitalism as it replaced feudalism. Believed in a classless society. Bourgeoisie and Proletariat
Origin Myth
A Story told about the founding and history of a particular group to reinforce a sense of common identity
Lineal Relative
A blood relative in direct line of descent - children, grandchildren
Rite of Passage
A category of ritual enacts a change of status from one life stage to another, either for an individual or a group
Caste
A closed system of stratification in a society
Economy
A cultural adaptation to the environment that enables a group of humans to use the available resources to satisfy their needs and to thrive
Patrilineal Descent
A descent traced through a line of ancestors, through the male line
Redistribution
A form of exchange in which accumulated wealth is collected from the members of the group and reallocated in a different pattern
Transgender
A gender identity or performance that does not fit with cultural norms related to one's assigned sex at birth
Egalitarian Society
A group based on the sharing of resources to ensure success with a relative absence of hierarchy and violence
Ranked Society
A group in which wealth is not stratified but prestige and status are
Descent Group
A kinship group in which primary relationships are traced through consanguine ("blood") relatives
Asexuality
A lack of erotic attraction to others
Civil Society Organization
A local nongovernmental organization that challenges state policies and uneven development, and advocates for resources and opportunities for members of its local communities
Hajj
A pilgrimage to Mecca, made as an objective of the religious life of a Muslim.
Ethnic Boundary Marker
A practice or belief, such as food, clothing, language, shared name, or religion, used to signify who is in a group and who is not
Gender Stereotypes
A preconceived notion about the attributes of difference between and proper roles of men and women
Transsexual
A previous transgender individual who undergoes sex reassignment surgery
Matrilineal Descent
A principle of descent from an ancestress through her daughter, her daughter's daughter and so on (in the female line)
Monogamy
A relationship between only two partners
Fictive
A relationship, such as godparenthood, modeled on relations of kinship, but created by customary convention rather than the circumstances of birth
Pilgrimage
A religious journey to a sacred place as a sign of devotion and in search of transformation and englightenment
Sexology
A scientific study of sexuality
Communitas
A sense of camaraderie, a common vision of what constitutes a good life, and a commitment to take social action to move toward achieving this vision that is shaped by the common experience of rites of passage
Ethnicity
A sense of historical, cultural, and sometimes ancestral connection to a group of people who are imagined to be distinct from those outside the group
Religion
A set of beliefs based on a unique vision of how the world ought to be, often revealed through insights into a supernatural power and lived out in community
Gender Ideology
A set of cultural ideas, usually stereotypical about the essential character of different genders that function to promote and justify gender stratification
Band
A small kinship based group of foragers who hung and gather for a living over a particular territory
Marriage
A socially recognized relationship that may involve physical and emotional intimacy as well as legal rights to property and inheritance
Pastoralism
A strategy for food production involving the domestication of animals. The Nuer.
White Wedding View
A study by sociologist Chrys Ingraham about wedding culture and its industry; a contemporary understanding of heterosexuality
Class
A system of power based on wealth, income, and status that creates and unequal distribution of a society's resources
Two-Spirits
A term that usually indicates a Native person who feels their body simultaneously manifests both a masculine and a feminine spirit, or a different balance of masculine and feminine characteristics than usually seen in masculine men and feminine women. Beardache.
Clan
A type of descent group based on a claim to a founding ancestor but lacking genealogical data
Lineage
A type of descent group that traces genealogical connection through generations by linking persons to a founding ancestor
Yehudi Cohen
Adaptive Strategies. anthropologist who came up with the 5 strategies for subsistence: foraging, horticulture, agriculture, pastoralism, industrialism
Ritual
An act or series of acts regularly repeated over years or generations that embody the beliefs of a group of people and create a sense of continuity and belonging
Surrogacy
An arrangement whereby a woman bears a child on behalf of another woman`
Chiefdom
An autonomous political unit composed of a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief
State
An autonomous regional structure of political, economic, and military rule with a central government authorized to make laws and use force to maintain order and defend its territory
Machismo
An emphasis on male strength and dominance. - In Mexico,"The Meaning of Macho" Matthew Guttman examines the male identities of a typical Mexican Man, a Mexican urban working-class man, and a macho Mexican.
Intersex / Intersexual "Spectrum"
An individual who is born with a combination of male and female genitalia, gonads and/or chromosomes
Life Chance
An individual's opportunity to improve quality of life/achieve goals
Situational Navigation of Identity
An individual's self-identification with a particular group that can shift according to social location
Agriculture
An intensive farming strategy for food production involving permanently cultivated land
Gender Stratification
An unequal distribution of power, prestige, and access to a group's resources, opportunities, rights and privilege based on gender
Melissa Checker
Anthropologist who studies and participates in movements for social justice
Sacred
Anything that is considered holy
Profane
Anything that is considered not holy
Equality
As a political value, the idea that all people are of equal worth.
Heterosexuality
Attraction to and sexual relations between individuals of the opposite sex
Homosexuality
Attraction to and sexual relations between individuals of the same sex
Bisexuality
Attraction to and sexual relations with members of both sexes
Elman Service
Becoming less popular. Primitive social organization (1962). 4 basic categories of human societies (bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states). Social evolution. Processual archaeology. Chaco Canyon debunked this theory because it did not fit into any of the four categories.
Audrey Richards
Bemba. Chisungu Rite. Zambia, Africa; Chisungu- coming of age ceremony for young, teenage women after menstruation and in prep for marriage
Habitus
Bourdieu's term to describe the self-perceptions and beliefs that develop as part of one's social identity and shape one's conceptions of the world and where one fits in it
Masculinity in High School
C.J. Pascoe's Ethnography "Dude, You're a Fag" explores the construction of gender, particularly masculinity, in a suburban, working class, racially diverse high school. Masculinity is present in both boys and girls.
Haley Duschinski
Conflict in Kasmir Valley
Cousins Southall, England
Cousins by choice, the youth call one another "cousin" as a way to build strong connections across ethnic, religious, and cultural boundaries
Incest Taboo
Cultural rules that forbid sexual relations with certain close relatives
Ethnic Cleansing / Ethno-Religious Cleansing
Efforts by representatives of one ethnic or religious group to remove or destroy another group in a particular geographic area
Potlach
Elaborate redistribution ceremony among the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest
Six Kin Systems
Eskimo. Hawaiian. Sudanese. Omaha. Crow
Ethnicity as a source of opportunity
Ethnicity allows for engagement in everyday activities. Ethnicity is being packaged and produced into a multi-billion dollar market. Ethnic Items. Ethno-Theme Parks. Native Americans have turned tribes into ethno-corporations.
Gender Roles / Gender Expectations
Expectations about what is appropriate behavior for each sex.
Equity
Fairness; justice
Boy-Inseminating Rites
Gil Herdt's fieldwork among the Sambia. The Sambia believed that adult men needed to supply boys with semen to ensue their development into manhood
The Algerian Experience
Gilo Pontecorvo's, The Battle of Algiers is about anticolonial struggle for the independence of France.
Jared Diamond
Guns, Germs, Steel. The Intersection of Sexuality and Biology. Cohabitation/Co-parenting. Monogamy.
Food Foragers
Humans who subsist to hunting, fishing, and gathering plants to eat
Caste in India
In India, the population is divided into four varna or castes dalits are members of India's lowest caste, literally broken people, also called untouchables.
Power
Influence over a government's leadership, organization, or policies.
Artificial Insemination
Injecting semen into the uterus by artificial means
Industrial Agriculture
Intensive farming practices involving mechanization and mass production
Ida Susser
Interested in silent majority. Classic ethnography: Norman Street, which is about Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood. Community prevention of HIV/AIDS towards greater understanding/equity
Inequality
It means people have unequal access to scarce and valued resources in society. These resources might be economic or political, such as healthcare, education, jobs, property, and land ownership, housing and ability to influence government policy
Black Networks in Chicago
Kinship can even be a means to survive. Carol Stack, through deep involvement in an impoverished urban African-American community called the Flats in a town outside of Chicago, Stack uncovered residents' complex survival strategies based on extended kinship networks.
Carl Polyani
Kinship that drives economy through travel
Former Yugoslavia
Know what former European country's breakup was influenced heavily by the religious differences among the groups there ("religion was the most important cultural identifier") - Ethnic Cleansing
Sex Work
Labor through which one provides sexual services
Sheng Nu
Leftover women
Patty Kelly
Lydia's Open Door: Inside Mexico's Most Modern Brothel
Polygyny
Marriage between one man and two or more women
Polyandry
Marriage between one woman and two or more men
Companionate Marriage
Marriage built on love, intimacy, and personal choice rather than social obligation
Arranged Marriage
Marriage orchestrated by the families of he involved parties
Exogamy
Marriage to someone outside the kinship group
Endogamy
Marriage to someone within the kinship group
Bourgeoisie
Marxist term for the capitalist class that owns the means of production
Proletariat
Marxist term for the class of laborers who own only their labor
Matthew Gutman
Masculine identity is flux and negotiable
Prestige
Max Weber. Reputation, influence, and deference bestowed on people by society
Politics
Method of maintaining, managing, and gaining control of government (who gets what, when, and how)
Glen Petersen
Micronesia are small islands in the South Pacific. Petersen documents how over time they developed elaborate social and political organizations that enabled them to survive and quickly recover from natural disasters
Modern Western Style State
Modern states feature a central administration designed to penetrate everyday social life of its citizenry. Administrative, communication and military infrastructure define and enforce the state's borders
The Five Sexes Theory
More than just male and female sexes, there are middle sexes. 1.7% live births were classified as intersex. Herms: true hermaphrodites, people born with both a testis and an ovary Merms: male pseudohermaphrodites, who are born with testes and some aspect of female genitalia Ferms: female pseudohermaphrodites, who have ovaries combined with some aspect of male genitalia
NGOs
Non-governmental organizations; groups not affiliated with any government, formed to provide services or push for a certain public policy
Sex Chromosome
One of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in the human, contains genes that will determine the sex of the individual.
Liminality
One stage in a rite of passage during which a ritual participant experiences a period of outsiderhood, set apart from normal society, that is key to achieving a new perspective on the past, future, and current community
Melville Hersokvits
Operates in a capitalist way
Tribe
Originally viewed as a culturally distinct, multiband population that imagined itself as one people descended from a common ancestor; currently used to describe an indigenous group with its own set of loyalties and leaders living to some extent outside the control of a centralized authoritative state
Mati-Work
Politics of Passion, Gloria Wekker explores the black, working class Creole women in the port city of Paramaribo, Suriname. Mati (women who form intimate spiritual, emotional, and sexual relationships with other women)
Leveling Mechanism
Practices and organizations that reallocate resources among a group to maximize collective good
Affinal
Relatives by marriage, whether of lineals (e.g. son's wife) or collaterals
Dana Davis
Research in a shelter for battered women. Her book, offers insights into the creative process that people use to construct fictive kinship relationships during times of need.
Gender Studies
Research into the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity across cultures as flexible, complex, and historically and culturally constructed categories
Stages of Rite of Passage
Separation: Physically, psychologically or symbolically Liminality: Outsiderhood from community Reincorporation: Returns the individual to everyday life. Transformed by experience
Kathleen Gough, The Nuer
She revisited Pritchard's study of the Nuer and suggested that local events may have affected the Nuer's kinship practices, which resulted in their reinforcing group identity and assimilate outsiders, exogamy
Achieved Status
Social position established and changeable during a person's lifetime
Ascribed Status
Social position inherited, assigned at birth, and passed down from generation to generation with enforced boundaries.
The Langkawi of Malaysia
Studied by Janet Carsten in the 1900s, kinship is not only given at birth but also acquired throughout life. For the Langkawi, it is through co-feeding and co-residence.
Marshall Shalins
Substantivist argued against a neoclassical economic approach. Economic structure bound by three themes; political, religious, and/or kin based
Slash and Burn
Swidden Farming & Fallow. A practice of clearing land for cultivation.
Chocolate and the Ivory Coast
Th conflict in the Ivory Coast reveals many of the complex dynamics of today's global economy: (1) the interconnectedness of farmers in rural West Africa with chocolate eaters and coffee drinkers worldwide; (2) the tension-filled relationship between nation-states and transnational corporations; (3) the strategic military interventions, often by former colonial powers, that serve to police local political affairs and global economic flows; (4) the power of global financial markets to determine the price of coffee or cocoa, and thus the quality of life of small farmers; and (5) the link between consumers and producers through global commodity chains that have shattered notions of distinct national territories
E.E. Evans Pritchard, The Nuer
The Nuer people of southern Sudan in northeast Africa constituted a classic representation of a descent group
Hegemony
The ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement within a population without the use or threat of force
Sexuality
The complex range of desires, beliefs, and behaviors that are related to erotic physical contact, intimacy and pleasure
Horticulture
The cultivation of plants for subsistence through non-intensive use of land and labor
Genocide
The deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic or religious group
Industrial Revolution
The eighteenth and nineteenth century shift from agriculture and artisanal skill craft to machine-based manufacturing
Barter
The exchange of good and services for the other
Reciprocity
The exchange of goods and services among people of relatively equal status; meant to reate and reinforce social ties
Gender
The expectations of thought and behavior that each culture assigns to people of different sexes
Triangle Trade
The extensive exchange of slaves, sugar, cotton and furs between Europe, Africa and the Americas that transformed economic, political and social life on both of sides of the Atlantic
Means of Production
The factories, machines, tools, and raw materials, land and financial capital needed to make things
Secondary Sex Characteristic
The genetically determined physical features that differentiate the sexes but are not directly involved with reproduction
Dowry
The gift of goods or money from the bride's family to the groom's family as part of the marriage process
Bride-Wealth
The gift of goods or money from the groom's family to the bride's family as part of the marriage process
Rwandan Genocide
The killing of more than 500,000 ethnic Tutsis by rival Hutu militias in Rwanda in 1994. The conflict between the dominant Tutsis and the majority Hutus had gone on for centuries, but the suddenness and savagery of the massacres caught the United Nations off-guard. U.N. peacekeepers did not enter the country until after much of the damage had been done.
Nuclear/Extended Family
The kinship unit of mother, father and children
Cultural Capital
The movement of one's class position, upward or downward, in stratified societies
Family of Orientation
The nuclear family into which ego was borned and reared, consisting of father, mother, brothers, and sisters
Family of Procreation
The nuclear family which ego establishes, consisting of wife/husband and children
Carrying Capacity
The number of people who can be supported by the resources of the surrounding region
Sex
The observable physical differences between male and female, especially biological expressions related to human reproduction
Social Reproduction
The phenomenon whereby social and class relations of prestige or lack of prestige are passed from one generation to the next
Sexual Dimorphism
The phenotypic differences between males and females of the same speicies
Colonialism
The practice by which a nation-state extends political, economic, and military power beyond its own borders over an extended period of time to secure access to raw materials, cheap labor and markets in other countries or regions
Collateral
The siblings of lineal relatives (parents, grandparents) and their descendants
Kinship
The system of meaning and power that cultures create to determine who is related to whom and to define their mutual expectations, rights and responsibilities.
Wealth
The total value of what someone owns, minus any debt
Gender Performance
The way gender identity is expressed through action. - Masculine: aggressive, physical, tough, competitive, sports oriented, testosterone driven, strong, unemotional - Feminine: gentle, kind, loving, nurturing, smart persuasive, talkative, enticing, emotional
Cultural Construction of Gender
The ways humans learn to behave as a man or woman and to recognize behaviors as masculine or feminine within their cultural context. - Teaching transgender in US: Boys, Girls, and Youth Sports. Co-Ed T-Ball provides insight into how gender in the US subtly and not-so subtly taught, learned and enforced. - The ideas of masculinity and manliness are taught
Arnold Van Gennep
Theorized Rite of Passage. Belgian anthropologist who noticed that initiation rituals of different cultures moved from an initial state of separation from society through a transitional period into a final state of incorporation back into the community
Income
What people earn from work, plus dividends and interest on investments, along with rents and royalties
Social Mobility
a change in position within the social hierarchy
Symbiosis`
a close relationship between two organisms in which at least one of the organisms benefits
Downward Mobility
a decrease in social class
Negative Reciprocity
a mode of exchange in which the aim is to get something for as little as possible. neither fair nor balanced, it may involve hard bargaining, manipulation, outright cheating, or theft
Primary Sex Characteristic
a physical feature such as the reproductive organs and genitals that distinguish the sexes
Intersectionality
an analytic framework for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification
Food Production
an economy based on plant cultivation and/or animal domestication
Upward Mobility
an increase—or upward shift—in social class
Victor Turner
anthropologist-communitas
Aberrations
departure from what is normal
Leith Mullings
emphasized the intersectionality of race, class, and gender and forced anthropologists to reconsider how they all interact to create the world we see today
Hijras
followers of the Hindu Mother Goddess, Bahuchara Mata, who through religious ritual and perhaps some ritual surgery to remove the genitalia, become and alternate sex/gender. Violence against them is not uncommon, but they are revered and powerful ritual figures. Feared and revered.
Balanced Reciprocity
giving knowing that it will be given back in the future in the form of a gift
Alfred Kinsey
his research described human sexual behavior and was controversial (for its methodology & findings)
Modes of Production
key aspect of social structure for Marx; includes forces of production and relations of production
Gender Dysphoria
refers to stress or discomfort stemming from the self-knowledge that one's biological sex does not conform to, or is the opposite of, his or her personal gender identity
Consanguineal
related by blood
Ethnocide
the act or attempt to systematically destroy another people's ethnicity or culture. Usually the term ethnocide is applied to intentional acts resulting in culture death. The legalized "kidnapping" of Native American children so that they could be educated as Europeanized Canadians and Americans during the late 19th and early 20th centuries is an example of ethnocide
Market Exchange
the buying and selling of goods and services, with prices set by rules of supply and demand
Anti-Colonial
the movement following World War II in which colonies began to revolt against their captors.
Adaptive Strategies
the unique way in which each culture uses its particular physical environment; those aspects of culture that serve to provide the necessities of life- food, clothing, shelter, and defense.
Pierre Bourdieu
this French sociologist developed the concept of capital. habitus
Human Rights Watch
this organization monitors governments and organized political groups for human rights abuses
The Arab Spring
was a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests (both non-violent and violent), riots, and civil wars in the Arab world that began on 18 December 2010 in Tunisia with the Tunisian Revolution, and spread throughout the countries of the Arab League and its surroundings. While the wave of initial revolutions and protests faded by mid-2012, some started to refer to the succeeding and still ongoing large-scale discourse conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa as the Arab Winter.
Max Weber
wealth, power, prestige
Generalized Reciprocity
when goods or services are given to another without any apparent expectation of a return gift
Emile Durkheim
who came up with the terms sacred and profane?