Anthro Exam 3

Lee, “The Hunters: Scarce Resources in the Kalahari”

Previous assumptions: hunting and meat is the primary sustenance for foragers, foraging is a struggle for existence

Findings: gathering within 6 mile radius of water, food shared equitably, population moves 5-6 times a year around waterhole, men trance dance and hunt, women rest, embroider, cook, etc.

Baka: People of the Forest (film)

Resources: knives, river for rinsing pulp, fish w/ hands, shelters w/ sticks and leaves, seeds as main food, plants for medicine, climb trees for honey

Contact with others: bring clothes and trade for meat, rely on material goods, give medicine to them

Social organization: women set up camp, men look for food, kids carreid around, permanent villages of 20ish, camps to forage

Free time: stories around campfire, singing, teaching children, playing music on string instrument, tickle and play

Foraging (ages excluded, intensity, diet)

The search for edible things

No domestication, low population density, little food storage, egalitarian

Just enough for family to survive comfortably

Evidence of women being primary contributors, 2-3x the food of men

Ages excluded: younger than married or older than 60

Intensity: 2-3 days and 12-19 hrs a week, no more than couple days of food at a time

Diet: veggies (60-80%), mongogo nut is 50%, meat is prestige

Horticulture

Small-scale subsistence agriculture, gardens/small fields to meet household needs

Simple tech like hoes, axes, machetes

Permanent villages, low density, some stratification/inequality

Fallow

Period of inactivity/resoration/avoiding surplus in horticulture

Shifting cultivation (slash and burn/swidden)

Farmers clear forest plots by cutting and burning vegetation, using the nutrient-rich ash for crops

Pastoralism

Raising of animal herds, breeding care, herding

Tools (riding/pulling), food (milk/meat), homes (dung), hair

Environments not suited to agriculture but include vegetation so animals/humans not competing for same resources

Pastoral nomadism

Whole social groups and animals move in search of pasture in pastoralism

Transhumance

Herd animals moved throughout the year to different areas as pasture becomes available

Intensive agriculture

Large-scale, commercial, farming

Management and cultivation to increase yields, complex tech, large labor force, manage water resources, modify plants/soils

Difference from horticulture: continuous use of land, intensive use of labor, supports high population, more reliable but not completely protected

Economic system

Structured patterns and relationships of exchange

Value

The relative worth of an object or service that makes it desirable

Market principle

Maximization of material gain, profit, associated with capitalism and classes, law of supply and demand, cost, and scarcity, fast and impersonal

Redistribution

Goods are collected to center and distributed to members of group (ex. Chiefdoms, taxation, and tithe)

Reciprocity

The mutual give and take among people of equal-ish status

Relationships: reciprocity connected to social relationships, some gifts are rude based on relationship

Timing: important and rude if not returned in time

Generalized reciprocity

Giving freely without expectation of return, among close kin (parents)

Balanced reciprocity

Giving and receiving goods of nearly equal value, expectation of return (start/build relationships)

Delayed reciprocity

Long time lag between giving and receiving (ex. Kula ring builds social prestige and maintains trade relationships between communities by exchanging necklaces/armbands in Papua New Guinea)

Negative reciprocity

Exchange conducted for the purpose of material advantage, social distance (stealing and bargaining)

Potlatch

Competitive ceremonial feasting, massive amounts of food is consumed/destroyed, earns prestige and adapts to plenty and famine, a form of redistribution in Indigenous communities when a big event occurs

Counts, Too Many Bananas: gift-giving rules in Kandoka, balanced reciprocity over time

No buying food for money (Counts pay for a watermelon and have to return it when chief comes)

Never refuse a gift and always return it (rejecting Rogi’s bananas was a social offense, surplus must be passed to others)

You cannot demand a gift (Counts pressured Sara into bringing a pineapple but she stole it)

15 years of overall balanced reciprocity, giving more to those who helped them most

Friendship and time together are prerequisites for exchange

Politics

Relationships and processes of cooperation, conflict, and power that are fundamental aspects of human life

Power

The ability to make people think/act in certain ways, often tied to control over resources

Authority

Socially recognized right to make decisions for group, lead group

Band

Small, nomadic, self sufficient group of 25-150, noncentralized power

Foraging, egalitarian, reciprocity, decisions made communally

Leadership is informal and situational, norms are informal

Tribe

Pastoral or horticultural societies in the hundreds/thousands, noncentralized power

Egalitarian, reciprocity and trade, settling disputes and controlling deviance is informal

More stable leadership, leaders = village head or “big man,” gain “authority” through achievements rather than office still based on support/loyalty 

Unilineal kin groups (important to land and livestock ownership)

Chiefdom

Political systems with hereditary leader who holds central authority, tens of thousands, centralized power

Status distinctions exist, supported by high-ranking elites and simple judicial system

Intensive agriculture and some specialization, economic redistribution

Chief has some authority (vs. just power, move from informal happens here)

Chief plays a role in conflict resolution and deviant behavior, informal laws with punishment enforce norms

State

Political organization for society with high levels of social stratification, intensive agriculture, and centralized authority

Markets and trade, redistribution at state level with taxation

Highly stratified, social classes and inequality

Private and state ownership of land

Sovereign leader supported by bureaucracy

Formal laws and punishments, state has police/military force

Law

Sets of rules established by formal authority

Office

Formal, permanent political positions

Village Head/headman

Limited authority over one tribe and chosen due to personal qualities, mediator

Big Man

Regional leader with multi-village support, more authority but still based on support/loyalty

Mechanisms of social control (formal and informal)

Formal: police, military, jail, laws

Informal: ridicule, gossip, bullying, supernatural, avoidance/shunning

Egalitarian society

All people are equal, few status distinctions not inherited, in band and tribe

Ranked society

People are ranked according to distance from chief, hereditary inequality, lack of defined social classes (in chiefdom)

Stratified society

Sharp social divisions into distinct classes, unequal accesses to resources, inherited status, in industralized states

Rites of Passage

Any life cycle rite that marks a transition from one social status to another

3 stages of rites of passage

Separation: removal from one status

Liminal Phase: no category, “in between”

• Lack of gender, name, social status, maybe relating to death, seclusion, danger, polluting, avoision, vulnerability

• Includes, tasks, challenges, lessons, use of ritual objects, secrets, new knowledge, and discomfort due to lack of position

Reincorporation: welcomed back into new status/category sometimes with a public ceremony, new features

Communitas

Bonding a sense of community during the liminal phase

Rites of passage examples

Apache (young girls reach a certain age and go through ceremony to reach womanhood, special clothes, special rules)

Pandemic (separated into homes, wearing masks, learning new things, community, reincorporation (vaccine))

Marriage

Rite of passage, new responsibilities, new status for men and women, cultivates political and economic relationships between families, regulates sex, care of children, transfer of property and social position (inheritance)

Incest taboo

Prohibition on sexual relations between family, all societies prohibit certain sexual relationships with kin

Reason: not biological explanations like birth defects, innate aversion based on familiarity, alliance theory (most likely, system of alliances in kinship based on exchange of partners)

Parallel cousins

Marriage between individual and child of mother’s sister or father’s brother

Cross cousins

Marriage between individual and child of his mother’s brother or father’s sister

Exogamy

Customs involving marrying outside of a particular group (expand network)

Endogamy

Rules prescribing a person must marry within a group (control resources)

Homogamy

Marriage within similar demographic

Sororate

Woman marries widower of deceased sister

Levirate

Woman marries widow of deceased brother

Monogamy

Only one spouse at a time

Serial Monogamy

Can be married to as many at once as you’d like

Polygamy

Plural marriage, rule allowing more than one spouse

Polygyny

Man married to more than one woman

Reason: women are economically important, extends a man’s alliances, must be able to care for all of them, conflict among wives happens

Polyandry

Woman has two or more husbands at once

Reason: fraternal polyandry (brothers), mainly in Tibet and Nepal, often related to shortage of land (break up among less) or when man leaves home for long periods of time

Dowry

Money or gifts bride brings to husband’s family

Reason: source of security/protection for wife, can be compensation for taking on economic burden of another family member 

Bridewealth

Exchange of money from husband’s family to wives family for loss of woman’s productive and reproductive abilities in marriage 

Reason: entitles husbands to certain rights, is returned if marriage ends, can promote family support

Kinship

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

Determines responsibilities and rights, sets expectations and obligations, forms and maintains alliances

Bases for kinship

Blood/biology, marriage, adoption, shared substance, familiarity/friendship/love

Corporate group can even be considered kinship group

Descent

Culturally established affiliations between children and one/both parents

Clan

Relatives who are descendants of a common ancestor 

Lineage

Groups composed of relatives directly descended from known ancestors

Patrilineage, patrilocality

Lineage based on descent from male ancestor

Newlyweds live with/near male family

Matrilineage, matrilocality

Lineage based on descent from a common female ancestor

Newlyweds live with/near female’s family

Cognatic/bilateral descent

Descent traced through either side, not automatic or fixed

Nuclear family, neolocality

Domestic family group of a couple and their children, more common in US

Newlyweds establish their own residence

Extended family household

Large, extended families living together in large homes, often passed down between generations, more common in Turkey

Kinship calculation and terms

Evaluations of who we consider a relative, and who we’re close to

Use different terms, relationship, obligation, and expecations (blood and marriage) 

Genealogical amnesia

We forget socially unimportant kin

“Family tree” vs “grafted tree” (Patton-Imani)

Family tree: allegory about kinship, reaffirming traditional family structure through heterosexual reproduction

Grafted tree: inclusive, emphasizes family making (IVF, adoption, co-parenting, etc.)

Case study: Dakota Kinship, Ella Deloria

Central role in social life: people must find a way to get along, Dakota did this with kinship, rules all defined through kinship, reciprocal obligations between kin, that is the government

Resolution of murder case: murder was brought to justice by bringing the murderer into the kin “trapped by loving kinship”

Sex

The reproductive forms and functions of the body, exist on a spectrum

Biological determinism

Idea that differences in behaviors, temperaments, maybe even intelligence/achievement, etc. are biologically driven

Margaret Mead, 3 cases

Cross cultural comparison can tell us if sex differences are biologically driven, three different tribes had different gender constructions

Arapesh: both genders feminine

Mundugumor: both genders masculine

Tchambuli: reverse of expectation

Gender as cultural construction

Mead’s main finding, social conditioning central to how children grow up to behave

Gender

The intersections of biological sex, internal senses of self, outward expressions of identity, and cultural expectations about performing

Gender/sex system

The ideas and social patterns a society uses to organize genders, rather than gender to describe sex

Gender as performance

Gender enacted and established through social performance (wearing clothes, speaking and moving, performing social roles)

Intersex

Sexual organs/functions somewhere between female and male

Masculinity/femininity over time + space

Time: male body types have changed to become skinnier and more muscly, female body types change to be skinny, thick hips, slim, athletic and toned, big boobs and butt and slim

Space: different cultures value fatness (Efik) or other body types, Western type is not the only one

Case study: Efik

Fattening is a sign of good health and is a rite of passage, go to passage room for prosperity, allure, fertility, womanhood, marriage, motherhood, but is becoming less popular in recent years

Gender roles

Appropriate feminine (cooking, cleaning, having kids) and masculine (being strong, doing labor, leadership) ways of behaving

Gender stratification

Men are associated with power and prestige

Nature/culture divide

Women are childbearing and rearing, associated with nature, while men deal with politics, trade, and warfare, associated with culture

Public/private dichotomy

Women are associated with nature and men with culture, women associated with private and lower-status tasks, men associated with public and high-status tasks

Gender variance

Expressions of sex and gender that diverge from norms that dominate most societies

Hijra (India)

Male/intersex at birth but dress and talk like women, had genitals removed sometimes, connection to mother goddess and used in rituals, criminalized recently with English influence

Five genders of the Bugis (Indonesia)

All needed for balance/harmony, born male, born female, male at birth but living in feminine roles, female at birth but living in male roles, and gender transcendent (ritual leaders/priests)

Revered until rise in other religions, now persecuted

“Two-Spirit Identity” (Margaret Robinson article)

Gender beyond binary among Indigenous communities

Erasure of traditional roles by colonists, missionaries, boarding schools, forced assimilation

Recent term, coined in 90s

Reason: Western categories are ethnocentric and inaccurate, two-spirit is anachronistic but centers solidarity with people from other indigenous communities, reclaims traditional language/roles

Religion

Symbolic system that is socially enacted through rituals and other aspects of social life that relate to issues of humankind’s existence

Based upon beliefs in spiritual beings/forces

Cultural universal

Purity/pollution, taboos, sacrifice, iniation, rites of passage, study, devotion, morality

Four components of religion

Existence of things more powerful

Promote acceptance that thing more powerful exists

Symbols make beliefs seem intense/genuine

Social settings involve doing specific things, power of symbols of belief

Animism

Belief that inanimate objects in nature/land were animated by spiritual forces/beings

Ritual

Stylized performances involving symbols associated with social, political, and religious activities 

Polytheism

Belief in multiple gods (Hinduism)

Monotheism

Belief in one god (Abrahamic faiths)

Cosmology/worldview

General approach to assumptions about the world and how it works

Functions of religion

Meaning and order, reducing anxiety, sense of control, social network, inequality, code of moral behavior, maintain status quo

Totemism

The system of thought that associates particular social groups with animal/plant species as an emblem

Trance

People reach states of trance through rituals like drumming/drugs (speaking in tongues)

Magic (imitative and contagious)

An explanatory system of causation that does not follow naturalistic explanation, working at a distance without physical contact

Imitative: procedure performed resembles desired result

Contagious: works through contact, procedure is performed on an object that has been in contact/retains a magical connection to person

Divination

Ritual practice directed toward obtaining hidden/unknown information in supernatural authority

Ex. coffee fortunes based on grinds on the cup