Cultural Anthropology Exam 1

What is culture?

Learned, shared, symbolic, and integrated system of meaning that shapes how people live and understand the world.

What is enculturation?

The process by which individuals learn their culture, usually during childhood, through explicit and implicit teaching.

What is ethnocentrism?

Tendency to believe one's own culture or way of life is normal or natural and using one's culture/perspective to evaluate and judge the practices and ideals of others

What is cultural relativism?

Understanding a group's beliefs and practices within their own cultural context without making judgments.

What is anthropology?

The study of the full scope of human diversity, past and present, and the application of that knowledge to help people of different backgrounds better understand one another

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) - Human Evolution

Three stages of evolution

1. Savagery

2. Barbarism

3. Civilization

Bronislaw Malinowski - Functionalism

Social institutions are present to meet basic human needs of individuals in the society.

Bronislaw Malinowski - Participant Observation

Participant observation is the technique of gathering data on human cultures by living among the people, observing their social interaction on an ongoing daily basis, and participating as much as possible in their lives

Must be for an extended period of time!

Bronislaw Malinowski - Extended Fieldwork

Increases your observational and other data collection period, to build rapport, gain access to potentially restricted materials, experience behaviours, rituals, and events that might be related to your research that you had not considered, and to observe changes to the culture

Franz Boas (1858 - 1942)

Father of American Anthropology

Critical of (then popular) evolutionary approach

Culture as a product of history

Holistic study of culture

Created the 4-field approach to anthropology (archeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistics)

Argued that anthropologists should study language on their own terms and within wider cultural contexts—extending cultural relativism to include language.

Structural Functionalism

Society as an organism

Society is a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability

EX: Political system, economic system, social organization, religion, traditions/customs, etc.

Structural Functionalism Critiques

Bias towards systematic equilibrium, leading to evolutionary change

No room for radical or revolutionary change

Lack of agency of individuals

Ignores issues of race, gender, and class

Does not address permeability of societies

Heteroglossia

Mikhil Bakhtin, 1934, "The Dialogical Imagination"

Different perspective and cultural voices coexist and influence each other within various cultural contexts

Positionality, Power dynamics

Internal Variation

Edmund Leach, 1954, "Political System of Highland Burma"

Idealized versus realized cultural forms

Cultures are dynamic, fluid, flexible, and changing

EX: most people are expected to go to college, get married in their 20s, and have kids, but that's not how it always plays out

Clifford Geertz - Interpretive Method

Understanding culture as a system of shared symbols, meanings, and "webs of significance" rather than just observable behaviors

Clifford Geertz - Thick Description

Detailed account including summary, context, meaning, and interpretation

Reflexivity

Awareness that an anthropologist's identity influences research and interpretation.

Ethnography

Text resulting from the long-term fieldwork, which includes descriptions of time in the field and analysis of the cultural practices and beliefs obsessed and experienced

Ethics: protecting informants

Coding systems: using pseudonyms, obscuring details

Informed Consent: The requirement that participants in anthropological studies should understand the ways in which their participation and the release of the research data are likely to affect them

Nation-states

Political entities located within a geographical territory with enforced borders, where the population shares a sense of culture, ancestry, and density as a people

Imagined Communities

the invented sense of connection and shared traditions that underlies identification with a particular ethnic group or nation whose members will likely never meet

National Identity

a constructed, imagined, and subjective sense of belonging to a nation-state, shaped through shared symbols, history, and cultural narratives rather than inherent biology

Iraq: lacks national identity

Argentina: strong national identity

Matter Out of Place

Not everyone fits into idea of nation, the bounded territory.

Matter Out of Place: Nomads - Sami

Northern Europe

Discrimination

Forced to attend boarding schools - loss of language and culture

Loss of historical lands

Matter Out of Place: Migrants - Mali

Migrants from Mali travel to Brazzaville, Republic of Congo to work

Send remittances to families in Mali, funding homes and community resources in homeland

Seen as outsiders and strangers in Brazzaville, excluded from local systems

Crate parallel networks in Brazzaville.

Matter Out of Place: Homeless in US

Hostile architecture

Criminalizing homelessness

Prohibit camping

Laws against storing personal items in public

Anti--loitering and anti-panhandling ordinance

Fines against giving food away

Turkish Houses

Houses connected to eachother

Each contains 203 small rooms, sometimes separated by function

The sitting room is multifunctional

Divan placed around room can fit a lot of people

Hierarchical seating (older men sit by window, younger men next to them, women next to them or on the floor)

Gendered spaces

Women's domain inside, men's domain outside

Women must get permission to leave home

Courtyard: liminal space between inside and outside

Reflects larger cultural hierarchy other

US Houses

No typical american house

Individualism and privacy

Living room, dining room, kitchen, garage, bathrooms, bedrooms, closets

Rooms can be symbolic of the idea of family

Liminal Space

The ambiguous, transitional middle stage of a rite of passage, where individuals are "betwixt and between" old and new identities

Cosmological Time: Time as a River

Time as a river:

Focus on present and progress

Linear conception

Can't go back

Cosmological Time: Time as a Pendulum

Back and forth, alternating day and night

Static, repetitive

Past events can swing back

Cosmological Time: Time as Cyclical

Goes round and round

Continuous return of seasons

Events repeat with no end

Everything is interconnected.

Gregorian Calendar

Dominant calendar in the world

Replaced Juliam calendar in 16th century

Changed led and implemented by Catholic Church

Need to realign Easter (had become out of sync w/ seasons)

Britain adopted calendar in 18th century

Along with colonies like US

Protestant suspicion delayed adoption

Muslim Calendar

Began with Muhammad's migration (Hijra) from Mecca to Medina

1 AH (after Hijra) = 622 CE

Lunar-based calendar

Based on phases of the moon

Out of sync with seasons

Holidays don't land on the same day each year

Reflects lack of attachment to earthly life

Mayan Calendar

One of the most accurate calendar systems in history

The ancient Maya had 20 different cycles of time

4 well-known cycles

Haab: 1 solar year and 18 months of 20 days and 1 month of 5 days, reserved fro ceremonies and rituals

Tzolk'in: sacred calendar: 13 cycles of 20 days, matching 9 cycles of moon and human gestational period

Calendar round: interweaving of 2 cycles, takes 52 periods (of 365 days) to repeat

At 52 years, Maya people gained special knowledge and were considered elders.

The long count calendar: chronological dating of mythic and historical events; this lasts for 5125.366 tropical years.

4th cycle ended in 2012

Lived Time

How we live time and experience time depends on our identity and circumstances.

Meditated through race, class, gender, age, occupation

Time is felt personally and is dependent on the larger culture and its history

Oecological Time

The concept of time originated from environmental circumstances and particular ways in which society adapts to them

Structural Time

Time is more abstract and determined by social structures.

Adamic View of Language

Direct connection between words and the things they represent

The drive for the origin of language popular until 19th century.

Admitting a plural origin of language meant admitting that Adam was not the ancestor of humanity humanity.

Linguistic Structuralism

Language is organized in a specific way. It is a system (or structure) where any individual element is meaningless outside of the structure.

Ferdinand de Saussure's contribution to the study of linguistics

Language is a system of signs, each with 2 parts

Signifier - word/sound pattern

Signified - concept

The relationship between two parts is arbitrary.

Saussure introduced the idea that there is a distinction between language as it exists and language as it is practiced by speakers

Langue - individual language viewed as structure

Parole - individual speech acts/acts of language as a process

Edward Sapir

Critical of evolutionary ideas about language and culture

Interested in interconnections between personality, verbal expression, and socially determined behavior

Believed linguistics could be used to study cultural change - slower to change than cultural and social structures

Suggested people are at the mercy of the language they speak - our thoughts are meditated by our language, our vocabulary.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Whorf's Principles

Linguistic determinism: assumption that the ways individuals think is determined to a significant degree by the language they speak

Linguistic relativity: the view that structural different among languages are reflected in the worldview held by their speakers

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Language affects how people perceive their reality; language coerces thought (and influences culture).

Different languages create different ways of thinking

The content of language is directly related to the content of a culture

The structure of a language is directly related to the structure of a culture.

Direct translation isnt really possible

Language and Gender

Arapesh: Male and female display "feminine" personality traits

Mundugumor: Male and Female display "masculine" personality traits

Tchambuli: Reversal of our cultural attitudes; men display "feminine" characteristics while women display "masculine"

Feminine and masculine attributes way across cultures; therefore, none of these behaviors can link to "sex" (gender)

Language and Race

Race is a cultural construct

Standard American English, typically coded as white, is seen as "proper" manner of speaking

Microaggressions such as "you are so well-spoken/articulate" often imply a "for an x person."

EX: AAVE seen as slang, lazy, defective, "broken" English

Code-switching

Switching back and forth between one language and another based on context

Everyone code-switches to a degree

EX: How you talk to friends vs. professors

EX: Texting vs writing a paper