ANTH #1 Midterm

Anthropology

Studies the whole of the human condition (past, present, future, culture, technology, history, etc...)

Four sub-disciplines

Cultural

Biological

Linguistic

Archaeology

Cultural Anthropology

The study of human societies from a cross-cultural perspective

EX: Culture of College Campus

TOOLKIT: Enthnography

Linguistic Anthropology

Form, function, and social context of language

Language is closely related to geography (potato chip example)

Proxemics- comfort distance from culture to culture

TOOLKIT: Language

Archaeology

Study of how people used to live, based on the material culture left behind

Ranges from Great Pyramids to tiny stones

Helps to understand relationships of people and their culture

TOOLKIT: Excavations, analysis of material

Biological Anthropology

Study of human biology within the framework of evolution and with an emphasis on the interaction between biology and culture

Modification of body, foods we eat, biomechanics

Teeth is a strong tool (care of teeth through time, foods eaten, grills)

TOOLKIT: biology (DNA, bones, behavior, etc)

Instincts

An inborn pattern of activity or tendency

Horse example (learning to stand)

Humans are one of the most helpless species when born but can be taught virtually anything (such as gender and culture)

Culture

Traditions and customs transmitted through learning that form and guide the beliefs and behavior of the people exposed to them

Culture. is taught through experience

Anthropology

We study human culture and how it manifests across space and time

Laetoli Footprints

Fossil site in Tanzania

Impressions in mud date to 3.66 million years ago

Two sets of footprints act as evidence of mother carrying a child (one heavy footprint, one light)

Scientific Method

Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment, Analysis, New Hypothesis, Experiment, Empirical, Repeatable, Self-correcting

Sir Francis Bacon

Created the scientific method

Creation Story (different from science, set of beliefs)

Maya, Inka, Book of Genesis

Science As a Way of Knowing

Testable, can falsify things

Science also has a creation story

History of Anthropology

Boas (1848-1942)- father of American anthropology, immigrant from Germany, studied Inuit of Baffin Island

Thought it essential to learn language, culture, biology, and past of Inuit to understand how they are, trained group of anthropologists, advocated for interdisciplinary studies of culture, rejected all the -isms, trained some of the earliest women in university systems, broke down the idea of ethnocentrism and rejected it, anthropology was flooded with racists before

Ethnocentrism

Idea your culture is better than others

EX: most of us reject the idea of cannibalism

Exo-cannibalism- eating other people from other cultures as a way to dominate

Endo-cannibalism- eating people from own culture as a demonstration of respect, carrying ancestors with you

Cultural Relativism

Preached by Boas

Viewpoint that behavior in one culture should not be judged by the standards of another culture (not judging other cultures)

Death traditions example (embalming, mummification, casket, donation), dealing with emotional pain/joy regarding death)

Ethnocentrism

Tendency to view one's culture as superior and to apply one's cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs of people raised in other cultures (judging different cultures)

Spaniards were heavily ethnocentric

Hollywood Forever: Cultural Relatvism or Ethnocentrism

National register of historic sites, the oldest cemetery in LA, many celebrities are buried there, dynamic venue for the living, judging the fashion of it all would be ethnocentrism, just a different way of treating the dead

According to Kluckhohn: Why do People Differ?

Because we were brought up that way, the total way of life

Babies as blank slates on which culture is imprinted on, every human being is influenced by culture even before they are born

Society

A group of people who interact more with each other than other with others (the United States is a society)

Society is different from culture (you may interact with each other (society)) but have different normalized behaviors (culture)

Culture

Distinctive way of life of a group of people

The United States is multicultural

Learning Culture

Everyone has culture, one is not more cultured because you have seen the Mona Lisa

Enculturation: the social process by which culture is learned and transmitted across generations, within generations, or across societies

Learning culture is a social process, not just going somewhere and seeing something

When did we start doing culture, learning from those who came before us? Around 2.6 million years ago

Do other species have culture? Maybe. Humans do have the most sophisticated culture

Universals

Found in every culture

Food, power relations, etc...

Particularities

Unique to certain cultural traditions

Themed characters at your wedding (Japan and United States examples)

How do Cultures Change?

Cultures are not static, they are always susceptible to change

Independent Invention:

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (Apple and Microsoft)- different codes, different systems, but came up at the same time

Diffusion (adoption): Culture spreading and changing, agriculture m adopting ideas

Agency and Practice- protests and calls for change, Culture is also maladaptive, it doesn't just improve things, sometimes it's a turn for the worse, cell phones (addictive), history tells us there has always been a fear of new technology

Methods

Fieldwork

White guy went to the island (fieldwork)

Changed dynamics by his very presence

Fieldwork is different for each anthropologist and the culture they are studying and often become part of the community

Preparing for the Fieldwork

You have to prepare as a cultural anthropologist by learning about the community you are about to study, can't go unprepared

Formulate a Research Question - is that culture, how do pafrents feed their babies? How is gender expressed? What role does money play? How is migration impacting economics?

Background Research

You have to make sure no one asked the same question before you, why do you think this is an important question

Research Design

Grant money, are you going to use surveys, participant observation (go out to region, immerse yourself)- find the best way to conduct your research, getting their life history, genealogical method (who is related to who?), survey, or interview schedule (open-ended questions)

American Anthropological Association Code of Ethics

Anthropologists cannot do whatever they want with no regulation, ethical implications behind anthropology, some anthropologists have been kicked out (like looters)

Insitutional Review Board (IRB)

Any time you study subjects you could cause harm to (humans, animals, etc...) you have to undergo IRB approval

Gang Leader- Sudhir Venkatesh

break down how people with no formal economy live

Informed Consent

After being informed of the goals of the research, informants formally agree to take part in the research (often involved a signed document)

Funding

National Geographic, Fulbright, NSF, Boren Awards, Allows for not just wealthy people to be involved in the field of research

Get Ready

Think about what you have to wear, money, vaccines

In the Field

Devices to record your study (computer, notebook, etc...) cameras, something to write with (hidden cameras)

Informants: any person who provies the anthropologists with information (building rapport is important, culturally important payment and something that won't harm power structures in community)

Publish!

Collected all data, synthesized it, published it, and put it out there to the world, go through peer review

Longitudinal research- long-term study of a community, society, culture, or other unit, unsually based on repeated visits (because cultures change)

Kinship

Who you are related to, how you relate, family is first impact on culture you grow up in, status in society, transfer of power through kinship

Marriage

A relationship between one or more men (male or female sex) and one or more (female or male sex) who are recognized by society as having a continuing claim to the right of sexual access to one another

Economic benefits

Intimacy, love, religion, companionship

Right to each other's labor

Monogamy is most common form but...

Serial Monogamists

Being married multiple times

Polygamy

Being married to multiple people at one time

Polygyny

Marriage of a man to two or more women at the same time

Polyandry

Marriage of a woman to two or more men at one time

Family

Two or more people related by blood, marriage, or adoption, Nuclear Family

Household

Basic residential unit in which economic production, consumption, inheritance, child rearing, and/or shleter are organized and carried out

Residence Patterns

Who are people going to live with when you get married

Patrilocal: husband's father's relatives

Matrilocal: wife's mother's relatives

Ambilocal: can choose either relatives

Neolocal: move away from both relatives

Extended Family

More than two generations

Descent: Who's Your Family

Patrilineal: automatic membership in father's group

Matrilineal: automatic member in mother's group

Bilateral: traced through both paternal and maternal lines

Descent: The Hopi

Culture in North American SouthWest on Navajo Nation

Matrilineal and matrilocal and patriarchy, organized by men, men run govt, men in charge of politics

Chickasaw Nation

Native group living in Oklahoma, matrilineal society

Magic and Rituals

Baseball players, rely on magic and religious rituals in attempt to control chance that is built into daily life

Religion

Belief with supernatural beings, powers, and forces (one of few cultural universals, like marriage)

E.B. Tylor- developed a taxonomy of religions

Animism->polytheism-> monotheism

He believed religions were based on cultural/evolutionary phase we were in (dawg was wrong- one culture is not more primite than another), he was just right about the way to sort them

Religion II

Religion provides stability, morality, identity, brings order, control

It is a belief

Religion can tell us about the culture of the participants, the participants themselves, economics, gender relations, institutions, power

Magic

supernatural techniques intended to accomplish specific aims, doing an actual act

Example of magic: Haitian Voodoo

Negative connotations in the United States but is a very positive religion

Supernatural techniques with specific goal

Get evil spirit out of Berto (in video)

Ritual

Prescribed behaviors in which there is no empirical connection between the means and the desired end

Illusion of control

Snake charmer as an example

Just to prove to other people around you that you believe

Snake-Handling churches in Appalachia- believe that god prevents the snake from biting them

You can still be atheist and still have your rituals

Dividing the Sacred & the Profane

Generally, people in the United States try to maintain a strict division between the sacred and the profane

Separation of church and state

Maintaining the strict division- motivate and control people to do things in the absence of religion (money, by force, verbal renforcement, social norms- for example)

Religious feeling of sport events

Taboo

Opposite of rituals, things you shouldn't do

Bride and groom seeing each other before getting married

Rituals

Rites of Passage- rituals which make a persons moving from one social state to another, doesn't require a religion

Rites of Passage 3 Stages

Separation- participant(s) withdraws from group and begins moving from one place to another

Liminality- period between states, during which the participants(s) has left one place but has not yet entered the next

Incorporation- participant(s) reenters society with a new status having completed the rite

Rites of Passage

Help individual conceptualize what it means to be transformed (wedding, graduation, convict reentering society with little to no help)

Ongka and Kawelka Tribe

Questions

In this money-less society, how do people make a living?

Pigs are essentially form of currency, Moka (gifts) , barter, go to jungle for supplies

How do people gain status without money?

By giving gifts (Moka), he gains status for himself and trive, big men have always been especially honorable

What is the role of kinship in community organization in this case study>

Ongka receives pigs from father-in-law

How is the division of labor gendered?

Ongka cannot order people around, can only persuade

Men seem to do a lot of the physical labor

His wife (Rumbuca) looks after pigs and lives with them (faces high pressure)

Additional

Moka- gifts, most important thing in the lives of highland people, repaid with interest

Men take on mulitple wives

Speech-making is important trait for the big men, big men try to out-do each other in each tribe

Sex

Biological differences between male and female, comes down to chromosome count (XX,XY)

Sexual dimorphism

Physiological differences between males and females, q angle, strength, facial differences, all on a curve

Sex Chromosome Anomalies

XXX, XYY, XO/XY, XXY

Intersex

Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome

Between sexes

XY but AFAB

In some cultures it's celebrated, in some, it's not

Sexual Orientation

One's identity in relation to who they are sexually attracted to or who they have sex with, Marriage Equality made legal in 2015 in US

Sexuality

Homosexuality is common in archaeological record

Gender

Refers to the cultural construction of masculine and feminine characteristics that may or may not correlate with the biological underpinnings of sex, gender our children based on their sex

Gender Roles and Gendered Division of Labor

Gender roles and gender vision of labor are not fixed; they're changeable in a culture, 1950s gender roles, new evidence points to the fact that females were hunters as well, only thing is females are better equipped to feed babies, when gender roles are rigid they can lead to repression and bias

For Swedlund

Barbie encompasses feminine gender identity and gender roles in US, gender has broadened its culture

Hijras

Official recognized 3rd gender, oldest ethnic transgender community, origins in Indian subcontinent

Biological Concept of Race

Biological concept of race comes from looking at animals, biological species concept of race is a geographically isolated subdivision of a species

If reproductive isolation lasts long enough, new species is produced

Liger and Cama (infertile)

Race as Constructed in Humans

Groups in which humans can be divided according to physical characteristics (eyes, skin hair, shape, etc..), nothing to do with reproductive isolating or subdivisions

Do Biological Human Races Exist

Early human classification into races have been dependent solely on the evaluation of phenotype

Genetic Diversity

Genetic diversity in humans is the result of migrations, most diversity in Africa, least in Eastern Asia, Human populations have never been reproductively isolated long enough to develop distinct biological races, humans are "closely" related, physical traits chosen to define race are basically arbitrary

Groundbreaking Work on Race: Franz Boas

He was an immigrant and faced discrimination/stereotype

Anti-racist (scientifically studied the basis of race)

Boas rejects racism based on empirical evidence

Used to be though cranial race correlated with race and intelligence, measured 13k immigrant cranial shapes, determined nutrition is the factor of size

Boas challeneged cultural issue (racism) by using biological anthropological research (cranial morphology)

Ethnic Groups and Race

People distinguished by cultural similarities -ethnicity

Race in every day discourse refers to social category, not biological

Ethnicity and race and not synonymous but US culture uses interchangeably

Important to study race in humans, even if there is no biological race, because we made it important through the social categorization, racism is an action

The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity

a social construct is a category created and developed by society, and a perception of a group that is 'constructed' through cultural or social practice (pregnancy related deaths differing between white and Black woman--> access to medical care, hospitals, etc)

Stereotype

Widely held, fixed, and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing that pigeon holes someone

Racism

prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized

Native American Mascots

Perpetuate stereotypes and people take them seriously

Guest Lecture 1

Professor Douglas Holmes - Ethnography

Ethnography

Scientific study of the customs of individual people and cultures.

Conditions of ethnography shifted, look for new spaces to do ethnography

Firebird and Stravinsky

Wanted to study that symphony and that style of music

• could go to multiple concerts performing the same symphony, perhaps from a nonprofessional group

• watch how Julliard group rehearsed it over time (source of the idea)

• interview the people playing the piece and talk to them

  • Stravinsky wanted to discuss and push us into the modern era and how we understand ourselves as modern beings (more than just a strange collection of sounds) and became a vehicle for profound cultural change

Wolf of Wall Street

• The role of money in film making

• how a story is made that captures something about our time

  • what cinema can do, studying a film from within

Key West

British company with genetically modified mosquito whose purpose was to rid a harmful group of mosquitoes in Key West

Psychiatry

• Redrafting the relationship between patient and psychiatrist

  • development of psychiatry

UAP & UFO

• how do we deal with observations about these strange phenomena

• what is behind the fascination behind these observations

  • how does it become the basis of public policy and rethinking science itself

Contemporary Fascism

• compelling and seductive

• could fit in the political field after the Cold War

• Holmes began to study the emergence of contemporary fascism

• argued that within European integration would inevitably create contemporary fascism

  • formulated a politics of identity and belonging

Central Banks

• how to condition people for labor

• modeled what makes us human and saw how they could be used for governmental policy

• how in a financial crisis it became a key instrument in fighting the crisis

Guest Lecture 1 Extra

• “Think about places you can get into the most trouble possible”

• can look at almost any environment in the planet and find complex cultural questions related to ethnography

  • inclined to think about culture as a contested phenomenon

Guest Lecture 2

Joshua Reno - non-verbal communication

Non-Verbal communication based on context

• time, place, setting

• language doesn’t just rely on space and time, too distinct

• isn’t just limited to humans

  it’s just experiencing and picking up on patterns

Not all communication is like language

• hitting the desk example

  • language is a distinct way of communicating that only beings trained by humans can use (non-human apes, computer programs)