anthro 2a midterm 1

Anthropology

The study of human diversity, different ways of being human; 4 subfields are socio-cultural, linguistic, archeology, biological.

Culture

The beliefs we have about the world and people; the power to naturalize; culture allows us to judge people by the way they look and act and make assumptions about their lives; provides categories and groupings.

Power to naturalize

Relating everything to nature; breaking things down to a simple level even if it cannot be evaluated in that manner.

A Priori

Something you've taken to be true, or accepted without evidence.

Scientific Racism

Social, cultural, and biological difference between different groups are expressions of biological stock (type).

Race & Colonialism

Emphasizes historical contacts, linkages, and power differentials between local people and international forces; the political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended time.

Science & Culture

Scientists use qualification to interpret things and in this case culture.

Linneaus (1735, 1758)

Developed a system of biological classification (taxonomy) for different "racial" subsections of homo sapiens, (ex. Homo sapiens europeus albesscus).

Blumenbach (1781)

Used race as a scientific category; 5 races-Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay, Ethiopian, American.

Hooton (1926)

Broke race into caucazoid, mongloid, negroid.

Monogenesis

Argues that there is one initial origin of humanity.

Polygenesis

Argued for independent origins of each race.

Typologizing & rank

The work done to try and create a rank order of races based on different characteristics; not viable since culture is variable and the findings are not based on nature.

Craniometry

Big brain=smarter; little brain=stupid; scientists made this assumption to try and prove that white men are at the top of the hierarchy.

Robbert Bennett Bean

Genu (anterior brain/front) had cognition, thinking problem-solving; Splenium (posterior/back) sensory function; Bean theorized that whites/men had more of the brain devoted to Genu than Splenium; created some bullshit theory to make white men superior.

Paul Broca

Tried to prove the theory that larger brains meant smarter; falsified data by using young healthy male brains and women's brains from insane asylums…clearly skewing the data; when he was called out on this he tried to use spine straightness to prove white men superior.

Culture: Biological vs. Social Transmission

Culture is socially transmitted, not biologically transmitted; all peoples have the capacity to acquire culture.

Four Facts of Distribution of Human Bio Variation

There is human biological variation, geographically localized variation, continuous variation (gradual differences), discordant variation (different traits don't vary together).

Social Races

A group assumed to have a biological basis but actually perceived and defined in a social context-by a particular culture rather than by scientific criteria.

Hypodescent

A rule that automatically places children of a union or mating between members of different socioeconomic groups in the less privileged group.

Cline

A gradation in a single character or gene frequency over geographic distance (geographic distribution of a trait/genre).

Race and Intelligence

Race and intelligence have no direct correlation; intelligence is best determined by culture and surroundings.

IQ Test Scores During WWII

Human variation; we have better data since WWII in which IQ tests were not as reliable.

Osage IQ Scores

The IQs of different native American tribes were tested and the Osage tribe had the highest IQ; this is because they found oil and used the money to invest in education, so there people are on average more intelligent; intelligence based on culture, not genetics/race.

Shirley Heath

Studied how children acquire linguistics; found that it is acquired through parents speaking and reading stories.

Genes

Determinants of traits and characteristics, not intelligence or culture.

Breeding Populations

Group of interbreeding organisms; population genetics; flexible unit of analysis; race is a trigger word.

Ethnicity

A common identity based on cultural similarities; people who share ethnicity are part of an ethnic group; ethnic identity is situational (certain situations yield differences in people's background).

Minority and majority groups

Sometimes the majority group in a population can be the minority in a different situation, it is entirely situational (ex. Asian as majority only in UCI).

Assimilation vs Multiculturalism

Assimilation is when the minority group assimilates and loses its culture to the majority group, whereas multiculturalism is the view of cultural diversity in a country as something good and desirable.

Discrimination

De facto-practiced, but not legally sanctioned; de jure-part of the law; apartheid in South Africa was an example of de jure discrimination

Imagination and Identity

Imagined communities are groups of people who wish they had their own political status (country), an example is the Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iran; identity refers to what nationality, ethnicity, or group a person views themselves as a part of.

Social Evolution

There are 3 assumptions: social forms change over time, rank order societies from high to low on some criterion, rank order is treated as sequence of events.

Social Darwinism

"Survival of the fittest" coined by Herbert Spencer.

Unilinear Evolution

Lewis Henry Morgan, change leads to increased socio-cultural complexity; savagery>barbarism>civilization; each stage has its socio-cultural attributes.

Savagery

Bow and arrow, fire; group marriage, promiscuous hordes.

Barbarism

Metallurgy, agriculture, pottery; polygyny.

Civilization

Phonetic alphabet; monogamy.

Diversity & Evolutionary Stages

Change was unilinear; diversity occurs through different rates of change (maternal conditions).

Franz Boas

Formed first academic department of anthropology at Columbia University.

Empirical Problems with Social Evolution

Data was based on sketchy second-hand accounts; data was falsified, overlooked, misplaced, misinterpreted.

Multilinear Evolution

Every human society changes over time; every society has unique history.

Cultural Diffusion

Ideas, inventions spread through cultures coming in contact (ex. Tribes of native americans go to war. One tribe has bow and arrow and the other doesn't. Tribe re-creates bow and arrow idea for their one production).

Ethnocentrism

The tendency to view one's own culture as best and to judge the behavior and beliefs of culturally different people by one's own standards.

Nature v Nurture

Debate over which plays larger role in human development; once the brain was established, then social-cultural phenomenon take over (nature, then nurture).

Thomas Hobbes

Humans are inherently selfish, nasty and evil but changed by society (nature before nurture).

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Humans are pure by nature but corrupted by society (nature, nurture).

Field Study of Chimpanzees

We have less than 2% genetic difference from chimpanzees; chimpanzees make and use tools, unlike any other species besides ourselves.

Fossil Record

Archeological record of bones and artifacts that show evolution in species; 2.5mya was when the first stone tools were created; 7mya was when chimps and humans common ancestor existed.

Culture & Society

Culture is distinguished from society; society is a group of people with some relation; culture is the explanation for a person's behavior in different situations.

Culture & Biology

Culture is distinguished from biology; scientific racists attempt to turn culture into biology.

Supra Organic

Culture operates at a level above the individual; transcends individual or human life (ex. English language-still exists even after a person dies, transcends their life).

Culture & World View

The way we see our world is shaped by culture; culture provides a world view, assumptions about the world; different societies/cultures have different world views, different perspectives.

Cultural Constructions

The meanings of culture; product of social interaction and human history (ex. food-different foods for different meals/occasions).

Cultural Relativism

Opposite of ethnocentrism; the viewpoint that behavior in one culture should not be judged by the standards of another culture; argues that there is no superior, international, or universally morality, that the moral and ethical rules of all cultures deserve equal respect.

Verbal & Nonverbal communication

Language is our principal means of communicating; verbal-information transmitted through words; nonverbal-our expressions, stances, gestures, and movements, even if unconscious, that convey information.

Phoneme

Significant sound contrast in a language that serves to distinguish meaning, as in minimal pairs (ex. bit/pit).

Morpheme

Words and their meaningful parts (cats has 2 morphemes: cat and -s).

Lexicon

A dictionary containing all of a language's morphemes and their meanings.

Syntax

Refers to the arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences.

Language & Thought

Language, spoken and written is our primary means of communication; only our complex thought process allows us to use language and discuss with other humans

Sociolinguistics: this field investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation; no language is a uniform system in which everyone talks just like everyone else.

Sociolinguistics

This field investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation; no language is a uniform system in which everyone talks just like everyone else.

Dialetcs (BEV)

dialects are different types of speaking or speaking different languages; BEV is Black English Vernacular which is the "relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the United States today, especially in the inner cities.

Gender Speech Contrast

there are differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, and in the body stances and movements that accompany speech; women typically use language and the body movements that accompany it to build rapport, social connections with others; men tend to make reports, reciting information that serves to establish a place for themselves in a hierarchy, as they also attempt to determine the relative ranks of their conversation mates.

Stratification

the creation of separate social strata; its emergence signified the transition from chiefdom to state; the presence of stratification is one of the key distinguishing features of a state.

Symbolic Domination

linguistic forms, which lack power in themselves, take on the power of the groups they symbolize; the linguistic insecurity often felt by lower-class and minority speakers is a result of symbolic domination.

Social Organization & Social Structure

all human labor is socially organized; they have some way of delegating all the tasks of a society; society and social groups cannot be judged based on the technique of production.

Mode of Production

a way of organizing production; a set of social relations through which labor is deployed to wrest energy from nature by means of tools, skills, organization, and knowledge

Means of Production: land, labor, and technology.

Means of Production

land, labor, and technology.

Relations of Production

the socioeconomic relationship people have to production in a particular epoch; ex. a slave master's relationship to their slaves.

Subsistence Strategies

the action or fact of maintaining or supporting oneself at a minimum level; ex. hunting and gathering, pastoralism, horticulture.

Foraging

hunting and gathering of nature's bounty.

Pre Industrial Agriculture

industrial methods made farming much more efficient and allowed farmers to mass produce crops; before then farming was "plant and pick, and hope for the best".

Pastoralism

it is a type of herding in which the herders attempt to protect their animals and to ensure their reproduction in return for food and other products, such as leather, dairy, meat.

Industrialism

the major shift to large industry corporations and a large increase in the work force due to industrialization.

Correlates of Foraging

here are some: people who subsisted by hunting and gathering often, but not always, lived in band-organized societies; foraging life correlates with lots of mobility; men hunt/fish and women gather/collect.

San Foragers of the Kalahari Desert

modern foraging groups in South Africa's Kalahari Desert; they still practice hunting and gathering.

Life span

the amount of time in years that a person lives.

Mean Life expectancy

a measure of the health status of a group; more people living to be older; if make it through childhood, live longer than average.

Domestication

the use of animals as a means of production-for transport, as cultivating machines, and for their manure.

Extensive Agriculture (Horticulture)

cultivation that makes intensive use of none of the factors of production: land, labor, capital, and machinery.

Slash and Burn Agriculture (Swidden)

when horticulturalists clear land by cutting down (slashing) and burning forest or bush or by setting fire to the grass covering the plot.

Intercropping

growing two or more crops in close proximity.

Fallow

type of land that has been left unseeded for a season or more; uncultivated.

Intensive Agriculture

requires more labor than horticulture does because it uses land intensively and continuously; the greater labor demands reflect its use of domesticated animals, irrigation, or terracing.

Terracing, Irrigation, etc

terracing is when farmers cut into hillsides to create level plains to plant crops without them getting washed away in the rainy season; irrigation is the construction of canals and waterways to control water during the dry season.

Wet Rice Agriculture

the cultivation of rice by planting on dry land, transferring the seedlings to a flooded field, and draining the field before harvesting.

Intensification

increasing the yield of harvested material per hectare of land used.

Energy Production & Efficiency

industrialism allowed for massive production but required a large harvest of energy; in comparison to agriculture it was way less energy efficient, but it was productively efficient.

Pastoralism & Ecology

take animals around to different areas to feed them off the land; then when herder was hungry, kill one of the livestock.

Livestock & Environment

livestock are not natural to the environment and mess with the flow of the ecosystem by eating the plants or becoming prey.

Livestock as Food

much more simple method to getting needed meat into diet than by hunting other animals; domestication of cows, sheeps, chickens and pigs allowed for mass production of livestock as main meat source.

Transhumance

in pastoralism when part of the group moves with the herd, but most people stay in the home village.

Market Principle

it governs the distribution of the means of production-land, labor, natural resources, technology, and capital.

Redistribution

operates when goods, services, or their equivalent move from local level to a center, the center may be a capital, a regional collecting point, or a storehouse.

Reciprocity

exchange between social equals, who normally are related by kinship, marriage or another close personal tie.

Specialization

only making one product or a few products but in vast amounts; specializing work towards a single product; specialization promotes trade; in clans, a clan's speciailization reflects the social and political environment rather than the natural environment.

Law of Supply & Demand

things cost more the scarcer they are and the more people want them; higher demand/lower supply means higher cost.