Anthro109: Exam 2 terms

Environmental Anthro- Medical Anthro

What do environmental anthropologists understand?

• Environmental anthropologists recognize that all systems of knowledge about nature are culturally based—even science.

Ethnoscience

• describe and understand the conceptual models and rules with which different people classify plants and animals

• How do we classify animals and plants?
  

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)

• Indigenous ecological knowledge and its relationship with resource management strategies

• Indigenous peoples have knowledge of ecology unknown to Western science.

The Pristine Myth

The idea that native people were “natural environmentalists”

• in reality: indigenous people are as susceptible to the risk of overexploitation as any other human group

Political Ecology

• Field that studies the roles of political, economic, and social power in environmental problems

  • What are the consequences of an industrial economy?

  • Who pays the costs of capitalist development that promote resource extraction?

  • How does pollution impact different groups of people?

Steward’s Multilinear Evolution

• Environment and ecology play a role

  • Band – small, mobile group of hunter gatherers

  • Tribe – larger more sedentary group of h-g or horticulturalists, no central decision-making authority

  • Chiefdom – large, sedentary group, usually agricultural, w/ elites and centralized decision-making

  • State (or “civilization”) - large group of settled agriculturalists, with complex social and political structures

Neoevolutionary theory

• Culture equates with technology to capture energy

  • People harnessing increasing amounts of energy

  • Fire, draft animals, coal, oil, electricity, nuclear energy

  • Measured with calories
    

C = Culture 

E = Energy

T = Technology

C= E * T

Economic Anthropology

• concerned with how people make, share, and buy goods and services

• study of economic systems across cultures 

• understanding how culture and economy affect each other.

Division of labor

• the cooperative organization of work into specialized tasks and roles

Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand

• value is no longer determined by the amount of labor necessary to produce object

• mass-production by a division of labor

• value function of exchange in the market

• “invisible hand” of the market economy

Capitalism

• An economic system based on private ownership of the means of production, in which prices are set and goods distributed through a market

Cultural Economics

• Focuses on how symbols and morals help shape a community’s economy

Appropriation

• Consumption begins with appropriation

  • taking possession of an object, idea, or relationship

• Example: “consumption” of a smartphone. 

  • Money necessary to appropriate

  • Is a certain type of phone statement of your socioeconomic status?

  • Consumption continues with how you modify, decorate, and use the phone.

Politics

• those relationships and processes of cooperation, conflict, and power that are fundamental aspects of human life.

acephalous societies

• societies without a governing head, generally with no hierarchical leadership.

• structural-functionalism: 

• theory that the different structures or institutions of a society (religion, politics, kinship, etc.) functioned to maintain social order and equilibrium.

Non-centralized power

• A political system in which power and control over resources are dispersed between members of the society

• Bands and tribes

Centralized

• A political system in which certain individuals and institutions hold power and control over resources

• Chiefdoms and states

Action Theory

• People are constantly managing their ability to exercise power over others

  • Follow daily activities and decision-making processes of individual political leaders

• Rules:

  • Normative – stable and explicit ethical norms to ensure honesty, fairness, etc.

  • Pragmatic - creative manipulations necessary to win game

• How do you see the difference between normative and pragmatic rules structuring politics today?

Structural Power

• power that not only operates within settings but also organizes and orchestrates the settings in which social and individual action take place.

Nation-states

independent states recognized by other states, composed of people who share a single national identity.

Taxonomy of Races

• Divides people into vibrant “colors” to describe skin pigmentation

  • Exaggerating the range of human skin tones

  • People are not “black,” “white,” “red,” or “yellow” 

The Problems of Racial Thinking

• Assumes that one visible trait (e.g., skin color) correlates with complex behavioral attributes like intelligence, athletic ability, or personal character

• Individual phenotype expression of thousands of genetically-based traits

• Traits we use to determine “race” are visually distinctive

  • Not particularly important

• Human groupings based on blood type or fingerprint patterns make biological sense but have no “racial” significance.

Race

• a concept that organizes people into groups based on specific physical traits that are thought to reflect fundamental and innate differences.

Gender/sex system

• the ideas and social patterns a society uses to organize males, females, and those who do not fit either category.  

sexual dimorphism

• a characteristic of a species in which males and females have different sexual forms

kinship

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

• constructed in culturally specific and dynamic systems

• Families function as corporate groups

groups of real people who work together toward common ends much like a corporation does.

Clan (descent groups)

• A group of relatives who claim to be descended from a single ancestor

• This apical (at the “apex”)  ancestor may be an animal or supernatural entity or human

Lineage (Descent groups)

A group composed of relatives who are directly descended from known ancestors

Clan Exogamy

• a social pattern in which members of a clan must marry someone from another clan

  • builds political, economic, and social ties with other clans 

Animism

• primitive peoples believed that inanimate objects such as trees, rocks, cliffs, hills, and rivers were animated by spiritual forces or beings

Religion

• a symbolic system that is socially enacted through rituals and other aspects of social life, including these four elements:

Totemism

• A system of thought that associates particular social groups with specific animal or plant species called “totems” as an emblem.

The biocultural approach

• involves complex intersections of biological, psychological, and cultural processes

• nthropologists apply their knowledge of culture, biology, and disease to address real-world health crises.

Sick role

the culturally defined agreement between patients and family members to acknowledge that the patient is legitimately sick

Medicalization

• the process of viewing or treating as a medical concern conditions that were not previously understood as medical problems.