Anthropology 210 - TAMUG Dr. Furth - Exam 1

Unique Anthropology

The Scientific and humanistic study of human beings. It encompasses the evolutionary history of humanity, human physical variation, and the stud of past societies, as well as comparative study of current and ancient human societies and cultures.

Anthropologists being Holistic approach to understanding an explaining. Anthropology combines the study of human biology, history, and culture to analyze human groups.

Holism operates anthropology from other Academic disciplines which general focus on one factor as the explanation of human behavior.

What are the 4 subdisciplines? What unites them in American anthropology?

Cultural Anthropology

Anthropological linguistics

Archeology

Biological or physical anthropology

Unity of the 4 Sub-Disciplines: They allow the holistic exploration of Biological and cultural variation across time and space

Cultural anthropology

The study of Human society and culture.

Cultural anthropologists attempt to understand culture through the study of its origins, development, and diversity

ex. Lamalera Whale and shark hunters.

Anthropological Linguistics

The study of language in varying social and cultural contests.

Speech communities

Current focus on group identities and resistance

Historical linguistics

Language is central to being human & is grounded in biology.

Ex, Irish Language

Archeology

The discovery, preservation and interpretation of material culture in order to inver past cultural patterns. NW Denmark, Corent France

Anthropological archeologists use ethnographic analogy and remains to reconstruct how past life ways, behaviors, and beliefs

Archeology provides the unique opportunity to look at cultural changes in social complexity through time and space

Biological Anthropology

The study of human as physical and biological entities

Bio-cultural variation across time and space

All human culture rests on a biological base

Examples: Human palaeontology (evolution), primatology, forensic anthropology.

What do we mean when we say that anthropology is comparative and holistic?

It encompasses the evolutionary history of humanity, human physical variation, and the study of past societies, as well as comparative study of current and ancient human societies and cultures

Anthropologists bring holistic approach to understanding and explaining

Anthropology combines the study of human biology, history, and culture to analyze human groups.

Holism separates anthropology form other academics disciplines which generally focus on one factor as the explanation for human behavior

Holism

separates anthropology form other academics disciplines which generally focus on one factor as the explanation for human behavior

Why is anthropology especially useful in addressing 'nature versus nurture' questions? What are some examples discussed in class?

The comparative and holistic approach in Anthropology provide a unique perspective on "Nature vs. Nurture" questions

Many behaviors an aspects of human development result from a combination.

Some examples: Agression Personality Mental illeness Creativity

Hypothesis

Hypotheses are generated form theories and are suggested explanations of observed phenomena

Explnatations show how and why something is related to other thins in some known way (correlations)

Associations are the observed relationships between two or more measured variables.

theory

is a broad set of hypotheses that have been tested and have been tested and have not been falsified. Theories are used to suggest and explain associations between 2 or more variables.

Theories cannot be proven; we evaluate them through the method falsification. If true, certain predication should stand up to tests designed to disprove them. Theories that have not been disproved are accepted because of available evidence thus far supports them.

Science is one of the way of viewing the world

7 Main Attributes of Culture

Learned

Transmitted through symbols

Shared

Patterned and integrated

All-encompassing

Adaptive or maladaptive

Dynamic

Taboos

norms specifying behaviors that are prohibited

Ex. Eating, sex, and other bodily functions are prescribed, may mark group identity.

Symbol

a word, sound, image, or object that represents and transmits cultural ideas or sentiments

Leslie White

Argued culture, and thus being human, began when our ancestors began using symbols or transmit culture

Symbol primates have limited abilities to use symbols

Kanzi the bonobo using signs

Norm

An ideal cultural pattern of appropriate behaviors that influence behavior in a particular society

Religious and political re-enforcement

May vary by subgroup

Value

A culturally defined idea of what is true, right, and beautiful

Why do anthropologists care about ideal norms and observed behaviors?

People can avoid, manipulate, subvert, change and resist cultural norms

Observed behaviors may or may not match formal, ideal norms.

Subculture

A system of perceptions, values, belief, and customs that are significantly different from those of a larger, dominant cultural whiting the same society.

Some may overlap

Subcultures can have norms that conflict with dominant norms

Ex. TAMU does not have Salt Camp Tamug does

Pagans

Ren Fair

Gender roles after WWII

Practices and beliefs from a relatively coherent and consistent system

Changes in one aspect will likely generate changes in other aspects of a culture Change the mode of production can change family organization, such as with women in World War II

Culture is Adaptive

Populations adapt to the environment so they can susie and reproduce

Maladaptive

Some practices have unexpected costs

Kuru of New Guinea: Female ate brains of dead relatives as an economic strategy; lead to disease British mad cow disease was an economic strategy (feeding sheep brains to cows) that also lead to diseases

Cultural Universals

Are found in all populations (psychological universals, fire, incest taboo, marriage, tool use, etc.), which may suggest a biological basis.

Cultural Generalities

Cultural generalities are common, often from diffusion and independent innovation (nuclear family).

Particularities

Are unique approaches to handle human problems. Eating guinea pigs

Diffusion

The spread of cultural elements from one culture to another through contact.

Can be: Direct: Between adjacent cultures Indirect: Long-distance contact

And Forced: Warfare, colonization, missions, etc. Unforced: intermarriage, trade, media.

Assimilation

A minority group adopts norms of its host culture ("melting pot").

Multiculturalism

View that the maintenance of cultural differences is beneficial

Acculturation

Exchange of some elements due to direct contact (forced or unforced) while maintaining differences

Cultural appropriation

the intentional claiming of elements from another culture, often modified with meanings. This often refers to a dominant group appropriating from a historically dominated group, especially native cultures.

Its about power, you can dress as them. You can dress as an Indian but natives wear the fact they are native everyday.

syncretism

The selective borrowing and merging of cultural elements (they "make it their own")

Common in religion (voodoo, historic catholicism) Lwa Erzulie Dantor Santa Muerte

Globalization

Process making nations and people increasingly interlinked and mutually dependent. It is driven by economic and political forces

Allows for domination of local peoples.

Local peoples adapt and resist and so they are not completely helpless

World View

It is structured: "It contains their most comprehensive ideas of order", including where humans fit into that order

Symbols 'store' meanings that reflect or embody the world 'as it is'.

Confirmed through systems of religion, but also of history, politics, economics, etc.

Geertz, however, does not address variation within a culture, nor cultural change

Ethos

The moral (and aesthetic) aspects of a given culture, the evaluative elements."

So what is deemed good, right, and beautiful and what is bad, wrong, and ugly.

In other words, it is how we engage wiht the world 'as it is'.

("As it is" means how the world works according to the cultural worldview).

This is IMPORTANT - Ethos/morality is made to seem so obviously common sensical that it would be unimaginable if not impossible to question it.

Nacirema Story

Allegory for Americans and our hygiene habits from the Anthropological point of view

What are the main ethnographic field methods used today, what are the strengths of each, and what are possible examples of each?

Firsthand exploration of a society and culture over an extended period of time (usually 6-24 months).

Reveals the difference between what people say they do and what they do.

Emphasizes local behavior, beliefs, customs, social life, economic activities, politics, and religion.

Ethnographers investigate local, regional national, and global contexts.

How long are anthropologists usually in the field?

(6 to 24 months)

participant-observation

Gathering cultural data by observing and recording people's behavior and participating in their lives.

Anthropologists work wiht respondents who guide them and offer insights to the culture.

Dr. Furth at Austin Pagan Pride Day

questionnaires

Semi-structured interviews

Open-ended questions

focusing on specific topics

Formal interviews

Structured

Ethnology

Used to build models, test hypothesis, and create theories that enhance our understanding of how social and cultural systems work.

Works from the particular (ethnographic data) to the general (theory)

Ethnography

Includes both intensive fieldwork among people in society and written results of fieldwork

Culture Shock

Researchers often have feelings of alienation, loneliness and isolation,

This can also be used in ehtnography

Informants and Key Cultural Consultants

expert on a particular aspect of local life Every community has people who can provide most complete or useful information about particular aspects of life.

Applied Anthropology

Application of anthropological data, perspectives, theory and techniques to identify, assess, and solve contemporary social problems.

Serve as advocates

Medical business, environmental forensic, education and development.

Anthropology's ethnographic method, holism, and systematic perspective make uniquely valuable in application to social problems

Applied anthropologists are more likely to focus on a local, grassroots perspective in approaching a problem than to consult with official experts

Edward Tylor and Louis Morgan

They saw themselves as compliers and analysts of ethnographic accounts ("armchair anthropologists")

Tylor was the first to assert "Primitives" Were equally intelligent as "Civilized" people

Morgan and Tylor relied on the writings of travers, explores, missionaries, and colonial officers. Using data from archeological finds and colonial accounts to produce evolutionary histories of human society

Morgan's Evolutionary Scale

Technology correlated with evolution:

Savagery: bow, fire, pottery Barbarianism: domestication, farming, metallurgy

Civilization: writing

He believed all societies would go through this transition given the right circumstances. This kind of social Darwinism justified that Europeans were morally bound to help less civilized peoples "catch up" (white man's burden).

Social Evolutionism

Understand and "Civilize" "primitive" Cultures.

Technology and social institutions were used to place each society on an evolutionary scale.

Franz Boas

Criticized evolutionary anthropology as ethnocentric and racist

Anthropologists must live among the people, Learn their language, and do participant-observation

Empiricism: direct oversation and object description.

Initial goal: compire data, then build theory.

Historical Particularism (Boas) (early 20th century)

Culture: shared set of norms and values.

Each society had a unique historical past which explained cultural variation. Similarities were explained through diffusion

Culture's historical and enviormetnal context.

Criticism: antithetical: non-comparative

enthocentlrism

The belief that one's own cure is superior nd that other cultures are to be judged abed n one's own cultural norms.

Often been used to justify colonialism, slavery and domination.

Boas and Cultural Relativism

To counter ethnocentrism, Boas invited ath anthropolgoists approach each culture on its own terms, in light of its own notions of worth and value

This came to be known as cultural relativism and is a hallmark of modern anthropology.

Functionalism

Specific cultural insutitons function to support the structure of society (radcliffe-Brown) or serve the needs of individuals in society (Malinowski)

Bronislaw Malinowski: Over-emphasized the functional and integrated of social, economic, political, and religious structures.

Argued emic point of view is primary

Problems: ethnographic present and ethnographic realism

Cultural Materialism (70s and Marvin Harris)

Focus on environmental adaption, technology, and methods of acquiring food in the development of culture.

Assumes all aspects of a culture are derived from its economic foundation.

Later led to neo-marxist materialism.

Heavily etic.

Structuralism (60s -70s) (Claude Levi-Strauss)

Cultural diversity stems form differences in the forms by which people express universal meanings

Forms defined and structure people's lives and experiences.

Identify and categorize these binary, "deep structures".

Cannot evaluate the merit of these (largely etic) categories.

Symbolic/Interpretive Anthropology

Clifford Geertz Culture is a system of symbols with mutable layers of meanings. People act out and communicate those meanings "Read" or interpret a culture's (emic) "text" rather than 'reading over the shoulder' Some consider this "Story-telling".

Neo-Marxist Anthropology (70s -90s)

Culture is about power relations within and between cultures

Distributions of power are tied to distributions of wealth and status, including gender and colonialism.

Seek to highlight a social issue and give voice to oppressed / marginalized groups

Tends to lean towards emic perspectives.

Feminist Anthropology (70s-90s)

Questions gender boas in ethnography and theory

Men, who had limited access to women's lives, performed much of the fieldwork. Ignoring women's pesrspectives perpetuates the oppression of omen.

Androcentric bias.

Postmodernism (80s and 90s)

Theory that focuses on issues of power and voice.

Ehtnogrphies are partial truths and reflect the background, training, and social position of their authors.

Culture is a heterogenous context in which norms and values are contested and negotiated

Tends to lean towards emic vices

Reflexive Anthropology?

AN inward view of anthropology.

Polyphony or multivocality

Attention to whose voices are chosen to represent the gourd, and how one goes about presenting the culture and voices studied.

Ethnographic Present:

presented a romanticized, "Pure" timelessness before westernization, over-empahised functional stability and ingnored social change

Ethnographic realism

a style that narrates the author's experiences and observations as if the reader were witnessing events first hand, thus creating a false sense of realism and hiding biases

Emic

Investigates how natives think, categorize the world, express thoughts, and interpret stimuli

Etic

emphasizes the categories, interpetiaton,s and feature that the anthropologist considers important

Ethics

Anthrpolgits must decide where they Dra a morel line, and how they will direct their research within their ethical system.

Anthrpopgists must: Obtain consent of the people to be studied Protect them from risk. Respect their privacy and dignity.

Anthropologists have ethical obligations to their scholarly field, to wider society and culture, to the human species, other species, and the environment.

Must obtained informed consent form all parties affected

AAA code of ethics Must be explicit about the purpose, nature, and procedures of the research Must clarify the potential costs and benefits of the research The researcher's primary ethical obligation is to the people being studied. Human Terrain System is unethical.

Langauge is Symbolic

Language is a system of arbitrary, learned symbols.

Words are symbols given meaning by consensus

Symbols enable us to transmit and store information, making culture possible

Conventionality

Words are conventionally connected to the things for which they stand.

Productivity

humans can combine words and sounds into infinite meaningful utterances

Displacement

The human capacity to describe things that are distant in time or space or are imagined/abstract.

Semantics

The subsystem of a language that relates form to meaning

Words carry culturally symbolic freight

Meanings depend on the relationship of those speaking and social context.

Affect meaning refer to subtle or implied meaning, sarcasm, humor, etc.

Lexicon

is the total stock of words in a language

Ethnosematics

Cultural presumptions: shared assumptions that are embedded in language "I mage the horse run." Vs. Navaho "The horse is running for me" Gender (which can show in semantics, prophology, and lexicon) SHisp are a she

Anthropological sociolinguistics

Speech performance in social and cultural contexts

Identify, describe, and understand the cultural patterning of different speech events within a community

How speech varies depending on a person's position in a social structure or relationship.

Langauge and Identity

Group identity, language display, and resistance, or how groups use language to negotiate social identities

This often relates to gender, class, politics, ethnicity, and religion

Social stratification and speech

The dialect of the dominant stratum is considered standard

Status-linked dialects affect the economic and social prospects of the people who speak them (Bourdieu's symbolic capital)

Societal consensus that on dialect is more prestigious results in symbolic domination.

Dialect

The standard dialect considered a "Language", and deviations from them are called dialects

Every language is a dialect in the truest sense of the word

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

No language or way of seeing the world is superior

Language shaped the world and is shaped by the world. People conceive of things through their language.

Challenges: recent studies of color perception

Modified Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Perceptions and understandings of time, space, and matter are conditioned by the structure of alanguge In other words, that language influences but does not deturme thought and behavior, leading to slightly different perceptions of the world.

non-verbal language

Messages are sent by emblems, clothing, jewelry, tattoos and body modifications.

Cultural ideas of touch, time, space, body movement, facial expressions and gaze

Often signals differences in status.

Debate about language survival

Some argue language loss is the loss of cultural and intellectual diversity, analogous to species extinction.

Others argue native speakers have the right to decide to carry not her language or not, and that cultural diversity continues to emerge

Ebonics

African-America English Vernacular has deep roots in African American community and is equally effective.

Pidgin

a simplified language of contact and trade composed of features of two or more languages. It is not a first language for speakers.

Creole

A first language composed of elements of two or more different languages

Hatian creol, based on French with a W. African structure is widely spoken.

Style shifting

Individuals may change the way they talk depending upon the social requirements of a given setting

Diglossia

the regular shifting from one dialect to another

Historical linguistics

English is a daughter language that evolved form the mother languages of West germanic

Linguistic origins relate to cultural origins.