UCLA ANTHRO 3 FINAL REVIEW

Life Cycle

Life Cycle

Division of the life course into meaningful segments/stages
- Stages not obvious or universal
- Not necessarily linear
- Social, not only individual

Socio & Cultural Citizenship

Citizenship is not just about legal status but also social & and cultural life (in 2 senses):
- Citizenship isn't culturally neutral but tends to produce and reinforce certain ways of life(citizenship shapes cultural life).
- Cultural life is a major force behind civic action, especially for minority groups (cultural forces shape citizenship).

Dimensions of Citizenship

- Feeling like you belong to a polity
- Contributing to a polity
- Belonging to society and having a role within that organized world
- Having a specific place within a polity due to who you are and where you are positioned in society
- etc.

Social Organization

- Society organized by patterns of relationships (work, race, religion, gender, class, caste, kinship, etc.)
- These vary cross-culturally in type and salience

Structure in the social sciences

- Enduring patterns in social organization that constrain choice and contribute to the continuity of power and meaning over time
- Processes, relationships, and institutions that shape/structure social action and relationships.

Agency

- Capacity of individuals or groups to think and act independently and/or to realize themselves
- Individuals (and sometimes groups') ability to contest cultural norms, values, institutions, and structures of power
- Note: agency is less autonomous than ideas of free will - agents still act within constraints, and those are important and often highly valued aspects of our worlds.

Social Category

Categories by which individuals are understood as part of groups
Based on socially-significant characteristics•
- Power-laden
- Variable cross-culturally not only by the content of the categories but also by their existence and salience

Social Construction

- Durable concept, category, phenomenon that's developed and given meaning through social processes
- Linked to specific groups and historical moments
- Depends on contingent values, not essential
- Because not a given, must be maintained, re-affirmed, and can change

Essentialism

Regarding a person or people as having innate qualities, irrespective of context

Gender

- Are diverse and multiple within societies
- Vary cross-culturally
- Change historically• Are powerful forces that shape individuals, groups, cultural representations

Intersectionality

- Often misunderstood in American politics
- Social categories are interconnected, mutually shaping, combined, with consequences for experience and social citizenship
- In Cox we see that being a woman, for Fresh Start girls, is shaped by race and class. And that being Black is shaped by gender and class, etc.
- Intersections will vary across cultural contexts

Cultural Production

- Culture is not static or given
- People creatively produce/shape culture in relation to their environments (including other people)
- A power-laden process
- Creativity within constraint

Anthropology

The study of the possible, human societies and cultures

Power

- Not only maintained by force or threat offorce. Not only in obvious situations like conflict, violence, enforcement of rules, etc.
- Also in cultural processes & institutions, flowing through the things we do every day, in how we act and move and feel

Hegemony

The ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement within a population without the use of threat of force
- "Common sense," often unspoken: what seems obvious, natural
- Cultural institutions (schools, religion, media)shape what people understand to be normal ,natural
- Cultural production implicates power

Hidden transcripts

- Hidden transcript" characterizes "discourse that takes place 'offstage,' beyond direct observation by powerholders
- The powerful have a "hidden transcript representing the practices and claims of their rule that cannot be openly avowed."
- Hidden isn't necessarily truer.

Emic

from the perspective of someone in a community

Etic

from analyst's outside perspective

Symbolic Anthropology

- Study of how people make and communicate meaning through symbols
- Examine symbols in their social and cultural context (not focused on universals like structuralism)
- Symbolic life at the core of humanity

Symbol

- Something that stands for something else - No obvious or necessary connection (arbitrariness of the sign)

Society

- Organized human groups
- Held together by subtle structures that can be studied (kinship/family, religion, gender, economy, etc.)
- Internally differentiated by social categories through which human interaction is conducted and makes sense

Social Person

- "someone who is created in part by others" (Weiner 50).
- Think of how that's true of you.

Kinship

- System of meaning and power that determines who is related to whom and how.
- Culturally variable (though often seems highly natural/obvious to any given person)
- Distributes rights & responsibilities, emotions

Exogamy

marriage outside the tribe, caste, or social group

Endogamy

the practice of marrying within one's own group

Exchange

- Part of economy, which is a cultural adaptation to the (ecological & human) environment that allows a human group to meet needs and thrive through relations to land, resources, and labor
- Exchange of things & ideas is central to cultural life and establishes patterns of obligation &interaction among people
- Relations among things are also relations among people.

Obligations of the gift

Give, Receive, and Reciprocate

Colonialism

- Nation-state extends control over others' territories, markets, polities
- Also a cultural project
- Takes various forms (e.g., extractive, settler)
- A world-shaping historical process

Charity

- Giving to help others
- Form of exchange
- Not just between individuals

Temporalization of Difference

- Post-enlightenment tendency to reformulate cultural difference in the terms of tradition and modernity
- Temporalization of difference: primitive, traditional, modern, developed, etc.
- Often associated with race

Globalization

the intensifying flow of capital, goods, people, images, and ideas around the world

Traditions

- that people reflect on their lives in the present and actively connect those lives to the past
- Reinforced with rules and symbols

Modernization

- the theory and practice (e.g., in global development programs) of transforming from traditional to modern ways of life, with emphasis on economy, governance, culture, and social organization

Representation

- How some stand in for a larger group
- How one is portrayed by and to others
- How one represents oneself

Ritual

- Formal activities: stylized, repetitive; express beliefs of group; create sense of continuity, belonging
- Performed in special places and at set times
- Often require specialized knowledge
- Transmit enduring values and sentiments into action
- Lessen the disruption of periods of uncertainty
- Shows acceptance of a social and moral order
- Maintains social order, generally conservative
- But can also be ways to manage change.

rites of passage

- transition from one stage of life to another
- Stages: Separation, Liminality, Reincorporation

Structural Functionalism

- Viewed social institutions like kinship as the keys to maintaining social order - social institutions function
- Function not biological/psychological but social
- Difficulty accounting for change

Post-structuralism

- Concerned with how categories are constructed, made, maintained in discourse
- Emphasis on power and historical change

Multispecies ethnography

- Studying how other organisms' lives and deaths are linked to human worlds (how they make human worlds, etc.)
- Studying multispecies relationality

Sacrifice

- Making an offering for a higher purpose, usually to appease gods, spirits. Often but not always involves death.
- A form of exchange
- Built into many religions
- Animals
- Ritualized

Environmental Anthropology

- Relations among people and their environments
- How culture shapes ecology & vice versa
- Cultural underpinnings of ideas about nature, of environmental projects & activism...
- ...and how these distribute power
- How knowledge and power shape people's claims to environment

Anthropocene

- Current geological era
- Defined by the human activity that reshapes the planet in permanent ways
- Anthropologists studying causes and effects

Indigenous peoples

- Of a place prior to colonialism
- Ongoing minorities in settler states
- Territories and claims thereto
- Sovereignty/governance
- May have distinct ways of life

Essentialism

- regarding a person or people as having innate qualities, irrespective of context

Primitivism

- viewing and often even valuing other ways of life by assuming that they are more primitive, simple, of the past
- Often a problem in perceptions of Indigenous peoples & environment
- Tied to tradition/modernity dichotomy

Indigenous sovereignty

- The political authority of an Indigenous polity over territory and people. Thus, also the governance of an Indigenous nation's people and territory, and of relations with other polities.
- Complicated by settler state sovereignty

Settler Colonialism

- The transformation of a colony into a home
- Logic of elimination (destroy to replace), which includes both a) violence and other kinds of physical elimination and b) assimilation, incorporation, and other kinds of erasure
- Dispossession and the project of settlement.
- An ongoing condition/structure/project, not a completed historical event
- Environmental dimensions are important.

Habitus

a structuring structure that is produced by 'respecting the collective rhythm' of the group
- Structure and agency

Subjectivity

- Being a subject (with views, experiences, desires, etc.)
- ...who is also an effect of power (subjected to...)
- About both individuality and sociality, attentive to how power shapes both

Enculturation

the process of learning culture

Illegality

- A condition, not a person
- Presumed to diminish with time from border crossing
- But not youth experience: growing into illegality
- Structures temporality
- Feelings

Migration

- A movement from one country or region to another
- Large‐scale processes
- Individual motivations, meanings
- Social organization and reproduction

Chain of care

- Love, emotion flow from Third World to First World
- Women caring for others' children in order to provide for their own at a distance
- Shaped by gender division of labor in the family and lack of state childcare

Medical Anthropology

- Diverse approaches to illness, health, healing
- Health and meaning
- Power, inequality in health/medicine
- Social/political etiologies
- Avenues for change

Witchcraft explanations

explanation of events based on view that certain individuals possess an innate power capable of causing harm

Social control

processes that regulate individual and group behavior, leading to compliance with social rules

Epistemology

theory of knowledge

cultural relativism

- Understanding and evaluating something according to the cultural standards of its context
- Opposite of ethnocentrism
- More about understanding than judging
- First step in cultural critique

Culture

complex and patterned ways that people have learned to live and understand their lives as part of groups
- how people find meaning in their lives

Cultural Critique

defamiliarization from one's cultural context in order to unsettle one's assumptions
- See things from other people's lives
- Examining the underlying foundations (not actually critiquing)

Ethnocentrism

assuming that one's own way of life is the best and using it as the measure for judging others

Etiology

causation of a disease or condition

Reification

A form of reductionism
• Treating an abstraction (idea, concept) as if
it was a real thing
• Culture is often reified: seen as a unified
thing that acts (society, too, for that
matter

e.g. Culture made me do this

Interconnections

Criticism of the tendency to view some kinds of difference in terms of culture/religion rather than historical circumstances

Forms of lives we find around the world are already products of long histories of interactions

Examining our own responsibilities (e.g. Gaza)

Polygamy

plural marriage

more than 1 spouse

Polygyny

man has more than 1 wife

Polyandry

woman has more than 1 husband

Evidentiary Ecologies

Environments that bear the scars of political violence and serve as evidence of violations, often highlighted through practices of archiving and documenting