Anth 45N: Cultural Diversity- A Global Perspective

Penn State University

What is Anthropology?

• The systematic and holistic study of human diversity.

• Directed toward diachronic and synchronic understandings of human variability

• Integrates all aspects of biology and culture to ask how we can understand the whole of the human condition in relationships through time and across space

What are human beings? What is it to “be” human?

• Epistemology, ways of knowing what it means to be human vary

• Ontology, the basic concept of “being” human vary

• “Humanity” is a categorical construct. It is constructed both ontologically and epistemologically from continuous diversity

• “Culture” is a process that does the construction

Human Diversity

• Synchronic variability (continuous)- through time

• Diachronic variability (continuous)- through space

• Culture is a process that makes discrete categories of such variability and gives meaning to those categories

• Culture is not a category of variability, nor is it a type of variability in contrast to biology

The Four Fields of Anthropology

Cultural, Archaeology, Linguistic, Physical

Cultural Anthropology

• The study of cultures and societies of human beings and their very recent past. Traditional cultural anthropologists study living creatures and present their observations in an ethnography

Archaeology

• The study of past societies and their cultures, especially the material remains of the past, such as tools, food remains, and places where people lived

Linguistic Anthropology

• The study of language, especially how language is structured, evolution of language, and the social and cultural contexts for language

Physical Anthropology

• Also called biological anthropology, physical anthropology is the study of human evolution and variation, both past and current.

“Being” human is constructed differently in

different social and environmental contexts

• We know that different people have different kinds of categories of being human

• Some divide up continuous environmental, biological, and social variability differently than you

• Some define human diversity differently than you!

• Many Australian Aboriginal ontologies define humans and dogs differently than we do in the west

• Martu-Kiinyumarratji: “Dingos are mothers!”

Emotional Categorization

• Martu Yumari and Kurnta

• Affinal vs conseguinial relationships (in law vs blood)

Jukurrpa

sacred practice, rights in land, and totemic identity

Minipuru Songlines

• Jukurrpa: all-encompassing framework for relating people to land, legitimizing this relationship as inalienable or “the law”

• System of Landesque Capital ownership and inheritance

• Landesque Capital refers to investments that increase the yield on parcels of land without replacing labor. It includes the accumulated results of previous work to the land and how labor to do this work was mobilized

• Cultural processes are representational systems of categorization for communication and coordination

• Renato Rosaldo and Ilongot: Liget= high voltage grief/rage

• What is ethnography

• Progressivism and its analogs: orthogenesis and ethnocentrism

• Progressivism assumes that we can classify variability along a progressive scale

• Orthogenesis = the assumption that evolutionary change is progressive: better and better changes until we end up with humans (anthropocentrism)

• Ecocentrism = the assumption that other systems of categorizing the world are inevitable/naturally progressing toward YOUR standards

• E.G. “capitalism is the natural result of economic progress”, “societies evolve from primitive to advanced, or simple to complex”.

• Unilineal Cultural Evolution => Progressivism Spencer and Morgan

• 19th Century Concept of Cultural Evolution

  • The process by which new cultural forms emerge out of older ones

  • Each society is believed to PROGRESS through the same stages of development, from SAVAGERY to BARBARISM to CIVILIZATION

    • Only Europeans had reached civilization

  • E.G. See Lewis Henry Mirgan’s idea that the “tribes of mankind can be classified, according to the degree of their relative PROGRESS”

Cultural relativism

The principle that one should seek to understand cultures on their own terms, not in terms of your own system of values, norms, and practice

Anti-determinism

Differences in human behavior (norms) are not primarily determined by innate biological dispositions but are largely the result of interactions between social, biological, historical processes

Franz Boas

Allowed Boas rejected the then-popular “evolutionary” approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western European culture at the summit (sensu Spencer)

Historical Particularism

Culture develops historically through interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas

• Variability in systems of symbolic categorization

• Plot of Lamnso color terms on a standard Munsell color chart:

  • Our sense of what black white, and red mean is not at all typical of the range of colors included in each of these Lamnso terms. The meanings of our color terms are specific to our cultural context.

• Darwin and Wallace: The Theory of Natural Selection- The Theory of Design

• The antithesis of orthogenesis

  • Observations

    • Continuous variability: what looks like discrete variability is not fixed

    • Discrete variability: however, some traits are inherited discrete units

  • All that variability seems to be DESIGNED to do something. How? How did these varieties come to be designed to function for some purpose?

• The problem with categories: they are real, and powerful, because they are cultural constructs

• The Theory of Life Design: Natural Selection

• Design and function: What are the origins of “purposeful” design in the world? Why does life appear to be designed? What is the “function” of life? What is it designed to do?

• 3 Propositions (based on observations)

  • Individuals of a population of the same species vary in their expressed traits (phenotypic variation)

  • Discrete traits can sort independently and can be inherited, or passed from parents to offspring (genotypic variation)

  • The world os finite: populations can grow geometrically, but individual reproduction is limited by finite access to resources

• Thus, only some traits are passed on to future generations, others are not. The

• Natural Selection: Differential reproductive success in a PARTICULAR context

• Genotype and phenotype are not the same

• Independent assortment: traits are inherited independently of one another

• Natural selection is NOT “survival of the fittest” species. It does not design adaptation for the “survival of the species” or “evolutionary progress”. 

• Species and population are concepts: useful ways to describe biological variability. They are not fixed categories of life in “nature”. They are categories that have a particular meaning relative to how we classify continuous variability.

• “Nature” does not exist in neat/discrete categories that are simply out there to be discovered. We classify “nature” relative to understanding a problem at hand.

• What is culture? (note lowercase c)

• If language is one type of “cultural process” involved in “cultural construction”, what is culture?

• Text: The taken-for-granted notions, rules, moralities, and behaviors within a social group.

• ??? This provides no insight into the work that culture does. What is the function of the cultural process?

• A more useful way to define culture: a systems of categorical meanings shared through symbolic representation

• How and why are these categorical systems shared?

  • Communication (through time and space) for coordinating action

• Symbolic Representation

• Humans often accomplish this through symbolic representation

• When the symbolic representation is organized into sets of social relationships that link individuals to each other in a way that is explicitly structural, it is said to be institutional

• Science is a good example

• Semiotics: The study of representation (Charles Sanders Pierce)

• Signs (representation) come in three parts

  • 1. Signifier: the form of a sign, e.g. a word, gesture, behavior

  • 2. Signified: the concept or object being represented

  • 3. Interpretant: the recipient audience of the signified concept or object

• Signifiers come in three kinds:

  • 1. Icon: physical resemblance to the signified

  • 2. Index: shows the consequences of the signifier

  • 3. Symbol: has no resemblance between signifier and signified

• Signaling systems are forms of communication designed to influence the behavior of others: systematic organization of signifiers to transmit information to an interpretant for coordinate purposes

• Language is a type of signaling system that uses symbolic signifiers to share categories of meaning… to coordinate concepts and behaviors between interpretation (signaler and recipient)

Language (definition)

•  an auditory (and visual, when written) conventional symbolic signaling system to transmit information about categories of shared meaning and intent. The outcome is coordination in thought and behavior.

Language (other)

• Language is distinct as a symbolic signaling system in that it uses sounds (phonemes) as the unit to compose basal meaningful signifiers (words) which are in turn organized systematically (grammar) in ways that represent more complex conceptual categories (narrative)

• Those conceptual categories are hierarchically nested in orders of complexity

• Signaling theory: a theory of communication

• Initially proposed to account for seemingly wasteful and ritualized display in animals, later formalized by game theoreticians

• How can individuals with conflicting interests (group vs individuals) solve problems of collective action for mutual benefit? Requires effective communication

• Costly signaling: the costs of performance ensure the honesty of information communicated- production of the info can’t be “faked”

• The performance is ritualized to ensure it valence: power of an action to communicate information about otherwise cryptic qualities of sender; combining in a signifier, honest information from which interpretant can “make distinction”

• Gazelles and lions: indexical signaling, builds “trust”

• Now, apply our conceptual tools (relativism and processulism): Ethnography and Ethics

• Abu-Lughod (2002): “What are the ethics of the “War on Terrorism”, a war that justified itself by purporting to liberate, or save, Afghan women?”

• The answer requires strategies for thinking carefully about such things as the veil, the burqa, and the clothing of what Abu-Lughod calls “women of color”

• Ethnography is the principle means by which that context can be studied and understood. But, it’s not magic! Doing ethnographic research is a social interaction

• Politics of the Veil

• Our experience of what it means to be a “woman” “man” “human” “Yumari” “Woman of cover” is constructed in the categories of concepts we have about what is “normal” or “proper”. Your experience of being “X” is not a direct indication of something objective about the world. It is subjective reality

• It is the way you categorize and experience reality

• Is the burqa a form of oppression imposed on women by the Taliban?

• Answering that question requires complex understanding of the context of difference and symbolic signaling systems, but: once “free” from the Taliban, women did not throw off the veil for Western clothing.

• Veils are part of a complex system of communication whose function is defined in a specific perspective about shared categories of meaning.

• Social stratification: Hierarchically constructed categories

• What is a good example of a common, especially power (meaningful) categorical construct?

• We begin with race

• Egalitarian (acephalous) vs Stratified (hierarchical) constructs

• Class = economic hierarchy

• Caste = rigid institutionally enforced social hierarchy (often stratified “purity”)

• Caste + Race = structural racism

• The American Caste System: Zora Neale Hurston

• Settler colonialism => Enslavement => the Jim Crow South

• Paramour rights: the legalized rights that some have over the reproduction of others

• Those rights were enforced by policing the use of space during the Jim Crow area

• Judging a book by its cover

• Many physical traits conventionally associated with race evolved as adaptations to different environmental contexts

  • Skin pigmentation

  • Facial characteristics

  • Body proportions

  • Hair texture and distribution

• Within these, there are slightly different variants of genes that (together with hundreds of other genes) code for superficial phenotypic traits

• The way those superficial phenotypical traits are combined in groups of people with different ancestry does not correspond with the cultural constructs that define race

• Skin tone

• Skin color: what is the purpose

• Why are we designed that way?

• How is the “function” of the design of skin different fundamentally from the “function” of race?

• What does it mean to understand race relativistically (embodiment)?

• RACE IS NOT ANCESTRY AND RACE IS NOT SKIN COLOR

• Complex phenotypic trait shaped by many genes (polygenetic) and their environmental interactions

• Differences in skin color came about through natural selection

• Shaped by melanin, a “natural sunscreen” produced by skin cells responsible for pigmentation

• Two variants of SLC-24A5, a gene that regulates calcium in melanin-producing cells in your skin

  • Ala-111 (ancestral) and Ala-111Thr (derived)

  • The derived allele is a major factor in light skin pigmentation

Embodiment, Wealth, and Communication

• Phenotypes are “epiphenomenal” not “determined”

• Two interacting processes of high fidelity transmission (communication): Biological and cultural

• What is transmitted across generations in cultural processes?

• How can the structure of socio-environmental context become embodied?

• What are some genetic disorders that can be transmitted in the transfer of a socio-environmental context (e.g. a caste system based on race)?

• While genetic changes can alter which protein is made, epigenetic changes affect gene expression to turn genes “on” and “off” and the timing of gene expression

• Epigenetic disorders are diseases caused by changes in the chemical tags that attach to DNA and affect its function. THese changes can be influenced by various factors, including the socio-evironmental context. Here are some examples:

  • 1. Stress related disorder: Chronic stress can lead to alterations in the epigenetic regulation of genes involved in stress response. This can potentially lead to disorders such as hypertension, diabetes, depression, anxiety, and PTSD

  • 2. Learning and memory: Social experiences can influence the epigenetic modification related to learning and memory. These changes can potentially impact cognitive function and contribut to disorder such as Alzheimer’s disease.

  • 3. Immune function: Social environments can influence the epigenetic regulation of immune function. This can potentially contribute to the development of autoimmune disorders.

  • It's important to note that while these disorders can be influenced by the social environment, they are not determined by it. Both genetic and environmental factors interact in the development of these disorders¹ ². Also, the exact mechanisms of how social environments cause these epigenetic changes are still being researched¹ ².

• What race is not…

• Categories seem self-evident: “biological” traits (which seem fixed, natural, real,vs. “cultural” traits (which seem facultative, artificial, arbitrary).

• So for many, race is “biological”: This is wrong.

• The point is that those categories (biological vs. cultural) themselves are CONSTRUCTED in social process!

• Race is not a population of people.

• Neither race nor populations are biologically determined categories. However, the population concept is biologically meaningful, while race as a meaningful category has NO biological utility. Nor are the superficial traits we use to construct racial categories biologically determined.

• Racial categories (or lack thereof) are specific to social context: they are coded and made meaningful in relationships and histories of power and status.

• Race (one type of category) does not equal Population (another type of category)

• Biological “races” are not a current scientific concept and often reinforce historical social stratification.

• But science itself is cultural: the categories it constructs do not operate in a political vacuum.

• Population: a group of organisms in a species that interbreed and live in the same place at a same time.

• Population categories become meaningful to scientists in large part because of their social and political salience — including, importantly, sometimes their power to produce and enforce hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and class

• Race is not ancestry, race is not population, race is…

• A pattern-based concept that organizes people into groups based on social conventions about suites of superficial phenotypic traits. When those groups are institutionally organized to stratify society, we call that structural racism. When the categories of race are ridged and prescribed with birth, we call that a race-based caste system.

• Economy

• Patterns in the transfer of material, relational, embodied wealth.

• What is the function of clothes?

• Remember our working definition of culture (small c):

  • Systems and processes shaping shared (conventional) notions of categorical meaning and categorical organization

• The origins of human systems of symbolic signaling: culture and coordinated action

• Michael Tomasello

  • Our abilities to scale cooperation/coordination lie in our:

    • Capacity to 1) understand that others have intentions of their own, 2) share attention with others, and 3) imitate others. That allows us to “outsource” intelligence: we can store our cognition in others

    • Infants (by 9 months) begin to observe an action, identify the underlying goal (intent), and mimic the means of achieving the goal that they observe

    • Humans and chimpanzees and bonobos develop special cognitive abilities as a result of their symbolic cultural environments. In looking at something, we can mentally transform it into something else.

    • Other animals can also do this, especially some birds

• Chimpanzee Cultures

• Christophe Boesch

  • Chimps have a subjective reality: they symbolize intent (of use) in materials, and they share that intent with each other.

  • Individuals from different social groups in the Tai forest (Ivory Coast, W. Africa) perform different daily actions: different groups have different categories of shared meaning (E.G. “proper” materials for fashioning tools, and “proper” use of tools for cracking nuts).

  • These are differences in normative traditions, not determined directly by, for example, differences in genes.

• Modes of production for chimpanzees

• Modes of production between groups of chimpanzees differ from group to group

  • The ways in which resources are produced and distributed

• Archeological evidence of durable symbolic signaling systems among ancestral humans

• Chimps and bonobos don't have the scales of cultural complexity we see among humans (completely different languages, religions, styles of dress, social mores, visual/spoken/performance/musical art, epistemologies, etc.)

• Earliest stone tools traditions: Olduwan (2.6 mya) and formal Achulean stone tool technologies (1.7mya)

• Earliest symbolic durable ornamentation: Pigments 300-250 kya

• Personal ornaments: beads 70-90 kya

• Graphic representation: 65kya

• Language???

• Why did this all come about? Communication. Symbolic signaling systems.

• What is farming?

• Staying put

• Low residual mobility, high logistical mobility = resource storing = delayed return economy

What is foraging

• Staying put

• Low residual mobility, high logistical mobility = resource storing = delayed return economy

Agta

• A population of foragers from the northern Philippines who are increasingly engaging in agriculture

• Cultural construction of economies: power and wealth

• Doesn’t everyone want to live in a “developed” country? A “1st world” country? No.

  • In Western market-based economies, power is closely tied to material wealth accumulation.

  • In egalitarian economies, power is closely tied to relational wealth accumulation.

  • Ju/‘hoansi (!Kung), Hadza, Martu: power lies in your ability to navigate and coordinate large social networks through cultural capital built in relational wealth.

•  Cultural Capital: the social assets, both material and embodied, of a person (education, skills, knowledge, style of speech, material goods, style of dress, etc.) that promote social mobility in society. Cultural capital functions as a social-relation within an economy of practices (system of exchange), and comprises all of the material and symbolic goods that society values as worth seeking. As a social relation within a system of exchange, cultural capital includes the accumulated knowledge/skill (embodied) that confers social status and power.

• E.G. Martu use social media to accumulate cultural capital through relational wealth. When you watch Bush Mechanics, you see sport, viewing/producing film/video, religious initiation are social events made meaningful in economies where “family” is “made” through honest signals of pro-social intent: pecuniary disinterest, food sharing without concern for reciprocity

• Myths about foragers

• Due to external constrains imposed by the environment and lack of tech, they face constant insecurity in resource supply. Misleading.

• They live in economically simple and small societies. They do not.

• They live in small groups of close kin. They do not.

• They are isolated. They are not.

• They are remnants of the past. They are not.

• They are pristine guardians of nature. They are not “natural conservationists”.

• Why should we learn about them?

• Now: Relationships between people and resources

• Cultural construction of economies, exchange, and environmental interactions

• ...or, why study variability in modes of work,

• production, and resource transmission in modern foraging societies?

• Sustainability and Ecologies

• The human-nature divide? Keyword = integration

• What “nature” means to people and how they see themselves in relation varies greatly

• Those relationships are not merely metaphorical tools for thinking about the environment

• Australia has been inhabited for at least 50,000 years

• Over the course of that time, human livelihoods have co-evolved with a range of species: disturbance ecology and anthropogenic landscapes -> complex adaptive systems

• Indigenous people are not “natural” conservationists: e.g. consumption and consubstantiality

• Settler Colonialism

• The establishment by a nation-state of foreign rule over a distant territory (often continental in scale) and the control and displacement of its people by settlers from a foreign nation-state. Generally associated with European imperial powers, the colonial project included:

  • 1. Legal domination over the Indigenous populations

  • 2. The exploitation of human and natural resources and the redistribution of those resources to benefit imperially interested

  • 3. The construction of racial and cultural differences that priveldge colonial rule

  • 4. Settler invasion of land (often continental in scale) occupied by people whose ancestors had occupied and owned land in those continents for millennia (being INDIGENOUS)

• Colonialism, and settler colonialism specifically, which started in the late 15th century, is one of the fundamental social, cultural, and political forces that shaped our contemporary world. It is one of the phenomena that have structured modernity with regard to racial and economic hierarchies, which continues to have profound effects on communities worldwide.

• We like to think the traditional period of colonialism has ended, and that the colonized are no more.

• However anthropological research on colonialism has demonstrated that not only are there lasting impacts of the colonial project worldwide, but nation-states retain power by reifying/justifying colonialism through certain kinds of economic and legal relationships

• Colonialism and Modernity

• Modernity: the global spread of imperial market-based economic systems and the possibilities of technological and political progress

• Things “modernized” (progressed) are then contrasted with things “pre-modern” or “primitive” (not-progressed): those “colonized” are thus cast as “primitive” (they haven’t “progressed” economically to market-based capitalist systems that fueled imperial expansion).

• Often linked to universalist notions of objective “know-ability”, morality, truth, human nature, language, and social progress

• “Postmodern” thinkers frequently call attention to the contingent or socially conditioned nature of knowledge claims and value systems, situating them as products of particular political, historical, or cultural relationships. Often those are relationships of structural inequality.

• Differences between American and Australian settler colonialism

• Both involved global imperial economic-military competition between European nation-states: seeking new continents for control of labor and resources

• This was fueled by continental invasion and settle expansion into previously occupied lands, with nation-state-sponsored genocide, ethnocide, assimilation, warfare, biological warfare, and exotic disease (smallpox, typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever).

• Both involved a caste system, and systematic and state-sponsored legal systems to appropriate land and eliminate/assimilate/displace indigenous people.

• But the legal basis upon which disposition was justified differed:

  • Warfare, tribal treaty, allotment, and reservations in North America

  • Terra Nullius for all of Australia

• Australia vs US indigenous controlled lands

• US: Federally recognized tribes are Sovereign. If a US treaty established a tribal reservation and those treaties were converted to statute under the Indian Appropriations Act of (1851) 1871, those lands are owned by Sovereign Nations, but most are held in trust by US

• Australia: Native Title (1993) and Land Rights lands/reserves (1976): Legal path for exclusive corporately controlled land (surface), owned by a federally recognized Prescribed Body Corporate.

Penn State

• Land Grant institutions

  • Penn State exists and benefits from the disposition of Native people in two ways

    • 1. Penn State properties are on the ancestral lands of the Erie, Haudenosaunace, Lenape, Monongahela, Shawnee, Susquehannock, and Wahzhazhe First Nations. These lands were settled by colonizers before Penn State was established. Recognition of the issue is clearly stated in Penn State’s current acknowledgment of Land

    • As a land-grant university, Penn State’s federal endowment was established with a federal grant based on the value of land acquired by the US government and giver to PA under the Morrill act