Anthropology Cards Exam 1 (copy)

1-4, 11, 13

Culture

collective processes through which people construct and naturalize certain meanings and actions as normal or even necessary

Ethnocentrism

Assuming ones way of doing something is correct

Cultural relativism

Seek to understand cultures and withhold judgement

Holism

functional systems, like a body or a country, can't be explained or understood by looking at the individual pieces; rather, the individual pieces can only be understood by looking at the whole.

Comparative method

derive insights from comparing two or more cultures

3 Issues of Ethical concern

-Do no harm

-Taking responsibility

-Sharing work

Enculturation

Process of learning cultural rules and logic of a society

4 Basic Parts of Culture

• Shapes an interaction prior to an individual forming a distinct sensibility about a situation.

• Culture generates interpretive work to make sense of interactions/events, people/places.

• Culture both guides interactions and is reproduced interactively

• Culture has the power to shape what we recognize and what we don’t notice

Central concern for culture

to establish sameness (belonging) and difference.

Central Activity for culture

interpretation & performance.

Ethnography goals

learn the role of place in shaping people’s practices, expressions, and sentiments

the performative dynamics of social interactions.

the patterns of thought/action and the context where they unfold and are shaped.

Heiman

Goal: to think through the ways that class anxieties
play out in everyday life.

Result: What was happening in Danboro appears to parallel some of what we see in the growing anthropological literature on the middle classes around the world

2 components to enthography

process, and analysis

Different types of field notes

physical/setting/social environment

ethnographic methods

mapping, interviews, living with people, participant observation

Franz Boas

cultural relativism, historical particularism, “phenomena whose only unity was the connection in which they appear to the mind of the observer, which can’t besubjected toquantitative determination or to laws”

Bronislaw Malinowski

Developed Ethnography. “Functionalist : “man in his full biological reality has to be drawn into our analysis of culture.” = bodily needs/environmental influences.

Margaret Mead

“Coming of Age in Samoa“

Band

: hyper-cooperation & human evolution

• foragers, migratory, low density

• question of belonging

• food sharing, sexual equality, people flow through different bands in a lifetime.

Tribe

: “network of bands,” more complicated food resources

• bigger community based on alliances and oppositions

• Form as a means of coping with greater numbers of people and with more complicated resources (horticulture and
  domesticated animals)

Cities

sedentary, concentrated populations

• rise of a division of labor

• Jericho and Canal Hoyak

• Components are material,
  technological, symbolic, and
  ecological, all in interaction

• More sedimentary, Humans concentrate spatially.

States

hierarchal power structures
A. Traditional (Peasants)
B. Modern (Market Economies/Capitalist Societies)

Ethnicity

Byproduct of the United States. (A Collectivity within a larger society
having real or putative common
ancestry, memories of a shared
historical past, and a cultural focus
on one or more symbolic elements
defined as the epitome of
peoplehood.
Richard Schermerhorn

The State

Political organization made on a territorial basis, full time specialization. “tax collector“

Theocracy

forms of government where religious leaders hold the highest authority and religious law is considered the basis of governance.

Ritual concepts

behaviors- vocalizations

physiological terms- alleviates anxiety and
prepares the organism to act.

catalytic-effect a
transformation of agents or substances.

Ritual

Mass secular events, often extend through the media; some of the earlier forms of rituals, but adds the visage of the impersonal modern state or of local subculture

Ritual Interaction

tests strength of social bond and/or expresses present or future commitment to the relationship.

Types of Rituals

Rites of Passage
Rites of Intensification
Rites of Inversion
Hortatory Rituals

Rites of Passage

occur in relation to life-cycle events and organize the passage of individuals from one state/identity into another, carrying them from one stage of life into another

Rites of Inversion

Reversals of everyday moral and political orders; specially marked moments when people break, or ‘humorously play with,’ their own cultural rules. (Halloween) rules change

Rites of Intensification

(Cyclic events) Perform/display community values and key symbols, seek to affect a reinvigoration or renewal of individuals’ group identity. going to church

Hortatory Rituals

exhortations to the supernatural to perform some
act.

Animistic

Nonhumans have an interiority identical to our own (souls); substance common to all living things, but differentiated (feathers, fur, scales, bark)

Total Social Phenomena

Marcel Mauss (e.g. Kwakiutl). Rituals involve ‘everyone’ and have kinship, economic, religious, political, aesthetic, and performative dimensions.

phonemes

are the smallest units of sound in a language that can distinguish meaning.

morpheme

Unknown

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language. Examples of morphemes include "cat" (a free morpheme) and "s" (a bound morpheme indicating plural).

syntax and grammar

(1) refers to the set of rules that dictate the structure and arrangement of words, phrases, and symbols in a programming language. (2) is the correct use of words/context

difference between signifier and signifier

the () is the form or representation of a sign, while the () is the meaning or concept associated with that sign.

ethnosemantic

categories/terms used by particular languages; how
they are then hierarchized and arranged.

linguistic relativity

parallels concept of cultural relativity—need to examine each language in terms of its own structure.

Shamanism

enactment of a convincing, theatrical-style performance, before an
audience that needs to be convinced; focus on efficacy—how well the rite works.

Liturgy

doing things in the correct sequence, in a setting where everyone participate.

Imagistic

episodes of intense physical experience (pain, fear); “episodic memory of
the violence of initiation rituals serves psychological and sociological function.

Doctrinal

sacred/secular instruction; requires “semantic memory” (high verbal); transmitted to children and strangers.

Anomie

Disconnected feeling

Social Gaze two functions

-perceive information

-signal to others.

Charged potential (alternately conveys affection/attraction or aggression)

Civil Inattention

Looking at someone without greeting, acknowledging presence

Micro Agressions

Brief and routine verbal or behavioral slights or indignities, whether intentional or not, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or prejudicial
stance toward marginalized groups or people.

what is built up through ritual

person

gender and sexuality

(1) performed identities; male and female roles are assigned by cultural rules and conventions; selectively draws from and elaborates upon biology. (2) The attraction to a sex

age classifications

age grades/sets

social self

maintained face in relation to others.

Goffman on Personhood

societies must mobilize their members as self-
regulating participants in social encounters.” = personhood

Norah Vincent

Acted as man for 8 months

Little too estrogen for men

erectile disfunction, decreased sex drive and increased body fat levels, (need to preserve bone mass)

Gender stratification

the unequal distribution of rewards (socially valued resources, power, prestige, and personal freedom) between men and women reflecting their different positions in the social hierarchy.

Generational conflict

Result of age gaps (Coined by Margaret Mead)

Jericho

walled city- big in defense

exoticization

Exoticization refers to the process of portraying or perceiving something or someone as exotic, often based on cultural or ethnic differences.

beep

boop

Catal Hoyak

No walls, dense with houses, no streets, foragers, artists

Anthropocene

a proposed geological epoch that marks the period of significant human impact on Earth's ecosystems and geology. After Halocene.

Four basics of culture

material values, beliefs, behaviors, material objects

Men and woman speaking

men are more dominant in the conversation, women are more submissive

Langue

study of the system and construction of models representing forms and their relationship to one
another, as well as their possible combination.

Parole

study of actual behavior/events: construction of
statistical models representing
probabilities of particular combinations
under various circumstances

active language

Time, which insures the continuity of language, wields another influence apparently contradictory to the first; the more or less rapid change of linguistic signs.

static language

Signifier “is fixed, not free” in relation to the idea, w/ respect to the linguistic community.

Girl

originally gender neutral term to label a child

Metaphor

Not just verbal devices (literary), but like
theories, templates, lenses, or filters we use to help us understand one domain of experience in terms of another.

Flexible Bodies Emily Martin

"flexibility" has become a valued commodity that may be leading to a new form of social Darwinism.

Discourse

culturally patterned verbal language use including varieties of speech, participation, and meaning.

Merit Discourse

political, social, or economic system in which individuals are assigned to positions of power, influence, or reward solely on the basis of their abilities and achievements and not on the basis of their social, cultural, or economic background or irrelevant personal characteristics.

Four Frames of colorblind discourse

Liberalism
Naturalization
Cultural Racism
Minimization of Racism

Liberalism

regarding each person as an
‘individual’ with ‘choices’ and
using this liberal principle as a
justification for whites having the
right of choosing to live in
segregated neighborhoods or
sending their kids to segregate
schools

Naturalism

"“That’s just the way it is.” Normalizes events or
actions that could otherwise be interpreted racially (Its just human nature)

Cultural Racism

Willingness to speculate and generalize about
a group. = Ignores institutional effects of discrimination in labor and housing markets and schools. (Theyre raised that way)

Minimization of Racism

Refusal to believe discrimination and institutionalized racism are the reasons
minorities lag behind whites in society. (I don’t see discrimination)

Symbols

forms of social communication, readily conveying information about group identity (kinship, status, etc.) to other cultural members or outsiders.

Geertz

Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. “culture is viewed as a text to be read and interpreted”

Totemism

Means of associating social groups with animals,
instilling coherence and distinctiveness by being identified with natural entities.

Lévi-Strauss

Critiqued early research on totemism: mistaken assumption “to conceive the relation between man and animals to be of a single kind: identity, affinity or participation. Matters are in fact infinitely more complex: there is an exchange of similarities and differences between culture and nature.”

Narrative

shape wider frames of meaning, they are how we understand the “big picture”: the way things are.

Myth

about the structure of the universe, particularly origins.
Superheroes are myths

Narrative is

ideological (misconstrues reality)

Myths involve

cosmology

cosmology

in science = the study of the origin, evolution, and eventual fate of the universe.

cosmology (anthropology)

(cultural) knowledge, beliefs,
interpretations and practices of a society or
culture related to explanations about origins of
the universe; on the meaning of humans, life,
and the world, within the universe or cosmos.

tricksters

1) enables breaches of the
accepted order to occur w/in the realm of
the imagination; 2) uses w/ the marginal,
liminal status to mediate or resolve human
dilemmas

superheroes

They suffer from human frailties (otherwise they
wouldn’t be interesting) but because of their
superior powers, these struggles play out on a
more dramatic screen or arena.

Mary Douglas on monsters

: monsters are often categorical confusions that upset human systems of classification and so are threatening abominations: zombies, vampires, and ghosts, upset the distinction between the living
and the dead.

Max Weber Theory on Religion

Life is made of pain and suffering, religion explains why

Sigmund Freud Theory on Religion

Religious institutions as society’s way of dealing with childish needs

Emile Durkheim Theory on Religion

Means by which society inculcates values and sentiments necessary for survival and to the promotion of social solidarity.

Components of Religion

1) belief in supernatural agents and miracles

2) Communal participation

3) separation of sacred/secular

4) has to be learned

Fetishism

The attribution of life, autonomy power and dominance over inanimate objects

Magic and religion

Differ from science, what science leaves unexplained, is emphasized by religion and magic

Magic and science

Both work to produce effects, but based on different theories of knowledge

Religion

The cultural means by which humans deal with the supernatural.