Anthropology Midterm

Four subfields of anthropology

Four subfields of anthropology

• Biological

• Archaeology

• Linguistic

• Cultural

Cultural anthropology

• The study of human nature, human society, and the human past

• Holistic

• Comparative

• Fieldwork based

• Evolutionary

Holistic approach

• “fitting together all that is known about human beings”

Comparative analysis

“Anthropologists realized long ago that the patterns of life common in their own societies were not necessarily followed in other societies”

Fieldwork

• Practical work by the researcher in the natural environment (as opposed to a lab or simulation)

• Ascertain how people create meaning in their everyday life

Participant-Observation

• Collecting data by living with another people, learning their language, and understanding their culture

• Actively participating and observing

Characteristics of culture

• Set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared.

  • Together, they form an all-encompassing, integrated whole that binds groups of people together and shapes their worldview and life.

• Humans are born with the capacity to learn the culture of any social group. Culture is learned directly and indirectly.

• Humans are not bound by culture; they have the capacity to conform, detach, or change it.

• Culture is symbolic: individuals create and share meanings of symbols within their group/society

• Human culture us what distinguishes us from other animals and shapes our evolution

• Human culture and biology are interrelated: Our biology, growth, and development are impacted by it

Standard definition of “culture”

A set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all-encompassing, integrated whole that binds people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways.

Agency

The ability to act and have a voice

Contemporary consensus on culture

• Hybridization and indigenization

• Culture is learned, not genetically programmed

• The way culture is learned is always shaped by power dynamics

• Global power relations and dynamics have forever penetrated local communities and local cultures

• Local cultures are not doomed to extinction, but rather, indigenizing Western and other cultural products

  There is not a one-to-one relationship between society and culture

Enculturation

• internalize cultural practices but may change and transform those practices as a result of experience.

• Culture may be internalized through:

  • language

  • kinship

  • religion

  • symbolic communication

  • space/place

  • food

Cultural rules

Internalized rules of behavior covering all aspects of life

Ethnocentrism

• The belief that one’s culture represents the “best” and “natural” way to do things

• The ways in which “they” differ from “us” are understood, ethnocentrically, in terms of what they lack.

Culture shock

• The realization that other people do things differently and one’s own culture is not “natural”

• Marks the initial stages of fieldwork and its successful mediation can determine ongoing ethnographic fieldwork

The beginning of Anthropology

• Shift from unilineal cultural revolution to cultural relativism

• Armchair anthropology

• No fieldwork or participant-observation

• Biased by eurocentrism

Science in the 19th Century

• Evolutionary Think

  • Darwin On the Origin of Species

• Ranking and classifying fetish

  • phrenology

  • eugenics

• Parallel “discovery” of different cultural groups

• Reordering of Concept of Time

• Positivism/Modernism

Biological Determinism

• AKA Scientific Racism, Social Darwinism

• Attempt to explain differences between human populations in terms of biological difference

• A group’s way of life is determined by its distinct, innate biological makeup

• The theory that individuals, groups, and peoples are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals

Cultural Relativism

The idea that each culture is unique and distinctive,  but that no one culture is superior to any other culture…simply, regarding a culture on its own terms

Franz Boas

• Founder of Anthropology in North America

• Started first graduate program at Columbia

• Natural History Museum Director

• Some argue one of the first advocates of diversity, equity and inclusion

  • Students include

    • Ruth Benedict

    • Margaret Mead

    • Zora Neale Hurston

Contemporary Anthropology

• The thin line between extremes of positivism and interpretivism

• No simple relation between a particular set of knowledge claims and a particular political agenda

• Situated Knowledges’ (Donna Haraway)

  • sets of knowledge produced by differently oriented observers engaged in different forms of knowledge production

Applied Anthropology

The use of anthropological fieldwork and practice to address contemporary social problems of groups studied by anthropologists

Paul Farmer

• Medical Doctor and Anthropologist

• Founded Partners in Health

• Primary Fieldwork in Haiti

  • provided healthcare there

• Pragmatic Solidarity

• Recognition of Structural Violence

• Critical Medical Anthropology

• Diseases of Geography

Structural violence

• A form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs.

• Paul Farmer: “The task at hand, if this silence is to be broken, is to identify the forces conspiring to promote suffering, with the understanding that these are differentially weighted in different settings. If we do this, we stand a chance of discerning the causes of extreme suffering and also the forces that put some at risk for human rights abuses, while others are shielded from risk. No honest assessment of the current state of human rights can omit an analysis of structural violence…”

Language

• A  system of arbitrary vocal symbols that human beings use to encode their experience of the world and to communicate with one another

• The anthropological take: the analysis of the cultural context in which language occurs

Symbol

Anything that serves to refer to something else

Arbitrariness

• Symbol has a meaning that cannot be guessed because there is no obvious connection between the symbol and its referent

Swahili

• Mark of cultural and personal independence from the colonizing Europeans and their languages of control and command

• Predominantly a mix of Bantu languages and Arabic

  • also has English, Persian, Portuguese, German and French influences due to trade contact

Closed systems

Languages that cannot create new meanings or messages (ex. dolphins)

Open systems

Languages that can easily create new meanings and messages (ex. human language)

Kinesics

Term used to designate all forms of human body language, including gestures, body position and movement, facial expressions, and eye contact

Paralanguage

Characteristics of speech beyond the actual words spoken. These include the features that are inherent to all speech:

• pitch

• loudness

• tempo

• duration of the sounds

Proxemics

• The study of the social use of space, specifically the distance an individual tries to maintain around himself in interactions with others.

• The size of the “space bubble” depends on a number of social factors, including the relationship between the two people, their relative status, their gender and age, their current attitude toward each other, and above all their culture

Dialect

A subordinate variety of a language and the common assumption is that we can understand someone who speaks another version of our own language

Language variation in the US

•Settlement Patterns

•Migration Routes

•Geographical Factors

•Language Contact

•Region and Occupation

•Social Class

•Group Reference

•Linguistic Process

Speech community

• A concrete community of individuals who regularly interact verbally with one another

• Families

• Work spaces

• Deaf Communities

• Virtual Communities

• Neighborhood/City

  • Bawlmerese

Vernacular

Non-standard varieties of English

• uses stigmatized forms of multiple negatives

• “ain’t”

• pronunciation of words (this to “dis”)

• “Improper” English

Whorf Hypothesis

Human beings see the world the way they do because the specific languages they speak influence them to do so.

Linguistic relativity

The proposal that the particular language we speak influences the way we think about reality, forms one part of the broader question of how language influences thought.

Verbal Repertoire

The sum total of verbal varieties a particular individual has mastered

Code-Switching

The ability to switch from one variety (or code) to another as the situation demands

Pidgin

Language created out of contact between two groups and do not have native speakers.

Creole

When a pidgin language is the native language for a subsequent generation

Language Death

• Extinction of a language (caused by colonialism? linked with capitalism?)

• About half the world’s more than seven billion people speak only ten languages. These include Mandarin Chinese, two languages from India, Spanish, English, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and German.

Linguistic Imperialism

• As a consequence of European colonization, English, French, or German, or one of the pidgins became the dominant language in the colonial areas

• A trend from linguistic diversity to monolingualism and language death began.

Language Ideology

The beliefs and practices about language that are linked to struggles between social groups with different interests, and which are regularly revealed in what people say and how they say

• Power relations; arguments over ‘official languages’ of nation-states (USA vs. South Africa)

• Utilization of foreign words

Medical anthropology

A distinct sub-specialty within the discipline of anthropology that investigates human health and health care systems in a comparative perspective.

Critical Medical Anthropology

Draws attention to the ways in which many forms of physical, mental, and emotional suffering correlate with forms of socioeconomic and political inequality.

Ethno-etiology

Cultural explanations about the underlying causes of health problems.

Naturalistic ethno-etiology

Views disease as the result of natural forces such as cold, heat, winds, or an upset in the balance of the basic body elements.

Personalistic ethno-etiology

Views disease as the result of the actions of human or supernatural beings.

Applied Anthropology

Sub-field of anthropology concerned with the production and  application of anthropological knowledge to the solution of practical problems, initiating direct action or contributing to the formation of a broad range of policies

Biology of Poverty

An aberrant set of health conditions that are established by the socioeconomic conditions and power relations people must live under, where certain diseases and ailments become associated with poverty.

Health Activism

The political organizing of practitioners and individuals to demand that the state acknowledge the existence of certain diseases, often seen as behavioral in nature, and provide funding for research to seek a cure.

Neoliberalism (according to Farmer)

• The ideology that advocates the dominance of a a competition-driven market model. 

• Individuals in a society are viewed, if viewed at all, as autonomous, rational producers and consumers whose decisions are motivated primarily by economic or material concerns. 

• This ideology has little to say about the social and economic inequalities that distort real economics.”

Biocultural Evolution

Describes the interactions between biology and culture that have influenced human evolution.

Shaman

A person who specializes in contacting the world of the spirits

Ethnography

The in-depth study of the everyday practices and lives of a people.

Kinship

• Blood ties, common ancestry, and social relationships that form families within human groups.

• The various systems of social organization that societies have constructed on principles derived from the universal human experiences of mating, birth and nurturance.

• It is the most basic principle of organizing individuals into social groups, roles, and categories.

• Some form of organization based on parentage and marriage is present in every human society.

Social Role

the set of behaviors expected of an individual who occupies a particular status.

Status

any culturally-designated position a person occupies in a particular setting

Relatedness

Socially recognized connections between human beings

Forms of relatedness

•Friendship

•Marriage

•Adoption

•Procreation

•Descent from a common ancestor

•Common labor

•Co-residence

•Sharing blood

Power of Blood

Invokes power through belief in purity and ability to control it

• Eugenics

Believed to determine relatedness

• Not necessarily by family (consanguineal links)

• Nation

• Monarchy

• Religion

• Race

Kinship as an idiom

• Kinship is a selective interpretation of the common human experiences of mating, birth, and nurturance.

• The result is a set of coherent principles that allow people to assign one another membership in particular groups.

Patrilineal descent

The paternal line of the family, or fathers and their children.

Matrilineal descent

Defines membership in the kinship group through the maternal line of relationships between mothers and their children.

Unilineal descent

involve descent through only one line or side of the family.

Clans

• A group of people who have a general notion of common descent that is not attached to a specific ancestor.

• Some trace their common ancestry to a common mythological ancestor (Navajo)

Marriage

Marks a change in status for a couple, and acceptance by society of the new family formed by it.

Incest taboo

Forbids sexual relations between certain categories of close relatives.

Endogamy

Marriage to someone within one’s group

Exogamy

Marriage outside one’s group

Monogamy

Only one spouse is allowed at one time

Polygyny

A husband can have more than one wife

Sororal polygyny

A man marries several sisters

Polyandry

A wife can have several husbands

Fraternal polyandry

A woman marries several brothers

Cave paintings

Depicted animals and abstract symbols that suggest the images were part of a supernatural belief system, possibly one focused on ensuring safety or success in hunting.

Venus figures

Expressed ideas about fertility or motherhood and may have been viewed as magical

Religion

• The extension of human society and culture to include the supernatural

• Assumes that the supernatural world acts upon the natural world: hinges on faith and belief

• A worldview in which people personify cosmic forces and devise ways to deal with them that resemble the ways they deal with powerful human beings in their society.

  • Big difference between Why and How

  • Magic/Science/Religion

Armchair Anthropology Bias of Religion

His contemporary, Sir E.B. Tylor, was less dismissive of unfamiliar belief systems, but he defined religion minimally and, for some, in overly narrow terms as “the belief in supernatural beings.” This definition excludes much of what people around the world actually believe.

Emile Durkheim on Religion

• Recognized that religion was not simply a belief in “supernatural beings,” but a set of practices and social institutions that brought members of a community together.

• emphasized the significance of spiritual beliefs for relationships between people.

• Religion, he said, was “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set aside and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.

Sacred

Objects or ideas are set apart from the ordinary and treated with great respect or care

Profane

objects or ideas are ordinary and can be treated with disregard or contempt

Elements of Religion

• Cosmology: an explanation for the origin or history of the world

• Supernatural: a realm beyond direct human experience

• Rules of Governing Behaviors: rules define proper conduct for individuals and for society as a whole and are oriented toward bringing individual actions into harmony with spiritual beliefs

• Ritual: practices or ceremonies that serve a religious purpose and are usually supervised by religious specialists.

Animatism

When cultures are organized around belief in an impersonal supernatural force

Mana

Accumulating power from the world around you

Religion and Politics

Despite the separation of church and state theoretically, religion and politics are often intertwined in the United States.

• Ongoing debate over separation of church and state in the US.

•n other parts of the world, they are unified and provide the cultural and political parameters for one’s identity and the economic and political functions of a nation-state

Magic

Assumes that the supernatural world can be manipulated to act upon the natural world in a desired way: hinges on faith and belief

Science

Assumes that the natural world can be manipulated: hinges on faith and belief

Anthropological analysis of Religion

• Relativistic: focus on rationales for religious practice

• Focus on symbolic aspects of religious practice that bring meaning and coherence to people’s lives

• A means for dealing with the uncertainty of life

• Creates social solidarity among adherents: Worldview

• Explains the unexplainable

  • Suffering

  • Death

  • Mysterious

  • Explanatory functions

    • Why are humans on Earth?

    • Meaning of Life?

    • Guilt and Misfortune?

Religious Rituals

A combination of speech, patterned behavior and altered emotional states through which the supernatural is approached

Everyday Rituals

A sequence of symbolic activities, set off from the social routines of everyday life, recognizable by members of society as a ritual, and closely connected to a specific set of ideas that are often encoded in myth

Prayer

An approach to the supernatural that only uses words and which emphasizes people’s inferior position to the gods

Sacrifice

Involves giving up something of value in an exchange with the spirits.

Rites of Intensification

Communal ceremonies at various points in the yearly cycle or at times when the society is exposed to some kind of threat

Rites of Revitalization

Ambitious attempts to resolve serious problems, such as war, famine, or poverty through a spiritual or supernatural intervention following a period of crisis

Cargo Cults

• Rituals to attract prosperity

• One possible explanation was that the foreign materials had been given to the islanders by a powerful deity or ancestral spirit, an entity who eventually acquired the name John Frum. The name may be based on a common name the islanders would have encountered while the military base was in operation: “John from America.”

• When the war ended and the U.S. military departed, the residents of Tanna experienced a kind of trauma as the material goods they had enjoyed disappeared and the John Frum ritual began.

• Each year on February fifteenth, many of the island’s residents construct copies of U.S. airplanes, runways, or towers and march in military formation with replicas of military rifles and American blue jeans.

Religious relativity

the correctness of a religion is relative to the world-view of its community of adherents.

• When asked to explain his continued faith, one village elder explained: “You Christians have been waiting 2,000 years for Jesus to return to Earth, and you haven’t given up hope.”

Rite of Passage

• Communal ceremonies held to publicly mark the changes in status an individual goes through as he or she progresses through the life cycle

• Often initiations into adulthood

  • Bar Mitzvah

  • Graduation

  • Retirement Party