Anthro Exam 1

What do we mean when we say that human cultures are characterized by many universals? What are some examples?

• Humans exhibit many cross-cultural universals, aspects of society, psychology, and behavior, for which there are no known exceptions.

• Examples: Honoring the dead, Music, Language, Social structures/government, Baby talk, Gift exchange, Marriage, Ceremony, Feasting, Belief in the supernatural

What do we mean when we say that cultures vary in terms of these universals? What are some examples?

• These things all exist but can be implemented in different ways or serve different societal functions

• Food is a social construct - what is food vs. what is not food

What does it mean to be ethnocentric?

• The notion that one’s own culture is superior to other cultures

• The idea that other cultures should be measured by the degree to which they live up to our cultural standards

• When you view other cultures through the narrow lens of your own culture or social position

• Ethnocentrism is a human universal

What do we mean by cultural relativism? What do we mean by moral relativism? How are these terms similar or different?

• Cultural relativism refers to the notion that a people’s values and customs must be understood in terms of the culture of which they are a part (Scientific/Research tool)

• Moral relativism refers to the notion that because no universal standard of behavior exists, people should not judge behaviors as good or evil (Ethical belief)

Why is the study of humans so much harder than the study of physical objects or non-human animals?

• Humans, unlike other critters, have rich mental lives. We think about the world and try to make sense of it. Often, our explanations emerge through interactions and conversations with those around us within cultural communities.

What do we mean by emic and etic explanations? How are these similar or different?

• Explanations for human behavior and beliefs

• Emic or Insider’s perspective: how it feels to be them in their context

  • Investigates how individuals perceive and categorize the world, their rules for behavior, what has meaning for them, and how they imagine and explain things

  • “Subjective” frame of reference (i.e. an insider’s point of view)

  • Only makes sense within the context of a specific cultural frame of reference

  • Obtained through living with and talking to members of a cultural community

• Etic or Outsider’s perspective: zoomed out trying to understand SCIENTIFICALLY why they think the way they do

  • Investigates how individuals think and behave using a scientific orientation, shifting the focus from the individuals themselves to the scientist observing them

  • “Objective” frame of reference (i.e. an outsider scientist’s view)

  • An etic explanation may or may not resonate with members of the culture being studied

  • Obtained through scientific methods, including careful observation, intersubjective, and theoretical logic

Be prepared to provide examples of emic and etic explanations of behaviors.

• Why do some groups practice male circumcision?

  • Emic explanations: promotes cleanliness, reduces libido

  • Etic explanations: among, Jewish and Muslim populations, the practice may have arisen as a form of culturally distinguishing from neighboring groups; among Americans, the practice seems to have spread based on 19th century medical beliefs about cleanliness and sexuality

What do anthropologists mean by “the ethnographic method” and “fieldwork”?

• The ethnographic method: the intensive study of a particular society and culture as the basis for generating understanding or testing anthropological theory

• Fieldwork

  • Long-term, firsthand research in a particular society or culture

  • Allows anthropologists to develop a holistic perspective about a culture

  • Lets the anthropologist develop both emic and etic perspectives

  • Reveals the difference between what people say they do and what they actually do

How are the research methods of anthropology different from other social sciences, like psychology and sociology?

• Psychologists conduct controlled, laboratory experiments

• Sociologists survey large groups of people

• Historians read archival materials

• Economists statistically analyze data sets of real behavior

• Anthropologists do fieldwork

What are some recent trends in how ethnographies are conducted (e.g. collaborative, engaged, etc.)?

• Collaborative anthropology: working WITH native people, making it not just the anthropologist who writes the ethnography but more of a joint effort

• Engaged anthropology: focus on political action/promoting native people's interests and welfare

• Native anthropology: trying to study one’s own culture from an outsider’s perspective

  • Difficulties

    • Easy to take things for granted

    • Hard to remain culturally relativistic

      • Studying the other: cannibalism, infanticide

      • Studying your own people: child neglect, corporate greed, armed conflict

How do anthropologists use the comparative method to help understand the patterning of cultural variation?

• Here, we combine knowledge across individual ethnographies

• You can think about the idea of seeing the forest or the trees

• Each ethnography is like an individual tree

• We can zoom out, look at a bunch of ethnographies, and try to see the forest

Why do we bother studying history? What can we learn from studying history? What’s an example we discussed in class?

• Many ideas from the past are still relevant today

• Understanding why bad ideas were originally rejected helps us dispatch them again

• Good ideas may have been ignored or forgotten (e.g. they were ahead of their time)

• To understand today’s world, we have to understand how we got here - history sets the context for the present

• Video of the old-timey anthropologists - making fun of them for the power they held and the harmful and selfish things they did with it

  • Still progressive for their time

What kinds of methods did the late 19th century anthropologists use? What kinds of questions were they interested in? What kinds of data did they use? Why do we call this approach “progressive evolution”? What were some problems with this approach?

• Believed life was arranged in a hierarchy, from the most simple to the most complex - cultures progress along a predetermined evolutionary sequence

  • e.g., some people think that chimps are just less evolved versions of humans and will eventually become humans

• Unilinear Progressive Evolution: The idea that societies progress through universal stages of development.

• Comparative Method: Analyzing similarities and differences across cultures to understand human development

• Nature vs. Nurture: Debates about the relative influence of biology and culture on human behavior and social organization

What kinds of methods did the anthropologists of the early 20th century use? How were these different than their predecessors in the late 19th century? What kinds of questions were these anthropologists interested in? Why do we call some of these approaches “historically particular”?

• Cultural Relativism: Understanding each culture on its own terms. This contrasts with earlier universalism, which seeks to uncover universal patterns across human societies.

• Participant Observation: The development and refinement of ethnographic methods as a primary tool for anthropological research.

• Historical Particularism: Emphasis on each culture's unique historical development.

• Structural Functionalism: Views society as a complex system and focus on how various cultural elements contribute to social solidarity and stability.

• Applied Anthropology: Beginnings of anthropology's practical applications.

We discussed how anthropology split in the mid 20th century with some anthropologists arguing that the field should be a science and others arguing that the field should be more like the humanities. What were these debates about?

• Scientific anthropology

  • Methodology: Employs empirical, quantitative methods

  • Goal: Seeks to establish generalizable laws or theories about human behavior and culture

  • Perspective: Often takes a more detached, objective perspective

  • Data: Relies heavily on measurable data and statistical analysis

  • Influence: Draws from natural sciences and positivist philosophy

• Humanistic anthropology

  • Methodology: Uses qualitative interpretive methods

  • Goal: Aims to understand unique cultural experiences and meanings

  • Perspective: Emphasizes subjective experiences and cultural relativism

  • Data: Focuses on narratives, symbols, and lived experiences

  • Influence: Draws from humanities, hermeneutics, and phenomenology

How were the two broad approaches of the mid 20th century that we discussed (cultural ecology and symbolic anthropology) different?

• Cultural ecology: examining the relationship between culture and environment

  • Multilinear cultural evolution: the ecology determines sociocultural complexity

  • Cultural materialism: cultures are well-adapted to the local ecology just like organisms

• Symbolic and interpretive anthropology: focus on meaning and symbols in culture

  • Thick description: detailed, contextualized description of cultural phenomena

    • Cultures should be interpreted like texts

  • Cultural theory of risk: seeks to explain how societies perceive and respond to risks

• Structure vs. Agency: The ongoing discussion about the balance between societal structures and individual agency in shaping human behavior

What were some of the trends in anthropology since the 1960s?

• Globalization: The study of how global interconnections affect local cultures and identities.

• Technology and Culture: Examining the impact of technological advancements on human societies.

• Power and Inequality: Increasing focus on how power dynamics and social inequalities shape cultures and societies.

• Postmodernism and Reflexivity: Awareness of the anthropologist’s role in shaping research outcomes and the importance of self-reflection.

• Decolonization: Efforts to address the discipline's colonial legacy and incorporate diverse global perspectives.

• Ethics and Representation: Ongoing debates about ethical research practices and how to responsibly represent studied cultures.

• Applied and Engaged Anthropology: The development of anthropology as not just an academic pursuit but a field with practical applications.

What do social scientists mean by the term “culture of honor” and “culture of dignity”? How did we talk about these differences in terms of adaptation?

• Honor culture: cultures where you must be brave and strong and tough, be willing to respond aggressively

• Dignity culture: social system in which an individual’s worth is considered inherent and not dependent on the opinions of others

• Differences between the two systems

  • Response to insults: In honor cultures, insults often demand a personal, sometimes violent response. In dignity cultures, insults are more likely to be ignored or addressed through formal channels.

  • Source of self-worth: Honor cultures tie self-worth closely to public reputation, while dignity cultures emphasize inherent individual worth.

  • Conflict resolution: Honor cultures often rely on personal or family-based conflict resolution, while dignity cultures tend to use formal, legal mechanisms.

  • Gender roles: Honor cultures often have more rigid, traditional gender roles, while dignity cultures tend toward greater gender equality.

  • Legal systems: Honor cultures may have legal systems that recognize concepts like crimes of passion or defense of honor, while dignity cultures typically do not.

Be able to explain Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

• Evolution will occur if three conditions are met:

  • 1. Individuals within a population vary in phenotype. A ‘phenotype’ refers to any observable aspect of an organism, such as its behavior or physical form.

  • 2. Phenotypic variation leads to differences in fitness among individuals. ‘Fitness’ refers to the ability to survive and reproduce. When we say ‘differences in fitness’ we mean that some individuals are better able to survive and reproduce than others within the population.

  • 3. Phenotypic variation is inherited in offspring. This means that the variation in traits that give rise to fitness differences must be transmitted from parents to offspring. Put another way, offspring must resemble their parents.

Is culture unique to humans? If not, what are some examples of social transmission and cultural traditions in non-human animals?

• Cultural transmission occurs in various species, not just humans

• Unlike human culture, non-human cultural traditions do not result in cumulative, complex adaptations; “cultural” behaviors in non-human animals are no more complex than what can be invented by a single individual

• New Caledonian crows are excellent tool users.

  • In the video, we see a New Caledonian crow fashioning a hood with a piece of metal to pull out a bucket of food from a plastic cylinder.

  • These crows observe and imitate tool use from other crows.

  • This results in different populations of crows having distinct styles of crafting stick tools for foraging.

If culture is not unique to humans, what are some of the key features of human culture that makes it different from non-human animal cultures? What are some of the psychological mechanisms humans have that other animals don’t that allow for human culture?

• Humans “over-imitate” compared to other animals, resulting in higher fidelity social transmission

• Humans actively teach other humans, whereas other animals tend to imitate but don’t teach

• Human language allows us to socially transmit more complex behaviors

• Humans preferentially imitate from successful models, a process called prestige-biased transmission

• Humans imitate in a conformist fashion, preferentially adopting the most common behavior in their group

How may have the climate of the late Pleistocene contributed to the evolution of the cultural capacity in humans?

• Climate changed rapidly/increased climate variability → environment and animals living in it changed rapidly → culture changed rapidly

What do we mean by gene-culture co-evolution? What are some examples we discussed in class?

• Humans have two systems of inheritance, genes and culture

• Malaria

  • Parts of Africa have a high prevalence of malaria, a mosquito-borne infectious disease.

  • Some people have a natural defense against malaria.

  • Natural selection seems to have favored the evolution of the sickle-shaped blood cells in parts of the world where malaria infection rates are high, like Africa.

  • In Africa, those communities that farm yams have higher rates of the sickle-cell gene than nearby communities with different agricultural practices.

    • In order to cultivate yams, farmers had to chop down trees.

    • The removal of trees had the inadvertent effect of increasing the amount of standing water when it rained.

    • Standing water provides the perfect breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

What were the major characteristics of culture that we discussed in class?

• Adaptive: culture helps humans adapt to their environment and changing circumstances

• Shared: culture is a collective phenomenon, shared by members of a group or society

• Learned: culture is not innate or biological, but acquired through learning and socialization

• Cognitive: culture includes shared cognitive frameworks (or mental models) that shape how members of a culture perceive, understand, and interact with their world

• Symbolic: culture relies heavily on symbols for communication and meaning-making

• Patterned: the various aspects of a culture are usually interconnected and form a coherent whole

• Normative: culture provides guidelines for behavior and sets standards for what is considered appropriate or inappropriate

• Dynamic: culture is not static, it changes over time through various processes

What do we mean when we say that humans adapt through culture?

• Culture helps humans adapt to their environment and changing circumstances

What do we mean when we say that culture is learned behavior?

• Culture is not innate or biological, but acquired through learning and socialization

• Birth is not universal

• Social birth - when personhood is achieved, when a thing becomes a person (varies across societies)

  • In US before birth, other cultures sometimes after birth

What do we mean when we say that culture provides us with mental models?

• Our culture provides us with “mental models” that help us make sense of the world

• Scientific models, folk models

What do we mean when we say that culture provides us with symbols to make sense of the world?

• People don’t just classify the world; they fill the with meaning using stories and symbols

• Cultural symbols are things that stand in for something else

What do we mean when we say that culture is in some ways an integrated system?

• Some anthropologists study culture by looking for patterns of functional organization

• After the 1960s, many anthropologists grew disillusioned with group functionalist explanations - Many anthropologists turned to Marxism and argued that societies are better understood through their inner conflicts, not the degree to which they are functionally organized and cooperative

• On this view, cultures may be patterned systems, but the parts never fit together perfectly

  • Conflict and struggle are fundamental parts to culture, not problems needing solutions

  • These conflicts within societies are the key factor driving social change

What do we mean when we say that culture provides people with norms and values?

• People interact and so share a framework of meaning and behavior

• Even though people within a culture share norms and values, not everyone agrees

Describe in rough outline the case study we discussed on Nicaraguan Sign Language? What does this case study teach us about human language?

• The schoolchildren quickly formed a pidgin-like system of communication. A “pidgin” is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops among people who don’t speak the same language.

• Very quickly, this pidgin developed into a creole-like language. A “creole” is a new and grammatically complete and complex language that emerges from the mixing of different languages.

• The young children had taken the pidgin-like form from the older children to a higher level of complexity, with verb agreement and other conventions of grammar.

What is human language? How is this different from non-human communication?

• Language: a complex, rule-governed system of communication that uses arbitrary symbols (words or signs) to convey infinite meanings

  • Cultural transmission: language is learned rather than genetically inherited

  • Duality of patterning: language has 2 levels of structure - meaningless units (phonemes) that combine to form meaningful units (morphemes)

  • Arbitrariness: the symbols used (words or signs) generally have no inherent connection to their meanings

  • Conventionality: shared agreement within a linguistic community about the meanings of words and grammatical structures

  • Recursion: the capacity to embed phrases within phrases, creating complex, hierarchical structures

  • Displacement: the ability to refer to things, events, or ideas that are not present in the immediate environment or time

  • Productivity: the ability to generate and understand an infinite number of novel utterances

• These features of human language allow us to say and do things that other animals cannot with primitive call systems.

  • We can make plans.

  • We can understand and correct mistakes.

  • We can coordinate and cooperate with one another.

How does language development work in children? What role does biology play? What role does culture play?

• Cognitive scientists argue that complex mental processes, including language acquisition, could not be explained solely through stimulus-response mechanisms. They argue for the importance of mental representations, information processing, and innate cognitive structures.

What kind of evidence do we have to suggest that at least some features of language are innate rather than learned?

• You cannot learn a language the same way once you pass the age of 6

What do we mean by “theory of mind”? How is this related to language?

• Theory of mind helps us learn language (other people know different things about the world than you, ability to simulate things other people think about with your mind)

What does the field of structural linguistics study?

• Structural linguistics: the study and analysis of the structure and content of particular languages

What are some of the major structures of language?

• Phonology: a system of sounds

• Morphology: a system for creating words from sounds

• Syntax: a system of rules for combining words into sentences

• Semantics: a system that relates words to meanings

What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about the relationship between language and culture?

• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: proposed that the structure and vocabulary of a language influence their perception of the world and their cognitive processes

• Language influences how you see the world

What does the field of sociolinguistics study?

• Sociolinguistics: the study of the relationships between language and culture