ANTH 114

Vocab

  • The pristine myth - the idea that the Americas were sparsely populated without any complex building

    • Large complex settlements (e.g. South American empires)

    • Large populations and complex works backed by archeological evidence

  • Romanticism - a period and style of art that engaged heavily in the pristine myth and cast a rose-tinted picture of the untouched American wilderness and the people living in it as a true and less corrupt way of being that needed to be tapped in the minds of the europeans

  • Proto-language - proposed parent-language from the study of modern languages

  • Genetic diversity - an assumption can be made based on words whether a language is close to another, the relatedness of languages (e.g. thirst, dorst, mother, mutter)

  • Structural diversity - languages can differ in that they have different structures

  • Language relativity - the idea that the language you speak can shape the way that you see the world

  • Linguistic functionalism - if there wasn’t a certain thing, there wouldn’t be a word for it (example - we wouldn’t have a word for i-pad if it didn’t exist)

  • Count nouns vs non-count nouns - can you put a/an in front of it?

    • patience vs person

  • Ethnocentrism - evaluation of other cultures based on your own

    • White mans burden

  • Historical Particularism - against ethnocentrism, the idea that every culture has its own history and we are limited by our own cultural assumptions and language

  • Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - language shapes how people think

  • Holism - studying society, culture, and language as an interconnected whole

  • Native speaker - grew up knowing a language or learned a language at a very young age

  • Settler colonialism - when a ruling country from a different geographic moves large groups of people to another country to establish dominance

    • Genocide - killing of a large number of people of a particular nation/ethnic group, and is a way for settler colonists to establish dominance



Language

  • Languages are ideologies and social constructs

    • Vernacular language was standardized with the increase of importance of nation-states

  • Languages can be grouped together based on their relatedness (language family)

  • According to early philosophers, different linguistic structures were linked to culture and biology - language used to classify people (race)

    • Racist way of thinking based of morphemes (Latin languages were superior to Chinese or Arabic)

  • Language death (metaphor) has 6 categories of language endangerment

    • Definitely endangered to critically endangered = children do not speak the language to language is only spoken by a few members of the oldest generation

  • Language revitalization -

  • Language change come into existence to demarcate different identities from each other


Anthropology history

  • Early anthropology was tied to categorizing people based on their biology and culture

  • Viewed different “races” as differently evolved species

  • Four Fields of Anthropology

    • Cultural

    • Archeology

    • Biological/physical

    • Linguistic

  • Cultures need to be studied and recorded before they are lost

Philosophers

  • Lewis Henry Morgan - founded “New Confederacy of the iroquois”

  • Franz Boas - curator of Pacific northwest objects, specifically Kwakiutl, practiced salvage anthropology and was against ethnocentrism

    • Known as the “Father of American Anthropology”, used anthropology to better society

    • Argued that cultural contact results in loss of culture

    • Argued that race is not biologically constructed but is instead a social construct

    • Controversy: Native Americans were not credited in his work

    • Argued speakers of different languages hear speech differently

  • Sapir - argued for proto-Native American Languages and use comparative linguistics to argue for the relation of different Native languages

    • Benjamin Lee Whorf (Sapir’s student) - argued categories of languages organized how we speak, and that created mental patterns of habitual thought

Notes: native languages

  • Disease from Europeans created a genocide, Native population dropped by 75% - 90%

    • In comparison: the black plague in Europe killed 30-50% of Europeans

  • Assimilation was forced by the U.S. government and caused the elimination of native languages, the Civilization Fund of 1819 was enacted to “civilize” Native people with boarding/residential schools

    • Because of forced assimilation, land is lost and therefore the context where a language should be used is eliminated - causing language death

  • Cliff Palace and Cahokia are places that disprove the pristine myth

  • Languages belonging to different language families are a kind of genetic diversity

    • Structural: grammar

    • Culture: cultural impacts of diversity

  • Languages were lost by genocide of the US government, dying from starvation and exposure on reservations and the trail of tears

From reading

  • 300 mutually unintelligible languages were spoken in North America a the time of first contact with Europeans: loss of diversity

  • At the rate of its disappearance, only 20 languages will be left by 2050

  • Certain sounds are not in varieties of American Language, and instead of certain accents changing the way they say words, Boas argues that the reason why native speakers sound inconsistent is because the person listening is at fault due to inadequacy of the ear

    • Believed that Native Americans were “bad” because the same word would be pronounced in different ways


What to know for assignment

  • jstor website

  • Giving last name for in text citation add page after last name

  • Intro: broad overview, general perspective of the matter, general information, and promote your argument

  • Conclusion: whats the most important