anthro

Based on the course materials provided, here's a comprehensive study guide covering key concepts, definitions, and important points for your upcoming exam:

I. Course Overview

• Socio-cultural anthropology studies human diversity, social organization, community life, values, worldviews, and cultural meanings. The goal is to learn to think like an anthropologist, developing critical awareness to understand the world.

• The course will cover themes like fieldwork, kinship, language, and ritual, and consider race, racism, social class, and gender from an anthropological perspective.

II. Course Objectives

• Identify, describe, and interpret cultural phenomena.

• Summarize and interpret anthropological texts like ethnographies.

• Identify, understand, and apply anthropological concepts and theories.

• Evaluate and critique understandings of culture and their repercussions.

III. Key Concepts and Definitions

• Culture: A system of meanings about the nature of experience shared by a people and passed down through generations, including meanings given to things, events, activities, and people. Culture can be understood as shared patterns of learned behavior and meanings.

• Thinking Anthropologically: Thinking about the world with a particular set of tools.

• Fieldwork: A key method in sociocultural anthropology. It shapes the discipline and the interests of anthropologists.

• Ethnography: The main thing anthropologists do. It is a genre of writing.

• Thick description: Detailed recording of cultural context to understand the native's point of view.

• Cultural Relativism: Interpreting a culture based on what is important and makes sense in that culture.

• Ethnocentrism: Judging another culture by the standards of one's own.

• Worldview: What people understand to be reality according to their cultural framework.

• Metaphor: A way through which people in different cultures come to know and share a particular worldview.

• Ritual: A dramatic rendering or social portrayal of meanings shared by a specific group that makes those meanings seem correct and proper.

• Rites of passage: A specific kind of ritual.

Rites of passage are rituals that mark the transition from one life stage to another. Every culture in the world has rites of passage. These rituals symbolically mark a transition from one status in life to another.

Rites of passage include:

• Weddings, marking the transition from being unmarried to married.

• Baptisms, where one transitions from not being part of a religious community to being part of that community.

• Graduation, where one goes from being a student to being a graduate.

• Boot camp in the armed forces.

Each rite of passage has three stages:

• Separation: The person or people are separated or removed from their former status.

• Transition/Liminality: The person is in between statuses. During this stage, they may learn things needed to obtain their next status or bond with others going through the same rite. "Liminal" refers to being on a threshold or doorway and not in either social category.

• Integration: Also referred to as reintegration.

During the liminal stage, people develop a sense of communitas, which is a strong, emotional understanding of what's important in society.

• Kinship: Doesn't exist in a vacuum and doesn't exist without people.

• Etic perspective: Analysis of a culture using comparative categories and explanations from an outside observer's perspective.

• Emic perspective: Understanding and representing a culture in its own terms.

• Nomenclature: A naming system, a system of symbols for naming something.

• Personhood: The status of being a person in a given culture.

• Selfhood: One's own sense of one's status as a person.

• Social Identity: The view that people have of their own, and others’ positions in society.

• Egocentric selfhood: the idea that each person is their own center and can act on their own. People with egocentric selfhood decide for themselves what they want and what they can do. This fits with societies that value being independent and relying on yourself. For example, if someone is "a generous person," egocentric selfhood sees that generosity as coming from within them, no matter what they do.

• Sociocentric selfhood: A context-dependent view of the self. The self exists only within the concrete situations or roles occupied by the person.

• Gender: One aspect of identity, selfhood, and personhood.

• Modes of livelihood: How people make a living.

• Foraging: Hunting, gathering, fishing.

• Horticulture: Domestication of plants and animals.

• Pastoralism: animal farming

• Agriculture: land farming

• Superior Whorf hypothesis: There's a systematic relationship between the categories of language that a person speaks and how that person understands the world and behaves in it.

IV. Key Themes and Topics

• What Anthropologists Do: Fieldwork and ethnography are central. Anthropology is differentiated from sociology by its emphasis on fieldwork.

• Thinking about culture: Culture is a key concept.

• Reading Ethnographies: Identify the research question, argument, and evidence. Pay attention to chapter titles and subheadings.

• Balinese Cockfight: Geertz's case study illustrates culture as patterned and the importance of thick description. The cockfight is a story the Balinese tell themselves about themselves.

• Legacies of Violence:

• The book examines the links between a local community and macro-historical trends.

• Key themes include landscape and history, "barbarism"/balentia, masculinity, divergent visions, and community cohesion.

• The importance of understanding the emic and etic views.

• Gender and personhood: Anthropologists study these in a cross-cultural perspective.

V. Important Points from Lectures

• Syllabus and Course Goals: The syllabus and Quercus are key resources for course information.

• Readings and Lectures: Readings and lectures complement each other, but don’t entirely overlap. Both contain "testable" material.

• Assignments and Evaluations:

• Midterm Exam: Multiple choice, based on the first 6 weeks of class (lectures and readings). 20% of the midterm will be about Legacies of Violence.

• Writing Assignment #1: "How to read an ethnography" exercise, based on Legacies of Violence. Submit notes and answers to questions.

• Weekly Quizzes: Online, based on readings and/or lecture. Designed to keep you on track with the material.

• Tutorials: Attendance and participation are important. Bring paper and pen to tutorials.

VI. Legacies of Violence by Antonio Sorge

• Key arguments: Orgosolo actively resisted outside forces, highland culture has a dissident history.

• Balentia: A male code of honor within the rural pastoral sector. Provides a framework for contemporary masculinity based in nostalgia and pastoralism.

• Localists vs. Cosmopolitans: Two divergent representations of masculine behavior. Localists (e.g., shepherds) recreate an earthy locality, while cosmopolitans are individualistic and globally oriented.

• La scuola impropria: Informal schooling that conveyed practical knowledge and ethics.

VII. General Tips for Studying

• Keep up with readings each week and take notes.

• Review lecture slides, and attend lectures and tutorials.

• Use the textbook's questions and bolded terms to guide your reading.

• For ethnographies, identify the research question, argument, and evidence.

• Pay attention to details, but focus on how they support the argument.

• Define key terms in your own words.

• Connect course concepts to examples from the readings and lectures.

Kinship Terms:

Here's a more in-depth list of kinship terms and definitions, drawing on the provided sources:

• Affinal Kin: Individuals related through marriage. These are your in-laws or relatives by marriage. The term "affines" refers to in-laws.
  
  

• Bilateral Descent: A kinship system where individuals trace their ancestry through both their mother's and father's sides of the family. In a bilateral kinship system, individuals understand themselves to be equally related to both their mother’s and father’s families.
  
  

• Bifurcate Merging Kinship Classification: A kinship system where kinship terms merge on both sides of the family but are differentiated based on gender. In this system, the terms used for the nuclear family extend further, and relationships through male or female connections are unique.
  
  

• Consanguinal Kin: Individuals related through "blood" ties. This can also include relationships that are structurally similar to blood relationships, such as adoption.
  
  

• Cross Cousins: Children of one's father's sister or mother's brother.
  
  

• Ego: The individual who serves as the reference point in a kinship diagram. The kinship relations are described in relation to ego.
  
  

• Endogamy: The practice of marrying within a specific group. The group can vary depending on the society, such as a caste or lineage.
  
  

• Etic Perspective: An approach to studying culture that uses comparative categories and explanations from the viewpoint of an outside observer. It provides a broad, comparative perspective that can be compared across different cultures.
  
  

• Exogamy: The practice of marrying outside a specific group. In some societies, individuals must marry outside their lineage.
  
  

• Fictive Kin: Individuals who are not related through blood or marriage but are treated as family. Examples include godparents, where the relationship is often formalized through a ritual.
  
  

• Kin Type: Terms used by anthropologists to denote biological relationships among family members.
  
  

• Kin Term: The actual term used for a relative, representing the emic or insider perspective.
  
  

• Matrilineal Descent: A kinship system where individuals trace their ancestry through the female line. In matrilineal societies, lineage and inheritance are traced through the mother's side of the family.
  
  

• Matrilocality: The practice of a newlywed couple living with or near the wife's family.
  
  

• Neolocality: The practice of a newlywed couple setting up their own, independent household.
  
  

• Parallel Cousins: Children of one's father's brother or mother's sister.
  
  

• Patrilineal Descent: A kinship system where individuals trace their ancestry through the male line. Membership and inheritance are often tied to male relatives.
  
  

• Patrilocality: The practice of a newlywed couple living with or near the husband's family.
  
  

Complete List of Terms:

Here is a list of terms from the Week 1 through Week 6 lectures and readings, with definitions and examples based on the provided sources:

Week 1: Introduction to Anthropology

• Anthropology: A generous, open-ended, comparative, and critical inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life. Anthropology aims to understand humanity by putting together different aspects of human life.

• Generous (in anthropology): Anthropologists listen to, pay attention to, and take seriously what people say and do, as well as the reasons they give for their actions.

• Open-ended (in anthropology): Anthropology explores questions without necessarily seeking definitive answers, focusing on detailed exploration.

• Belief: Something accepted as true; beliefs vary and shape how individuals understand the world.

  • Example: Beliefs about the importance of family can influence social behaviors and values.

Week 2: What is Anthropology and What Do Anthropologists Do?

• Culture: Shared patterns of learned behavior. It is a system of meanings about the nature of experience that is shared by a people and passed from one generation to another, including the meanings people give to things, events, activities, and people. Culture is the lens through which individuals understand how to behave.

  • Example: Table manners vary across cultures, demonstrating how culture shapes behavior.

• Ethnography: A genre of writing and the main methodology used by anthropologists. It involves fieldwork to understand how people live and why they do what they do, helping to understand context.

• Fieldwork: A key method in anthropology to gather data, requiring anthropologists to immerse themselves in a specific location.

• Native's Point of View: Seeing culture from an insider's perspective. Anthropologists try to understand beliefs, values, behaviors, and practices from the perspectives of those within the culture.

• Thick Description: Recording detailed observations to provide context for understanding a culture, a term coined by Clifford Geertz.

• Cultural Relativism: The idea that a culture must be understood relative to what is important and what makes sense in that culture.

• Ethnocentrism: Judging another culture based on the standards of one's own culture.

Week 3: Worldview and the Cultural Construction of Reality

• Worldview: The way people understand reality according to their cultural framework. It can be shared and learned.

  • Example: Religious and secular worldviews can overlap and intermingle.

• Metaphor: A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.

  • Example: Using sports metaphors to explain other domains of life in North America.

• Ritual: A dramatic rendering or social portrayal of meanings shared by a specific group of people that makes those meanings seem correct and proper.

• Rites of Passage: A type of ritual.

• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: The idea that there is a systematic relationship between the categories of the language a person speaks and how that person understands the world. Different language patterns yield different patterns of thought.

Week 4: Relatives and Relations (Kinship)

• Kinship: How people understand their relationships to a certain group of people in their society.

• Emic Perspective: An insider's perspective.

• Etic Perspective: An outsider's perspective.

Week 5: Gender, Personhood, and Identity

• Cultural Constructionism: Human behavior and ideas are best explained as the result of culturally shaped learning.

• Sex: Refers to biological categories assigned on the basis of genital, chromosomal, and hormonal differences.

• Gender: Refers to patterns of culturally constructed and learned behavior assigned to sexed bodies.

• Gender Identity: How one understands oneself vis-à-vis available gender categories.

• Personhood: The status of being a person in a given culture.

• Selfhood: One's own sense of one's status as a person.

• Social Identity: The view that people have of their own and others' positions in society.

Week 6: Wrapping Up Legacies of Violence

• Modes of Livelihood: What people do for subsistence.

  • Examples: Foraging, horticulture, extensive agriculture, pastoralism.

• Pastoralism: A mode of livelihood based on domesticating animals.

• Transhumance: Seasonal movement of livestock between fixed summer and winter pastures.

• Forms of Political Organization:

  • Bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states.

• Balentia/Balente: (From Legacies of Violence) Provides a framework for contemporary masculinity that is based as much in nostalgia as in real pastoralism.

• Localism vs. Cosmopolitanism: Divergent visions of how the world works.

Legacies of Violence Information

Here's some key information and terms related to Legacies of Violence, with an emphasis on potentially testable material and items mentioned in the lecture transcripts:

• Legacies of Violence explores the history, society, and the state in Sardinia, particularly focusing on the long history of resistance to outside authority among the inhabitants of the highland region. The book examines local understandings of the past and how a history of violence impacts a community.
  
  

• Central themes in Legacies of Violence include:
  
  

  • Violence and its legacies.

  • History, society, and the state.

  • Local understandings of the past.

  • Masculinity and pastoral identity.

  • Resistance to the outside world.

• Balentia: An ancient male code of honor ostensibly uncorrupted by the values of mainstream Italian society. It provides a framework for contemporary masculinity rooted in both nostalgia and real pastoralism. A balente is a man with honor who exhibits traits such as masculinity, virulence, effectiveness, vitality, maturity, restraint, and good judgment.
  
  

• Orgosolo: A village in the central highlands of Sardinia that has a dissident history vis-à-vis the state.
  
  

• Key arguments in Legacies of Violence:
  
  

  • Orgosolo was never conquered by outside forces.

  • Highland culture and society have a dissident history vis-à-vis the state.

  • Values of honor and patterns of violence are long-term responses to geographical, ecological, and political marginalization.

• The title Legacies of Violence implies violence, and its legacies should be considered. Legacies are things from the past that remain in the present.
  
  

• The subtitle, History, Society and the State in Sardinia indicates how the content will be organized.
  
  

• The book cover depicts a piece of art called Shepherd in Repose located at the entrance to Orgosolo. It ties together shepherds, landscape, and Orgosolo.
  
  

• The introduction provides the main research question.
  
  

• The main research question and argument are evident in the introduction and elaborated in the conclusion.
  
  

• Each chapter contributes to the overall argument.
  
  

• The landscape and history are connected.
  
  

• The book uses both emic and etic views. The emic perspective is the insider's point of view, while the etic perspective is that of an outside observer.
  
  

• Sorge argues that in Sardinian history, the use of the mountain landscape as a strategic resource for the maintenance of local autonomy, the institution of a customary legal system premised on the threat and use of violence, as well as a clearly defined code of honor, balentia, are byproducts of circumstances encountered by local people throughout their history. Remnants of this history remain in the lives of shepherds, who dominate public space in the village. The contemporary significance of balentia is a matter of debate.
  
  

• One legacy of violence is not wanting the state to have a monopoly on violence.
  
  

• People in Orgosolo for many centuries lived outside the state, using bands and tribal forms of social organization, solving their own problems, sometimes violently.
  
  

• Orgolesi contend with "divergent visions" of how the world works and what matters most. These visions can be characterized as localism vs. cosmopolitanism.
  
  

• Highland Sardinians are often stereotyped as violent and isolated.
  
  

• The codice barbaricino (Barbagian code) is a form of customary law buttressed by the threat of violent action, which regulates behavior through a set of coercive norms that are expressed most vividly through their enactment in blood feud.
  
  

• Sa mala iustizia: The evil justice; a moniker used to describe agents of the state.
  
  

• Acts of violence are not widely discussed or even acknowledged publicly.
  
  

• Disamistades: States of enmity between two or more individuals.
  
  

• Shepherds mobilize history in the creation of a charter that offers guidelines for life in the present.
  
  

• The values of balentia speak to a set of social configurations that are ubiquitous throughout the Mediterranean.
  
  

• Anthropologists should pay close attention to the way in which local inhabitants apprehend the past.
  
  

• The full incorporation of the central highlands into the modern nation-state has had lingering effects upon the most marginal of communities, and their self-definitions vacillate by necessity between either accepting or rejecting the cosmopolitan, urbane values of the new order.
  
  

• In bars, Orgolesi tell tales, argue, joke, gossip, interrogate, exchange information, and talk about politics, sports, the weather, women, and nothing at all.
  
  

• The rituals of hospitality directed towards outsiders provide a glimpse into mechanisms by which the community defines itself vis-à-vis the outside world, subverts hegemonic structures, and effectively assists in the production of locality.