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Chapter 4: Constructing RealitiesIn Class Notes:The author sees chapter 4 as the World view – everyone has different believes and this shapes how we see the world. Often religion is the backbone of this regarding how humans treat each other or look at situations. Religion can bring people together o...

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Chapter 4: Constructing Realities In Class Notes: The author sees chapter 4 as the World view – everyone has different believes and this shapes how we see the world. Often religion is the backbone of this regarding how humans treat each other or look at situations. Religion can bring people together or divided people. Politics is like religion by shaping people’s minds to shape a culture and world view. Q. Why do people believe different things, and why are they so certain that their view of the world is correct and that other views are wrong? This proves how people believe that the way they think overpowers others depending on their region or political view for example. Edward Evens: 1920-1940’s was one of the first anthropologist who gave credit to African Americans. Identified a system of how people cured an issue or problem within their community, he believes that how should an outsider judge this approach of healing even if it’s not logical to an outsider. Q. How does the use of metaphor affect the meanings people assign to experience? “Through metaphors we understand and abstract in terms of the concrete.” Lakoff and Johnson 1980. Metaphors come from one domain and apply to another domain. “God is your father” this is a metaphor of someone who cares for you and watches out of you. This is one example on how metaphors are used in religion and politics. Humans do not often face life issues with science, they often reach out to other forces regarding the afterlife. It’s often a supernatural believe system. Humans create the idea of the soul because once a soul dies it is still present within some one’s dreams. Therefore, it doesn’t often leave this “world”, and this is how supernatural believes overpowers science in the human’s world. There is a need for faith. Durkheim: studied Australian aboriginals, religions do not focus on external believes it more of a power within the people and what they believe in as a group or community. Expressing their life and respect towards each other by coming together and believing in the same thing. Durkheim is unable to prove but he believes that most religions are created by the people in what they want to be believe. Its humanity celebrating humanity itself. This can be expressed in symbols, or art. Richard Doctens: Biologist. Religion is an escape to not face reality and the science that is right in front of people. In the end science and people faith are never going to go hand in hand. People will always look for a “higher power” to have comfort in their life. Religion as anthropologist: looking at the given faith from the outsider’s view. This will build up a picture and understanding with not being ethnocentric. Religions are related to the cultures of the people who believe them. Humans everywhere creates god in their own image. The image that people can relate to and this is what makes religions so different. Men often show more power over religion, people live it grow and change with each other and this is shown and represented by religion.

The relationship between metaphor, religion and symbol. Metaphor are central to Victor Turner for example, he was an anthropologist who studied society’s in Africa. He studied how the people in the village used religion to express themselves. He noticed that not just in Africa people acted like this, it also happens in England, America and around the world. The expression of dancing around a fire is like the atmosphere of sports events in America or even at a concert. Humans experience communities to gather and celebrate something to be expressed out of the normal activities. Victor Witter Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals, and rites of passage. His work, along with hat of Clifford Geertz and other, is often referred to as symbolic and interpretive anthropology. Response to change in a religious form is an important point in Chapter 4. The social issues within religion are often changing with time and communities. Religions might be subdivided, and this is often lead by human politics that is making the change and difference. European colonialism; slavery from Africa are bought over to Jamaica for example and are treated like slaves to work on plantations. Slavery ended in Jamaica in 1930’s. The push of the people in Jamaica to find their roots back to Africa. The teaching of Marcus Garvey – was a Jamaican political activists, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator. He was the founder and first President General to the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, thorough which he declared himself provisional President of Africa. The identity of people in Africa are Rastafarians and now relocated in Jamaica people wanted to keep their identity. Bob Marely was a large symbol of this. It transcends the gap from Africa and Jamaica and looking at their past, present and future. What is needed is to be able to put everything together to give people a future and direction.

Reading Notes: Many people tend to think that their worldview is the only correct way to interpret their reality, which often leads to ethnocentric (the tendency to judge the beliefs and behaviours of other cultures from the perspective of one’s own culture) assumptions about other cultures and their beliefs. Emile Durkheim, studied Indigenous peoples of Australia, particularly their beliefs about totemism (the use of a symbol, generally an animal or a plant, as a physical representation for a group, generally a clan). The totem was worshipped and was considered scared and holy by the member of the group. They believed that religious beliefs served some purpose: the beliefs and rituals may have increased group cohesion or provided supernatural sanctions for the violation of group norms. Symbolic actions the activities including ritual, myth, art, dance, and music- that dramatically depict the meanings shared by a specific body of people. Metaphors take language from one domain of experience, such as the domain of the body or the domain of animals, and apply it to anther domain, such as landscape features or persons. Metaphors are valuable tools for constructing worldviews. By directing attention to certain aspects of experience, while

downplaying or ignoring others, metaphors can reinforce people’s beliefs, as well as their understandings of reality, which ultimately come to be taken from granted as correct and true. Example: Cree in northern Quebec used the metaphor ‘hunting is like gardening’ and ‘hunting lands are like a garden’ – hydroelectric project- Cree ‘garden’ is destroyed, Cree people will be destroyed too. These domains become key metaphors that give to each culture a style or cast that makes the culture distinctive. Example: Kwakwaka’wakw of British Columbia, believe that when a person dies, the soul leaves the body and enters the body of a salmon. When the salmon is caught and eaten by human beings, however, the soul is once again freed and enters the body of a newborn baby. Eating becomes a metaphor through which must of their life is understood and described. The full impact of a metaphor lies in the fact that people are trying to impose order on their lives by describing the world according to a particular domain of experience. The Kwakwaka’wakw believe that greed, conflict, and child rearing can be solved by controlling hunger. The Metaphors of Contemporary Witchcraft and Magic Witchcraft refers to the belief that an individual (the witch) can cause harm to other through the manipulation of powerful substance or words. Witches are believed to use magic to harm or threaten their victims. (magic – refers to the manipulation of words or substance to influence spiritual being for good or evil purposes) Symbolic actions carry bundles of meaning that represent public displays of a culture. They are dramatic renderings and social portrayals of meaning shared by a specific body of people. More important, symbolic actions render beliefs and views of the world in a way that makes them seem correct or proper. Example: Stories about zombies alone are not likely to convince anyone that the world works in the way it is portrayed in the stories. Instead, the meaning that characterize a culture are repeated and again in other symbolic actions, particularly ritual. How people cope with not knowing. The first example explores how people in northern Madagascar speculate on what happens to sapphires that are mined locally and then explored to other places in Cameroon use witchcraft to explain the conflicts of modernity. Northern Madagascar: The Malagasy know that knowledge is being actively withheld from them and that only foreigners have true knowledge about how the global market works; as a result, they speculate, both in and about the true value of sapphire, based on their own experience of the intimate connection between world trade and deception. Cameroon: the process of evaluating the unknowable by using what is knowable (witchcraft, in this case) produces explanations that makes sense to those who are living the experience but may seem totally illogical to outsiders who do not share their beliefs. The Dene Tha and Christianity: many were converted to Christianity. But they did not completely abandon their traditional shamanic beliefs. Indeed, many contemporary indigenous societies are a syncretism, or blend, of shamanic and christen elements. Christianity in the Solomon Islands: Most of the population in Solomon Islands are Christians, with a majority of Christians belonging to Protestant churches. The constitution of Solomon Islands establishes

the freedom of religion, and this freedom is respected in practice by both the government and general society. Rastafari in Jamaica: The case of Bob Marley reggae, and of Rastafarianism more generally, provides a powerful example of the often unexpected ways in which people incorporate introduced beliefs into existing belief systems, and of the ways in which ones living conditions shape and are shaped by one’s worldview. Wovoka and the Ghost Dance: The Ghost Dance was associated with Wovoka's prophecy of an end to white expansion while preaching goals of clean living, an honest life, and cross-cultural cooperation by Indians. Practice of the Ghost Dance movement was believed to have contributed to Lakota resistance to assimilation under the Dawes Act. Haitian Vodou: Vodou is a creolized religion forged by descendents of Dahomean, Kongo, Yoruba, and other African ethnic groups who had been enslaved and brought to colonial Saint-Domingue (as Haiti was known then) and Christianized by Roman Catholic missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries. Western Secularism: Secularism, also called Secularity, is the idea of something being not religious or not connected to a church. An example of this is the government, which is independent of any religion in many states.

Definitions: Atheism: Refers to a lack of belief in supernatural forces or beings.

Cerole: A term used commonly to refer to the formation of salve societies in this Caribbean in which elements of African and European cultures were merged, blended, or combined into something uniquely Caribbean.

Domain of experience: An area of human experience from which people borrow meaning to apply to other areas.

Key metaphors: A term to identify metaphors that dominate the meanings that people in a specific culture attribute to their experience.

Key scenarios: Dominant stories or myths that portray the values and beliefs of a specific society.

Magic: Refers to the manipulation of words or substances to influence spibeing for good or evil purposes.

Metaphors: Figures of speech in which linguistic expressions are taken from one area of experience and applied to another

Myths: A story or narrative that portrays the meanings people give to their experience

Revitalization movements: According to Marcel Mauss, gift giving involves reciprocity. The idea is that the exchange of gifts creates a feeling of obligation, in that the gift must be repaid.

Rites of passage: The term coined in 1908 by Arnold van Gennep to refer to the category of rituals that accompany changes in status, such as the translon from boyhood to manhood, living to dead, or student to graduate.

Ritual: A dramatic rendering or social portrayal of meanings shared by a specific body of people in a way that makes them seen correct and proper.

Secularism: Refers to the separation of political and economic realms of society from religion or spirituality.

Shamanism: Refers to a spiritual belief system whereby spiritual practitioner, called ‘shamans’, enter into an altered state of consciousness to seek guidance from spiritual forces

Symbolic action: The activities-including, ritual, myth, art, dance, and music- that dramatically depicts the meanings shared by a specific body of people.

Syncretisation: The term given to the combination of old beliefs or religions and new ones that are often introduced during colonization.

Totemism: The use of a symbol, generally an animal or a plant, as a physical representation for a group, generally, a clan.

Witchcraft: refers to the belief that an individual (the witch) has the ability to cause harm to others through the manipulation of powerful substances

Worldview: An encompassing picture of reality based on shared cultural assumptions about how the world works.

Chapter 5: Constructing Families and Social Relationships In Class Notes: Kinship- biological, love, relationships is a large topic of study in anthropology. There is a large amount of information that comes with the study of Kinship. It shows how a culture is related to one another in regard to relationships, elements of life, and how they practice life within a culture. In anthropology, Kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Dissection Friday Oct 25th: World view is the topic for this Friday, no essay is due. The outcome of magic is a belief depending on the culture. Q. What do we need to know before we can understand the dynamics of family life in other societies? Ethnocentric around family, people need to look at the options of what kinships means to them within their culture. 1973 “Real American Family”, shows the ups and downs of one’s family. The modern family. Each family has their own story. Every family means differently to others, with how people treat one another, or how they welcome each individual. Q: what is the composition of the typical family group? Pair bond: husband and wife  Nuclear family: Spouses/children (hunter gathers/ industrial) Extended family: Nuclear family, other generations (farmers). Certain kinds of societies have certain kinds of kinship. Depending if they are farmers, live in a village, live in a city. Families determined how one person lives one’s life outside of their outside environment (job, society). Three different kinds of societies: the culture of each of the societies are different from one another and this is expressed with how each one of them lives by expresses themselves and living together. The three stories express this within the chapter. Culture changes with the acceptance of new ideas and traditions. (ex. Gay people, raciest, sexual preference groups) Family is not a universal or fixed thing. Family values the blood relationships, marriage, love. They are not all valued the same way; blood overpowers all and this is expressed within cultures. “blood is thicker than water” Fictive kinship: having an aunt/uncle or grandparents who are not related to you by blood or law. They are often family friends. David Schneider: talk about how kinship can be broken down to its basics within a society. It is broken into blood and love. Biogenetic substance (eggs and sperms) form the gametes what carry the DNA that

spread the family genes. The breakup of biogenetic substance towards adoption is now classified as love instead of blood. This is still family kinship but expressed differently. David Schneider: was an American cultural anthropologist, best known for his studies of kinship and as a major proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology. Q. How are families formed, and how is the ideal family type maintained? In Canada bilateral system – mother and fathers’ side of the family are very important towards kinship. There is a weakness in this system because women give up their family name and take on their husband’s name. Then the children take the fathers name. This is known as a powerful hangover (men are a higher power from the past, but the tradition is still present “often”). Definition: Bilateral descent is a system of family lineage in which the relatives on the mother’s side and fathers’ side are equally important for emotional ties or for transfer of property or wealth. It is a family arrangement where descent and inheritance are passed equally through both parents. The Trobriand islands, Poirotian which is on the island of Taiwan, Botswana and Namibia in South Africa. These different ethnic groups represent different ethnographic relationships. Over time the culture has changed but their cultures are based off history towards their family and marriage. Botswana is an interesting location to study as an anthropologist because it Is the heartland of where humans came from. Kinship- biological, love, relationships is a large topic of study in anthropology. There is a large amount of information that comes with the study of Kinship. It shows how a culture is related to one another in regard to relationships, elements of life, and how they practice life within a culture. In anthropology, Kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Endogamous: is the practice of marrying within a specific social group, caste, or ethnic group, rejecting those from others as unsuitable for marriage or other close personal relationships. Endogamy is common in many cultures and ethnic groups. Exogamous: is the social norm of marrying outside one’s social group. The group defines the scope and extent of exogamy, and the rules and enforcement mechanisms that ensure its continuity. One from of exogamy is dual exogamy, in which two groups engage in continual wife exchange. Examples: Ju/Hoansi bilateral lineage: exogamous spouse, alliance, naming system. Th Trobriand matrilineage: Exogamous spouse, bride wealth/birds service (money or good that the grooms give to the female’s family) Chinese patrilineage: Exogamous spouse, dowry, arranged. Dowry: property or money brought by a bride to her husband on their marriage. (hope chest, and bride’s family paying for the wedding)

Arranged marriage is a type of marital union where the bridge and groom are selected by individuals other than the couple themselves, particularly by family members such as the parents. In some cultures, a professional matchmaker may be used to find a spouse for a young person. The definition of incestuous is an overly close relationship that seems improper, or inappropriate sexual behavior between family members. When two siblings, have a sexual relationship, this is an example of an incestuous relationship. Conception ideology: the Ju/hoansi have no idea how babies comes about. The mother’s blood is producing the baby. You need to have sexual intercourse multiple times. Trobriand matrilineage: have an interesting output towards sexual intercourse and experiences. Men are afraid of women when they are menstruating. There is an issue of how the intercourse does not create a baby but if you have a large amount of sex then it preps the women for having a baby with opening up the birth canal. Chinese patrilineage: They find having sexual intercourse as a special thing and they understand this is where baby come from.

Reading Notes: The study of kinship, including famil...