ANTH 103 Class Notes for Exam 1 PDF

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Andrew Orta...

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ANTH 103 intro Monday August 28, 2017 Prof. Andrew Orta [email protected] ● ●

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FOR TESTS: key terms in book, question guest asks at end of chapters, notes in class-all good review TA’s ○ Dilara Caliskan [email protected] ○ Lila Ann Dodge [email protected] ○ Teaching associate: Dr. Korinta Maldonado [email protected] Anthropology is about making sense of differences while recognizing a shared sense of humanity “We make the strange familiar; we make the familiar strange.” ○ Question societal norms ○ Critiquing the history of the norms Anthro encourages a form of self-awareness ○ Our familiar society is only one of the societies that have inhabited the world Course website on compass ○ Read the syllabus on it ○ Additional readings in folders labeled the weeks of the class (in addition to textbook) ○ Announcements and assignments ○ Study guides Mondays and Wednesdays are lectures, Fridays are group work (4 small projects throughout the semester) Reading dates listed on syllabus and should be completed before class ○ Take notes on the readings and on the notes on the lectures in class Course requirements ○ Exams ■ (9/29 and 10/20) ■ 4 group projects ■ 1 final exam (12/19) ○ Grading ■ In-class exams (2 @ 25%) ■ Group projects (4 @ 5%) ■ Final exam (30%) -- cumulative but emphasis on the final third of sem Read syllabus on exam conflicts, academic integrity, accessibility, cell phones, laptops, etc. TEXTBOOK ○ Guest, Kenneth J. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A toolkit for a global age. W. W. Norton, 2016. ■ Used for key concepts and definitions ○ Additional readings:

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■ Supplemental concepts and definitions ■ Illustrative case studies ○ LOTS of reading every night-- 60-90 pages Outline of topics: ○ Introduction to Anthropology and the concept of culture ○ Language ○ Race ○ Ecology, Subsistence, Exchange ○ Kinship and Social Organization ○ Gender and Sexuality ○ Religion ○ Economics ○ Power and Politics ○ Anthropology in Practice

Wednesday August 30, 2017 ● Culture ○ A distinctly human capacity to experience the world as meaningful in ways that are shared and transmitted over time ○ Shapes social organizations and individual and collective practices ● Goals today ○ Locate cultural anthro w the broader discipline of anthro ■ Sociocultural anthro ○ Discuss anthropological concept of culture ○ Research methods of cultural anthro ● Anthropo/logy ○ Melding of the sciences and humanities ■ human/man and the study of ○ Interdisciplinary ■ Empirical-- field research ■ Comparative-- built out of studies of many cases ■ Holistic-- look at the big picture as interconnected ● 4 subfields-- all interact and contribute to one another ○ Archaeology ■ evidence of the past in the form of material objects and the traces of past societies ○ Biological/ physical anthropology ■ Human biology-- contemporary diversity and the history ○ Linguistic anthropology ■ Study language ■ Historical changes and contemporary diversity, as well as the merging of languages ○ Sociocultural anthropology****

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Also: Applied anthropology, public anthropology

Cultural anthropology ○ Social organization of human communities ○ Social organization of meaning within those communities ○ Ways this organization varies across communities Archaeology and cultural anthropology ○ Long-term historical perspective ○ Evidence of social change over time ○ Evidence of shifting relationships among societies ■ Different centers of power/influence at different times ○ Material remains are traces of culture, but not the same as culture Biological Anthropology and cultural anthropology ○ Evidence and understanding of human evolution, and of evolutionary processes more generally ○ Important evidence against race as a biological phenomenon ○ Culture is not based in biology Linguistic anthropology and cultural anthropology ○ Considerable overlap with sociocultural anthropology ○ Languages as coherent systems of meaning Being ‘inside’ a language ○ Grammar, tense, and vocabulary all shape the way we live in the world ■ Formal vs. informal ■ Gender markings ■ Examples of Aymara ■ Vocabularies vary in in different languages ● Words translate differently throughout language, tough to convey meaning Different languages reflect different ways of living in the world and different languages affect the ways people live in the world

Friday September 1, 2017 ● Sociocultural Anthropology ○ Social organization of human communities ○ Social organization of meaning ○ Ways this varies across communities ● Social Organization ■ Social groups (friend groups, family), social structure ● Patterns of relationships ■ Roles, Rank/status ■ Individual and Society

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“Abstract individual”? Cultural anthropologists insist individuals are never “culture-free.” Always enmeshed in society and culture. We are born into culture that gives us direction in the world. ● Culture is taught over time ● On its own, social organization is not culture Social Organization of Meaning ○ Mediated experiences of the world ○ Values, norms, standard expectations ■ What feels right when you are doing things ■ Sometimes they are clearly spelled out ○ Tacit knowledge ■ Not explicitly taught, but we use shared information Organization varies across communities ○ Culture: Single or Plural? ■ Culture is shared p. 33 in the book ○ A pan-human capacity manifest differently in different human societies ○ Ethnocentrism vs. relativism ■ Ethnocentrism- Understanding another society with respect to what makes most sense to you ■ Relativism- Understanding other cultures how different behavior makes sense based on the fact that they have their own unique culture Readings for wednesday ○ Posted on compass ■ Readings/ week 2 ■ “Shakespeare in the bush” ■ “Thick description”-- know what he means by thick description Sociocultural anthropologists are interested in the way people experience the world as meaningful Two Paradoxa ○ Studying a diversity of cultures to appreciate a common humanity ○ Studying other societies to gain insight into your own

Wednesday September 6, 2017 ● Shakespeare in the Bush (Laura Bohannan) ○ Another culture taking our stories and “dressing them in our own clothes” ○ Trying to think that there is a universal meaning ○ Taboo subject of mother marrying father’s brother in western culture, but to them it is normal and the right thing to do ○ Monogamy-- with only one wife, wouldn’t it be better to have more of them around??! ■ Actions that make sense in certain cultural views seem like the only possible outcomes according to particular frameworks ● Thick Description by Clifford Geertz

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An “interpretive” (“semiotic”) approach “Thin” vs. “thick” description ■ Thin description is an objective description ■ Thick description- these activities are meaningful ● difference between a twitch (can’t control) and a wink (intentional and encodes meaning) both are the same action but require context to tell which is which ○ “Etic” thing description ○ “Emic” places it in context with cultural knowledge ○ Poor cohen and sheep raid ■ Different participants in the sheep raid might have different interpretations of what is going on ● Colonial morocco- french colonial, jewish trader (cohen), 2 groups of Berber (local ethnic group) ○ Context of colonialism ● Cohen is robbed by another group of berbers who come in. He wants compensation for what has happened to him and for the death of his friend. Have a mock sheep raid. They are not there to actually raid the sheep but rather, it will be what the berbers know as peacemaking through exchange Colonialism ○ The political, social, and economic domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended period of time ■ Usually involves an effort of reconfigure local economic and political practices to make them part of a large scale set of relations ■ Local cultural order are disrupted (ex. Mezrag) ○ Anthropologists meaning of culture is based on looking into the contexts of situations Anthropology and Voyages of Discovery and Colonization ○ From 15th century ○ Voyages of discovery Anthropology and the Enlightenment ○ 18th and 19th centuries ○ Intensification of trade and colonial relations ○ Systemic efforts to make sense of unfamiliar societies ○ Growth of natural sciences Anthropology and the Enlightenment explained ○ Progress (modernity) vs. tradition ■ Tension, leaving tradition behind. Dates to this time in history. ○ Faith in accomplishments of science ■ Use of human reason was going to give us knowledge ● Encyclopedic knowledge/control of world ● Industrial revolution

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Machines could do amazing things

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Secularization ■ Europeans were relying on scientific reasoning not anymore on the approval of the bible Evolution ○ Charles Darwin On the origin of species (1859); Descent of Man (1871) ○ Edward Burnett Tylor Primitive culture (1871) ■ Europe is the pinnacle of development and everywhere else was basically a living fossil and that they were undeveloped ■ Unilineal Cultural Evolution Joseph Marie de Gerando- French naturalist, expeditions that went around the world and wrote about the best way to act about new societies ○ Travelling in time -- european view that the other societies were examples of earlier forms of human society

Friday September 8, 2017 ● Unilineal Cultural Evolution-ists: focused on isolated cultural traits and comparing them without looking into their cultures and origins ○ Treated culture as a single thing ○ Societies ranked on the comparison of certain cultural traits ■ “Savage”,”barbarian”,”civilized” ○ Unilineal evolution ■ Guided by “reason”-- idea that social practices responded to the “right” practices of the europeans ○ Classification of isolated culture traits ■ Tools, kinship, subsistence practices, religion ● Armchair Ethnographers ○ Correspondence with missionaries, explorers, colonial administrators, etc. ○ Flawed process because it selects traits according to the interest of the observer rather than the relevance of the traits to the culture ■ Ethnocentric thinking ● Etic (thoughts) ● Franz Boas, Bronisław Malinowski ○ Developed methods of long-term field research ■ ethnography/ participant-observation ○ Stressed approach to culture as an integrated whole ○ Shifted the focus of anthro from the etic research of armchair investigators to emic concern with the experiences and viewpoints of the “natives” ● Franz Boas (1858-1942) ○ “Father” of U.S. Anthro ■ Historical particularism ■ Founding first university departments of anthro (clark university)

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Career at columbia U where he trained some of the most influential U.S. anthropologists of the early 20th century ○ Absorption of light by seawater research ■ As light passes through water it refracts and gives off different colors, experiences ■ Hard for him to measure ■ Raises questions: ● Is he testing the objective phenomena of light intensity and color, or is he testing his own perception of the phenomena? ● Is his perception limited by the imperfections and limitations of his measuring instrument (his eye), or are there other factors at work? ● Focusing on the world and internal thought processes-- emic ■ Boas the Geographer ● Interested in the way people living in a given place perceived their environment, the knowledge people have of their environment, etc. ○ Emic ● Diffusion of culture traits as they were borrowed and copied across borders ● Baffinland (between canada and greenland in the arctic circle) inuit, interested in the ways people perceive their island ■ Boas’ Baffin Island Research ● Making maps and asking people to draw maps ● Collecting local oral histories/myths ● Spends time fishing and trekking with people ● Long term immersion in “the field” ● “The seeing eye is not a mere physical organ but it is a means of perception conditioned by the tradition in which its possessor has been reared” ----> referring to a modern definition of culture ○ Boas vs. Unilineal Evolutionists ■ Boas ● Cultures as integrated wholes ● Cultural relativism ● Historical particularism ● Long term field research ● Salvage ethnography- important to document local cultures that were on the verge of being slammed by modernity ■ Unilineal Evolutionists ● Isolated culture traits ● Ethnocentric ranking ● Armchair ethnography Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942) ○ Fieldwork pioneer (or accidental ethnographer?)

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Trobriand Islands ■ Island chain around new guinea ○ Kula ring- early fieldwork experience that gave rise to contemporary practice of culture ■ Shell valuables- armbands and necklaces ● Natives trade them and circulate in a very unique pattern that reflected prestige ● Travel by canoe ● Need to know about: ○ magic-- the natives do magic in order to ensure a safe journey ○ myths-- meaning of everything ○ trade and economic practices ○ Kinship ○ political hierarchies ○ Avoid preconceived ideas; grasp the native's point of view Boas and Malinowski together shifted the focus of anthropology from the etic research of armchair investigators to an emic concern with the experiences and viewpoints of the “natives” ○ Holistic culture, rather than singular culture

Monday September 11, 2017 ● Boas and Malinowski ○ Avoid preconceived ideas ○ Grasp the “native’s” point of view ○ Make sense of how others make sense ● Ethnographic research ○ Ethnography as a method and a text: -Long-term, immersive research aimed at describing another way of life -Intersubjective: “grasping the native’s point of view” -Etic vs. Emic -Qualitative research -How do anthropologists (ethnographers) learn what they know? ■ Participant observation ● “Deep hanging out”- first hand observation of day to day activities ○ Every moment is rich with learning opportunities ● Learning by doing ○ ‘Apprentice’ to the culture ○ Socialized like a child ● Tacit knowledge ● Formal and informal interviews- questionnaires (limits the information you are getting and maybe inflicting some of your

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preconceived ideas) and conversations (follow them as they happen and ask questions on the spot) ● Building relationships ○ Rapport- getting them to like you and feel more comfortable to open up to you ○ Key informants ● Conducting research in the native language ● Participant observation ○ An iterative process of inquiry with new, refined questions emerging from the field experience ■ “Learning how to ask” ● A mutually humanizing endeavor ○ “Culture:” a progressive concept ○ Challenging stereotypes (when the natives found out that a gringo could work- orta) Research ethics ● Informed consent- they should know why you’re there ● Benefits or risks of the research- what’s the value in it- do no harm ● Dignity and respect/ maintaining anonymity of the research subjects (pseudonyms, mask details of research, pixelated photos) ● Institutional review boards ○ Guest- american anthropological association

Language ○ Symbol (sign)- something that stands for something else to someone else ■ Signification ■ Signifier (material representation) -- signified (thing/idea for which it stands) ● Ex. gestures, red octagons means stop, flags, clock represents time, clothing, accents, the phones we use ○ Humans are one of the few, perhaps the only, and certainly the most accomplished symbol using animals. The level of symbolic activity that is peculiar to humans is the basis of culture. We can link signifier and signified and can convey deeper meanings. ○ Signifier-- signified relationship is arbitrary ■ No necessary relationship between the sound or graphic image and the thing or idea it signified ■ Another ex. of arbitrariness: ● No necessary relationship between the categories of a given language and the world ○ Language and Culture ■ “Sapir- Whorf hypothesis”

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Grammatical categories of a language shape the ways speakers experience the world Focal vocabularies- things that tend to be important to certain societies tend to be the popular activities

Wednesday September 13, 2017 ● Group 41- going to left side of the classroom ● Different words can signify the same words ○ Arbitrary ■ The way languages segment the world in their categories is unique to each language ■ Richer vocabulary to describe nuances of specific things they have in their cultures (ex. Snow, potatoes) ● Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis ○ Theory about how language shapes the way we understand the world ■ Babies cannot articulate sounds ■ Each language selects a set of sounds is at base: arbitrary ■ As we learn to speak a language we learn to vocalize in a certain set of sounds, we also learn to listen and pick out those sounds and make sense of them ■ Descriptive linguistics-- study of how language are built up out of the combination of sounds used to convey meaning ● Phonology-- sounds humans can make and the way that a subset of those are important in a given language ● Phonetics-- the study of the different sounds that are used by different languages ● Phonemics-- the study of the specific sounds that are meaningful within a given language ○ Pill vs bill, white vs wide→ sound similar but these tiny differences make a big difference in meaning ○ Active listening ○ Ignoring insignificant variation and hearing sounds according to a shared phonetic system ■ Different languages build their signifiers out of different sets of phonemes ● Aspirated or ‘stopped’ consonants, not significant in english ○ Paper vs phaper, tiger vs thiger ● Compare Aymara: ○ phistataki vs phistathaki ○ waka vs wak’a ● Morphemes-- units of language that carry meanings (ex. They pluralize something) ○ newspapers→ news/paper/s ● Syntax-’rules’ for arranging words into larger units of language

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○ Phrases, sentences, etc ○ “I have to put you on your shoes” Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) ■ Founder of modern linguistics ■ Arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign (symbol) ■ Langue (systematic structure of language) vs. parole (the messy stuff that people actually do in language) → (a heuristic distinction-- not real but tries to get at some kind of analysis) ● Synchrony vs. diachrony ● Synchronic structure in language and culture ■ Valeur (linguistic value) ● When studied within a synchronic system, linguistic signs derive their value/meaning from relations of contrast with closely related signs ○ Paper vs. pepper (phonemic difference) ○ Paper vs. papers (phonemic level) ○ Paper vs. magazine (semantic distinction) Language is at once arbitrary and systematic- parts are unmotivated and could be different but together they create a mutually cohesive language This is a characteristic of other aspects of culture

Monday September 18, 2017 ● Culture and language shape our expectations of the world ● The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis ○ Edward Sapir ○ Benjamin Lee Whorf ○ Linguistic categories shape the ways people think and behave ■ “Empty” drums, empty poses no threat→ way the word was used helped to shape the dangers of it ■ “Spun limestone” → insulated pipes, industry name is spun limestone, the fumes broke down and caused fires, no one knew why because they associated the word stone with being strong and not flammable ● No one thought it would catch fire bc of the vocabulary being used shapes the beliefs and behaviors of people ○ Linguistic determinism-- idea that the language you speak creates a thought world that you can’t think beyond it ○ We are always frame the world by our language and by our culture ● Sociolinguistics ○ Language as a medium of social activity ■ Doing things with words ■ Gestures and physical actions ■ The meaning of words are context-dependent bc they take on different meanings in different contexts

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Symbolic valu...