ANTH 195 Readings - Reading Summary for test 2 in Megan Tracy\'s ANTH 195 class PDF

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Reading Summary for test 2 in Megan Tracy's ANTH 195 class...

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Jonathan Marks: Black, White, Other - It encapsulated a longstanding problem in our use of racial categories - namely, a confusion between biological and cultural heredity - Guinier: she is using a cultural category, according to which one can either be black or white, but not both - Race: it is passed down according to a system of folk heredity, an all-or-nothing system that is different from the quantifiable heredity of biology - Miscegenation laws in this country (which stayed on the books in many states through the 1960s) obliged the legal system to define who belonged in what category - Applying such formulas led to the biological absurdity that having one black great-grandparent was sufficient to define a person as black, but having seven white great grandparents was insufficient to define a person as white - We humans have two constantly intersecting ways of thinking about the divisions among us. On the one hand, we like to think of “race” - as Linnaeus did - as an objective, biological category. In this sense, being a member of a race is supposed to be the equivalent of being a member of a species or of a phylum - except that race, on the analogy of subspecies, is an even narrower (an presumably more exclusive and precise) biological category - The label refers to little or nothing in the natural attributes of its members. These members may not live in the same region and may not even know many others like themselves. What they share is neither strictly nature nor strictly community. The groupings are constrictions of human social history. - While membership in (or allegiance to) these categories may be assigned ro adopted from birth, the differentia that mark members from nonmembers are symbolic and abstract: they serve to distinguish people who cannot be readily distinguished by nature. - They allow nature to be invoked to reinforce group identities and antagonisms that would exist without these physical distinctions. But are there any truly “racial” biological distinctions to be found in our species? - The anatomical properties that distinguish people - such as pigmentation, eye form, body build - are not clumped in discrete groups, but distributed along geographical gradients, as are nearly all the genetically determined variants detectable in the human gene pool. - The racial categories with which we have become so familiar are the result of our imposing arbitrary cultural boundaries in order to partition gradual biological variation - Culturally constructed categories are ultrasharp - A scientific definition of race would require considerable homogeneity within each group, and reasonably discrete differences between groups - Consequently, we have no basis for considering extreme human forms the most pure, or most representative of some ancient primordial populations. Instead, they represent populations adapted to the most disparate environments - Categorizing people is important to any society. It is, at some basic psychological level, probably necessary to have group identity about who, and what you are, in contrast to who and what you are not. The concept of race, however, specifically involves the recruitment of biology to validate those categories of selfidentity Alan Goodman: Why Genes Don’t Count (for Racial Differences in Health) - Human biological variation is continuous, complex, and ever changing - As a static and typological concept, race is inherently unable to explain the complex and changing structure of human biological variation - Acceptance of the notion of race-as-biology declined in anthropology throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yet during the past decade, racialized notions of biology have made a comeback. This is especially true in human genetics, a field that, paradoxically, once drove the last nail into the coffin of race-as-biology - The concept of race is based on the idea of fixed, ideal, and unchanging types.

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Human variation is continuous. Human variation is nonconcordant. Within-group genetic variation is much greater than variation among “races” There is no way to consistently classify by race. There is no clarity as to what race is and what it is not.

Jefferson M Fish: Mixed Blood - The problem with debates like the one over race and IQ is that psychologists on both sides of the controversy make a totally unwarranted assumption: that there is a biological entity called “race” - Race is a myth - Race is just one culture-specific scheme for reducing uncertainty about how people should respond - In every culture, people also classify things along culture-specific dimensions of meaning - All that hypo-descent tells you is that, when someone is classified as something other than white, at least one of his or her parents is classified in the same way, and that neither parent has a less prestigious classification Miller: Communication - Communication is the process of sending and receiving messages - Language - a systematic set of symbols and signs with learned and shared meanings; may be spoken, handsigned, written, or conveyed through body movements, body markings and modifications, hairstyle, dress, and accessories - Productivity - a feature of human language whereby people are able to communicate a potentially infinite number of messages efficiently - Call system - a form of oral communication among nonhuman primates with a set repertoire of meaningful sounds generated in response to environmental factors - Displacement - a feature of human language whereby people are able to talk about events in the past and future - Phoneme - a sound that makes a difference for meaning in a spoken language - The study of phonemes is called phonetics - Ethnosemantics - the study of meaning of words, phrases, and sentences in particular cultural contexts - Sign language - a form of communication that uses mainly hand movements - Syntax or grammar consists of the patterns and rules by which words are organized to make sense in a sentence or string - Gestures are movements, usually of the hands, that convey meanings - The full range of body language includes eye movements, posture, walking style, the way one stands and sits, cultural inscriptions on the body such as tattoos and hairstyles, and accessories such as dress, shoes, and jewelry - Critical media anthropology - an approach within the cross-cultural study of media that examines how power interests shape people’s access to media and influence the contents of its messages - Digital divide - social inequality in access to new and emerging information technology, notably access to up-to-date computers, the Internet, and training related to their use - Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - a perspective in linguistic anthropology which says that language determines thought - Sociolinguistics - a perspective in linguistic anthropology which says that culture, society, and a person's social position determine language - Critical discourse analysis - an approach within linguistic anthropology that examines how power and social inequality are reflected and reproduced in communication - Tag question - a question placed at the end of a sentence seeking affirmation

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Historical linguistics - the study of language change using formal methods that compare shifts over time and across space in aspects of language such as phonetics, syntax, and semantics Language family - a group of languages descended from a parent language

Guy Deutscher: Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think - Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims - Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. - Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey” - When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time - The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space - how we describe the orientation of the world around us - So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways - The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position of the sun, wind, and so on) every second of their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientations at any given moment. Wortham: Racialization in Payday Mugging Narratives - Race: a cultural category of difference that is [constructed in context] as essential and natural [thought to be grounded in measurable biological and/or genetic differences] - Racialization: the processes through which any [marker] of social personhood - including class, ethnicity, generation, kinship/affinity, and positions within field of power - comes to be essentialized, naturalized, and/or biologized...into fixed species of otherness - Semiotics: the study of how meaning is made through the study of sign systems like language. In other words, how signs and meanings are combined and then interpreted - Signs of identity: any perceivable aspect of a person (an accent, a piece of clothing, a gesture) that can be read as emblematic of a certain type of person - Models of personhood: characterizations of the dispositions, moral strengths, and weaknesses, typical behaviors and life prospects of a person or a group - Index: a kind of sign that has some kind of existential relation with the thing it refers to - What function do the authors argue that these narratives fulfill? (in other words, what is their basic argument?) Stories change across social space. - What data do the authors draw on to make their argument? Payday mugging stories are frequently told by Marshall residents. We follow payday mugging narratives through police reports, media, and person-to-person storytelling, as they are told by mexican, white, and black narrators in Marshall. Members of our team have done participant observation, collected documents and conducted both informal and recorded interviews with Marshall residents in schools, social service agencies, churches, coffee shops, restaurants, libraries, and government agencies. - How does racialization work? It is useful to ground this in the specifics of particular groups. Most accounts of racialization describe how white colonizers or majorities attribute racial otherness in

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order to maintain their own position, but in contemporary multi-ethnic societies racialization can involve more than two relevant groups. We describe the racialization that these narratives do as they move across groups in Marshall, as immigrants and established residents struggle to identify themselves and each other. What role does a narrator play? Think specifically about the narrators of payday muggings. Narratives are one powerful means of communicating models of identity, through the “voices” assigned to characters and through narrators’ positioning with respect to these voices. What specific examples of “language in use” do the authors use to support their argument? Those of different backgrounds will describe the incidents differently. White narrators racialize blacks in similar ways, but they also cast Mexicans as passive, submissive and scared. Black narrators change the stories in other ways. Victims become more generic. Their Mexicanness is not relevant and they are portrayed as less sympathetic than the victims in white or Mexican tellings.

Bearman: Between Male and Female - The term intersex, according to the Intersex Society of North America, refers to a variety of conditions in which a person “is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male” - Transgender, on the other hand, refers to people whose gender identity or expression does not conform to their birth-assigned sex - For forensic anthropologists and the law enforcement communities they aid, the he/she binary is the primary building block of a “biological profile,” a description of a person’s physical characteristics Camporesi: Caster Semenya and athletic excellence: a critique of Olympic sex-testing - Semenya underwent sext testing because of her masculine appearance - While both men and women produce androgen, women typically produce 1/10 that of men. According to IOC regulations, if a female athlete is found to have hyperandrogenism “that confers a competitive advantage (because it is functional and the androgen level is in the male range),” she will not be eligible to compete as a woman. - There is not enough biomedical data to demonstrate that increased androgen levels provide women with an advantage over their fellow athletes Schultz: So what if some female Olympians have high testosterone? - In 2014, the International Association of Athletic Federations banned her from competition on the grounds that her body naturally produced too much testosterone, a condition called hyperandrogenism...