Anthro 3 Study Guide for Midterm I PDF

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Study Guide for First midterm...

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Chapter 2 - Ways of Doing Anthropology - Subfields in anthropology: - Archaeology: study of fossils and artifacts to read clues and reconstruct history - Biological/physical anthropology: how culture evolved - Linguistic anthropology: change in communication patterns - Cultural or sociocultural anthropology - Applied anthropology - Globalization - Leads to more jobs but also outsourcing - Culture fluency is ability to understand and coexist with other cultures which is highly valued - Culture - Culture is both abstract since we cannot see values or ideas but visible as we can see behavior - Culture is a way of life and is diverse from other cultures and in a single culture there are internal variations - Enculturation is the transfer of culture; occurs without us knowing through teachers, friends, parents, etc - Universal Culture vs individual cultures - Universal culture doesn’t allow human sacrifice; sets certain principles that all ethnic cultures follow - Cultural relativism: - Increases cultural capacity and fluency - There is a limit to cultural relativism as we cannot explain or justify everything like holocaust - Always consider power relations with cultural relativism - Fine to have it but need to understand your culture is not the only way life can be had - Characteristics of cultures: shared (cannot exist with just one person), learned, based on symbols, integrated with all aspects and cultural aspects themselves are interconnected, are adaptive and change often - Not everything you share is culture like brown hair - Not everything you learn is culture → repetition - Barrel model of culture: - Cultural traits are infused in each category - All cultural features fall within three categories: social structure, infrastructure, and superstructure - Cultural adaptation - Is the way the society uses culture to make changes in the environment - Adjustments are either adaptive or maladaptive

- Can be a detriment to the environment Culture and cultural adaptation allow people to meet their biological and psychological needs - Society and culture - No culture without society and no society without culture - Subcultures can occur in many ways → voluntarily or involuntarily - Culture is dynamic - Cannot be static → will not survive the test of time and be able to respond to outside pressures - Cannot be too fluid → lose its cultural traits - However sometimes outside pressures are too great - Functions of culture - Cultural institutions work to: explain understandings of life and death, facilitate social interaction, regulate sexual behaviour, etc. Look at summary in textbook for anything else Chapter 3 - History of ethnographic research and its uses - Anthropologists tried to escape ethnocentric terminology like primitive yet they still have words that are controversial like undeveloped → this may justify corporations intervening - First few anthropologists worked for museums - Armchair anthropology (19th century) → private scholars and first generation university professors were anthropologists in a field that wasn’t very established, got material from missionaries, studied away from foreign cultures. - Edward Tylor gave first definition of culture - Frazer: developed comparative methodology - Veranda anthropology (late 19th century to early 20th century) - Anthropologists went to colonized areas to report back to governments to better understand the people. Built big houses, only invited prestigious people - Fieldwork-based anthropology (since 1920s) - Came as an accident by malinowski in New Guinea - WW1 - Malinowski's 3 basic principles in doing cultural anthropology - Need to go to the location for an extended period of time (usually 1 year) - Participate in the society - Learn the local language - Studying cultures at a distance - WW2 → cultural knowledge was used for propaganda and psychological warfare - Studying peasant communities -

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Do this to provide solutions to exploitation of peasants; prevent future conflicts - Digital ethnography: - Fieldwork is usually still done - Site-selection and research question - Need to make sure its safe, need to plan everything, need to be approved, and make a preliminary trip, learn culture before hand , need to get funding - Sometimes get a translator but should learn the local language themselves - Need to be taken in by a family usually - Surveys → don't usually do them, should not be basis of knowledge and should not be prepared beforehand - Has a lot of problems: people might not be credible, leads them to answers, etc - Mapping - Usually use GIS which signifies culturally significant areas - Anthropologists must consider three kinds of data - The people’s own understanding of their culture and the ideal sense of their society - What they believe is actually happening in the society - What the observer sees - Ethical responsibilities in anthropological research - Need to make sure research is not militarized - Need to make sure to get consent on everything and appeal to the code of ethics for anthropologists Everything else is on the summary in the book Chapter 7 - 2 units of adaptation: organisms and environment - Organisms make changes in the environment through culture * this is called cultural ecology - Environment also makes biological changes in the people - Through adaptations will lose abilities - The notion of cultural core: cultural features that are fundamental in the society’s ways of making a living - Food-producing techniques, knowledge of the resources, work arrangements to utilize resources, world view - Environment: a defined space which has limited natural resources that presents certain possibilities and limitations - Hard to understand foraging groups before based on now - Cuz dont live in isolation, move much more than usual - Adaptive features of food-foraging societies

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Mobility: move often once resources are exhausted in an area, travel light, are efficient as they do not walk or expend more energy than they get from food - Small group size: do this to reduce density of social relations and members needed to feed, could support more but want to protect against unknown, can give members to another group - Carrying capacity: number of people that can be supported in a society by the available resources and the techniques to utilize them - Population control: through widely spaced intervals of breastfeeding, how much body fat is present - Optimal strategy of foraging: do not believe that more people increases output, want to maximize short input for a lot of output Culture of food-foraging societies - Flexible division of labor by gender → men do hunting and risk, women do collecting and usually work more than men. Men will do what women do without shame if they need to - Egalitarian social relations→ differences in treatment is not inequality, different rituals, men and women were equal - Communal property → everything is shared, didn’t have much so weren’t selfish, inexistence of private property - Food sharing → shared everything, women decided who to share with, didn’t believe in reciprocity - Rarity of warfare→ barely fought which is ironic, were peaceful, until expansionist societies came - Original affluent society: scarcity and deprivation are relative concepts and are basically related to the gap between the needs and resources, yet foraging societies didn’t have much needs and easily satisfied them so were not living in scarcity and were healthy both mentally and physically, lived harmoniously with the environment - From modern perspective: they are poor and miserable - Limit is the law of diminishing returns of the environment and the mobile and low desire culture Food producing societies - Believe that came by involuntarily since require more work - Became a necessity due to growing population demands Horticulture - Ecologically friendly - Semi-settled, settled as they didn’t recycle crops - Could live in isolation - Increase in working times and planning

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Social division of labor creating specialized roles like political leader, military personnel, etc - Emergent individual claims on garden but still community property rights - Appearance of surplus and possibility of wealth accumulation Mixed farming: - Involves crop growing and animal breeding; it may occur in mountainous environments where farmers practice transhumance, moving their livestock between high altitude summer pastures and lowland valleys Pastoralism - Animal products account for 50 percent or more of the person’s diet - Rely on trade; can’t live in isolation - Division of labor → emphasis on masculinity and hierarchy - Raised animals that do not compete with them in terms of food - Caused private ownership of herds and domestic goods, collective ownership of pasture land and migratory routes - Nomadic Agriculture - Fixed settlements, new technologies, and altered division of labor even more - Used same plot of land Intensive crop cultivation (intensive agriculture) - Very labor intensive but produces at high output (worked hard to keep plot useable) - Produced surplus of goods → more is produced but producers receive less, non-producers receive more - Social division of labor: means of production and means of subsistence, transaction of private property, and decrease of communal property - Created social inequality: control of means of production and the concentration of wealth - Created peasant communities differences, deprivation - More people suffered from hunger than a foraging societies High yield commercial farming: occurs due to technological advancements - Doesn’t mean their isn’t labor intensive work in commercial farming - Allows for increase in population but is less environmentally friendly than intensive agriculture Neolithic revolution → shift from working alone to must work together - Shift from quantity and quality of food and labor input - Shift from smaller groups to larger and storage and planning and accumulation, and need for belongings, and notion of unlimited wants

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Shift from gender division of labor to social division of labor Shift from egalitarianism to inequality and hierarchy in social relations - Justification of the new social order and the need for coordinating larger group, and extraction of surplus goods - Early foraging societies did not reflect, didn’t feel like they needed to explain social order - The modern and market based view of human nature: - Everyone is doing maximization of self interest → competition among individuals - Private vice can be lead to public virtue by fair competition on equality of opportunities - We cannot go back to original affluent society because of diminishing returns and population density and we have been emancipated by the environment - Post industrial society - Only attainable with globalization like this due to electronic and digital revolution which links people - Limits of progress and evolution - Not all changes in the environment should be seen as adaptive and not all cultural changes as well - Cultural evolution is not the same as progress - Progress is tricky because not all people may have had their lives bettered. - If human groups do not make necessary cultural adaptations → can devastate populations and natural environment Chapter 9 - Introduction to ways of living - Increasing need of cooperation has led to many things: - Need for human reproduction: birth, death, and copulation at the individual level - Leads to vertical bonds between mother and child; pair bonds which are horizontal bonds between pairs of people - Eternity is achieved for a person through a group - Basic issues of social life at the group level - Pair bond, food sharing, divisions of labor, need for a social order to control larger social groups all create issues in social life - Mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, siblingship, inheritance, succession, and group formation are other issues - Consanguinity, affinity, descent, and descent groups - Consanguinity → blood relatives; not a cultural creation - Affinity → non-blood relatives; is a cultural creation

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Ways different cultures regulate sexual relations - Culture regulates sexual relations; most cultures allow sexual activities before marriage to an extent while others do not allow any at all until marriage - Society has rules on sexual relations, households, family structures, marriages, etc to ensure society’s overall well-being - Marriage (universal institution) is regulated as societies have criminalized affairs - Culture also memorializes marriage with anniversaries - Cultures make it difficult to divorce Incest taboo: prohibition of sexual relations between closely related people - Universal institution but also diverse as different cultures deal with it in different ways - Some cultures: parallel cousins X, Cross cousins ✓ - Some religious laws that ban marriage between cousins - Three interpretations of incest taboo: genetic defects due to inbreeding, psychological impact of children, and social alliance model - Psychological impact of children: Freud believed that childhood intimacy produces sexual attraction between cousins - Westermark believes that childhood intimacy prevents sexual relations between cousins and his research showed there were lower reproductive rates with childhood marriage than with adult marriage - For last point: some cultures are concerned with endogamy (marrying in a group) or exogamy (marrying out of a group) - Also, edward tyler believed in endogamy as marrying out creates more relations; strauss said that exchange of women occured way before exchange of goods as a way of marrying out instead of killing out - For most cultures: between parent and kids no, between siblings no - Levi strauss’s believed that once you find something that is universal and different then this is culture → incest taboo was the beginning of culture hence Endogamy vs exogamy - Individuals may marry outside of clan and lineage (exogamy) but marry within the village (endogamy) - Endogamy: dangerous; exogamy: promotes foreign relations and makes new alliances Definitions of Marriage - Old definition: only 2 people, man and wife, legitimate children only produced during marraige

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- New definition refutes that Arranged marriage and marriage as a collective property - Marriage is seen by some cultures as a social bonding and formation of alliances between different kins - Don’t want kin with bad lifestyle - Marriage is arranged by parents and others; doesn’t involve the people actually getting married and occurs for political, economic, and social purposes - Couple can’t live alone financially so bridewealth and dowry are used to finance and formalize the marriage - From one kin to the other nut just groom to bride for example - Ways a society controls and allows for arrange marriage: - Child marriage (do it from early on), class boundaries, separation and isolation from other sexes and sometimes same sexes, close supervision, guidance in dating culture - While love is a universal thing → marriage based on love is still relatively new in some cultures Free choice marriage and the notion of romantic love marriage - Free choice marriage is different from romantic love marriage - Free choice marriage occurs in industrial societies but also in foraging societies and horticulture - Hence development of complex society and economy led to stricter marriage - There has been a free-choice marriage revolution in some cultures like in china (abolished arranged marriage and brideswealth) but this is still for nation builiding Arrange marriage vs free choice - AM → start low so only have space to improve and go up so get happier over time, less divorce rates than FC - FC → start high so only way to go is down Main forms of marriage: - Monogamy: most common having only one spouse - Serial monogamy: in which a person marries partners in a successive order which is also common - Polygamy: a marriage form in which one individual has multiple spouses at the same time Minor forms of Marriage - Visiting marriage: by most cultures, wouldnt be classifed as marriage as the man has no legal obligation to the family or the partner other than reproduction - Not pure to pass through the house so has to go up to the window where the woman allows him to come in

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Levirate marriage, ghost marriage, child marriage, and woman to woman marriage - No sex in ghost marriage and woman-woman marriage - Woman-woman marriage occurs when a woman is infertile so she gets another woman to be her husband and have sex with a man that becomes their baby - Levirate marriage: if husband dies, usually brother marries the widow to keep kin’s investment in the woman worthy - This is seen in a lot of patrilineal societies The case for polygyny - More women than men, labor, prestige Forms of marriage: - Polygyny: men marry many women, occurs in places with surplus of women like pastoralism where many women is better since more labor - For security to the women: if man dies, his brother will marry the women - Although not common, it is preferred form of marriage in the majority of the world’s cultures - Sororal type polygyny: wives are sisters - Polyandry: woman marries many men - Rare and holds down population growth, avoiding pressure of resources - Group marriage: very rare, a group of men and women have sexual access to each other - Fictive marriage: used to protect rights to property in the next generations - Supports prisoners Choice of spouse in marriage - Marriage is political and economical as it is based on love - In western: based on ideals of love while in non western societies: economic considerations as both families are binding - Parallel cousin: the greater the property, the more the family wants the property to stay in the family, so the more parallel cousins are seen as good partners - Cross cousins: preferred by some cultures - Still maintains solidarity between related groups - Same sex: before was not wanted while recently cultures have allowed same sex marriages and are reflected in laws now allowing it to happen - Yet in some areas still not allowed - In africa: homosexual marriages do not solve any problems while women do

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Marriage and economic exchange - In many cultures, marriage is formalized with economic exchange - Bridewealth for example is done to compensate for the loss of a daughter and her labor to a family - Refunded if they separate - Bride service is also used - Dowry is usually seen in an agriculturally based economy and helps woman if divorce occurs or if husband dies - It is an economic status indicator as well - Divorce - Impacts kids and everyone involved;occurs for many reasons - In arrange marriages since the kin has so much investment in it it is made very hard to do - Family and household - Family is different from household (household may include non-related members) - Family is the basic cooperative structure that people use to ensure they get their basic needs - Forms of the family - Most basic domestic unit is the nuclear family - Now: nuclear family is more favored than extended family as a person cannot provide for a lot of people now - Agricultural and horticulture and pastoralism favor extended - Nuclear family was also favored in food foraging societies as they had to move a lot - What kind of marital residence patterns exist across cultures - Patrilocal residenc...