Chapter 3 notes - Summary Cultural Anthropology PDF

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Beyond Nature and Nurture ! • Nature and nurture: the common shorthand term that refers to biological and cultural or environmental influences. ◦ They are not opposed or mutually exclusive, but rather intertwined and emergent processes. ◦ Our genes work together with our culture and environment to shape our lives as individuals. ◦ Biocultural: biological, psychological, and cultural processes interact in complex ways. • What Cab the Biology of the Brain Development Teach us About Culture? ◦ Cognitive sciences: the study of the processes of thought ◦ Culture plays a key role in growth and development of neurons in the brain that allows for cognition. • The Adaptable Human Brain ◦ 75% of brain development occurs after birth. ◦ The most crucial process of the human brain construction take place during the first five years after birth. ◦ Humans are enculturated to think and act in the conventional ways of their society. ◦ Neural plasticity: the moldability and flexibility of brain structure. • The Mind and Culture ◦ Mind: the emergent qualities of consciousness and intellect that manifest themselves through thought, emotion, perception, will, and imagination.

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◦ The mind constructs cognitive models- an identifiable set of patterns- to make sense of the world around us. • "cultural models" because they are external and shared by a social group. • "personal models": an individual's way of making sense of things. Using Mind and Matter: A Biocultural Perspective ◦ The mind manifests itself through the whole person, throughout an individual's lifetime. How Do Anthropologists Understand Other People's Psychologies? ◦ What is an Individual Person? • Psychological anthropology: studies the psychological states and conditions of individuals. ▪ Seeks to reconcile psychology's focus on the individual with anthropology's focus on culture and society. ◦ The Culture and Personality School • Focused on how patterns of child- rearing, social institutions, and cultural ideologies shaped individual experience, personality characteristics, and thought patterns. • Most studies tried to show that our psychologies were primarily shaped by environment rather than our biology. • Ruth Benedict: Patterns of Culture- argued that particular cultures produce more or less

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consistent patterns of thought and action in individuals. • Culture and personality studies represented an effort to reconcile the divide between the individual and culture. ◦ The Individual: Persons and Selves • Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss focused on the person as a universal social category, whose characteristics would vary depending on a society's customs and beliefs • Self: an individual's conception of his or her fundamental qualities and consciousness. • Person: the socially recognized individual, as a universal category. ◦ Ethnopsychology • How other societies make sense of persons, selves, and emotions. • Different cultures lead people to understand themselves differently from us. ◦ Culture and Mental Illness: • Culture- bound syndrome: a mental illness unique to a culture. • Different societies define mental illness differently based on specific understandings of individual psychology, their treatments differ too. • Mediumship: a psychological disturbance with a biological basis.! What Role Does Evolution Play in Human Lives?

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◦ Evolution: life forms make adaptive changes over generations. ◦ Understanding Evolution Among Human Populations: • Phenotype: the visible characteristics of an organism. • Natural selection: phenotypes shaped over time through an evolutionary mechanism. • Homo sapiens became anatomically modern 10,000 years ago. ◦ Mutation: slight, unpredictable variations in genetic code that occur when 2 organisms reproduce. ◦ Gene flow: the movement of genes through interbreeding or intermarriage among humans from distinct populations ◦ Genetic drift: only important when population sizes are small and possibly isolated geographically. It consists of random sampling effects that bring changes to the distribution of traits within a population. Racism and Early Evolutionary Models in Anthropology ◦ Models put non- white groups on the bottom of the racial scales and these models were used to justify colonial conquest of people of color around the world. Franz Boas and Antievolutionism: ◦ Criticized attempts to equate evolution with racial theories. ◦ Used biological data to show that human populations change.

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◦ Resisted the link between race and individual character. ◦ Showed how "nurture" (cultural factors such as the food people consume) can influence the shape of "nature" (physiology and anatomy). Moving Beyond Purely Biological Notions of Evolution ◦ Boas's influence of culture over biology became dominant in the 20th century Evolutionary Psychology ◦ Evolutionary psychologists seek to explain contemporary human behavior, cognition, and perception as the outcome of evolutionary processes. ◦ Biological determinism: the belief that human behaviors and beliefs are primarily the result of biological characteristics and processes. ◦ The capacity for dominance, aggression, and passivity are complex social and psychological conditions and states that involve biological processes. ◦ Causes of aggression also come from social and cultural processes, such as disagreements over land and resources. Evolution Still Matters ◦ Intermixing of humans is leading to more gene flow, an evolutionary process in which genetic material moves between populations and creates changes in how people look, the distribution of susceptibility to disease, and other biological changes. Is Biotechnology Changing Our Bodies?

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◦ Genetic engineering or any other technological modification of biological systems to make useful products. • Transforming nature to fit their needs ◦ "Gene therapy" taking out mutated gene sequences linked to disease and inserting new ones. How Genes Work: The Basics ◦ Double helix ◦ Each strand has billions of nucleotide bases that contain the genetic blueprint for all living organisms ◦ A, C, T, G ◦ The rungs of the ladder of DNA are always composed of A- T or C- G pair. ◦ A gene is a long sequence of nucleotides, found along a strand of DNA. ◦ Understand how a particular gene interacts with its environment. ◦ Genes never work in isolation. ◦ Biotechnology is not changing our human nature The Dilemmas of Geneticization ◦ Geneticization: the use of genetics to explain health and social problems over other possible causes. !...