Lecture Notes Cultural Anthropology All Lectures PDF

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Lecture notes, Cultural Anthropology all lectures
Cultural Anthropology (University of Manitoba)
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Cultural Anthropology 2015-11-09 12:34 PM
Anthropology
• Anthropos = humanity
• Archaeology, Biological/Physical, Linguistic (salvage ethnography)
Ethnography
• Ethnos = culture
• Graphy = writing
• Field work: ‘go native’ – live among, adapt and become the kind of people

CHAPTER 1 – What is Anthropology?
How is anthropology different from…
• Sociology – both study social relations
• Political Science – both interested in power relations
• Economics – both study material conditions of peoples lives
• History
• Psychology – both study relationships between people and society

Key Distinguishing Features:
• A focus on the concept of culture
• A comparative perspective
• A holistic perspective – look at culture as an integrated whole (cannot understand
any aspect of any culture, without understanding all the aspects of a culture – must
consider the whole culture)
- Anthropological curiosity: deals with cultural and biological diversity, within and between
populations

Four Subfields of Anthropology:
• Cultural anthropology
• Linguistic anthropology
• Archaeology
• Biological anthropology
• Applied anthropology (5th added)

Cultural Anthropology:
• The study of human culture
o Comparative study of living and recent cultures (past hundred years)
• Ethnology
o Building theories about cultural behaviours and forms
• Ethnography

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o Observing and documenting peoples ways of life

Linguistic Anthropology:
• Interconnections among language, culture and society
• Languages of Indigenous peoples
• Endangered languages (salvage ethnography)
• Historical linguistics – language change over time

Archaeology:
• The study of material culture
• Historic and prehistoric societies
• Methods applied to living cultures
o Ex: Arizona garbage project 1973
! They would ask people to keep record of what they threw away and
compared it to what they found in their garbage

Biological Anthropology:
• The study of human origins and contemporary biological diversity
• Paleoanthropolgy
o Human evolution
o Primatology – study of nonhuman primates
• Human variation (racial differences)
• Health and disease issues

Applied Anthropology:
• The application of the techniques and theories of anthropology to solving real-world
problems
o Forensic anthropology
• Cultural resource management (CRM)
• Contract archaeology
• Language preservation
• Consulting and applied research
o Government agencies
o Non-governmental organizations (NGO’s)
o First nations land claim settlements
• Applied medical anthropology
• Corporate and consumer anthropology


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What is Culture?:
• Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law
custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society – Edward Taylor
- Culture can be broadly divided into:
• Symbolic culture – ideas and knowledge people have about themselves, others and
the world and the way that people express these ideas
• Social culture – rules and practices that regulate membership and participation in
social groups and networks
• Material culture – stuff
** Definition: culture is the values, beliefs, technological knowledge, and rules of conduct
acquired by learning

Characteristics of Culture:
• Culture is shared
• Culture is learned
• Culture is adaptive
• Culture is integrated
• Culture is based on symbols
• Culture organized the way people think about the world

Culture is Shared:
- One person cannot have their own culture, at least 2 people
• Cultural knowledge
• Cultural norms
• Subcultures – group of people whose members and others think of themselves as
somehow significantly different than everybody else

Culture is Learned:
• Socially transmitted (think about language)
• Enculturation – process of learning ones culture through informal observation and
formal instruction
• Taboos – norms specifying behaviours that are prohibited in a culture

Culture is Adaptive:
• Behaviours and beliefs respond to environmental constraints and opportunities

Culture is Integrated:

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• Practices and beliefs form a relatively coherent and consistent system

Culture is Symbolic:
• Symbol: a word, image, or object that stands for cultural ideas or sentiments
• Language
• Religion
• Art

Culture Organized the Way People Think About the World:
• Naturalized concepts: ideas and behaviours so deeply embedded in a culture that
they are regarded as universally normal or natural
• Ethnocentrism: a set of misunderstandings and prejudices base on the idea that
ones own belief system provides the only accurate and moral view of the world
• Cultural hegemony: the use of cultural beliefs to justify and support social hierarchy
and political domination
• Counterculture: an alternative cultural model within a society that expresses
different views about the way that society should be organized
• Worldview: culture-based, often ethnocentric, way that people see the world and
other peoples

Culture Change:
• Internal:
o Invention
o Innovation
o Adaptation
• External:
o Diffusion
o Acculturation
o Assimilation
• Culture contact: direct interaction between peoples of different cultures through
migration, trade, invasion, or conquest (external)
• Cultural evolution: theory which maintains that societies develop through a series of
stages based on their technological development and according to which they can
be grouped into categories
• Marxist theory: theory that analyzes society and culture in terms of class divisions
and class conflicts (internal)

Culture Change (external):

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• Diffusion: spread of ideas, material objects, and cultural practices from one society
to another through direct and indirect culture contact (external)
• Acculturation: process by which a group adjusts to the influence of a dominant
culture, while at the same time maintaining its original cultural identity
• Assimilation: wholesale acceptance of the entire value and meaning system and
abandonment of ones own values. Often occurs under pressure from the
domination of a more powerful group over a subjugated one
• Global Culture: a constellation of technologies, practices, attitudes, values, and
symbols that spread internationally
• Globalization: the process by which the exchange of products, investment, and
people across national and regional boundaries increases
• Liberalization policies: policies that attempt to eliminate national government
controls on investment, imports, currency rates, and many other practices that ere
considered to constrain trade

CHAPTER 2 – Studying Culture

• 14th – 15th century we began to think about cultural difference
o Coincides with the age of exploration

Missionaries:
• Travel with explorers
• Civilize the savages
• Worked and lived among the people they were studying
o Very critical of the way the indigenous lived their lives
• Thought the Western Way was right

Explorers:
• Marco Polo
• Zheng He
• Ibn Battuta – 1304-1368
o Moroccan traveler for 30 years (120,000 km)

Social Philosophers:
• 17th – 18th century
o Hobbes
o Locke
o Rousseau

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• Examined the moral order of Europe

• Thought about how our European way of living was different than other parts of the
world
• Turned to missionaries and travelers tales
o Issue with relying on these tales: biased, ethnocentric, misunderstood
o Big problem: relying on somebody else’s work – second hand data (called
armchair anthropology)
th
• 19 century – ethnology

Ethnological Theory:
• Early anthropologists (19th century)
• Evolutionism (cultural evolutionism): view that cultural variation can be accounted
for by different degrees of intellectual progress, leading to different levels of cultural
achievement
o Lewis Henry Morgan (savage, barbarian, civilized)
• Diffusionism: view that similarities in culture could be explained by borrowing from a
common source
o Centers of innovation – Ancient Egypt (all the good things in the world
started there and slowly spread to the rest of the world)
• Both view cultural difference as the result of progressive development that is rooted
in biology (Biological Determinism)
o Try to explain how people behave in terms of evolution, but they could not
help the way they behaved, it was expected
• Re-thinking culture and society – beginning of the 20th century
o Emile Durkheim
! Social Structure: the integrated assemblage of formal groups and
social roles that make up a society
! Social structure is external to the individual they are studying, but
impacts the individual
! Viewed individuals as the product, rather than the producers of the
cultural environment

Structural Functionalism:
• The theory that social structure determines peoples thought and behaviour and that
culture functions primarily to uphold the unity and continuity of society – developed
by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown
o Society is a structure with interrelated parts
o Systems of Society: kinship, religion, economics, politics

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• Franz Boas (1858-1942) – Anthropologist

o Franz Boas - "...civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ...
our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.”
o Cultural relativism: an approach that stresses the importance on analyzing
cultures in their own terms rather than in terms of the culture of the
anthropologist
! Don’t be ethnocentric – don’t compare to your own culture
o Historical particularism: the theory that each way of life is a unique result of
its particular historical conditions
! Each society develops in its own way

What are the Limits of Cultural Relativism?
• Female genital mutilation?
o Circumcising women against their will
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
o Written by white people in the west
o All about western ideals as to what human rights are
• Singapore?
o Death penalty for bringing drugs into their country

Modern Theoretical Perspectives:
• Interpretive anthropology
o Culture as a system of symbols
o Multiple layers of meaning
• Ethnosemantics
o Culture as a meaning system, classified through language
o Focus on linguist and cognitive categories
• Materialist approaches (Emic and Etic)
o Emic – insiders perspective (about the people) – the “right” perspective
o Etic – outsiders perspective (observe and analyze)
o Cultural evolution – focus on technology
! Classified based on food production and acquisition
o Cultural ecology – focus on environment
! How the culture and people adapt to the local environment
o Ex: Roy Rappaport (anthropologist): Book: Pigs for the Ancestors -1968
! Emic: offering the pigs to the ancestors

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! Etic: women in the society took care of the pigs, ever couple years
there were too many pigs, and had to slaughter the pigs to maintain
the ecological balance
• Processual Approaches – Britain
o Agency: the way in which an individual reacts to and acts upon his or her
culture and society
• Marxism – analyzes culture, wealth and power
o Focus on the mode of production: social type that is defined by the way in
which society is divided into classes based on ownership of the “means of
production”
o World systems theory: (Wolf) Stresses division of the world into core nations
and those on the periphery and the expansion of international capitalism
o Hegemony: dominance by one country or social group over others
(Meillassoux – a neo-Marxist)
! Ex: cultural hegemony: American culture dominating

Ethnography and Fieldwork:
• Ethnography is a reaction to arm-chair anthropology
o Go interact with the people you want to study, don’t rely on second have
information
• Ethnography involves collecting and analyzing information about culture
o Writing culture
• Fieldwork involves living and interacting with the people or group under study

Doing Fieldwork:
• Choosing a problem and site
• Obtaining funding
o SSHRC – social science humanities research council
o Private Agencies
• Preliminary research
• Gaining permission for research
• Arrival and culture shock…?
• Finding a place to live
• Working in a unfamiliar language
• Gathering data
o Interviewing
o Participant-observation

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• Judgment sample: a sample of research informants selected according to how well

they represent the larger population rather than on a random basis
• Key informants: research subjects who are well versed in local cultural knowledge
and representative of the larger community

Research in Large-Scale Societies:
• Survey research
• Formal questionnaires
• Random samples
• Urban anthropology
• Not all research in large-scale societies is “urban”
o Ex: study of RVers of North America (Dorothy and David Counts)

The Anthropology of Anthropology:
• Reflexive anthropology: the anthropology of anthropology, which focuses on the
cultural and political bias in ethnographic research, the impacts of anthropologists
on the people they study, and professional ethics
o George Marcus/James Clifford
• Polyphony: the many voices of people from all the different segments and groups
that make up a society; a quality of ethnographic writing today that present multiple
views of a culture

Ethical Issues in Anthropology:
• Professional guidelines (AAA code of ethics)
• Respect for human well-being
• Avoidance of harm
• Informed consent
• Transparency of research
• Respect for privacy and confidentiality
• Some anthropologists go further with ethical responsibilities:
o Continuing obligation to people and communities
o Advocacy rules
o Expert witnesses

Ethnographic Film: Cannibal Tours (1988):
Think about:
• Anthropological curiosity
• The directors “point of view”

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• How this type of film differs from other types of film

• Are there “characters”?
• Is there any type of bias in the presentation of the material?

CHAPTER 3 – Language and Culture

What is Language?:
• Language is any form of communication that involved symbols misplacement and
productivity

Key Features of Language:
• Symbolism
• Displacement
• Productivity
• Duality of patterning

Symbolic:
• Based on the arbitrary association of sounds with meanings
• Arbitrary: no connection between the sound and the object

Displacement:
• The ability to communicate about something that is not happening at the moment
• Talk about the past and the future
• Allows us to lie

Productivity:
• The ability to add words and join them in different combinations

Duality of Patterning:
• The independent ordering of speech at two levels
o Sound
o Meaning

Call Systems (signal systems):
• Animal communication systems that consist of a relatively small number of sounds
to express moods and sensations like fear, delight, contentment, anger or pain

The Components of Language:

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• Phonology
o Phon = sound (study of sound)
o Study of sound systems in language, including phonetics and phonemics
o Phonetics: study of the articulation and production of human speech sounds
! Outside (etic) - sound
o Phonemics: analysis of the use of sounds to differentiate the meanings of
words
! Inside (emic) - meaning
o Phoneme: a minimal unit of sound that differentiates meaning in a particular
language
o Ex: /p/ and /b/: pit and bit
! So in this English example, /p/ and /b/ are separate phonemes
o Stress: phonemic use of accented sounds of syllables
o Pitch: phonemic use of rising and falling speech cadences
! Ex: in Mandarin, the word /ma/ can be used with 4 different pitches,
which all have different meanings
• Morphology
o Morph = shape (study of shape)
o The study of the internal structure of words and the combination of
meaningful units within the words (the analysis of word structure)
o Morpheme: a unit of sound and meaning, either a separate word or a
meaningful part of a word
• Syntax: the rules that generate the combination of words to form phrases and
sentences
o Ex: the cat chased the dog or the dog chased the cat
o Same words in both sentences but different meanings because of the word
order
• Semantics: the study of systems of meaning in languages

Non-verbal Communication:
• Emblems: nonverbal actions with specific meanings that substitute for spoken words
• Body language
• Intercultural communications: people from different languages and their
communication with each other

Linguistic Anthropology:
• Investigates connections between language, culture, and worldview
• Overlaps with sociolinguistics

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• Sociolinguistics: study of the impacts of socioeconomic factors, such as gender and

class, on language and communication within a society
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the assertion that they form and content of language
influence speakers’ behaviours, thought processes, and worldview
o False story/idea
o Ex: how the Inuit have forty different words for the word snow and shaped
how they see the world
• Dialects: a variety of a language spoken by a particular group of people, based on
regional differences of social differences, such as gender, class, race or ethnicity
o Ex: Pittsburg language (yinz – you ones)
o Regional dialect
o Social dialects – ex: Black English in the US (speak that way because they are
apart of a social group in the same part of the US, not because their black)

Language Standardization:
• Standard English: the dialect of English chosen as normative, a reflection of the
social, economic and political standing of its speakers
o Generic, flat English
• Code-switching: changing from one dialect or language to another according to the
context in which one is speaking

Processes of Language Change:
• Lingua Franca: language used in particular areas by speakers of many different
languages in order to communicate with one another
o Ex: speaking English at the UN
• Pidgins: a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between
two or more groups that do not have a language in common
o Ex: language in Cannibal Source
• Creoles: a language that has historic roots as an amalgamation of vocabulary and
grammar derived from two of more independent languages
o Pidgin evolves into creoles – when pidgin is their native language
• Historical linguistics:
o Language families
o Cognates – words that all mean the same thing in different languages
o False cognates – when you think there is a connection to the spelling of the
word, but really it means something completely different
! Ex: embarazada – you think it would mean embarrassed, but it really
means pregnant in Spanish

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CHAPTER 4 – Learning One’s Culture

Enculturation:
• The process by which children acquire their culture
• We learn the culture into which we are born and raised
o Born weak as a species (cant walk, cant talk, highly dependant)
o Large brain relative to body size – large part of our survival as a species relies
on learning
o Mature slower, but live longer – longer time to learn
• Enculturation takes place in an informal, non-explicit means
• Enculturation continues throughout life (life long process)

Socialization:
• A similar process to enculturation that emphasizes social factors/norms rather than
cultural factors in learning ones culture

The Process of Enculturation:
• Becoming a human being
o When does human life begin?
! Considered human a few days/weeks after birth
! Wait to make sure the baby survives
o Social birth
o Naming practices
• Child rearing
o Feeding and weaning
o Sleeping
o Physical and social stimulation
• Implicit: learning by observation, listening and watching culture

Informal and Formal Learning:
• Imitate and observe their elders
• Informal:
o Skills
o Cultural values
o Behavioural expectations
• Formal:
o Socialization

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o Rites of passage
o Schooling
! Spiritual and religious education

Learning Skills and Values:
• Cultural values: norms, attitudes, ethics
o Abstract
• Skills: using tools, economic roles
o Things we can do
• Both learned through observation, direct instruction and folklore

Folklore:
• Texts that relate traditional stories, the exploits of cultural heroes, and characters
handed down from generation to generation

Learning Behavioural Expectations:
• Appropriate behaviour
• Rules of authority and deference
• Learning through:
o Observation
o Trial and error
o Corrections, reprimands, praise

Age and Gender Socialization:
• Social status
• Age
o Restricted rights and limited control (children, because of their age)
! Children should be seen and not heard
o Lack of power
• Gender
o Gender identity
! Boys: blue
! Girls: pink, names
o Differential treatment
o Ex: boys vs. girls
! Boys: play outside, public, breadwinners
! Girls: play inside, domestic, care takers


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Rites of Passage:
• Life transitions
o Birth
o Marriage
o Death
• Initiations rites
o Transition from childhood to adulthood

3 Stage Model (Van Gennep 1909):
• Separation from the familiar
• Transition from old state to new state (called liminality - means “between”)
• Reintegration into original social structure

Schooling:
• Formal setting
o Educational institutes
o Only elites were schooled in a formal setting
• Explicit instruction
o Designated teachers

Psychological Anthropology:
• The study of the psychological motivations of behaviour and the personality types
prevalent in a society
• Culture and personality traits
o Personality: a constellation of behavioural traits and dispositions
o Cooperation and competition (among children)
o Public self and private self
• Culture and self-concept
o Self-concepts
! Independent self – don’t need anybody else, independent
! Interdependent self – interacting with other people determines who
you are and how you behave
o National character
• Deviance and abnormal behaviour in cross-cultural perspectives
o Cultures responses to “mental illness”
o Culture specific psychological disorders
! ADHD – mostly in Western industrialized countries
! Latah

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! Amok – Southeast Asian disorder

! Anorexia and bulimia – mostly in Western industrialized countries
! Pibloktoq – Arctic hysteria
! Windigo
! Koro – Asian men


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Exam Review – Terms and Concepts 2015-11-09 12:34 PM
Anthropology: study of humanity

Societies: _________________
Cultural Anthropology: the study of human culture
Ethnology: building theories about cultural behaviours and forms
Linguistic Anthropology: interconnections among language, culture and society (worldview)
Archaeology: the study of material culture
Biological/Physical Anthropology: the study of human origins and contemporary biological
diversity
Paleoanthropology: human evolution (primatology: study of non-human primates)
Applied Anthropology: application of the techniques and theories of anthropology to solving
real-world problems (ex: Forensic Anthropology)
Distinguishing Features of Anthropology:
• Focus on the concept of culture
• Comparative perspective
• Holistic perspective
Definition of Culture: culture is the values, beliefs, technological knowledge and rules of
conducts acquired by learning
Six Characteristics of Culture:
• Culture is shared – one person cannot have their own culture (at least 2 people)
• Culture is learned – socially transmitted
• Culture is adaptive – behaviours and beliefs respond to the environmental
constraints and opportunities
• Culture is integrated – practices and beliefs from a relatively coherent and
consistent system
• Culture is based on symbols – word, image or object that stands for cultural ideas or
sentiments
• Culture organized the way people think about the world
Culture Hegemony: the use of cultural beliefs to justify and support social hierarchy and
political domination
Counterculture: an alternative cultural model within a society that expresses different views
about the way that society should be organized
Worldview: culture-based, often ethnocentric, way that people see the world and other people
Globalization: the process by which the exchange o products, investment, and people across
national and regional boundaries increases
Culture Change: _________________
Evolutionism: view that cultural variation can be accounted for by different degrees of
intellectual progress, leading to different levels of cultural achievement

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Diffusionism: view that similarities in culture could be explained by borrowing from a common
source
Social Structure (Durkheim): the integrated assemblage of formal groups and social roles that
make up a society
Cultural Relativism (Boas): an approach that stresses the importance on analyzing cultures in
their own terms rather than in terms of the culture of the anthropologist
Historical Particularism (Boas): the theory that each way of life is a unique result of its
particular historical conditions
Ethnocentrism: a set of misunderstandings and prejudices based on the idea that ones own
belief system provides the only accurate and moral view of the world
Structural Functionalism: the theory that social structure determines peoples thought and
behaviour and that culture functions primarily to uphold the unity and continuity of society
Interpretive Anthropology: culture as a system of symbols, multiple layers of meaning
Ethnosemantics: culture as a meaning system, classified through language (focus on linguistic
and cognitive categories)
Materialist Approach:
• Emic: insiders perspective
• Etic: outsiders perspective
Processual Approach: agency: the way in which an individual reacts to and acts upon his or her
culture and society
Marxist Approach: analyzes culture, wealth and power
Ethnography: observing and documenting peoples ways of life, and collecting and analyzing
information about culture (writing culture)
Fieldwork: involves living and interacting with the people or group under study
Key Informant: research subjects who are well versed in local cultural knowledge and
representative of the larger community
Revitalization Movement: _______________
Relfexive Anthropology: the anthropology of anthropology, which focuses on the cultural and
political bias in ethnographic research, the impacts of anthologists on the people they study,
and professional ethics
Polyphony: the many voices of people from all the different segments and groups that make up
a society; a quality of ethnographic writing today that presents multiple views of a culture
Social Evolutionism (3 assumptions): ________________
Lewis Henry Morgan: _________________
Unilinear Social Evolutionism: _____________
Critique of Unilinear Social Evolutionism: ________________
Language: language is any form of communication that involved symbols misplacement and
productivity

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Key Features of Language:

• Symbolic – based on the arbitrary association of sounds with meanings
• Displacement – the ability to communicate about something that is not happening
at the moment (talk about past and future)
• Productivity – the ability to add words and join them in different combinations
• Duality of Patterning – the independent ordering of speech at two levels (sound and
meaning)
Call Systems: animal communication systems that consist of relatively small number of sounds
to express moods and sensations life fear, delight, anger or pain
Components of Language:
• Phonology: study of sound systems in language, including phonetics and phonemics
o Phonetics: study of the articulation and production of human speech sounds
o Phonemics: analysis of the use of sounds to differentiate the meanings of
words
o Phoneme: a minimal unit of sound that differentiates meaning in a particular
language
o Stress: phonemic use of accented sounds of syllables
o Pitch: phonemic use of rising and falling speech sounds
• Morphology: the study of the internal structure of words and the combination of
meaningful units within the words (analysis of word structure)
o Morpheme: a unit of sound and meaning, either a separate word or a
meaningful part of a word
• Syntax: the rules that generate the combination of words to form phrases and
sentences
• Semantics: the study of systems of meaning in languages
Non-Verbal Communication: emblems: nonverbal actions with specific meanings that
substitute for spoken words, body language
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: the assertion that the form and content of language influences
speakers’ behaviours, though processes, and worldview
Code-Switching: changing from one dialect or language to another according to the context in
which one is speaking
Language Change:
• Pidgin: a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between
two or more groups that do not have a language in common
• Creole: a language that has historic roots as a amalgamation of vocabulary and
grammar derived from two or more independent languages
Enculturation: process by which children acquire their culture (continues throughout life, life
long process)

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Becoming Human:
• When does life begin?
• Social birth
• Naming practices
Child-Rearing:
• Feeding and weaning
• Sleeping
• Physical and social stimulation
Socialization: a similar process to enculturation that emphasizes social factors rather than
cultural factors in learning ones culture
Folklore: texts that relate traditional stories, the exploits of cultural heroes, and characters
handed down from generation to generation
Age: restricted rights and limited control, lack of power
Gender: gender identity, differential treatment
Rites of Passage:
• Life transitions: birth, marriage, death
• Initiation rites: transition from childhood to adulthood
Psychological Anthropology: the study of psychological motivations of behaviour and the
personality types prevalent in a society
Culture and Self-Concept: independent self and interdependent self
Personality: a constellation of behavioural traits and dispositions
National Character: _________________
Deviance and Abnormal Behaviour: responses to mental illness, and cultural specific
psychological disorders


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CHAPTER 5 – Making A Living

Paleolithic (Old Stone Age):
• 2.5 MYA

Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age):
• 15,000 YA
• ***14,000 YA, we as a species, in some regions, began to stop depending on herds
of animals for hunting, and began to try and stay in one place (stationary food
sources – shellfish, fish, small animals, wild plants) – more settled way of life
o Europe and Middle East – settled into broad spectrum collecting (foraging)
o During Mesolithic (middle stone age)

Neolithic (New Stone Age):
• 11,000 YA

Ecological Anthropology:
• Sub-discipline of anthropology that focuses on subsistence strategies and how
people exploit and adapt to their environment
• It looks at how people meet their needs and make their living – and how those
strategies shape their society and culture

Understanding Human Subsistence Patterns:
• Subsistence: refers to the basic methods of obtaining food within a society
• Subsistence patterns: the methods of obtaining food using the available land and
resources, available labour, and technology
• The idea here is that resources + labour + technology = food & goods
• Two basic modes of subsistence involve finding food known as foraging (hunting and
gathering) and growing food (food production)
• Food production involves and efficient adaptation to a specific environment
• Food producers transform and maintain the environment in order to obtain food
• The three major types of food production are:
o Pastoralism: raising and caring for large herds of domesticated animals
o Horticulture: small-scale farming using relatively simple technology
o Agriculture: intensive farming investing a great deal of time, energy, and
technology

Ecosystem, Adaptation, and Carrying Capacity:

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• Adaptation to environments
o Possibilities and challenges
o Available resources, land, water, labour supply
• Carrying capacity
o Number of people who can be sustained by resources in a given environment
o NOT a fixed number
o Varies with subsistence techniques, labour expenditure, technology

Subsistence and Settlement Patterns:
• A settlement pattern refers to the way people distribute themselves in their
environment
o Where dwellings are located
o How dwellings are grouped into settlements
o Permanent of transitory

Subsistence and Population:
• The population of a community depends on
o Available resources
o Subsistence strategies used
! Food producers generally have larger populations than foragers
• Population may fluctuate with season
o Particularly true of those who practice foraging

More Subsistence Patterns:
• Work and the division of labour
• Social relations
o Interpersonal and intergroup relations
! Cooperation or competition
! Reciprocity – mutual gift giving
! Redistribution – system of collection and reallocation of resources
" Ex: taxes
More About Foraging:
• There are several factors that affect foraging practices, some are ecological while
others are dependant on population
• Ecological factors include nomadism, practiced by nomads, people who do not have
permanent homes but travel to sources of food as the food becomes seasonally
available

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• Population factors revolve around the fact that many foraging societies have small
populations and utilize strategies to curb the population (think about how this
relates to the notion of carrying capacity)

San of the Kalahari:
• A meal, laid out for cooking: wildebeest meat (gnu), wild watermelon, wild
cucumber, nuts, jewel beetles, and a tortoise shell bowl

Even More About Foraging:
• There are also social and cultural factors associated with foraging:
o Little property
o Territorial flexibility
o Communal sharing
o Social equality

Foraging Sounds Simple:
• But it can get complex
o Especially in marine environments with abundant resources such as the
pacific northwest
o Storage technologies are a main reason for this occurrence
o This can lead to more complex societies which feature permanent
settlements, large(r) populations, complex societies with social divisions and
the accumulation of wealth and prestige items

Pastoralism:
• Pastoralism is a subsistence strategy and way of life that focuses on raising and
caring for large herds of domesticated animals
• Pastoralism is rarely self-contained; in most instances it is combined with another
subsistence strategy such as foraging or small-scale farming
• In most pastoralist societies, there are rules of ownership and control of the animals
• In pastoralism, do not kill your animals, instead, grow a big herd of live animals
o Worth so much more to you alive than dead
• Pastoralism is also less egalitarian than foraging societies
o This means that while the men and the boys generally tend to the animals,
women and children tend to related tasks
• Customary rights allow groups of pastoralists to share certain plots of land for
grazing purposes

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• To prevent overgrazing, pastoralists take their herds to different grazing areas

throughout the year in a pattern known as transhumance

Horticulture:
• Horticulture is a subsistence strategy that focuses on small-scale farming using a
relatively simple technology (digging sticks, hoes, and other handheld tools)
• This is different from agriculture, which focuses on large-scale farming and relatively
complex technology
• Horticulture allows the formation of long-term permanent settlements which we
refer to as sedentism
• By-products of this way of life includes food storage and the accumulation of
property
• Horticulture often involves the technique of slash and burn (also known as swidden)
o Slash all the vegetation off the land, then burn and the ashes are used as a
fertilizer (very efficient way of using the land when done correctly)
• This involves a cycle of cleaning the land, burning the cuttings, growing and
harvesting crops (2-3 years) and then long periods of leaving the land fallow in order
to regenerate the forest
• In horticulture societies, the gendered allocation of work varies by society and the
ownership of land is generally corporate – it is owned by kin groups
o Corporate ownership is barbarian in Morgan’s hierarchy, company owned
and run (private ownership would be civilized)

Agriculture:
• Agriculture is another subsistence strategy that focuses on intensive farming,
investing a great deal of time, energy, and technology
o Main characteristics of agriculture:
! Continuous cultivation of land
! Private ownership
! Increased yields
! Irrigation, draft animals, ploughs
! Large, dense populations
• Private ownership (civilized)
• Use of fertilizers, pesticides, genetically modified seeds

Industrialization and Globalization:
• Industrial revolution
• Rural-to-urban migration

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• Market economy – commodification of resources, land, labour

o Commodification: taking something with no value/abstract value, and make
into a commodity to sell
• Individualism
• Industrial agriculture and commercialized farming

A (not so green) Green Revolution in India:
• Pesticides + chemical fertilizers = higher crop yield
• They also create land degradation, chemical toxicity, the depletion of ground water
• The largest wave of suicide in history: more than 17,500 farmers a year killed
themselves between 2002-2006
o Killed themselves because of the green revolution
o “Suicide genes” were what the seeds called
o Farmers: growing cotton, make money, go buy seeds, but then crop failure
and cant buy seeds the next year, so they go to the bank and ask for a loan
(not getting one), then money lender, buy their seeds, but debt increases
because they were not selling their crops (no money, no crops) so they killed
themselves (out of desperation)
o Drank pesticides to kill themselves
• Deccan Development Society (India) – where professor did his work
o Hard to grow stuff there
o NGO – trains women to be farmers and self-sufficient
o Grow an indigenous grain (millets?, mallets?) – don’t need water
o Women are illiterate and cannot write (make videos of their lives)

CHAPTER 6 – Economic Systems

Analyzing Economic Systems:
• Economic system: methods of allocating resources, and the production, distribution,
consumption, and exchange of goods and services
• Economic processes: allocation # production # distribution # consumption
• Economic anthropologists stuffy economic systems and economic behaviours cross
culturally
o Compare economies of exchange, how societies organize their labour, etc
• Industrial agriculture: land is privately owned
• Horticulture: land publically owned

Allocating Land and Resources:

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• Ideas and rules about rights to resources

• Valuation, allocation, and use
• Political, religious, and other cultural considerations
o May effect land tenure (=ownership)
o Ex: fraternal polyandry
! Fraternal = brothers
! Polyandry = many men
! One woman marrying a set of brothers
! Plays into the ideas of land use rights, communal ownership, private
property
• Land use rights, communal ownership, or private property
o Ex: Nepal/Tibet – land is scarce
o Normally: dividing land among the brothers within a family, land you get is
very small
o With fraternal polyandry: land is kept intact because there is only one eldest
son because there is one woman

Organizing Labour:
• Assignment of work roles
o According to age, gender, social status
o “Gender division of labour”
• Domestic production (non-industrial societies)
o Labour organized by households
• Industrial and post-industrial economies
o Commoditized labour – “job market”

Sweatshops and Child Labour:
• “I'm sitting in a nice, air conditioned office. Why should people in Vietnam really
have to work in those terrible factories?”
• You’ve got to compare things with the alternatives that people actually have in their
own countries
• Swedish economist - Johan Norberg
• People have a very ethnocentric view of child labour (but they were earning money
they needed for their family to survive, and without those jobs they turn to be sex
workers)
o These factory jobs are good for their culture and countries

Capital Goods and Social Capital:

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• Capital goods: items produced not for consumption but for the production of other
goods
o Ex: factories that produce machines, that produce other goods
o Ex: raw rubber
• Social capital: bonds of reliable friendship, support, and obligations acquired within
a community
o Ex: friendships, alliances, gift giving (bond and obligation)

Distributing and Exchanging Products and Services:
• Types of reciprocity:
o Generalized – don’t keep track (I give you something, you give me something
– friends)
o Balanced – more formal (specific values) – opposite of generalized (what I
gave you, I want back the same)
o Negative – one of the people makes a profit
! Ex: when we buy something
o Barter – trade
• Example of balanced reciprocity:
o Trobriand Islands (South Pacific)
! Kula – two step process
! Step 1:
" Men travel in circular patterns, island to island, stop along the
way
" Give their hosts a shell necklace or armband (depending which
direction their traveling – clockwise or counter clockwise)
" Kula builds bonds, alliances, and friendship, although the
shells have no value
" Ritual exchange of the objects
! Step 2:
" Once they have established friendships, then they can ease
into real trade (rubber, coffee, etc)
" Once you are apart of a Kula, always a Kula

Redistributive Networks:
• Food and other goods collected by an organizer
• Distributed to community members
• Redistribution often occurs at large public gatherings
o Feasts, ceremonial events

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o Example: potlatch, pacific Northwest First Nations

• Redistribution in modern states: taxes

Markets and Trade:
• Immediate and impersonal exchanges
• Goods are bartered or bought and sold for money
• Does not reflect or create social ties or obligations
• Based on forces of supply and demand
• Competitive exchange

General and Special Purpose Money:
• Money: a medium of exchange used to acquire goods and services, and held as store
of value for later use

Market Economies and Capitalism:
• Market economies
o Allocation and distribution according to prices determined by market forces
o General purpose money – currency
o Commodities
o Commodification
! Essentially non-economic things turned into saleable items
" People, their talents, events in their lives, their DNA, etc
• Capitalism
o Workers do not control means of production
o Workers earn incomes through wages
o Workers produce surplus value

Industrial Economies:
• Based on capitalism and market system
• Developed through Industrial Revolution
o Late 18th-Early 19th centuries
o Began with textile industry in Great Britain
o Quickly spread to North America and Europe
• Social implications
o Massive urban migration
o Increased inequality
• Consumerism


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Impacts of Colonial Expansion, Industrialism, and Globalization:

• Colonialism propelled by European capitalism
• Closely tied to nation building
• Expansion of control over resources, labour, and markets
• Transformation of traditional economies based on foraging, pastoralism, and
horticulture

Impacts of Colonial Expansion, Industrialism and Globalization
• As colonialism grew so did the need for resources
• Imperialism = Broad indirect control, mostly economic
• Colonialism = Much more direct, setting up shop in the country you control
• 3 waves:
o Discovery – 15th-17th century, Columbus, etc
o Early industrial – 18th century, needed raw material – Britain
o Industrial colonialism – late 19th/early 20th century – US, France, Germany,
Japan, etc

Commoditization of people
• 1) Direct slave trade
• 2) “Blackbirding” Kidnapping
• 3) Conscripted labor – signed contract in home country and then shipped off
• 4) Dispossession of land – get people to them work for you

5 Impacts:
• Depopulation
o Disease
o War
o Genocide à white mans burden to civilize
• Dispossession of the land
o Indian removal of 1830 à took away land and put them on reserves
o Privatizing ownership of land – corporate ownership
• Abusive forms of labor control
o Slavery
• Environmental degradation
o Coffee plantations on mountains à hillsides stripped of everything and
literally fell off into the ocean
• Language
o Changes to local language and culture

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o Indigenous languages were forbidden

Colonialism and the Exploitation of Labour:
• Slavery
• Forced labour
• Poll taxes
• Resource extraction and plantations

Post-Industrial Society:
• Based on expansion of service economy, especially knowledge sector
• Globally organized corporations and institutions
• Liberalization and privatization
• Technological innovations
• Complex impacts on local communities

CHAPTER 7 – Kinship and Descent

North American Kinship Terms:
• Ego = who’s kinship where analyzing
• Circles = females
• Triangles = males
• Huge part of social organization is how we organize and make sense of our world
through kinship, marriage, sex/gender, race, ethnicity, etc
• David Schneider: defined kinship in North American context
o Calling it “familial love” # “enduring diffuse solidarity”

Kinship Systems:
• Systems for determining relatives and relationships
• Organize relationships and categorize people
• Kin terms: words that we have for different kinds of relationship in different cultures
• Biological kin types:
o Ego = point of reference of who you're analyzing
o F = father
o M = mother
o S = son
o D = daughter
o B = brother
o Z = sister

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o C = child
o H = husband
o W = wife
• Types of kin:
o Consanguines – people that you are related to by blood
o Affines – people that you are related to by law
o Fictive kin – people who you consider apart of your family, but who are not
• Rules of descent:
o Bilateral descent – trace lineage through both mother and father
! Kindred – huge kin group
! Common in modern industrial and in small foraging societies
o Unilateral descent
! Matrilineal – trace lineage through mother (father not apart of your
kin group)
! Patrilineal – trace lineage through father (mother not apart of your
kin group)
! Common in horticultural, partoralist and agrarian societies

Matrilineal and Patrilineal Systems:
• Matrilineal descent much less prevalent than patrilineal
o Concentrated in horticultural societies
o Only about 15% of kin groups that have been studied have been matrilineal
decent
• Subsistence plays role in shaping kinship patters, but does not determine them

Patrilineal Descent:
• Most common kinship pattern
• Kinship traced from male ancestor in a descent line through subsequent male
descendants
• Variation in women’s roles and status within patrilineal societies
• Patriarchy: most, but not all, patrilineal societies are also strongly patriarchal (males
rule)
• Patrilineal kin = agnatic
o Ego (female) – females children are not part of her lineage, males children
are
o Ego (male) – males children are part of his lineage, females children are not

Matrilineal Descent:

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• Kinship traced from female ancestor in a descent line through subsequent female
descendants
• Males often still have greater access to wealth, power and status
• Matrilineal kin = uterine
o Ego (female) – females children are part of her lineage, males children are
not
o Ego (male) – males children are not part of his lineage, females children are

Unilineal Descent Groups:
• Lineages:
o Smallest kinship group formed through unilineal descent
o Martilineages or patrilineages
o Lineage can only traced back to a common ancestor
o Spouses are not part of each others lineages
o Clan = a lineage that cannot be traced
! Believe they descend from a common ancestor
o Ascendants = anyone above the ego in question
o Descendants = anyone bellow the ego in question
• Exogamy and Endogamy:
o Parallel cousins and cross-cousins
! Parallel cousins: children of parents same-sex sibling (fathers brothers
children and mothers sisters children)
! Cross-cousins: children of parents opposite sex siblings (mothers
brothers children and fathers sisters children)
" Further away, but still in same lineage
o Gamy = marriage
o Exogamy = marry outside your lineage
! Why would you want to do this?
" Expand lineage/family
" Creates bonds and builds alliances
o Endogamy = marry inside your lineage
! Why would you want to do this?
" Keep relations intact
" Maintain status, hierarchy
" Ex: Hutterites, Indian cast system

Complex Forms of Descent:
• Double descent

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o Both matrilineal and patrilineal descent

o Different kinds of property inherited along each line
• Ambilineal descent
o Either matrilineal or patrilineal descent
o Individuals may choose to affiliate with either group (at a certain age)

Patterns of Change:
• Kinship systems may change in response to internal and external forces

David Schneider:
• Wrote a book called “American Kinship”
• Part of the Kinship Project (kinship in the UK and North American)
• Worked in inner city Chicago
• Enduring diffuse solidarity
o Nothing about blood or law
o Fictive kin – people you consider in your family, but are not
o Social/cultural considerations are much more important than blood or law

Kath Weston:
• 20 years after Schneider (1991)
• Wrote book called “Family We Choose”
• Worked in San Francisco at time of AIDS crisis
• Made de facto families – went against the traditional family

Surrogacy:
• Happens during the conception process
• Class, race, feminism
• Surrogate pregnancy exposes motherhood not as a fact of nature, but as a social fact
• There is also usually an assumption of heterosexual marriage or coupling
• 1. Threatens the natural process of birth – shared process (motherhood as well)
o Shared motherhood
• 2. Belonging of the child – tradition dictates that the mother raises the child that she
births
• 3. Sometimes seen as unnatural or abnormal

Father:
• Genitor = sperm donor
• Pater = father (socially defined)

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CHAPTER 8 – Marriage and Family:

Defining Marriage and Family:
• Marriage: a socially recognized, enduring, stable bond between two (or more)
people who have certain rights and obligations toward one another
o Socially recognized
o Producing new rights and new obligations
o 2 major functions or marriage:
! Institution producing descendants
! Creates alliances (Levi Strauss wrote about this)
" Affines
" Incest taboo
" 2 kinds of people in this world (those you can have
relationships with and those that you cannot)
• Household: group of people occupying an common dwelling
• Family: a marriage couple, or other group of adult kin folk, who cooperate
economically in the upbringing of children, most sharing a common dwelling

Families and Ideal Types:
• Nuclear families
o Common in both foraging and industrial societies
o Parents and their children
o Includes single-parent families
• Extended and joint families
o More common worldwide than nuclear families
o 3 or more generations (parents, children, and grandparents) living in
common group
o Especially prevalent in farming and pastoral economies

Endogamy, Exogamy, and the Incest Taboo:
• Incest taboo: a ban on sexual relations within the nuclear family
• While the incest taboo is universal, beyond the nuclear family “forbidden” relatives
are different in different societies
• Cultural aspects
• Endogamy: marrying within your lineage
o To maintain social hierarchies and status
o Ex: castes system in India, racial classification in the US

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• Exogamy: marrying outside your lineage

Effects of Exogamy on Social Organization:
• Village exogamy
o Creates alliances over broader geographic region
o Ex: marrying someone in Brandon
• Lineage and clan exogamy
o Binds descent groups into larger systems of relationship
• Alliance theory

Effects of Endogamy on Social Organization:
• Class or rank endogamy
o Castes
o Marry within your caste (India)
• Ethnic and racial endogamy
o Ethnic groups and “races”
o Until 1970/1980 couldn’t marry outside race (US)
• Religious endogamy
o Faith communities

Forms of Marriage:
• Monogamy
o Serial monogamy
• Polygamy
o Plural marriage
o Two forms:
! Polygyny
" Marriage between a man and two or more women
" Sororal polygyny
! Polyandry
" Marriage between a woman and two or more men
" Fraternal polyandry
Explanations of Polygyny:
• Occurs in different societies for different reasons
o May help correct sex ratio imbalance in societies where women outnumber
men
o May be tied to wealth and status, especially in strongly patriarchal societies,
where women are viewed as property

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o Adaptive in societies where women serve important economic roles

o Children increase social status in patrilineal societies through growth of
lineage or clan

Other Forms of Marriage:
• Same-sex marriage
o Traditionally allowed in some societies
o Legal in Canada, South Africa, and in some European countries
o Judith Bulter suggests that it:
! Extends the power of the state
" Why would you want the state to have more control over your
life – don’t get married
! Breaks long-standing alliances
• Adaptive forms
o Marriage to ensure continuation of partilineal or matrilineal descent groups
o Nuer (Southern Sudan)
! “Ghost marriage”
" If a man died, his brother can marry a woman in his place
" Their children belong to the dead guy – keeps the dead guys
lineage going
" The dead man is the socially recognized father
" Also in Singaporean Chinese
! Woman as “husband”
" Woman cant have children with husband so secret boyfriend
impregnates her
" Adding people to her kin group, even though she cannot have
children
" Husband is socially recognized father
Levi Strauss:
• Women – Marriage (1940’s)
• Wrote about how women are the objects of exchange/trade between men in most
societies
• Ex: walking woman down the aisle and giving her off to the new husband (object
being traded)

Marriage as Alliance and Economic Exchange:
• Marriage establishes an economic and a social relationship
• 3 forms of economic exchange:

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o Bride wealth
! Also called bride price, but not purchasing the woman
! Gifts from the grooms family to the brides family
" Represents new alliances and compensation for the loss of the
daughters labour (one less person to work around house)
o Bride service
! For months/years, the groom works for the brides family
o Dowry
! Brides family gives gifts/cash to the grooms family
! All the stuff that a bride will need to make up her own household
! Early inheritance
! Out of control today, what is expected from family and violence
" Dowry free weddings – modern

Marriage as a Rite of Passage:
• Arranged marriages
o Common where alliances formed through marriage are important
• Courtship
o Common in societies without arranged marriages, where people choose their
own marriage partners
• Wedding rituals
o Publicly confirm change in marital and kinship status
• We live in a post traditional world, where it is now about the individual and love
• Bride capture:
o The groom and kinfolk kidnap bride from family
o All in good fun, fake rescue of the girl
o Traffic in women/alliances – exchange of women “conversion of female
labour into male wealth”

Patterns of Residence after Marriage:
• Residence Rules:
o Matrilocal and Patrilocal
! With or near either family
o Avunculocal
! Resides with the husbands mothers brother
o Bilocal and Neolocal
! Bilocal – alternate between residence
! Neolocal – a new home for both

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Widowhood and Divorce:
• Levirate and Soroate
o Levirate: if a woman’s husband dies, she marries his brother
o Soroate: If a mans wife dies, he marries her sister
o In the event of a spouses death
o Strategies to preserve kin ties
• Divorce
o Societies vary in their beliefs concerning divorce and remarriage
o May be freely practiced, or subject to social and religious restrictions
o In extremely patriarchal societies, only men may have the right to divorce

Bigamy and Polygamy:
• Bigamy: one has two spouses
o Illegal in the US – crime
o Marrying someone before your divorce is final
• Polygamy: one has multiple spouses

Introduction: Gender, Sexuality, Race and Inequality:
• Biological determinism: when explorers saw these strange sexual practices, they
must be from a deeply rooted biological drive (the primitives could not help it)
o Negative way of approach
o Victorian Era
o Led to medicalization
• Medicalization: deviant sexual practices were given a medical diagnosis
o “sick” and “well” (good and bad)
• 1930-1950’s – very socially conservative time (family centered, kinship structures,
sexuality in families)
• Levi Strauss: women were objects exchanged amongst men (in his kinship model) -
1960’s
• 1960-1970
o Civil Rights Movement in the US – racial equality
o Stonewall Riots in NYC – sexual equality
o March for Women’s Rights – gender equality
• 1960’s – prompted feminist anthropology
o It is not about women power, women first, etc
o It is a different way of thinking and approaching a problem

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o Shows all the types of people in the world, not just Western white
heterosexual men
• Sex is biological and gender is socially constructed
• Judith Butler – “gender is performance”
• Queer theory:
o Nothing within your identity is fixed
o Your identity is little more than a pile of social and cultural things which you
have previously expressed or which have been said about you
o There is not really an “inner self”- we come to believe that we have one
based on repeatedly talking about it
o Gender, like other aspects of identity, is a performance, reinforced through
repetition
o People can therefore change

CHAPTER 9 – Sex and Gender

Sex and Gender:
• Sex: biological differences between males and females
• Gender: the roles that people perform and the values and attitudes that people have
regarding men and women
• Gender constructs: colours, gifts, jobs
o Ex: pink for girls, blue for boys

The Cultural Construction of Gender Identity:
• Cultural Constructs: models of behaviour and attitudes that a particular culture
transmits to its members
o Body posture
o Clothing and bodily adornment
o Cross-dressing
o Status and social value
o Speech styles

Intersectionality:
• A concept often used in critical theories to describe the ways in which culturally
constructed categories such as gender, race, class, ability, and other axes of identity
intersect on various levels
• While they do intersect, the result is institutionalized inequality


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Gender and Sexuality:

• Sexual feelings and practices shaped by culture
• Beliefs about what is appropriate for different genders
• Relationship between sex and marriage

Gender and Homosexuality:
• Attitudes about homosexuality reflect cultural learning
• Third gender categories:
o Neither men nor women – genderqueer
o Hijras – in between gender in India
o Two-spirits

Sexualities:
• Heterosexual
• Homosexual
• Bisexual
• Asexual – no interest in other people sexually
• Pansexual – attraction to people heterosexual and transgender (video)
• Polysexual – attracked to many different types of orientations
• Transsexual (does this belong on this list?)
o Might not be sexually related

Gender Roles and Relations:
• Gender roles:
o Constellations of rights, duties, attitudes, and behaviours
o Culturally associated with each gender
• Gender relations:
o Norms of interaction between men and women
o May reflect differences in relative status, prestige, and power

Division of Labour by Gender:
• Men’s and women’s work often complementary
• Some patterns common cross-culturally; other tasks variable
o Example of cross-cultural pattern: women cook
• Gender roles change as economic and material factors change
o WWII – men to war, women take over their jobs in factories
• Gendered division of labour also supported by cultural beliefs


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Gender and Status:

Continuum of gender relations
• Gender equality $#Gender inequality # male dominance
• Status of women varies greatly across cultures
• In general, women’s status is higher where their labour contributes major share of
food
o Foraging societies – egalitarian (equal) – pull their weight=more status

Gender and Subsistence:
• Modes of subsistence relate to gender roles, gender status, and gender relations
• Foragers and Gender:
o Economic roles defined by gender, but some what flexible in many societies
o Status of women related to source of annual caloric intake
! More women contribute, the higher their status
• Gender in Pastoral and Horticultural Societies:
o Status influenced by the control over distribution of produce and goods
o Somewhat related to descent and residence patterns
o Mostly male dominated
• Gender in Agricultural States:
o Complex societies with social stratification
o Often characterized by male dominance, but degree varies widely
o Role/status of women is dependant on economic, political, and historical
factors
• Industrialism and Gender:
o Women marginalized
o Segregation in employment
o Gender gap – unequal pay
o Cult of domesticity
! Women knowing how to do all of the things around the house
(cooking, cleaning, raising kids) – keep going with it because their
good at it
• Post-Industrial Era:
o Expansion of service sector
! Men and women
o Social reproduction work undervalued


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CHAPTER 11 – Power and Political Systems:

Political Organization:
• The ways in which societies are organized to plan group activities, make decisions
affecting members of the group, select leadership, and settle disputes within the
group and with other groups

Political Anthropology:
• The study of ways that communities plan group actions, make decisions affecting the
group, select leadership, and resolve conflicts and disputes both within the group
and with other groups
• Abstract notions – citizenship (sectional citizenship: the way you fit into society and
the way one does not)

The Search for Laws of Social Organization:
• Thinkers such as Karl Marx and Lewis Henry Morgan looked for laws through
historical change – we call this cultural evolutionism
• Biological determinists look for biological triggers
• Cultural ecologists look to the natural environment
• Anthropologists find that in fact, there is no law, that social organization is arbitrary

Varieties of Social Organization:
• Power:
o Transformative capacity (Anthony Giddens); the ability to transform a given
situation
o Political power: visible, hidden, invisible
o Political anthropology: the study of social power in human society

The Power to Act:
• Coercion versus free agency
• Gramsci argued that coercion alone is rarely sufficient for social control

Domination and Hegemony:
• Domination:
o Coercive rule
• Hegemony:

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o A system of leadership in which rulers persuade subordinates to accept the

ideology of the dominant group by offering mutual accommodations that
nevertheless preserve the rulers’ privileged position

Foucault and Power:
• Michel Foucault:
o 1926-1984
o French philosopher, social theorist, and historian of ideas
o Associated with both Structuralist and post-Structuralist movements
o Extremely wide-ranging influence in the humanities and social sciences

Biopower and Governmentality:
• Michel Foucault – also gave us Biopower
• Biopower: reoccupied with the bodies of citizens and the social body itself
o Ex: women’s reproductive rights (birth control)
• Governmentality: the art of governing appropriate to promoting the welfare of
populations within a state

Michel Foucault Major Works:
• Madness and civilization – 1961
o About the birth of the insane asylum
• Birth of the clinic – 1963
o About biopower – creation of this system of policing bodies
• Archaeology of knowledge – 1969
o About the power behind knowledge production
• Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison – 1975
o About policing of bodies – combines biopower and governmentality
o A panopticon, a prison designed by Thomas Bentham
o Self policing – idea of surveillance
• History of sexuality (volumes I, II, and III) - 1976
o About power
• Foucault:
o Knowledge should transform the self
o “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest
in life and work is to become someone that you were not in the beginning”
! Idea of transformation and change
o Power is everywhere


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Foucauldian Power:
• Traditional power: monolithic, hierarchal, clearly visible, embodied in the law,
written, and is negative (based on prohibition)
• Foucauldian Power:
o Localized: physical organization of space shapes the knowledge and power
that are possible and can be harnessed
o Omnipresent: rather than something “invoked” on special occasions or at
specific times, power is ALWAYS in play
o Dialectically related to knowledge: power draws from existing knowledge,
relies on it, shapes it; knowledge influences the type and location of effective
power
• They way we see ourselves in the world is the result of power relations
• “Where there is power, there is resistance”
o They can only exist in the strategic field of power relations

Power is Productive:
• It was the discourses about sexuality, in Victorian times and the early 20th century,
which sought to suppress certain kinds of behaviour, which simultaneously gave an
identity to them, and so launched them into the public sphere…
• The whole idea about sexuality in Victorian times (when sexuality wasn’t talked
about), Foucauld said when we are told not to talk about something, we end up
talking about it

Power as an Independent Entity:
• Resistance: the power to refuse being forced against ones will to conform to
someone else’s wishes
• Consensus: an agreement to which all parties collectively give their assent
• Persuasion: power based on verbal argument

The Power of Imagination:
• Anomie: a pervasive sense of rootlessness and normlessness in a society (Durkheim)
o Feeling of not belonging in a society
• Alienation: the deep separation that individuals experience between their innermost
sense of identity and the labour they are forced to perform in order to survive
(Marx)
o Leads to power problems
• Post-traditional societies (Giddens)
o There are rules that tell us our role in society

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o Rules structure society

o Traditional societies have died, so it led to post-traditional societies
o Free in this post-traditional world to figure out what we want to be
o Ex: pick who you want to marry (based on love)

VIDEO: Privatization of Water
• Bolivia (1999/2000)
• How does this relate to foucault’s notion of power
• Not matter how small a group or in what apart of the world, what they can fight to
change (the government)

Types of Political Organization – Stateless Societies:
• Bands
o Small
o Informal
• Tribes
o Some degree of formalization of structure
o Associations
o Age grades
• Chiefdoms
o Stratified societies organized by kinship
• States
o Highly organized
o Centralized
o Hierarchical
o Characteristics of state societies:
! Cities
! Large populations
! Specialists
! Social control

Republics:
• State societies with elected rather than inherited leadership

Empires:
• States expanded into larger units through conquest and the occupation or
annexation of new territories


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Theocracies:
• Societies ruled by religious leaders, in which the social order is upheld through
beliefs in its divine origin or sanction

Internal Political Change and State Societies:
• Terrorism
• Factionalism
• Revolution

An Example of Forced Change:
• China’s one child policy
• Implemented in 1979
• Advocates delayed marriage and delayed child bearing
• Advocated fewer healthier births
• Advocates one child per couple

Exceptions to the Policy:
• Ethnic minorities are formally excluded from the policy
• If both parents are only-children, provided the children are spaced more than four
years apart
• Families who have children with mental or physical disabilities sometimes may have
a second child

Social Issues:
• Chinese families overwhelmingly prefer male children; as a result, female infanticide
is increasing
• Abortions are sometimes forced on women who become pregnant with their second
child without authorization (these may include late term abortions)
• There have been reports of mass sterilizations in the rural areas

CHAPTER 10 – Equality and Inequality in the Contemporary World

Anthropology:
• Study of human biological and cultural diversity of time and space
• Why?
o We live in a multicultural world
o To understand ourselves and others better

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Scientific Racism:
• The notion of fundamentally different biological stocks (races) as the cause of
different behaviours, cultures, etc
• Statements that put forth the idea that cultural traits and behaviours are biologically
inherited

A) History of Scientific Racism:
• Racial Categories:
o We make sense of the world by categorizing them
o Linnaeus
o Blumenbach
o Hooten

Race:
• Example of typologizing
o Categorizing

Racial Categories:
• Linnaeus (1758):
o “Systema Naturae” identified variants of homo sapiens
! Europaeus albascens (white)
! Asiaticus focus (brown)
! Africanus negreus (black)
! Americanus rubesceans (red)
• Blumenbach (1781):
o Delineation of races into scientific category
! Caucasian (white)
! Mongolian (yellow)
! Malay (brown)
! Ethiopian (black)
! American (red)
• Hooten (1926):
o All races come down to the big three
! Caucasoid (Europe, India, Mideast)
! Mongoloid (East Asia, Pacific Islands, Native American)
! Negroid (Africa, Australia)
o Problems: people can move, where is East Asia? (China?)

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Characteristics of Racial Types:
• Salient biological traits
o Skin colour, hair, facial features, stature
• Behavioural propensities
o Intelligence, criminality, violence

What About the Origins of Races?:
• Monogenesis
o Monogenecists: subscribe to the theory of human origins which posits a
single origin for all humans
• Polygenesis
o Polygeneists: believe that human races have been created separately in
different zones (by God)
! Fixity of species
! Strict limit on environmental influence
! Unchanging underlying type
! Anatomical and cranial measurement differences in races
! Physical and mental differences between racial groups (notice again
the idea of “ranking”)
! Human races are all distinct

B) Science, Race, and Culture:
• Culture:
o Categories – organizing the universe
o “A priori” assumptions
• Races are Western cultural categories
• Race: cultural categories in the hands of science
o Science and quantification – trying to use science and numbers
o Craniometry (measuring heads) and other comparative anatomical measures
– in many instances based on “a priori” assumptions

C) Critique of Race in the Analysis of Human Sociocultural Diversity:
• Race does not exist biologically – exists as a social construct (socially and culturally)
• Culture is socially transmitted (NOT biologically); it is learned, NOT inherited
• All peoples have an equal capacity to acquire culture

D) Critique of Race in the Analysis of Human Biological Diversity:

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• Scientific study of human diversity since WWII

o Broader and more systematic analysis of “traits”
o Systematic observations of many more populations than in the past – better
data
• Four facts of human biological variation
o There is human variation and it is a valid topic of scientific investigation
o Much human biological variation is geographically localized in its distribution
o Human biological variation is continuous in its geographic distribution
o Human biological variation is discordant in its geographic distribution
• But why is this complex picture of human diversity?
o Newness of species
o Great migrations
• Racial typologies reconsidered in light of today’s data
o Tremendous variation within racial groups
o Mean variation WITHIN racial groups exceeds mean variation BETWEEN
racial groups
o Physical variation is not distributed by race
o Parents pass genes, not types to offspring
• Alternative unit of analysis
o Cline: gradation in a single trait of gene frequency over geographic distance

Race and Ethnicity:
• Race is salient as a subject of anthropological inquiry (as a Sociocultural
phenomenon), NOT as a unit of analysis
• Ethnicity: common identity based on cultural similarity
o Ethnic group: shares Sociocultural attributes: values, beliefs, etc
• Social Races:
o Ethnic groups that are believed to have a biological basis
o Cultural categories: vary cross-culturally
! Hypodescent in the US
" Susie Guillort Phipps case in Louisiana

CHAPTER 10 (cont) - Race, Social Evolution, Colonialism

Identity:
• Non-changing, concrete, way of seeing ourselves and others seeing us (fixed
identity)
• Self-fulfilling prophecy of social rank and inferiority – ex: IQ tests

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• Imagination and imagined communities: Benedict Anderson

• Subjectivity – subject position
o Ex: subject position = teenager , subjectivity = good student, rebel

Social Evolutionism:
• 1. Social forms change over time
• 2. Societies of the world can be ranked from high to low
• 3. This ranking is an actual sequence of historical events – it is real

Lewis Henry Morgan:
• Evolutionary movement from simple to complex
• BIG QUESTION: what has this got to do with colonialism? What does scientific race
have to do with colonialism?
o Simple people have not evolved the way the complex have and therefore we
can enslave them
o Monogenisism and polygenisism – every racial group created in a different
spot in a different time – they are different than us therefore we can exploit
them

Unilinear Social Evolution (Morgan):
• The idea is that change leads to increased Sociocultural complexity
o One line (point A to B) – simple # complex
• 1. Savagery:
o Bow and arrow
o Group marriage
o No sense of property
• 2. Barbarism:
o Pottery
o Polygyny
o Communal property
• 3. Civilization (these existed in Morgan’s life):
o Phonetic alphabet
! Problem: advanced non-phonetic languages (ex: mandarin)
o Monogamy
o Private property
• Evolutionary change is unilinear – implying “progress”
• Diversity occurs through differential maturation through evolutionary stages
o Not everybody progresses at the same rate

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• This implies the idea of a “living fossil”

• Unlinear social evolution explains away human diversity – there is one basic social
plan, just different stages

Critique of Unilinear Evolutionism (Boaz):
• 1. Empirical problems
• 2. Social change is multilineal – like a tree
• 3. Histories merge (ex: savages living next to civilized – no wall/boundary)
• 4. “Progress” is a value laden term

• Since the end of colonialism, new classifications have appeared
o First, second, third, fourth world countries
o 1st: Western
o 2nd: states of former soviet union
o 3rd: any else – China, India
o 4th: indigenous groups within a country that they do not associate with
• Developed/developing – (ex: US developed, Mexico developing)
• Global North (developed) and Global South (less developed)

10 Facts About Race:
• Race is a modern idea
o Ancient societies, like the Greeks, did not divide people according to physical
differences, but according to religion, status, class or even language
o The English word “race” turns up for the first time in a 1508 poem by William
Dunbar referring to a line of kings
• Race has no genetic basis
o Not one characteristic, trait, or even gene distinguishes all the members of
one so-called race from all the members of another so-called race
• Human subspecies don’t exist
o Unlike many animals, modern humans simply have been around long
enough, not have populations been isolated enough, to evolve into separate
subspecies or races
o On average, only one of every thousand of the nucleotides that make up our
DNA differ one human from another
o We are one of the most genetically similar of all species
• Skin colour really is only skin deep
o The genes for skin colour have nothing to do with genes for hair form, eye
shape, blood type, musical talent, athletic ability, or forms of intelligence

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o Knowing someone’s skin colour doesn’t necessarily tell you anything else
about them
• Most variation is within, not between “races”
o Of the small amount of total human variation, 85% exists within any local
population
o About 94% can be found within any continent
o That means, for example, that two random Koreans may be as genetically
different as a Korean and an Italian
• Slavery predates race
o Throughout much of human history, societies have enslaved others, often as
a result of conquest of debt, but not because of physical characteristics or a
belief in natural inferiority
o Due to a unique set of historical circumstances, North America has the first
slave system where all slaves shared a common appearance and ancestry
• Race and freedom were born together
o The US was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” but the
country’s early economy was based largely on slavery
o The new idea of race helped explain why some people could be denied the
rights and freedoms that others took for granted
• Race justified social inequalities as natural
o The “common sense” belief in white superiority justified anti-democratic
action and policies like slavery, the extermination of First Nations peoples,
the exclusion of Asian immigrants, the taking of Mexican lands, and the
institutionalization of racial practices within governments, laws and societies
o Alterity – people that are different than us are completely different moral
beings
• Race isn’t biological, but racism is still real
o Race is a powerful social idea that gives people different access to
opportunities and resources
o The government and social institutions of much of the Western world have
created advantages that disproportionately channel wealth, power and
resources to white people
• Colorblindness will not end racism
o Pretending race doesn’t exist is not the same as creating equality

CHAPTER 12 – Religion

What Does Religion Do?:

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• One important function of religion cross-culturally is to provide an explanation of

how things came to be and why things happen as they do

Back to Morgan:
• Recall his evolutionary scheme: savage, barbarian, civilized
• This was also applied to religion
• Animism # polytheism # monotheism (Tylor)
• Magic # religion # science (Frazer)
• Structural functionalism (Durkheim)
o Religion always takes place in a social context
o Maintain and protect the social order
o God is a reflection of society
o “God is society writ large” – Durkheim

Science:
• In modern society, science offers an alternative and powerful framework for
understand reality

What is Religion?:
• Beliefs and practices about spirit beings and supranormal and superhuman forces
and their relationship to everyday life
• Beliefs:
o Ideas about spirit world
o Creation of universe and first humans
o World view
! The way we look at the world and the way we think it should be
! Ex: conservative world view
! Also world views based on religion (Islamic, Christian, etc)
! Connecting their beliefs and practices dealing with the supernatural
with the happenings of our everyday lives
! Religious belief system influence the way we see the world
• Practices:
o Sacred rituals
o Religious speech
o Practical and symbolic action

The Raven and the First Man:
• Bill Reid – 1980

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• UBC Museum of Anthropology

• Creation story/myth
• Legend of the first hyda

Spirit Beings and Forces:
• Animism and Animatism:
o Animism: belief in souls that animate living and non-living things
! People, rivers, trees, rocks – all have soul like natures
o Animatism: belief in generalized, pervasive spiritual power
! Holy place possesses animatism
! Idea that God is everywhere
• Gods and Heroes:
o Spirit beings in human form
! Polytheism – belief in many gods
" Ex: ancient Rome and Greece (God of war, love, etc)
! Monotheism – belief in one god
" Many variations
" Ex: Judaism, Islam, Christianity
" Catholicism?
• Important Mortal Heroes – ex: saints
o Sufism – pirs
o Christianity – saints
o Some Hindus and Muslims in India worship Sai Baba of Shirdi (holy person
that took on the status of almost a god)
o Role models for us
• Ancestors, Ghosts, and Demons:
o Ancestor worship – pay respect to your deceased ancestors
o Spirits of deceased – coming back in the form of ghosts
o Demons: negative/not so nice spirit of the deceased (do harm to the living)
• Totems and Taboos:
o Totemism – people believe they are descendants of spirit beings
o Secret societies
o Ritual restrictions and prohibitions
! Ex: Judaism: kosher (chew cud, hooves, scales, fins)
! Ex: Hinduism: vegetarian – favored way of eating
! Ex: Catholicism: no meat during lent

Religious Practitioners:

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• Mediums, Diviners, and Healers:

o Mediums: persons having special gifts to make contact with the spirit world
! Going between the two worlds
o Diviners: persons with the power to predict the future through messages and
omens
! Ex: reading tea leaves, taro cards
o Healers: religious practitioners who acquire spirit power to diagnose and
cure illness
• Shamans and Priests:
o More authoritative
o Shamans: religious practitioners believed to make contact with the spirit
world through prayer, ritual, and trance
! Ex: pope
o Priests: full-time religious practitioners who lead a religious organization and
officiate at rituals, but are not expected to communicate directly with spirit
world

Religious Practice:
• Rituals: activities, ceremonies, and behaviours that are demonstrations of belief
o Rituals put belief into action
o Usually involve visual and performing arts
• Religious rituals – ex: baptism, bar mitzvah

Sacred and Secular Rituals:
• Sacred rituals:
o Dedicated to spirit realm and expression of religious faith
• Secular rituals:
o May be important culturally
o Ex: hockey night in Canada
• Rites of renewal:
o May have both sacred and secular elements

Prayer and Sacrifice:
• Prayer:
o Religious speech or thought to transmit messages to spirit beings
o Comes in many different forms – individual, group, silent, aloud, songs, etc
o Mental way of worshiping
• Sacrifice:

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o Offerings that honour spirit beings by giving up something important

! Blood sacrifice
o Ex: fasting – can focus more on prayer, not food

Rites of Passage:
• Rituals to celebrate socially significant transitions in an individuals life cycle
o Puberty rites
! Religious rites at puberty – ex: bar mitzvah
o Funerary rites
! Ex: put coins on the eyes so that when they are crossing into the
other world they can pay
! Ex: Viking funeral – burn and float in the ocean

Healing or Curing:
• Cultural beliefs about:
o Illness and health
o Causes of disease
o Strategies for treatment
• Religious healing
o Illnesses believed to be caused by spirit beings or forces
o Ritual diagnosis
! Praying, etc
o Spirit possession

Magic and Witchcraft:
• Imitative magic
o Also called sympathetic magic
o Like causes like
o Ex: voodoo doll
• Contagious magic
o Touching something is going to cause something to happen
o Ex: communion, Jesus turning water to wine
• Witches
o Mostly associated with women
o A woman too powerful for her own good

The Origins and Functions of Religious:
• Explaining the World:

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o Gain sense of order and control

o Religion tries to explain why bad things happen to good people
o Helps us make sense of a world that is very nonsensical
! Ex: Tsunami, Holocaust, Earthquake, etc
o Legitimate social or political system
• Solace, Healing, and Emotional Release:
o Psychological support
o Catharsis (emotional release) – helps work through something and come out
in one piece
• Social Cohesion:
o Unite communities through rituals
o Justify existing social order
! Cosmology
• Social Control:
o Formal and informal mechanisms
o Ritual role reversals
• Economic Adaptations:
o Management of environment and resources
! Ex: Rapaport – killing the pigs not for fun/food, but because there
were too many to manage

Religion and Culture Change:
• Syncretism
• Revitalization movements:
o Prophets
o Nativistic
o Revivalistic
o Millenarian
o Messianic
• Cargo cults:
o Melanesian revitalization movements
o Early 20th century
o Imitative magic

Role of Founders in Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam:
• Began in revitalization movements
• Founders: individuals with divine inspiration
o Buddhism: Siddartha Geutama – 6th century BCE

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o Christianity: Jesus – 1st century CE

o Islam: Muhammad – 6th century CE
• After death of founders, disciples spread faith to others
• Eventually, religious doctrines standardized

Religion and Globalization:
• Proselytism:
o Attempt to convert a person or group from one religion to another
o Buddhism, Christianity, Islam
• Fundamentalism:
o Commitment to defend traditional religious beliefs
o Christian
o Islamic

Professor’s Research:
• Hyderabad (Rangareddy) and Andhra Pradesh – cities
• South Asia (South, Central India)
• Goddesses (Hinduism) – characteristics their share: fair skin
• Village goddesses vs. classical goddesses
• Focus: looking at a non-Hindu festival called Bonalu (means meals) – the idea of
offering meals to a goddess
• How did the festival go from a small family village level festival to a major festival in
the center city (hundreds of thousands of people)
o Rural # urban migration (when they come to the cities they bring their
rituals with)
• Village goddess – (amma = mother)
o Ammoru
! Carves out of a tree trunk, no body
o Maiasamma
! No body or face – roadside shrine
o Mutalayamma – Professor studied this one (Hyderabad)
! Original goddess’ image replaced
! Pulled them out of a well – made offerings to the stone
! Eyes – human appearance
! Silk wrapped around stone
! First stage in this piece of stone becoming a goddess of worship
! Now associated with Sheba (pitchfork symbol) – classical god

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• Anthropomorphism: the goddess in the form of a tree and a protector in the form of
a stone
o Tree (mother), stone (brothers – “potturaja”) – symbols of nature
• Story of the goddess born in a graveyard
o If we don’t worship her, for her power, small pox and paralysis will come
o Also worship for the well-being of children, fertility and householders
o “God is society writ large” – pray for nature, production (farming),
procreation, freedom from disease
! Not asking for money, etc – praying for basic things/needs
! God is a reflection of the people and their needs
• Village goddesses vs. classical (Hindu) goddesses
o Village:
! Non-vegetarian
! Meat
! Want blood
! Love liquor
! Always single
! Want them to pray in a vernacular language
! No priest
o Classical (Hindu):
! Vegetarian
! Fruit
! No-blood
! No liquor
! Consort – pair up
! Sanskrit language
! Priest
• Toddy tappers:
o Toddy = sap of the palm tree
o Drain the sap of the tree by tapping it, but not to the point of killing the tree
o Make liquor out of the sap (Arack)
• Women wear “pots” on their heads – the offerings to the goddesses
o Yellow and red
o Leaves
o Cooling substances – offering the goddess cooling foods to make the goddess
happy
o Offering these things to hope the goddess keeps you free of small pox
o Marking the steps on the way up to the temple – yellow and red markings

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o Sacrifice animals on the way up too (Goats, chickens, etc)

Adaptation:
• Classicization: take a folk idea and link it to the greater tradition (classical tradition)
• Catholic church has adapted to a Christian church

CHAPTER 13 – The Arts
• Frieze of the Black Horses – Lascaux II – France
• Piss Christ – Andre Serrano – 1987
• Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers – Van Gogh – 1888
• The Mona Lisa – Da Vinci – 1503-1505
• Migrant Mother – Dorothea Lange – 1936
• Square Dancing – Laird Goulet – around 2010

What is Art?:
• Artifacts of human creation
• Created through exceptional skill
• Intended to affect the senses
• Shares stylistic conventions with similar works
• Art is guided by aesthetics:
o Philosophies about what ahs beauty and value in art
• Cultural assumptions about appropriate:
o Media for making art
o Styles of painting, sculpting, oral traditions
o Dance movements

Cultural Aesthetics:
• Attitudes toward art and artists vary cross-culturally
• Aesthetic paradigms – art may be:
o Mimetic
o Representational
o Instrumental
o Emotionalist
o Formalist

Mimetic Art:
• The mimetic paradigm is concerned with the art work itself
• It is a reflection of nature

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• The work is a correct representation of reality

• Ex: “A Young Hare” – Albecht Curer 1502

Representational Art:
• Art that imitates, idealizes, or symbolizes form and experience
• Ex: “The Oath of the Horatii” – Jacques-Louis David 1784

Instrumental Art:
• Art that attempts to have a beneficial effect on society, enriching peoples lives,
teaching moral lessons, and providing insights for improving and changing the world
• Ex: “The Third of May” – Francisco de Goya 1814
• Ex: Michael Jackson and Bubbles – Jeff Koons 1988
• Ex: Banksy – Follow you dreams, cancelled

Emotionalist Art:
• Art that attempts to express the artist’s feelings or to release the feelings of the
viewer
• Ex: “Composition VII” – Kandinsky 1913

Formalist Art:
• Abstract art that focuses on the formal qualities of art – colour, composition, sound,
words, or movement
• Ex: “Composition with Gray and Light Brown” – Piet Mondrian 1918
• Ex: “Earth and Green” – Mark Rothko 1951

Body Art:
• Scarification
o Artistic and ritualistic scarring of the face or other parts of the body in
particular designs – commonly used to mark transitions to adulthood
• Tattooing
o Injecting inks or dyes under the skim to produce designs
• Piercing
• Clothing
• Body painting
• Jewelry

Origins and Functions of Art Objects:
• Embellished utilitarian objects

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o Crafts
• Artisans: specialists in the production of works and art – crafts perform artisans
• Gender differences in art production
o Men did wood carving and painting = art
o Women were trained, but their work was never taken seriously – not art
o Women did blankets, baskets, beadwork = craft
o Art will always been more important/greater than craft
• Ritual/ceremonial art
o Sand paintings

Art vs. Craft:
• Art requires creativity, takes time and resources, free from financial constraints –
does not need to be sold
• Craft requires skill and a commercial mind, but no creativity
• Craft is performed by artisans

The Origins of Art:
• 30,000-50,000 years ago
• Meanings and purpose unknown
o Cave paintings
o Rock paintings
o Venus figurines
! Oldest = willendorft venus – stylized image of female body (pregnant)
o Squatting goddesses in India
! Birthing position
! Women as a vessel of reproduction

The Arts of Sound and Movement:
• Musical styles
• Sacred or secular
• Song
• Dance
• Ethnomusicology: the study of music from an anthropological perspective

Oral Literature and Written Texts:
• Oral literature: stories that people tell about their sacred past, their secular
histories, and their personal lives
o Stories we tell ourselves about ourselves

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• Folktales: secular stories that relate events that teach moral lessons or entertain
listeners
o Part of socialization and enculturation – everyday childhood
o Ex: Hansel and Gretel – moral: stranger danger, don’t be greedy
• Stylistic features of narratives
o Begin “once upon a time”, “long, long ago”, with a flood
• Storytelling and performance style
• Proverbs – traditional advice and admonitions
• Riddles – impart cultural knowledge and wisdom (help enculturate children)
• Written texts and visual beauty

Art and Globalization:
• Global processes
o Effects on indigenous arts
o Reproducing art that is not part of their culture
• Diffusion of art styles
o Colonialism
o Travel: performers and tourists
o Migration
• World music
o Removed from lived contexts
! Ex: listening to afrocuban music in Canada – it changes and does not
make sense in this context always
o Blending of styles

Art and Identity:
• Art objects and styles as carriers of cultural identity
• Art and ethnicity in multiethnic societies
o Iconic use of dance and music
o Ex: Indian student groups in univ, putting on bollywood dance performances
(expressing Indian-ness
• Control of nation identity in states
o Banning certain arts
o Nature, beauty, children = encouraged
o Anything negative or non-soviet were banned

Art in the Global Economy:
• Incorporation of indigenous peoples into regional, national, and global networks

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• Influence of market demands on styles and motifs

• Art for export market may be major sources of income

Art and Tourism:
• Ecotourism and cultural tourism
• Traditional meanings and sacred forms transformed as entertainment
• Ethnic art

CHAPTER 14 – Living in a Global World

What is Globalization?:
• The process by which the world increasingly becomes one market, dominated by
electronic culture
• Scope and scale is changing – happening much faster
• Examples: Colonialism, Language, Agriculture, Sweatshops
• Neoliberalism: minimal government interference

The Global Economy:
• International market replacing nation-state as main focus of economic activity
• Reorganization of investment, production, and trade
• Increase in scale and power of transnational corporations
• Liberalization of government economic policies
• Unequal distribution of benefits
o Ex: privatization of water (Bolivia)
• Rural-to-urban migration of unskilled workers (urbanization)

Cultural Minorities:
• Members of ethnic or cultural groups who have become minorities in their native
lands, due to:
o Migrations of other peoples into their territories
! Ex: Aboriginals in Canada, Dubai, etc
OR
o Historical configurations of a nation-state made up of diverse groups
! Ex: Yugoslavia (broke up into separate countries),

Migration:
• Voluntary migrant:
o Temporary:

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! Students
! Work permits
o Permanent:
! Immigrants
• Even work permits for example is not always voluntary – need to make money for
families (India, etc)
• Migration is not always by choice (leave because they have to leave)
• Refugees:
o War
o Civil strife
o Asylum seekers
• Immigration in Canada
o Before 1961: 90% Europe, 6% Other, 4% Asia
o 1991-2001: 59% Asia, 20% Europe, 21% Other
o Origin in foreign born population of Canada: 21% Other, 37% Asia, 42%
Europe
• In between voluntary migrants and refugees, there are floating populations
• Floating populations: China – large groups of people, mostly unskilled workers, that
become part of China’s manufacturing company

Ethnogenesis (birth of a culture) and Ethnic Identity:
• Formation and reformation of ethnic groups
• Ethnic labels
• Politicization of ethnic identity
• Tribalization: the process of identification with ones tribal origins
• Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality
• Definition for ethnicity:
o Proper name
o Myth of common ancestry
o Shared historical memories
o Elements of common culture
o Link with a homeland
o Sense of solidarity

MOVIE: Call Centers:
• Globalization
• Western culture taking over (culturally, economically, linguistically)
• Asking the people change who they are a bit (people receiving the call)

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• Indian’s mimic Americans with their accents at call centers

• Changing identities for other people
• Americans want to talk to other Americans

Transnationalism:
• Processes by which immigrants maintain social, economic, religious, and political ties
to both their immigrant communities and their communities back home
• Trans = cross
• Also knowledge that is passes back and forth between nations

Nationalism and Pluralism:
• Nationalism: allegiance to the nation as a symbolic identity
o 18th-20th centuries
o Nation=contested
o Anderson imagined communities
o Nations divide based on religion, ethic groups, language, culture, boundaries,
folklore
! Artificial idea – ex: Canada does not have just one of any of those
(many religions, many languages, etc)
o Do we feel a strong tie to Canada, or would we pick up and leave if given the
chance?
o Ethnic cleansing: when we want people who don’t belong in Canada to leave
• Ethnic groups as structural features in states
• Tensions between ethnic differences and national identity – state strategies
• Decolonization and ethnic pluralism
o Ex: Aboriginal decolonization, India (pre-British 1947) – get rid of the colony
and make a nation
! Difficult with so many different cultures, languages, religions
o Decolonization results in violence

Islamization:
• The process of imposing the Islamic religion and associated cultural values within a
nation to foster cultural uniformity
• Also Christianization, Indianization, etc (different parts of the world) to foster
cultural uniformity
• Indonesia: 4th largest nation, largest Muslim nation, send Javanese people to
colonize the rest of the country (spreading the ideas of Islam)


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Reactions Against Pluralism:

• Pluralism: two or more states coexist and come together
• Anti-immigration
o Changes groups
o Mostly against Asians and women (especially Asian women)
• Xenophobia
o Fear of outsiders/difference
o Leads to anti-immigration laws and institutionalized discrimination
• Discrimination

Globalization and Cultural Identities:
• Global culture of consumerism
o Consuming other cultures
o Ex: Western corporations consuming other cultures (McDonalds)
o Ex: Westerner’s consuming Shakira (half Lebanese and half Columbian)
• Global identity based on social class
o Ex: University students sharing social class based on age (not based on
gender, ethnicity, race, etc)
• Influence of mass media
• Global spread of English

Cultural Minorities and Indigenous Peoples in a Global World:
• Indigenous peoples: comparatively homogeneous peoples or small-scale societies
who share the same culture and are “native” to their territory, or have occupied it
for a long time

United States and Canada:
• History:
o Colonization of Aboriginal peoples and their lands
o Federal jurisdiction over Aboriginal communities
! Very different in US (kill them) vs. Canada (make treaties)
! Converting nature into culture
! Converting chaos into order
! Conversions are often violent (physically and mentally)
o Historical policies of assimilation
• Issues today:
o Self-government and limited sovereignty
o Land claims and resource rights

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Oka Crisis – 1992:
• Sacred burial ground for Aboriginals and Oka people wanted to create a golf course
on the land
• Aboriginals became violent protecting their cemetery/land
• Canadian forces vs. Mohawk rebels
• Golf course cancelled
• The idea of developing policies of indigenous rights issues and land claims came
from this for the Aboriginals

Mexico and Indigenismo:
• Inconsistent government policies toward indigenous peoples
• 1993 Constitution – Idigenismo
• Development of resources and ignoring of indigenous rights
• Led to the Zapatista movement
o Small part of Mexico fought back
o Music was used to get the message of the Zapatista movement across in
Mexico

Brazil and the “Indian Problem”:
• Indigenous communities mostly in isolated regions in the Amazon
o Wavering government protection of indigenous lands and rights
o Operation Amazonia – opened up the rainforest for development
o Yanomami at risk – extinction, changing, and losing their culture
o “Urban Indians” – ex: Indian coming to New York (short clip)

Costs of Economic Development in Ecuador and Bolivia:
• Majority population of indigenous peoples
• Movements to oppose resource extraction and development of indigenous
territories
• Oil drilling and pipelines
• Coalitions with environmental groups

Developments in Africa:
• Complex delineation of “indigenous” and “tribal” peoples
• Sudan and the Dinka
o Control of water
• Kenya and Tanzania

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o Maasai and Barabaig lands

• Nigeria and the Ogoni
o Oil drilling and bioprospecting

Legal Rights and International Recognition:
• Coalitions to protect lands and cultural rights
• UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples
o Indigenous people do have rights and need to be recognized
• International law and claims to land, resources, and cultural heritage

CHAPTER 14 – Part 2 – A Global World:

Views of the Political Economy:
• Modernization theory: a theory that argues that they social change occurring in non-
Western societies under colonial rule was a necessary and inevitable prelude to
higher levels of social development that had been reached by the more ‘modern’
nations
• Dependency theory: a theory that argues that the success of ‘independent’ capitalist
nations has required the failure of ‘dependent’ colonies or nations whose economies
have been distorted to serve the needs of dominant capitalist outsiders
• World-system theory: a theory that argues that, from the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries, European capitalism began to incorporate other regions and
peoples into a world system whose parts were linked economically but not politically
• Core: in world-system theory, the nations specializing in banking, finance, and highly
skilled industrial production
• Periphery: in world-system theory, those exploited former colonies that supply the
core with cheap food and raw materials
• Semi-periphery: in world-system theory, states that have played peripheral roles in
the past but that now have sufficient industrial capacity and other resources to
possibly achieve core status in the future

Cultural Processes in a Global World:
• Globalization: reshaping of local conditions by powerful global forces on an ever-
intensifying scale
• 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world countries (way of ranking the world)

Globalization and the Nation-State:

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• Diaspora: migrant populations with a shared identity who live in a variety of

different locales around the world; a form of transborder identity that does not
focus on nation-building
o Indian Diaspora – nationality Diaspora
o Sikh Diaspora (Khalistan movement) –religious Diaspora
o Telugu Diaspora – language Diaspora
• Diaspora implies a return to the homeland in the future
o Leave and come back (focus on the return)
o Reasons for leaving: economic, voluntarily, by force, etc
• Long-distance nationalists: members of a Diaspora who begin to organize in support
of nationalist struggles in their homeland or to agitate for a state of their own
o Ex: Khalistan movement (Sikh’s living outside of India, in Canada and US, who
are fighting for a homeland (Palestine)
• Transborder state: a form of state in which it is claimed that those people who left
the country and their descendants remain part of their ancestral state, even if they
are citizens of another state
• Transborder citizenry: a group made up of citizens of a country who continue to live
in the homeland plus the people who have emigrated from the country and their
descendants, regardless of their current citizenship
o Ex: non-resident Indian (NRI) – whether they live in India or not, they are still
apart of the nation and considered Indian (have special rights – financial
incentives)
• Legal citizenship: the rights and obligations of citizenship accorded by the laws of a
state
• Substantive citizenship: the actions people take, regardless of their legal citizenship
status, to assert their membership in a state and to bring about political changes
that will improve their lives
• Transnational nation-states: nation-states in which the relationships between
citizens and their states extend to wherever citizens reside
o Ex: being on the move (living in multiple countries in a year)
o Ex: being born abroad
• Many people from transnational nation-states have flexible citizenship
• Flexible citizenship: the strategies and effects employed by managers, technocrats,
and professionals who regularly move across state boundaries and who seek both to
circumvent and benefit from different nation-state regimes
• Sexual citizenship: the concept of sexual citizenship bridges the private and public,
and stresses the cultural and political sides of sexual expression
• All of our citizenship is sexed

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• Post-national ethos: an attitude toward the world in which people submit to the
governmentality of the capitalist market while trying to evade the governmentality
of nation-states
o People will soon swear loyalty to corporations/corporate groups rather than
a nation-state
• Multiculturalism: living permanently in settings surrounded by people with cultural
backgrounds different from your own and struggling to define the degree to which
the cultural beliefs and practices of different groups should or should not be
accorded respect and recognition by the wider society

Rights versus Culture:
• Human rights: a set of rights that should be accorded to all human beings
everywhere in the world
o 2 major arguments:
! Human rights are opposed to culture and that they two cannot be
reconciled
! A key universal human right is precisely ones right to culture

Rights to Culture:
• Anthropologists’ contributions to debates about rights and culture:
o Anthropologists have addressed the ways in which human rights discourse
can be seen as culture
o They have mounted a critique of some of the ways that the concept of
culture has been mobilized in the discussion of human rights

Culture as a Way of Thinking about Rights:
• Two lessons:
o It is possible to find ways of accommodating the universal discourse of
human rights to the particularities of local conditions
o No single model of the relationship between rights and culture will fit all
cases

Cultural Imperialism:
• The idea that some cultures dominate other cultures and that cultural domination
by one culture leads inevitably to the destruction of subordinated cultures and their
replacement by the culture of those in power
o Ex: Halloween in Australia, Easter

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• Cultural imperialism does not seem to explain the spread of Western music, fashion,
food, and technology for 3 reasons:
o It denies agency to non-Western peoples who make use of Western cultural
forms
o It assumes that non-Western cultural forms never move ‘from the rest to the
West’ – ex: anamay from Japan
o It ignores the fact that cultural form sand practices sometimes move from
one part of the non-Western world to other parts of the non-Western world,
bypassing the West entirely – we are not always the center
• Global flows are uneven (not smooth)
• Global flows vs. globe-hopping

Cultural Hybridization and Cosmopolitanism:
• Hybridity: cultural mixing
o Ex: immigration policies in North America to encourage Sikh men to marry
Mexican women (cultural mixing)
o Not such thing as a pure culture – mixing cultures is always tainted
• Cosmopolitanism: being at ease in more than one cultural setting
o Ex: travel without feeling culture shock, not at ease, etc

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Lecture notes, Cultural Anthropology all lectures

Cultural Anthropology (University of Manitoba)

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Cultural Anthropology 2015-11-09 12:34 PM

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o Observing and documenting peoples ways of life

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• Practices and beliefs form a relatively coherent and consistent system

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• Examined the moral order of Europe

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• Franz Boas (1858-1942) – Anthropologist

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• Judgment sample: a sample of research informants selected according to how well

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• How this type of film differs from other types of film

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• Sociolinguistics: study of the impacts of socioeconomic factors, such as gender and

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! Amok – Southeast Asian disorder

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Exam Review – Terms and Concepts 2015-11-09 12:34 PM

Anthropology: study of humanity

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Key Features of Language:

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Cultural Anthropology 2015-11-09 12:34 PM

CHAPTER 5 – Making A Living

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• To prevent overgrazing, pastoralists take their herds to different grazing areas

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• Market economy – commodification of resources, land, labour

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• Ideas and rules about rights to resources

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o Example: potlatch, pacific Northwest First Nations

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Impacts of Colonial Expansion, Industrialism, and Globalization:

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o Indigenous languages were forbidden

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o Both matrilineal and patrilineal descent

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• Exogamy: marrying outside your lineage

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o Adaptive in societies where women serve important economic roles