1. Ch.8:Gender
1.1. This chapter reviews the topic of gender studies and how it is constructed in human culture. Gender is an identity that assigned to people of different sexes formed by behavior and culture. Gender differs from biological sex as it focuses more giving one's an assigned identity based on their physical attributes.
1.1.1. "Over a lifetime, gender becomes a powerful, and mostly invisible, framework that shapes the way we see ourselves and others (Bern 1981, 1983). Our relationships with others become an elaborate gendered dance of playing, dating, mating, parenting, and loving that reinforces our learned ideas of masculinity and femininity and establishes differing roles and expectations. Gender is also a potent cultural system through which we organize our collective lives, not necessarily on the basis of merit or skill but on the constructed categories of what it means to be a man or a woman (Rubin 1975; Lorber 1994; Cohen 2001; Bonvillain 2007; Brettell and Sargent 2009)." (pg.273)
2. Ch.4: Language
2.1. This chapter tells how language in humans originated from our primate relatives (chimpanzees, and other apes). Language is a system of words , sounds and gestures which shapes cultural categories such as race, gender, class, and age. The effects of globalization on language consolidates the use of language in small groups and threatening the extinction of other groups.
2.1.1. "Languages develop over time to enable human groups to adapt to a particular environment and to share with one another information that is essential to their local culture. When a language is lost, when it is crowded out by more widely used languages, we lose all of the bodies of information and local knowledge that had been developed — perhaps over thousands of years — by that community. Within a language is embedded rich knowledge about plants, animals, and medicines. Within a language is embedded a particular group’s unique way of knowing the world and thinking and talking about human experience. (pg.140) GUEST,KENNETH J. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: a Toolkit for a Global Age. W W NORTON, 2023.
3. Ch.12: The Global Economy
3.1. This chapter tells us about economy and how its purpose is a set of ideas, activities, technologies, that enable society with resources to satisfy their needs. Over the course of history humans have developed different economic strategies such as food foraging, pastoralism, horticulture, agriculture, and industrialism.
3.1.1. "Beginning in the 1500s, European colonialism played a pivotal role in establishing the framework for today’s global economic system. Patterns of trade in slaves, sugar, furs, and cotton, enforced through military interventions, drew together the people, politics, economics, and even diseases of Europe, Africa, and the Americas in a triangle of previously unimaginable, highly unequal, and long-lasting relationships of exchange. Even today, we can find traces of many of these connections in the global economy — for example, the French military operating in Côte d’Ivoire" (pg.455) GUEST,KENNETH J. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: a Toolkit for a Global Age. W W NORTON, 2023.
4. Ch.6: Race and Racism
4.1. Race is a flawed system of characteristics that are based upon an individuals skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and eye color. Race effects people and how our society is shaped in terms of cultural institutions and the allocation of wealth, power, and privilege. Racism has existed all throughout our history and it is usually expressed through prejudiced beliefs, and discriminatory actions. Institutional racism is more of a structuralized racism that effects cultural institutions, policies, and systems.
4.1.1. "In the United States, stratification along racial lines is a legacy of discrete historical events that include slavery, Jim Crow legal segregation, expropriation of indigenous lands and immigration restrictions. Through these legal forms of institutional racism, the political, economic, and educational systems were organized to privilege whiteness. Today, despite the elimination of legal racial discrimination and segregation, patterns of inequality still break along color lines as a result of continuing individual and institutional racism. Such racism is evident in employment rates, income and wealth differentials, home ownership, residential patterns, criminal sentencing patterns, incarceration rates, application of the death penalty, infant mortality, access to health care, life expectancy, investments in public education, college enrollments, and access to the vote." (pg.233) GUEST,KENNETH J. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: a Toolkit for a Global Age. W W NORTON, 2023.
5. Ch.1: Anthropology in a Global Age
5.1. This chapter depicts how anthropologist's view different cultures and how globalization is helping anthropologists to discover increased movement of people, money, and goods from around the world.
5.1.1. "The field of anthropology emerged in the mid-nineteenth century during a time of intense globalization. At that time, technological inventions in transportation and communication were consolidating a period of colonial encounter, the slave trade, and the emerging capitalist economic system and were enabling deeper interactions of people across cultures." (pg.20) GUEST, KENNETH J. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: a Toolkit for a Global Age. W W NORTON, 2023.
6. Ch.9:Sexuality
6.1. Sexuality is based of gender, religion, race, and kinship. Another perspective of sexuality would be one's desires, beliefs, behaviors, physical contact, intimacy, and pleasure. In culture sexuality shapes what is normal and what isn't considered normal and how expressing your sexuality might effect others and how they might view you as.
6.1.1. "Western model that limits discussion to two categories: heterosexuality, or attraction to and sexual relations between individuals of the opposite sex; and homosexuality, or attraction to and sexual relations with members of the same sex. At times in Western cultures this heterosexual-homosexual binary may be supplemented by discussions of bisexuality, or attraction to and sexual relations with members of both sexes, and asexuality, or lack of attraction to others. The term transgender has emerged in recent decades to describe people whose gender identity or gender expression differs from the sex they were assigned at birth (Valentine 2007)." (pg.320)
7. Ch.2: Culture
7.1. This chapter tells us how culture is created by people and it can be a shared experience as a result of living in a community. In culture there are norms, values, and mental maps of reality. Culture and power are related through stratification which is an uneven distribution of resources and privileges among participants.
7.1.1. "Anthropology seeks to broaden our worldview, to enable people to see their own culture as one expression within the context of global cultural diversity, and to recognize that what may seem unusual or unnatural from one cultural perspective may be normal and commonplace from another." (pg.44) GUEST, KENNETH J. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: a Toolkit for a Global Age. W W NORTON, 2023.
8. Ch.3: Fieldwork and Ethnography
8.1. This chapter is about how ethnographic fieldwork is how we analyze how human societies work which includes gathering cultural, linguistic, archeological and biological data. Ethnography is how anthropologists display their data which is in the form of writing such as articles or books.
8.1.1. "Anthropologists often face moral and ethical dilemmas while conducting fieldwork. These dilemmas require us to make choices that may affect the quality of our research and the people we study. Indeed, the moral and ethical implications of anthropological research and writing are of deep concern within the discipline and have been particularly hot topics at various times in its history."(pg.100) GUEST,KENNETH J. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: a Toolkit for a Global Age. W W NORTON, 2023.
9. Ch.15:Religion
9.1. Religion is a diversity of symbols, rituals, myths, institutions, deities, religious experts, and groups. Religion is also a big part of human culture and what establishes expression and devotion and creative adaptations that people practice in their daily lives.
9.1.1. "In The Golden Bough ( 1890), anthropologist James Frazer (1854–1941) distinguishes between imitative magic and contagious magic. Imitative magic involves a performance that imitates the desired result, perhaps manipulating a doll or some other representation of the target of magic in the belief that the action will have direct imitative effect. Contagious magic centers on the belief that certain materials perhaps clothing, hair, fingernails, teeth that have come into contact with one person carry a magical connection that allows power to be transferred from person to person." (pg.593)
10. Ch.11: Class and Inequality
10.1. In this chapter it tells us how class is what dictates one's own power based off of wealth, income, and status which is controlled by the hands of the elite. Class is also effected by inequalities which are conflicts revolving race, gender, and ethnicity.
10.1.1. "Growing global inequality affects the life chances of the world’s population on many fronts, including hunger and malnutrition, health, education, vulnerability to climate change, and access to technology. Hunger is indeed a global problem. Although there is enough food in the world to feed everyone, it is unevenly distributed." (pg.434) GUEST,KENNETH J. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: a Toolkit for a Global Age. W W NORTON, 2023.
11. Ch.7:Ethnicity and Nationalism
11.1. This chapter analyses the role of ethnicity and how it is used for race when describing their group differences. Nationalism is applied to ethnicity when a ethnic community has a desire to combine, create, and maintain a nation-state in a location where a common destiny can be lived out.
11.1.1. "Across the world over the past two hundred years, people have shifted their primary associations and identifications from family, village, town, and city to an almost universal identification with a nation or the desire to create a nation. Yet despite our contemporary assumptions that identification with an ethnic group or a nation has deep history, anthropological research reveals that most ethnic groups and nations are recent historical creations, our connection to people within these groups recently imagined, and our shared traditions recently invented." (pg.255) GUEST,KENNETH J. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: a Toolkit for a Global Age. W W NORTON, 2023.