Essentials of Cultural Anthropology (1)

1. Part 3: Change in the Modern World

1.1. Chapter 11: The Global Economy

1.1.1. What is an Economy & Its purpose?

1.1.1.1. Distribution and Exchange

1.1.1.1.1. Exchange of goods and ideas appears to be central to the workings of culture, establishing patterns of interaction and obligation among people.

1.1.1.1.2. Reciprocity - exchange of resources.

1.1.1.1.3. Redistribution - a form of exchange and reallocated in a different pattern.

1.1.1.2. A cultural adaptation to the environment that enables a group of humans to use the avaiable land, resources, and labor to satisfy their needs and to thrive.

1.1.2. What are the Roots of Today's Global Economy?

1.1.2.1. Colonialism - the practice by which a nation-state extends political, economic and military power beyond its own borders over an extended period of time to secure acess to raw materials, cheap labor in other countries or regions.

1.1.2.2. The Triangle Trade

1.1.2.2.1. Among Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

1.1.2.3. Anti-colonial struggles

1.1.2.3.1. Haiti declared independence in 1804.

1.1.2.3.2. Latin America, Brazil declared independence in 1822.

1.1.3. Global Economy Reshaping Migration

1.1.3.1. Pushes and Pull: *Pushed* to migrate from their home community by poverty, famine, natural disasters, war, ethnic conflict, genocide,political reason or religious oppresion. *Pulled* to certain places by job opprtunities, higher wages, educational opportunities.

1.1.3.2. Bridges and Barriers: influenece who moves and where they go.

1.1.3.3. Types of immigrants

1.1.3.3.1. Labor immigrants

1.1.3.3.2. Professional immigrants

1.1.3.3.3. Entrepreneurial immigrans

1.1.3.3.4. refugees

1.1.3.4. "It costs $65,000. We borrowed some from my uncles. And some from friends who had already gone to New York. The rest we borrowed at really high interest. It will probably take me four or five years to pay it all off." (Guest, 320)

1.2. Chapter 12: Politics & Power

1.2.1. Origins of Human Political History

1.2.1.1. Band - small kinship-based group of foragers who hunt and gather for a living over a particular territory.

1.2.1.1.1. Limited resources to compete for -> minimal stratification of wealth and pwoer.

1.2.1.1.2. lives in the most remote areas of the planet.

1.2.1.2. Tribe - indigenous group ith its own set of loyalties and leaders living to some extent outside the control of a centralized authroitative state.

1.2.1.2.1. have negative stereotypes from poor social representation

1.2.1.2.2. largely egalitarian, with a decentralized power structure and consensus decision making.

1.2.1.3. Chiefdom - autonomous political unit composed of a number of villages or communities undeer permanent control of a paramount chief.

1.2.1.3.1. leadership was centralized under a single ruling authority figure.

1.2.1.3.2. the process of distribution served a central role in moderating inequality anf limiting conflict within the chiefdom.

1.2.2. Globalization affecting the State

1.2.2.1. struggling increasingly to control who and what enters and leaves their territories.

1.2.2.2. people joining together to form local organizations and movements to protest the social upheaval and uneven development that has accompanied the institution of neoliberal economic policies.

1.2.3. Are Humans naturally violent or peaceful?

1.2.3.1. De Waal suggests that among primates there are various options for resolving conflicts, including avoidance, tolerance, and aggression.

1.2.4. "Economic restructuring promoted by international financial institutions and implemented by the state has yielded a flourishing of civil society." (Guest, 344)

1.3. Chapter 13: Religion

1.3.1. What is Religion?

1.3.1.1. a set of beliefs and rituals based on a unique vision of how the world ought to be, often focused on a supernatural power and lived out in community.

1.3.1.2. seeking a working definition - compiled a vast and diverse set of data on religious beliefs and practices

1.3.2. Religion and Ritual

1.3.2.1. "Surprisingly, pilgrims to the shrine of Husain Tekri are of many religious backgrounds, not only Muslims but also Hindu, Sikh, and Jain." (Guest, 370)

1.3.2.2. Rites of Passage - a category of ritual that enacts a change of status from one life stage to another, either for an individual or for a group.

1.3.2.3. Pilgrimage - a religious journey to a sacred place as a sign of devotion and in search of transform and enlightenment.

1.3.3. Shamanism

1.3.3.1. part-time religious practitioners with special abilities to connect individuals with supernatural powers or beings.

1.3.3.2. lives as part of the local community, participating in daily activities and work, but are called on at times to perform special rituals and ceremonies.

1.3.3.3. generally associated with small agricultural or seminomadic societies, shamans today often relocate to contemporary urban settings along with their immigrant communities.

1.3.4. Blurring the Boundaries between Meaning and Power

1.3.4.1. Religion and Revolution in Mexico study: Catholicism - a faith that has been a key component of Mexican national identity ever since Spanish colonizers forcibly imported it 500 years ago. (Guest, 387)

1.3.5. Globalization and Religion

1.3.5.1. Cities serving as immigrant gateways - revitalize older religious institutions and construct new ones, often establishing deep ties to hgome and sophisticated networks of transnational exchange.

1.4. Chapter 14: Health, Illnessm and The Body

1.4.1. How anthropologists help solve health-care problems

1.4.1.1. apply research strategies and key theoretical concepts of our field to solve pressing public health problems, understand the spread of disease, and improve the delivery of health care.

1.4.1.2. Public health system in Rural Haiti

1.4.2. Medical Migration

1.4.2.1. Medical travelers cross borders to obesity, failed organs, infertility, and sexual dysfunction.

1.4.3. How does Culture Shape our Ideas and of Health and Illness?

1.4.3.1. Medical Migration

1.4.3.2. Multiple Systems of Healing

1.4.3.2.1. Hmong refugees - Colliding Culture

1.4.3.2.2. Bridging Cultural Divides via Illness Narratives

1.5. Chapter 15: Art and Media

1.5.1. all ideas, forms, techniques, and strategies that humans employ to express themselves creatively and to communicate their creativity and inspiration to others.

1.5.2. Anthropology of Art

1.5.2.1. Art is both created and received.

1.5.2.2. Fine Art vs Popular Art - From an anthropological perspective, art is not the sole province of the elites or professional artists.

1.5.2.3. cannot be underestimated as anthropologists consider the full expression of human life.

1.5.2.4. The expectations of art and the cultural frameworks for perceiving art may also vary from place to place and even within different cultures.

1.5.3. Relationship between Art and Power

1.5.3.1. staging dynamic engagements with these system of power, unmasking patterns of stratification, making the unconcsious conscious, and opening space for alternative visions of reality.

1.5.3.2. Black Girls' Playground games and the consctruction of gender identity

1.5.4. Ethnogrpahic Film and Indigenous Media

1.5.4.1. Indigenous media - the use of media by people who have experienced massive economic, political and geographic disruption to build alternative strategies for communication, survival, and empowerment.

1.5.4.2. Chinese villagers stay connected.

2. Part 1: Anthropology for the 21st Century

2.1. Chapter 1: Anthropology in a Global Age

2.1.1. What is Anthropology?

2.1.1.1. study of the full scope of human diversity, in order to understand one another.

2.1.1.2. Ethnocentrism: belief that one's own culture or way of life is normal and natural, hence judge the practices and ideals of others

2.1.1.3. Key characteristics

2.1.1.3.1. Global in Scope

2.1.1.3.2. Start with Local Communities

2.1.1.3.3. Study people and Structures of Power

2.1.1.3.4. Believe that Humans are Connected

2.1.2. Globalization

2.1.2.1. Key dynamics

2.1.2.1.1. Time-space Compression

2.1.2.1.2. Flexible Accumulation

2.1.2.1.3. Increasing Migration

2.1.2.1.4. Uneven Development

2.1.2.2. worldwide intensification of interactions and increased movement of omney, people and ideas within/ across borders.

2.1.3. Comprehensive view of Human Culture

2.1.3.1. Four-field approach: interrelated disciplines

2.1.3.1.1. archaeology: invetigation of human past through excavating and analyzing artifacts

2.1.3.1.2. linguistic anthropology: study human language in the past & the present

2.1.3.1.3. physical anthropology: study evolution and adaptation to the environments

2.1.3.1.4. cultural anthropology

2.1.3.2. Holism: commitment to look fully upon the human life, across space and time.

2.1.4. " Anthropologists have constantly worked to bring often-ignored voices into the global conversation. A a result, the field has a history of focusing on the cultures and struggles of non-Western and nonelite people." (GUEST 10)

2.2. Chapter 2: Culture

2.2.1. system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behaviros, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, shared, and contested by a grop of people

2.2.2. Hegemony: ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement without threatening or force

2.2.3. Impact

2.2.3.1. Consumerism

2.2.3.2. Globalization -> Homegenizing or Diversifying

2.2.3.2.1. Migration

2.2.3.2.2. Increasing Cosmopolitanism

2.2.4. "...But for anthropologists, culture is much more: It encompasses people's entire way of life." (GUEST 34)

2.2.5. What makes of Culture?

2.2.5.1. *Culture is learned and taught* - Humans establish cultural institutions as echanisms for enculturating their member.s

2.2.5.2. *Culture is shared yet contested* - "Culture is a shared experience developed as a result of living as a member of a group." (GUEST 35)

2.2.5.3. Culture is symbolic and material - "Norms, values, symbols, and mental maps of reality are four elements that an anthropologist may consider in attempting to understand the complex workings of a cuilture." (GUEST 36)

2.2.5.3.1. Norms: ideas or rules about how people should behave in particular situations or toward certai other people.

2.2.5.3.2. Values: fundamental beliefs about what is important.

2.2.5.3.3. Symbols: anything that represents something else.

2.3. Chapter 3: Fieldwork and Ethnography

2.3.1. " But it was more difficult to convince a mother to rescue a child she perceived as likely to die, a baby she already thought of as "an angel rather than a son or daughter." (GUEST 62)

2.3.2. ethnographic network: a primary research strategy in cultural anthropology typically involving living and interacting with a community of people over an extended period to better understand their lives.

2.3.3. Fieldwork

2.3.3.1. Uniqueness

2.3.3.1.1. *begins with people* - understand peopl's everyday lives, and to see what they do & to understand why.

2.3.3.1.2. *shapes the anthropologists* - enables them to perceive our own cultural activities in a new light.

2.3.3.1.3. *as social science and as art* - an experiment for testing hypotheses and building theories about the diversity of human behavior and interaction of people with systems of power. Fieldwork depends on the anthropologist's more intuitive ability to negotiate coplex interactions, to be conscious of one's own biases and particular vantage point.

2.3.3.1.4. *Informs daily life* - a strategy for gethering information that will help the anthropologist make informed decisions in order to act morally and weigh in advance the likely consequences of their actions.

2.3.3.2. Development

2.3.3.2.1. Franz Boas

2.3.3.2.2. Bronislaw Malinowski

2.3.3.2.3. Annette Weiner

2.3.4. Moral and Ethical Concerns

2.3.4.1. Do no harm

2.3.4.2. Obtain informed consent

2.3.4.3. Ensure Anonymity

2.4. Chapter 4: Language

2.4.1. A system of communication organzed by rules that uses symbols such as words, sounds, and gestures to convey information

2.4.2. Where does it come from?

2.4.2.1. "Our nearest primate relatives - chimpanzees, oranguatans, and other great apes - with some surprising results." (GUEST 94)

2.4.2.2. An array of vocalizations, passed along gentically through the generations.

2.4.2.3. the ability of humans to manipulate their vocal cords, tongue, and lips is far more limited than that of humans.

2.4.3. Descriptive linguistics

2.4.3.1. study of the consctruction of the sounds, symbols, and gestures of a language, and their combination into forms that communicate meaning.

2.4.3.2. phonemes: the smallest units that make a difference in meaning.

2.4.3.3. morphemes: smallest units of sound that carry meaning on their own

2.4.3.4. syntax: the specific patterns and rules for combingin morphemes to construct phrases and sentences.

2.4.4. Non-verbal communiation

2.4.4.1. Kinesics: study of the relationship between body movements and communication.

2.4.4.2. Paralanguage: an extensive set of noises and tones of voice that convey significant information about the speaker.

2.4.4.3. Sign language is a system of its own

2.4.4.4. Some of their meanings are not universal; they vary culture to culture.

2.4.4.4.1. thumbs-up in N.America

2.4.4.4.2. point with fingers, point with lips.

2.4.5. dialect: a nonstandard variation of a language

2.4.6. Effects of Globlaization

2.4.6.1. Diminishing language deiversity

2.4.6.2. Hastening language loss

2.4.7. "Globalization threatens the loss of many local languages, and with them their local knowledge and ways of understanding the world." (GUEST, 113)

3. Part 2: Unmasking the Structures of Power

3.1. Chapter 5: Race & Racism

3.1.1. racism: individuals' thoughts and actions and institutional patterns and policies that create or reduce unequal access to power, privilege, resources, and opportunities based on imagined diffrences among groups.

3.1.2. phenotype: ways for genes to express physical form as a result of genotype interaction with environmental factors.

3.1.3. Genotype: inhertied genetic factors that provide the framework for an orgnaism's physcial form.

3.1.4. Types of racism

3.1.4.1. Individual racism

3.1.4.2. Institutional racism

3.1.4.3. Racial ideology

3.1.5. "Anthropologists of race in the United States have studied the often "unmarked" category of whiteness. The privileges of whiteness in the United States are not experienced uniformly but rather are stratified along deep lines of class, region, gender, and sexuality." (GUEST, 146)

3.2. Chapter 6: Ethnicity & Nationalism

3.2.1. ethnicity: a sense of historical, cultural, and sometimes ancestral connection to a group of people who are imagined to be distinct from those outside the group.

3.2.2. "Ethnic boundaries are often fluid, messy, and contested." (GUEST 158)

3.2.3. Ethnicity as a Source of Conflict

3.2.3.1. genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic or religious group.

3.2.3.2. Hutu - Tutsi

3.2.4. Ethnicity as a Source of Opportunity

3.2.5. Assimilation & Mulrticulturalism

3.2.5.1. "Melting pot"

3.2.5.2. assimilation: process through which minorities accept the patterns and norms of the dominant culture and cease to exist as separate groups.

3.3. Chapter 7: Gender

3.3.1. Cultural Construction

3.3.1.1. the ways humans learn to behave as a man or woman and to recognize behaviors as masculine or feminine within their cultural context.

3.3.1.2. Teaching Gender in the United States

3.3.1.3. Constructing Masculinity in a U.S high school

3.3.2. Theory of Five Sexes

3.3.2.1. intersex: the state of being born with a combination of male and female genitalia, gonads, and/or chromosomes.

3.3.2.2. "The presence of middle sexes suggetss that we must reconceptualize one of our most rigid mental maps of reality -- the one separating male and female. (GUEST, 187)

3.3.2.3. transgender: a gender identity or performance that does not fit with cultural norms related to one's assigned sex at birth.

3.3.3. Challenging Gender Ideologies

3.3.3.1. Mothers of "The Disappeared" in El Salvador

3.3.3.2. gender stratification: an unequal distribution of power in which gender shapes who has access to a group's resources, opprtunities, rights, and privileges.

3.3.3.3. gender stereotypes: widely held preconceived notions about the attributes of, differences between, and proper roles for men and women in a culture.

3.3.4. "*Hijras* pften facxe extreme discrimination in employment, housing, health, and education. Many support themselves through begging, ritual performances, and sex work. Violene against them is not uncommon, particularly against *hijra* sex workers. (GUEST, 188)

3.4. Chapter 8: Sexuality

3.4.1. Sexuality and Culture

3.4.1.1. "humans are enculturated from birth to channel sexual feelings and desires into a limited number of acceptable expressions. Culture shape swhat people think is natural, normal, and even posisble." (GUEST, 211)

3.4.1.2. The meaning certain sexual desires and behaviors acquire in a particular culture has the potential to affect access to social networks, social benefits, jobs, health care, and other resources and to make people vulnerable to discrimination, marginalization, and violence.

3.4.2. The invention of Hetereosexuality

3.4.2.1. heterosexuality

3.4.2.2. homosexuality

3.4.2.3. bisexuality

3.4.2.4. asexuality

3.4.3. "White Weddings"

3.4.3.1. Constructing heterosexuality: bombarded with cultural symbols and messages about what it will take to have her very own white wedding.

3.4.3.2. These behaviors do not occur in nature.

3.4.3.3. Inequality and Unequal Access: Historically, the institution of heterosexual marriage included legal stipulations that effectively made women the economic and sexual property of their husbands.

3.4.4. The effects of globalization

3.4.4.1. homogenizing influence

3.5. Chapter 9 : Kinship, Family, and Marriage

3.5.1. How are we related to One Another?

3.5.1.1. Descent

3.5.1.1.1. descent groups: a kinship group in which primary relationships are traced through certain consanguineous

3.5.1.1.2. lineage: type of descent group that traces genealogical connection through generations by linking persons to a founding ancestor.

3.5.1.2. Marriage & Affinal ties

3.5.1.2.1. affinal relationship: a kinship relationship established through marriage and/or alliance, not thorugh biology or common descent.

3.5.2. The Nuclear Family

3.5.2.1. Family of Orientation: the family group in which one is born, grows up, and develops life skills.

3.5.2.2. Family of Procreation: the family group created when one reproduces and within which one rears children.

3.5.2.3. Chosen families

3.5.3. Are Biology and Marriage the only Basis?

3.5.3.1. Langkawi of Malaysia: the fostering has been common for nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and others who are welcomed into the foster family and treated on an equal basis with those born into the family.

3.5.4. "Not surprisingly, chosen families come in many shapes and sizes. Gay and straight friends, biological children, children adopted formally and informally, former lovers all can become kin." (GUEST, 255)

3.6. Chapter 10: Class & Inequality

3.6.1. Is inequality a natural part of human culture?

3.6.1.1. Egalitarian Societies: groups based on the sharing of resources to ensure success with a relative absence of hierarchy and violence.

3.6.1.2. Ranked Societies: groups in which wealth is not stratified but prestige and status are.

3.6.2. The construct

3.6.2.1. "Poor whites in Rural Kentucky?"

3.6.2.2. "Miners in Hazard, Kentucky, sit in a "break car" that will carry them down a coal mine shaft for their daily work shift. How does their sweat "trickle up"?" (GUEST, 275)

3.6.3. Why is it invisible?

3.6.3.1. Consumer Culture: Consumption patterns, fueled by deep indebtedness through credit cards, home mortgages, and educational loans, mask class differences at least on the level of acquisition of consumer goods.

3.6.4. The effects of Global Inequality

3.6.4.1. Street Vendors in Cochabamba: determined efforts of street vendors -- poor urban small business people -- to scrabble together a living against the odds in the only way available to them -- as precarious owners of the streets and side-walks of the informal city.

3.6.4.2. Circulation of water in Mumbai, India: class structures are made visible as poor Indian laborers travel across the city, passing shanties,and luxury buildings, seeing poverty and wealth and remebering having turned off a running hotel tap while standing in line for water.

3.6.4.2.1. Urban infrastructure plays a key role in establishing these patterns of class stratification and inequality.