2. Contemporary Culture Flashcards
What is the cultural lens?
The cultural lens is largely invisible but it’s how we view the world and learn to interact with each other.
People learn to relate to one another through a complex web of knowledge, beliefs, and practices.
What do ethnographers seek to understand?
Emic: cultural insiders-view
Etic: outside observers- view
Describe cultures three parts?
What we think, cognition.
All the ways we process information, perceive, understand and evaluate the world.
What we do, actions.
Interactions with each other are behavioral.
Culture guides behavior in ways that make people understand and act appropriately towards each other.
What we have, material.
Artifact, portable items, and features, non-portable items.
The things people make alter and use.
The four characteristics of culture?
Learned, from people around us. Agency in choosing what aspects are meaningful.
Shared understands allows people to understand each other and act appropriately.
Holistic, if one aspect is altering the others will change as well.
Based on sympols, anything that stands for something else. Language is one example.
Society/Group?
Shares a geographic space as well as similar rules and behavior.
Every culture has variations, the larger the society the more diversity exists
Societies and groups are made up of different ethnicities and subcultures aka identity markers.
Community?
Either people who live and work and play together or are connected by cultural norms and values wherever they live.
Identity markers?
Ethnicity/Cultural identity: socio-economic class, religion, age gender and interests
Affinity/Subcultures: People connected by similarities, like heritage or similar interests and ideas.
Heterogeneous culture?
Groups/societies that share few identity markers. A diverse society with many languages, religions and ethnicities.
Enculturation? + Primary transmitters of culture
Cultural knowledge is transmitted from one generation to the next in informal and formal ways.
People who have the most contact with infants or young children.
Biological adaptations?
Allow an organism to survive and reproduce,
Cultural adaptations?
All the ways humans use cultural knowledge to better succeed in their surroundings.
Maladaptive?
Behaviors that lead to a decrease in well-being for its members of a culture or the ability for the culture itself to survive.
Ways of assessing the adaptiveness of a culture?
Health - Physical and mental
Demographics _ Birth and mortality
Goods and services - Do the people have access to clean safe food and water
Order- Safety, rules for violence etc.
Enculturation - How well the culture gets passed on
Participant Observation?
A researcher lives the people and observes their everyday behavior, often for a year or longer. Reflecting and analyzing their observations and putting them into a larger cultural context.
Ideal vs. real behavior
Cognitive vs. behavioral
Ways field workers can work?
Formal interviews Informal interviews Life histories Case studies Kinship data Map-making Photography
Principles of Professional Responsibility?
Consider the possible impact of their actions on the dignity, health and material well-being of the people they are studying.
Praxis?
The use of ethnographic knowledge as power
Participatory action research/PAR?
A model of field research and implementations
Describe anthropology’s roots in colonial practices?
Knowledge was used to:
Stereotype
Control
Oppress
Fray Bernardino de Sahagún?
One of the first ethnographers
- Travelled to Mexico 1529
- Spend 50 years studying the Aztec people
John Locke end of the 1700th century? + tabula rasa
- First ideas that lead to the concept of culture
- Tabula rasa: We’re born as a blank slate, personality, thought and behaviors develop through life experiences and are not biologically programmed.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels?
- Published:
Communist Manifesto 1848
Das Capital 1867 - Focused on the poor industrial laborer
Believed that the way people engage in production shapes their consciousness = how people think and act is related to their work
Lewis Henry Morgan 1818-81?
Created a typology of all the stages of cultural evolution he believed all humans societies pass through:
Savagery -> Barbarism -> Civilization
Edward Burnett Tylor 1832-1917?
Professor of anthropology at Oxford
- Wrote the first anthropology textbook
- Firat definition of culture
Evolution of religious beliefs
- Rational explanations for hoe “primitive” peoples understood the word
Franz Boas 1858-1942?
“Father” of American anthropology
Experienced discrimination as a Jew
- Re-examination of racism through scientific pursuits
- Differences among people are cultural and not biological
Strongly believed in ethnographic fieldwork, to deeply understand people
Bronislaw Maliowski 1884-1942
Functionalism:
Cultures function to fulfill human biological needs.
Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908-2009?
Social life works due to innate structures of though
Example gift-giving led to alliances and social stability
Victor Tuner 1920-83?
Symbolic anthropology:
The theory argues that symbols are used throughout society to maintain order. Like rituals, where social order is reconstructed and affirmed
Clifford Geerts 1926-2006?
Thick description:
Field site in ethnography as a pathway to reading symbols like a test.
Understanding everyday behavior (codes and symbols) as the participants themselves understands them.
Feminist anthropology?
Aims to correct decades of anthropology that left our women and other marginalized groups -> led to the focus of postcolonial groups
Describe how cultural ban be fluid? Multicultural
Culture can be concentrated in one place, or spread across borders or virtually.
People who left their homeland and live in other places are biocultural.
Culture is not static but is always changing.
Ethnocentrism?
Our own customs are normal while others are strange, wrong or disgusting.
Cultural relativism?
The idea that all cultures are equally valid and beliefs and behaviors can only be interpreted in their own context.
Depandance training?
Child-rearing practices that support the family unit over the individual.
Extended family
Sense of self is strongly linked to the group
Independence training?
Childrearing practices that support the child’s independence.
Focus on developing skills so the child can be competitive and successful in life.
Industrial societies
Nuclear family
Sense of self is strongly linked to the individual.
Random sample?
Allow everyone an equal chance to be interviewed by selecting randomly
Judgment sample?
Selects informants based on skills, occupation, knowledge and sensitivity to cultural issues.
Snowball sample?
One informant introduces the ethnographer to other informants
Key informants?
Informants who are chosen for their special insight. The field worker will spend a lot of time with them.
