Ch.14 Flashcards
What is meant by a naturalizing discourse?
Claims that consider social categories as eternal and unchanging, rather than the result of history or culture.
These ranks have always been a part of human society.
Identify the three reasons anthropologists are suspicious of naturalizing discourses.
- They ignore historical evidence showing how present-day arrangments contrast with earlier social arrangments in society.
- Ignore variations in social arangments in other present day socities, which also show that social life may be irganized fifferently.
- Direct attention away from current social inequalities, insisting that these inequalitie are so deeply rooted that attempting to change them would be impossible.
Provide an example of “shared bodily substance”.
Blood line within a family
Define classes.
Hierarchically arranged groups are defined on economic grounds. Higher members have disportionally access to wealth where lower members have limited acess to wealth.
In terms of class and gender in Indonesia, how do members of the Indonesian middle class define themselves?
They don’t define themselves in terms of as members of a class but “as people who are educated/developed and thereby have to pursie a commitment to truth, justice, ethics, or beauty whild needing to deny their privliges satus.
Briefly describe how Indonesian middle class consumption patterns revolve around women (i.e., who is the frugal housewife, who replaced her, etc.).
Seen as a model for middle class distinction who was frugal fulltime house wife in the 80’s and 90’s. Viewed as domesticating income used for family consumption. The housewife was also became assoclated with corruption because she was increasibgly seen as a women who pressured her income earning husband through her feminine impilse to consume, corrupting her husband as he store to stratify his wife’s consumption demands.
It has been replaced by the women who claim respectability through Muslim piety. This has even been tarnished, by the latest elegant Islamic fashions. Women are now criticized for pursuing piety as a fashion statement rather than as a religious statement.
Consumption and feminity are closely linked components in the creation of selves shaped by class.
Identify and describe the two key concepts providing the foundation of the caste system in India.
Varna- wisepspread Hindu notion that Indian Society is ideally divided into priests, warriors, farmers, and merchants-four functionally subdivided analogous to the estates to the estates of medival and early modern Europe.
Jati-nlocalized groups; although jati names are frequently the names of occupations there is no universally agreed upon way go group may local Jatis within one or another of the four varnas.
Varna are more theoretical in nature but jati is everyday term used in most of local villages.
What two things distinguish a jati?
Briefly describe how certain foods and occupations are classed as pure or polluted.
Ranked from purest to polluted. Ranked highest are the vegetarian Brahmins who are pure enough to approach the gods. Carpenters and blacksmiths also eat a vegetarian diet, also have a high rank. Below them are the ones who eat a clean meat, which include saltmakers, farmers, and shepards who eat sheep, goats, chicken and fish, but not pork or beef. The lowest ranking are unclean meat eaters which include stoneworks and basketweaverseat pork) as well as leatherworkers(pork and beef). Occupations that involve slaughtering animals or touching polluted things are considered polluting.
Those that slaughter or wash dirty clothing are ranked lowest. Traditional work tht doesn’t involve polluting activites.
In what two ways have members in low-caste groups in urban India attempted to lift themselves off the bottom of society?
By imitating the ritual practices of higher castes by converting to non-Hindu religion.(Buhdhism and Christianity, in which caste plavs no role
The government passed legislation to improve economic and educational opportunities.
In what context did the concept of race develop in?
it developed in contex of European exploration, colonization, and conquest, beginning in the 15 century.
What was the European concept of race used both to explain and to justify?
Used to explain human diversity and to justify the domination of indigenous peoples and enslavement of Africans.
Racial thinking persists in the twenty-first century. What do anthropologists argue to suggest racial categories have their origins not in biology but in society?
Race is a culturally constructed social category whose members are identified on the basis of certin selected phenotypic features that are all said to share. Highly distoreted and more or less coherent set of criteria that members ofnsociety use to assign people to one or another culturally defined racial category. Once this exists they can treat itas racial categories as if they reflect blological reality in order to build institutins that Include or exclude particular culturally delfned races.
Is “whiteness” monolithic (i.e., do all “white people” share the same attributes)?
No it is not. Cultural attributes attributes supposedly shared by “white people” hav varied in different times and places.
What is colourism?
There are no fixed race boundries exist. Instead individuals negotiate their colour dentity anew in every social situation they enter, with the result that colour they might daim or be accorded changes from situation to situation.
