Definitions

Question 1

Marriage

Answer 1

1. The legal union of several people - the definition can vary widely in different societies. A form of regulating sex and procreation.
2. Different groups. Endogamy is when one marries someone within one’s own group. Exogamy is when one marries someone outside one’s own group.
3. Different number of people. Polygamy- more then two people. Polyandry is multiple men, polygyny is multiple women.
4. Different post-marital residences; partilocal, matrilocal. Marriage prestations: dowry, bridewealth
5. E.g Nuer Ghost Marriage - marries dead brothers wife. Or Oneida- North American large polygamous marriage.

Question 2

Subsistence

Answer 2

1. The action or fact of maintaining or supporting oneself, especially at a minimal level. Refers particularly to lifestyle including home and food.
   2 .Nomads are people who live without fixed domicile, subsisting either by hunting and gathering, slash-and-burn agriculture, or pastoralism. An example is the reindeer Saami of Norway.
2. Transhumance is a mode of subsistence based on pastoralism or animal husbandry, combined with agriculture, where the group is sedentary, but moves to better pastures once or twice a year. Norwegian sæterdrift is a well-known example.
3. Horticulturalists: root and tree crops; hoe, slash + burn
   technologies
   ‣ Agriculturalists: seed crops, draught animals; plow
   technologies
   Hunter-gatherers.
   Pastoralists: Subsistence from domesticated animals
4. Regulating consumption
   • Taboos – e.g. what meat to
   consume, which animals are
   food
   • Periodic fasting – Lent before
   Easter, Ramadan
   • Taste preferences – expressing
   belonging to certain groups

Question 3

Fieldwork

Answer 3

1. Observing the subjects of anthropological research in situ. Culture shock, learning language, earning trust, being impartial but participating, reciprocity and anominity.
2. Pioneered by Levi-Strauss and Malinowski
3. Suggested method is participant observation and an inductive approach. Can be at home or abroad.
4. Famous examples include Evans-Pritchard and the Azande ‘Witchcraft, Magic and Oracles among the Azande’ and Nuer, Malinowski and the Trobrainers ‘ Argonauts of the Western Pacific’ and Napoleon Chagnon and the Yanomamo ‘The Fierce People’
5. Requires Ethical Committee approval; famous unethical examples include Malinowski’s diary and Chagnon/Good/Lizot

Question 4

Religion

Answer 4

1. A particular system of faith and worship. •Gives meaning and offers euphoria, Strengthens and enables self-discipline, Connects, Offers practical answers
2. Described by early anthropologists as a remnant of neurotic childhood fantasies (Freud) and pre-logical (Lévy-Bruhl)
3. Types: Magic
   • Totemism – belief that people have a connection or
   kinship with an animal or a plant?
   • Fetishism – cult of things (Durkheim)?
   • Animism – belief that natural objects and non-human
   entities are animated by spirits (Müller, Tylor)?
   • Animatism - belief in generalised, impersonal power
   (e.g. Mana in Polynesian cultures)?
4. Syncretism e.g Chrislam in Nigeria
5. Cargo cults In Melanesia since II World War, but also
   in Fiji, Indonesia, Australia

Question 5

Classification

Answer 5

1. The act of assigning categories to things based on their characteristics.
2. Mary Douglas - Purity and Danger (1966). Human beings construct categories of classification: PURITY, ORDER. Need for order: UNIVERSAL.
   Categories: CULTURALLY SPECIFIC.
3. Totemism -people employ animal forms of life to establish taxonomic classifications of society
4. Lele people (Congo), pangolin cult
5. Anomalies have no category:dangerous, polluting, threatening. Dirt is matter out of place, out of category. Categories create gender roles, norms of behaviour etc..

Question 6

Exchange

Answer 6

1. An act of giving one thing and receiving another (especially of the same kind) in return. Exchange became an important concept in anthropology around 1920.
2. Exchange can be seen as a metaphor of interaction generally, a form of precapitalist economic systems and from a structuralist view (Lévi-Strauss), kinship based on the exchange of women.
3. Every form of giving is a form of exchange; even if it is subconcious, we expect something in return.
4. Malinowski’s empirical studies of trade systems among the Trobrianders - Kula Ring
   Potlatch: Competitive feasting and gift giving
   Cargo system: Obligation to throw a party
5. The Gift, Marcel Mauss obligation of giving gifts
   - obligation to accept gifts
   - obligation to return the gift
   - Creates a moral bond
   - Gift cycle holds societies
   together

Question 7

Gender and sex

Answer 7

1. Gender- a social construct based on biological differences, that dictate social relationships and norms e.g gender roles.
   Sex- male and female, based on chromosomes, secondary sexual characteristics and genitals.
2. Gender roles build norms - sanctions for breaking them included violence, sexism, isolation.
3. Anomalies e.g Third Gender e.g Two Spirit, Native American
4. Factors that influence the construction of sex/gender: biology, cultural setting, political-economy social class, race
5. Ideas of fem and masculinity: e.g Matthew Gutmann, The Meaning of Macho, on men in Mexico City.

Question 8

Descent

Answer 8

1. Kinship figured “downwards” from grandparents to parents to children to grandchildren etc.
2. In many societies, descent is an important principle for distribution of inheritance and definition of group membership (e.g. “sons of X are friends, sons of Y are enemies”).
3. Cognatic (bilateral) descent is counted along both the mother’s and the father’s line. Matrilineal descent is counted along the mother’s line (grandmother-mother-daughter-granddaughter). Even though descent is counted from mother to daughter, matrilineal inheritance is normally transferred from man to man: not from father to son, but from a woman’s brother to her son. Patrilineal descent (and inheritance) follows the father’s line (grandfather to father to son to grandson).
4. While linear kin are counted “downward”, by descent, through the kinship system (father-son-grandson), lateral kin are kinfolk “to the side” (siblings and affinals). Descent group is defined on the basis of descent from a common ancestor or ancestress.
5. Bilateral such as Himba of Namibia. “Eskimo” terminology: no distinctions between male and female lineages.

Question 9

Sanctions

Answer 9

1. Negative and positive reactions to divergence from the norm, to encourage or discourage behaviour. A form of social control.
2. Types of sanctions
   ‣ Diffuse/informal: spontaneous, individual e.g.
   avoidance, ridicule, chastisement
   ‣ Systemic bias: structural advantages in e.g.
   media/organisations
   ‣ Organised/Formal: traditionally recognised
   procedures
   3.Positive:
   • honours, titles, rewards
   ‣ Negative:
   • public reprobation, exclusion from
   social life, loss of property/wealth,
   physical harm
   ‣ Religious “sins”:
   • considered to dis/please the sacred
   order; “neutralising” aspects
3. American war veterans and medals, Estonian shame songs.
4. Religious sanctions also serve to regulate behaviour and explain incomprehensible phenomena.Witchcraft,sorcery and other magical practices instil fear and thereby act as effective sanctions that lead to the conformity to proper behaviour. Azande

Question 10

Modernity

Answer 10

1. how “local,” usually non-Western people, adapt objects, ideas, and symbols from global circuits of production, consumption, and knowledge, indigenizing, resignifying, appropriating, and hybridizing them in the process’
2. James Ferguson, 1999 Expectations of Modernity
   Zambia, copper miners
   -1930-1950s: economic growth, urbanization
   -1950s-1970s: collapse, back to rural life
3. expectations of modernity
   ‘desire to gain access to the first-class things of the world’
   e.g. money, car, suit
4. abjection
   the feeling of being ‘thrown aside, expelled, or discarded’ and stuck into ‘the ranks of the “second class”’ (p. 236)
5. Many indigenous women want “successful” non-indigenous men and jobs and clothes

Question 11

Power systems

Answer 11

1.Controls every aspect of life, class, distribution of wealth and political control, who can marry who, what jobs people can do. Discriminating according to ascribed status
• Republic of South Africa until 1994
• Hitler’s Germany
• Discriminating according to achieved status:
• Stalinist Soviet Union
2. Egalitarian societies have no other power structures than those based on gender and age.
3. Class societies
• Primarily in capitalist societies (private property, wage labour)
• Hierarchical division based on property but also social status,
concentrating resources in one segment of society
4. Rank/status societies
• Chiefdoms
• Feudal societies
5. •Cast system (India, Rwanda)
• Belonging ascribed by birth
•Determines roles, rules,
professions one can have

Question 12

Postmarital residence

Answer 12

1. The residence a newly married couple will move to. Closely linked to ideas of gender hierachy and lineage.
2. Matri- or Uxorilocal - moving to the woman’s home. Patri- or Virilocal - moving to the man’s home. Neolocal - new home.
3. 70% of the world are patrilocal
4. . Although an increase in the female contribution to subsistence tends to lead to matrilocal residence, it also tends simultaneously to lead to general non-sororal polygyny which effectively destroys matrilocality, and pushes a social system toward patrilocality.
5. The verbs for marriage in the Hungarian language show evidence of patrilocality. The verb for “to marry”, when done by a woman, is férjhez menni, literally meaning “to leave [the family home] for the husband”.

Question 13

Evolutionism

Answer 13

1. Social theory developed in the 19th century, which had fundamental influence on sociological and anthropological thinking up until the First World War (see structural functionalism). Evolutionism postulates that societies develop from simpler to more complex organizational forms, a simple formulation, which hardly anyone would disagree with, even today.
2. In the 19th century, however, one often also imagined that development proceeded by necessity toward morally “superior” and more “civilized” conditions (a view that was widely abandoned after the First World War).
3. Developed by Armchair Anthropologists such as Burnett-Tylor and Frazer.
4. Levi Strauss fought against this with his Fieldwork: Bororo people, Amazonia examining native thought as NOT pre-science.
5. Belief in magic, spirits and witchcraft e.g Azande, Nuer

Question 14

Ethnocentrism

Answer 14

1. Ethnocentrism is judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one’s own culture. Ethnocentric individuals judge other groups relative to their own ethnic group or culture, especially with concern for language, behavior, customs, and religion.
2. Anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski argued that any human science had to transcend the ethnocentrism of the scientist. Both urged anthropologists to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in order to overcome their ethnocentrism.
3. . Classic examples of anti-ethnocentric anthropology include Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928),
4. Boas developed the principle of cultural relativism and Malinowski developed the theory of functionalism as guides for producing non-ethnocentric studies of different cultures
5. Ethnocentrism causes evolutionary theory and some discrimination