Midterm 1 Flashcards
What is holism?
Assumes that mind and body, person and society, humans and their environment interpenetrate and define one another
What is Dualism?
Dualism contrasts with holism and is composed of Idealism: mind is essence of human, and Materialism: bodies and material world shape human essence
What are the 4 fields of Anthropology?
- Biological/Physical Anthro
- Cultural Anthro
- Archaeology
- Linguistic Anthro
What are the limits of holism?
- Not all research questions require equal emphasis from each four fields
- Societies are not homogeneous in globalizing world
What is comparison?
To view societies across time and space in order to understand what it means to be human.
What do anthropologists do?
- Fieldwork: Extended period of time of close involvement with people of interest to collect data
- Ethnography: Anthropologist’s written description of a culture
- Ethnology: Comparative study of two or more cultures
What does an Informant do?
They are people like friends, teachers, and respondents that help anthropologists with their work by providing them information
What does Rich Contextualization mean?
It’s how different areas of social and cultural life influence one another
What is culture?
Culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities, and habits acquires…as a member of society” LSD
What are the debates of culture?
Some anthropologists like Franz Boas argue that culture combats racism
while other contemporary anthropologists say that current definitions of culture denies historical change, agency, internal diversity and treats non-Western cultures as exotic
In the Walt Disney film “Saludos Amigos”, what are some things that were depicted?
- Bright colored clothes and hats
- Merchant life
- Music called “Strange and exotic”
- Native “costumes”
- Put a lot of emphasis on Incas history, presuming that past is like present
- Gave impression that tourists were celebrated
Culture is … (2 things)
- Learned
2. Expressed in symbolic and material form
Cultures are shaped by…
Global flows and exchange
There was never a point in history where cultures were isolated from each other in societies.
Culture involves both…
Tradition and change
Culture both limits and allows for agency. What is agency?
The ability for human beings to exercise at least some control over their lives
Cultural Relativism vs. Ethnocentrism
Cultural Relativism: “the perspective that all cultures are equally valid and can only be understood in their own terms”.
- Cultural beliefs and practices must be understood
Ethnocentrism: “The opinion that one’s own way of life is the most natural, or correct way of life”
- Imposes on others’ beliefs and can lead to war and ethnic cleansings
Problems with Cultural Relativism
Human right: balancing rights and cultural differences
Can lead to cultural determinism
and Cultural Relativism is not Moral Relativism, meaning that we still have to make ethical judgement
(Ex. Illongot headhunting cultural practice unethical)
Burqas in context are used a portable seclusion. Head coverings do not equate to an absence of agency. Muslim culture of freedom and agency is different from western view
das it
Structural Functionalism
- Focuses on how particular social forms function to reproduce the traditional structure of the society
- Looks at society as an organism
- Ignored history and treated cultures as isolated
Slave and sugar trade
- Used people as commodities
- slavery existed past colonization
- many slaves worked in sugar plantations
- Slave trade fuels English industrial revolution
- Sugar provided a cheap high calorie food substitute which led to obesity
Colonization and gender (Baule gender relations)
- Pre-colonial gender equality
- Post-colonization, French enforced ideology that men should be the head of the household and provide for family. Made Baule women labor roles obsolete by introducing factories
Neo-colonialism
The persistence of profound social and economic entanglements linking former colonial territories to their former colonial rulers despite political sovereignty
Martha of the North
- Tactic used by Canada to move Inuit people farther up north to assert sovereignty in the arctic
- Inuit were lied to many times and treated poorly
- Starved
- Government enforced wildlife laws which prevented them from hunting certain game
- Severed social relations
- Deprived of housing and education for many years
- Way of life was away
- Residential schools introduced more abuse and racism
Rich Points
Unexpected problems in cross-cultural understanding that may come up
Culture Shock
Feeling of physical and mental discomfort a person experiences when in a new or strange cultural setting
Modes of Ethnographic Fieldwork (3)
- Positivist
- focuses on material causes and processes that can be detected by our senses
- knowledge that is always true in all times and places - Reflexive
- Thinking critically at the data we’ve looked at
- Knowledge is situated, where social identity influences the research
- Strong objectivity
- Annette Weiner found exchange in “women’s wealth” after Malinowski’s findings - Multi-sited
- Follow process, people, things, metaphors
- Methodological challenges
Unilineal Evolutionism
“The nineteenth century theory that proposed a series of stages through which all societies must go in order to reach civilization”
- Social Darwinism: all societies must go through the same stages on the way to civilization
What is Historical Particularism
Each culture must be understood as the product of its own unique history
How do we learn out culture(s) and cultural identities?
- We learn though play and watching others doing it
- we learn through enculturation and socialization
What is enculturation
the process by which human beings learn the ways of thinking and feeling that are considered appropriate in their cultures.
In society, gender plays a big role; boys = blue, girls = pink
What is socialization
the process by which human beings learn to become members of a group
Why should cultural anthropologists care about language
Language is culture.
Social roles go into language and language has social dynamics.
How you interact with others is through language.
Anthropologists also need the access information and interpretations through language (informants)
What is language
Language is a biological phenomenon where (for most languages) you make sounds that create language and context.
All languages are equal in their ability to communicate experience, according to their speakers’ needs
Features of language (6)
- Openness: different sounds to say what they want
- Displacement: ability to talk about something not currently happening
- Prevarication: Language can be used to form statements that are grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical
- Arbitrariness: There’s no meaningful connection with language and the sounds
- Duality of patterning: sounds and meaning; Phonemes and Morphemes
- Semanticity: how language means things
Phonemes and Morphemes
Phonemes: The basic units of sound characteristics of a language that have no meaning by themselves but together form words
Morphemes: meaning to words
Components of a language (5)
- Phonology: study of the sounds of language
- Morphology: study of how words are put together
- Syntax: study of sentence structure
- Semantics: study of meaning
- Pragmatics: the study of language in the context of use
What is a metaphor
it is a figurative form of speech that links expression from unrelated semantic domains
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
The assertion that the forms of language have the power to shape the way people see the world
“Strong” version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: Linguistic determinism
The language you speak rigidly determines what you perceive and how you perceive it
“Weak” version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Gendered pronouns (he/she) naturalize binary concepts of gender without determining them.
objection to this is that many English speaking people promote gender equality
Contemporary anthropologists reject deterministic versions of S-W hypothesis but accept that language relies on cultural knowledge and shapes interactions, identities and power
das it
Ethnopragmatics
Study of language use in a specific culture, grounded in an ethnographic approach, with close attention to the relationships among language, communicate and social interactions
Heteroglossia
Our ability to move between co-existing genres (specific way you interact with different people) and cultural knowledge
Ex. texting friends compared to writing an essay
African American English argument
In the 1960s an argument that believed that African American children suffered linguistic deprivation. They didn’t follow proper English structure and grammar so they thought they were dumb but AAE just had it’s own rules and structures not found in Standard English. tl;dr black kids aint dumb
