Race and Sex

Question 1

Thematic Obsessions in Cultures

Answer 1

Same themes recurring over and over, for ex: Fat in the Andes

Question 2

Culture as a Conspiracy

Answer 2

Every culture is a self-referential conspiracy

Question 3

Once you are enculturated…

Answer 3

The rules of the culture are in your head, everyone acts according to the culture (schemas)

Question 4

Geography of Estrangement

Answer 4

Things seeming geographically off, what kinds of people belong - landscape can be gendered or raced
Ex: West is a culturally masculine, white, male landscape

Question 5

Cholas

Answer 5

Urban Indian women who maintain a traditional way of dress but are urban dwellers (usually work in markets), kind of violates some indian cultural categories: Indian women should be in the countryside, city is a white/male place, lots of fantasy attributes

Question 6

How are Chola’s matter out of place?

Answer 6

They are Indian Women in Public (belong at home) and in the City (belong in the Country)

Question 7

Pishtaco

Answer 7

Fantasy character with real attributes, fat sucking vampire, white male hiding in the countryside

Question 8

What does an Indian woman in a public space convey?

Answer 8

She must be sexually available, but also dangerous and promiscuous … “dirty”

Question 9

How does Culture work?

Answer 9

Cultures use the forms & habits of thoughts our minds use to buy into culture, our brains have an irrepressible tendency to think in binary ways - culture hooks into that and uses it to get us to believe in things related to race and sex that help and reinforce structures of power

Question 10

Are categories of race real?

Answer 10

Often structures of racial thought separates into 2 categories: black and white, indian and white etc… No, there is no core category of a white person or a black person but it is sociologically real, it’s so often used in our society that it might as well be real because it has real consequences

Question 11

Types of Pishtaco’s

Answer 11

• Pishtaco’s are originally Originally priests who came and killed indian people and stole their fat to make church bells
  
  • Next pishtacos are engineers who use the fat for oil, to run their machinery
  • Next Is businessmen fat stealing for lotion/makeup: encounter with global economy in the Andes (their actual encounter has been about extraction of metals)

Question 12

Pishtaco is a metaphor for…

Answer 12

What actually happened in the Andes