Anthro 3 Study Guide

WEEK 1 – ANTHROPOOGY

WAYS OF DOING ANTHROPOLOGY:

Subfields in Anthropology
- The anthro-shock: what is anthropology
- Archaeology
- Biological/ physical anthropology
- Linguistic anthropology
- Cultural (sociocultural anthropology)
- Applied anthropology
- Globalization and anthropological knowledge
The Concept of Culture:
Cultural Adaptation: a complex of ideas, technologies, and activities that enables us to survive
and thrive in this measly world.
- Cant run as fast as cheetah make car
- Survival + expansion
Culture: shared and socially transmitted ideas, values, and perceptions that are used to make
sense of experiences and generate behavior. OR- Culture as a way of life, consisting of patterned
and repetitive ways of thinking, acting, feeling that are characteristic of the member of a
particular society
Characteristics of Culture
1. Culture is shared
2. Culture is learned
3. Culture is based off symbols
4. Culture is mostly integrated
5. Culture is dynamic

1. Culture is Shared:
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Shared set of ideas, values, perceptions and standards of behavior. Culture is what allows
people to understand one another in their society
- No one shares the exact same version of their culture because everyone is
different and has different perceptions
- Subcultures: Groups within a larger society. Occupational group functioning by
it's own distinctive set of ideas, values and behavior WHILE still sharing some
common standards
o Ex: Amish people
o Ethnic group: people who publicly identify themselves as a distinct group
based on various cultural features
- Pluralistic society: society in which two or more ethnic groups are politically
organized into one territorial state but maintain their cultural differences

2. Culture is Learned:
All culture is socially learned rather than biologically inherited
- Enculturation: the process whereby culture is passed on from one generation to
the next.
o Allows us to learn socially appropriate ways to satisfy our needs: food,
sleep, shelter. The needs themselves are not learned, but ways to deal with
them vary from culture to culture
- Not all learned behavior is cultural.
o For example: Chimps smoothing down twig to make it into a fishing tool.
This is passed down to juveniles

3. Culture is Based on Symbols

- Symbols: symbol, gesture, mark or other sign that is linked to something else and
represents in a meaningful way
o Symbols acquire special meanings when people agree on usage in their
communications. They change their meanings over time.
o LANGUAGE: using words to represent objects and ideas making it
possible to lean from cumulative, shared experiences

4. Culture is Mostly Integrated

- Culture is seen as a structed system made up of distinctive parts that function
together as an organized whole
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- Barrel Model of Culture: - Every culture is an integrated and dynamic system of

adaptation that responds to a combination of internal factors (economic, social,
and ideological) and external factors (environmental, climatic)
1. Superstructure: Sense of identity , society, and the world around us
2. Social structure: the patterned social arrangements of individuals within a
society.
o Concerns rule-governed relationships that hold members of a society
together
o Establishes group cohesion and enables people to constantly satisfy
their basic needs by means of work
3. Infrastructure: “economic base”- the mode of substance
o Production and distribution of goods and services considered
necessary for life
o Supports society

5. Change and Continuity in culture – Dynamic

- Cultures respond to motions and actions within and around them
- To strive a culture must be flexible, but not too flexible it loses itself

Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism and Evaluation of Cultures

Ethnocentrism is the belief that your culture is the best and outsiders are referred to as
subhuman. This can be combatted through cultural relativism
Cultural relativism: belief that you cannot judge a culture based off your own culture
- Important to note that this does not mean you cannot judge, but rather that you should
avoid premature judgments
- Ask yourself: “how well does it satisfy the biological, social, and psychological needs of
those who behavior it guides

The Site of Doing Anthropology: From Armchair to Veranda to the Field

Armchair Anthropology (19th century):
Old white men conducting comparative studies far away from the actually culture they were
studying through the use of newspapers, literature, photographs.
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- Use of structured interviews with immigrants and refugees from enemy countries
- Knowledge was used for
o propaganda and psychological warfare
o childrearing practices
- Private scholars and first generation of university professors; Edward Tylor’s primitive
culture; James bough
Veranda Anthropology (late 19th – early 20th):
Unlike “armchair anthropology” Veranda anthropology sees a transition away from “culture at a
distance” and we have government anthropologist going to specific site.
- Anthropologist would stay in government homes and call selective members for
interviews
- Advocacy anthropology: anthropology committed to community-based and politically
involved research
Field-work based anthropology (1920s – Now)
Fieldwork anthropology involves actually going to a place to observe and experience people and
their cultures firsthand.
- Peasant communities considered important because their unrest over economic and social
problems fueled political instability
- Bronislaw Malinowski’s accidental invention of modern anthropology
o 1910 LSE; 1914 going to New Guinea; WWI and his fieldwork in 1914-1918; his
book Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922).
Participant Observation: research method in which one learns about a group’s behavior and
beliefs through social involvement and personal observation within the community

Malinowski’s Three Principles in Doing Cultural Anthropology

1. Living with local people for an extend period of time
2. Participating in and observing people’s everyday life
3. Learning the local language
Challenges to Ethnography
1. Culture shock and not being socially accepted by the major societies
- Being accepted and gaining information is being adopted into a network of
kinship relations
2. Anthropologists must avoid getting involved in political rivalries and used by factions
3. Age, ideology, ethnicity or skin color could block access
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4. Physical danger: illnesses, accident and occasional hostility

Ethnography: is the academic art of collecting cultural data about particular cultures, through
the process of “fieldwork
Ethnology: involves comparative study of cultures and the analysis of that data to propose
theoretical frameworks for better understanding cultural phenomena.
Urgent anthropology: documenting endangered cultures
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WEEK 2 – MAKING A LIVING

Ways of Making a Living

Cultural Adaptation: complex of ideas, activities, and technologies that enable people to
survive and thrive
In general adaptation is the process organisms undergo to achieve a beneficial adjustment to a
particular environment. We are unique because we can produce and reproduce culture, which
enables us to creatively adapt to a wide range of radically different environments
There are two units of adaptation:
1. Organisms
2. Environment: a defined spaced with limited resources that presents certain possibilities
and limitations
Together organisms and their environment make up an ecosystem
The Tsembaga people of Papua New Guinea-the cycle of feast and fighting and the balance
among humans, land, and animals. – when there are a lot of pigs then they are slaughtered
Cultural Core: cultural features that are fundamental in the society’s way of making its living.
1. food-producing techniques
2. knowledge of available resources
3. work arrangements involved in applying those techniques to the local environment
4. world view or ideology, such as food taboo or religious beliefs.
Modes of Subsistence
1. Food foraging: the oldest way of making a living
2. Horticulture: gardens
3. Pastoralism: going with the herd
4. Intensive agriculture

Food Foraging: The Oldest Way of Making a Living

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Food foraging was and is still very common among hunter and gathers society. This mode of
subsistence does not require the domestication of animals as it utilizes food available from
nature. It is a combination hunting, fishing and gathering wild plant food. However, it does
require people to find suitable and extensive land.
PROBLEM: areas rich in soil and water soon became appropriated by farming societies where
machines replaced human labor
Adaptive Features of Food-Foraging Life
- High mobility: These people move as needed in search of food and water.
However, the distance between food supply and water must not be so great that it requires
more energy than the food can provide
- Small group size: this mode of subsistence cannot support too many people.
- Population control is conducted through the control of body fat and prolonged
breastfeeding to keep number of offspring low
o Fat accumulation: periods start later in these societies
o Child care: mothers nurse children several times each hour in order to suppress
the hormones that produce ovulation. Makes conception less likely
The optimal strategy of foraging—the maximum energy return for the time spent foraging.
Culture of Food-Foraging
- Division of labor:
o based on gender and age
o There is an emphasis on gathering instead of hunting: men focus on game and
women on gathering. While there are different roles, no one role is seen as more/
less important the other
- Property relationship: egalitarianism— “use right”, helps limit status differences
o minimum personal belongings due to high mobilty and lack of animals/
mechanical transportation
o Everything is shared; first come first serve
 No one person attempts to accumulate surplus foodstuffs since everything
is shared so hoarding is actually looked down upon
- The culture of modest needs and the “original affluent society”—the Ju/’hoansi
o control of food intake and the much reduced working time;
o carelessness toward material belongs and lack of planning;
o health and wellbeing; foragers being poor or not?

The tension between unlimited wants and limited means to meet the wants in modern society,
and the perceptions of scarcity and poverty.
Food Producing Society
Horticulture: Producing Food in Gardens
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Horticulture was the use of small community gardeners to cultivate crops through the use of
simple hand tools. We do not see the use of irrigation or plow. Land was only used for a few
years.
Features of Horticulture:
- 10, 000 years ago
- made enough food for their subsistence and occasionally produce a modest surplus. This
modest surplus was used for inter-village feasts and exchange
- hunting if need be
- Slash and Burn: natural vegetation is cut; the slash is burned and the crops are planted
among the ashes
- Compared to food-foragers we see an increase of working time and the need of buildings,
containers and hand tools
Culture of Horticulture
- Semi-settled and tools allow for the creation of certain roles
- Social division of labor—the creation of specialized roles such as political leaders,
military personnel, ritual specialists, and craftsmen
- The emergent individual claim on gardens while communal property right remains
dominant; the appearance of surplus goods, and the possibility of wealth accumulation

Pastoralism: Following the Herd

Pastoralism is making a living based on the domestication of animal herds and the use of animal
products for at least 50% of the people’s diet.
Features of Pastoralism:
- Life is centered around breeding and herding animals
- Mobile life to chase fresh pastures and need of large land support small group of people
- No permanent settlement
- Rely on trade with other people and cannot exist in isolation
Culture of Pastoralism:
- Division of labor has an emphasis on hierarchy and masculinity
- Property ownership
o Herd and domestic goods: private
o Pasture lands and migratory routes: collective

Agriculture: Producing Food in Fields

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Agriculture is growing food plants in soil prepared and maintained for crop production. Unlike
horticulture, this method is more intensive and utilizes the help of plows, fertilizers and irrigation
to produce a surplus of crop production.
Crop Producing Society Culture
- Development of fixed settlements
- New social organization
o Certain group of people is devoted to tending the plants
o Other people can focus on making the tools/ technology
- Social structure
o At first social relations were more egalitarian and hardly different from that
prevailed from food forager
o Later we see division of labor and complex social organization

Intensive Agriculture:
With the intensification of agriculture, some farming settlements grew into town and cities Urban
ruling class sought to widen its territorial power and political control over rural populations and
we see social inequality.
Features of Intense Agriculture:
- Peasant class: small-scale producers of crops/ livestock who lived on land they owned or
rented in exchange for labor, crop or money
- Intense use of same plot of land, draft animals to plow, more labor, more fertilizer to
increase yield
- Extreme surplus of good
o Producers receive less and the non-producers

Culture of Intense Agriculture:

- Social division of labor: producers vs. non-producers, specialized occupations, rulers and
ruled
- Extensive private ownership of property
o Means of production
o Means of subsistence
o Weaning of communal property
- Marked social inequality
o Control of means of production and concentration of wealth; formation of class
differences; notion of poverty, deprivation, inequality, and social injustice.
Neolithic Revolution
- Neolithic (agricultural) Revolution: domestication of crops and animals
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- The shift from food foraging to food producing

o More quantity of food, labor input, and time to work
o People possessed stone-based technologies and depended on domesticated plants
and animals
- The shift from mobile to settled life
o Dependence on domesticated crops
o No longer on the move they were able to build more permanent dwellings
o Formation of larger groups, the notion of storage and planning, hoarding and
accumulation, the need for more belongings, the increasing importance of social
groups, and the notion of unlimited wants.
- The shift from social division of labor beyond age and sex to specialization’s
o Specialists in manufacturing of needed materials, specialists in religion, politics,
military, exchange and trade
- The shift from egalitarianism to inequality and hierarchy in social relations
o The need of coordinating larger groups, management of job specialization,
division of labor, order-giving and order-taking, extraction of surplus goods, and
justification of the new social order (ideology).

Types of Cultural Evolution

- Convergent evolution
o Development of similar cultural adaptations to similar environmental conditions
by different people of different ancestral cultures
- Parallel evolution
o Development of similar cultural adaptations to similar environmental conditions
by peoples whose ancestral cultures were already alike

Ways of Making a Living and the Changing Human Nature

- The modern and market-based view of human nature
o Maximization of self-interest
o Living under the condition of scarcity
o competition among individuals,
o the private vice can be led to public virtue by fair competition on equality of
opportunities.

Marshall Sahlins’ notion of the “original affluent society” (1971)

Scarcity: the gap between desires and means to meet desires
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Foraging society is the original affluent society; the limit is the law of diminishing returns from
the environment; hence the mobile and low desire culture. Human being is not by nature
“economic.”
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WEEK 3 – MARRIAGE, FAMILY AND KINSHIP

Introduction
The increasing need of cooperation in making a living from foraging to intensive agriculture.
The need for human reproduction
- Birth, death, and copulation at the individual level
- Mother-child bond and pair bond
- Basic issues of social life at the group level
- Pair bond, food sharing, division of labor; the need for social order in increasingly large
social groups
- Mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, siblingship, inheritance, succession, and
group formation.
- Consanguinity, affinity, descent, and descent groups
Incest Taboo; the prohibition of sexual contact between certain close relatives
While it can be agreed that it is prohibited between close relative, what is defined as close varies
from culture to culture
- parallel cousins: child of a father’s brother or a mother’s sister
- cross cousisn: child of a mother’s brother or a father’s sister
Three interpretations of incest taboo
1. Avoidance of inbreeding defect
2. Psychological impact of childhood intimacy (Edward Westermarck vs. Sigmund Freud)
3. Social alliance model: incest is a cultural rule against endogamy and society promotes
exogamy
o Endogamy: within a group
o Exogamy: outside a group
Levi: exogamy as an alliance system in which distinctive communities participate in an
exchange of marriage males/ females. By extending social networks, potential enemies
turn into relatives who may provide support in times of need.
Nature vs. Culture - Other forms of sex regulations: premarital sex and adultery

Marriage as a Social Institution

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Marriage: a socially binding and culturally recognized relationship. Cultural institution unique
to humans
- Arranged marriage and marriage as a collective property. It represents the social bonding
and alliance between two kin groups; reproduction of kin group.
o Bride wealth: payment of money or valuable goods to a bride’s parents or close
kin. Contributes to wife’s household
o Bride service: a period of time during which the prospective groom works for he
bride’s family
o Dowry: woman’s share of parental property that is given to her directly, rather
than at parent’s death
o Ex. wife parents pay wedding expenses
- Ways of control
o Child marriage
o Class boundaries
o Separation and isolation
o Close supervision
o Guidance in dating culture
- Free-choice marriage and the notion of romantic love marriage
o Trobriand Islanders vs. contemporary Americans
o Marriage revolution, nation building, and modernization

What is Marriage
An anthropological definition in the early 1950s:
“Marriage is a union between a man and a woman such that children born to the woman are the
recognized legitimate offspring of both parents” (see Barnard and Good 1984: 89).

A recent definition of marriage:

“A culturally sanctioned union between two or more people that establishes certain rights and
obligations between the people, between them and their children, and between them and their in-
laws. Such marriage rights and obligations most often include, but are not limited to, sex, labor,
property, child rearing, exchange, and status” (Haviland et al, 2017: 208).

Forms of Marriage and Causes of Diversity

Major forms of marriage:
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- Monogamy: Both partners have just one spouse

- Polygamy: Having more than one spouse
o Polygyny: a man is married to more than one woman
 Common in food-producing society that support themselves by herding
grazing animals or growing crops in which women do the bulk of
cultivation
 Inequality
 Women are valued as workers and child bearers
 Women have a strong bargaining position
 High position of power for men
o Polyandry: women is married to multiple men
 3 brothers; keeps the land together
 Down population growth
 Avoiding increase pressure on resources.
 Provides household with an adequate pool of male labor for all activities
- Visiting marriage (the Mosuo in China, the Nayar in India): Both partners live under the
roof of their extended family, but at night it is common for the man to visits and stay at
the women’s house until sunrise
Minor forms that coexist with the major forms:
- Levirate marriage
- ghost marriage
- child marriage
- woman-to-woman
Family and Household
Family: two or more people related by blood, marriage or adoption
- Conjugal family: basis of martial joins
- Consanguineal family: a family of blood relatives, consisting of related women, their
brothers and the women’s offspring
- Functions of family:
o Production, reproduction, and socialization

o Familism and the familial mode of social life

Household: a domestic unit of one or more persons living in one residence

Family size, structure, and intra-family relations

- Nuclear family vs. extended family; the key is how many couples in a given family;
conjugal tie vs. parents-child relationship
o Nuclear family: made up of one or two parents and dependent offspring
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o Extended family: made up of two or more closely related nuclear families cluster
together in a large domestic group
 Consanguineal kin blood or biological relative
 Affinal kin  people related through marriage

Descent Group and Kinship Systems

Descent group: any kin-group whose members share a direct line of descent form a real or
fictional ancestor. Can trace shared connections through parent-child links
- Unilateral descent: establishes group membership based on descent traced through
either male or female line of ancestry
o Matrilineal: Females are culturally recognized as socially significant because
they are considered responsible for the descent group’s continued existence
o Patrilineal: males are culturally recognized as socially significant because they
are considered responsible for the descent group’s continued existence
- Bilateral descent: People trace their descent through both of their parent’s ancestors

Post-marital residence:
- Patrilocal: couple lives in husband’s fathers place.
o Wife’s family is losing her and her potential offspring
o Compensation is bride wealth
- Matrilocal: couple lives in wife’s mother’s place.
o Found in horticultural societies
- Neolocal: married couple forms household in a separate location
o Food foraging society

The multiple functions of kinship organization

- The predominate way to organize in culture that have not developed as state societies
- Kinship: a network of relatives into which people are born
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Revisiting Underlying Themes in Week 3

1. Ways of making a living and ways of organizing the primary group
• Diminishing return, labor input, scale of cooperation, and larger organization;
• Modern changes: manufacturing, social mobility, and the changing forms of
cooperation; the individualization process;
2. The increasing value of labor and the rise and fall of natalism
• Modern change: the demographic turn (1) high fertility and low mortality; (2) low
fertility and low mortality; the fall of natalism and declining importance of
kinship;
3. Marriage as collective property and the primacy of collectivity
• Modern changes: the privatization of marriage and family; free-choice/love
marriage; the globalization of love marriage, premarital cohabitation, delinking of
marriage and child-bearing, and the primacy of the individual in modern marriage
and family institutions.
4. Family and kinship as a multi-functional (and often only or major) social organization in
stateless societies
• Modern change: the loss of public functions; the intimate and emotional turn of
family and kinship; the U-shape development of emotional aspect in family and
kinship;
5. A new factor in modern time: the role of the state in marriage, family, and kinship—law, social
welfare, and social service.
• The dialectics of the private and the public: e.g., mate choice becomes totally
private, while domestic violence becomes a public concern.
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WEEK 4 – WAYS OF BECOMING AND BEING

Enculturation is the processes of passing down a culture. The primary agents of early
enculturation in all societies are members of the infant’s household, especially the mother.
- Enculturation begins with self-awareness: the ability to identify oneself as an individual
creature, to reflect on oneself, and to evaluate oneself
o this allows us to take social responsibility for our actions and to learn and react to
other
o IMPORTANT: attachment of positive value to one’s self

o Self-awareness in pre-industrial and industrial societies: importance of early

mother-child bonding-- The amount of human contact and stimulation that infants
receive is very important. More stimulation = more awareness
- Social identity is gained through personal naming because it is through naming that a
social group acknowledges a child’s birthright and establishes it's social identity

Behavioral Environment for Self-awareness and Action

Every individual must learn about a world of objects other than self
- Object orientation: each culture singles out for attention certain environmental features,
while ignoring others or lumping them together in broad categories
- Spatial orientation: the ability to get from one object to another
- Temporal orientation: gives people a sense of their place in time
- Normative orientation: moral values, ideals, and principles

Child-rearing and formation of personality via enculturation

Personality Formation (social interactions)
Personality: the distinctive way a person thinks, feels, and behaves
• Margaret Mead’s study of sex and gender in relationship to personality.

Personality and Child Rearing

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- Dependence training: Socializes children to think of themselves in terms of the greater

whole
o Children learn early on that it is normal for family members to share and actively
help one another
o it is found mostly in societies with intensive agriculture or foraging
o Attempts to create a community member whose idea of selfhood transcends
individualism, promoting compliance in the performance of assigned tasks and
keeping people within the group
o Selfish/ aggressive behavior is discouraged
o Definition of self comes from the individual being a part of a larger social whole
rather than from his/ her individual existence
- Independence training: FOSTERS self-reliance and personal achievement
o mostly in trading, industrial, and postindustrial societies where self-sufficiency
and individual personal achievement are important traits for success,
o Normally found in societies where children must fend for themselves
 EX. middle class Americans who are quick to feed baby and getting them
to eat by themselves, to hold their own bottles, and children are given their
own space
o Displays of individual will, assertiveness and even aggression are tolerated more
o Schools competition and winning are emphasized

Socialization patterns and cultural values are increasingly prevalent throughout the
world as a result of globalism, splintering of traditional communities
Note that personality is discussed here mostly at the level of the individual, yet the patterns of
childhood training are in cross-cultural perspective.

Group personality and cross-cultural variations of personality and personhood

Modal personality: character traits that occur with the highest frequency in a social group and
are therefore the most representative of its culture
National character: stereotyping
- Generalization based on limited data; and the nation-state societies are more complicated

Core Values: the values that are especially promoted in a particular culture and are related
personality traits
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- Collectivism vs. individualism

Alternative gender
- The biological facts of human nature are not always as clear-cut as most people assume.
- intersexual—a person who is born with reproductive organs, genitalia, and/or sex
chromosomes that are not exclusively male or female.
- A society’s attitude toward these individuals can impact their personality, such as the case
study “The Blessed Curse” in textbook.
- The third gender is accepted in many cultures, and these people may even hold a status
higher than someone of a traditional gender. More tolerance or sex/gender is not the base of
personality and identity?
- Why sex and gender are so important for one’s identity in contemporary American society?

Normality and abnormality

- The boundaries that distinguish the normal from abnormal vary across cultures and times, as
do the standards of what is socially acceptable
- Culture-bound syndrome: mental disorder specific to a particular cultural group
- In India and Nepal, ascetic Hindu monks known as sadhus provide an ethnographic example
of a culture in which abnormal individuals are socially accepted and even honored
(Textbook pp. 150-151).
- These individuals illustrate the degree to which one’s social identity and sense of personal
self are cultural constructs.

The Notion of personhood

Personhood: the state of being a person or the process of becoming a person?
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1. The indivisible individual in the US:

o The inner self and the notion of rights
o “finding oneself” in American society
o Leaving home
o leaving church
o establishing oneself through work
2. The partible person in Melanesia
o M. Strathern’s research:
o a person exists in relation to other persons and things
o the importance of exchange and rituals.
3. The relational person in China:
o The process of making oneself a human being, or, “doing personhood”;
o obligations,
o life tasks
o earned privileges (as oppose to rights)

The indivisible individual (with a set of birth rights) as a historical construct and a new global
culture.

Contemporary challengers in becoming and being a person

- The ontological aspect of individual-society relationship
o The limit of individual rights

- The new and horizontal ways of enculturation

o The issue of continuity and change

- The choices in identity politics and self-identity

o The access to a cultural supermarket of identity choices