Anthropology EXAM

Anthropology EXAM● Anthropology- The study of human cultures, both past and present ○ Relationships, groups of people,environment, objects and ideas ● Culture- A system of meanings embodied in symbols and practices ○ Can be both explicit and implicit ○ The connection is arbitrary ○ Attributes of culture ■ It is learned, has history, is shared, involves debate, it changes, involvespower ● Culture: The myths we live by ○ Myths are not real, they are narratives we tell ourselves in order to make senseof our world and experiences ● Challenges of cross-cultural understanding ○ Ethnocentrism- where we judge cultures by an outsiders standards ○ Cultural relativism- where cultures are evaluated by their own standards ○ Etic- Outside Perspective ○ Emic- Insiders Perspective ○ Enculturation- process of learning one's own culture ○ Acculturation- Process of learning another culture ● Translating Culture ○ The problem of Incommensurability ○ What do we need to know to understand the system of beliefs of other people?○ Shakespear in the Bush and Darmok ● Origins of Anthropology Lecture 2.1 ○ Anthropologists job is to translate these myths to make the “strange familiar andthe familiar strange” ○ Use of the terms “Primitive” and “Savage” ○ How do anthropologists study other cultures and why do we use the methodsthat we use ○ Socio-Cultural Anthropology ■ Malinowski ○ Four Field Anthropology ■ Boas ○ Colonialism set the conditions for modern anthropology ○ Colonial anthropology was a tool for imperialism ○ The original version of anthropology was to help the european powers better understand where they were going to extract things and then became a academic discipline against that ○ ALl the big systems for how the world understands itself are rapidly changing○ Malinowski and “The other” ■ Contact with other people's leads to new questions ■ Who are we in relation to others? ONLYSTUDENTS STORE 2025 ALL THE BEST ONLYSTUDENTS STORE 2 DO NOT COPY ■ Who “counts” as a person ONLYSTUDENTS STORE 2025 ALL THE BEST ONLYSTUDENTS STORE 3 DO NOT COPY ○ People from Europe saw other people like natives as “savages” irrational beast, ungodly and wanting to learn more about nature and communismbut still claiming that there is a fundamental difference between Europeans and other people ○ Ethnology- an attempt to make a direct comparison between two groups of people ■ Is not very deep and is shallow ○ Wanted dot create a more scientific kind of anthropology ■ Methods ● Participant Observation ● Fieldwork ■ Watch and listen to reduce Ethnology ○ Reflexivity- Understanding our own cultural assumptions ■ Examining our biases and power relationships ■ Making observations better ■ Collaborative conversation with community and key people ■ Ethics and power ● Responsibility of how you have to act ● Origins of Anthropology Lecture 2.2 ○ Franz Boas ■ Became interested in how people perceived the world and the environment around them ■ The Father of American Anthropology ■ Cultural Relativity and CUltural Determinism ■ Native Communities ○ Boas and Malinowksi were coming up with the same ideas on other sides of theworld ■ Argued need to create more scientific anthropology ○ Boas started making argument about the environments that people live in○ Coined the term cultural relativity ○ Believed people are just different from one another ○ Research interests of Boas ■ Empiricism and Observation ■ Language ■ Race and Scientific Racism ■ Holistic study of culture ○ Four field Anthropology ■ Cultural ■ Linguistic ■ Archaeology ■ BIological/physical ○ Multi-sided anthropology- following something, a group of people, and idea, athing ○ Fieldwork and ethics ONLYSTUDENTS STORE 2025 ALL THE BEST ONLYSTUDENTS STORE 4 DO NOT COPY ■ Do no harm ● Economic and physical harm ■ Do not violate Cultural norms ● Do not ask questions that you should not know ■ Be culturally relative ■ Informed consent ● Napoleon Chagnon and the Yanomamo violated the informedconsent rule ● Lecture 3.1 9/14 ○ Scientific Racism- the use of science and scientific evidence to justify social andracial inequality ○ Boas critiques the naturalization of social theory and Misuse of Evolution ○ Herbert Spencer- Social Evolution ○ Lewis Henry Morgan- Unilineal Evolution ○ Edward B. Tyler- “Primitives” are “Living Cultural Fossils” ○ Degenerationism- Belief that we are descended from Angels ○ Biological Determinism- A set of beliefs that suggest that biology determinesor ultimately causes our social world ○ Race- the belief that there are natural separate divisions of the human speciesbased on serious traits ○ Is race a good statistical predictor of variation? ■ Concordant vs. Discordant traits ● Traits that go together are concordant and traits that don’t gotogether and have no relationship are discordant traits ■ Microevolution: Clines and geography ■ Phenotype vs genotype ● Phenotype like surface traits like skin color ● Genotype are genetic traits ○ There is different of how things affect people like more sickle sell near wet placeslike marshes and people near the equator who are more likely to be lactoseintolerant ■ Evolutionary people farther away from the equator had access to cow'smilk ○ Is race a good term? ■ As a biological concept it has limited utility ■ Physical traits do not predict meaningful variations in biology ■ Racial classifications represent a form of folk heredity that allowfor thenaturalization of social inequality Two Questions about Race Reading ● Race is not a mere social construct, but as a lived experience has devastatinglyreal effects. ● In Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, Montagu (1942) considered race to be a myth because race was a typological rather thanan ONLYSTUDENTS STORE 2025 ALL THE BEST ONLYSTUDENTS STORE 5 DO NOT COPY evolutionary concept. Human variation was unstable and races could not bereliably defined. ● race is an inherently unstable and unreliable concept Why do so many people believe that there are biological causes to inequality? ● Privilege and the social construct of race ● How we use scientific arguments of causation ● Social and Cultural Roots of Science ● Is race Real? ○ Race is a product of Essentialization ■ Essentialization- To misrepresent (a characteristic of something) by falsely portraying it as essential to the whole ○ Socially- race does matter because it shapes our lives and experiences○ Racism and racialism is real ● AS sa social structure race, gender, and class can create privilege ● Race creates disadvantages for some and advantages for others ● Affirmative action vs Color Blind Policies ○ Affirmative action- a policy favoring those who tend to suffer fromdiscrimination, especially in relation to employment or education Lecture Thursday 9/15 ● Where do you observe? ○ Work neighborhoods, Everyday Life, Social Lives, Public gatherings, Public protests, public festivals ● Why study this? ○ Specifics to Generalities and Generalities to Specifics ■ Regional political debates ● Citizenship ● Rights ● Just Economies ○ Understand the Science and Experience of Exposure ■ Supporting Environmental Justice ● Evolutionary model- magic is an early stage of religion. This implies that “primitives” are less evolved ○ Tylor Animism ● Frazer made a distinction between magic and religion ○ Magic- attempting to control things you cannot control ○ Religion- appealing to a higher power when all else fails ● Magic vs. science vs. relig