Anthropology
What is anthropology and what are the subfields of anthropology?
Anthropology is the holistic study of humankind.
•Physical Anthropology: The study of human biology and evolution.
•Archeology: The study of people who are known only from their physical and cultural remains; it gives us insight into the lives of now extinct societies
•Linguistic Anthropology: A field devoted to the study of language in its social context
•Cultural Anthropology: Is the study of contemporary human societies
•Applied anthropology: the application of anthropological knowledge to the resolution of real-world problems
What is language? Characteristics of language
An open, arbitrary, conventional system of sounds or signs used for communication within a linguistic community
3 Laws or Rules of Magic
•Law of Sympathy: magic depends on the apparent association or agreement between things
•Law of Similarity: things that are alike are the same
•Law of Contagion: things that were once in contact continue to be connected after the connection is severed.
Rituals that attempt to influence or control nature, especially in activities that affect human survival and well-being
Technological rituals
When uttered by a ritual specialist or a state representative in the context of a marriage ceremony, the expression “I declare you husband and wife” is...
A performative utterance.
What are the three main characteristics of anthropological fieldwork?
1) Language competence
2) Long term residence
3) Participant observation
What does arbitrariness mean?
The relationship between a word and the concept it represents is arbitrary; there is no inherent link between sound and meaning
Homeopathic magic is based on which Law of magic?
The Law of Similarity
Rituals that serve to maintain the normal functioning of a community. They delineate proper behavior, define good and evil, moral and immoral, and articulate the community’s worldview. Examples: social rites of intensification: weekly mass (Christianism), Sabbath (Judaism), daily prayer (Islam), etc.
Ideological rituals
Characteristics of performative utterances
What is participant observation?
The anthropologist participates in the lives of local people, living as they live, doing what they do, while at the same time making objective observations
What is a symbol? What is an icon?
•A symbol is something that stands for something else.
•Icons are signs that resemble in their qualities the object they represent are icons
“Things that were once in contact continue to be connected after the connection is severed”
The Law of Contagion
Rites of passage
Rituals that mark the transition from one social status to another
Name 3 characteristics of ritual speech
Ethnocentrism vs. cultural relativism
•Ethnocentrism: the tendency to use our own society as the basis for interpreting and judging other societies.
•Cultural relativism: anthropologists attempt to describe and understand people’s customs and ideas, not to judge them. The goal is to study what people believe, not whether or not what they believe is “true”.
"Symbols can have multiple meanings"
Polysemy
Examples of homeopathic magic and contagious magic discussed in class (and handout)
Homeopathic: The belief that walnuts are good for your brain; The Increase Rite (Australia), picture burying to harm an enemy; ex-voto offerings.
Contagious: When a man has been hit in battle by an arrow, his friends bind up the wound and put a cool poultice on it and on the arrow which has been taken out of the wound, because the arrow is connected with the wound, and this will help with the cure (New Guinea); The belief that a person will swim well if their mother at their birth threw their navel-string into water (Australia).
Which are the three parts of rites of passage?
Separation, transition, incorporation
"Complementarity" means...
Some formal features of ritual speech complement those of ordinary speech: ritual register, believed to be non-arbitrary, meaning opaqueness, ambiguity, fluidity, marked voiced quality, may include archaisms and borrowed words.
Emic vs. etic
•Emic: The “native” view, or insider’s point of view
•Etic: The analyst, or observer’s point of view
Dominant ritual symbols vs. instrumental symbols. Definition and examples.
Dominant ritual symbols refer to values that are considered as ends in themselves, that is, to axiomatic values. Unlike other symbols, dominant ritual symbols may or may not be entirely arbitrary, they may possess analogous qualities to the concepts they represent. Example: Mudyi (The Milk Tree)
Instrumental symbols are those that serve as means to a specific end. In magical practices, instrumental symbols are manipulated to channel the energy or supernatural element necessary to obtain the benefit that is the goal of the ritual. Examples: an image of the person that is buried or burned.
How is magic learned and transmitted in the Trobriand Islands? What are some characteristics of spells in the Trobriand Islands?
•Magic is learned from one’s kin. Magic is “owned” as such, it can be transferred or sold. To learn a particular type of magic owned by a magician, apprentices present a series of gifts to convince the magician to pass on that knowledge
•Spells: Oral texts transmitted without change from generation to generation. Spells often come to be recited in an archaic form of the language and might include words that no longer have meaning, or foreign words
A rite of passage in which young boys must dance with their hands inside gloves lined with bullet-ants is practiced by…
What is parallelism?
•Parallel verses are repeated sentences that only differ in one or two words. They involve the use of a synonym, a semantically related word of the same word class, or an antonym in a repeated syntactic frame.
•A repeated syntactic frame: two (or more sentences) that have the same structure, and only a word or two are different: ex. May it vanish from your heart, may it vanish from your soul