Race and Ethnicity
Compare/contrast race and ethnicity. Are the mutually exclusive? Why?
•Race is a flawed system of classification with no biological basis (but claims of such), that uses certain physical characteristics (e.g. skin color) to divide the human population into discrete groups.
•Ethnicity is a sense of historical, cultural, and sometimes ancestral connection to a group of people who are imagined to be distinct from those outside the group. Physical characteristics may be used as an “ethnic boundary marker” but are not driving the logics of the classification system.
•Not mutually exclusive. Both are social constructs and can be deployed simultaneously by a group.
The worldwide intensification of interactions and increased movement of money, people, goods, and ideas within and across national borders.
What is Globalization?
The long-term immersion in a community to study their daily lives, behaviors, and social interactions.
What is Participant Observation?
The father of American Anthropology who believed cultures should be studied in their own contexts.
Who is Franz Boas?
The shared, often unwritten rules, expectations, and standards that guide behavior within a specific group or society.
What are Norms?
Explain what code-switching is. Give one example of why this might occur.
Switching back and forth between one linguistic variant and another depending on the cultural context.
The dominance of one social group, class, or nation over others, maintained not through direct force, but through the shaping of culture, ideologies, and beliefs.
What is hegemony?
Explain "Armchair Anthropology"
19th and early 20th-century scholars who developed cultural theories without conducting firsthand, immersive fieldwork.
Puerto Rican artist, Bad Bunny made history by performing completely in Spanish at the superbowl. What concept about language did this challenge?
The language, dialect, or speech variety associated with power, wealth, education, and social prestige within a community.
What is Prestige Language?
Explain Imagined Communities
The invented sense of connection and shared traditions that underlie identification with a particular ethnic group or nation whose members likely will never all meet. An imagined community is forged through “invented traditions.”
Define Cultural Relativism and Ethnocentrism
(+150 points if you can give examples)
Relativism: Understanding a group’s beliefs and practice within their own cultural context, without making judgments.
Ethnocentris: The belief that one’s own culture or way of life is normal and natural; using one’s own culture to evaluate and judge the practices and ideals of others.
Name at least three strategies used in ethnographic fieldwork.
Participant observation, Key informants, Life history interviews, In-depth interviews, Surveys, Kinship analysis, Social network analysis, Field notes, Mapping
Cultural Anthropologist who found that challenges of adolescence are culturally shaped, not biological.
Who is Margaret Mead?
The process of learning culture is called _________ and give a concrete example of how this occurs.
Enculturation
Define intersectionality and give an example of how it can be used to understand complex issues.
Intersectionality is an analytic framework for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification.
Define Structural Functionism. For double points, give an example of a anthroplogist who worked in the structural functionalism framework, and how they used it.
Structural functionalism is a conceptual framework positing that each element of society serves a particular function to keep the entire system in equilibrium. Differs from hist part because it emphasizes the present over historical particularities.
Used by Bronislaw Malinowski (worked with the Trobriand Islanders)
E.E. Evans-Pritchard (worked with the Nuer)
Alfred Radcliffe Brown
Explain the difference between emic and etic
•Emic=“insider’s” perspective; etic=“outsider’s” perspective.
•Etic allows for comparison across cultures and a bird’s eye view.
•Emic (achieved partially through participant observation) helps the anthropologist to understand the cultural world from the perspective of the people they’re working with—important for cultural relativism.
A ceremonial exchange system practiced by islanders near Papua New Guinea, where participants travel long distances to trade two specific shell items—red necklaces (soulava) clockwise and white armbands (mwali) counterclockwise—to build social, political, and economic alliances. It is not for survival, but for prestige and strengthening relationships.
What’s the “four-field approach” to anthropology? (What are the four fields and how does this approach strengthen anthropology as a discipline?)
The use of four interrelated disciplines to study humanity (it’s holistic!):
–Physical
–Archaeology
–Linguistic
–Cultural