The Culture Concept
What are the 4 subfields of anthropology?
Biological Anthropology, Archaeology, Linguistic Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology
Explain the relationship between human language and culture. How does language shape reality?
•Benjamin Lee Whorf and his colleague Edward Sapir argued that words and grammatical structure actually shape one’s reality.
•People can think about only those things that their language can describe or express.
•Without the words or structures with which to articulate a concept, that concept will not occur.
What are the strengths of participant observation? What unique perspectives does it offer?
■if we know that our common sense is shaped by a process of differentiation and becomes productive through the way we talk about ourselves, then a way we might overcome this (at least partially) is by placing yourself fully in another discursive/knowledge-producing context.
■Take away those geographic barriers that also service as mental barriers. Instead of living just outside of the village, live IN the village.
■Seek out natives like they are your peers, develop an appreciation and interest in the things they are interested in
■>this way you adopt their common sense/their way of representing the world/their way of knowing
Define the term 'reification' and explain how the concept of race has become reified throughout history.
Our concepts of race become reified – they become so widely used and referred to that they become people’s “common sense”
Race becomes reified through literature, media, language, etc.
It becomes a system of representation
What are the strengths and weaknesses of kinship terminology systems and lineage diagrams?
-Different lineage systems lead to different conceptualizations of who is family and who is not
-Decides how inheritance/land/property/housing is allocated.
-shows us what kind of forces hold people together.
-shows us cultural expectations and if/how people negotiate these expectations
-illuminates people’s economic motivations for marriage
-can show us how/when/why systems change.
eg. changes in family size, prevalence of divorce, increased number of unmarried adults due to economic pressures, urbanization, migration, etc.
-We have to be careful about the ethnocentric assumptions of these theories.
-We can’t forget that variation and change are possible.
Explain the context for cultural anthropology’s formation as a science and among the other subdisciplines
-Anthropology as a proper discipline came into being shortly after the formalization of “hard” sciences like biology and anatomy.
-Because these other sciences had institutional authority and were discursively ubiquitous, early anthropology, in an attempt to justify its own relevance, borrowed the language and abstractions of biology.
-As a result, early conceptions of culture were influenced by biology.
Explain Saussure's theory of a sign. What are its strengths? What are its weaknesses? Extra credit if you can draw it.
•A sign is composed of a signified and a signifier.
•Signified – a concept
•Signifier – a sound-image
What are emic and etic perspectives? What are the strengths of each? Give examples.
■Etic – from the perspective of the observer. Descriptions that typically arise from the ethnographer and the anthropological community.
■Tend to be based in science and are informed by historical, political, and economic studies and other types of research.
■The etic approach acknowledges that members of a culture are unlikely to view the things they do as noteworthy or unusual.
■They cannot easily stand back and view their own behavior objectively or from another perspective (pg 49 in textbook)
■Eg. Hurston’s friends can’t understand why their folk tales would be of any interest to anyone.
■The townspeople dismiss them as “lies” – however, the anthropologist, equipped with a theoretical perspective, might attribute some significance to these stories that the people telling them are unaware of.
Explain why the biological basis for human race categories do not exist.
Phenotypic traits (skin color, hair color, hair texture, eye color, height, nose shape, blood types, etc) may be more common in some geographic areas than others
>but the variation is gradual and continuous with no sharp breaks
>these traits are adaptive responses to certain environmental factors
>they do not align with any discrete 'race' or 'type'
Identify the differences between kinship established by "blood", by marriage, and by choice.
-Kinship is the general way of talking about relatedness.
-Kinship can be by “blood” connections – consanguineal
-Or through marriage ties – affinal
-Kinship can also include “chosen kin” – no formal blood or marriage ties but for practical purposes, function as family.
Eg. adoption, godparents, brotherhoods/sisterhoods, etc.
Describe the role that early anthropologists played in defining the concept of culture in anthropology.
eg. Armchair anthropologists, structural functionalists, Boaz and his students, the symbolic turn.
Assess the relationship between language variations and ethnic or cultural identity
•Eg. there are hundreds of dialects in China which may or may not be mutually intelligible.
•However, the Chinese government promotes the idea that all of the variants are merely dialects of the same “Chinese language”
•>encourages people to see themselves as belonging to the same speech community i.e. as unified Chinese Nationals
•The opposite might also be true
•E.g. Scandinavian languages may be mutually intelligible but nationalisms promote the idea of separateness/difference.
Discuss some of the ethical considerations of representing other cultures.
■The relationships we have with our subjects are necessarily defined by unequal power dynamics
■We are the mediators between the reader and our subjects.
■Because of the academic nature of our work, it is given great authority and wide distribution
■As such, we have a duty to represent them fairly and accurately.
Discuss what anthropologists mean when they say that race is socially constructed and explain how it is socially constructed in different contexts giving three examples.
Omi and Winant argue that racial categories are culturally defined, they can vary from one society to another and change over time - racial formation.
This is because race is a sociohistorical concept – racial categories and the meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and historical contexts in which they are embedded
The idea of race becomes a useful category for achieving certain political and economic ends
eg. US, Brazil, Japan
Define 'statuses' and 'roles'.
-Titles like father or aunt for example, can tell us how these individuals fit into a family – we call these titles statuses.
-Statuses suggest certain obligations to others in the family or larger community – we call these expectations roles
Identify the contributions Franz Boas and his students made to the development of new theories about culture.
-Considered the father of American Anthropology
-Notable for championing the “culture concept” and the idea of "cultural relativism"
-Against the backdrop of American anti-miscegenation sentiment, he argued against race as a useful term for understanding human difference.
Explain how language is affected by social class, ethnicity, and gender
•Code-switching – the use of several language varieties in a particular interaction or in different cultural contexts.
•Using one dialect or set of linguistic codes when speaking with your parents vs when you are speaking with your friends.
•Using different codes when speaking to different races.
How does anthropology of the past differ from anthropology of today?
■Traditionally ethnography was conducted much like this – in an isolated “savage” community.
■>motivated by certain ideas about primitiveness and the natural state of humans (think the West and he Rest)
■>possibly motivated by a desire to document and preserve disappearing cultures – especially true of the native Americans – salvage ethnography
■The format for documenting and publishing was the monograph – a large tome that was supposed to be a comprehensive survey of the entire “culture”
■Who our subjects are and where they are located in the world doesn’t look like one thing anymore.
■We might study our own communities or ourselves - autoethnography
■We might study online communities – netnography
■we might study migrating people or diasporas that require us to conduct research in multiple locations.
Explain what is meant by racial formation, hypodescent, and the one-drop rule.
•A racial classification system in which a person of mixed racial heritage is automatically categorized as a member of the less (or least) privileged group.
•Eg. a child born of a black parent and a white parent would automatically be considered to be black (legally or socially)
What do polyandry and other types of family structures tell us about the "naturalness" of the nuclear family.
-The case of Tibetan polyandry shows that there is not necessarily a granted mother-father-child triad
-In the 17th and 18th centuries among the Nayar of southern India, men and women did not live together after marriage and were not considered relatives.
-a child would grow up in a separate household than his “bio father” and was fathered by male siblings.
-likewise, in the “bio father’s” household, they were father to their sister’s children.
-Similarly, in traditional Chinese society, children grew up knowing their father’s families, but not their mother’s families.
-some families still live this way, but urbanization and changes in housing and economic livelihood have made this impractical
-Another contradiction is found in the Israeli Kibbutz where there is a de-emphasis on family and an emphasis on the “house”
-child rearing is done communally.
Give 3 examples of how people may perceive, respond, resist, or embrace cultural systems that they are a part of.
eg. someone walking into a classroom and sitting in the chair backwards
eg. someone rejecting their family role.
eg. someone deciding to pray in a way that is different than what is expected.
·Evaluate the reasons why languages change
•Settlement patterns – bring new dialects to areas or creating new dialects
•Migration routes – can establish dialects boundaries
•Geographical factors – can isolate or expose dialects
•Language contact – can borrow/give words, pronunciations, syntax, meanings, etc.
•Region and occupation
•Social class
•Group reference – language can reference group identity, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, etc.
What was Zora Neale-Hurston looking for when she went to Eatonville Florida? What did she find? What does this tell us?
Was looking for "folklore". However, when she arrived, she found that the people of Eatonville didn't believe they were telling folklore. They believed they were just telling 'lies'. Shows us that our terms can only tell us so much about the aims and motivations of our subjects.
Explain why it appears that certain races dominate certain sports.
There are sociohistorical reasons why certain groups are given certain opportunities and others are not. eg. tennis can be practiced in tennis courts which are mainly built in high socioeconomic areas. Whereas soccer fields and basketball courts are built lower SES areas > are more accessible to certain races which leads to different cultural attitudes towards these sports.
Recognize patterns of family/marriage and explain why these patterns represent rational decisions within cultural contexts giving an example.
Goldstein and others argue that polyandry is economically advantageous.
-allows brothers to hold on to their family land rather than split it
-allows brothers to pool income
-wife can be assured that her children will be provided for
-overall ensures higher standard of living