Four subfields of anthropology

Etic – Outsiders’ perspective, objective perspective

 Data collected according to the researcher’s questions and categories, with the goal of
being able to test a hypothesis
 Example -
Emic – Insiders’ perspective
 Subjective perspective
 Data collected that reflect what insiders say and understand about their culture, and
insiders’ categories of thinking
 Example -
Culture - Shared, learned behavior and ideas typically passed from one generation to next
Ethnocentrism - Judging another culture by the standards of one’s own culture rather than by
the standards of that particular culture.
Fieldwork
Participant observation
Ethnology - Study of a particular topic in more than one culture
 Example -
Ethnography – A firsthand, detailed description of a living culture, based on personal
observation.
 Example -
Infralegal - Disputes settled without intervention of special authorities
 No court intervention
 Non-violent
 Example – Disagreement with roommate, family member, etc. you talk, cry about it but
typically you settle it amongst yourselves in a nonviolent way
Extralegal - Disputes that escalate into violence
 Law enforcement, court system involved
 Feuds – Long-term retributive violence
 Wars
 Example -
Banditry - Socially patterned theft
 Practiced by socially marginal people
 Theories – Flourish in weak states form of social protest
o Weak states – States that don’t have strong government principles (e.g.,
dictatorships)
 Links to identity and status
 Example -
Feuding - Long term retributive violence
 Horticultural community of Hongot (Phillippines) and headhunting
o Used to be a community that practiced headhunting, was something fathers would
pass on to their sons but it was eventually banned and there was a real effort to
move the Hongot from their horticultural practice to different kinds of modes of
production which had a devastating impact on the community
Racialized thinking - Insists that behavioral differences among people are biologically caused,
inborn, and “natural”
  Examples - Black people experience pain differently – if you look at rates of prescription
of pain medication, you will find that it is much lower for African Americans as opposed
to white folks
o Black people are better athletes
 Key features of racial thinking: behavioral differences among people are
o “Natural”
o Inborn
o Biologically caused
 Belief that features such as head size, head shape, and brain size explain behavioral
differences
o Within anthropology, a large part of this way of thinking about difference was
developed in physical or biological anthropology with this focus on head size and
the correlations that people drew between head size and intelligence
Franz Boas and race
 Demonstrated that people with the same head size from different cultures behaved
differently and;
o Really pushed back this idea of the correlation between cranial capacity and
intelligence
o People from the same culture with different head sizes behaved similarly
o For Boas (and followers) culture, not biology, key to explaining behavior
o It was really culture that was a determining factor in terms of peoples’ lives,
rather than biology
 Culture explained people’s behavior rather than biology
Racial classifications
 Historically, Western racial categorizations have held that head size and shape and brain
size account for behavior differences in people
 Race is not a biological reality
o Despite what people believe to be deeply genetic biological differences between
different groups of people that we think of as Black, Latino, White, etc.
 If you look at the genetics behind this, there is more genetic variation
between people who belong to the same so-called race than between
different so called races
 Humans cannot be divided into “races” on the basis of biological features
o However, “social race” does exist and contributes to social stratification
 Despite some progress (e.g., Civil Rights Movement, legal segregation has been
abolished) in US, race-based discrimination persists
o One perspective (Broadkin): Persistence linked to class formation
 Function – To keep people in less desirable jobs or unemployed
 She talks about race-based discrimination in the context of
capitalism – ties race-based discrimination to the growth in the
proliferation of capitalism
o Basically, you need a class of individuals that you can
count on for cheap sources of labor and resources
 o So there is a real effort to keep people in less desirable
jobs, unemployed, so you will have this ready cheap labor
supply
 Advanced industrial capitalism as dependent on their being low-paid
workers
 So there is a real effort to keep people in less desirable jobs,
unemployed, so you will have this ready cheap labor supply
 Racial classifications in other parts of the world are complicated
o Caribbean and Latin America:
 Fluidity to racial identity
 Lack of a “one drop” rule
 “One drop” rule – legally meant that if you had one drop of black
blood you were considered legally black
 “One drop” rule doesn’t exist in many parts of the world so the
way that they think about race is very different than we think about
here in the U.S.
o There is a lot more fluidity in terms of how people are
conceptualized with regard to race/color
 Money whitens
 Money can make you lighter – your wealth can change the way
people perceive you
 Wealth is very often times associated with whiteness in many circles – the ideas that if
you have more wealth that it
Social class - A person’s position in society in economic terms
 The amount of money that an individual has, makes, that pertains to an individual’s
family
 Social class and economic status are inextricably linked; Jessica’s social status in a social
situation might be considered middle class or upper middle class and has a white collar
job, however, white collar jobs don’t pay a lot so economically she would be considered
the working class
o Grew up working poor, parents had white collar jobs
Race/ethnicity
Displacement (linguistic) - Ability to talk about displaced domains (temporal, spatial, and
ideational)
 Example -
Infinite productivity - Communication of many messages efficiently
 Example -
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - A perspective that says that people’s language affects how they think
 Example - If a language has many words for variations of the English word snow, then
someone who speaks that language can “think” about snow in more ways than someone
can whose language has fewer “snow” terms.
o If a language has no word for snow, then someone who speaks that language
cannot think of snow.
Linguistic determinism - Language determines our worldview and behavior
 Example -
Sociolinguistics - Social position shapes form and content of language
 Example -
Pidgin – A contact language that blends elements of at least two languages and that emerges
when people with different languages need to communicate
 Example -
Creole - A language directly descended from a pidgin but possessing its own native speakers and
involving linguistic expansion and elaboration
 Example -
Paralanguage - Nonverbal forms of communication
 Examples - Posture, eye movement, hand signals
Kinesics - Study of communication happens through body movement, facial expression, and
spatial behavior
 Example -
Linguistic pluralism
Migration
Immigration
Internal/international migration
Labor migrants
Institutional migrants
Transnationalism - Movement back and forth between two or more nations
 Much of movement motivated by economic factors
 Transnational Migrants can from new identities that transcend local geopolitical unit
o New Yoricans
o Dominican Yols
 Example -
Displaced persons People forced to leave homes, communities, or countries and live elsewhere
 Reasons for displacement: war, colonialism, natural disasters, persecution
 Example -
Impacts of migration on health
“Push-Pull” theory
Refugees - Displaced persons as result of persecution: ethnicity, religion, nationality, and gender
 Example -
Three defining trends in Migration (globalization, acceleration, and feminization)
 Globalization – Scale of migration has increased leading to great diversity in
sending/receiving countries
 Acceleration – Pace has increased
 Feminization – The role of women in migration streams increasing, in some cases
Xenophobia - Fear and hatred of strangers or of anything that is strange or foreign
 Xenophobia is often the result of ignorance and lack of exposure
 Xenophobia often contributes to stereotypes and is shaped by stereotypes of migrants
 Public perceptions reflect real issues and problems, but they also reflect ignorance,
prejudice, and fear
 Example -
Internally displaced persons - People displaced from communities/homes but remain in the
same country
  Example -
Far East Deep South (film)
Chinese Exclusion Act
The “new” immigration
Globalization
The Goddess and the Computer (film)
Worldview
Animism - A belief in spirits (Edward Tylor)
Magic - People’s efforts to get supernatural forces and beings to do certain things (James Frazer)
 Ritual practices whose apparent effects have no scientific explanation and have influence
on outcome of practical matters
Imitative magic - Things that resemble one another can be acted upon to influence the other
 Example – Voodoo Dolls
o If someone sticks pins into a doll that represents a person, then that person will experience pain or
suffering.

Contagious magic - Things that were in contact with someone can still have an effect on them
 Hair/nail clippings
 A person’s hair trimmings, nail clippings, teeth, saliva, blood, and fecal matter, as well as
the placenta of a baby

Ritual - Patterned forms of behavior related to supernatural realm

 Periodic rituals
o Regularly performed during year
 Nonperiodic rituals
o Irregularly performed in response to unforeseen events
 Life-cycle rituals (rites of passage) – mark status change of individual/group from one
life stage to another
o Phases to life-cycle ritual: separation, transition, and reintegration
 Rituals of inversion – Normal social roles and relations inverted
o Carnival
o Egungun festivals
 Sacrifice – Offerings to the supernatural
o Human
o Animal
o Food, flowers, other products
Polytheism – Belief in many different types of gods and/or goddesses
 Example -
Monotheism – Belief in a single God/creator
 Example -
Myth - Stories or narratives about supernatural forces or beings
 Example -
Doctrine - Explicit descriptions of supernatural forces and beings and how we should relate to
them
 Example -
Zoomorphic - Gods appear in shape, or partial shape, of animals
 Example -
Anthropomorphic - Gods appear in human form
 Example -
Ancestor veneration - Spirits of dead prayed for intercession
 Example -