Anthropology

Chapter 1: What is Anthropology?

 Anthropology A disci- pline that studies humans, focusing on the study of differences and similari- ties, both
biological and cultural, in human popu- lations. Anthropology is concerned with typical biological and cultural
characteristics of human populations in all periods and in all parts of the world.
 Dives in the origin of humans and the different biological and cultural traits that distinguish
 Anthropologists study the development of humans from immediate ancestors till present

 For example, when American educators discovered in the 1960s that African American schoolchildren rarely
drank milk, they assumed that lack of money or education was the cause. But evidence from anthropology
suggested a different explanation- they were lactose intolerant and instead consumed it as cheese
 Anthropologists study different aspects of human as a whole
 Find pattern of relationships between seemingly unrelated characteristics
 Major fields of anthropology:
o Biological Anthropology
o Cultural Anthropology
 Archaeology
 Linguistics
 Ethnology
o Practicing Anthropology

 With its broad scope of subjects and methods, anthropology has sometimes been called the most humane of the
sciences and the most scientific of the humanities
 Anthropology is an empirical social science based on observations or information about humans taken in
through the senses and verified by others rather than on intuition or faith. But anthropology is distin- guished
from other sciences by the diverse ways in which scientific research is conducted within the discipline

Similarities with Real-Life Anthropological Examples:

 Interdisciplinary Research: Anthropologists often collaborate with experts

from other fields to enrich their understanding of a culture.
 Example: Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois' work on substance abuse in
East Harlem involved collaboration with sociologists and public health
experts to understand the social and health implications of drug use.
  Use of Qualitative Methods: Ethnography, a qualitative research method, is a
hallmark of anthropology but is also used in sociology.
 Example: Nancy Scheper-Hughes' ethnographic work in Brazil for
"Death Without Weeping" provided deep insights into the lived
experiences of poverty and infant mortality, similar to a sociological
study.
 Theoretical Frameworks: Anthropologists use various theories to analyze
cultures, much like sociologists or political scientists.
 Example: Clifford Geertz's interpretive approach to understanding
Balinese cockfighting as a system of meaning is akin to how a
sociologist might analyze a social institution.
 Focus on Human Behavior and Societies: Anthropologists study human
behavior within the context of society and culture.
 Example: Margaret Mead's comparative study of adolescent behavior in
different cultures in "Coming of Age in Samoa" is a classic example of
analyzing human behavior in its cultural context.
 Ethical Considerations: Anthropologists face ethical challenges similar to
other social scientists, particularly when working with vulnerable populations.
 Example: During her fieldwork among the Yanomami, anthropologist
Napoleon Chagnon faced ethical questions about the impact of her
presence and research on the tribe, a concern shared by sociologists
and political scientists in their fieldwork.

Differences with Real-Life Anthropological Examples:

 Holistic vs. Specialized Focus: Anthropology's holistic approach can be seen

in how cultural, social, biological, and linguistic aspects are integrated into
studies.
 Example: Bronisław Malinowski's Trobriand Islands research examined
the islanders' kinship, myth, magic, and economy to provide a
comprehensive view of their society.
 Methodological Emphasis: Anthropology's traditional emphasis on long-
term fieldwork and participant observation is distinct.
 Example: Annette Weiner's work in the Trobriand Islands involved
extended fieldwork that built upon Malinowski's earlier studies,
highlighting the importance of women's wealth and exchange.
 Temporal Scope: Anthropologists often consider historical perspectives,
including the study of ancient societies.
 Example: Kathleen Kenyon's archaeological excavations in Jericho were
pivotal in understanding the ancient city's history and prehistoric
community life.
  Cultural Relativism: Anthropologists strive to understand cultures on their
own terms, which can lead to different interpretations than those in other
social sciences.
 Example: Ruth Benedict's "Patterns of Culture" exemplifies cultural
relativism by describing how cultures can be understood only in
reference to their own values and norms, not by external standards.
 Fieldwork Duration: The extended duration of anthropological fieldwork
allows for a deep immersion in the culture being studied.
 Example: Colin Turnbull's time spent with the Mbuti pygmies in the
Congo allowed him to understand their culture and social relations
intimately, as documented in "The Forest People."

These examples showcase how anthropologists conduct their research and how their
methods and approaches both align with and differ from those of other social
scientists.

 Anthropological researchers monitor themselves by constantly checking their own biases and assumptions as
they work; they present these self-reflections along with their observations, a practice known as reflexivity
 Ethical dilemmas in Anthropology:
o In the case of research on an ethnic or religious minority whose values may be at odds with the
dominant mainstream society, will government or corporate interests use anthropological data to
suppress that group?
o What are the limits of cultural relativism when a traditional practice is considered a human rights
abuse globally?
o informed consent Formal recorded agreement to participate in research; federally mandated for all research in the
United States and Europe.
o For example, when Dutch anthropologist Anton Blok studied the Sicilian mafia, he did not obtain the
informed consent of this violent secret group but opted not to disclose their real identities
o Code of ethics of the American Anthropological Association (AAA)
o

Biological Anthropology
 Studies the emergence of humans and their later evolution under paleontology
  Study fossils of humans, pre-humans, and related animals

 Paleontologists working in East Africa, for instance, have excavated the fossil re- mains of humanlike beings that
lived more than 4 million years ago. These findings have suggested the approximate dates when our ancestors
began to develop two-legged walk- ing, very flexible hands, and a larger brain.
 Also study the geological information on the succession of climates, environment, and animal and plant
populations
 Interested in the study of our close mammal relatives, such as apes, which are members of primates

o Primate A member of the mammalian order Primates, divided into the two suborders of prosim- ians
and anthropoids.
 Chimpanzees resemble human behavior in physical appearance, blood chemistry, and susceptibility to diseases
 Investigate human variation as how and why contemporary human populations vary in physical characteristics;
despite belonging to one species- Homo Sapiens
o Homo sapiens All living people belong to one biological species, Homo sapiens, which means that all
human populations on earth can success- fully interbreed. The first Homo sapiens may have emerged
about 200,000 years ago.
 Use techniques of other disciplines: human genetics, population biology, and epidemiology
 Today, physical anthropologists study the impact of disease, pollution, and poverty on growth. Comparisons
between human and nonhuman primate growth patterns can provide clues to the evolutionary history of
humans. Detailed anthropo- logical studies of the hormonal, genetic, and physiological bases of healthy growth in
living humans also contribute significantly to the health of children today.
 Developmental adaptations are responsible for some features of human variation, such as the enlargement of the
right ventricle of the heart to help push blood to the lungs among the Quechua Indians of the Andean highlands
known as the altiplano
 Forensic anthropology: the identification of human skeletal remains for legal purposes

Cultural Anthropology

 Culture refers to the customary ways that a particular population or society thinks and behaves
 the language that people speak, childrearing, and the roles assigned to males and females to religious beliefs and
practices and preferences in music, etc.
 Findings of Alyssa Crittenden: the kids of Hadza tribe in Tanzania were also hunter gatherers for their mothers.
As the relatively safe terrain rendered the foraging of food as an extension of playing
 Two main components: ethnology and ethnography
 o In ethnography, the technique of learning a people’s culture through social participation and personal observation within
the community being studied, as well as interviews and discussion with individual members of the group over an extended
period of time.

o ethnology The study and analysis of different cultures from a comparative or historical point of view, utilizing ethnographic
accounts and developing anthropological theories that help explain why certain important differences or similarities occur
among groups.

Archaeology

 Study of past cultures, primarily through their material remains. not only to reconstruct the daily life and
customs of peoples who lived in the past but also to trace cultural changes and to offer possible explanations for
those changes. Serve as historians for past societies that lacked written record- prehistory
 Some of these remains are as grand as the Mayan temples discovered at Chichén Itzá in Yucatán, Mexico. More
often, what remains is as ordinary as bits of broken pottery, stone tools, and gar-bage heaps.
 More recently, archaeologists have employed aerial photography and even radar imaging via satellite (a
technique developed by NASA to pinpoint sites)
 For example, shallow, restricted concentrations of charcoal that include oxidized earth, bone fragments, and
charred plant remains, located near pieces of fire-cracked rock, pottery, and tools suitable for food preparation,
indicate cooking and food processing.
 Innovations in geology and geographical sciences have been readily incorporated into archaeology, such as
geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, etc.
 Bioarchaeology is the archaeological study of human remains, emphasizing the preservation of cultural and
social processes in the skeleton. For ex- ample, mummified skeletal remains from the Andean highlands in South
America not only preserve this burial practice but also provide evidence of some of the earliest brain surgery ever
documented
 Garbage Project- an example of contemporary archaeology
 Since passage of the Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the
Archaeological and Historical Preservation Act of 1974, and the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979,
cultural resource management is required for any con- struction project that is partially funded or licensed by the
U.S. government
Anthropological linguistics

 Study of languages
 Anthropological linguists started fieldwork in places where language was not written. This meant constructing
their own dictionary and grammar for that language. Historical linguistics is the study of language changes over
time. Structural linguistics is the study of how contemporary languages differ. Sociolinguistics examines how
language is used in social contexts.
 As writing is only 5000 years old, linguistics begin with comparisons to contemporary languages
 Structural linguists are concerned with discov-ering and recording the principles that determine how sounds and words are
put together in speech
 Sociolinguists are interested in the social aspects of language, including what people speak about, how they interact
conversationally, their attitudes toward speakers of other dialects or languages, and how they speak differently in different
contexts.
 Linguistic diversity reflects not just differences in sounds and grammar but differences in ways of looking at the
world. For example, the observation that the language of the Hopi Indians of the American Southwest had no
words for past, present, and future led the early proponents of linguistic relativity to suggest that the Hopi people
had a different conception of time.4 Similarly, the observation that English- speaking North Americans use a
number of slang words— such as dough, greenback, dust, loot, bucks, change, paper, cake, moolah, benjamins,
and bread—to refer to money could be a product of linguistic relativity. The profusion of names helps to identify
a thing of special importance to a culture.
 A holistic anthropological approach considers language to have both a universal biological basis and specific
cultural patterning


Ethnology (Cultural Anthropology)

 How and why people from past and present differ in their customary ways of thinking and acting. How aspects of
cultures affect one another
 They examine such written documents as missionary accounts, reports by traders and explorers, and government records to
identify the cultural changes that have occurred.

Applied (Practicing) Anthropology

 Applied anthropologists are commonly employed in settings outside traditional academia, including government agencies,
international develop- ment agencies, private consulting firms, businesses, public health organizations, medical schools, law
offices, community development agencies, and charitable foundations.
 Relevance

 Disbelief in principles of human behavior will be reinforced by the failure to find them

 Notable Anthropologists
 Franz Boas (1858–1942

o Boas did his first ethnographic research among the Inuit (Eskimos) in arctic Canada in 1883 and1884. After a brief academic
career in Berlin, he came to the United States where he worked in museums interspersed with ethnographic research among
the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka’wakw) Indians in the Canadian Pacific

o As a Jewish immigrant, Boas recognized the dangers of ethnocen- trism and especially racism. Through ethnographic
fieldwork and comparative analysis, he demonstrated that white supremacy theories and other schemes ranking non-
European peoples and cul- tures as inferior were biased, ill-informed, and unscientific. Throughout his long and illustrious
academic career, he promoted anthropology not only as a human science but also as an instrument to combat rac- ism and
prejudice in the world.

o Stevenson and Boas were also pioneers in visual an- thropology. Stevenson used an early box camera to document Pueblo
Indian religious ceremonies and material cul- ture, while Boas photographed Inuit (Eskimos) in northern Canada in 1883
and Kwakiutl Indians from the early 1890s for cultural as well as physical anthropological documentation. To- day, these old
photographs are greatly valued not only by anthropologists
and historians, but also by indigenous peoples themselves.

 Matilda Coxe Stevenson (1849–1915)

o Did fieldwork among the Zuni Indi- ans of Arizona. In 1885, she founded the Women’s Anthropological Society in
Washington, DC, the first professional association for women scientists

o one of the first women in the world to receive a full-time position in science

Anthropology and Globalization

  The powerful forces driving globalization are tech- nological innovations, cost differences among countries, faster
knowledge transfers, and increased trade and financial integration among countries.
 As participant observers, anthropologists describe and try to explain how indi- viduals and organizations
respond to the massive changes confronting them
 Dramatically increasing every year, globalization can be a two-edged sword. It may generate economic growth
and prosperity, but it also undermines long-established institutions. Generally, globalization has brought
significant gains to higher-educated groups in wealthier countries, while doing little to boost developing countries
and actually contributing to the erosion of traditional cultures. Upheav- als due to globalization are key causes
for rising levels of ethnic and religious conflict throughout the world
 Can provide insights into challenges confronted by diversity and how to overcome it


Chapter 2: Research Methods

 Scientific Research could be defined as an organised and systematic enquiry into a (physical or
social-cultural) phenomenon to discover new or to verify the existing knowledge
 Anthropology is an observational and field-based science
 Scientific method
o Method of obtaining objective knowledge through systemic observation
o Scientific Process: Scientific process includes all the activities of the researcher as part of
attaining knowledge. The process of identification of problem, formulation of hypothesis,
the methods or techniques of data collection, conduct of fieldwork/experiments,
classification, analysis and interpretation of data and the logical inference of
generalisation would all come under the purview of the scientific process.
o Scientific method: It is a system used by scientists to generate data to understand a
phenomenon, and to test hypothesis or to develop new theories or to confirm or reject old
theories. It involves systematic observation,collection, classification, analysis and
interpretation of data
o It is empirical, systematic, irreplaceable, produces provisional results, objective
 anthropological research adopts comparative, historical or ethnographic approach to the study
of society and culture.
 Comparative method refers to the method of comparing different societies, groups or social
institutions within the same society or between societies to show whether and why they are
similar or different in certain aspects
 Cross-Cultural Comparison: Comparative method could be used to study different cultures of
same period. It is known as cross-cultural approach. The history of crosscultural comparison
dates back to the late 19th century when E B Tylor and L H Morgan developed early cultural
evolution. Later this approach was advanced by G P Murdock.
 In historical method, the origin, development and gradual evolution of institutions, societies and
cultures are studied.The principles of biological evolution have definitely influenced the historical
method. It studies social institutions in the background of whole human history
 Uncontrolled observation (also requires self-observation)
o Participatory observations
o Non-participant observation

 Controlled observation
o Case study method
 Sources of data:
 Life histories
 Personal documents, letters and records
 Biographies
 Information obtained through interviews
 Observation
o Genealogical method
 Genealogy is the study of one’s ancestors - parents, grandparents great
grandparents and so on. The genealogical method was originally developed by
W.H.R. Rivers during the Torres Straits expedition of 1898-99.
 Analysis of social organization
 o Survey method
 Types of surveys
 General survey
 Specific survey
 Regular survey
 Sample survey
 Tools and techniques of anthropological research
o Questionnaire
 Open-ended
 Close-ended
 Contingency question
 Types:
 Structured
 Unstructured
 Mixed
 Pictorial
o Interview
 Individual interview
 Group interview
 Structured interview
 Unstructured interview
 Steps in preparing research design:
o Title of the research
o Statement of the problem
o Purpose of the research
o Literature review
o Scope
o Objectives of the study
o Concepts and variables used in the research
 o Formulation of hypothesis
o Selection of sample
o Methods of data collection
o Data analysis
o Interpretation of data
o Chapter scheme
o Time budget

Chapter 3: Major Theories

 The fathers include Lewis Henry Morgan, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, Franz Boas, and Bronislaw Malinowski. The mothers include
Ruth Benedict and especially Margaret Mead.

 Evolutionism
o Tylor and Morgan wrote books that presented culture as a topic that could be studied scientifically
o Ancient Society (a book) is a key example of 19th-century evolutionism applied to society. Morgan assumed that
human society had evolved through a series of stages, which he called savagery, barbarism, and civilization. He
subdivided savagery and barba- rism into three substages each: lower, middle, and upper savagery and lower, middle,
and upper bar- barism.
o The earliest humans lived in lower savagery, with a subsistence based on fruits and nuts. In middle savagery people
started fishing and gained control over fire. The invention of the bow and arrow ushered in upper savagery.
o Lower barbarism began when humans started making pottery. Middle barbarism in the Old World depended on the
domestication of plants and animals, and in the Americas on irrigated agriculture. Iron smelting and the use of iron
tools ushered in upper barbarism.
o Advent of Civilization with the introduction of writing
o Morgan’s brand of evolutionism is known as linear evolutionism (he assumed that stages could not be skipped)
 o Critics argue because Polynesians never developed pottery, they were frozen, in Morgan’s scheme, in upper savagery.
In fact, in sociopoliti- cal terms, Polynesia was an advanced region, with many complex societies, including the ancient

Hawaiian state.
o In his book Primitive Culture (1871/1958), Tylor developed his own evolutionary approach to the anthropology of
religion. Like Morgan, Tylor proposed a unilinear path—from animism to polytheism, then monotheism, and finally
science. In Tylor’s view, religion would retreat as science provided better and better explanations
o Morgan was interested in the evolution of a number of specific things. He listed them as follows: Subsistence,
Government, Language, the Family, Religion, House Life and Architecture, and Property”.
For example, in terms of the evolution of the family, by examining the Hawaiian society, Morgan anticipated that
human beings of the past used to live in the ‘primitive hoards’ where they used to practice unregulated sexual
behavior and as a result, people could not identify their own fathers After that there came brother-sister marriage and
group marriage in a chronological order. Then there came the matriarchal society and the last form of family is the
patriarchal one where men took the charge of economy and politics
o Morgan also talked about the development of arts of subsistence. According to him, this development went through
five successive stages. In a chronological order, they are: Natural subsistence (fruit), Fish subsistence, Farinaceous
subsistence (cultivation), Meat and milk subsistence and the last one is unlimited subsistence (through field
agriculture).

o
 The Boasians- Four Field Anthropology
o Boas is the father of American four- field anthropology.
o Boas contributed to cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology. His biological studies of European immigrants to
the United States revealed and measured phenotypical plasticity. The children of immigrants differed physically from
their parents not because of genetic change but because they had grown up in a different environment
o Worked to demonstrate that biology (including race) did not determine culture
o In an important book, Ruth Benedict (1940) stressed the idea that people of many races have contributed to major
historical advances and that civilization is the achievement of no single race.
o Historical particularism: different variations of the same culture have different causes and therefore they are
incomparable
 o The evolutionists had stressed independent invention: Eventually people in many areas (as they evolved along a
preordained evolutionary path) had come up with the same cultural solution to a common problem. Agriculture, for
example, was invented several times. The Boasians, while not denying independent invention, stressed the importance
of diffusion, or borrowing, from other cultures.
o The analytic units they used to study diffusion were the culture trait, the trait complex, and the culture area. A culture
trait was something like a bow and arrow. A trait complex was the hunting pattern that went along with it. A culture
area was based on the diffusion of traits and trait complexes across a particular geographic area
o Environmental boundaries could limit the spread of cultural traits outside that area
o For Boasians, historical particularism and diffusion were complementary
o Boasians such as Alfred Kroeber, Clark Wissler, and Melville Herskovits studied the distribution of traits and
developed culture area classifications for Native North America (Wissler and Kroeber) and Africa (Herskovits)
o Historical particularism was based on the idea that each element of culture had its own distinctive history and that
social forms (such as totemism in different societies) that might look similar were far from identical because of their
different histories.
 Functionalism
o Functionalism postponed the search for origins (through evolution or diffusion) and instead focused on the role of
culture traits and practices in contemporary society. The two main strands of functionalism are associated with Alfred
Reginald Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist who taught mainly in Great Britain.
o Usually considered the father of ethnography by virtue of his years of field work in the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski
was a functionalist in two senses.
o In the first, rooted in his ethnography, he believed that all customs and institutions in society were integrated and
interrelated, so that if one changed, others would change as well
o The second strand of Malinowski’s functionalism is known as needs functionalism. Malinowski (1944) believed that
humans had a set of universal biological needs, and that customs developed to fulfill those needs. The function of any
practice was the role it played in satisfying those universal biological needs, such as the need for food, sex, shelter, and
so on.
o It describes the inter-relationship between several parts of any society. These parts or the constituent elements of a
society could be named as norms, traditions, customs, institutions like economy, kinship, religion etc. These parts are
interrelated and interdependent.
o According to Radcliffe-Brown (1962/1965), although history is important, social anthropology could never hope to
discover the histories of people without writing.
o Radcliffe-Brown advocated that social anthropology be a synchronic rather than a diachronic science, that is, that it
study societies as they exist today (synchronic, at one time) rather than across time (diachronic).
o According to functionalism and structural functionalism, customs (social practices) function to preserve the social
structure. In Radcliffe-Brown’s view, the function of any practice is what it does to maintain the system of which it is a
part. That system has a structure whose parts work or function to maintain the whole.
 o Radcliffe-Brown saw social systems as comparable to anatomical and physiological systems. As having distinct
functions towards keeping the social system running smoothly
o In Radcliffe-Brown’s concept of function, the notion of structure is involved. This structure involves several constituent
unit entities which maintain the continuity of social structure.
o Structural features of social life:
 Existence of social group
 Internal structure of group
 Arrangement into social classes
 Social distinctions
 Arrangement of persons in dyadic relationships
 Interaction between groups and persons
o According to Radcliffe-Brown the importance of social institution is that social structure is the arrangement of persons
which is controlled and defined by institutions. There are two types of models of studying social structure i.e. actual
social structure and general social structure. ‘Actual social structure’ according to Brown, the relationship between
persons and groups change from time to time. Thus, actual social structure remains changes in many times. On the
other hand, in general social structure, remain relatively constant for a long time.
o Panglossian functionalism means a tendency to see things as functioning not just to maintain the system but to do so
in the most optimal way possible, so that any deviation from the norm would only damage the system
o A form of functionalism persists in the widely accepted view that there are social and cultural systems and that their
elements, or constituent parts, are functionally related (are functions of each other) so that they covary: when one part
changes, others also change.

o Must read pdf “functionalism, Radcliffe”. You are still not clear on the topic
 Configurationalism
o Traits might not spread if they met environmental barriers, or if they were not accepted by a particular culture. There
had to be a fit between the culture and the trait diffusing in, and borrowed traits would be reworked to fit the culture
adopting them
o Even among neighboring societies, different enculturation patterns could produce very different personality types and
cultural configurations
 Neo-evolutionism
o General evolution, the idea that over time and through the archaeological, historical, and ethnographic records, we
can see the evolution of culture as a whole. For example, human economies have evolved from Paleolithic foraging,
through early farming and herding, to intensive forms of agriculture, and to industrialism.
o Multilinear evolution: how cultures had evolved along several different lines. For example, he recognized different
paths to statehood (e.g., those followed by irrigated versus nonirrigated societies).
 o Cultures advanced in proportion to the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year. In this view, the United States
is one of the world’s most advanced societies because of all the energy it harnesses and uses. White’s formulation is
ironic in viewing societies that deplete nature’s bounty as being more advanced than those that conserve it.
 Cultural Materialism
o Marvin Harris adapted multilayered models of determinism associated with White and Steward
o For Harris (1979/2001) all societies had an infrastructure, corresponding to Steward’s culture core, consisting of
technology, economics, and demography—the systems of production and reproduction without which societies could
not survive. Growing out of infra- structure was structure—social relations, forms of kinship and descent, patterns of
distribution and consumption. The third layer was superstructure: religion, ideology, play—aspects of culture
furthest away from the meat and bones that enable cultures to survive.
o Harris’s key belief, shared with White, Steward, and Karl Marx, was that in the final analysis infrastructure
determines structure and superstructure.
 Science and Determinism
o Harris insisted that anthropology is a science; that science is based on explanation, which uncovers relations of cause
and effect; and that the role of science is to discover causes, to find determinants.
 Culture and the Individual
o Culturology
 Leslie White saw anthropology as a science
 Cultural factors, which depended on unique human capacity for symbiotic thought, were more influential
than individuals. And challenged the “great man theory of history”
 During certain historical periods, such as the Renaissance, conditions were right for the expression of
creativity and great- ness, and individual genius blossomed. At other times and places, there may have been
just as many great minds, but the culture did not encourage their expression. Simultaneity of discovery
o Durkheim contented that anthropologists study individuals as representative of something more. It is those larger
systems, which consist of social positions—statuses and roles—and which are perpetuated across the generations
through
o Symbols also play a culturally significant role in society
 Structuralism
o Structuralism rests on Lévi-Strauss’s belief that human minds have certain universal characteristics, which originate in
common features of the Homo sapiens brain
o These common mental structures lead people everywhere to think similarly regardless of their society or cultural
background. Among these universal mental characteristics are the need to classify: to impose order on aspects of
nature, on people’s relation to nature, and on relations between people.
o Although many phenomena are continuous rather than discrete, the mind, because of its need to impose order, treats
them as being more different than they are.
 Agency refers to the actions that individuals take, both alone and in groups, in forming and transforming cultural identities.
 Practice theory focuses on how such varied individuals influence and transform the world they live in. Culture shapes how
individuals experience and respond to external events, but individuals also play an active role in how society functions and
changes.
 Influenced by the Italian social theorist Vilfredo Pareto, Leach focused on how individuals work to achieve power and how their
actions can transform society.
 World Systems Theory and Political Economy
o A post–World War II turn of anthro- pology away from “primitive” and nonindustrial societies, assumed to be
somewhat isolated and autonomous, to contemporary societies recognized as forged by colonialism and participating
fully in the modern world system.
o Julian Steward, Eric Wolf, and Sidney Mintz
o Wolf wrote the modern classic Europe and the People without History (1982), which viewed local people, such as Native
Americans, in the context of world- system events, such as the fur trade in North America. Wolf focused on how such
“people without history”—that is, nonliterate people, those who lacked written histories of their own— participated
in and were transformed by the world system and the spread of capitalism
o Such works in political economy illustrate a movement of anthropology toward interdisciplinarity, drawing on other
academic fields, such as history and sociology.
o World-system approaches in anthropology have been criticized for overstressing the influence of outsiders, and for
paying insufficient attention to the transformative actions of “the people without history” themselves.
 Chapter 4: Family, Marriage, and Residence Pattern, Kinship

What Is Marriage?

A nonethnocentric definition of marriage is a culturally sanctioned union between two or more people that estab- lishes certain rights
and obligations between the people, be- tween them and their children, and between them and their in-laws.

What Is the Family?

Although the idea of family means different things to different people, in anthropological terms it is a group of two or more people
related by blood, marriage, or adoption. The family may take many forms, ranging from a single parent with one or more children, to
a married couple or polygamous spouses with offspring, to several generations of parents and their children

What Is the Difference Between

Family and Household?
Households are task-oriented residential units within which economic production, consumption, inheritance, childrear- ing, and
shelter are organized and accomplished. In the vast majority of human societies, a household consists of a fam- ily or part of a family
or their core members, even though some household members may not be relatives of the fam- ily around which it is built.

 According to strict Judeo-Christian law, as prescribed in the Book of Leviticus (20:10), adultery was punishable by
death: “And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife . . . , the adulterer and the adulteress shall
surely be put to death.”
 Such restrictions exist today in many traditional Muslim societies in northern Africa and western Asia, where age- old
Shariah law continues or has been reinstated to regulate social behavior in strict accordance with religious standards
of morality
 This restriction on premarital affairs was the reason the spread of HIV/AIDS was less in Muslim African countries
than other non-Muslim countries
 The importance to marriage as an institution, and laws and regulations surrounding it vary within cultures and
countries
 Historically, marriage has been of marginal significance in the family life of the Nayar people of Kerala in
southwestern India. A landowning warrior caste, their estates are traditionally held by corporations made up of
kinsmen related in the female line. These blood relatives live together in a large household, with the eldest male
serving as manager.
 A classic anthropological study describes three transactions related to customary Nayar sexual and marriage practices
o The first, taking place shortly before a girl experiences her first menstruation, involves a ceremony that joins
her with a “ritual husband” in a temporary union (does not necessarily involve sexual relations; though a
future ritual of mourning when the man dies)
o The second transaction takes place when a young Nayar woman enters into a continuing sexual liaison with
a man approved by her family. This is a formal relationship that requires the man to present her with gifts
three times each year until the relationship is terminated. (involves sexual relations, not necessarily limited
to one man, and man is not obligated to support economically)
o If a Nayar woman becomes pregnant, one of the men with whom she has a relationship (who may or may
not be the biological father) must formally acknowledge paternity. This third transaction, marked by the
man giving gifts to the woman and the midwife, establishes the child’s birth rights.
o However, once a man has formally acknowledged fatherhood by gift giving, he may continue to take interest
in the child, but he has no further obligations. Support and education for the child are the responsibility of
the mother and her brothers with whom she and her offspring live (consanguineal kin)
 Incest taboo—the prohibition of sexual contact between certain close relatives
 the Inca Tribe in Peru and the ancient Egyptians engaged in incest to protect their political lineage
 Closely related to prohibitions against incest are cultural rules against endogamy (from Greek endon, “within,” and
gamos, “marriage”), or marriage within a particular group of individuals (cousins and in-laws, for example). If the
group is defined as one’s immediate family alone, then so- cieties generally prohibit or at least discourage endogamy,
thereby promoting exogamy (exo is Greek for “outside”), or marriage outside the group
 French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw exogamy as a form of intergroup social exchange in which “wife-
giving” and “wife-taking” (or, as happens in communities with female-headed households, husband-giving and
husband-taking) created social networks and alliances between distinct communities
 In contrast to mating, which occurs when individuals join for purposes of sexual relations, marriage is a socially
binding and culturally recognized relationship
 Among humans, mates are secured and held solely through personal effort and mutual consent.
 Forms of marriage:
o Monogamy-marriage in which both partners have just one spouseIn some parts of the world (including
Europe and North America), where di- vorce rates are high and people who have been divorced remarry, an
increasingly common form of marriage is serial monogamy, whereby an individual marries a series of
partners in succession.
o Polygamy: one individual having multiple spouses—specifically to polygyny, in which a man is married to
more than one woman (gyne is Greek for “woman” and “wife”). Favored in about 80 to 85 percent of the
world’s cultures, polygyny is commonly practiced in parts of Asia and much of sub-Saharan Africa
 Although polygyny is the favored marriage form in these places, monogamy exceeds it, and the
reason for this is economic rather than moral.
 Polygyny is particularly common in traditional food-producing societies that support themselves
by herding grazing animals or growing crops and where women do the bulk of cultivation.
 Decline in polygyny as families transition from traditional farming and herding to wage labor in
cities
 The custom of levirate- where a brother marries his widowed sister-in-law. And sororate- where a
husband marries the youngest sister of his deceased wife. In some societies, also applies to a man
who has married a woman who can’t bear child.
 Polyandry- the marriage of one woman to two or more men simultaneously
o Group marriage. Until a few decades ago, Iñupiat Eskimos in northern Alaska, for instance, engaged in
“spouse exchange” (nuliaqatigiit) between non-kin, with two conjugal husband–wife couples being united
by shared sexual access.
 Patrilateral parallel-cousin marriage. Although not obligatory, such marriages have been favored historically among
Arabs, the ancient Israelites, and the ancient Greeks
 Marriages in many societies are formalized by some sort of economic exchange
 Far more common is bride- wealth (sometimes called bride-price), which involves payments of money or valuable
goods to a bride’s parents or other close kin. This usually happens in patrilineal societies where the bride will become a
member of the household where her husband grew up; this household will benefit from her labor as well as from the
offspring she produces. Thus her family must be compensated for their loss.
 Other forms of com- pensation are an exchange of women between families— “My son will marry your daughter if
your son will marry my daughter.” Yet another is bride service, a period of time during which the groom works for the
bride’s family.
 In a number of societies more or less restricted to the western, southern, and eastern margins of Eurasia, where the
economy is based on agriculture, women often bring a dowry with them at marriage. A form of dowry (as also in the
US) is that the bride’s father bears the wedding expenses
 One of the functions of dowry is to ensure a woman’s support in widowhood (or after divorce), an important
consideration in a society where men carry out the bulk of productive work, and women are valued for their
reproductive potential rather than for the work they do. In such societies, women incapable of bearing children are
especially vulnerable, but the dowry they bring with them at marriage helps protect them against desertion. Another
function of dowry is to reflect the economic status of the woman in societies where differences in wealth are important.
It also permits women, with the aid of their parents and kin, to compete through dowry for desirable (that is, wealthy)
husbands.
 Divorce may have social, political, and economic consequences far beyond the breakup of a couple and their
household.
 Among the most common reason for divorce across cultures are infidelity, sterility, cruelty, and desertion
 High rates of divorce in western industrialized societies are seen as a worrying signs for traditional forms of marriage
and family system
 With increased longevity, separation by death has diminished, and separation by legal action has grown.
 An effective way to facilitate economic cooperation be- tween men and women and simultaneously provide for a close
bond between mother and child is by establishing residential groups that include adults of both sexes
 For purposes of cross-cultural comparison, anthropologists define the household as the basic residential unit where
economic production, consumption, inheritance, childrearing, and shelter are organized and carried out.
 In the vast majority of human societies, most households are made up of families, but there are many other
arrangements. For instance, among the Mundurucu Indians, a horticultural people living in the center of Brazil’s
Amazon rainforest, married men and women are members of separate households, meeting periodically for sexual
activity
 Forms of family
o Conjugal family- formed on the basis of marital ties
o Consanguineal family- related women, their brothers, and the women’s offspring (not very common)
 o The Nuclear Family
 The smallest family unit, a group consisting of one or two parents and dependent offspring, which
may include a stepparent, stepsiblings, and adopted children
 Industrialization and market capitalism have played a historical role in shaping the nuclear family
as they only pay individual pay without regard to their family structure
 And since few wage earners have the financial resources to support large numbers of relatives
without incomes of their own, industrial or postindustrial societies do not favor the continuance of
larger extended families
 Also, likely to be prominent in traditional foraging societies such as that of the Eskimo people who
live in the barren Arctic environments of eastern Siberia (Russia), Alaska, Greenland, and Canada
 Such isolation comes with its own set of challenges, including the difficulties of rearing children
without multigenerational support and a lack of familial care for the elderly



o The Extended Family
 When two or more closely related nuclear families clus- ter together in a large domestic group,
they form a unit known as the extended family
 This larger family unit, common in traditional horticultural, agricultural, and pastoral societies
around the world, typically consists of siblings with their spouses and offspring, and often their
parents.
 Has continuity through time, as old members die off and new members are born into the family
 Extended families have built into them particular challenges. Among these are difficulties that the
in-marrying spouse is likely to have in adjusting to his or her spouse’s family.
o Non-family Households
 Where people live alone or with people who are not relatives
 Cohabitation households- made of unmarried couples
 In Norway, over half of livebirths happen outside marriage
 This temporary arrangement has contributed to a number of single-parent households
 Blended families- comprised of a married couple together raising children from previous unions.
 Patrilocal residence is when a married couple lives in the husband’s father’s place of residence.
 Matrilocal residence, in which a married couple lives in the wife’s mother’s place of residence
 Neolocal residence, a married couple forms a household in a separate location. This occurs where the independence of
the nuclear family is emphasized. In industrial societies such as the United States, where most economic activity occurs
outside rather than inside the family and where it is important for individuals to be able to move where jobs can be
found, neolocal residence is better suited than any of the other patterns.
 Large-scale emigration, modern technology, and multiple other factors in the emerging political economy of global
capitalism also impact the cross-cultural mosaic of marriage, family, and household
 Electronic and digital communication by way of fiber optic cables and satellites has transformed how individuals
express sexual attraction and engage in romantic courtship
 Cross-cultural and transnational love relations bloom via the Internet. New technologies also permit the pursuit of
traditionally prohibited relationships through clandestine text messaging of forbidden desires and tabooed intimacies
—for example, across castes in India and between young unmarried men and women in traditional Muslim
communities.
 Among other contributing factors to today’s diversity of families and households are new reproductive technologies
(NRTs), including various forms of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in which an egg is fertilized in a laboratory. The embryo
is then transferred into the uterus to begin a pregnancy or is frozen for future use

What Is Kinship?

Kinship is a social network of relatives within which individuals possess certain mutual rights and obligations. One’s place in this
network, or kinship status, determines what these rights and obligations are

What Are Descent Groups?

A descent group is a kind of kinship group in which being in

the direct line of descent from a particular real or mythical
ancestor is a criterion of membership.

 Unilineal descent (sometimes called unilateral descent) es- tablishes descent group membership by a direct line from a
common ancestor exclusively through one’s male or fe- male ancestors, but not both
 A lineage is a unilineal kinship group descended from a common ancestor or founder who lived four to six
generations ago and in which relationships among members can be exactly stated in genealogical terms
 A clan is an extended unilineal kinship group, often consisting of several lineages, whose members claim common
descent from a remote ancestor, usually legendary or mythological
 Patrilineal Descent
o Through forefathers, the male members of a patrilineal descent group trace their descent from a common
ancestor
o A man’s son and daughter also trace their descent back through the male line to their common ancestor.
o In the typical patrilineal group, authority over the children rests with the father or his elder brother.
o A woman belongs to the same descent group as her father and his brothers, but her children cannot trace
their descent through them.
o The Han clan in China is an example
o Often, the father’s brother and his sons are members of the same household. Thus
one’s paternal uncle is like a second father and deserving of obedience and respect, while his sons are like
one’s brothers
o Although a woman belongs to her father’s tsu, for all practical purposes she is absorbed by the tsu(social
lineage in Chinese) of her husband, with whom she lives after marriage. Nonetheless, members of her natal
(birth) tsu retain some interest in her after her departure. Her mother, for example, would assist her in the
birth of her children, and her brother or some other male relative would look after her interests, perhaps
even intervening if her husband or other members of his family treat her badly.
o Just as families periodically split up into new ones, so would the larger descent groups periodically splinter
along the lines of their main family branches.
o In this way, over many centuries, a whole hierarchy of descent groups develops, with all persons having the
same surname considering themselves to be members of a great patrilineal clan.
 Matrilineal Descent
o Does not automatically confer gender authority
o Share exclusive authority with men (brothers) in descent group
o Brothers and sisters belong to the descent group of the mother
o A common feature is the relative weakness of social tie between husband and wife. Brother are the decision
makers of the household, and their property is inherited not by their own kids but by their sister’s kids
o White Mountain Apache are an example
 o Although sons learn from their fathers how to farm, a man has no real authority over his son. This is
because a man’s own children belong to his wife’s lineage while his sister’s children form part of his. When
parents have difficulty with an unruly child, the mother’s brother is called upon to mete out discipline.
o The Garo (India), The Khasi (India), The Mosuo (China), The Minangkabau (Indonesia) are examples of
matrilineal societies in South Asia
 Ambilineal descent and bilateral descent groups
 Whatever form of descent predominates, the kin of both mother and father are important components of the social
structure in all societies
 As a traditional institution in a kin-ordered society, the descent group often endures in state-organized societies where
political institutions are ineffective or weakly developed
 Because the cultural ideas, values, and practices associated with traditional descent groups may be deeply embedded,
such patterns of culture often endure in diasporic communities
 As generation succeeds generation and new members are born into the lineage, the kinship group’s membership may
become too large to manage or may outgrow the lineage’s resources, the original lineage splits into new, smaller
lineages. The result of this process is the appearance of a larger kind of descent group: the clan.
 A clan—typically consisting of several lineages—is an extended unilineal descent group whose members claim
common descent from a distant ancestor
 It lacks the residential unity that is generally, although not always, characteristic of a lineage’s core members.
 Clans, lacking the residential unity of lineages, frequently depend on symbols—of animals, plants, natural forces,
colors, and special objects—to provide members with solidarity and a ready means of identification. These symbols,
called totems, often are associated with the clan’s mythical origin and reinforce clan members’ awareness of their
common descent.
 Totemism was defined by the British anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown as a set of customary beliefs and practices
that set up a special system of relations between the society and the plants, animals, and other natural objects that are
important.
 Iroquois Indian matrilineal clans in New York carry such totemic names as Wolf, Bear, and Turtle. Families belonging
to these clans can be found in different villages of the Mohawk or any other of the six Iroquois nations, and they act
toward each other as if they are related as “brothers,” “sisters,” “sons,” or “daughters.”
 Patrilineal clans trace descent exclusively through men from a founding ancestor. Historically, a few dozen such clans
existed in the Scottish highlands, often identified with the prefix “Mac” or “Mc” (from an old Celtic word meaning “son
of ”). During the past few hundred years, large Scottish clans such as McGregor and Mackenzie broke apart as many
members moved away in search of economic opportunity.


 Phratry A unilineal descent group composed of at least two clans that supposedly share a common ancestry, whether
or not they really do.
 Moiety Each group that results from a division of a society into two halves on the basis of descent .
 The feelings of kinship among members of lineages and clans are stronger than those of members of phratries and
moieties. This may be due to the much larger size and more diffuse nature of the latter groups.
 By institutionalizing reciprocity between groups of clans, the moiety system joins together families who otherwise
would not be sufficiently invested in maintaining the commonwealth.
 Bilateral kinship, a characteristic of most contemporary European and American societies as well as a number of food-
for- aging cultures, affiliates a person with genetically close relatives (but not in-laws) through both sexes.
 Since such a huge group is too big to be socially practical, it is usually reduced to a smaller circle of paternal and
maternal relatives, called the kindred. The kindred may be defined as an individual’s close blood relatives on the
maternal and paternal side of his or her family. Since the kindred is laterally rather than lineally organized—that is,
EGO, or the central person from whom the degree of each relationship is traced, is the center of the group — it is not
a true descent group
 Kindreds are frequently found in industrial and postindustrial state societies where capitalist wage labor conditions
promote mobility and individualism, thereby weakening the importance of a strong kinship organization.
 In societies where small domestic units—nuclear families or single-parent households—are of primary importance,
bilateral kinship and kindred organization are likely to result.
 Kinship terminology and Kinship groups:
o Each cultures uses different terms associated with relatives
o Eskimo system Kinship reckoning in which the nuclear family is emphasized by specifically identifying the mother,
father, brother, and sister, while lumping together all other relatives into broad categories such as uncle, aunt, and
cousin; also known as a lineal system.
 o Hawaiian system Kinship reckoning in which all relatives of the same sex and generation are referred to by the same
term.
o Iroquois system Kinship reckoning in which a father
and father’s brother are referred to by a single term, as are a mother and mother’s sister, but a father’s sister and
mother’s brother are given separate terms. Parallel cousins are classified with brothers and sisters, while cross cousins
are classified separately but not equated with relatives of some other generation.

Chapter 5: Religion

 The anthropological approach to religion and spirituality

 Religion An organized system of ideas about the spiritual sphere or the supernatural, along with associated
ceremonial practices by which people try to interpret and/or influence aspects of the universe otherwise beyond their
control.
 Spirituality is also concerned with the sacred, as distinguished from material matters, but it is often individual rather
than collective and does not require a distinctive format or traditional organization.
 Food foraging people with their limited technological ability are of a naturalistic worldview. Religion is inseparable
from daily life. At the other end is the western civilization, with more reliance on organizational skills and technology
 Religious activity may be less prominent in the lives of social elites, who may see themselves as more in control of their
own destinies, than it is in the lives of peasants or members of lower classes
 One psychological function is to provide a model of the universe, which plays a key role in establishing orderly human
behavior.
 A social function of religion is to prompt reflection concerning conduct

 Spiritual forces and supernatural beings
 Super natural beings may be divided into three categories: major deities (gods and goddesses), ancestral spirits, and
other sorts of spirit beings.
 Gods and goddesses are major deities, and as such they are more remote than other spirit beings. They are usually
seen as controlling the universe.
 Polytheism Belief in several gods and/or goddesses (as contrasted with monotheism—belief in one god or goddess).
 pantheon The several gods and goddesses of a people.
 Generally speaking, societies that subordinate women to men define the supreme deity in masculine terms. Such male-
privileging religions developed in traditional societies with economies based on the herding of animals or intensive
agriculture carried out or controlled by men, who are dominating figures to their children.
 Goddesses, by contrast, are likely to be most prominent in societies where women play a significant role in the
economy, where women enjoy relative equality with men, and where men are less controlling figures to their wives and
children. Such societies are most often those that depend on crop cultivation carried out solely or mostly by women
 Goddesses are often associated with concepts such as light, procreation, fertility
 About 3,200 years ago, the Israelite tribes crossed the Jordan River and entered the land of Canaan (Palestine) where
they began to till the soil and grow crops, requiring them to establish a new kind of relationship with the land. As they
settled down and became sedentary, dependent upon rainfall and concerned about seasonal cycles and soil fertility (as
the region’s Canaanites already were), they adopted many of the region’s already established Canaanite goddess cults
 This ancient masculine-authoritarian concept of god has been perpetuated down to the present, not just in the Judaic
tradition but also by most Christians and Muslims, whose religions stem from the old Israelite religion.
 Belief in ancestral spirits is consistent with the belief that humans are made of a physical and spiritual self. For
example, traditional belief of the Penobscot Indians in Maine holds that each person has a vital spirit capable of
traveling apart from the body
 Ancestor spirits played an important role in the patrilineal society of traditional China. For the gift of life, a boy was
forever indebted to his parents, owing them obedience, deference, and a comfortable old age. They are also to fulfil the
duties of their ancestors.
 Animism
 a belief that nature is animated (enlivened or energized) by distinct personalized spirit beings separable from bodies.
Spirits such as souls and ghosts are thought to dwell in humans and animals but also in human-made artifacts,
plants, stones, mountains, wells, and other natural features
 less remote than gods and goddesses and more involved in people’s daily affairs. Can have a distinct personality as
well
 Animism, a concept theoretically developed by the pioneering British anthropologist Sir Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917),
is typical of those who see themselves as being a part of nature rather than superior to it.
 Give minimal role to gods and goddesses for daily problem
 Animatism
 A belief that nature is enlivened or energized by an impersonal spiritual power or supernatural potency which may
make itself manifest in any special place, thing, or living creature. Although this concept is not universal, it is found in
cultures on every continent
 The Melanesians, for example, think of mana as a spiritual force inherent in all objects. A warrior’s success in fighting
is not attributed to his own strength but to the mana contained in an amulet that hangs around his neck
 This concept of impersonal potency or energy was widespread among North American Indians. The Algon- quins
called it manitou; to the Mohawk it was orenda; to the Lakota, wakonda.
 Animism and animatism are not mutually exclusive but are often found in the same culture
 Given a belief in animatism and/or the powers of supernatural beings, one is predisposed to see what appear to be
results of the application of such powers. And the result of a task can be attributed to that power
 Humans generally emphasize successes over failures, and long after many of the latter have been forgotten, tales will
still be told of the workings of supernatural powers.
 Sacred places
 Some religious traditions consider certain geographic places to be spiritually significant or even sacred. Typically, such
sites are rivers, lakes, waterfalls, islands, forests, caves, and— especially—mountains.
 Often, they are associated as the abodes of gods or dwelling places for the spirits of the dead, heights where prophets
received their divine directions, or retreats for prayer, meditation, and vision quests
 Three sacred mountains are shared by the Jewish, Chris- tian, and Muslim traditions: Mount Ararat in the Caucasus
Mountains, a multinational region between Russia and Turkey where the ark of the ancient patriarch Noah is said to
have landed after the Great Flood; Mount Horeb, the “mountain of God” in the Sinai Desert where the prophet Moses
received the stone tablets from his god with the ten sacred rules of behavior; and Mount Moriah, also known as the
Temple Mount, at the old city of Jerusalem.
 the Japanese view the snow-capped perfect volcanic cone of Mount Fuji (“ever-lasting life”) as a sacred place. Aztecs
held several snow-capped volcanoes sacred, including Popocatepetl (“Smoking Mountain”) just outside Mexico City.
 Priest or priestess A full-time religious specialist formally recognized for his or her role in guiding the religious
practices of others and for contacting and influencing supernatural powers.
 shaman Apersonwhoentersanalteredstateofconsciousness— at will—to contact and utilize an ordinarily hidden
reality in order to acquire knowledge, power, and to help others.
 Sacred Performances: Rituals and Ceremonies
 Anthropologists have classified several different types of ritual.
o rituals of purity: which illustrate not only how members of a social group are bound together, but also how
they reinforce the boundaries between the group and outsiders by means of cultural prohibitions known as
taboos
o rites of passage: when individuals change their social status within their group
o rites of intensification: that allow members of a social group to strengthen their common identity in times of
crisis.
 Taboo A prohibition, which, if not observed, leads to a penalty inflicted by magic, spiritual force, or religion.
 Taboo is derived from the Polynesian term tabu (or tapu). Among Pacific Islanders such as Maoris or Samoans, this
term refers to something that has supernatural power and is to be avoided.
 Hindu caste society is religiously reinforced by strict rules against ritual pollution that govern the lives of members of
the different varnas. As members of the highest-ranking “grade of being,” Brahmans are especially concerned about
maintaining their “purity,” which is symbolically associated with the color white and publicly visible in their dress.
 Like other traditional Hindus, they dutifully follow their ritually prescribed rules of conduct, known as dharma and
thus avoid becoming “unclean.” If they break a taboo, they are believed to have violated the fundamental Hindu
principles of the cosmic order. And for someone who believes in reincarnation, such misconduct has consequences for
one’s karma, the soul’s destiny or fate when it is reincarnated (literally, “returns into flesh”) in the next life.
 Rules maintaining social order within the group, as well as defining these groups from others, are reinforced by rituals
of purity and associated taboos.
 Repeated year after year, generation after generation, rituals translate enduring messages, values, and sentiments into action.


 German-French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep analyzed the rites of passage that mark an individual’s crossing
over from one social status to another. he found it useful to divide ceremonies for all of these status transitions or life
crises into three phases: pre-liminary (of separation), liminary (of marginality), and post-liminary (of admission).
 In anthropology today, this scheme is presented as three stages:
o separation In a rite of passage, the ritual removal of the individual from society.
o transition In a rite of passage, isolation of the individual following separation and prior to incorporation
into society.
o incorporation In a rite of passage, reincorporation of the individual into society in his or her new status.
 The rites of passage of contemporary cultures include confirmations, baptisms, bar and bat mitzvahs, and fraternity
hazing. Passage rites involve changes in social status, such as from boy- hood to manhood and from nonmember to
sorority sister. There are also rites and rituals in our business and corporate lives. Examples in- clude promotion and
retirement parties. More generally, a rite of passage may mark any change in place, condition, social position, or age.
 All rites of passage have three phases: separa- tion, liminality, and incorporation.
 The Aborigines of Australia and Mende in West Africa are examples of rites of initiation of manhood and womanhood
 A remarkable cultural example of a rite of intensification is the Hindu cremation ceremony in Bali. Sharing a world-
view with a religious belief in the reincarnation of a deceased person’s soul, the Balinese deal with death by turning
what could be a painful emotional experience of grief and loss into a joyous celebration of life’s progressive continuity
by being reborn in a future existence
 Rituals for death, onset of war, crop yield, etc. are examples of rites of intensification as these events affect the
community as a whole and can lead to unity
 Funeral ceremonies, such as those among the Malinowski, can also include cannibalism; though not always
 Magic
 Many societies have magical rituals to ensure good crops, the replenishment of game, the fertility of domestic animals,
and the avoidance or healing of illness.
 In the 19th century British anthropologist Sir James George Frazer made a useful distinction between two fundamental
principles of magic.
 o The first principle, that “like produces like,” he named imitative magic (some- times called sympathetic
magic). For example, in Myanmar (Burma) in Southeast Asia, for example, a rejected lover might engage a
sorcerer to make an image of his would-be love. If this image were tossed into water, to the accompaniment
of certain charms, it was expected that the hapless girl would go mad. Thus the girl would suffer a fate
similar to that of her image.
o The second principle of thought on which magic is based contagious magic—the idea that things or
persons once in contact can influence each other after the contact is broken. The most common example of
contagious magic is the permanent relationship between an individual and any part of his or her body, such
as hair, fingernails, or teeth.
 Witchcraft
 In Salem, Massachusetts, 200 innocent citizens suspected of being witches were arrested in 1692; of these, thirteen
women and six men were hanged, and one 80-year-old farmer was tortured to death. Despite awarding damages to
descendants of some of the victims nineteen years later, it was not until 1957 that the last of the Salem witches were
exonerated by the Massachusetts legislature
 witchcraft An explanation of events based on the belief that certain individuals possess an innate psychic power
capable of causing harm, including sickness and death.
 As the Ibibio of Nigeria have become increasingly exposed to modern education and scientific training, their reliance
on witchcraft as an explanation for misfortune has increased. And attribute almost every misfortune to witchcraft
 Any combination of the following may cause someone to be labeled a witch: not being fond of greeting people; living
alone in a place apart from others; charging too high a price for something; enjoying adultery or committing incest;
walking about at night; not showing sufficient grief upon the death of a relative or other member of the community;
taking improper care of one’s parents, children, or wives; and being cold hearted. Witches are apt to look and act
mean and to be socially disruptive people in the sense that their behavior exceeds the range of variance considered
acceptable.
 Not only does the idea of personalized evil answer the problem of unmerited suffering, but it also provides an
explanation for many happenings for which no cause can be discovered.
 A witch-hunt is a systematic investigation, through a public hearing, into all social relationships involving the victim
of the sickness or death.
 Through such periodic public scrutiny of behavior, people are reminded of what their society regards as both
strengths and weaknesses of character. This encourages individuals to suppress as best they can those personality
traits that are looked upon with disapproval, for if they do not, they at some time may be accused of being a witch. A
belief in witchcraft thus serves as a broad control on antisocial behavior.
 Another function of witchcraft accusations is that they permit direct expres- sion of hostile feelings against people
toward whom one ordinarily would be unable to express anger.


Lecture 6: Economic Anthropology

 The Trobriand Islanders use of yams as a form of currency and wealth Thus yam exchanges are as much social and
political transactions as they are economic ones. Banana leaf bundles and skirts, for their part, are symbolic of the
political status of families and of their immortality.
 The primary resources in any culture are raw materials, technology, and labor and the rules directing the use of these
are embedded in a people’s culture and determine the way the economy operates within any given natural
environment.
 All societies regulate allocation of valuable resources, especially land and water
 Food foragers, fish-reliant societies, farmers, etc. all have mechanisms to determine right to land access and use of
water
 In Western capitalist societies, a system of private ownership of land and rights to natural resources generally prevails.
Whereas, in traditional nonindustrial societies, land is often controlled by kinship groups such as the family or band
rather than by individuals.
 For example, among the Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari Desert, each band of ten to thirty people lives on roughly 250
square miles of land, which they consider to be their territory—
their own country. These territories are not defined by boundaries but in terms of water holes that are located within
them
 A tributary system of land ownership is where all land is said to belong to the head chief, who allocates it to various
sub- chiefs, who in turn distribute it to family groups. Then the family group leaders assign individual plots to each
farmer.
 When an individual no longer uses the allocated land, it reverts to the head of the large family group, who reallocates
it to some other group member. In this system, the land is allocated for use and is not ‘owned’ therefore mitigating loss
of farm land through subdivision or conversion(selling) into other uses
 All societies have some means of creating and allocating tools that are used to produce goods, as well as traditions for
passing them on to succeeding generations.
 A society’s technology—the number and types of tools employed, combined with knowledge about how to make and
use them—is directly related to the lifestyles of its members.
 Food foragers have fewer and simpler tools as opposed to settled farmers
 Food foragers make and use a variety of tools, many of which are ingenious in their effectiveness. Some of these they
make for their individual use, but codes of generosity are such that a person may not refuse to give or loan what is
requested. Tools may be given or loaned to others in exchange for the products resulting from their use
 Among horticulturists, the axe, digging stick, and hoe are the primary tools and are often traded or loaned to others
for use. And ownership is divided among those who helped grow the crop
 In permanently settled agricultural communities, tools and other productive goods are more complex, heavier, and
costlier to make. In such settings, individual ownership tends to be more absolute, as are the conditions under which
people may borrow and use such equipment. It is easy to replace a knife lost by a relative during palm cultivation but
much more difficult to replace an iron plow or a diesel-fueled harvesting machine.
 A basic division of labor by gender and age is present in almost every human culture
 Women are often assigned tasks that are near place of living or can be resumed after interruption; whereas, men have
often undertaken requiring physical strength, high bursts of energy, frequent travel from home and tasks involving
risk and danger. Though there are some exceptions to these rules
 In some societies, women perform almost three quarters of all work, and in several societies they have served as
warriors. For example, in the 19th-century West African kingdom of Dahomey (in what is now called Benin),
thousands of women served in the armed forces of the Dahomean king, and some considered the women to be better
fighters than their male counterparts. Such examples can also be found among Vikings, and women fought in Soviet
side in WW2
 Researchers find a continuum of patterns, ranging from flexible integration of men and women to rigid segregation
by gender in societies
o The flexible/integrated patte is seen most often among food foragers (as well as communities where crops are
traditionally cultivated primarily for family consumption). In such societies, men and women perform up to
35 percent of activities with approximately equal participation, and tasks deemed especially appropriate for
one gender may be performed by the other, without loss of face, as the situation warrants
o Societies following a segregated pattern define almost all work as either masculine or feminine, so men and
women rarely engage in joint efforts of any kind. In such societies, it is inconceivable that someone would
even think of doing something considered the work of the opposite sex. This pattern is frequently seen in
pas- toral nomadic, intensive agricultural, and industrial societies, where men’s work keeps them outside the
home for much of the time
o In the third pattern of labor division by gender, sometimes called the dual sex configuration, men and
women carry out their work separately, as in societies segregated by gender, but the relationship between
them is one of balanced complementarity rather than inequality.
o In postindustrial societies, division of labor by gender becomes irrelevant. Though, gender preferences and
discrimination could exist
 Division of labor by age
o In many traditional farming societies, children as well as older people may make a greater contribution to
the economy in terms of work and responsibility than is common in industrial or postindustrial societies.
For in- stance, in Maya peasant communities in southern Mexico and Guatemala, children not only look
after their younger brothers and sisters but also help with housework
o In food foraging societies, elder are mostly responsible of spiritual matters and providing guidance. The
older women do take the role foraging often in order to support the younger women who have to nurse a
young child or feed it
o Children also work in industrial societies, where poor families depend on every possible contribution to the
household. There, however, economic desperation may easily lead to the cold exploitation of children in
factory settings.
o It is estimated that there are some 200 million child laborers under age 14, almost all living in Third World
countries where their families depend on the extra income, they bring home. Many enter the labor force
when they are only 6 or 7 years old, working fulltime, from dawn to dusk, for extremely low wages, which
helps keep the labor costs down.
 Cooperative labor is when communities come together and perform task collectively. Due to this, a festive spirit
permeates the work.
 In some parts of East Africa, work parties begin with the display of a pot of millet beer to be consumed after the tasks
have been finished. Home-brewed from millet, the beer is not really payment for the work; indeed, the labor involved is
worth far more than the beer consumed. Rather, drinking the low-alcohol but highly nutritious beverage together is
more of a symbolic activity to celebrate the spirit of friendship and mutual support
 In most human societies, the basic unit within which cooperation takes place is the household. It is both a unit of
production and consumption; only in industrial societies have these two things been separated
 In societies without a money economy, the rewards for labor are usually direct. The workers in a family group consume
what they harvest, eat what the hunter or gatherer brings home, and use the tools they themselves make. But there is
still some distribution of good and medium of exchange
 Anthropologists often classify the cultural systems of distributing material goods into three modes: reciprocity,
redistribution, and market exchange.
o Reciprocity refers to the exchange of goods and services, of roughly equal value, between two parties. This
may involve gift giving.
o Because reciprocity is about a relationship be- tween the self and others, gift giving is seldom really selfless.
The overriding (if unconscious) motive is to fulfill social obligations and perhaps to gain a bit of prestige in
the process
 o Cultural traditions dictate the manner and occasion of exchange. For example, when an animal is killed by a
group of indigenous hunters in Australia, the meat is divided among the hunters’ families and other
relatives.
o generalized reciprocity A mode of exchange in which the value of what is given is not calculated, nor is the
time of repayment specified.
o balanced reciprocity A mode of exchange in which the giving and the receiving are specific as to the value of
the goods and the time of their delivery.
o Negative reciprocity is a third form of exchange, in which the aim is to get something for as little as possible.
The parties involved have opposing interests and are not usually closely related; they may be strangers or
even enemies.
o negative reciprocity A form of exchange in which the aim is to get something for as little as possible. Neither
fair nor balanced, it may involve hard bargaining, manipulation, and outright cheating.
 Trade refers to a transaction in which two or more people are involved in an exchange of something—a quantity of
food, fuel, clothing, jewelry, animals, or money, for example—for something else of equal value. The value of the good
can be determined through agreement or negotiations
 Barter is When there is no money involved in the transaction, and the parties negotiate a direct exchange of one trade
good for another
 The trade of balanced reciprocity and barter existed in India between the Kota, Toda, Badaga farmers and Kurumba
 silent trade A form of product exchange in which mutually distrusting ethnic groups avoid direct personal contact.

 An example of silent trade occurs with the Mbuti Pygmy of Congo’s Ituri forest, who trade bushmeat for plantains and
other crops grown by Bantu villagers on small farms. It works like this: People from the forest leave trade goods in a
clearing, then retreat and wait. Agriculturalists come to the spot, survey the goods, leave what they think is a fair
exchange of their own wares, and then leave. The forest people return, and if satisfied with the offer, take it with them.
If not, they leave it untouched, signifying that they expect more. In this way, for 2,000 or so years, foragers have
supplied various commodities in demand in a wider economy

 One classic ethnographic example of balanced reciprocity between trading partners seeking to be friends and do
business at the same time is the Kula ring in the southwestern Pacific Ocean.

 Redistribution is a form of exchange in which goods flow into a central place where they are sorted, counted, and
reallocated.
 In societies with a sufficient surplus to support some sort of government, goods in the form of gifts, tribute, taxes, and
the spoils of war are gathered into storehouses controlled by a chief or some other type of leader
 The leadership has three motives in redistributing this income: The first is to gain or maintain a position of power
through a display of wealth and generosity; the second is to assure those who support the leadership an adequate
standard of living by providing them with desired goods; and the third is to establish alliances with leaders of other
groups by hosting them at lavish parties and giving them valuable goods.
 The redistribution system of the ancient Inca empire in the Andean highlands of South America was one of the most
efficient the world has ever known, both in the collection of tribute (obligatory contributions or gifts in the form of
crops, goods, and services) and in its methods of administrative control
 conspicuous consumption A showy display of wealth for social prestige.
 Potlatch On the northwest coast of North America, a ceremonial event in which a village chief publicly gives away
stockpiled food and other goods that signify wealth. these extravagant giveaway ceremonies have played an
ecologically adaptive role in a coastal region where villages alternately faced periods of scarcity and abundance and
relied upon alliances and trade relations with one another for longterm survival.
 A strategy that features this sort of accumulation of surplus goods for the express purpose of displaying wealth and
giving it away to raise one’s status is known as a prestige economy. In contrast to conspicuous consumption in
industrial and postindustrial societies, the emphasis is not on amassing goods that then become unavailable to others.
Instead, it is on gaining wealth in order to give it away for the sake of prestige and status
 leveling mechanism A cultural obligation compelling pros- perous members of a community to give away goods, host
public feasts, provide free service, or otherwise demonstrate generosity so that no one permanently accumulates
significantly more wealth than anyone else.
 Leveling mechanism keep resources in circulation and reduce tensions among members of a community
 market exchange The buying and selling of goods and ser- vices, with prices set by rules of supply and demand.
 When people talk about a market in today’s industrial or postindustrial world, the particular geographic location
where something is bought or sold is often not important at all.
 money Something used to make payments for other goods and services as well as to measure their value.
 Its critical attributes are durability, transportability, divisibility, recognizability, and interchangeability. Items that
have been used as money in various societies include salt, shells, precious stones, special beads, livestock, and valuable
metals
 About 5000 years ago, traders and merchants in Mesopotamia started using silver as a form of currency. As the
means of exchange was standardized in terms of value, it became easier to accumulate, lend, or borrow money for
specified amounts and periods against payment of interest. In due time, some merchants began to do business with
money itself, and they became bankers. In many cultures, such pieces of iron, copper, or silver were cast as miniature
models of especially valuable implements like sword blades, axes, or spades. But some 2,600 years ago in the ancient
kingdom of Lydia (southwestern Turkey), they were molded into small flat discs conforming to different sizes and
weights. By about 2,000 years ago, the commercial use of such coins was spreading throughout much of Europe and
 be- coming increasingly common in parts of Asia and Africa, especially along trade routes and in urban centers. Thus
money set into motion radical economic changes in many traditional societies and introduced what has been called
merchant capitalism in many parts of the world
 Failing to overcome cultural biases can have serious eco- nomic consequences, especially in this era of globalization.
For example, it has led prosperous countries to impose inappropriate development schemes in parts of the world that
they regard as economically underdeveloped
 Local farmers in the cultivation of soy are being marginalized and driven out by the greater land
owner and agriculturists, in cooperation with large agribusinesses, in Paraguay
 Economic activities in traditional cultures are intricately intertwined with social and political relations and even
involve spiritual elements. Agribusinesses and other large-scale economic operations or development schemes that do
not take such structural complexities into consideration may have unintended negative consequences on a society
 As globalization increases so does corporate awareness of the cost of such cross-cultural miscues
 Surviving indigenous foragers, small farmers, herders, fishermen, local artisans such as weavers and carpenters, often
bear the brunt of the commercial success of multinationals
 Because of insufficient government resources, bureaucratic mismanagement, or official corruption, or because people
are able to avoid government regulations and tax collectors, state-organized societies also possess a largely
undocumented informal economy—a network of producing and circulating marketable commodities, labor, and
services that for various reasons escapes government control (enumeration, regulation, or other types of public
monitoring or auditing)

Making a living

 The anthropologist Yehudi Cohen (1974b) used the term adaptive strategy to describe a group’s system of economic
production
 Cohen developed a typology of societies based on correlations between their economies and their social features
o Foraging
 Environmental differences around the world created different types of hunter-gatherers i.e.,
tropical and arctic foragers
 Despite differences due to environmental variation, all foraging economies have shared one
essential feature: People rely on available natural resources for their subsistence, rather than
controlling the reproduc- tion of plants and animals.
 Plant cultivation began 10k-12k years ago in the Middle East
  In many areas, foragers had been exposed to the “idea” of food production but never adopted it
because their own economies provided a perfectly adequate and nutritious diet—with a lot less
work. Whereas, some reverted back after adopting it
 All modern foragers live in nation-states, depend to some extent on government assistance, and
have contacts with food-producing neighbors as well as missionaries and other outsiders. Modern
foragers are influenced by regional forces (e.g., trade and war), national and international policies,
and political and economic events in the world system.
 The Ju’hoansi of the Kalahari Desert and the Inuit of Alaska and Canada are examples of hunter
gatherers
 Foragers often live in bands- groups. Whose size is dependent of factors such as kinship and
seasons
 Among foragers, men typically hunted and fished while women gathered and collected, but the
specific nature of the work varied among cultures
o Cultivation
o Horticulture
 According to Cohen, horticulture is cultivation that makes intensive use of none of the factors of
production: land, labor, capital, and machinery.
 Horticulturalists use simple tools such as hoes and digging sticks to grow their crops. Their fields
are not permanently cultivated and lie fallow for varying lengths of time.
 Often use slash-and-burn technique
 Horticulturalists change plots when one is exhausted and, in a cycle, return to it after some time
 Horticulture can support large permanent villages. Among the Kuikuru of the South American
tropical forest, for example, one village of 150 people remained in the same place for 90 years
o Agriculture
 Agriculture is cultivation that requires more labor than horticulture does, because it uses land
intensively and continuously.
 The greater labor demands associated with agriculture reflect its common use of domesticated
animals, irrigation, or terracing
 Many agriculturalists use animals as means of production—for transport, as cultivating
machines, and for their manure.
 Asian farmers typically incorporate cattle and/or water buffalo into agricultural economies based
on rice production
 In the Philippines, the Ifugao irrigate their fields with canals from rivers, streams, springs, and
ponds.
  Irrigation makes it possible to cultivate a plot year after year. Irrigation enriches the soil because
the irrigated field is a unique ecosystem with several species of plants and animals, many of them
minute organisms, whose wastes fertilize the land.
 Agriculture’s main advantage is that the long-term yield per area is far greater and more
dependable. Because a single field sustains its owners year after year, there is no need to maintain
a reserve of uncultivated land as horticulturalists do
 Cultivation continuum; Horticultural systems stand at one end—the “low-labor, shifting- plot”
end. Agriculturalists are at the other—the “labor-intensive, permanent-plot” end.
 The key difference between horticulture and agriculture is that horticulture always uses a fallow
period whereas agriculture does not
 Because tropical horticulturalists typically cultivate dozens of plant species simultaneously, a
horticultural plot tends to mirror the botanical diversity that is found in a tropical forest.

 Agricultural plots, by contrast, reduce ecological diversity by cutting down trees and
concentrating on just a few staple foods.

 Agriculturists attempt to reduce risk in production by favoring stability in the form of a reliable
annual harvest and long-term production. Tropical foragers and horticulturalists, by contrast,
attempt to reduce risk by relying on multiple species and benefiting from ecological diversity.

 Water and its distribution is a recurring problem among agriculturalists.

 Agriculture paved the way for the origin of the state, and most agriculturalists live in states:
complex sociopolitical systems that ad- minister a territory and populace with substantial
contrasts in occupation, wealth, prestige, and power.
o Pastoralism
 Pastoralists live in North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. These
herders are people whose activities focus on such domesticated animals as cattle, sheep, goats,
camels, and yak. East African pastoralists, like many others, live in symbiosis with their herds.
 Herds provide dairy products, meat, and blood.
 Animals are killed at ceremonies, which occur throughout the year, and so meat is available
regularly.
 Although some pastoralists rely on their herds more completely than others do, it is impossible to base
subsistence solely on animals. Most pastoralists therefore supplement their diet by hunting, gathering,
fishing, cultivating, or trading. To get crops, pastoralists either trade with cultivators or do some cultivating
or gathering themselves
  Two patterns of movement occur with pastoralism: nomadism and transhumance
 In pastoral nomadism, the entire group— women, men, and children—moves with the animals
throughout the year. The Middle East and North Africa provide numerous examples of pastoral nomads. In
Iran, for example, the Basseri and the Qashqai ethnic groups traditionally followed a nomadic route more
than 300 miles (480 kilometers) long
 With transhumance, part of the group moves with the herds, but most people stay in the home village.
There are examples from Europe and Africa. In Europe’s Alps, it is just the shepherds and goatherds—not
the whole village—who accompany the flocks to highland meadows in summer.

 Pastoralists often trade with sedentary people

 mode of production is a way of organizing production—“a set of social relations through which labor is deployed to wrest
energy from nature by means of tools, skills, organization, and knowledge”
 In nonindustrial societies, labor is not usually bought but is given as a social obligation. In such a kin-based mode of production,
mutual aid in production is one among many expressions of a larger web of social relations.
 In nonindustrial societies, by contrast, people usually see their work through from start to finish and have a sense of
accomplishment in the product. The fruits of their labor are their own, rather than someone else’s.
 Industrial workers have impersonal relations with their products, coworkers, and employers.
 In nonindustrial societies, however, the relations of production, distribution, and consumption are social relations with economic
aspects. Economy is not a separate entity but is embedded in the society.
 Subsistence fund, replacement fund, social fund, ceremonial fund, and rent fund
 Peasants are small-scale agriculturalists who live in nonindustrial states and have rent fund obligations. All peasants have two
things in common:
o They live in state-organized societies.
o They produce food without the elaborate technology—chemical fertilizers, tractors, airplanes to spray crops, and so
on—of modern farming or agribusiness.

Chapter 7 - Race, Ethnicity + Political Anthropology

 When European scholars first began their systematic study of worldwide human variation in the 18th century, they
were concerned with documenting differences among human groups. Soon afterward, some began to divide these
groups hierarchically into progressively “better types” of humans.
 Early European scholars classified Homo Sapiens into subspecies based on geographical location and phenotypic
features
 The German physician Johann Blumenbach (1752– 1840) introduced some significant changes to this four- race
scheme with the 1795 edition of his book On the Natural Variety of Mankind. Most notably, this book formally
extended the notion of a hierarchy of human types.
 o He deemed the human skull of the caucus mountain range as the most beautiful and closest
to god’s creation. he thought that the living inhabitants of the Caucasus region were the most beautiful in
the world. Based on these criteria, he concluded that this high mountain range, not far from the lands
mentioned in the Bible, was the place of human origins.
o All light-skinned peoples in Europe and adjacent parts of western Asia and northern Africa belonged to the
same race. On this basis, he dropped the “European” race label and replaced it with “Caucasian.” Although
he continued to distinguish American Indians as a separate race, he regrouped dark-skinned Africans as
“Ethiopian” and split those Asians not considered Caucasian into two separate races: “Mongolian” (referring
to most inhabitants of Asia, including China and Japan) and “Malay” (indigenous Australians, Pacific
Islanders, and others).
o He declared the Caucasians as the superior race and regarded other races as a form ‘’degeneration’’
 Ota Benga, an African Pygmy man who in the early 1900s was caged in a New York zoo with an orangutan. Captured
for an exotic savages, he was brought to USA and later kept in a zoo. After realizing he can’t go back to Congo, he shot
himself in 1916

 As president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Boas criticized false claims of racial
superiority in an important speech titled “Race and Progress,” published in the prestigious journal Science in 1909.
Boas’s scholarship in both cultural and biological anthropology contributed to the depth of his critique.
 Ashley Montagu (1905–1999), a student of Boas and one of the best-known anthropologists of his time, devoted much
of his career to combating scientific racism. Born Israel Ehrenberg to a working-class Jewish family in England, he also
felt the sting of anti-Semitism. He immigrated to the United States, where he went on to fight racism in his writing
and in academic and public lectures. Of all his works, none is more important than his book Man’s Most Dangerous
Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Published in 1942, it debunked the concept of clearly bounded races as a “social myth.”
 The visible traits in humans were generally found to occur not in abrupt shifts from population to population but in a
continuum that changed gradually, with few sharp breaks.
 To compound the problem, one trait might change gradually over a north-south gradient, whereas another might
show a similar change from east to west. Human skin color, for instance, becomes progressively darker as one moves
from northern Europe to Central Africa, whereas blood type B becomes progressively more common as one moves
from western to eastern Europe.
 In biology, a race is defined as a subspecies, or a population of a species differing geographically, morphologically, or
genetically from other populations of the same species. But has three flaws
o It is arbitrary; there is no agreement on how many differences it takes to make a race.
 o no one race has exclusive possession of any particular variant of any gene or genes.
o the differences among individuals and within a so-called racial population are greater than the differences
among populations
 In many Latin American countries, people are commonly classified as Indio (Indian), Mestizo (mixed), or Ladino (of
Spanish descent).
 The confusion of social with biological factors is frequently combined with prejudices that then serve to exclude whole
categories of people from certain roles or positions in society
 The Nuremberg race laws of 1935 declared the superiority of the Aryan “race” and the inferiority of the Gypsy and
Jewish “races.” The Nazi doctrine justified, on supposed biological grounds, political repression and extermination. In
all, 11 million people (Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other so-called inferior people, as well as political opponents of
the Nazi regime) were deliberately put to death.
 Genocides are accompanied by a rhetoric of dehumanization and a depiction of the people being exterminated as a
lesser type of human
 Racism, a doctrine of superiority by which one group justifies the dehumanization of others based on their distinctive
physical characteristics is not just about discriminatory ideas, values, or attitudes but is also a political problem.
Politicians have often exploited this concept as a means of mobilizing support, demonizing opponents, and
eliminating rivals. Racial conflicts result from social stereotypes, not scientific facts.
 Certain characteristics have been attributed to groups of people under a variety of names—national character, spirit,
temperament—all of them vague and standing for a number of concepts unrelated to any biological phenomena. i.e.,
“coldness” of Scandinavians
 No inborn behavioral characteristic can be attributed to any group of people that cannot be explained in terms of
cultural practices. If the Chinese happen to exhibit exceptional visual-spatial skills, it is probably because reading
Chinese characters requires a visual-spatial kind of learning, one that is not as necessary in mastering Western
alphabets.
 Individuals alienated and demoralized by poverty, injustice, and unequal opportunity tend to abandon the traditional
paths to success of the dominant culture because these paths are blocked.
 Some psychologists insist that intelligence is a single quantifiable thing measured by IQ tests. Many more
psychologists consider intelligence to be the product of the interaction of different sorts of cognitive abilities: verbal,
mathematical-logical, spatial, linguistic, musical, bodily kinesthetic, social, and personal
 IQ tests themselves are not a fully valid measure of inborn intelligence. An IQ test measures performance rather than
genetic disposition.
 In the United States systematic comparisons of intelligence between “whites” and “blacks” began in the early 20th
century and were frequently combined with data gathered by physical anthropologists about skull shape and size.
 During World War I, for example, a series of IQ tests, known as Alpha and Beta, were regularly given to draftees. The
results showed that the average score attained by Euramericans was higher than that obtained by African Americans.
Even though in some cases the African Americans scored more than the Euromericans
 The tests did not measure intelligence per se, but the ability, conditioned by culture, of certain individuals to respond
appropriately to certain questions conceived by Americans of European descent for comparable middle- class “whites.”
 Herrnstein and Murray’s book The Bell Curve says that the difference in IQ scores between Americans of African,
Asian, and European descent is primarily determined by genetic factors and therefore immutable
 Intelligence like other traits is heavily influenced by environment and social factors
 Polymorphic Describing species with alternative forms (alleles) of particular genes. For example: blood types
 A species can also be considered polymorphic, meaning that there is wide variation among individuals. Here
“polymorphic” refers to continuous phenotypic variation that may be genetically controlled by interactions among
multiple different genes, in addition to the allelic variation
 When polymorphisms of a species are distributed into geographically dispersed populations, biologists describe this
species as polytypic (“many types”); that is, genetic variability is unevenly distributed among populations
 Climate also contributes to human variation through its impact on the process of growth and development
 Cultural forces have a strong impact on biological fitness
 Culture can also contribute directly to the development of disease. For example, one type of diabetes is very common
among overweight individuals who get little exercise—a combination that describes 61 percent of people in the
United States today.
 Skin color is subject to great variation and is attributed to several key factors: the transparency or thickness of the
skin; a copper-colored pigment called carotene; reflected color from the blood vessels (responsible for the rosy color of
lightly pigmented people); and, most significantly, the amount of melanin (from melas, a Greek word meaning
“black”)—a dark pigment in the skin’s outer layer.
 Amount of melanin results in skin color, except those with a condition called albinism
 Melanin is known to protect skin against damaging ultraviolet solar radiation; 17 consequently, dark-skinned people
are less susceptible to skin cancer and sunburn than are those with less melanin.
 The inheritance of skin color involves several genes (rather than variants of a single gene), each with several alleles,
thus creating a continuous range of phenotypic expression for this trait.
 In northern latitudes, light skin has an adaptive advantage related to the skin’s important biological function as the
manufacturer of vitamin D through a chemical reaction dependent upon sunlight. Vitamin D is vital for maintaining
the balance of calcium in the body.

 The increased brain size of Homo habilis noted around 2.5 million years ago supports the notion that these ancestors
were capable of more complex cultural activities than australopithecines, including the manufacture of stone tools.
 Closer to the present, the same assumptions do not hold. At some point in our evolutionary history we became a
single, unified global species.
 Grouping by social status in stratified societies
 Stratified society A society in which people are hierarchically divided and ranked into social strata, or layers, and do
not share equally in the basic resources that support survival, influence, and prestige.
 the restrictions and obligations imposed on those in the lowest-ranked strata are usually more strenuous or
oppressive, and they must work harder for far less financial reward.
 Egalitarian societies, in which everyone has about equal rank, access to, and power over basic resources. In these
societies, social values of communal sharing are culturally emphasized and approved; wealth hoarding and elitist
pretensions are despised, belittled, or ridiculed.
 social class A category of individuals in a stratified society who enjoy equal or nearly equal prestige according to the
system of evaluation.
 Class distinctions are not always clear-cut and obvious in societies that have a wide and continuous range of
differential privileges.
 A caste is a closed social class in a stratified society in which membership is determined by birth and fixed for life. The
opposite of the principle that all humans are born equal, the caste system is based on the principle that humans
neither are nor can be equal. Castes are strongly endogamous, and offspring are automatically members of their
parents’ caste.
 Traditional Hindu caste system
o the world’s longest surviving social hierarchy, it encompasses a complex ranking of social groups on the
basis of “ritual purity.
o The different castes are associated with specific occupations and customs, such as food habits and styles of
dress, along with rituals involving notions of purity and pollution. Traditional Hindus are taught to follow
the ritual path of duty, or dharma, of the specific caste into which they are born, and learn to avoid everyone
and everything considered taboo to their caste
o All of these castes, or jatis, are organized into four ranked orders, or varnas, distinguished partly by
occupation and ranked in order of descending religious status of purity
o It defines the Brahmans as the purest and therefore highest varna. As priests and lawgivers, Brahmans
represent the world of religion and learning.
o Next come the fighters and rulers, known as the Kshatriyas.
o Below them are the Vaisyas (merchants and traders), who are engaged in commercial, agricultural, and
pastoral pursuits.
o At the bottom are the Sudras (artisans and laborers), an order required to serve the other three varnas and
who also make a living by handicrafts.
 o Falling outside the varna system is a fifth category of degraded individuals known as “Untouchables.” They
are tasked with doing the ‘dirty work’ in society.
o Untouchables constitute a large pool of cheap labor at the beck and call of those controlling economic and
political affairs. In an effort to bestow some dignity on these poverty-stricken victims of the caste system,
Hindu nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi renamed them harijan or “children of God.”

 Most European stratified societies were historically organized in closed social classes known as estates—ranked as
clergy, nobility, and citizens and each with distinctive political rights (privileges).
 The hierarchy in a society can be based on social class, caste, estate, ethnic origin, and skin color
 One of the best-known historical examples of a pluralistic country with social stratification based on the notion of
“race” is South Africa. From 1948 to 1994, a minority of 4.5 million people of European descent imposed a political
regime of racial segregation and discrimination on 25 million indigenous Zulu, Sotho, Tswana, Xhosas, Khoi
(Hottentot), Bushmen, and other ethnic groups. Known as apartheid (an Afrikaans-Dutch term meaning
“segregation” or “separation”), this white superiority ideology officially relegated indigenous dark-skinned Africans to
a low-ranking stratum
 Until the mid-20th century, institutionalized racial segregation officially prevailed in the United States, where the
country’s ruling upper class was historically comprised exclusively of individuals of European (“Caucasian” or “white”)
descent. After the American Revolution, several states in New England joined Virginia and other southern states and
made it illegal for whites to marry blacks or American Indians. After the federal government officially abolished
slavery in 1863, these miscegenation laws remained in force in many states from Maine to Florida for decades.
 In 1924, Virginia’s General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity Act to prevent light-skinned individuals with some
African ancestry from “passing” as whites. Known as the one drop rule, it codified the idea of white racial purity by
classifying individuals as black if just one of their multiple ancestors was of African origin (“one drop of Negro
blood”).
 Social status in a stratified society is manifested through, among others, verbal evaluation, patterns of association,
symbolic indicators,
 Cultural values may change, so that something regarded favorably at one time may not be so regarded at another. For
example: the use of Arabic as official language in Egypt. Only the middle class are fluent, who study in public schools
and hold jobs in government bureaucracy. As opposed to upper class, who are affluent in English, studied from
private schools
 In any system of stratification, those who dominate proclaim their supposedly superior status by means of a powerful
ideology, commonly asserting it through intimidation or propa- ganda (in the form of gossip, media, religious
doctrine, and so forth) that presents their position as normal, natural, divinely guided, or at least well-deserved.
 As anthropologist Laura Nader points out, “Systems of thought develop over time and reflect the interests of certain
classes or groups in the society who manage to universalize their beliefs and values.”
 Social mobility: Upward or downward change in one’s social class position in a stratified society.
 Social mobility is most common in societies made up of independent nuclear families where the individual is closely
tied to fewer people—especially when neolocal residence is the norm and it is assumed that individuals will leave their
family of birth when they become adults.
 Societies that permit a great deal of upward and downward mobility are referred to as open class societies
 Caste societies exemplify closed-class societies because of their severe institutionalized limits on social mobility.
 Gulabi Gang- a group of lower caste Dalit women in India’s northern province of Uttar Pradesh who vigorously protest
government discrimination and official corruption and strive to create opportunities for women. They dress in vibrant
pink saris and wielding traditional Indian fighting sticks.

Political Anthropology

 power The ability of individuals or groups to impose their will upon others and make them do things even against
their own wants or wishes.
 political organization The way power is accumulated, arranged, executed, and structurally distributed and embedded
in society; the means through which a society creates and maintains social order.
 band A relatively small and loosely organized kin-ordered group that inhabits a common territory and that may split
periodically into smaller extended family groups that are politically and economically independent.
 tribe In anthropology, refers to a range of kin-ordered groups that are politically integrated by some unifying factor
and whose members share a common ancestry, identity, culture, language, and territory
 Each tribe consists of one or more self-supporting and self-governing local communities that may then form alliances
with others for various purposes.
 The Kapauku of Western New Guinea typify this form of political organization. Among them, the ‘Big Man’ is called
the tonowi or “rich one.” To achieve this status, one must be male, wealthy, generous, and eloquent. Physical bravery
and an ability to deal with the supernatural are also common tonowi characteristics, but they are not essential.
 Age sets, age grades, and common-interest groups are among the political integration mechanisms used by tribal
societies. Cutting across territorial and kin-groupings, these organizations link members from different lineages and
clans.
 For example, among the Tiriki of East Africa the Warrior age grade guards the village and grazing lands, while
Judicial Elders resolve disputes. The oldest age grade, the Ritual Elders, advise on matters involving the well-being of
all the Tiriki people.
 In bands and tribes, political authority is not centralized, and each group is economically and politically autonomous.
Political organization is vested in kinship, age, and common interest groups.
 chiefdom A regional polity in which two or more local groups are organized under a single chief, who is at the head of
a ranked hierarchy of people.
 The leader of a chiefdom is generally a true authority figure, whose right to make final decisions, give commands, and
enforce obedience serves to unite members in all affairs and at all times. For example, a chief can distribute land
among community members and recruit people into military service.
 Chain of command in chiefdoms
 Typically, chiefdoms involve redistributive systems, and the chief has control over surplus goods and perhaps even
over the community’s labor force.
 Chiefdoms in all parts of the world have been highly unstable, with lesser chiefs trying to take power from higher-
ranking chiefs or paramount chiefs vying with one another for supreme power. As in pre-colonial Hawaii
 State In anthropology, a political institution established to manage and defend a complex, socially stratified society
occupying a defined territory.
 The state is organized and directed by a government that has the capacity and authority to make laws and to use
military force to defend or expand its territories
 A large population in a state-organized society requires increased food production and wider distribution networks.
Together, these lead to a transformation of the landscape by way of irrigation and terracing, carefully managed crop
rotation cycles, and intensive competition for resources—such as clearly demarcated lands, roads, and enough
farmers and other rural workers to support market systems and a specialized urban sector.
 Every state, whatever its population, claims sovereign power over its subjects, controls social tension, represses or
punishes violent protest by angry factions, and protects its territorial borders against hostile forces, including
neighboring states.
 Police, foreign ministries, war ministries, and other bureaucracies function to control and punish disruptive acts of
crime, dissension, and rebellion
 legitimacy The right of political leaders to govern—to hold, use, and allocate power—on the socially accepted
customs, rules, or laws that bind and hold a people together as a collective whole.
 Power based on legitimacy results in authority. It is distinct from power based solely on force: Obedience to authority
results from the belief that obedience is “right”; compliance to power based on force results from fear of being
deprived of liberty, physical well-being, life, or material property.
 In Peru, the divine ruler of the Inca empire proclaimed absolute authority based on the proposition that he was
descended from the Sun God.
 Religious beliefs may influence or provide authoritative approval to customary rules and laws. For example, acts that
people believe to be sinful, such as murder, are often illegal as well.
 cultural control Control through beliefs and values deeply internalized in the minds of individuals.
 social control External control through open coercion.
 sanction An externalized social control designed to encourage conformity to social norms.
 Operating within social groups of all sizes and involving a mix of cultural and social controls, sanctions may vary
significantly within a given society, but they fall into one of two categories: positive or negative.
 For sanctions to be effective, they must be applied consistently, and they must be generally known among members of
the society. Even if some individuals are not convinced of the advantages of social conformity, they are still more likely
to obey society’s rules than to accept the consequences of not doing so
 Formal sanctions, such as laws, are always organized, because they attempt to precisely and explicitly regulate people’s
behavior, whether they are peacefully trading with others or confronting others on a battlefield
 Informal sanctions emphasize cultural control and are diffuse in nature, involving spontaneous expressions of
approval or disapproval by members of the group or community.

 According to anthropologist E. Adamson Hoebel, an important pioneer in the cross-cultural study of law, “A social
norm is legal if its neglect or infraction is regularly met, in threat or in fact, by the application of physical force by an
individual or group possessing the socially recognized privilege of so acting.”
 Anthropologists recognize several basic functions of law, in particular the following three:
o First, it defines relationships among society’s members and marks out proper behavior under specified
circumstances.
o Second, law allocates the authority to employ coercion in the enforcement of sanctions.
o Third, law functions to redefine social relations and to ensure social flexibility. As new situations arise, law
must determine whether old rules and assumptions retain their validity and to what extent they must be
altered.
 In Western societies a clear distinction is made between offenses against the state and offenses against an individual.
However, in non-state societies such as bands and tribes, all offenses are viewed as transgressions against individuals
or kin-groups (families, lineages, clans, and so on).
 Basically, disputes are settled in one of two ways. First, disputing parties may, through argument and compromise,
voluntarily arrive at a mutually satisfactory agreement. This form of settlement is referred to as negotiation or, if it
involves the assistance of an unbiased third party, mediation. Second, in chiefdoms and states, an authorized third
party may issue a binding decision that the disputing parties will be compelled to respect. This process is referred to as
adjudication.

 Ethnicity and Race
 Some statuses are ascribed: People have little or no choice about occupying them. Age is an as- cribed status; we can’t choose not
to age. Race and gender usually are ascribed; people are born members of a certain group and remain so all their lives.
 Achieved statuses, by contrast, aren’t automatic; they come through choices, actions, ef- forts, talents, or accomplishments and
may be positive or negative. Examples of achieved statuses include physician, senator, convicted felon, union member, father,
and college student.
 Hispanics includes people who speak Spanish and are from Spanish countries of Central and South America; whereas,
Latinos include even the Portuguese speaking Brazilians
 In many societies an ascribed status is associated with a position in the social-political hierarchy. Certain groups, called minority
groups, are subordinate. They have inferior power and less secure access to resources than do majority groups.
 When an ethnic group is assumed to have a biological basis (distinctively shared “blood” or genes), it is called a race.
Discrimination against such a group is called racism
 The 4 million outcast Burakumin in Japan are regarded as the untouchables in India
 Assimilation describes the process of change that a minority ethnic group may experience when it moves to a country where
another culture dominates. By assimilating, the minority adopts the patterns and norms of its host culture.
 Through a study of three ethnic groups in Swat, Pakistan, Fredrik Barth (1958/1968) challenged an old idea that interaction
always leads to assimilation. He showed that ethnic groups can be in contact for generations without assimilating and can live in
peaceful coexistence.
 Barth defines plural society as a society combining ethnic contrasts, ecological specialization (i.e., use of different environmental
resources by each ethnic group), and the economic interdependence of those groups.
 In Barth’s view, ethnic boundaries are most stable and enduring when the groups occupy different ecological niches. That is, they
make their living in different ways and don’t compete.
 Cultural colonialism refers to internal domination—by one group and its culture or ideology over others. One example is the
domination over the former Soviet empire by Russian people, language, and culture, and by communist ideology.
Chapter 8 - Urban Anthropology