Wykad 4

Food foragers
Foragers follow an ancient way of life driven by survival or preference; it is a rational response to particular ecological, sociopolitical and economic realitires Well-balanced and ample diets Plenty of leisure time for family, social life and spiritual development Family a basic political and economic unit Lack of government or warfare Sexual division: cooperative relations The camp as the center of daily activity Egalitarianism: little difference in status but status differences do not imply inequality Food resources on a given territory/home range are accessible to all: equal distribution of resources Emphasis on cooperation not competition (food sharing) They do not accumulate surplus foodstuffs: the environment is the storehouse

Food producers Pattern of subsistence changes the nature of human society: Permanent settlements of
farmer families; they stay near their gardens

New social organization appears: food produced by some members only enough to provide
for all; other were fee to invent and manufacture new equipment needed in a sedentary way of life: pottery, clothing made of woven textiles, harvesting and digging tools, housing

Social structure: with the growth of the settlements competition for resources; multifamily
kinship units were probably organizing units

Horticulturalists: produce for subsistence but their politics involves periodic feasts when
produce and gifts are given away to gain status

Agriculturalists: Live in towns and cities where political power is centralized in the hands
of the social elite

Social order marked by inequality: gender, lineage Tenochtitlan: Capital of the Aztec Empire
Precolumbian Mesoamerica: 14th-16th centuries. The Aztec empire included many cities and towns, especially the Valley of Mexico (2,100 m above sea level). Tenochtitlan

The Venice of the New World: A preindustrial urban settlement

The Aztecs were ruled by a semidivine king (Moctezuma II), chosen by nobles, priests and leaders. Absolute monarch, councillors advised him on affairs of the state, vast number of governments

Class structure of the Aztecs

Nobility: nobles by birth, priests, and those who earned their rank: warriors, outstanding artisans, physicians, the long distance traders. Members of the hereditary nobility occupied the top position in the government, the army and the priesthood Commoners: agriculture and food production, tenant farmers Pharaoh, government officials, soldiers, scribes, merchants

Development of economy
As specialization increased, the market became an important economic and social institution: daily markets in each city, larger markers at different times of the year Barter the primary means of exchange

Is there a hierarchy of cultures as civilizations?

Foragers (in the center), horticulturalists, pastoralists, agriculturalists

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881): Social Evolutionism of Ancient Society (1877)

The latest investigations respecting the early condition of the human race are tending to the conclusion that mankind commenced their career at the bottom of the scale and worked their way up from savagery to civilization through the slow accumulation of experimental knowledge. As it is undeniable that portions of the human family have existed in a state of savagery

Uniliniear evolutionary theory: The history of the human race is one in source, one in
experience, and one in progress (Morgan, 1877: vi) Thus the different portions of humanity whether in Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia

Societies perched at different stages on a common progression of cultural evolution

Morgans Evolutionary Scheme

Private property and social system

With the the rise of property, the settlement of its rights, and above all, with the established certainty of its transmission to lineal descendants, descriptive kin systems evolve [the same name

for father and fathers brother disappears], and the nuclear family eventually develops. The family became organized and individualized

Family, private property and the state

Ancient Society, 1877

Evolutionist anthropology materialist theories In the 1930 evolution reemerges in anthropology It is explicitly anti-Boasian and implicitly Marxist (materialist theories, general historical
process of change)

Their causal explanations are materialist: changes in the mode of production Leslie White (1900-1975): The Evolution of Culture (1959)
White viewed technology as the foundation on which social and ideological systems are raised: The technological system is basic and primary The technological factor is therefore determinant of a cultural system as a whole. If technology survival capturing enough energy and diverting it to human needs,;

Julian Steward (1902-1972): Cutural ecology and Multilinear Evolution

Influental in 1960s and 1970s Similar cultural patterns reflect parallel adaptations to analogous environmental situations Five cultural traditions (see map) evolved in similar arid and semiarid environments

Three steps of culturalecological investigation 1. interrelationship of technology and environment, material culture vs. natural resources 2. behavior patterns involved in the exploitation of a particular area by means of a popular
technology

3. behavior patterns as affecting other aspects of culture

This procedure identifies the CULTURAL CORE the cultural features that (next to environment and technology) determine a societys way of subsistence: productive techniques and knowledge of the resources available, including patterns of labor, production and distribution of food, role of ideology

Culture and personality

Growing up Human Enculturation

Ruth Benedict Margaret Mead

Culture and personality school

Their work is reaction against the 19th social evolution and diffusionism the functionalism of Radcliff-Brown and Malinowski They believed in cultural determinism and studied SOCIALIZATION creates personality patterns different socialization practices resulted in different personality types. shapes a persons emotions, thoughts, behaviors, cultural values and norms

Enculturation and self-awareness

The process by which culture is passed down from one generation to the next. It begins with the development of self-awareness the ability to identify oneself, and to appraise and evaluate oneself Self-identification alone is not sufficient positive value to the self must be attached This develops in concert with neuromotor development (unlike in traditional societies human contact and stimulation are limited: no co-sleeping

Behavioral Environment: Other-then-the-self world

Like any concept of culture, conceptions of the self vary from one society to another Basic orientations that structure the psychological field in which the self is prepared to act

Personality
Personality: a distinct way a person thinks, feels and behaves A product of enculturation as experienced by individuals, each with his or her genetic makeup During the process of enculturation we build

Ruth Benedict (1887-1948)

Theory of culture as personality

 Boasian idea of cultural relativism; anthropology linked with psychology cultural patterns are illuminated by placing cultures in relation to each other; comparative method, lack of moralizing judgment A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action (46) If we are interested in cultural processes, the only way in which we can know the significance of the selected detail of behavior is against the background of the motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized in that culture (49)

Patterns of Culture (1934)

Dionysian ecstatic, egocentric and individualistic (the Kwaikitul of the American Northwest used Franz Boass research) Apollonian living by the golden mean, no excess or disruptive psychological state (the Zuni of the American Southwest her own research) paranoid magic ridden, fearing and hating everyone (the Dobuans Reo Fortunes work, Papua New Guinea)

Normal and abnormal personality

The kind of abnormality involving a development of a delusional system that the culture does not sanction can be called PSYCHOSIS For example, paranoid schizophrenia fear and mistrust of others, hearing voices, bizarre behaviors, institutionalization as mental patients Ethnic psychosis, for example, Windigo among the Algonkian Indians (Chppewa, Cree, and Ojibwa) Individuals with Windigo develop a delusion that falling under the control of these monsters, they themselves were being transformed into Windigos, craving for human flesh.

Hermaphroditus deity of effeminacy and bisexuality The Blessed Curse: Spirituality and sexual difference (1995)
Rhonda Kay Williamson: born between sexes as an intesex child to a Christian Euro-American family, but also a great-granddaughter of a Cherokee woman In Native American culture: she was seen by her grandmother as given a special

Margaret Mead (1901-1978) sex, parenthood, child rearing

Pioneering cross-cultural study of child-rearing practices on adult personality would give ideas on how to reform the American society Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

Effects of child rearing on personality recent studies

Dependence Training Promotes compliance with the group Associated with extended families and subsistence farming Supportive aspects: indulgence shown to young children, nursing on demand At an early stage children are assigned domestic tasks contributing to the familys welfare Obedience

Mead and dr Spock

Mead implemented her own ideas about childbirth and child-rearing, influenced by her experiences with different cultures. For her daughters pediatrician she chose a New York doctor named Benjamin Spock. Spock agreed that Mead could breast feed her baby on demand, a practice

Dr William Sears: The Baby Book 1992 Now in print in 18 languages, with more than 1.5 million copies sold. While the concept sounds simple, the practicalities of attachment parenting ask a great deal
of mothers. The three basic tenets are breast-feeding (sometimes into toddlerhood), cosleeping (inviting babies into the parental bed or pulling a bassinet alongside it) and baby wearing, in which infants are literally attached to their mothers via slings.