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Cultural Anthropology (ANTH 2) Notes

1. What is Anthropology?
a. Anthropology is study of all facets of humanity
b. An increasingly interdisciplinary field of inquiry
c. Borrows concepts & research from different fields to understand humans
d. Five Fields of Anthropology
i. Physical
1. Studies human evolution and biology, primate physiology
and behavior, human genetic variation, the interdependency
between humans and the natural environment, etc.
2. Prosimians Lemurs, Racoons
3. Monkeys (Old & New World)
4. Lesser & Greater Apes
5. Hominins
ii. Archaeology
1. Studies material culture
2. Things people make and use
3. Can tell us about communitys way of life and culture
iii. Anthropological Linguistics
1. Studies how humans use symbolic language to
communicate and represent the world
iv. Cultural
1. Studies the diverse ways of life, symbols, beliefs and
practices of humans from holistic, comparative perspective
v. Applied
1. Focuses on the application of anthropological studies to
determine answers to economical, political questions
a. Ex: Studying Hmong refugees in Laos to
understand illness and develop culturally sensitive
health programs for them
2. Anthropological Perspectives
a. Holistic
i. In order to understand a part, we must try to understand the whole
b. Comparative
i. We shouldnt make generalizations about humans and human
nature based on singular examples or norms of one culture
c. Relativistic
i. We should avoid judging the cultures of others based on our own
cultural standards and norms when we study them
d. Situated and Partial
i. Our perspective of the world and others is shaped by our sociocultural backgrounds and life experiences.
ii. Our perspective is always partial rather than omniscient (allseeing)

iii. Objective reality is always filtered through our subjective senses


and cognitive capacities.
3. Features of Culture
a. The Cannibal Tribes
i. Unilineal Cultural Evolution
1. This idea argues that all human societies can be placed
somewhere along a single line of cultural development
(primitive civilized)
2. But lot of current anthropologists consider it too simplistic
and not reflective of how real world cultures work
a. Too ethnocentric
b. Based on subjectively selected criteria designed to
favor some societies over others
i. Primitive is applied to small-scale,
indigenous societies that are different from
capitalist, post-Industrial societies
ii. Who are the cannibals in the film?
1. They are the ancestors of the current tribe people. They
used to eat human flesh for traditions sake, and not out of
necessity.
iii. What kind of miscommunication happens between villagers and
tourists?
1. The villagers assume that the tourists have all the money in
the world, and hence can buy more than just 1-2 carvings
from the villagers and spread the wealth. But in reality, the
tourists have to spend money on a lot of other things as
well. The villagers are too dependent on tourists for money,
since they dont have their own self-sustaining economy.
4. Cultural Categories & Intersectionality
a. Cultural categories operate as
i. Registers of identity
1. We believe that they indicate something meaningful about
who we are
ii. Modes of social organization
1. Used to organize people and society according to different
criteria
iii. Technologies of power
1. Used as tools for exercising power over people and society
b. Intersectionality
i. The idea that cultural categories intersect with each other and dont
operate by themselves
ii. People live in the intersections of various cultural categories
1. Race is not system of classification based on essential or
scientific truths about human biology
iii. What is Race?

1. Race is a social construct that operates as a cultural


category based on the classification of peoples physical
appearance
a. Race makes sense of diversity by categorizing
people according to visible, physically expressed
genetic characteristics known as phenotype.
b. The phenotypic traits upon which racial categories
are based on represent only a tiny fraction of the
human genotype.
i. Genotype the total inheritable
characteristics of an organism in
DNA/mRNA
2. Race assumes that phenotypes are distinct and fixed, and
tells us something about the fundamental characteristics of
people
3. There are no race genes.
a. Genes that code for skin color, hair, texture and
nose shape vary independently of each other.
4. Human genetic variation is fluid between and within human
populations
a. There are often greater levels of genetic variation
within races than between them.
b. Racial categories are hierarchically arranged.
c. They organize and rank.
5. Marriage Practices
a. Signals a change in the social status of participants
i. Often marks the people involved as full adults
b. Redistributes economic resources and establishes specific sets of
responsibilities between marriage partners and their kin
i. Provides a culturally specific framework for regulating sexual
access, reproduction, and the rearing offspring
ii. Organizes a gendered and age based division of labor in the family
and society
c. Number of spouses
i. Polygamy
1. Polygyny a husband may be married to more than one
wife at a time
2. Polyandry a wife may be married to more than none
husband at a time
ii. Monogamy
1. A person may have only one spouse at a time
d. Marriage Eligibility
i. Exogamy Rules outmarriage
1. Person is prohibited from marrying within their social
group or category
ii. Endogamy Rules inmarriage

1. Person must marry someone from within their social group


or category
6. Race, Marriage, and Sexuality in the US
a. Miscegenation
i. A demeaning term used to label interracial marriages and
procreation
ii. Used in the US since the Civil War
iii. 1948 California Supreme Court voids state law prohibiting
interracial marriage
iv. 1967 Supreme Court rules anti-miscegenation laws
unconstitutional in Loving v. State of Virginia
7. Ethnography
a. Definition
i. A written description, interpretation and analysis of customs and
beliefs of a cultural community of people
ii. Such ethnographic accounts can translate the culture and social
practices of one cultural community into terms another community
might understand better
b. Fieldwork
i. Anthropologists gather qualitative and quantitative data for
ethnographies through fieldwork
ii. This involves living alongside, participating in, and observing dayto-day lives of their research subjects for at least a year
c. Fieldwork Research Methods
i. Participant-Observation
ii. Interviews
iii. Oral Histories
iv. Archival Research
v. Surveys
vi. Media Analysis
d. Field Notes
i. They begin as raw, hand-written notes recording participation,
observation, interviews, etc.
ii. Field notes are processed and coded before being cooked into
ethnographic accounts
8. Sex, Gender, Sexuality
a. Sex
i. Male/Intersex/Female
ii. A biological/cultural category usually assigned to newly-borns
iii. Primary Sexual Characteristics
1. Reproductive Organs: Ovaries, Vulva, Penis, Vagina
iv. Secondary Sexual Characteristics
1. Breasts, adipose tissue distribution (fat), voice pitch
v. Sexual Dimorphism
1. Differences in secondary sexual characteristics between
males and females of same species

2. Degree of sexual dimorphism vary between species


3. Male orb spider is size of female orb spider (high degree
of sexual dimorphism)
b. Gender
i. Man/Woman
ii. Cisgender
1. If gender identity and assigned sex match dominant cultural
norms regarding bodies and gender, as well as their own
sense of self (normal person)
iii. Transgender
1. If their identity moves between or combines gender
expressions
2. Someone who does not conform to either gender
iv. Judith Butler
1. Argued that gender is performative
a. Gender norms are learned, internalized and
practiced through repeated actions
c. Sexuality
i. Hetersexuality/Homosexuality/(Bisexuality)
ii. Gender norms change over periods of time
iii. The expression of varying capacities for erotic, emotional and
spiritual desire for others
d. Biological Fluidity vs. Rigid Human Cultural Classifications
i. Some humans assign sex based on visible features, but there are lot
of limitations
ii. A persons visible reproductive organs may be typical of one sex,
but their internal anatomy and psychological state align more with
another sex
1. Or a person may be born with ambiguous sexual
morphology
9. Binary Oppositions
a. Definition
i. A pair of cultural significant categories or concepts that are
imagined to exist as linked opposites
1. Day/Night
2. Raw/Cooked
3. Culture/Nature
b. Strengths of Binary Oppositions
i. Provide a framework for comparison between cultural categories
ii. Useful for elaborating differences between cultural categories
c. Problems of Binary Oppositions
i. Often mistaken as universal
ii. Can lead to black or white thinking
iii. Carry a value judgment that marks one element of the pair as
superior than the other element
10. The Politics of Representation

a. Acts of Representation
i. Telling stories or describing our lives are powerful because they
can shape how people interpret the world and perceive each other
ii. Acts of representation not only attempt to reflect perceptions of
social reality, but also help to create our sense of social reality
b. Who gets to represent whom?
i. Who has the means to represent themselves and who does not?
1. Ability to communicate your perspective and needs is a
powerful form of social self representation
ii. A college education is not just about learning facts or gaining
career skills
1. It is also about learning to more effectively communicate
your perspective and represent the complexity of your life
to others
c. Ethnography
i. These accounts are powerful because they often examine cultural
communities that are socially invisible and they shape how these
communities are understood by readers of ethnography
d. Social Marginalization
i. Marginals are people the system of labor cannot or will not use
ii. Leads to dehumanization
1. A whole category of people is expelled from useful
participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to
sever deprivation and even extermination
iii. Homeless live in a state of marginality that renders them largely
socially invisible except as threats to public safety and health
e. Power Inversion
i. Racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. often create power inversions
wherein those aligned with the dominant power structure see
themselves as victims of those they unknowingly marginalize
11. Social Inequality
a. 3 metrics according to Morton Fried
i. Prestige
1. Status, influence, respect, esteem
ii. Power
1. Ability to get others to do your work based on authority
iii. Wealth
1. Ownership/control of culturally valued material goods and
resources like land, tools, commodities, money, etc.
2. Wealth inequality shapes lives of people and physical
environment of cities
12. Globalization
a. Arjun Appadurai
i. Argued that globalization should be conceptualized as a dynamic
process made up of interacting global flows of:
1. People

2. Ideas
3. Media
4. Technologies
5. Capital and Commodities
ii. These global flows can produce disjunctive, uneven effects:
1. Great wealth for some, poverty for others
2. Greater cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity
3. A growing sense of global interconnection for some, and a
growing sense of isolation/disconnection for others
iii. He compared globalization to a plant with a rhizomic root structure
b. Globalization is a decentered process
i. Has sometimes been equated with Americanization/Westernization
ii. However, most scholars see it as a phenomenon that doesnt have a
definite or single center
c. David Harvey
i. Time-Space Compression
1. A term used to describe how capitalism and technology
have changed the apparent scale of world and the speed at
which human interactions occur
2. We have less time to make decisions, were more fickle
about social trends, cultures change very rapidly
d. Human Migration
i. Legal and cultural citizenship of immigrant communities continue
to be questioned
1. Cultural citizenship: the right to be considered a full
member of a society. Refers to cultural, social, civic
inclusion of a community of people and their culture

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