Anthropology nowadays- focus on migration, looking at movement of peoples

Globalization- technology “doubles” every two years

Anthropology:
- Cross cultural
- Comparative
4 fields
- Cultural
o Participant observation- producing ethnography
o Lives of people in and between local/global communities
o Ethnology (analysis, comparison of ethnographic data)
- Archaeology
o Prehistoric
o historic
- Linguistic
o Descriptive
o Historical
o Sociolinguistic/sociocultural focus
- Physical
o Paleoanthropology
o Primatology
o Forensics

Zora Neale Hurston- anthropologist

- “formalized curiosity… poking and prying with a purpose”

- Anthropology is asking questions about humans, and why those answers matter/change
things

o Relevancy in wide variety of other fields: medical, historical, artistic, HR,

Globalization: worldwide intensification of interactions, increased movement of money, people,

goods, and ideas
 1. Time-space compression
2. Flexible accumulation (companies hiring overseas)
3. Increasing migration
4. Uneven development
5. Rapid change
Global commodity chain- mapping production, distribution, consumption
- Example: bead necklaces used for mardi gras, etc
o Redmon followed beads from oil source in iraq
o Followed to factory, parade, trash
These 5 categories in the film “Mardi Gras Made in China”:
1. working hours in china are up to 16 hours
2. mardi gras beads made in china – majority of workers are women
Working for $60 a month
Disconnect between worker/employer
3. can’t make a living off of working locally or rurally
4. factory conditions in china- relatively poor conditions with younger workers working long
hours
Beads have a short life- ironic how they’re thrown away so easily
only a few people benefit
5. unfair pay- working class culture is different in china

Day 2

Paradox- globalization connects us but we don’t realize it

How can anthropology help us deal with diversity?
Applied anthropology- practical application of theory and method
Public anthropology- going beyond the discipline, creating conversation
Culture- something not biologically determined- passed down
- Animals like species of primates, dolphins, whales, elephants
- Not exclusive to humans
 Early examples of culture:
- Cave paintings
- Arrowheads, early tools
Culture: “unified and complex system of ideas”
- Knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts, institutions
- Not natural- learned through enculturation
- Both informally and formally taught
- Shared by groups but dynamic, negotiated, challenged
- Separate cultures exist, new ones always being developed
Example:
Kissing study:
- Romantic kissing only common in 46% of cultures
- Kissing only used for ritual events
Culture spread through media, colonialism
- Concept of “right” and “wrong” culture

- nature vs nurture
- behavior can’t be explained by just biology and evolution
o how does enculturation affect this
o why is nature justified for inequality
o cultural adaptations can replace genetic adaptations
- culture influences everything, even basic needs

non-material aspects of culture

- aspects of variability, permeability
o contact with others has always happened
o within there is inequal knowledge but a “common core” – shared aspects
norms:
- how to behave appropriately(unwritten or written)
- different expectations for different groups/individuals
values:
- ideas about what is good
 - standards as a guide- defining purpose
symbols:
- anything that can stand for something else
- language
- non-verbal, action based, unconscious
mental map:
- cultural classifications of people and things
- how reality is classified
o treating schemas “natural”
- Assigning meaning to classification
o Example: “life span”
- Reflect the ideas of people with power
Symbolic
- Vulgar gestures vary on cultures
Mental maps:
- Dene astronomy- “man in the sky”
Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism
- Ethnocentrism- belief that your own culture is superior and normal
- Cultural relativism- understand that every culture is on their terms with their own
context
o As anthropologists, assume every people’s culture makes sense for them,
o We want to understand they system by which they make sense
o Degrees of relativism taken to extremes can be a problem
 Negotiating human rights, questioning
 Avoiding harm and suffering resulting from one person acting against
another

EMIC vs ETIC
- Emic knowledge/interpretations are existing in the culture
- Etic knowledge is generalizations about behavior made by an outsider

Day 3
Culture and globalization-
- Homogenization
o Loss of diversity?
o relocalization, production of new things
 k-pop, Bollywood, spaghetti westerns

fill in later

culture and power

- Antonio Gramsci: power
o Material power, direct force, politics, economy, military
o Hegemonic power- consent without force
- (institutional) culture- shapes normality, creates beliefs, truths
o Self-discipline
o Hegemonic power can control behavior without laws
o Agency- power to contest norms, power, institutions
 “weapons of the weak” – scott

Creating culture:
- Consumer culture
o Economics/culture dichotomy
 Advertising is enculturation
 Teaching us concepts of success and wanting to consume
o Max weber –“protestant work ethic” , grow out of capitalism
 Religious history in us similar to free market economy
 Secular work as “sacred calling” as asceticism
 Led to drive for capitalism
- Rituals in the US
o Valentines day
- Global impacts of consumption?
Early ethnography- Herodotus

- First writer in the ancient world to be interested in other people’s lives

Early anthropology-
- European men
- No fieldwork, depended on travelers and colonists
- Made generalizations
- Tried to justify colonialism, governments
o Justified ethnocentric ideals
History of approach of culture
Unilineal cultural evolution- armchair anthropologists - Tylor, frazen, morgan
o Idea all cultures had same stages- savage, barbarian, civilized
 - Historical particularism- boas, benedict, mead, hurston
o Rejection of unilineal idea
o Cultures come from different causes, similarities are because of diffusion
o Understanding effects of culture, environment on behavior
- Structural functionalism- malinowski, evans-pritchard
o Rejected unilineal
o Each element in society serves the whole
o Only looked at culture at one point of time rather than through history
- Interpretivist approach(es)- Geertz
o Culture is symbolic- each action has a deeper meaning
o Comprehending shared understandings- everything is in a “web of meaning”

Early fieldworkers:
- Bronislaw Malinowski
o Stuck in trobriand islands after wwi
o Set standards- “get off the veranda”, participant observation
 Get into routines of daily life
- Franz boas
o Geographer
o Holistic approach, 4 fields, salvage ethnography
o Disprove unilineal approach- replace with historical particularism, diffusion
o Cultural relativism- emic point of view
o Against racism in science
- E. e. evans-pritchard
o Fieldwork was an experiment
o Structural particularism- how does the part contribute to the whole
o Didn’t consider history/broad world

Writing ethnography
- Start with emic perspective
o Be reflexive- how you affect your data(age, gender….)
- Start writing with an etic perspective
o Wheres your ethnographic authority
- Incorporate other voices- polyvocality

Doing fieldwork
 - Getting qualitative, quantitative data- scientific method for examining the social world
o Participant observation, field notes
o Interviews, surveys
o Oral histories
o Mapping physical, geographic surroundings- built, natural
o Drawing, photography
o Network, kinship analysis
- Fieldwork as an art
o Interpersonal skills
o Listening skills including for zeros
o Self-awareness
o Risk to be changed- process of mutual transformation

Case study: Nancy scheper-hughes

- Brazil- death without weeping
- How do the mothers here make sense of the high mortality rate?
- What startles Scheper-Hughes about their reactions?
- How does she overcome her ethnocentric bias about what is “natural”?
- How are the mothers’ reactions justified? How do they fit into broader mental map of
reality, and system of values?

Day 4
Language and Culture
Language – symbolic system, organized to rules, conveys info
- How does human language differ from other animals?
o Infinite possibilities
o Control over vocal chords, tongue, lips
o Foxp2 gene
o Hyoid bone
o Art, tools
- Primate abilities
o Using ASL
o Lucy the chimp- productivity, combining words
o Displacement- past and future
o Imitative? Primates only use ASL among humans
- Not humanlike grammar
Descriptive linguistics
- Phonemes
o Smallest sound unit that makes a difference in meaning(study of = phonology)
o Can vary- 12 is smallest 120 largest
- Morphemes
o Smallest units that have meaning on their own (morphology)
 Creating new words, adding meaning
o Compounding in English
- Syntax
o How morphemes combine to make phrases, sentences
o Grammar

- Kinesics
o Body movement
 Proxemics
 Sign language
- Paralanguage- noises, tones that accompany speech, sign
o Emojis, reaction gifs

Language, thought, culture

- Is there universal grammar?
- Can language influence the way you think?
o Sapir-whorf hypothesis/linguistic relativity -> the languages you speak create
certain mental categories that shape your world view
o Not the same as linguistic determinism- language traps you
- Language, though, culture influence each other
- Language connected to how we engage in the world
o Shakespeare in the bush

Western apache toponyms:

- Use of specific place names in storytelling/conversation in Cibecue, Arizona
- Place “stands for” a narrative
- Place names remind of importance- cultural links
- “trail goes between two hills”
What domains are affected by language?
- Perception of space
- Absolute directions- guugu yimithirr in Australia
- Writing direction- left to right/right to left
o Orders of pictures
- Grammatical classification
- Direction of time
o Affects gestures, metaphors

Linguistic specialization
- Language is dynamic
- New words always being made
- Focal vocabularies: lexical richness due to particular cultural reality
o Digital communication
 Computer: in Icelandic, from words for “number” and “prophetess”
 Inuktitut – “something that works like a brain”
o Color term growth in English because of fashion
 Varies by gender
o Kinship terms
o Pastoralist vocabularies for animals

Steps of field work

1. Issue/interest/idea
2. Initial investigation
3. Steeping
4. Questioning
5. Revising
6. Missing pieces
7. Interviews/participant observation
8. Steeping pt 2
9. Reflection
10. Compiling
11. Le fin

Day 5
Sociolinguistics
- How culture/language shape each other- relations of power to age, race, class, ethnicity,
gender, sexuality
o Common approach in linguistic anthropology
- Speech community: group of people sharing norms for language use
- Difference between language/dialect
o Mutual intelligibility- language
o Dialect – non-standard variety of a language
 Accent: only how you sound
o Classification not absolute
o Max weinreich – “A language is a dialect with an army and navy”
Language and state borders
- Language continuum
o Variation occurs gradually
- Historical linguistics: change over time, how languages are related through ancestor
languages

- Language ideologies: how we see a certain language

Code-switching:
- Act of switching between language variants because of cultural contexts
o If within a sentence: called code-mixing
o Not always because you forgot or don’t know a word- social meanings
Esmeralda Salas- Accents and Standard Language Ideology
Accents – who has them, and what are they
Accents refer to:
- Pitch/stress
- Specific diacritics
- Phonological and intonation features
Accent modification/reduction
- What is desired and why
- Is it about language or something more
Standard language ideology: belief there is a language variety that is superior
Ask:
- What is the desired accent
- What are the social/political/historical/economic processes that have contributed to
this
- What are consequences
Lippi-green – “When people reject an accent, they also reject the identity of the person
speaking: his or her race, ethnic heritage, national origin, regional affiliation, or economic class”

Day 6
The Race Paradox
Race has real impacts on peoples lives, but no scientific basis
- Social reality, biological fiction
Race: classifying people using physical characteristics
Racism: can be individual and institutional

The difference between us: Race- the power of an illusion

 What biological evidence disproves discrete races?
 What is the purpose of some genetic variation? Ex – sickle cell anemia, skin color
 Athletic ability, How they disprove it? What might influence it instead?
- Race- idea that external differences are linked to internal differences
o Idea that we ascribe to biology
 - Example how race affects people: sporting events
o Some believe race affects one’s athletic ability- but there is no difference
- Eugenics: helped with racial hierarchy idea
- Berlin Olympics- jesse owens won
o Eugenics justified this as blacks having athletic ability but lacked “civilized” ability

Summing up the biology:

- More alike than different
- 99.9% of genome shared

- No magic dividing line between races- gradual difference

o Adaptations to environment
- Genotype vs phenotype
- What genetic traits?

Colonial roots of race as a category

- Ideas of race come from European colonialism
o race became classification system for hierarchy
o western Europeans on top
 justified colonialism, slavery, killing indigenous peoples
- whiteness: colonial law in 1691- either white or not
o white supremacy
o jim crow

different countries have different systems

- all are hierarchal, used to privilege some, disadvantage others
- brazil- 130 categories
o based on western European system
o a “utopia”?
o different ones for race/ethnicity
o 5 on the census, more in everyday life
o Different family members can be different races
o Socio-economic status can lighten or darken you
Race in the us census:
- How did people “become white”
- Changing social category
o 1790- free white males, free white females, all other free people, slaves
o 1890- white, black, mulatto, quadroons, octoroons, Indian, Chinese, Japanese ->
hypodescent
o “one drop rule”
o 1930s, 40s- 10 to 11 categories
o 1970- origin of descent(Hispanic, latino, Spanish)
o 2000 – pick more than one descent

Recap of race:
As anthropologists, examine how racism can be:
- Individual
- Institutional(structural) – create unequal access to power, resources…

Colorblindness:
- “not seeing color” in social/institutional sense
- May perpetuate institutional racism
- Denying wealth, property, education, health, employment

Race in the US
Racial privilege-
- “invisible package of unearned assets” – white privilege
- Those in the dominant group favored by others in the group
- Class, region, gender, sexuality all interconnected – privilege is not uniform
- Case study: regional/class discrimination in white people in rural florida
o Couldn’t get jobs
o Called “white trash”
- Still an issue of social mobility disparities- improved class status doesn’t bring a decrease
of discrimination for African-americans in the same way it does for whites

Race and language

Raciolinguistics- new subfield of linguistic anthropology- understanding how racial and linguistic
prejudice overlap
How is language used to construct race?
How do ideas of race influence language and language use?

- English-only movements
- John baugh- mixed guise techniques
o Linguistic profiling

Day 7

Race- phenotype, applied category, hierarchical

Ethnicity- cultural background, internal, not hierarchical
- Historical, cultural, ancestral connection – distinct from others outside the group
- “the social organization of cultural difference” – barth
- Kinship
- Origin myth- common identity
o Example: Aztecs
o Exodus
o American origin myths?

Ethnic boundary markers:

- Practices, beliefs- food, clothing, language, names, ancestors, religions
- Different groups may have different markers
o What do you have to share to be a part of the group?
- Boundaries seem “fixed” but are fluid
- Situational negotiation of identity: how someone’s self-identification can shift due to
location
o Moving groups can change aspects
o Immigration

Ethnicity and nation:

State: autonomous regional structure – political, economic, military
Nation-state: distinct political entity – population shares a sense of culture, ancestry, destiny
- More than just geography
- Nationalism: desire of ethnic group to create/maintain a nation-state
- “imagined community” – Anderson
o How we invent connection and shared tradition – underlies identification with
group whose members haven’t all met
o Iraq
o France pre 1800 – diversity
 Helped unify through education, transportation

Paths to incorporation:
- Assimilation: minorities assimilate to norms and patterns
o Melting pot: immigration into US
- Multiculturalism: ethic relations where new immigrants and children enculturate to
dominant culture, but retain ethnic culture
o Hyphenated identities

- Is this US a true melting pot?

o Concept of whiteness- who is white
o Pushing for assimilation?
o How is agency exerted?

Ethnicity and conflict

- Rwandan genocide- hutus vs tutsis
- Before colonialism – shared language, religion, intermarried
- Belgian colonialism described tutsis as superior
- After independence – hutu tried to gain revenge
Yurumein – Homeland film
St. Vincent – island in Caribbean, home to indigenous Kalinago(carib) – incorporated west
africans into community (ethnogenesis)
- 1797 – fought off Europeans until two major chieftains killed
o Remaining kalinago: killed, sent into exile in central America, went into hiding
- Those that went to central America became known as Garifuna

- Dr. Cadrin Gill: carib, grew up on st. Vincent, raised as English, became a doctor in LA
- Not much known about history of caribs

- Caribs resisted against French and british, but british broke the treaty and took all the
land
- Sent to balliceaux

- Language, songs, dance

- Phenotype
- Values
- Ancestors
- Rituals

Diaspora
- Dispersal of people across boundaries of two or more nation-states
- Real or imagined relationship with homeland
- Self-awareness of group identity that lasts multiple generations
- Diaspora caused by greater force – war, political change, need for labor/income,
industrialization
- Can involve historical/cultural trauma – “the cumulative social-cultural trauma spanning
across generations which stems from massive cataclysmic events”

Day 8

Ethnic cleansing: members of one religious/ethnic group destroying each other in a specific
area
 - Yugoslavia
o Local groups that used to live peacefully were mobilized by military, politics
- Bringa – changing solidarities
o Not identifying as part of a village, but as muslims, catholics, etc
o Local croats destroyed all muslim homes

Forming a new ethnicity

- Ethnogenesis: one group splits off, or multiple groups form a new one
o Garifuna
o Argentina
 Diverse indigenous groups, Spanish arrive in 1500s
 6 million European immigrants 1870-1914
 14+ countries
 “imagined community”
 Spanish with Italian influence language
 Soccer – national style of play

Studying gender in anthropology

- How is gender like race?
o Physical differences
o Power relations
Gender – expectations of thought, behavior assigned to perceived sex differences
Sex – observable physical differences (sexual dimorphism) related to human reproduction
- Genitalia, gonads, chromosomes
- Secondary: height, weight, hair
o Varies
o Doesn’t predict gender roles

Fluidity in sex:
- Anne Fausto-sterling: male/female sex not absolute
o Intersex: combination of male-associated, female-associated primary
characteristics
o Many societies ignore this
 In US – turned ambiguous genitalia “female”
  Biopower – Foucault – disciplining body through control of biological sex
characteristics
 Criticized, transition to patient-centered care: allowing person to choose
later in life

- Mead: studies in papua new guinea

o “masculine” “feminine” are cultural specific
o Arapesh: egalitarian child-rearing, gentleness, non-aggression
o Biwat(Mundugumor) – aggression and competition
o Chambri: women do procurement, travel, control trade; men stayed in village,
were politician
- Gender is what we do rather than what we are
o “invisible framework”

Gender ideologies:
- Gender stratification: unequal distribution of power, access to group’s resources,
opportunities, rights, privileges, based on ender
o Gender stereotypes
o Held in place by gender ideologies
 “man the hunter”
 “the sperm and egg” tale
o Martin – reproductive cells are gendered when we talk about them

Gender identities:
- Transgender: gender identity different than assigned sex
- Queer/non-binary: not conforming to gender norms
- Many other similar sex/gender systems worldwide, not same as west
- Hijra – South Asia
o 3rd gender: marginalized and revered
- Muxes – Zapotec community in Oaxaca, Mexico
o 3rd gender
- Two-spirit: pan-indigenous north American category
o 2-5 genders
o Have other specific terms
o Sacred, ceremonial
- Buginese 5-gender system: Sulawesi, Indonesia
o Men – male, masculine
 o Women – female, feminine
o Calalai – female, masculine
o Calabai – male, feminine
o Bissu – all genders, intersex, religious role

Muxes film:
- Similar to transgender, but different
- 3rd gender: accepted
- Muxes: means feminine, fear
- Zapotec: no distinction between genders when talking about someone

Gender in Occupational Contexts – Melissa

- Research in male-dominated workplaces
o Craft breweries
- Language in maintaining gendered boundaries
Projects:
- Linguistics among women in craft beer industry
- Visual, text
Gendered occupations:
- Women are HR, dental hygienists, preschool teachers, nurses…
- Women are rarely: ceos, dentists, software engineers, surgeons…
Women in craft brewing:
- Women make up 4% of master brewers in US
- 1 in 3 women regularly drink craft beer
- Most common jobs for women – support positions
Historically:
- Women were original brewers
- Before industrialization, women were laborers in hops agriculture
- Prohibition linked to women’s suffrage
- After prohibition, beer appealed to women, white, middle-class
Revolutionary men:
- Beer industry consolidated post-war
 - Craft beer history crowded with men
- Associated with words like “adventure, innovation, pioneer”… associated with
masculinity
- Craft breweries proliferate, especially last 2 decades
Reconstruction gender:
- End to sexist environment in craft beer
- Trade associations addressing gender imbalance
- Women brewers and other craft brewers resisting limited legibility

Day 9

Language and gender

- Different genders can use different forms in all words
Are we enculturated to speak different ways by gender?
- Context: public/private, same-/mixed- gender groups
- Who talks more?
o ~16,000 average for everyone
 Men at top and bottom
 Profession-based
- Who interrupts more?
o Men interrupt more, more likely to interrupt women, women more likely to
interrupt other women (hancock)
o Men more likely to interrupt a man, women interrupt other women (Snyder)

Gendered pronoun use

- English: they/them
- Swedish: “hen” as official gender neutral pronoun
Case: gendered writing
- Nushu in hunan province
o Women couldn’t learn to read or write
o Developed own system
o Agency, push for change
Kinship, family, marriage
Kinship – systems of meaning/power created to determine relatedness, define expectations,
rights, responsibilities
- Descent groups
o Consanguineal relatives (related by blood)
o US – nuclear family, few generations back
o Lineages – link to founding ancestor
 Matrilineal, patrilineal, bilateral(ambilineal)
o Clans – group based on founding ancestor
- Social forces
o Conflicts, external forces
o Immigration

Constructing ties
Marriage:
- Socially recognized relationship
o Physical/emotional intimacy, rights to property/inheritance
- Creates affinal relationship (kinship through marriage/alliance, not descent)
- Arranged vs companionate marriage
o Nanda
- Romantic love: more prevalent than thought by early anthropologists
o Is it always a part of marriage? Outside of marriage does it involve sex?
 Khevsur people in Georgia (country)
  Arranged marriage, but could have a sts’orproba (romantic relationship)
before marriage

Marriage types and rules:

- How many?
o Monogamy vs polygamy (polygyny = 2+ women, polyandry = 2+ men)
- Who?
o Endogamy (within group), exogamy (outside group)
o What sex/genders?
 Same-sex/gender marriage found in many socities
 2 females: nandi, nuer, east Africa
 Social, economic relationships

Incest taboo – forbidding sex with close relationships

- Almost universal prohibition in nuclear family
o No consensus to why in all cases
- Many cultures allow cross-cousins(mother’s brothers kids, father’s sister’s kids)
o Not parallel cousins

The women’s kingdom

Mosuo/na people – 40,000 living in Yunnan/Sichuan Chinese provinces
- Part of Naxi national minority
- Matriarchal society – “walking marriage”
- What are advantages/disadvantages of Mosuo “marriage” system? What are effects of
globalization?

- Walking marriage: man walks into women’s bedroom at night – if she lets him stay he
must leave in the morning
o You can leave easily if you don’t like a marriage
- Children live with mothers
- Women can have as many relationships as they want
- Women enjoy more freedom then in most of china
- Women tell men if they like them or not
-
 - Singing and dancing part of culture – now more of a tourist attraction
- Tourists mainly interested in walking marriage
o Taking advantage of the culture
- Women tourists attracted in Mosuo men too
- Rural mosuo village: seeing media, building paved roads, telephone lines

Day 10

Arranging a Marriage in India:

- Difference between arranged vs companionate marriage
- Focus on family, compatibility

Formalizing a marriage
- Gift exchange:
o For the couple
o Dowry – bride’s kin to groom’s kin
 Family inheritance to establish new household
 Compensation to groom for “taking on a wife”
 Gender stratification: dowry seen as insufficient, bride face
violence/rejection
 Taking advantage of dowry
o Bridewealth – groom’s kin to bride’s kin
 Compensate for loss of bride, create stability
 Makes bride’s family richer and more attractive
 Symbolic agreement
 Sometimes bride service – groom works for bride’s family
 Incompatibility, infertility, infidelity – return of bridewealth
- Sister exchange
o Woman marries man, sister from his family marries the woman’s brother or
cousin
- Marriage becomes transaction: coming together of families
Kin beyond biology, marriage
- Idealized version of nuclear family in US after WWII
- Family of procreation, rather than family of orientation
- Small units, good for mobility, economic success, independence
- Not universal: just small part of middle class

- More ways to negotiate kinship

o Blended families, divorce/remarriage
o Unmarried partnerships
o Chosen families
 Step-children
 Adoption
 Close friends
 Networks to replace family of origin

Assistive reproduction technologies

Culture shaping biology
- Not necessarily new
- Implications for kinship
o Paternity testing, sex testing
o Artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization
Connections to globalization:
- Surrogates
o Power dynamics
- Transnational adoption
o Kinship across borders

Day 11

Religion and anthropology

Religion: set of beliefs/practices based on a vision of how the world should be – supernatural,
community
As anthropologists,
 - No true/false religion
- How people experience religion/non-religion, how it affects their lives
o Morals/ethics outside of religion

- Diverse belief systems

- Religions may have central beliefs, but can look different in different places

Diversity in local practice:

- Yaqui (yoeme) easter ceremonies – Tucson AZ, Sonora Mexico
o 7 weeks of ceremonies from lent to easter
o Renewal of the world, good chasing out evil, purification for new year
o La Gloria(passion of Christ), and deer dance
 Flower: symbol of weapon against evil
 Jesus’s blood, signs from flower world

Religions, rituals:
- All religions have sacred (holy), profane (not hold) – Durkheim
o Ritual: repeated acts, embody beliefs, create continuity and belonging
- Rites of passage – ritual that enacts status change – A. Van Gennep
o Symbolic
- 3 stages of rites of passage: separation, liminality, reincorporation – V. Turner
o Communitas: sense of camaraderie, vision of what constitutes a good life,
commitment to social action

Gender and religion

- Religion and gender roles?

Veiled voices film:

- 3 different women in 3 countries in North Africa/Southwestern Asia where islam is the
most popular religion
o How do they use agency? What assumptions/norms do they challenges?
- Hanan Al-Lahham
o Reading a lot of books despite not being able to go to college
 o Balanced view
o Teaching people to think and elaborate on ideas
o Different interpretations
- Al-Azhar University
o Women study to become religious leaders
o Dr. Amna Nosseir:
 Same facilities for women and men
 No difference between men and women teachers

Religion and power

- Americans become more secular
o Catholicism – latin American immigrants
 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico
- State and religion connected in some countries
o Sharia law
- Does the US have separation between church/state?
- Religious revivals in countries where religions were outlawed before
o China: state recognizes buddhism, Daoism, islam, Catholicism, Protestantism
o Russia: orthodoxy, local belief systems

Magic
- Part of rituals: using spells, incantations, words, actions to try to get supernatural forces
to act in certain ways
o Imitative/sympathetic magic
o Contagious magic

Katryn: Mormon fundamentalism and polygamy

- Mormon
o Joseph smith: got info from god in 1800s, wrote them down in book of Mormon
- FLDS – practice polygyny
o Apostolic united brethren
o Enter polygynist marriages to help them attend spirituality
Day 12

Class
- System of power based on wealth, income, status – creates unequal distribution of
resources
o Resources tend to move up – maintain inequality
- Caste is different – no social mobility
- Stratify life changes, affect social mobility opportunities
o Intersectionality: how many factors overlap to shape life changes, patterns of
stratification – how power systems impact most marginalized people – Crenshaw

- Class is relatively new invention – 10,000 years

Historically: egalitarian societies

- Reciprocity; exchange of resources, goods, services, among people of equal status –
social ties

System of exchange
3 main systems
- Market exchange
o Currency
o Bartering
- Reciprocity
o Generalized(give/receive)
 No calculated value, repayment not predetermined
 Out of goodness
 Close kin, friends
o Balanced (equal)
 More distant relationships
 Building relationships beyond kin
 Follow norms of giving. Accepting, reciprocating
o Negative (receive/give)
 Expect to receive more than you give
 Strangers, enemies
 - Redistribution
o Goods collected, reallocated differently
o Good flow through certain point
 Potlatch ceremonies in indigenous northwest coast
o Can increase or decrease inequality
 Leveling mechanisms reallocate resources to maximize common good
 Taxes
 Increasing inequality?

Types of economies
Economy: cultural adaption to environment that allows people to use resources to
survive/thrive
- Include ideas, activities, technologies; relations and instututions
- Production, distribution, consumption
types:
- Food foraging
o Hunting, fishing, gathering
o Mobilized
o Egalitarian
o Possible in all ecosystems
o 250,000 people worldwide, most use other systems too
- Pastoralism
o Domesticating animals
o Herding for food, labor
o Seasonal migration
o Combined with foraging, horticulture today
- Horticulture
o Non-intensive plant cultivation
o Not a lot of land or labor
o Small plots, rotation
o Slash-and-burn
o More sedentary, can be combined with other methods
- Agriculture
o Intensive, large-scale farming for food production
o Fertile crescent – tigris, quphrates, nile
o Indus valley, yellow river, Mexico, andes
o More land, more labor
  Irrigation, fertilizer, draft animals, tools, machines
o Can satisfy needs, have a surplus – sedentary
o Drawbacks?
- Industrial agriculture
o Farming today
o Monocropping, pesticides, corporate ownership, extensive technology usage,
intensive genetic engineering

European expansion
- Europe wanted Chinese goods
- Chinese exports surpassed imports – needed payments of deficits in precious metals
- Started european agenda in Americas, launched colonial era
o Colonialization: the nation-state extends political, economic, military power
beyond borders for an extended period of time
Triangle trade
- Trading slaves, sugar, cotton, furs between Europe, Africa, Americas
o Big impact on economic, political, social life
o 1650-1860s, 10-15 million people enslaved
o Slave labor subsidized economic growth and development of Europe and
Americas for 350+ years
o Institutional racism, inequality still felt
Cacao – lasting impacts
How do we see lasting colonial impacts in El Cacao?
- Exploitation of resources, labor
o What positives in el cacao?
- Who has power?
o Producers vs consumers
- Direction of flow of capital
o Who profits the most?
- Direction of flow of labor
o How does this drive migration?

El Cacao movie
- Cooperative belongs to all farmers
- Inspected
 - Dangerous job
- In Africa: cacao produced on large-scale farms, chemicals
- Organic farming in panama
- Few education opportunities, but value in farming and school
- Diversified crops
- Monilla disease- spoils most of the fruit
- Cacao still has to go through co-op
- Don’t get anything out of it: others get the profit, not the farmers

Flexible accumulation
- 1900s-1950s – fordist approach: social compact between labor, capital, government
o Living wage, 8 hours a day, starting to afford what you produce
o Regulations for health, safety
- 60s, 70s – flexible accumulation – bypassing of high production cost, organized labor,
environmental laws
o Offshoring, outsourcing
o Global cities

Aria – Community Organizing and Public Anthropology

public anthropology – addressing problems for larger social issues, fostering larger social
change
community organizing – collective self-interest, taking action on community issues
- Helping bring communities together over shared issues, ideas
- Undocumented immigrants: forming communities in social media
- Actionn group in Nevada
- Community organizer- 1 to 1 conversation
o Understanding person better – issues, self-interest
- Looking at certain motels where people live – more accessible, but poor living standards
o Power relations changed
Public anthropology:
- Empowering lower class

Day 13
Medical Anthropology
links between health and culture? How do understandings of health and treatments differ?
- More than juts germs, individual behavior, genes
- Health: holistic concept – physical, mental, social
- Medical migration – movement of disease, treatments, systems, people across borders
Key terms:
- Health ecology: interactions between environment and culture
- Interpretivist approach: health systems as mental maps, systems of meaning
o How do we make sense of health, illness
- Critical medical anthropology: systems of inequality, impacts on health
o Political, economic, race, class, age, gender…
o How are health systems bound up with power

Differentiating threats to health

Differences between disease, illness, sickness?
- Disease: natural entity that can be identified, treated
- Illness: more than just disease, includes experience of being unwell – feeling
- Sickness: public expression, norms and expectations: what we do
- How discrete/separate/individual is the body as host for microbiome
o New research changing western biomedical understandings

Ethnomedicine
- Local systems of health, healing within cultural norms and values
o Ethnopharmacology: local use of natural substances in healing remedies,
practices
- Amchi medicine – Tibet buddhist in Ladakh, India
o Effective in minor illnesses
o Passed down through lineage
o Globalization
 Increasing study of biomedical practices
 Also spread of amchi medicine to other places

Biomedicine
- Applying biology and natural sciences to diagnose disease, promote healing
- Local variations but also medication, surgery, invasive treatments
 - How do biomedical practices vary?
o Even western practices reflect cultural norms/values
 way of thinking and knowing: epistemology
 individualism, rationalism, enlightenment

traditional Chinese medical

just an ethnomedicine?
- Supported and systematized by government to treat everyday disease, illness
- Not alternative but complementary to biomedicine
o Dr. Aung at university of alberta
- Individualized treatments

Anthropology of birth
- Physiological process with many culturally-associated practices worldwide
o Variation comes from different conceptions of the body and its needs
- Different kinds of experiences in contexts
o Birth in four cultures – Floyd
 Mayan, us, Sweden, Netherlands
 Compare approaches to and understandings of pain, pain medication
 Cultural values?

Health and inequality

Health transition: improvements to health over 20th century weren’t evenly distributed
- Patterns of inequality mirrored in health
- How are ideas about individuality, responsibility, etc tied up in health inequity

Case study: nyc hospital

- Treatment between medicaid, non-medicaid
- Tensions between physicians and other staff
- More than just poverty affecting black women’s mortality
o Racist myths about pain tolerance
o Serena Williams
Excerpt from bad sugar
How do environmental, political, social factors affect health
- Pima and tohono o’odham: 2 main indigenous groups in southern Arizona
- Highest rates of type 2 diabetes
- Didn’t have access to water: changed diets to food from government

Contact between health systems

Excerpt from the spirit catches you and you fall down
- Lee family from Hmong minority from Laos, Vietnam, southern china – settled in
California
- Daughter diagnosed with epilepsy (quag dab peg), differently viewed in Hmong culture
(txiv neeb)
- Misunderstanding
- Importance of illness narrative – personal stories people use to explain illness
- Reveal psychological, social, cultural aspects that give illness its context and meaning
- Can provide healers with framework for developing treatment strategies that make
sense to the patient, have biggest chance for success

Day 14
What is art?
For anthropologists: ideas, forms, techniques, strategies that humans use to express
themselves; communicate creativity, inspiration
- Art “encounter” – not just created but received by other

Anthropological approaches
- How is art embedded in community?
o Norms, values, mental maps, systems
- Fine vs popular art
o How do power dynamics affect what’s considered “fine”
- Is there a universal aesthetic that characterizes human art?
o Universal gaze? Intrinsic way of perceiving art that lets us recognize it
o Moving from “primitive” hierarchies
Case study – great basin basketry
- For 100+ years, Washo, Paiute, Shoshone baskets collected by outsiders and displayed
in collections, galleries, museums
o Usually in glass, under dim light, no touching or interaction
 Virtual exhibit
o Indigenous understandings are different:
 Meant for use
 Extension of weaver’s spirit
 Baskets have spirit and want interaction
 Blessings with water

Studying art in a global context

- Connections to globalization – local art is made within a global context
- Cote d’ivoire carvings
o Baule artisans to traders to consumers
 Economic, social networks
o Wo determines value and authenticity?
 Creating narratives for objects
 Anonymous creator
 Why are they made?

Ethnomusicology
- Music within cultural context
- In text:
o African-american girls’ skipping rhymes, playground games – gaunt
o Kinetic orality: body movement + voice
o Influence of “game songs” on African-american men’s pop music from 1950s
o Down down baby – nelly, “country grammar”
 Lyrics change (masculinity, marijuana…), rhythms and patterns remain

Media and globalization

Mediascape – global cultural flows of media/visual images enable linkages and communication
across boundaries of culture, language, geography, economics, and politics in ways
unimaginable one hundred years ago – Appadurai
 - Media worlds – local realities and the tensions that exist when political, economic, and
visual worlds collide in the context of contemporary globalization – Ginsberg
o Not always assimilation; relocalization
- Case study: sakha pop, hip-hop
o Addresses local/global concerns, local instruments, “pure” sakha, linguistic
genres like chabryghakh, shamanic singing
o Directly engages with questions of language; negotiation of values and norms
- Russian federal nationalism increasingly associated with ethnic nationalism, eliding
multiethnic, multilingual, multireligious characteristics
o Russian is one word, 2 in Russians (rossiiskii for citizens, russki as ethnic term)
o 100+ language spoken in Russia
 2012: 10-15% of Russians supported “Russia for the Russians”, 30%
believe ethnic Russians should enjoy more rights that other people
- Minority ethnic identity more likely to be in day to day lives rather than public
demonstrations with a cause

Visual anthropology
- Production, circulation, consumption of visual images
- Focuses on power of visual representations in art, performance, museums, mass media
to influence culture and identity

- What did an analysis of the photography in national geographic reveal

o Neutrality of photographic gaze?
 o What events not depicted? What narrative did this convey
- Changes in who makes images and how they circulate