Anthropology Midterm Study Guide

Terms for Anthropology of Religion

Syncretism

Religion "(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic" (Geertz 1966)

Magic vs. religion

Soul as social

Ritual

Shamanism

Monotheism

Polytheism

Animism

Totemism

Fetishism

Categories of Religion

1. Individualistic: most basic; simplest. Example: vision quest.
2. Shamanistic: part-time religious practitioner, uses religion to heal, to divine, usually on the behalf of a client. The Tillamook have four categories of shaman. Examples of shamans: spiritualists, faith healers, palm readers. Religious authority acquired through one's own means.
3. Communal: elaborate set of beliefs and practices; group of people arranged in clans by lineage, age group, or some religious societies; people take on roles based on knowledge, and ancestral worship.
4. Ecclesiastical: dominant in agricultural societies and states; are centrally organized and hierarchical in structure, paralleling the organization of states. Typically deprecates competing individualistic and shamanistic cults.

 

Elisa Sobo, “The Sweetness of Fat.”

·       Notions of health and nutrition and culturally determined.

·       Marcel Mauss: Gift giving and exchange. A threefold obligation to give, receive and reciprocate.

·       Food is an extension of shared substance, creates/maintains bonds among family.

·       Food Sharing-Integral to social relations

·       Social constructions of fatness and thinness

·       Cooking as characteristic of personality.

Mintz and Du Bois, “The Anthropology of Food and Eating.”

Approaches to the Anthropology of Food:

·       Food as commodity

o   This approach looks at single commodities, such as sugar, coffee, bananas, chocolate, etc., to examine wider social processes.

·       Food as agent of social change.

o   Examines relationships between larger social processes (such as government, war, economy, colonization) and dietary shifts.

·       Food insecurity (shortage)

o   Examines world hunger, starvation, rural class inequalities, gender inequalities, etc. Scholars in this field look at how social/economic inequalities influence starvation.

·       Eating and ritual

o   Examines how food binds people to their faiths, how ritual meals reaffirm faith. Looks at the reasons for food taboos, how eating is a vehicle for ritual.

·       Eating and identities

o   Looks at how foods mark people ethnically/religiously; how race, class, gender, and other markers of identity are reinforced through food. For example, “ethnic food” is a product of immigration: it is only ethnic out of context.

·       Eating and memory

o   Examines how memory and linkages to culture are established through food.

Margaret Mead

·        Mead’s Central Question: “Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?” (page 6)

·        Cultural Particularism

·        Nature vs. Nurture

·        Sexual Repression

·        Teenage Angst

·        Tabula rasa

·        Monocultural

·        Pluralistic

Morgan: Cultural Evolution

i.                 Savagery

a.    Fishing, Stone tools, subsistence, use of fire, pottery, basic weapons

ii.                Barbarism

a.    Use of writing, pastoralism, horticulture, dwellings, metal work

iii.              Civilization

a.    Formalized written language and record keeping, rise of private property, inheritance, development of the state, organized religion

b.    Suppression of women/male dominance

The Functions of the family:

·       Socialization

·       Support network

·       Ensures Survival

·       Organizes Sexuality

·       Shares resources

·      

Types of families:

·       Nuclear family

·       Extended family

·       Blended family

·       Chosen family

Kinship terms:

·       Shared Substance
 Consanguine

·       Affinal Ties

·       Kinship

·       Descendents

·       Matrilineal, Matriarchal, Matrilocal, Matrifocal

·       Patrilineal, Patriarchal, Patrilocal, Patrifocal

·       Incest Taboo

·       Adaptation/procreation/reproduction

Linguistics:

·        Language: System of communication governed by rules, resulting in meanings that are shared by all who speak the same language.

·        Linguistics: Descriptive, Historical, Cultural

·        Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis/Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis: Language determines reality.

·        Code switching: Changing from one mode of language to another.

·        Ethnolinguistics: studies the relationship between language and culture, and the way different ethnic groups perceive the world.

·        Socialization and Enculturation

·        Paralanguage: Focuses on how pitch, tone and emotion convey meaning in addition to words.

·        Dialect

·        Gendered Speech

·        Language family

·        Linguistic divergence

·        Phonemes: Smallest unit of sound that makes a difference in meaning.

·        Morphology: Patterns in language

·        Non-Verbal Communication

·        Kinesics: body language

·        Symbols: Signs that are arbitrary links to something else that represent them in a meaningful way.

·        Sociolinguistics: How language/speech styles are influenced by age, gender, ethnicity, class

·        Culture

o   Geertz: Symbols and meanings

o   E.B Tylor: Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

·        Subjective/objective

·        Symbols

·        Meanings

o   “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.”

o   Culture is public because meaning is.

·        Thick description

·        Codes

·        Socialization

·        Gender socialization

·        Social construction of reality: persons and groups interacting in a social system create, over time, concepts or mental representations of each other's actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other.

·        Culture as enacted text

·        Discourse: Social communication, not limited to speaking and writing, which gives life to ideas and makes them realities. Discourse creates subjects and is shaped by power. 

Four Field Approach to Anthropology

Physical Anthropology

Cultural Anthropology

Linguistic Anthropology

Archaeology

Culture

Ethnocentrism

Cultural Relativism

Diversity

Culture as way of life

Culture as human trait

Eurocentrism

Afrocentrism

Culture Shock

Elements of culture:

Symbols

Language

Values

Beliefs

Culture is shaped by technology

Hunter/gatherer

Pastoralism

Horticulture

Agricultural

Industrial

Post industrial

Cultural Changes

Invention

Discovery

Diffusion

Subculture

Counterculture

Multicultural

Participant Observation

Armchair Anthropology

Folklore

Unofficial vs. Official History

Oral Traditions

Folkways: a mode of thinking, feeling, or acting common to a given group of people

Legends/Folktales

Artifacts

Rituals

Urban Legends

Key People:

Bronislaw Malinowski

Franz Boas

Ruth Benedict

Margaret Mead

Bounded Theory

     Unbounded Theory

    Scientific Theory: An observable, testable and correctable explanation for an observable phenomenon.

    Religious Belief: unbounded, not testable, do not uncover new knowledge

    Lamark: Inheritance of acquired characteristics

    Darwin

    Evolution

    Natural Selection

     Struggle for existence: Competition for scarce resources

 Survival of the Fittest

 Sexual selection: traits exist to attract a species to the opposite sex

 Group selection/Altruism: sacrificing oneself for the good of the group

Adaptation

Bipedalism

Out of Africa Theory

Childhood Development in humans

Importance of cataclysmic events

 

Definition of Folklore:

Folklore is an integral part of being human. The discipline of folklore studies the unofficial, the spoken, and the traditional forms of expressed culture, such as legends (including urban ones), myths, folk music, jokes, festivals, and more.

It is often contrasted with the printed word, yet the recent growth of the internet and digital communications has brought the realms of popular culture increasingly closer to folklore as well. Thus the field of folklore and popular culture encompasses more than two hundred different genres such as folktales, myths, legends, proverbs, jokes, games, folk medicine, and ethnomusicology.

Folklore, everyday cultural forms of expression, are communicated, enjoyed, replicated, passed on, modified, deployed and interpreted by all of us. We weave folklore effortlessly into our daily lives, using folklore to shape and understand our world and our place in it. We are all experts. So much so that most of the time our use and reception of folklore goes unnoticed.
Folklore operates in the realm of the obvious, taken for granted, self-evident, and thus is not designated as being open to interpretation. Thus, Folklore has been described as “quotidian” – the stuff that makes up everyday life, ordinary. But in the potential to convey meaning, create boundaries, constitute identity, and create sense out of nonsense, Folklore is anything but ordinary. Folklore, that stock of knowledge brought into specific situations, “…substantiates our belief in the connectedness and orderliness of the larger context of the everyday lifeworld.” (S. Stewart, Nonsense, pg. 11)