Anthropology – Study of Human Diversity - the four subfields of anthropology

Anthropology – Study of Human Diversity - the four subfields of anthropology
Cultural anthropologists: ethnography… based on field work
Archaeologists: material remains
Biological: diversity thru time and space
Language: now language to learn past

Earnest Hooton:
Physical anthropologist
Black racist… said closer to primates than whites. caucazoid, mongloid, negroid

Culture Traditions and customs that govern behavior and beliefs; distinctly human; transmitted through learning. | | Carl Linnaeus
Binomial nomenclature… taxonomy
Pioneer researcher in defining race

Johann Blumenbach
Explore mankind thru natural history… uses comparative anatomy
Divided people into five faces based on crania research
Believed in degeneration theory: other races came about by degeneration from environmental factors such as the sun and poor dieting

Scientific Racism
Started mainly during white European imperialism… to justify
Race with relation to intelligence and IQ

A priori
Justification independent from experience
Taken to be true without evidence

Robert Bean
White brains = better
Genu (anterior brain/front) had cognition, thinking problem-solving; Splenium (posterior/back) sensory function; Bean theorized that whites/men had more of the brain devoted to Genu than Splenium; created some bullshit theory to make white men superior.

Paul Broca
French scientists, biologist, anthropologist, very influential. He claims that whites are racially superior in the 1860s
Broca’s area in frontal lobe. Responsible for articulated language.
Tried to prove the theory that larger brains meant smarter; falsified data by using young healthy male brains and women's brains from insane asylums...clearly skewing the data; when he was called out on this he tried to use spine straightness to prove white men superior.

Craniometry
Measurement of the skull to determine its characteristics as related to sex, race, or body type

Monogenesis & Polygenesis
Mono: origin by descent thru single ancestral individual
Poly: more than one lineage

Power to naturalize
Relating everything to nature; breaking things down to a simple level even if it cannot be evaluated in that manner.

Race and Colonialism
Emphasizes historical contacts, linkages, and power differentials between local people and international forces; the political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended time.

Science & Culture
Scientists use qualification to interpret things and in this case culture.

Race, Typologyzing, and Rank
The work done to try and create a rank order of races based on different characteristics; not viable since culture is variable and the findings are not based on nature.

Culture: Biological v Social Transmission
Culture is socially transmitted, not biologically transmitted; all peoples have the capacity to acquire culture.

“Facts” of Human Biological Variation - implications for Racial Typologies
There is human biological variation, geographically localized variation, continuous variation (gradual differences), discordant variation (different traits don't vary together).

Social races
A group assumed to have a biological basis but actually perceived and defined in a social context-by a particular culture rather than by scientific criteria.

Hypodescent
A rule that automatically places children of a union or mating between members of different socioeconomic groups in the less privileged group.

Race and Intelligence- biology and environment- cultural biases
Race and intelligence have no direct correlation; intelligence is best determined by culture and surroundings.

Reservation Osage Indians and IQ scores
The IQs of different native American tribes were tested and the Osage tribe had the highest IQ; this is because they found oil and used the money to invest in education, so there people are on average more intelligent; intelligence based on culture, not genetics/race.

Shirley Heath: - children’s development of language skills
Studied how children acquire linguistics; found that it is acquired through parents speaking and reading stories.

Minority Groups and Majority Groups
Sometimes the majority group in a population can be the minority in a different situation, it is entirely situational (ex. Asian as majority only in UCI).

Assimilation vs Multiculturalism
Assimilation is when the minority group assimilates and loses its culture to the majority group, whereas multiculturalism is the view of cultural diversity in a country as something good and desirable.

Imagination and Identity - Nationalities & Imagined Communities
Imagined communities are groups of people who wish they had their own political status (country), an example is the Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iran; identity refers to what nationality, ethnicity, or group a person views themselves as a part of.

Social Evolution
There are 3 assumptions: social forms change over time, rank order societies from high to low on some criterion, rank order is treated as sequence of events.

Social Darwinism
"Survival of the fittest" coined by Herbert Spencer.

Unilinear Evolution - Lewis Henry Morgan
Lewis Henry Morgan, change leads to increased socio-cultural complexity; savagery>barbarism>civilization; each stage has its socio-cultural attributes.

Evolutionary Stages - Savagery, Barbarism, Civilization
Bow and arrow, fire; group marriage, promiscuous hordes.
Metallurgy, agriculture, pottery; polygyny.
Phonetic alphabet; monogamy.

Empirical Problems with Social Evolution
Data was based on sketchy second-hand accounts; data was falsified, overlooked, misplaced, misinterpreted.

Multilinear Evolution
Every human society changes over time; every society has unique history.

Cultural Diffusion
Ideas, inventions spread through cultures coming in contact (ex. Tribes of native americans go to war. One tribe has bow and arrow and the other doesn't. Tribe re-creates bow and arrow idea for their one production).

Ethnocentrism
The tendency to view one's own culture as best and to judge the behavior and beliefs of culturally different people by one's own standards.
Nature v Nurture
Debate over which plays larger role in human development; once the brain was established, then social-cultural phenomenon take over (nature, then nurture).

Hobbes
People are nasty but changed by society (nature before nurture

Rousseau
Humans are pure by nature but corrupted by society (nature, nurture).

Culture in Evolutionary Perspective - Field Studies of Chimpanzees - Fossil record
We have less than 2% genetic difference from chimpanzees; chimpanzees make and use tools, unlike any other species besides ourselves.
Archeological record of bones and artifacts that show evolution in species; 2.5mya was when the first stone tools were created; 7mya was when chimps and humans common ancestor existed.

Culture & Society
Culture is distinguished from society; society is a group of people with some relation; culture is the explanation for a person's behavior in different situations.

Culture & Biology
Culture is distinguished from biology; scientific racists attempt to turn culture into biology.

Supra-Organic
Culture operates at a level above the individual; transcends individual or human life (ex. English language-still exists even after a person dies, transcends their life).

Culture & World View
The way we see our world is shaped by culture; culture provides a world view, assumptions about the world; different societies/cultures have different world views, different perspectives.

Cultural Constructions
The meanings of culture; product of social interaction and human history (ex. food-different foods for different meals/occasions).

Cultural Relativism
Opposite of ethnocentrism; the viewpoint that behavior in one culture should not be judged by the standards of another culture; argues that there is no superior, international, or universally morality, that the moral and ethical rules of all cultures deserve equal respect.

Language - verbal and non-verbal communication - phoneme & morpheme - lexicon & syntax - language and thought
Language is our principal means of communicating; verbal-information transmitted through words; nonverbal-our expressions, stances, gestures, and movements, even if unconscious, that convey information.
Significant sound contrast in a language that serves to distinguish meaning, as in minimal pairs (ex. bit/pit).
Words and their meaningful parts (cats has 2 morphemes: cat and -s).
A dictionary containing all of a language's morphemes and their meanings.
Refers to the arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences.
Language, spoken and written is our primary means of communication; only our complex thought process allows us to use language and discuss with other humans
Sociolinguistics: this field investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation; no language is a uniform system in which everyone talks just like everyone else.

Sociolinguistics - dialects - gender speech contrasts - stratification & symbolic domination
This field investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation; no language is a uniform system in which everyone talks just like everyone else. dialects are different types of speaking or speaking different languages; BEV is Black English Vernacular which is the "relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the United States today, especially in the inner cities. there are differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, and in the body stances and movements that accompany speech; women typically use language and the body movements that accompany it to build rapport, social connections with others; men tend to make reports, reciting information that serves to establish a place for themselves in a hierarchy, as they also attempt to determine the relative ranks of their conversation mates. the creation of separate social strata; its emergence signified the transition from chiefdom to state; the presence of stratification is one of the key distinguishing features of a state. linguistic forms, which lack power in themselves, take on the power of the groups they symbolize; the linguistic insecurity often felt by lower-class and minority speakers is a result of symbolic domination.

Social Organization & Social Structure all human labor is socially organized; they have some way of delegating all the tasks of a society; society and social groups cannot be judged based on the technique of production.

Mode of Production - Means of Production - Relations of Production 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
Means of Production: land, labor, and technology. land, labor, and technology. the socioeconomic relationship people have to production in a particular epoch; ex. a slave master's relationship to their slaves.

Subsistence Strategies/Techniques of Production - Foraging - Pre-industrial Agriculture - Pastoralism - Industrialism the action or fact of maintaining or supporting oneself at a minimum level; ex. hunting and gathering, pastoralism, horticulture. hunting and gathering of nature's bounty. industrial methods made farming much more efficient and allowed farmers to mass produce crops; before then farming was "plant and pick, and hope for the best". is a type of herding in which the herders attempt to protect their animals and to ensure their reproduction in return for food and other products, such as leather, dairy, meat. the major shift to large industry corporations and a large increase in the work force due to industrialization.

Domestication the use of animals as a means of production-for transport, as cultivating machines, and for their manure.

Extensive Agriculture (Horticulture) cultivation that makes intensive use of none of the factors of production: land, labor, capital, and machinery.

Slash and Burn (Swidden) Agriculture when horticulturalists clear land by cutting down (slashing) and burning forest or bush or by setting fire to the grass covering the plot.

Fallow type of land that has been left unseeded for a season or more; uncultivated.