Review Sheet: Unity Of Heart And In Search Of Respect
EXAM TIME:
WEDNESDAY APRIL 30TH, FROM 2-5 PM
IN THIS ROOM
Second Exam Review Sheet
Think about the two ethnographies we have read: Unity of Heart and In Search of Respect. How does each author go about writing their ethnography? How do they present the people they are studying? How do they place themselves into the ethnography?
How does the cognatic descent system of the Nanumea reinforce their egalitarian culture?
The cognatic system is an inheritance system that encourages people to distribute the land evenly over resources.
How does the marginal landscape of Nanumea shape Nanumean culture?
What does the title Unity of Heart refer to and how does it represent the main argument of the authors?
Unity of heart as …show more content…
in everyone must work together to survive, very egalitarian. The idea of shared ideology overrides the challenges of todays offerings.
What are the arguments for and against cannibalism in the Aztec Empire? How does Harris justify cannibalism? Why does Sahlins say he is wrong?
Some say that it’s due to a complex social system of rituals, while others say it’s solely for getting their source of protein. Harris said that he beliefs there is a complex system based on culture, but was only made so that they can have a reason to eat other people; he had an etic perspective. Sahlins paid attention to reasoning, said that these practices were situated for systems of meaning; emic perspective
How did the Dou Donggo and the Biamenese respond to drought differently?
The Dou Donggo is egalitarian, and form close relationships. Strong belief towards god and believes that the world continues in a natural order unless it is disturbed. Believes that spirits can bring both good and bad.
During rain, the Dou Donggo elders will clean the brushes around the spring and made offerings
The Biamenese are muslim, hierarchial, that god is powerful and all knowing, so they pray to a father.
During a drought, they would declare a day of fasting and prayer where they asked allah for rain.
What role does religion play as a belief system? What role does religion play in explaining the world?
Religion exists so that you can get together with a group of people with similar beliefs and share the same experience. Religion and rituals usually exist to create a sense of connection
How does a great concert experience relate to a religious experience?
Connected because you feel connected to the people around you and share the same experience. There is a larger sense of belonging, and in that moment, your differences do not matter.
Emile Durkheim
Max Weber
How does Emic vs. Etic relate to discussions of religion? How does Victor Turner deal with these different perspectives?
Victor Turner used both emic and etic perspective to relate to discussions of religion.
Victor Turner
Tried to understand rituals from a both emic and etic perspective. Using both, he tried to get a better understanding of the cultures he was studying. 3 structures of data for his analysis:?????
The Ndembu
According to Victor Turner, what are the three classes of data used to determine the structures of properties of ritual symbols?
The Milk Tree
What do anthropologists mean when we say “collective solidarity”?
A group of people getting together and becoming one ex. Sports games
Know about the two ways of defining a group. Either looking at the core elements that define the group or the way that the group is different from other groups. What does each viewpoint highlight and what could be some problems from taking one viewpoint over the other?
How is collective solidarity created at the University of Richmond?
We take classes together, we live together, greek life, attend sports games, play games, etc
What is the difference between imagined and encountered communities?
Imagined community is when you have a strong sense of connection even if you never have or may never meet them. Same views and history
Encountered community is what you connect with day to day physical connection
What is essentialism?
Something(s) are seen as the essential character of an individual or a culture; it cannot change and is often tied to racism. Narratives of essentialism have a lot of power
Ex. race
What is the difference between identity and culture? What is a nation? What is a state? What is a nation-state?
A nation typically refers to a group of people with a shared language, background, origin, cultural practices and tradition – often mobilized for political authority
The state is a centralized and bureaucratized political unit whose control extends across a given territory
How do movements of people such as diasporas challenge traditional views of cultures being located in particular places? ex. The jewish has lived for 200 years without having a control of a geographic area, but still maintains their cultural and religious identity
people can maintain its distinctive culture, its difference, wihout controlling land, a fortiori without controlling other people, and developing a need to dispossess them of their lands
indigenous – a political claim based on the idea whose land it rightfully is
autochthony – a natural connection to the land, that place to which has always been from, the right to the land is seen not as a political claim but a natural …show more content…
claim
The Story of Ham
From the book of genesis, told his brother about nakedness, and his father made him so he is a slave to his brothers
The Great Chain of Being
Stone flame plant beast human heaven angel god
These views became linked to biology and created the idea of race and would lead the eugenics movement
Franz Boas and his Immigrant Studies
Measured the skulls of over 1800 immigrant families. He found that the children’s skull shapes and sizes were not the same as their parents meaning that environmental factors shaped biological factors. If this is true, then using skull shape to identify races is problematic
Related to phrenology – which is the study of the shape of skulls as a meaning to determine character and intelligence
They believed that you could identify race by cranial capacity – the assumption was that body forms do not change and that race was a meaningful biological distinction and was unchanging through time
What is a clinal trait? Examples
Ex. Variation in human skin color is associated with levels of UV irradiation, which are higher near the equator
Gradual integration of genetic variation from population to population
Discrete traits – you have it or you don’t
Genealogical and Geographic Identities
Danzinger wrote that all creatures create categories that divide the world/things/people into eistinct groups despite that these things exist and gray, not black and white
Diaspora and Transnationalism
Cater Semenya – Who is she? What does her case tell us about the relationship between gender and sex? How does this case show that categories that we often assume are natural are in fact cultural constructions?
What is the difference between the individual and the dividual
What are the three ways of thinking about the individual?
To give, to receive, to reciprocate. Remember the giving of a gift is a total social fact
Marcel Mauss
French, newphew of emile Durkheim, wrote Essai sur le don which was translated to the gift. Comparative anthropology GIFT DUDE
Fredrik Barth
Norwegian, said that we should look at the boundaries of cultures and asked how cultures create boundaries between themselves and other cultures
The Gift
Gift giving generally seen as giving object without an expectation of result, and usually voluntary. But, Mauss said these aren’t necessarily true
Not individuals but collectivities that impose obligations of exchange and contract upon each other
The refusue to give, or to fail to invite is just as to refuse to accept is a tantamount to declaring war; it is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality
Systems of Exchange
Modes of Production
Capitalist, tributary and kinship
Capitalist detain control of the means of production, laborers are denied of independent access to means of production and must sell their labor power to the capitalists. The maximation of surplus is produced by labors with the means of production owned by the capitalist entails “ceaseless accumulation accompanied by changes in methods of production”
Capitalist mode creates class differnces, there’s who control the means of productionand who don’t. winners and losers.
pRadox of capitalism and democracy – calitalism creates differences while democracy says were all the same
Tributary mode is when social laor is mobilized and committed to the transformation of nature primarily through the exercise of power and domination through political access
People control their own production, but someone with political power collects tribute (the surplus) from these individuals – centralized or fragmented
Leaders are often justified through cosmologies
Merchants challenge the system by bringing wealth and surplus from other locations
Kinship is committing social labor to the transformation of nature through appeals to filiation and marriage and to consanguinity and affinity. So kinship social labor is locked up or embedded in particular relations between people
Labor power belongs to a kin group – so political power is often limited soley to kin relations
Consumption
How can consumption equal identity?
What are the three obligations of the gift?
Obligation to give – reinforces social status, only way to convey own prestige and honr
Obligation to accept – to not attend is tos ay that you far you will not be able to reciprocate that you have no honor, you will be “flattened”
Obligation to receiprocate – to not do this is to fall into the slavery of debt
Money is abstract value, gifts are people’s souls
What is the potlatch and why is it so intriguing to Western Anthropologists?
Mauss asks “What rule of legality and self-interest, in societies of a backward or archaic type, compels the gift that has been received to be obligatorily reciprocated? What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” – How does Mauss answer this question?
What are three types of Modes of Production that Wolf Explores?
Kinship, tributary, and capitalist
He questioned how these modes interacted within the world and expanded capitalism
How do lower-class Jamaicans use their cell phones and how does it fit with their cultural practices of kinship?
Jamaicans use their phones to keein in connecection. The average phone call is only 19 seconds. Technology doesn’t always cause homogenization, technology serves different purposes in different regions. Jamaicans are more focused on making the connection than on the actual content of the call. Contact lists often represented a set of possible sexual partners (for women more of finding a man sufficiently solvent and reliable to support them)
When you would ask Jamaicans to list number of people in their family, the average number was 284. Networks are often formed through individuals and remain after the relationship between you and that individual are gone (I can still be friends with doug’s friends even if im no longer friends with doug)
The maintenance of cross sex relationships is probably the most visible use of cell phone technology. Men see it as sexual relationships while women associate men with mostly economic survival
More than half the household incomes in our survey came from social networking rather than any kind of labor or sales, networking is crucial for survival
When you’re almost out of credit, you have the ability to send out a number of texts that basically say “please call me” – developed by digicel to encourage people to buy phones and use their networks
Cell phones are not an item of luxury but a necessity of survival for many lower income individuals
Does new technology change culture or does culture change that technology?- How would an anthropologist answer this question
What does David Harvey mean by the term “space-time compression”
The new technology makes the world smaller, less time difference and you can get everywhere in much shorter time
What are Arjun Appadurai’s five “scapes”?
Ethnoscape – landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and other moving groups and indivudlas constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of nations to a hithero unprecented degree
Technoscapes – global configuration, also ever fluid of technology and the fact that technology both high and low both mechanical and informational now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previous impervious boundaries
Financescapes – disposition of global capital is now a more mysterious, rapid and difficult landscape to follow than ever before as currency markets, national stock exchanges and commodity speculations move megamonies through national turnstiles at blinding speed, with vast and absolute implications for small differences in percentage points and time units
Mediascapes – refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, tv stations, and film production studios) which are now available to a grow number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the image of the world created by these media
Ideoscapes – concatenations of images, but are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counterideologies of movements explitcitly orented to capturing state power or a piece of it
These scapes interact with each other and move in flows, they’re not easily direct links but something more ambiguous, these flows come together in particular locations.
Dislocations and disjunctures occur when these flows do not line up
The Chinese-Central American Beauty Pageant – what does this tell us about identities, practices of creating communities, and the embodiment of culture
How does In Search of Respect highlight the ethical challenges of doing ethnographic fieldwork?
Why does he title the book In Search of Respect?
What is the tension between structure and agency in cultural anthropology and how does In Search of Respect highlight this
tension?
Structure is refered to as the various institutions and power differentials that create a marginalized and racialized population
Agency is the free will of individuals to choose their own path
In ISOR, they may have had some sort of agency, but mainly the structure which they grew up in made it difficult for them to grow out of the crack scene.
Why is there tension between universal human rights and cultural relativism and what are some examples from the second section of the class?
WEDNESDAY APRIL 30TH, FROM 2-5 PM
IN THIS ROOM
Second Exam Review Sheet
Think about the two ethnographies we have read: Unity of Heart and In Search of Respect. How does each author go about writing their ethnography? How do they present the people they are studying? How do they place themselves into the ethnography?
How does the cognatic descent system of the Nanumea reinforce their egalitarian culture?
The cognatic system is an inheritance system that encourages people to distribute the land evenly over resources.
How does the marginal landscape of Nanumea shape Nanumean culture?
What does the title Unity of Heart refer to and how does it represent the main argument of the authors?
Unity of heart as …show more content…
in everyone must work together to survive, very egalitarian. The idea of shared ideology overrides the challenges of todays offerings.
What are the arguments for and against cannibalism in the Aztec Empire? How does Harris justify cannibalism? Why does Sahlins say he is wrong?
Some say that it’s due to a complex social system of rituals, while others say it’s solely for getting their source of protein. Harris said that he beliefs there is a complex system based on culture, but was only made so that they can have a reason to eat other people; he had an etic perspective. Sahlins paid attention to reasoning, said that these practices were situated for systems of meaning; emic perspective
How did the Dou Donggo and the Biamenese respond to drought differently?
The Dou Donggo is egalitarian, and form close relationships. Strong belief towards god and believes that the world continues in a natural order unless it is disturbed. Believes that spirits can bring both good and bad.
During rain, the Dou Donggo elders will clean the brushes around the spring and made offerings
The Biamenese are muslim, hierarchial, that god is powerful and all knowing, so they pray to a father.
During a drought, they would declare a day of fasting and prayer where they asked allah for rain.
What role does religion play as a belief system? What role does religion play in explaining the world?
Religion exists so that you can get together with a group of people with similar beliefs and share the same experience. Religion and rituals usually exist to create a sense of connection
How does a great concert experience relate to a religious experience?
Connected because you feel connected to the people around you and share the same experience. There is a larger sense of belonging, and in that moment, your differences do not matter.
Emile Durkheim
Max Weber
How does Emic vs. Etic relate to discussions of religion? How does Victor Turner deal with these different perspectives?
Victor Turner used both emic and etic perspective to relate to discussions of religion.
Victor Turner
Tried to understand rituals from a both emic and etic perspective. Using both, he tried to get a better understanding of the cultures he was studying. 3 structures of data for his analysis:?????
The Ndembu
According to Victor Turner, what are the three classes of data used to determine the structures of properties of ritual symbols?
The Milk Tree
What do anthropologists mean when we say “collective solidarity”?
A group of people getting together and becoming one ex. Sports games
Know about the two ways of defining a group. Either looking at the core elements that define the group or the way that the group is different from other groups. What does each viewpoint highlight and what could be some problems from taking one viewpoint over the other?
How is collective solidarity created at the University of Richmond?
We take classes together, we live together, greek life, attend sports games, play games, etc
What is the difference between imagined and encountered communities?
Imagined community is when you have a strong sense of connection even if you never have or may never meet them. Same views and history
Encountered community is what you connect with day to day physical connection
What is essentialism?
Something(s) are seen as the essential character of an individual or a culture; it cannot change and is often tied to racism. Narratives of essentialism have a lot of power
Ex. race
What is the difference between identity and culture? What is a nation? What is a state? What is a nation-state?
A nation typically refers to a group of people with a shared language, background, origin, cultural practices and tradition – often mobilized for political authority
The state is a centralized and bureaucratized political unit whose control extends across a given territory
How do movements of people such as diasporas challenge traditional views of cultures being located in particular places? ex. The jewish has lived for 200 years without having a control of a geographic area, but still maintains their cultural and religious identity
people can maintain its distinctive culture, its difference, wihout controlling land, a fortiori without controlling other people, and developing a need to dispossess them of their lands
indigenous – a political claim based on the idea whose land it rightfully is
autochthony – a natural connection to the land, that place to which has always been from, the right to the land is seen not as a political claim but a natural …show more content…
claim
The Story of Ham
From the book of genesis, told his brother about nakedness, and his father made him so he is a slave to his brothers
The Great Chain of Being
Stone flame plant beast human heaven angel god
These views became linked to biology and created the idea of race and would lead the eugenics movement
Franz Boas and his Immigrant Studies
Measured the skulls of over 1800 immigrant families. He found that the children’s skull shapes and sizes were not the same as their parents meaning that environmental factors shaped biological factors. If this is true, then using skull shape to identify races is problematic
Related to phrenology – which is the study of the shape of skulls as a meaning to determine character and intelligence
They believed that you could identify race by cranial capacity – the assumption was that body forms do not change and that race was a meaningful biological distinction and was unchanging through time
What is a clinal trait? Examples
Ex. Variation in human skin color is associated with levels of UV irradiation, which are higher near the equator
Gradual integration of genetic variation from population to population
Discrete traits – you have it or you don’t
Genealogical and Geographic Identities
Danzinger wrote that all creatures create categories that divide the world/things/people into eistinct groups despite that these things exist and gray, not black and white
Diaspora and Transnationalism
Cater Semenya – Who is she? What does her case tell us about the relationship between gender and sex? How does this case show that categories that we often assume are natural are in fact cultural constructions?
What is the difference between the individual and the dividual
What are the three ways of thinking about the individual?
To give, to receive, to reciprocate. Remember the giving of a gift is a total social fact
Marcel Mauss
French, newphew of emile Durkheim, wrote Essai sur le don which was translated to the gift. Comparative anthropology GIFT DUDE
Fredrik Barth
Norwegian, said that we should look at the boundaries of cultures and asked how cultures create boundaries between themselves and other cultures
The Gift
Gift giving generally seen as giving object without an expectation of result, and usually voluntary. But, Mauss said these aren’t necessarily true
Not individuals but collectivities that impose obligations of exchange and contract upon each other
The refusue to give, or to fail to invite is just as to refuse to accept is a tantamount to declaring war; it is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality
Systems of Exchange
Modes of Production
Capitalist, tributary and kinship
Capitalist detain control of the means of production, laborers are denied of independent access to means of production and must sell their labor power to the capitalists. The maximation of surplus is produced by labors with the means of production owned by the capitalist entails “ceaseless accumulation accompanied by changes in methods of production”
Capitalist mode creates class differnces, there’s who control the means of productionand who don’t. winners and losers.
pRadox of capitalism and democracy – calitalism creates differences while democracy says were all the same
Tributary mode is when social laor is mobilized and committed to the transformation of nature primarily through the exercise of power and domination through political access
People control their own production, but someone with political power collects tribute (the surplus) from these individuals – centralized or fragmented
Leaders are often justified through cosmologies
Merchants challenge the system by bringing wealth and surplus from other locations
Kinship is committing social labor to the transformation of nature through appeals to filiation and marriage and to consanguinity and affinity. So kinship social labor is locked up or embedded in particular relations between people
Labor power belongs to a kin group – so political power is often limited soley to kin relations
Consumption
How can consumption equal identity?
What are the three obligations of the gift?
Obligation to give – reinforces social status, only way to convey own prestige and honr
Obligation to accept – to not attend is tos ay that you far you will not be able to reciprocate that you have no honor, you will be “flattened”
Obligation to receiprocate – to not do this is to fall into the slavery of debt
Money is abstract value, gifts are people’s souls
What is the potlatch and why is it so intriguing to Western Anthropologists?
Mauss asks “What rule of legality and self-interest, in societies of a backward or archaic type, compels the gift that has been received to be obligatorily reciprocated? What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” – How does Mauss answer this question?
What are three types of Modes of Production that Wolf Explores?
Kinship, tributary, and capitalist
He questioned how these modes interacted within the world and expanded capitalism
How do lower-class Jamaicans use their cell phones and how does it fit with their cultural practices of kinship?
Jamaicans use their phones to keein in connecection. The average phone call is only 19 seconds. Technology doesn’t always cause homogenization, technology serves different purposes in different regions. Jamaicans are more focused on making the connection than on the actual content of the call. Contact lists often represented a set of possible sexual partners (for women more of finding a man sufficiently solvent and reliable to support them)
When you would ask Jamaicans to list number of people in their family, the average number was 284. Networks are often formed through individuals and remain after the relationship between you and that individual are gone (I can still be friends with doug’s friends even if im no longer friends with doug)
The maintenance of cross sex relationships is probably the most visible use of cell phone technology. Men see it as sexual relationships while women associate men with mostly economic survival
More than half the household incomes in our survey came from social networking rather than any kind of labor or sales, networking is crucial for survival
When you’re almost out of credit, you have the ability to send out a number of texts that basically say “please call me” – developed by digicel to encourage people to buy phones and use their networks
Cell phones are not an item of luxury but a necessity of survival for many lower income individuals
Does new technology change culture or does culture change that technology?- How would an anthropologist answer this question
What does David Harvey mean by the term “space-time compression”
The new technology makes the world smaller, less time difference and you can get everywhere in much shorter time
What are Arjun Appadurai’s five “scapes”?
Ethnoscape – landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and other moving groups and indivudlas constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of nations to a hithero unprecented degree
Technoscapes – global configuration, also ever fluid of technology and the fact that technology both high and low both mechanical and informational now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previous impervious boundaries
Financescapes – disposition of global capital is now a more mysterious, rapid and difficult landscape to follow than ever before as currency markets, national stock exchanges and commodity speculations move megamonies through national turnstiles at blinding speed, with vast and absolute implications for small differences in percentage points and time units
Mediascapes – refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, tv stations, and film production studios) which are now available to a grow number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the image of the world created by these media
Ideoscapes – concatenations of images, but are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counterideologies of movements explitcitly orented to capturing state power or a piece of it
These scapes interact with each other and move in flows, they’re not easily direct links but something more ambiguous, these flows come together in particular locations.
Dislocations and disjunctures occur when these flows do not line up
The Chinese-Central American Beauty Pageant – what does this tell us about identities, practices of creating communities, and the embodiment of culture
How does In Search of Respect highlight the ethical challenges of doing ethnographic fieldwork?
Why does he title the book In Search of Respect?
What is the tension between structure and agency in cultural anthropology and how does In Search of Respect highlight this
tension?
Structure is refered to as the various institutions and power differentials that create a marginalized and racialized population
Agency is the free will of individuals to choose their own path
In ISOR, they may have had some sort of agency, but mainly the structure which they grew up in made it difficult for them to grow out of the crack scene.
Why is there tension between universal human rights and cultural relativism and what are some examples from the second section of the class?