ANTH230 Lecture Notes

8 September 2010

1. Evolutionlists vs Boas
a. Evolutionists
i. Isolated culture traits
ii. Ethnocentric ranking
iii. Armchair ethnography
b. Boas
i. Cultures as integrated wholes
ii. Cultural Relativism
iii. Long term field research
1. What became known as “participant observation”
2. Boas shifted the focus of anthropology from the etic research of armchair investigators to an
emic concern with experiences and viewpoints of the “natives”
3. The limitations of the comparative method
a. Like traits are not necessarily the result of like causes
b. “before extended comparisons are made, the comparability of the material must be
proved.”
c. Culture area
i. Group of neighboring societies that share similar cultural aspects.
1. Not necessarily same cultures but similar
2. Example: Trobriand Islands
4. Bronislaw Malinowski
a. Fieldwork pioneer (or accidental ethnographer?)
b. Trobriand Islands
c. Kula ring
d. Avoid preconceived ideas; Grasp the native’s point of view
5. Participant Observation
a. First hand observation of day to day activities
b. Learning by doing
c. Formal and informal interviews
d. Building relationships
e. Native language
6. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers
a. Kaluli (Bosavi)
b. Field research 1966-68
c. Gisaro
7. Synchrony and Diachrony
a. “Throughout this book I refer to the Bosavi people – particularly… etc”
8. Locality
 a. The relationship between a group of people and the places they live
i. Natural resources and subsistence practices
ii. Territorial boundaries and intergroup politics
iii. Other ways people ascribe cultural meaning to the natural landscape
9. Reciprocity

22 September 2010
1. Goals Today:
a. Social Structure (and Function)
i. Malinowski
ii. Radcliffe-Brown (Structural-Functionalism)
iii. British Social Anthropology
b. Kinship
2. Exchange is about much more than just getting and giving stuff.
3. The circulation of food and labor serve to create, affirm, perform Kaluli social relations
4. Malinowski (Functionalism)
a. Funtion
i. Fit of a culture element within the cultural whole
ii. Function of a cultural element with respect to individuals
1. Integrating individual within society
2. Meeting individual “needs”
a. “basic” needs, physical needs
b. “derived” needs, things beyond the immediate, physical
needs, emotional and psychological needs
5. Malinowski:
a. “The goal [of ethnography] is briefly, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation
to life, to realize his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study
what concerns hi most intimately, that I, the hold which life has on him.”
6. Kuper:
a. “It is this insistence upon the living, acting, calculating individual that gave
Malinowski’s monographs their vitality, and made them such a startling, refreshing
contrast to the work of other anthropologists.” (Kuper p. 25)
7. Radcliffe-Brown
a. Structural Functionalism
i. Focus more at the level of society that at the level of individual
ii. Different take on the individual and society
iii. Took one step forward as a study of sociology
iv. Approaches society as an integrated whole
v. Concerned with the complex and systematic interrelationship of the parts of
a society
1. Looking above the level of the individual
 a. Focus on social groups
vi. Function has to do with the continuity of the structure
vii. “structure”: enduring patterns of group relations and the
roles/norms/expectations that shape interactions between persons
1. Individuals according to Radcliffe-Brown are almost free of society
until they are shaped and molded by society
2. Individuals are persons as they are embedded into social structures
b. Influenced by Emile Durkheim
i. French sociologist
ii. Approach to society as a distinct order of natural phenomena, irreducible to
the individual
c. We speak a language that we did not make, we use instruments that we did not
invent, we invoke rights that we did not found, and we survive by a collective effort;
it’s wrong to view a society by its individuals. Individuals area the product of their
social environment
8. Kinship
i. Classically, anthropologists have studied societies in which kin ties are very
important
ii. Kinship is a powerful illustration of the relationship between culture and
nature
b. Kinship, Nature, and Culture
i. Natural, universally occurring set of relationships is invested with cultural
meaning by humans.
ii. Across the world we find a range of social systems organizing kin relations in
different ways.
c. Building blocks of kinship
i. Consanguineal relations
1. Relations of “blood”
2. Direct biological relations
ii. Affinal relations
1. Kin ties based in cultural institutions or conventions
2. In-Laws
d. Generate a limited set of relationships
i. Those of parent and child
ii. Husband and wife
iii. Siblings
iv. Every other relationship can be describe by combining the above relations
1. MBW (mother’s brother’s wife)
2. FZS
3. MFB (mother’s father’s brother)
v. Kinship Notations
vi. Male (triangle) Female (circle)
 vii. Marriage (Triangle)=(Circle)
viii. Descent |
ix. Siblings (Triangle)-(Circle)
e. Etic kin diagram (see slide)
f. An emic diagram would perhaps contain terms of reference of another point of view
(eg: cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc)
g. Biological kin types (etic) vs king terms (emic)
i. Different societies label/classify kin relations in different ways
ii. Creating different kin categories
iii. Different patterns of relations
h. Family structures
i. Monogamy
ii. Polygamy
1. Polygyny
2. Polyandry
i. Classes of Kin
i. Aunts/uncles
1. FZ =MZ=MBW=FBW
ii. Cousins
1. Parallel cousins – Mother’s sister’s kids, Father’s Brother’s kids
2. Cross cousins – Father’s Sister’s kids, Mothers Brother’s kids

6 October 2010
1. Gisaro
a. Dancers/singers from one longhouse visit another
b. Songs evoke places familiar to host
c. Provoke feelings of nostalgia and loss
d. Hosts respond, weeping and angr
i. Burning dancers
ii. Embracing dancers
2. Song lyrics, the locales/paths they describe as ritual symbols
a. Indexical relations (association) with people who garden there or pass by there, etc.
b. Conventional meaning of images – flowering sago that has not been processed, implies
break down of productive activity, perhaps a dead parent? A child goes hungry… so sad!
c. Resemblance.
d. Gisaro is aout the social processes of groups forming in opposition to one another (the
“opposition scenario”)
e. Gisaro is the performance of this process in extreme, luminal conditions
i. Liminal state of the dancers
ii. Merging of the seen and unseen worlds
f. Reactions of hosts generate social groups and work to locate the dancers as a social
group in relation to hosts
 3. Midterm Exam
a. 35 Questions
i. 20 multiple choice (2 points each)
ii. 10 Fill in the blank (3 points each)
1. Answers of a word or phrase
iii. 5 Short Answer (6 Points each)
1. Answers of a couple sentences in length
b. Review
i. Totemism and Totem
1. If there’s a special magical relationship between a certain group of
people and the world, it helps them to connect to and control that
important thing – Malinowski (Functionalism)
2. Radcliffe-Brown – (Structural Functioanlism) Society as a whole, the
totem connects the society
ii. Malinowski is concerned with the individual, Radclife-Brown – is interested in
the function of a social group and how it works together as a system
iii. Kula Ring
1. Specific patterns of exchange in the Trobian Islands
a. Specifically shell exchanges
b. Politics, Kinship
c. Some necklaces are meant to be given to a leader in the village
to recognize authority and the position of village chief
iv. Tyler looked more at specific things, cultural traits, in a culture; a dissection of a
culture and comparing these traits vs. Culture as integrated whole
v. Subsistence practices
1. Julian Stuart
c. Announcements

27 October 2010

1. Power
a. Can be located in particular institutions
b. Interacts with other dimensions of stratification
i. Wealth/Power/Prestige
c. Social roles and norms help shape leadership and power in different cultural contexts
d. Power is part of the symbolic cultural realm
2. Hegemony/Ideology/Culture
a. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
i. Italian Marxist/Political Activist
b. Relations of dominations
i. The dominant position of one group in a particular social/world system
 c. Cultural norms that benefit a particular social group and are so routinized as to be
accepted without debate by all of society
i. Hegemonic beliefs are seen as natural and accepted without question as a result
of a particular cultural system
ii. They maintain a stratified social order
d. Hegemony is never entirely total
i. Because societies change, there are always new questions that come into play
e. Hegemony is on one end of a continuum with Ideology on the other end?
Culture
f. Hegemony_______________________________Ideology
3. Brazillian Historical background
a. Colonized by the Portuguese.
b. Slavery in Brazil
i. To maintain colonial economy
ii. Since 16th century
iii. Continued until 1850
iv. “Free birth” law 1871
v. Slavery officially ended 1888
vi. At least 3.5 million enslaved people brought to Brazil
vii. Slaves brought cultural traits that have become part of Brazilian cultural identity
viii. Brazilian history helps us understand the history of hierarchy in hegemonic
social values, and other aspects of the social capital in Brazil
c. Independent Brazil
i. Brazilian elites turning to British, French, and US society
1. Cultural practices from the British, French, etc became self-evident
privileges of elite status
2. Very often moved in and replaced the leaving colonial powers
a. “Neo-Colonial” relations
ii. Brazilian claim of a “Racial Democracy”
1. Essentially a “spin” on the legacy of slavery
2. A claim that Brazil celebrated its African heritage
3. Emerging as a modern “color blind” racial society
4. Crucial contradictions with reality, however.
iii. Rio de Janeiro as service economy and civil service
1. A very revealing place to see these contradictions
2. Prototypical elite economy contrasted with favelas
3. People moving into Brazil typically moved into favelas and the service
industry, rather than attaining a middle class life.
4. Race in Anthropological Perspective
a. Anthropometry
i. Documenting of race specific physical traits
b. Phrenology
 i. Determining character and mental capacity by measuring cranial capacity, shape
and size
c. Anthropological Critiques of Racism
i. This takes place from two sides:
1. Decoupling biology and culture
a. Have come to question the very existence of culture as a
biological phenomenon
b. Human behavior is not a function of nature
c. Biological differences and cultural differences are independent
variables
d. Phenotype – an organism’s evident traits; physical features (eg:
skin color, hair texture, etc)
2. The cultural particularities of any given “racial group” reflect the
historical coincidence of independent variables
3. Discrediting race as a biological concept
a. Spectrum of skin color and other phenotypic traits
i. No absolute classification
ii. Range of skin tones and pigments in a certain
population is impossible to classify
b. Hard to find in a laboratory setting
4. Race is emic and not etic; cultural and not natural
a. Racial classifications are arbitrary
b. Different systems of classification in different societies
c. Racial categories can change in time, and is an unstable concept
d. Race is unsuitable for any kind of generalization
5. Real Scientists Agree
a. Analysis of DNA – greater variation within “racial” groups than
between them
i. 94% of genetic variation occurs within “racial” groups
ii. Geographically dispersed “racial” populations differ in
only about 6% of their genes
b.