I. Introduction
A. There is no single definition of marriage that is adequate to account for all of the diversity found in marriages cross-culturally.
B. Edmund Leach argued that there are several different kinds of rights allocated by marriage.
1. Marriage can establish the legal father of a woman’s children and the legal mother of a man’s.
2. Marriage can give either or both spouses a monopoly in the sexuality of the other.
3. Marriage can give either of both spouses rights to the labor of the other.
4. Marriage can give either of both spouses rights over the other’s property.
5. Marriage can establish a joint fund of property—a partnership—for the benefit of the children.
6. Marriage can establish a socially significant relationship of affinity between spouses and their relatives.
Genitor - the biological father of the children
Pater -socially recognized father (foster father)
II. Same-Sex Marriage
A. In the section Kottak argues that same-sex marriages are legitimate unions between two individuals because like other kinds of marriage, same-sex marriage can allocate all of the rights discussed by Leach.
1. In the U.S., since same-sex marriage is illegal, same-sex couples are denied many of these rights (e.g. rights to the labor of the other, over the other’s property, relationships of affinity with the other’s relatives).
2. This does not mean that same-sex marriages like any other cultural construction is not capable of meeting these needs; only that in the U.S. laws prevent it from doing so.
B. There are many examples in which same-sex marriages are culturally sanctioned (e.g. the Nuer of Sudan, the Azande of Sudan and Congo, and the Igbo of Nigeria, Belgium and the Netherlands).
III. Incest and Exogamy
A. Exogamy is the practice of seeking a spouse outside one's own group.
1. This practice forces people to create and maintain a wide social network.
2. This wider social network nurtures, helps, and protects one's group during times of need.
B. Incest refers to sexual relations with a close relative.
1. The incest taboo is a cultural universal.
2. What constitutes incest varies widely from culture to culture.
C. In societies with unilineal descent systems (patrilineal or matrilineal), the incest taboo is often defined based on the distinction between two kinds of first cousins: parallel cousins and cross cousins.
1. A sexual relation with a parallel cousin is incestuous, because they belong to the same generation and the same descent group.
2. Sexual relations with a cross cousin is not incestuous because they belong to the opposite group or moiety.
D. Specific cultural examples are taken from the Yanomami, the Lakher, and middle class America.
IV. Explaining the Taboo
A. Instinctive Horror
1. This theory argues that Homo sapiens are genetically programmed to avoid incest.
2. This theory has been refuted.
a. However, cultural universality does not necessarily entail a genetic basis (e.g. fire making).
b. If people really were genetically programmed to avoid incest, a formal incest taboo would be unnecessary.
c. This theory cannot explain why in some societies people can marry their cross cousins but not their parallel cousins.
B. Biological Degeneration
1. This theory argues that the incest taboo developed in response to abnormal offspring born from incestuous unions.
2. A decline in fertility and survival does accompany brother-sister mating across several generations.
3. However, human marriage patterns are based on specific cultural beliefs rather than universal concerns about biological degeneration several generations in the future.
a. Neither instinctive horror nor biological degeneration can explain the very widespread custom of marrying cross cousins.
b. Also, fears about degeneration cannot explain why sexual unions between parallel cousins but not cross cousins is so often tabooed.
C. Attempt and Contempt
1. Malinowski (and Freud) argued that the incest taboo originated to direct sexual feelings away from one’s family to avoid disrupting the family structure and relations (familiarity increases the chances for attempt).
2. The opposite theory argues that people are less likely to be sexually attracted to those with whom they have grown up (familiarity breeds contempt).
D. Marry Out or Die Out
1. A more accepted argument is that the taboo originated to ensure exogamy.
a. Incest taboos forces people to create and maintain wide social networks by extending peaceful relations beyond one's immediate group.
b. With this theory, incest taboos are seen as an adaptively advantageous cultural construct.
2. This argument focuses on the adaptive social results of exogamy, such as alliance formation, not simply on the idea of biological degeneration.
3. Incest taboos also function to increase a group's genetic diversity.
V. Endogamy
A. Endogamy and exogamy may operate in a single society, but do not apply to the same social unit.
1. Endogamy can be seen as functioning to express and maintain social difference, particularly in stratified societies.
2. Homogamy is the practice of marrying someone similar to you in terms of background, social status, aspirations, and interests.
B. Caste
1. India’s caste system is an extreme example of endogamy.
2. It is argued that, although India’s varna and America’s “races” are historically distinct, they share a caste-like ideology of endogamy.
C. Royal Incest
1. Royal families in widely diverse cultures have engaged in what would be called incest, even in their own cultures.
2. Manifest function is the reason given for a custom by its natives.
3. Latent function is the effect a custom has, that is not explicitly recognized by the natives.
4. The manifest function of royal incest in Polynesia was the necessity of marriage partners having commensurate mana.
5. The latent function of Polynesian royal incest was that it maintained the ruling ideology.
6. The royal incest, generally, had a latent economic function: it consolidated royal wealth.
VI. Marriage as Group Alliance
A. Bridewealth
1. Particularly in descent-based societies, marriage partners represent an alliance of larger social units.
2. Bridewealth is a gift from the husband’s kin to the wife’s, which stabilizes the marriage by acting as an insurance against divorce.
3. Brideprice is rejected as an appropriate label, because the connotations of a sale are imposed; but progeny price is considered an equivalent term.
4. Dowry, much less common than bridewealth, correlates with low status for women.
5. Fertility is often considered essential to the stability of a marriage.
6. Polygyny may be practiced to ensure fertility.
B. In the News: Love and Marriage
1. Typically, anthropologists have overlooked romantic love as a factor in the interpersonal relationships of the people they study, but this has begun to change.
2. As motifs of romantic love have become more widespread, globally, it has come to play an increasingly important role in the selection of marriage partners, even to the extent of being a basis for resistance against arranged marriages, for example.
C. Durable alliances
1. The existence of customs such as the sororate and the levirate indicate the importance of marriage as an alliance between groups.
2. Sororate marriages involve the widower marrying one of his deceased wife’s sisters.
3. Levirate marriages involve the widow marrying one of her deceased husband’s brothers.
VII. Divorce
A. Divorce is found in many different societies.
1. Marriages that are political alliances between groups are harder to break up than marriages that are more individual affairs.
2. Payments of bridewealth also discourage divorce.
3. Divorce is more common in matrilineal societies as well as societies in which postmarital residence is matrilocal.
4. Divorce is harder in patrilocal societies as the woman may be less inclined to leave her children who as members of their father’s lineage would need to stay him.
B. In foraging societies forces act to both promote and discourage divorce.
1. Promote divorce:
a. Since foragers lack descent groups, marriages tend to be individual affairs with little importance placed on the political alliances.
b. Foragers also have very few material possessions.
2. Discourage divorce:
a. The family unit is the basic unit of society and division of labor is based on gender.
b. The sparse population means that there are few alternative spouses if you divorce.
C. Divorce in the U.S.
1. The U.S. has one of the world’s highest divorce rates.
2. The U.S. has a very large percentage of gainfully employed women.
3. Americans value independence.
VIII. Plural Marriages (Polygamy)
A. Polygamy is illegal in North America, but North Americans do practice serial monogamy, through multiple marriages and divorces.
B. Polygyny (a man has more than one wife)
1. Even in cultures that approve of polygamy, monogamy still tends to be the norm, largely because most populations tend to have equal sex ratios.
2. Polygyny is more common than polyandry because, where sex ratios are not equal, there tend to be more women than men.
3. Multiple wives tend also to be associated with wealth and prestige (the Kanuri of Nigeria and the Betsileo of Madagascar are used as examples).
C. Polyandry (a woman has more than one husband)
1. Polyandry is quite rare, being practiced almost exclusively in South Asia.
2. Among the Paharis of India, polyandry was associated with a relatively low female population, which was itself due to covert female infanticide.
3. Polyandry is usually practiced in response to specific circumstances, and in conjunction with other marriage formats.
4. In other cultures, polyandry resulted from the fact that men traveled a great deal, thus multiple husbands ensured the presence of a man in the home.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Families, Kinship, Descent
I. Families
A. Nuclear and Extended Families
1. The nuclear family consists of a married couple and their children.
2. The nuclear family is ego-centered, and impermanent, while descent groups are permanent (lasting beyond the life-spans of individual constituents) and reckoned according to a single ancestor.
3. One’s family of orientation is the family in which one is born and grows up, while one’s family of procreation is formed when one marries and has children.
4. Claims made for the universality of the nuclear family, based upon the universality of marriage, do not hold up--the nuclear family is widespread, but not universal.
5. In societies where the nuclear family is important, this structure acts as a primary arena for sexual, reproductive, economic, and enculturative functions, but it is not the only structure used by societies for these (e.g., the Etoro, Nayar, Betsileo, etc.).
6. In many societies, the extended families are the primary unit of social organization.
a. Among the Muslims of western Bosnia, nuclear families are embedded within large extended families called zadrugas headed by a male household head and his wife.
b. The Nayars are a matrilineal society in which extended families live in compounds called tarawads headed by a senior woman.
B. Industrialism and Family Organization
1. The most prevalent residence pattern in the United States is families of procreation living neolocally.
2. In the U.S., as in other large, industrialized societies, patterns of residence and family types may change from class to class, in response to the conditions of these different contexts (e.g., extended families as a response to poverty).
C. Changes in North American Kinship
1. In 1995, 25 percent of American households were inhabited by nuclear families.
2. Increasing representation of women in the work force is associated with a rise in marriage age.
3. The divorce rate rose steeply between 1970 and 1994.
4. The media is reflecting an intensifying change.
5. Comparatively, Americans (especially the middle class) identify a smaller range of kindred than members of nonindustrial societies.
6. A comparison between American and Brazilian kinship is made.
D. The Family among Foragers
1. The two basic units of social organization among foragers are the nuclear family and the band.
2. Typically, the band exists only seasonally, breaking up into nuclear families when subsistence means require.
II. Descent
A. Descent Groups
1. A descent group is a permanent social unit whose members claim common ancestry.
2. With matrilineal descent individuals automatically join the mother’s descent group when they are born (see figure 15.1).
3. With patrilineal descent individuals automatically join the father’s descent group when they are born (see figure 15.2).
4. Matrilineal and patrilineal descent are types of unilineal descent in which individuals only recognize one line of descent.
5. A lineage is a descent group who can demonstrate their common descent from an apical ancestor.
6. A clan is a descent group who claims common descent from an apical ancestor but cannot demonstrate it (stipulated descent).
7. When a clan’s apical ancestor is nonhuman, it is called a totem.
B. Interesting Issues: Brady Bunch Nirvana
1. The 1960's television program The Brady Bunch focused on a blended family.
2. The great familiarity introductory anthropology course students have with the characters of this program is contrasted with the lack of familiarity the same students have for the members of their own extended families.
3. Some reference to the role television plays in transmitting and shaping American culture is made.
C. Lineages, Clans, and Residence Rules
1. In tribal societies, the descent group, not the nuclear family, is the fundamental unit.
2. In many societies, descent groups are corporate, sharing resources and property.
3. Unilocal Residence
a. Patrilocality—married couple lives with husband's family; associated with patrilineal descent and is more common than matrilocality.
b. Matrilocality—married couple lives with wife's family; associated with matrilineal descent and is less than patrilocaility.
D. Ambilineal Descent
1. People can choose the descent group that they want to belong to.
2. Membership is fluid as people can change their descent group membership.
3. With unilineal descent, membership is ascribed, but for ambilineal descent, membership is achieved.
III. Kinship Calculation
A. Kinship calculation is any systemic method for reckoning kin relations.
B. Genealogical Kin Types and Kin Terms (see figure 15.3)
1. Kin terms are the labels given in a particular culture to different kinds of relatives.
2. Biological kin type refers to the degree of actual genealogical relatedness.
C. Bilateral Kinship
1. Used by most Americans and Canadians
2. Kinship is traced through both male and female lines.
3. Kin links through males and females are perceived as being similar or equivalent.
4. In North American bilateral kinship there is often matrilineal skewing, a preference for relatives on the mother's side.
IV. Kinship Terminology
A. Kinship terminologies are native taxonomies (emic), not developed by anthropologists.
B. Lineal terminology: most Americans and Canadians use lineal terminology, which distinguishes lineal, collateral, and affinal relatives (figure 15.4 and figure 15.5).
C. Bifurcate merging terminology: this is the most common, associated with unilineal descent and unilocal residence (figure 15.6).
D. Generational terminology: typical of ambilineal societies, this calls ascending, same sex relatives by the same names (figure 15.7).
E. Bifurcate collateral terminology: common to North Africa and the Middle East, this is the most particular system (figure 15.8).
A. Nuclear and Extended Families
1. The nuclear family consists of a married couple and their children.
2. The nuclear family is ego-centered, and impermanent, while descent groups are permanent (lasting beyond the life-spans of individual constituents) and reckoned according to a single ancestor.
3. One’s family of orientation is the family in which one is born and grows up, while one’s family of procreation is formed when one marries and has children.
4. Claims made for the universality of the nuclear family, based upon the universality of marriage, do not hold up--the nuclear family is widespread, but not universal.
5. In societies where the nuclear family is important, this structure acts as a primary arena for sexual, reproductive, economic, and enculturative functions, but it is not the only structure used by societies for these (e.g., the Etoro, Nayar, Betsileo, etc.).
6. In many societies, the extended families are the primary unit of social organization.
a. Among the Muslims of western Bosnia, nuclear families are embedded within large extended families called zadrugas headed by a male household head and his wife.
b. The Nayars are a matrilineal society in which extended families live in compounds called tarawads headed by a senior woman.
B. Industrialism and Family Organization
1. The most prevalent residence pattern in the United States is families of procreation living neolocally.
2. In the U.S., as in other large, industrialized societies, patterns of residence and family types may change from class to class, in response to the conditions of these different contexts (e.g., extended families as a response to poverty).
C. Changes in North American Kinship
1. In 1995, 25 percent of American households were inhabited by nuclear families.
2. Increasing representation of women in the work force is associated with a rise in marriage age.
3. The divorce rate rose steeply between 1970 and 1994.
4. The media is reflecting an intensifying change.
5. Comparatively, Americans (especially the middle class) identify a smaller range of kindred than members of nonindustrial societies.
6. A comparison between American and Brazilian kinship is made.
D. The Family among Foragers
1. The two basic units of social organization among foragers are the nuclear family and the band.
2. Typically, the band exists only seasonally, breaking up into nuclear families when subsistence means require.
II. Descent
A. Descent Groups
1. A descent group is a permanent social unit whose members claim common ancestry.
2. With matrilineal descent individuals automatically join the mother’s descent group when they are born (see figure 15.1).
3. With patrilineal descent individuals automatically join the father’s descent group when they are born (see figure 15.2).
4. Matrilineal and patrilineal descent are types of unilineal descent in which individuals only recognize one line of descent.
5. A lineage is a descent group who can demonstrate their common descent from an apical ancestor.
6. A clan is a descent group who claims common descent from an apical ancestor but cannot demonstrate it (stipulated descent).
7. When a clan’s apical ancestor is nonhuman, it is called a totem.
B. Interesting Issues: Brady Bunch Nirvana
1. The 1960's television program The Brady Bunch focused on a blended family.
2. The great familiarity introductory anthropology course students have with the characters of this program is contrasted with the lack of familiarity the same students have for the members of their own extended families.
3. Some reference to the role television plays in transmitting and shaping American culture is made.
C. Lineages, Clans, and Residence Rules
1. In tribal societies, the descent group, not the nuclear family, is the fundamental unit.
2. In many societies, descent groups are corporate, sharing resources and property.
3. Unilocal Residence
a. Patrilocality—married couple lives with husband's family; associated with patrilineal descent and is more common than matrilocality.
b. Matrilocality—married couple lives with wife's family; associated with matrilineal descent and is less than patrilocaility.
D. Ambilineal Descent
1. People can choose the descent group that they want to belong to.
2. Membership is fluid as people can change their descent group membership.
3. With unilineal descent, membership is ascribed, but for ambilineal descent, membership is achieved.
III. Kinship Calculation
A. Kinship calculation is any systemic method for reckoning kin relations.
B. Genealogical Kin Types and Kin Terms (see figure 15.3)
1. Kin terms are the labels given in a particular culture to different kinds of relatives.
2. Biological kin type refers to the degree of actual genealogical relatedness.
C. Bilateral Kinship
1. Used by most Americans and Canadians
2. Kinship is traced through both male and female lines.
3. Kin links through males and females are perceived as being similar or equivalent.
4. In North American bilateral kinship there is often matrilineal skewing, a preference for relatives on the mother's side.
IV. Kinship Terminology
A. Kinship terminologies are native taxonomies (emic), not developed by anthropologists.
B. Lineal terminology: most Americans and Canadians use lineal terminology, which distinguishes lineal, collateral, and affinal relatives (figure 15.4 and figure 15.5).
C. Bifurcate merging terminology: this is the most common, associated with unilineal descent and unilocal residence (figure 15.6).
D. Generational terminology: typical of ambilineal societies, this calls ascending, same sex relatives by the same names (figure 15.7).
E. Bifurcate collateral terminology: common to North Africa and the Middle East, this is the most particular system (figure 15.8).
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Assignments for BSHRM Sections B, D and F
Part II- In one whole sheet of paper, answer the following questions based on the website cited below:
New Guinea Feast: Read the page by Oliver Kortendick entitled "A village, and anthropologist, two goats and a meal…" at
http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/Sonja/Oliver/hoploi/hop1.html
a. Why was the feast being held?
b. What kind of food was eaten at the feast? What are some typical foods eaten by the people of Hoploi?
c. Who had the original idea for the feast? Who performed what tasks in obtaining and preparing the food? Who then participated in the feast?
d. How does the Hoploi feast compare to celebrations you have participated in?
Part I - In clean sheets of paper, answer the following
Samburu Pastoralists: Read the article about the Samburu at http://africa.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp/e/about1/samburu.html.
a. Who are the Samburu? Where do they live?
b. What role do cattle play in Samburu subsistence? What role do cattle play in Samburu society?
c. How has contact with the outside world changed Samburu society?
d. How are cattle central to Samburu culture? Is there something similar that is central to your own culture?
New Guinea Feast: Read the page by Oliver Kortendick entitled "A village, and anthropologist, two goats and a meal…" at
http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/Sonja/Oliver/hoploi/hop1.html
a. Why was the feast being held?
b. What kind of food was eaten at the feast? What are some typical foods eaten by the people of Hoploi?
c. Who had the original idea for the feast? Who performed what tasks in obtaining and preparing the food? Who then participated in the feast?
d. How does the Hoploi feast compare to celebrations you have participated in?
Part I - In clean sheets of paper, answer the following
Samburu Pastoralists: Read the article about the Samburu at http://africa.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp/e/about1/samburu.html.
a. Who are the Samburu? Where do they live?
b. What role do cattle play in Samburu subsistence? What role do cattle play in Samburu society?
c. How has contact with the outside world changed Samburu society?
d. How are cattle central to Samburu culture? Is there something similar that is central to your own culture?
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
MAKING A LIVING
I. Adaptive Strategies
A. Yehudi Cohen used the term adaptive strategy to describe a group’s system of economic production.
B. Cohen has developed a typology of cultures using this distinction, referring to a relationship between economies and social features, arguing that the most important reason for similarities between unrelated cultures is their possession of a similar adaptive strategy.
II. Foraging
A. Human groups with foraging economies are not ecologically dominant.
B. The primary reason for the continuing survival of foraging economies is the inapplicability of their environmental settings to food production.
C. Correlates of Foraging
1. Band organization is typical of foraging societies, because its flexibility allows for seasonal adjustments.
2. Members of foraging societies typically are socially mobile, having the ability to affiliate with more than one group during their lifetimes (e.g., through fictive kinship).
3. The typical foraging society gender-based division of labor has women gathering and men hunting and fishing, with gathering contributing more to the group diet.
4. All foraging societies distinguish among their members according to age and gender, but are relatively egalitarian (making only minor distinctions in status) compared to other societal types.
III. Cultivation
A. Horticulture
1. Horticulture is nonintensive plant cultivation, based on the use of simple tools and cyclical, noncontinuous use crop lands.
2. Slash-and-burn cultivation and shifting cultivation are alternative labels for horticulture.
B. Agriculture
1. Agriculture is cultivation involving continuous use of crop land and is more labor-intensive (due to the ancillary needs generated by farm animals and crop land formation) than horticulture.
2. Domesticated animals are commonly used in agriculture, mainly to ease labor and provide manure.
3. Irrigation is one of the agricultural techniques that frees cultivation from seasonal domination.
4. Terracing is an agricultural technique which renders land otherwise too steep for most forms of cultivation (particularly irrigated cultivation) susceptible to agriculture (e.g., the Ifugao of Central Luzon, in the Philippines).
5. The Costs and Benefits of Agriculture.
a. Agriculture is far more labor-intensive and capital-intensive than horticulture, but does not necessarily yield more than horticulture (under ideal conditions) does.
b. Agriculture’s long-term production (per area) is far more stable than horticulture’s.
C. The Cultivation Continuum
1. In reality, nonindustrial economies do not always fit cleanly into the distinct categories given above, thus it is useful to think in terms of a cultivation continuum.
2. Sectorial fallowing: a plot of land may be planted two to three years before shifting (as with the Kuikuru, South American manioc horticulturalists), then allowed to lie fallow for a period of years.
3. A baseline distinction between agriculture and horticulture is that horticulture requires regular fallowing (the length of which varies), whereas agriculture does not.
D. Intensification: People and the Environment
1. Agriculture, by turning humans into ecological dominants, allows human populations to move into (and transform) a much wider range of environments than was possible prior to the development of cultivation.
2. Intensified food production is associated with sedentism and rapid population increase.
3. Most agriculturalists live in states because agricultural economies require regulatory mechanisms.
IV. Pastoralism
A. Pastoral economies are based upon domesticated herd animals, but members of such economies may get agricultural produce through trade or their own subsidiary cultivation.
B. Patterns of Pastoralism
1. Pastoral nomadism: all members of the pastoral society follow the herd throughout the year.
2. Transhumance or agro-pastoralism: part of the society follows the herd, while the other part maintains a home village (this is usually associated with some cultivation by the pastoralists).
V. Modes of Production
A. Economic anthropology studies economics in a comparative perspective.
1. An economy is a study of production, distribution, and consumption of resources.
2. Mode of production is defined as a way of organizing production--a set of social relations through which labor is deployed to wrest energy from nature using tools, skills, organization, and knowledge.
3. Similarity of adaptive strategies between societies tends to correspond with similarity of mode of production: variations occur according to environmental particularities.
B. Production in Nonindustrial Populations
1. All societies divide labor according to gender and age, but the nature of these divisions varies greatly from society to society.
2. Valuation of the kinds of work ascribed to different groups varies, as well.
3. Examples are taken from the Betsileo, of Madagascar.
C. Means of Production
1. Means of production include land, labor, technology, and capital.
2. Land: the importance of land varies according to method of production — land is less important to a foraging economy than it is to a cultivating economy.
3. Labor, tools, and specialization: nonindustrial economies are usually but not always characterized by more cooperation and less specialized labor than is found in industrial societies.
D. Alienation in Industrial Economies
1. By definition, a worker is alienated from the product of her or his work when the product is sold, with the profit going to an employer, while the worker is paid a wage.
2. A consequence of alienation is that a worker has less personal investment in the product, in contrast to the more intimate relationship existing between worker and product in nonindustrial societies.
3. Alienation may generalize to encompass not only worker-product relations, but coworker relations, as well.
VI. Economizing and Maximization
A. Classical economic theory assumed that individuals universally acted rationally, by economizing to maximize profits, but comparative data shows that people frequently respond to other motivations than profit.
B. Alternative Ends
1. People devote their time, resources, and energy to five broad categories of ends: subsistence, replacement, social, ceremonial, and rent.
2. Subsistence fund: work is done to replace calories lost through life activities.
3. Replacement fund: work is expended maintaining the technology necessary for life (broadly defined).
4. Social fund: work is expended to establish and maintain social ties.
5. Ceremonial fund: work is expended to fulfill ritual obligations.
6. Rent fund: work is expended to satisfy the obligations owed (or inflicted by) political or economic superiors.
7. Peasants have rent fund obligations.
C. Interesting Issues: Scarcity and the Betsileo
1. Kottak describes some of his fieldwork experiences on Madagascar, particularly in the Betsileo village of Ivato, which was a principal research site and where he made many friends.
2. The process of interviewing and sharing wine and cigarettes with his friends generated comparative comments from them regarding their perceptions of American wealth and which also revealed the sense that Ivatans felt they had all they needed.
3. Kottak uses these experiences as evidence to support the argument that the profit motive is culturally specific, being attached to Western-style consumerism.
VII. Distribution, Exchange
A. The Market Principle
1. The market principle occurs when exchange rates and organization are governed by an arbitrary money standard.
2. Price is set by the law of supply and demand.
3. The market principle is common to industrial societies.
B. Redistribution
1. Redistribution is the typical mode of exchange in chiefdoms and some nonindustrial states.
2. In a redistributive system, product moves from the local level to the hierarchical center, where it is reorganized, and a proportion is sent back down to the local level.
C. Reciprocity
1. Reciprocity is exchange between social equals and occurs in three degrees: generalized, balanced, and negative.
2. Generalized reciprocity is most common to closely related exchange partners and involves giving with no specific expectation of exchange, but with a reliance upon similar opportunities being available to the giver (prevalent among foragers).
3. Balanced reciprocity involves more distantly related partners and involves giving with the expectation of equivalent (but not necessarily immediate) exchange (common in tribal societies and has serious ramifications for the relationship of trading partners).
4. Negative reciprocity involves very distant trading partners and is characterized by each partner attempting to maximize profit and an expectation of immediate exchange (e.g., market economies, silent barter between Mbuti foragers and horticulturalist neighbors).
D. Coexistence of Exchange Principles
1. Most economies are not exclusively characterized by a single mode of reciprocity.
2. The United States economy has all three types of reciprocity.
VIII. Potlatching
A. Potlatches, as once practiced by Northwest Coast Native American groups, are a widely studied ritual in which sponsors (helped by their entourages) gave away resources and manufactured wealth while generating prestige for themselves.
B. Potlatching tribes (such as Kwakiutl and Salish peoples) were foragers but lived in sedentary villages and had chiefs--this political complexity is attributed to the overall richness of their environment.
C. Dramatic depopulation resulting from postcontact diseases and the influx of new trade goods dramatically affected the nature of potlatches, which began to extended to the entire population.
D. The result of the new surplus, cultural trauma, and the competition caused by wider inclusion was that prestige was created by the destruction of wealth, rather than the redistribution of it
E. Potlatches were once interpreted as wasteful displays generated by culturally induced mania for prestige, but Kottak argues that customs like the potlatch are adaptive, allowing adjustment for alternating periods of local abundance and shortage.
F. The Northwest Coast tribes were unusual in that they were foraging populations living in a rich, nonmarginal environmental setting.
A. Yehudi Cohen used the term adaptive strategy to describe a group’s system of economic production.
B. Cohen has developed a typology of cultures using this distinction, referring to a relationship between economies and social features, arguing that the most important reason for similarities between unrelated cultures is their possession of a similar adaptive strategy.
II. Foraging
A. Human groups with foraging economies are not ecologically dominant.
B. The primary reason for the continuing survival of foraging economies is the inapplicability of their environmental settings to food production.
C. Correlates of Foraging
1. Band organization is typical of foraging societies, because its flexibility allows for seasonal adjustments.
2. Members of foraging societies typically are socially mobile, having the ability to affiliate with more than one group during their lifetimes (e.g., through fictive kinship).
3. The typical foraging society gender-based division of labor has women gathering and men hunting and fishing, with gathering contributing more to the group diet.
4. All foraging societies distinguish among their members according to age and gender, but are relatively egalitarian (making only minor distinctions in status) compared to other societal types.
III. Cultivation
A. Horticulture
1. Horticulture is nonintensive plant cultivation, based on the use of simple tools and cyclical, noncontinuous use crop lands.
2. Slash-and-burn cultivation and shifting cultivation are alternative labels for horticulture.
B. Agriculture
1. Agriculture is cultivation involving continuous use of crop land and is more labor-intensive (due to the ancillary needs generated by farm animals and crop land formation) than horticulture.
2. Domesticated animals are commonly used in agriculture, mainly to ease labor and provide manure.
3. Irrigation is one of the agricultural techniques that frees cultivation from seasonal domination.
4. Terracing is an agricultural technique which renders land otherwise too steep for most forms of cultivation (particularly irrigated cultivation) susceptible to agriculture (e.g., the Ifugao of Central Luzon, in the Philippines).
5. The Costs and Benefits of Agriculture.
a. Agriculture is far more labor-intensive and capital-intensive than horticulture, but does not necessarily yield more than horticulture (under ideal conditions) does.
b. Agriculture’s long-term production (per area) is far more stable than horticulture’s.
C. The Cultivation Continuum
1. In reality, nonindustrial economies do not always fit cleanly into the distinct categories given above, thus it is useful to think in terms of a cultivation continuum.
2. Sectorial fallowing: a plot of land may be planted two to three years before shifting (as with the Kuikuru, South American manioc horticulturalists), then allowed to lie fallow for a period of years.
3. A baseline distinction between agriculture and horticulture is that horticulture requires regular fallowing (the length of which varies), whereas agriculture does not.
D. Intensification: People and the Environment
1. Agriculture, by turning humans into ecological dominants, allows human populations to move into (and transform) a much wider range of environments than was possible prior to the development of cultivation.
2. Intensified food production is associated with sedentism and rapid population increase.
3. Most agriculturalists live in states because agricultural economies require regulatory mechanisms.
IV. Pastoralism
A. Pastoral economies are based upon domesticated herd animals, but members of such economies may get agricultural produce through trade or their own subsidiary cultivation.
B. Patterns of Pastoralism
1. Pastoral nomadism: all members of the pastoral society follow the herd throughout the year.
2. Transhumance or agro-pastoralism: part of the society follows the herd, while the other part maintains a home village (this is usually associated with some cultivation by the pastoralists).
V. Modes of Production
A. Economic anthropology studies economics in a comparative perspective.
1. An economy is a study of production, distribution, and consumption of resources.
2. Mode of production is defined as a way of organizing production--a set of social relations through which labor is deployed to wrest energy from nature using tools, skills, organization, and knowledge.
3. Similarity of adaptive strategies between societies tends to correspond with similarity of mode of production: variations occur according to environmental particularities.
B. Production in Nonindustrial Populations
1. All societies divide labor according to gender and age, but the nature of these divisions varies greatly from society to society.
2. Valuation of the kinds of work ascribed to different groups varies, as well.
3. Examples are taken from the Betsileo, of Madagascar.
C. Means of Production
1. Means of production include land, labor, technology, and capital.
2. Land: the importance of land varies according to method of production — land is less important to a foraging economy than it is to a cultivating economy.
3. Labor, tools, and specialization: nonindustrial economies are usually but not always characterized by more cooperation and less specialized labor than is found in industrial societies.
D. Alienation in Industrial Economies
1. By definition, a worker is alienated from the product of her or his work when the product is sold, with the profit going to an employer, while the worker is paid a wage.
2. A consequence of alienation is that a worker has less personal investment in the product, in contrast to the more intimate relationship existing between worker and product in nonindustrial societies.
3. Alienation may generalize to encompass not only worker-product relations, but coworker relations, as well.
VI. Economizing and Maximization
A. Classical economic theory assumed that individuals universally acted rationally, by economizing to maximize profits, but comparative data shows that people frequently respond to other motivations than profit.
B. Alternative Ends
1. People devote their time, resources, and energy to five broad categories of ends: subsistence, replacement, social, ceremonial, and rent.
2. Subsistence fund: work is done to replace calories lost through life activities.
3. Replacement fund: work is expended maintaining the technology necessary for life (broadly defined).
4. Social fund: work is expended to establish and maintain social ties.
5. Ceremonial fund: work is expended to fulfill ritual obligations.
6. Rent fund: work is expended to satisfy the obligations owed (or inflicted by) political or economic superiors.
7. Peasants have rent fund obligations.
C. Interesting Issues: Scarcity and the Betsileo
1. Kottak describes some of his fieldwork experiences on Madagascar, particularly in the Betsileo village of Ivato, which was a principal research site and where he made many friends.
2. The process of interviewing and sharing wine and cigarettes with his friends generated comparative comments from them regarding their perceptions of American wealth and which also revealed the sense that Ivatans felt they had all they needed.
3. Kottak uses these experiences as evidence to support the argument that the profit motive is culturally specific, being attached to Western-style consumerism.
VII. Distribution, Exchange
A. The Market Principle
1. The market principle occurs when exchange rates and organization are governed by an arbitrary money standard.
2. Price is set by the law of supply and demand.
3. The market principle is common to industrial societies.
B. Redistribution
1. Redistribution is the typical mode of exchange in chiefdoms and some nonindustrial states.
2. In a redistributive system, product moves from the local level to the hierarchical center, where it is reorganized, and a proportion is sent back down to the local level.
C. Reciprocity
1. Reciprocity is exchange between social equals and occurs in three degrees: generalized, balanced, and negative.
2. Generalized reciprocity is most common to closely related exchange partners and involves giving with no specific expectation of exchange, but with a reliance upon similar opportunities being available to the giver (prevalent among foragers).
3. Balanced reciprocity involves more distantly related partners and involves giving with the expectation of equivalent (but not necessarily immediate) exchange (common in tribal societies and has serious ramifications for the relationship of trading partners).
4. Negative reciprocity involves very distant trading partners and is characterized by each partner attempting to maximize profit and an expectation of immediate exchange (e.g., market economies, silent barter between Mbuti foragers and horticulturalist neighbors).
D. Coexistence of Exchange Principles
1. Most economies are not exclusively characterized by a single mode of reciprocity.
2. The United States economy has all three types of reciprocity.
VIII. Potlatching
A. Potlatches, as once practiced by Northwest Coast Native American groups, are a widely studied ritual in which sponsors (helped by their entourages) gave away resources and manufactured wealth while generating prestige for themselves.
B. Potlatching tribes (such as Kwakiutl and Salish peoples) were foragers but lived in sedentary villages and had chiefs--this political complexity is attributed to the overall richness of their environment.
C. Dramatic depopulation resulting from postcontact diseases and the influx of new trade goods dramatically affected the nature of potlatches, which began to extended to the entire population.
D. The result of the new surplus, cultural trauma, and the competition caused by wider inclusion was that prestige was created by the destruction of wealth, rather than the redistribution of it
E. Potlatches were once interpreted as wasteful displays generated by culturally induced mania for prestige, but Kottak argues that customs like the potlatch are adaptive, allowing adjustment for alternating periods of local abundance and shortage.
F. The Northwest Coast tribes were unusual in that they were foraging populations living in a rich, nonmarginal environmental setting.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Language and Communication 2
I. Introduction
A. Language is our primary means of communication.
1. Language is transmitted through learning, as part of enculturation.
2. Language is based on arbitrary, learned associations between words and the things they represent.
3. Only humans have the linguistic capacity to discuss the past and future in addition to the present.
B. Anthropologists study language in its social and cultural context.
II. Animal Communication
A. Call Systems
1. Call systems consist of a limited number of sounds that are produced in response to specific stimuli (e.g. food or danger).
a. Calls cannot be combined to produce new calls.
b. Calls are reflexive in that they are automatic responses to specific stimuli.
2. Although primates use call systems, their vocal tract is not suitable for speech.
B. Sign Language
1. A few nonhuman primates have been able to learn to use American Sign Language (ASL).
a. Washoe, a chimpanzee, eventually acquired a vocabulary of over 100 ASL signs.
b. Lucy, another chimpanzee, lived in a foster family until she was introduced to the “wild” where she was killed by poachers.
c. Koko, a gorilla, regularly uses 400 ASL signs and has used 700 at least once.
2. These nonhuman primates have displayed some “human-like” capacities with ASL.
a. Joking and lying.
b. Cultural transmission: they have tried to teach ASL to other animals.
c. Productivity: they have combined two or more signs to create new expressions.
d. Displacement: the ability to talk about things that are not present.
3. The experiments with ASL demonstrate that chimps and gorillas have a rudimentary capacity for language.
a. It is important to remember that humans taught these animals ASL.
b. There are no known instances where chimps or gorillas in the wild have developed a comparable system of signs on their own.
C. The Origin of Language
1. The human capacity for language developed over hundreds of thousands of years, as call systems were transformed into language.
2. Language is a uniquely effective vehicle for learning that enables humans to adapt more rapidly to new stimuli than other primates.
III. Nonverbal Communication
A. Kinesics is the study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures and facial expressions.
B. Odors also play an important role in nonverbal communication.
IV. The Structure of Language
A. The scientific study of spoken language involves several levels of organization: phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax.
1. Phonology is the study of the sound use in speech.
2. Morphology studies the forms in which sounds are grouped in speech.
3. A language’s lexicon is a dictionary containing all of the smallest units of speech that have a meaning (morpheme).
4. Syntax refers to the rules that order words and phrases into sentences.
B. Speech Sounds
1. In any given language, phonemes are the smallest sound contrasts that distinguish meaning (they carry no meaning themselves).
2. Phones are the sounds made by humans that might act as phonemes in any given language.
3. Phonetics is the study of human speech sounds; phonemics is the study of phones as they act in a particular language.
4. Phonemics studies only the significant sound contrasts of a given language.
V. Language, Thought, and Culture
A. Chomsky argues that the universal grammar is finite, and the fact that any language is translatable to any other language is taken to be evidence supporting this claim.
B. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Sapir and Whorf are described as early advocates of the view that different languages imply different ways of thinking (e.g., Palaung vs. English, Hopi speculative tense).
C. Focal Vocabulary
1. Lexical elaboration that corresponds to an activity or item that is culturally central is called a focal vocabulary.
2. It is argued that, while language, thought, and culture are interrelated, change is more likely to move from culture to language, rather than the reverse.
D. Meaning
1. Semantics “refers to a language’s meaning system.”
2. Ethnoscience, or ethnosemantics, is the study of linguistic categorization of difference, such as in classification systems, taxonomies, and specialized terminologies (such as astronomy and medicine).
VI. Interesting Issues: Do Midwesterners Have Accents?
A. Every region has its own dialect based on regional patterns of speech, pronunciation, and word choice.
B. Some dialects, like that of Midwestern Americans, have few stigmatized variants that people readily notice.
VII. Sociolinguistics
A. Introduction
1. Sociolinguistics is the study of the relation between linguistic performance and the social context of that performance.
2. The notion that linguistic variation is a product of constantly ongoing general forces for change is called linguistic uniformitarianism.
B. Linguistic Diversity
1. The ethnic and class diversity of nation-states is mirrored by linguistic diversity.
2. Single individuals may change the way they talk depending upon the social requirements of a given setting--this is called style shifting.
3. Diglossia is the regular shifting from one dialect to another (e.g., high and low variants of a language) by members of a single linguistic population.
4. Linguistic relativity says that no language is superior to any other as a means of communication.
C. Gender Speech Contrasts
1. In America and England, there are regular differences between men’s speech and women’s speech that cut across sub-cultural boundaries.
2. The fact that women in these populations tend to speak a more “standard” dialect and use fewer “power” words is attributed to women’s lack of socioeconomic power.
D. Stratification and Symbolic Domination
1. In situations where social stratification exists, the dialect of the dominant strata is considered “standard” and valued more than the dialects of the lower strata.
2. Sociolinguistic studies have indicated that status-linked dialects affect the economic and social prospects of the people who speak them, a situation to which Bourdieu applies the term, symbolic capital.
3. According to Bourdieu, overall societal consensus that one dialect is more prestigious results in “symbolic domination.”
E. In the News: Japan’s Feminine Falsetto
1. Most languages are expressive of and also create gendered differences through grammatical, phonological, or performance patterns.
2. One such gendered style occurs in Japan, wherein the tradition was for women to adopt a stylized, high-pitched voice when speaking in public.
3. This style has begun to disappear as a result of having been challenged through increased awareness of alternatives, some presented directly via feminism, others coming as a more incidental by-product of intercultural contact (e.g., women announcers in the television news).
F. Black English Vernacular (BEV), a.k.a. “Ebonics”
1. Most linguists view BEV as a dialect of American English, with roots in southern English.
2. William Labov writes that BEV is the “relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the U.S. today…”
3. BEV has its own complex system of linguistic rules; it is not an unstructured selection of words and phrases.
a. BEV speakers do not pronounce intervocalic r’s.
b. BEV speakers use copula deletion to eliminate the verb to be from their speech.
4. Standard English is not superior in terms of ability to communicate ideas, but it is the prestige dialect.
VIII. Historical Linguistics
A. Historical linguistics studies the long-term variation of speech by studying protolanguages and daughter languages.
B. Anthropologists are interested in historical linguistics because cultural features sometimes correlate with the distribution of language families.
IX. Cyberspace: A New Realm of Communication.
A. Terms
1. Cyberspace: that part of the world that is navigable by computer.
2. AIT: (Advanced Information Technology) is the high technology communications environment that has given rise to cyberspace.
B. AIT as a medium has allowed for the creation of transnational affinity groups and also created means by which populations have begun to resist the pressure of authoritarian governments.
1. These groups and others that are formed around different sorts of interest, as well as the nature of relations among these groups and with the rest of the world, are rapidly becoming the subjects of anthropological inquiry.
2. Transecting groups create direct communication channels between groups that previously had, or otherwise have trouble communicating--e.g. physicians and patients.
C. Access to cyberspace is not equal.
1. Poverty and underdevelopment limit access to cyberspace for some populations.
2. Some governments use artificially high costs to limit the connectivity of ordinary people.
3. Class also affects access in the United States, although this is mitigated somewhat by the existence of public access computers.
4. While class has not been eliminated entirely from cyberspace, some of the markers of class are not as functional--for example, language/writing style in cyberspace is marked by informality.
5. Recent studies have shown that the marking of class and gender still exists, and that some of the gendered dynamics born outside of cyberspace are carried on within it.
6. One area wherein inequality has persisted is in the delivery of the latest high technology equipment to schools, which consistently reflects class and race bias, as well as socioeconomic inequality.
7. “Netiquette” is the term applied to uses and styles deemed appropriate and polite in cyberspace communication (such as the avoidance of using all capital letters, which connotes strong emotion or “shouting”).
D. Elitism and Gate-keeping Cyberspace
1. As access and interest have increased the numbers of people using the Internet, “Old Guard” vs. “New Guard” elitism has developed.
2. As use has broadened, problematic and criminal practices on the Internet have also increased, generating a corresponding interest in the regulation of such communication (e.g., laws against pornography on the Internet).
3. There are also techniques employed by ordinary users and sysops (“systems operators”) to prevent and punish transgression of various ilk.
4. Kottak applies the term “gatekeepers” to people who enforce the various regulations and norms of Internet communication.
E. The fluidity of social reality in cyberspace
1. The various uses of cyberspace and computer technology have generated a whole new realm of ways to manipulate one’s identity (e.g., role-playing games, presenting various selves in course of cyberspace conversations, etc.).
2. The relationship between cyberspace behavior and behavior in “face-to-face” communities is under investigation.
Assignment: In clean sheets of paper, answer the following:
Primate Language: Read the page entitled "Primate Use of Language" created by Lauren Kosseff at http://www.pigeon.psy.tufts.edu/psych26/language.htm.
a. Who was Kanzi? What abilities with language did Kanzi demonstrate?
b. Who was Washoe? What abilities with language did Washoe demonstrate?
c. Who was Loulis? What abilities with language did Loulis demonstrate?
d. Who was Nim? What abilities with language did Nim demonstrate?
e. Do you think that language is uniquely human? Which parts of human language do primates possess?
A. Language is our primary means of communication.
1. Language is transmitted through learning, as part of enculturation.
2. Language is based on arbitrary, learned associations between words and the things they represent.
3. Only humans have the linguistic capacity to discuss the past and future in addition to the present.
B. Anthropologists study language in its social and cultural context.
II. Animal Communication
A. Call Systems
1. Call systems consist of a limited number of sounds that are produced in response to specific stimuli (e.g. food or danger).
a. Calls cannot be combined to produce new calls.
b. Calls are reflexive in that they are automatic responses to specific stimuli.
2. Although primates use call systems, their vocal tract is not suitable for speech.
B. Sign Language
1. A few nonhuman primates have been able to learn to use American Sign Language (ASL).
a. Washoe, a chimpanzee, eventually acquired a vocabulary of over 100 ASL signs.
b. Lucy, another chimpanzee, lived in a foster family until she was introduced to the “wild” where she was killed by poachers.
c. Koko, a gorilla, regularly uses 400 ASL signs and has used 700 at least once.
2. These nonhuman primates have displayed some “human-like” capacities with ASL.
a. Joking and lying.
b. Cultural transmission: they have tried to teach ASL to other animals.
c. Productivity: they have combined two or more signs to create new expressions.
d. Displacement: the ability to talk about things that are not present.
3. The experiments with ASL demonstrate that chimps and gorillas have a rudimentary capacity for language.
a. It is important to remember that humans taught these animals ASL.
b. There are no known instances where chimps or gorillas in the wild have developed a comparable system of signs on their own.
C. The Origin of Language
1. The human capacity for language developed over hundreds of thousands of years, as call systems were transformed into language.
2. Language is a uniquely effective vehicle for learning that enables humans to adapt more rapidly to new stimuli than other primates.
III. Nonverbal Communication
A. Kinesics is the study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures and facial expressions.
B. Odors also play an important role in nonverbal communication.
IV. The Structure of Language
A. The scientific study of spoken language involves several levels of organization: phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax.
1. Phonology is the study of the sound use in speech.
2. Morphology studies the forms in which sounds are grouped in speech.
3. A language’s lexicon is a dictionary containing all of the smallest units of speech that have a meaning (morpheme).
4. Syntax refers to the rules that order words and phrases into sentences.
B. Speech Sounds
1. In any given language, phonemes are the smallest sound contrasts that distinguish meaning (they carry no meaning themselves).
2. Phones are the sounds made by humans that might act as phonemes in any given language.
3. Phonetics is the study of human speech sounds; phonemics is the study of phones as they act in a particular language.
4. Phonemics studies only the significant sound contrasts of a given language.
V. Language, Thought, and Culture
A. Chomsky argues that the universal grammar is finite, and the fact that any language is translatable to any other language is taken to be evidence supporting this claim.
B. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Sapir and Whorf are described as early advocates of the view that different languages imply different ways of thinking (e.g., Palaung vs. English, Hopi speculative tense).
C. Focal Vocabulary
1. Lexical elaboration that corresponds to an activity or item that is culturally central is called a focal vocabulary.
2. It is argued that, while language, thought, and culture are interrelated, change is more likely to move from culture to language, rather than the reverse.
D. Meaning
1. Semantics “refers to a language’s meaning system.”
2. Ethnoscience, or ethnosemantics, is the study of linguistic categorization of difference, such as in classification systems, taxonomies, and specialized terminologies (such as astronomy and medicine).
VI. Interesting Issues: Do Midwesterners Have Accents?
A. Every region has its own dialect based on regional patterns of speech, pronunciation, and word choice.
B. Some dialects, like that of Midwestern Americans, have few stigmatized variants that people readily notice.
VII. Sociolinguistics
A. Introduction
1. Sociolinguistics is the study of the relation between linguistic performance and the social context of that performance.
2. The notion that linguistic variation is a product of constantly ongoing general forces for change is called linguistic uniformitarianism.
B. Linguistic Diversity
1. The ethnic and class diversity of nation-states is mirrored by linguistic diversity.
2. Single individuals may change the way they talk depending upon the social requirements of a given setting--this is called style shifting.
3. Diglossia is the regular shifting from one dialect to another (e.g., high and low variants of a language) by members of a single linguistic population.
4. Linguistic relativity says that no language is superior to any other as a means of communication.
C. Gender Speech Contrasts
1. In America and England, there are regular differences between men’s speech and women’s speech that cut across sub-cultural boundaries.
2. The fact that women in these populations tend to speak a more “standard” dialect and use fewer “power” words is attributed to women’s lack of socioeconomic power.
D. Stratification and Symbolic Domination
1. In situations where social stratification exists, the dialect of the dominant strata is considered “standard” and valued more than the dialects of the lower strata.
2. Sociolinguistic studies have indicated that status-linked dialects affect the economic and social prospects of the people who speak them, a situation to which Bourdieu applies the term, symbolic capital.
3. According to Bourdieu, overall societal consensus that one dialect is more prestigious results in “symbolic domination.”
E. In the News: Japan’s Feminine Falsetto
1. Most languages are expressive of and also create gendered differences through grammatical, phonological, or performance patterns.
2. One such gendered style occurs in Japan, wherein the tradition was for women to adopt a stylized, high-pitched voice when speaking in public.
3. This style has begun to disappear as a result of having been challenged through increased awareness of alternatives, some presented directly via feminism, others coming as a more incidental by-product of intercultural contact (e.g., women announcers in the television news).
F. Black English Vernacular (BEV), a.k.a. “Ebonics”
1. Most linguists view BEV as a dialect of American English, with roots in southern English.
2. William Labov writes that BEV is the “relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the U.S. today…”
3. BEV has its own complex system of linguistic rules; it is not an unstructured selection of words and phrases.
a. BEV speakers do not pronounce intervocalic r’s.
b. BEV speakers use copula deletion to eliminate the verb to be from their speech.
4. Standard English is not superior in terms of ability to communicate ideas, but it is the prestige dialect.
VIII. Historical Linguistics
A. Historical linguistics studies the long-term variation of speech by studying protolanguages and daughter languages.
B. Anthropologists are interested in historical linguistics because cultural features sometimes correlate with the distribution of language families.
IX. Cyberspace: A New Realm of Communication.
A. Terms
1. Cyberspace: that part of the world that is navigable by computer.
2. AIT: (Advanced Information Technology) is the high technology communications environment that has given rise to cyberspace.
B. AIT as a medium has allowed for the creation of transnational affinity groups and also created means by which populations have begun to resist the pressure of authoritarian governments.
1. These groups and others that are formed around different sorts of interest, as well as the nature of relations among these groups and with the rest of the world, are rapidly becoming the subjects of anthropological inquiry.
2. Transecting groups create direct communication channels between groups that previously had, or otherwise have trouble communicating--e.g. physicians and patients.
C. Access to cyberspace is not equal.
1. Poverty and underdevelopment limit access to cyberspace for some populations.
2. Some governments use artificially high costs to limit the connectivity of ordinary people.
3. Class also affects access in the United States, although this is mitigated somewhat by the existence of public access computers.
4. While class has not been eliminated entirely from cyberspace, some of the markers of class are not as functional--for example, language/writing style in cyberspace is marked by informality.
5. Recent studies have shown that the marking of class and gender still exists, and that some of the gendered dynamics born outside of cyberspace are carried on within it.
6. One area wherein inequality has persisted is in the delivery of the latest high technology equipment to schools, which consistently reflects class and race bias, as well as socioeconomic inequality.
7. “Netiquette” is the term applied to uses and styles deemed appropriate and polite in cyberspace communication (such as the avoidance of using all capital letters, which connotes strong emotion or “shouting”).
D. Elitism and Gate-keeping Cyberspace
1. As access and interest have increased the numbers of people using the Internet, “Old Guard” vs. “New Guard” elitism has developed.
2. As use has broadened, problematic and criminal practices on the Internet have also increased, generating a corresponding interest in the regulation of such communication (e.g., laws against pornography on the Internet).
3. There are also techniques employed by ordinary users and sysops (“systems operators”) to prevent and punish transgression of various ilk.
4. Kottak applies the term “gatekeepers” to people who enforce the various regulations and norms of Internet communication.
E. The fluidity of social reality in cyberspace
1. The various uses of cyberspace and computer technology have generated a whole new realm of ways to manipulate one’s identity (e.g., role-playing games, presenting various selves in course of cyberspace conversations, etc.).
2. The relationship between cyberspace behavior and behavior in “face-to-face” communities is under investigation.
Assignment: In clean sheets of paper, answer the following:
Primate Language: Read the page entitled "Primate Use of Language" created by Lauren Kosseff at http://www.pigeon.psy.tufts.edu/psych26/language.htm.
a. Who was Kanzi? What abilities with language did Kanzi demonstrate?
b. Who was Washoe? What abilities with language did Washoe demonstrate?
c. Who was Loulis? What abilities with language did Loulis demonstrate?
d. Who was Nim? What abilities with language did Nim demonstrate?
e. Do you think that language is uniquely human? Which parts of human language do primates possess?
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Language and Communication
Language
No language uses all the sounds the human vocal tract can make.
Phonology - the study of speech sounds- focuses on sound contrasts (phonemes) that distinguish meaning.
Phonemes - smallest sound contrast that makes a difference.
Phonetics - study of speech sounds in general, what people actually say in various languages, how sounds are produced.
Kinesics-the study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions.
Morphology - studies the forms in which sounds combine to form morphemes - words and their meaningful parts.
Lexicon - language's dictionary containing all its morphemes and their meanings.
Syntax - refers to the arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences.
Semantics - refers to a language's meaning system.
- primary means of communication.
- is transmitted through learning, as part of enculturation.
- based on arbitrary, learned associations between words and things they stand for.
- allows us, humans, to discuss the past and future, share our experiences with others, and benefit from their experiences.
No language uses all the sounds the human vocal tract can make.
Phonology - the study of speech sounds- focuses on sound contrasts (phonemes) that distinguish meaning.
Phonemes - smallest sound contrast that makes a difference.
Phonetics - study of speech sounds in general, what people actually say in various languages, how sounds are produced.
Kinesics-the study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions.
Morphology - studies the forms in which sounds combine to form morphemes - words and their meaningful parts.
Lexicon - language's dictionary containing all its morphemes and their meanings.
Syntax - refers to the arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences.
Semantics - refers to a language's meaning system.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)