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?
Thursday, February 19, 2009
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.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
ROOTS OF ETHNIC CONFLICT
A. Prejudice and Discrimination
1. Prejudice is the devaluation of a given group based upon the assumed characteristics of that group
2. Discrimination is disproportionately harmful treatment of a group; it may be de facto or de jure. De facto means practiced, but not legally sanctioned such as unequal treatment of black and white policemen. It isn't legal but it happens anyway. De jure means part of the law.
Forms of Discrimination:
1. Attitudinal - discrimination against a group based only upon its existence as a group.
2. Institutional - formalized pursuance of discriminatory practice by a government or similar institution.
3. Genocide - "the deliberate elimination of a group through mass murder". This is the most extreme form of discrimination.
PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE
1. Assimilation - occurs when a minority group adopts the patterns and norms of a more powerful culture, as when a migrant ethnic group conforms itself to its host culture, abandoning their own.
2. The Plural Society - refers to a multiethnic nation-state wherein the sub-groups do not assimilate but remain essentially distinct, in stable coexistence.
3. Multiculturalism - is the "view of cultural diversity in a country as something good and desirable. This is opposed to assimilationism.
1. Prejudice is the devaluation of a given group based upon the assumed characteristics of that group
2. Discrimination is disproportionately harmful treatment of a group; it may be de facto or de jure. De facto means practiced, but not legally sanctioned such as unequal treatment of black and white policemen. It isn't legal but it happens anyway. De jure means part of the law.
Forms of Discrimination:
1. Attitudinal - discrimination against a group based only upon its existence as a group.
2. Institutional - formalized pursuance of discriminatory practice by a government or similar institution.
3. Genocide - "the deliberate elimination of a group through mass murder". This is the most extreme form of discrimination.
PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE
1. Assimilation - occurs when a minority group adopts the patterns and norms of a more powerful culture, as when a migrant ethnic group conforms itself to its host culture, abandoning their own.
2. The Plural Society - refers to a multiethnic nation-state wherein the sub-groups do not assimilate but remain essentially distinct, in stable coexistence.
3. Multiculturalism - is the "view of cultural diversity in a country as something good and desirable. This is opposed to assimilationism.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Nations and Nationalities
A. Nation and nation-state now refer to an autonomous, centrally organized political entity.
- Ethnic groups are not necessarily so formally politically organized.
- The majority of all nation-states have more than one ethnic group in their constituent populations, and the multiethnicity of all countries is increasing.
- Nationalities are ethnic groups that aspire to autonomous statehood (regardless of their political history).
- The term “imagined communities,” coined by Benedict Anderson, has been used to describe nationalities, since most of their member population feel a bond with each other in the absence of any “real” acquaintance.
- Mass media and the language arts have helped to form such imagined communities by becoming the means of establishing a commonalty of values, motivations, language, and the like.
- Colonialism refers to the political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended period of time.
- Colonialism helped create imagined communities as different ethnic groups under the control of the same colonial administration often pooled resources in opposition to the colonial power.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Nationality and Ethnicity
Nationality - or citizenship - the nation we are a member of
Ethnicity (ethnic identity) - membership in a particular cultural group. It is defined by shared cultural practices, beliefs, values, habits, customs, norms, holidays, foods, language, costumes, music, religion, historical experience, geographical isolation, kinship or "race."
People can share the same nationality but have different ethnic groups.
Example: Citizens of the U.S. are of many different ethnic backgrounds.
People who share an ethnic identity can be of different nationality.
Example: Turkish citizens of Turkey and Turkish citizens in Germany.
Status - encompasses the various positions that people occupy in a society.
Can be ascribed status and achieved status:
Ascribed - people have little or no choice about occupying them.
examples: age, race, gender
Achieved - are not automatic; they come through choices, actions, efforts, talents and accomplishments
Ethnicity (ethnic identity) - membership in a particular cultural group. It is defined by shared cultural practices, beliefs, values, habits, customs, norms, holidays, foods, language, costumes, music, religion, historical experience, geographical isolation, kinship or "race."
People can share the same nationality but have different ethnic groups.
Example: Citizens of the U.S. are of many different ethnic backgrounds.
People who share an ethnic identity can be of different nationality.
Example: Turkish citizens of Turkey and Turkish citizens in Germany.
Status - encompasses the various positions that people occupy in a society.
Can be ascribed status and achieved status:
Ascribed - people have little or no choice about occupying them.
examples: age, race, gender
Achieved - are not automatic; they come through choices, actions, efforts, talents and accomplishments
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