Cult.Anthro101Berg_readings,_Final.docx

Part 3 Part eight: Religion, Magic and Worldview -Religion: the cultural knowledge of the supernatural that people use to cope with the ultimate problems of human existence. -Supernatural: realm beyond normal experience. -Ultimate problems: emerge from universal features of human life and include life?s meaning, death, evil, and transcendent values. -Transcendent values: values of the larger group that override differences and unify the group. -Two kinds of supernatural power. 1) Personified supernatural force: resides in supernatural beings, in the deities, ghosts, ancestors and other beings found in the divine world. 2) Impersonal supernatural force: often called mana, represents a kind of free-floating force lodged in many things and places. -Magic: strategies people use to control supernatural power. -Sorcery: uses magic to cause harm. -Witchcraft closely related to sorcery since both use supernatural force to cause evil. -Prayers: to petition supernatural beings. Sacrifices: gifts to supernatural beings as offerings. Spirit possession: occurs when a supernatural being enters and controls the behavior of a human being. Divination: a second way to communicate with the supernatural, usually requires material objects or animals to provide answers to human-directed questions. -Shamans: religious specialists who directly control supernatural power, may have personal relationships with spiritual beings or know powerful secret medicines and sayings. Associated w/ curing. -Priests: religious specialists who mediate between people and supernatural beings. Help petition the gods. -Worldview: refers to a system of concepts and often unstated assumptions about life. Usually contains a cosmology about the way things are and a mythology about how things have come to be. -Revitalization movements: usually related to rapid change that renders a traditional way of life ineffective. CC-31 Gmelch: Baseball Magic -Looks in detail at the rituals, taboos and fetishes employed by baseball players. Mainly associated with pitching and hitting, which have the highest degree of chance, and not fielding. Fielding has the highest execution success rate so there is little need for ritual for fielding. Rituals and superstitions give their practitioners a sense of control and with that, added confidence. CC-32 Dubisch: Run for the Wall: An American Pilgrimage -Talks about motorcycle pilgrimage that involves travel from Los Angeles to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. CC-33 Miner: Body Ritual among the Nacirema -Talks about North Americans and how the concern for our health and beauty of bodies has led to an elaborate ritual system. Part seven: Law and Politics -Infralegal: Disagreements that never reach a pint where they are settled by individuals with special authority. Extralegal: dispute that occurs outside the law and escalates into violence. -Law: the cultural knowledge that people use to settle disputes by means of agents who have recognized authority to do so. Societies evolved a variety of structures: -self-redress: wronged individuals are given the right to settle matters themselves. -Contests: requires physical or mental combat between disputants may be used to settle disputes. -Go-between: a trusted third party negotiating with each side until a settlement is achieved. -Ordeal: disputants asked to take an oath in the name of a powerful deity or to submit to a supernaturally controlled, painful or physically dangerous test. -Moot: an informal community meeting where conflict may be aired. -Courts: formally organized and include officials with authority to make and enforce decisions. -Political system: contains the process for making and carrying out public policy according to cultural categories and rules. Policy: guidelines for action. -Two types of support: Legitimacy ? People?s positive evaluation of public officials and public policy. Coercion ? support derived from the threat or use of force or the promise of short-term gain. -Authority: the right to make and enforce public policy. CC-26 Sutherland: Cross-Cultural Law: The Case of the Gypsy Offender -Sutherland describes what happens when the substantive laws of two culturally different groups collide in court. A young Gypsy man is convicted or using another family member?s social security number although he had no intention of defrauding anyone. -First cultural issue is the question of the cultural conflict between a historically nomadic group and the state bureaucracy of settled people. Identification has no meaning to nomadic Gypsies, who consider descent and extended family ties the defining factor of identification. -Second is the conflict between Gypsy religious rules regarding ritual pollution and prison regulations. Gypsies can become marime (rejected by other Gypsies) for eating unclean food and to live in non-Gypsy living conditions. -Third is the cultural clash between the Gypsy value on corporate kinship and the American value on individual rights. S-27 AAA Statement on Race -Scientific research has shown that there is greater DNA variation within ?racial? groups than between them. -Physical variations in any given trait occurs gradually than abruptly over geographic areas. Knowing the range of one physical trait does not predict the presence of others. For example, skin color varies from light in temperate areas in the north to dark in the tropical areas in the south, its intensity is not related to nose shape or hair texture. -The idea of ?race? has always carried more meanings than mete physical differences. Physical variations in humans have no meaning except the social meanings that humans put on them. -Concept of ?race? was modeled after an ancient theorem of the Great Chain of Being, which posited natural categories on a hierarchy established by God or nature. Proponents of slavery used ?race? to justify keeping slavery. Almost like caste system ranking people of unequal rank and status differences. -Eventually spread and became a strategy for dividing, ranking and controlling colonized people used by colonial powers. Later on, Europeans used it to rank one another to justify inequalities. Then Nazis used ?race? to exterminate. -Present-day inequalities between so-called ?racial? groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and social, economic, educational and political circumstances. S-28 Delgado and Stefancic: Intro -Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism and power. Questions the foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law. -Many in educational field consider themselves race theorists who use CRT?s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, controversies over curriculum and history, and IQ and achievement testing. -Critical Race Theorists agree on the following things: First, racism is ordinary, not aberrational-?normal science? (like business) making racism difficult to cure or address. Second, most would agree that our system of white-over-color ascendancy services important purpose, both psychic and material. Large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate racism since racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class people (psychically). Third is that race and races are products of social thought and relations. Races do not correspond to biological or genetic reality but are categories that society invents, manipulates or retires when convenient. Another development is that dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market. S-29 Hartigan: Saying ?Socially Constructed? is not Enough -New research may show that to say race is only socially constructed may not be fully true. Whether the research succeeds or not, more needs to be said than ?race is socially constructed.? -Two problems with defining race that way: 1) It goes against what people see as being something they experience and ?see.? Due to that, trying to say that race is socially constructed may lead to it being resisted than taken seriously. 2) Often saying that race is a social construction leads directly to claims that race is only a myth, a form of false consciousness or it is entirely a function of racism. - S-30 De la Cadena: Reconstructing Race. Racism, Culture and Mestizaje in Latin America -Very visible discriminatory practices coexist with the denial of racism in Latin America. Local explanation is that discriminatory behavior, practiced both by the elite and the dispossessed, is not racism because it is based on cultural differences and not on skin color or any other biological marker. They say that race is not important but ethnicity is. Part nine: Globalization -Globalization: consists of powerful forces that reshape local conditions on an ever-intensifying scale. Impact of international money, tourists, transportation, goods, and the movement of the island?s peoples to other parts of the world. -Globalization may occur on several levels. Most general - world system: defined in market terms and links nations and people together economically. Transnational: consists of companies and patterns of exchange that transcend national borders and may evade control by individual governments. -Refugees: people who immigrate to other parts of the world because it is too dangerous for them to stay in their homeland. -Guest workers: people granted permission to work in a country other than their own. -Multicultural: people with different cultural backgrounds living side by side. -Cultural diffusion: cultural borrowing, represents the movement of cultural ideas and artifacts from one society to another. -Cultural hybridization: mixture of the borrowed and the local cultural ideas/artifacts. CC-15 Ehrenreich and Hochschild: Global Women in the New Economy -Women migrating from poor countries to rich countries where they could work as nannies, maids or sometimes as sex-workers. They turn over the care of their own children, old parents and homes to other women from their country. In turn, they do ?women?s work? elsewhere that the women there are not willing to do. -It reflects worldwide gender revolution where more and more women are starting to work. Without the men being the sole money-makers, somebody has to care for the children, the sick and the elderly. They would have to hire somebody like a nanny to do it ? in many cases, it ends up being somebody from a third-world country. -The migration has received little media attention due to 1) racial discrimination since many migrant workers are women of color and 2) the nannies/maids/sex-workers are hidden away from public view. 3) Individualism stops the acknowledgement of nannies/maids, remain in the background or disappear when company comes. -Such movement of women had historical precedents. CC-34 Shandy: The Road to Refugee Resettlement -Nuer subject of three books by social anthropologist Evans-Pritchard. Described Nuer as people whose existence revolved around the needs of their cattle, especially the requirement to move the animals from high to low ground and back again each year. -US bureaucracy works differently than in refugee?s country of origin. Screening process is intended to determine ?real? refugees and economic refugees leaving their home voluntarily to seek a better life. Languages are a major barrier. Nuer were successful in the screening process. -Thok was born in southern Sudan. Underwent a ritual of ?gaar? that ushered him into manhood. Civil war broke out in southern Sudan. Nuer and other south Sudanese were displaced and that caused a major cause of migration. -Thok left his village with mother and siblings and cattle to an Ethiopian refugee camp, where he received his first formal education. Passed a national exam in 7th grade. Transferred to Gambela, another Ethiopian camp. War broke out in Ethiopia and Thok returned to Sudan with family where the UN had established a temporary camp for Sudanese refugees. Then he traveled to Kenya, was arrested and filled out a form with UN to consider him for resettlement in another country. USA admitted him. -Lutheran Social Services helped Thok find apartment to live in and a job. Later, he was able to get in touch with an old friend from refugee camps in Ethiopia. Thok moved to Iowa where there was a Nuer community living. -Refugee groups are scattered deliberately across USA since policymakers believe that it ?increases individuals? ability to adapt to their new environment and decreases any disruptive impact on the host community that receives the refugees.? Many Nuer refugees feel that staying in contact with other Nuer dispersed across the USA and those left behind in Africa is important. -Transnationalism: crosscutting social ties that span the borders of nation-states. CC-35 Gmelch: Why Tourism Matters -Tourism is the largest industry of all, involves 1 in every 12 worker. -transportation industry has played a key role in promoting tourism. Tourism took off with the growth of jet travel. -Cost and safety are important considerations in where people go. Marketing also has an effect on where people travel. Some travel to satisfy a desire for change or to find a place to relax. -Tourism can have an effect on the people and places that tourists visit. It can overwhelm residents of some areas. It can change how the locals do certain things. Some destinations may commodify local rituals and celebrations so that might lead to their meaning/value to degrade or be lost to local people. -Many resorts and travel agencies offer packages that cover everything from airfare to accommodations, entertainment, meals and other services. When that happens, very little money ends up in the hands of the countries the tourists visit. -Less developed countries also have to spend large sums of money in upgrading their infrastructures to attract tourists. At times, they have to take loans to do the upgrades and to pay the loans pay, they might have to raise local taxes or take spending money from public sector to pay back taxes. -It might create new jobs but they might only be seasonal. A lot of them will be low paying and provide little long-term benefits. They still would take up whatever job they are offered. S-33 Brennan: Tourism in Transnational Places: Dominican Sex Workers and German Sex Tourists Part Ten: Culture Change and Applied Anthropology Culture change can originate from two sources: -Innovation: the invention of qualitatively new forms. It involves the recombination of what people already know into something different. -Borrowing or diffusion: refers to the adoption of something new from another group. -The cultural change must pass through a process of social acceptance where the innovation becomes known to the members of a society. Several principles facilitate social acceptance: -If a person in authority supports it, others may also. -timing -If change meets a felt need, if they appeal to people?s prestige and if they provide some continuity with traditional culture. -Cultural contact: situations of contact where one society politically dominates another. -Acculturation: results from cultural contact. -Applied anthropology: includes any use of anthropological knowledge to influence social interaction, to maintain or change social institutions, or to direct the course of cultural change. Includes four basic uses 1) Adjustment anthropology: uses anthropological knowledge to make social interaction more predictable among people who operate with different cultural codes. They often work with companies and government agencies to help those people interpret the cultural rules that govern interaction of another society. 2) Administrative anthropology: uses anthropological knowledge for planned change by those who are external to the local cultural group. The use of anthropological knowledge by a person with the power to make decisions. Could be an anthropologist working with a mayor or some other administrators. 3) Action anthropology: uses anthropological knowledge for planned change by the local cultural group. The anthropologist acts as a catalyst, providing information but avoids decision making. 4) Advocate anthropology: uses anthropological knowledge by the anthropologist to increase the power of self-determination of a particular cultural group. -Anthropologists take a qualitative approach at least partially. In contrast to quantitative data by other social scientists, they use the insider?s viewpoint to discover problems, to advise, and to generate policy. CC-37 Turner: The Kayapo Resistance - CC-38 Patten: Medical Anthropology: Improving Nutrition in Malawi -Medical anthropology has three major areas of emphasis 1) study of cultural differences in health beliefs and systems of healing such as alternative therapies, shamanism and folk concepts of disease. 2) biomedical studies of human adaptations to disease, including nutrition, genetics and demography. 3) applied medical anthropology, which focuses on the application of anthropology to health-related problems and possible solutions. CC-39 McCurdy: Using Anthropology -Anthropology is slowly becoming a part of businesses and companies. Ethnography studies are very useful in understanding problems and situations from the perspective of the employees instead of just the executive employer. CC-40 Omohundro: Career Advice for Anthropology Undergraduates -