Cultural Anthropology Final

Front 1

Uncentralized

Back 1

doesn’t mean its not organized, it just means there is no central authority
• Band
• Tribe

Front 2

Band

Back 2

o Small, autonomous group (generally hunting & gathering)
o No private ownership of property
o Highly democratic, with headman of limited authority
o Leaders depending on situation (each leader is decided depending on each situation)
o Decision by consensus

Front 3

Tribe

Back 3

o Generally horticultural, pastoral societies
o Larger populations
o Leadership informal (ex. Big Men in Melanesia)
o Small autonomous groups which may form alliances; highly independent
o Political organization is temporary and informal (crisis oriented)

Front 4

Political Organization

Back 4

1. Public Policy- may not actually transfer into action (ex. USA agrees to pay for and demine Vietnam, but Congress never appropriates a $)
2. Maintenance of public order

Front 5

Government

Back 5

1. Administrative systems
2. Not necessarily synonymous with political organization

Front 6

Political Systems: Centralized

Back 6

• Chiefdom
• State

Front 7

Pan-Tribal Integration

Back 7

Mechanisms that may achieve pan-tribal integration when necessary
• Descent (ex. Clans)
• Age sets- a group of people the same age for their whole lives
• Associations (ex. Secret societies; sorcerers)
• Exchange networks (ex. Big Men & tee or moka in New Guinea)

Front 8

Chiefdom

Back 8

o Ranked societies, where every member has a position in the hierarchy (descent often the major criterion ranking)
o Office of chief may or may not be hereditary, but he is a genuine authority figure (unlike headman or Big Man)
o Redistributive economic systems appear, with chief as controller

Front 9

state

Back 9

o True, permanent government which allows state to use legitimate force
o Only found in large, complex societies
o State often has central power & formal rigid system of law administered by the central power

Front 10

Key Elements of Political Systems

Back 10

• Use of coercion (force; wealth)
• Claims to legitimacy (force; charter)
• Religion (divine authority; justification)
• Fear/chaos (terror; catastrophe)
• Reliance on deception (McNamara- Tonkin Gulf; Bush- terror, Weapons of Mass Destruction)

Front 11

Paul Bohannan

Back 11

o Tiv (Central Nigeria)-
o “Law” in western sense doesn’t exist among TIV; law is about absolutes [you’re either guilty or not guilty]
o importance of “custom”; doing right thing in a given situation; custom about negotiation & discretion
o Key Concept
 Re-institutionalization
• Central to systems of law
• Attempt to reconcile custom & law
• Law & custom always “out of face”—law is always trying to keep up with custom/culture
• Custom shapes law
• Law may be used to shape custom

Front 12

Re-Institutionalization

Back 12

• Central to systems of law
• Attempt to reconcile custom & law
• Law & custom always “out of face”—law is always trying to keep up with custom/culture
• Custom shapes law
• Law may be used to shape custom

Front 13

Papua New Guinea

Back 13

Case Study in Re-institutionalization:
- Pre-contact period ruled by "custom"
-Colonial era introductions
--British Common Law
---Queensland Criminal Code (Australian)
----Statutes of colonial era House of Assembly (elected, not totally New Guinean, Australians too)
---- Statutes of post-'75 national Parliament
-Post-Independence Introductions
----Constitution
----Recognition of "custom" as underlying law

Front 14

Laura Nader's Disputing Process

Back 14

 Grievance
 Conflict (once you engage both parties)
 Dispute (include third parties)

Front 15

Laura Nader's Procedural Modes

Back 15

 Lumping it (the other person won’t even talk about it or apologize)
 Avoidance (force other party to listen, threaten to avoid)
 Coercion (involves both sides of trouble; test of power; 1 side has power to unilaterally force its solution on the other)
 Negotiation (compromise; lost power of persuasion)
 Mediation (introduce 3rd party)
 Arbitration (3rd party has absolute power to say what the solution is)
 Adjudication (judges, juries, lawyers, courts—you can present your case)

Front 16

Enga Warfare

Back 16

• Gardens don’t hold in hilly areas
• Houses are within forested areas
• Sweet potatoes
• People are vulnerable to attack; palpable sense of fear
• Tee is the only mechanism for solving problems—pig sharing among Big Men
o Once 2 groups enter into Tee, it pacifies them for at least 6 months
• Consequences of Enga warfare:
o Schools are victims of tribal warfare
 Parents kill each other so students will grow up killing each other
 Schools are often destroyed because of where they’re located
 We always look at big picture, how we impact country at national level; we treat schools how we treat them in the USA
o Natural Resources: trees are burned to prevent people from living there
o Lots of casualties
 Doctors were forbidden to treat wounds caused by tribal warfare?!?! (in efforts to reduce tribal warfare)
o People feel constantly at threat (men would prefer to kill other men but it’s okay to kill women and children)
o Women hurt other women: downside of Polygyny
o Gardens are vulnerable to attack; women still have to harvest every day, sentries guard/ watch over gardens during war
o Traffic jams because wars often take place on highways
• Technique:
o Ambush: warriors hang out in front of only door, then others set the back of the house afire
o Weapons: bow & arrow, shields of bark, umbrellas, axes (also young men shave with axes), shovels
o Decide who fights/when based on divination dance ritual
• Intergroup Fighting Act: being present while fighting was going on, giving material help (even food); created peace committee that would declare fight zones
• Save the trees which are wounded by battle by covering them with moss and bark; group of dead trees means there must’ve been a battle nearby
• Enga live in forest areas, while immbongu live in grasslands
• Etic solutions: national police force in Papua New Guinea
o Almost never assigned to police their own areas

Front 17

Change Mechanisms

Back 17

Innovation, Diffusion, Acculturation, Syncretism

Front 18

Innovation

Back 18

 Change from within a culture (some bright new idea, new strategies for old ways, ex. how do we guarantee Americans will have access to healthcare?
 Totally new idea, concept, or behavior, ex. Public healthcare option that covers everybody [not just elderly, etc.], even prisoners
 First adopters generally modify a new idea to meet local culture

Front 19

Diffusion

Back 19

 Idea, behavior, or thing moves from one culture to another
 Involves additional processes & aspects
• Selectivity (people select elements of a culture)
• Reciprocity
• Modification (ex. Imbonggu wigs)
• Likelihood (ex. Halls cough drops)

Front 20

Acculturation

Back 20

 Change due to cultures coming into contact
 Change is usually slow
 Change is usually sustained
 Change is usually intimate
 Change is conscious strategy of 1 culture to alter the character of another

Front 21

Syncretism

Back 21

 [Doesn’t require so long necessarily]
 Special case of change
 2 cultures in contact are often radically different
 Though culturally different, the 2 cultures present an easy “fit” for the transfer of new ideas

Front 22

Contact May Not Produce Change

Back 22

o Thais are very given to not changing
o Change is not automatic
o Change is often consciously rejected
o Structural & cultural obstacles often hinder change

Front 23

Obstacles of Culture Change

Back 23

o Cultural boundary maintenance
o Relative cultural values
o Culture as an organic whole

Front 24

Agents of Change: Historical Context

Back 24

 Conquest
 Colonialism (period of time following late 15th century, awful navigators, gained courage, not skill, to move out of Mediterranean to establish colonies)
 Missionization (were there to exploit the way the people lived, not change it; missionaries by contrast have a more directed agenda, with the goal to change a cultural system)

Front 25

Agents of Change: Contemporary/Modern Context

Back 25

 Government foreign policies (typically wealthy, western nations—most able to implement foreign policy)
 Education (young immbongu children taken from home to learn Australian or American curriculum to learn their information from their perspective [though it’s often useless]
 Communication
 Globalization (ex. Facebook, idea of changing people, not just informing them of what’s going on, conscious strategy on the part of western societies, WTO, G20, goal: have our economic system transplanted into every society in the world)

Front 26

Anomie

Back 26

o Loss of cultural values, standards (people fear this, even though it happens anyway, anomie= ex. Of French word we borrowed, Emile Durkheim tried to link it to suicide, state of mind where people at individual/group level feel a strong loss of cultural values, sense of hopelessness, depression, frustration
o Most often due to catastrophe
o Sense of aimlessness and depression
o Commonly used to explain suicide

Hint 26

o Case Study in Anomie I
 Papua New Guinea
 Chambri Lakes people (known as Tschambuli)—documented under 2 different names
 Live in the middle of the water, houses on stilts, fish and live on aquatic plants
 Salvinia molesta—plant discovered in US and tropical places, used as an aquarium plant
 Salvinia weevil—eats only salvinia then dies because it won’t eat anything else
o Case Study in Anomie II
 Southeast Asian populations
 Diasporic phenomenon (not while they’re home, but when they’re somewhere else
 Linked to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
 SUNDS (sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome)

Front 27

Overt

Back 27

you can describe it- food, music

Front 28

Covert

Back 28

underlying beliefs, values, hidden, not directly visible, shapes overt culture

Front 29

6 Qualities of Culture

Back 29

 Learned: not inherited genetically
• Wink
 Shared: common property of group
• “stupid human tricks”, Letterman
 Symbolic: much lacks physical reality
• Patriotism, cross for Christians,
 Adaptive: rational response to change
• Natural: Tuvalu islands are sinking; islanders must adapt; they’ll have to become part of a new culture
• Unnatural: Patriot Act in response to communism; our ideas have been changed in response to an “attack”
 Dynamic: always changing
• Cultural goals that [sometimes] change slowly; comes from internal momentum of our culture
 Integrated: fully connected internally;
• all aspects of culture are related
• if you try to fix one problem, you may create several new problems
• ex. Enga warfare
o only thing in common is the Tee, mass exchange system run by “big men”
 not by divine placement, election, etc.; they created their own following
 big men obtain power by giving away wealth (pigs)
 marriage kept sections of Enga from fighting
 Lutheran missionaries taught monogamy which kept the warfare from being prevented
 Missionaries thought they were just changing 1 idea, but really created several problems, as fighting became more frequent and violent