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15 Cards in this Set
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1. What is “art” (in anthropological terms)? Identify and describe THREE categories of
art/kinds of artistic expression studied by anthropologists and provide at least TWO concrete examples of each. What role does art serve in society? |
art - the creative use of the human imagination to
interpret, express, and engage life, modifying experienced reality in the process. symbols - something verbal or nonverbal that represents something else. symbols are central to culture & creative expression Why and how do anthropologists study art? • Creative expression often reflects society’s collective ideas, relations, values, concerns. • It’s not just about the objects! Product, producer, process and context are all important. – Careful attention to the context and related associations that accompany artistic creation, presentation and performance. Three Types Studied: Visual Arts Ex 1: Brazilian Street art Ex 2: Portraits - Realism Mona Lisa by Leonardo di Vinci body art -5300 year old Otzi show earliest tattooing -Trobriand women who use face paints and adornments to attract lovers Verbal & Performative Arts Body/voice as media • spoken, narratives, poetry, proverbs, oral traditions • movement, dance, drama Ex1 : The Native Hawaiian dance form “hula” dramatizes the story told in the accompanying verbal chant or song called “mele.” Ex 2: The Moscow Ballet Art has a variety of different roles in human societies, including: • expressing group identity • legitimizing political leaders • expressing political resistance Summary • Creative expression often reflects society’s collective ideas, social relations, values, concerns. • Anthropologists seek to understand artists and their creations (in all media) in relationship to the context and associations of the expressions |
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2. How is an anthropological approach to art and symbolic expression different from that of art historians, art critics, or art dealers? Illustrate by describing an anthropological
approach to the study of graffiti in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s (as seen in film “Style Wars”). Why is context important to understanding art and symbolic expression? |
Why and how do anthropologists study art?
• Creative expression often reflects society’s collective ideas, relations, values, concerns. • It’s not just about the objects! Product, producer, process and context are all important. – Careful attention to the context and related associations that accompany artistic creation, presentation and performance. • Wednesday: “Style Wars”: art forms (graffiti, break-dancing, rap music) in an urban landscape |
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3. How do anthropologists define and distinguish the concepts of “sex” and “gender”?
Explain why gender is considered to be a cultural construction. To illustrate your explanation, discuss specific ways that gender is part of enculturation and socialization in American culture. |
Gender – cultural, societal, construction, culture shapes who you are
Sex – biological, (1) hormones (2) Chromosomes (3) Genitalia/reproductive organs Enculturation – socialization, how you learn culture, take something and mold it into a specific context use in a culture. Encultured to values, ways of speaking, acting etc. through culture (TV, ads, others behavior) to be effective gender Berdache – member of male sex but identifies with female gender |
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4. Is the recognition of only two genders a cross-cultural universal? Illustrate your answer by discussing TWO of the following cultural traditions: Native American berdache; Indian hijra; Omani xanith; and/or gender pluralism in Southeast Asia.
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No, there can sometimes be a Gender pluralism: the existence within a culture of multiple categories of femininity, masculinity, and androgyny that are tolerated and legitimate. blurred gender category, as demonstrated by
Native American berdache: A blurred gender category, usually referring to a person who is biologically male but who assumes a female gender role. In some Native American groups, a berdache is a male (in terms of genitals) who opts to wear female clothing, may engage in intercouse with a man or a woman, and does female tasks such as basket weaving and pottery making. A person may become a berdache in variety of ways. Some people say that parents, especially if they have several sons, chose one to become a berdache. Others say that a boy who shows interest in typically female activities or who likes to wear female clothing is allowed to become a berdache. Such a child is a focus of pride for the family, never a source of disappointment or stigma. Hijra: Term used in India to refer to a blurred gender role in which a person, usually biologially male, takes on female dress and behavior. Hijras dress and act like women but are neither truly male nor truly female. Many hijras were born with male gentials or with genitals that were not clearly male or female. Hijras have the traditional right to visit the home of a newborn, inspet its gentials, and claim it for their group if the genitals are neither clearly male nor clearly female. Hijras born with male genitals may opt to go through an initiation ceremony that involves cutting off their penis and testicles. Hijras roam large cities of India, earning a living by begging from store to store (and treatening to lift their skirts if they are not given money). Because women do not sing or dance in public, hijras play an important role as performers in public events, especially as dancers or musicians. Mainstream people do not admire or respect hijras, and no family would be delighted to hear that their son has decided to become a hijra. Hijras are a stigmatized group, separated from mainstream society. |
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5. How does culture shape fertility? Describe how and why reproduction/fertility is
controlled by: (1) individuals/families, and (2) states. Provide specific examples. For states, contrast pronatalist and antinatalist policies to illustrate your explanation. |
Fertility - amount of live births that a women is capable of having throughout life-span
1 - use of contraception or not and at what age to start having sex. Social reason - age, marriage. Economic reason - affordability to support a child 2 - China - anti-natalist (against babies/pregnancy) lower fertility evidenced in their low rate. 1 Child Policy - family can only have 1 child or risk receiving fines and punishment. Female infantilism is a problem (abandonment, abuse, etc.) skewed male to female ratio Italy – pro-natalism. Baby bonus – government pays money to those who have Italian babies. As many as possible. Increased fertility rate |
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6. Define the concepts of space and place and explain the relationship between human
culture and space. Describe the cultural values embedded in the layout or meanings of places like: (1) the planned suburb of Levittown, NY (1950s); (2) Uluru (Ayers Rock), Australia; and (3) panopticons in prison designs worldwide. |
1 – Levittown – mass produced suburb, used to promote equality, after 1950s people changed houses and made them bigger, wider etc. suburb looked completely different than intended. Clear set of expectations that didn’t pan out. Took bland space and embodied it with cultural meanings
2 – Ires Rock – rock in Australian outback. Large part of Uluru culture where ancestors lived. Ritualistic meaning 3 - The Panopticon -- a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the incarcerated being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." Control of cell doors, CCTV monitors and communications are all conducted from the control station. The correctional officer, depending on the level of security and segregation, may be armed with nonlethal and lethal weapons. Increasingly, meals, laundry, commissary items and other goods and services are dispatched directly to the pods or individual cells. These design points, whatever their deliberate or incidental psychological and social effects, serve to maximize the number of prisoners that can be controlled and monitored by one individual, reducing staffing; as well as restricting prisoner movement throughout the prison as tightly as possible. |
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7. What is play? Explain why anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes games and sports as “models OF culture” and “models FOR culture.”
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It is impossible to draw a clear line between the concepts of play or leisure and art or performance because they often overlap. A person could paint watercolors in her leisure time, yet simultaneously be creating a work of art. In most cases, though, play and leisure can be distinguished from other activities that they have no direct, utilitarian purpose for the participant.
Dutch historian Huizinga, in the 1930’s, proposed some features of play (summarized in Hutter 1996): * Play is unnecessary activity, and thus free action * Play is outside of ordinary life * Play is closed and limited in terms of time * Play has rules * Play contains chance and often tension Attending cockfights and participating in them is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education. What he learns there is what his culture's ethos and his private sensibility (or, anyway, certain aspects of them) look like when spelled out externally in a collective text; that the two are near enough alike to be articulated in the symbolics of a single such text; and-the disquieting part-that the text in which this revelation is accomplished consists of a chicken hacking another mindlessly to bits. Every people, the proverb has it, loves its ownform of violence, The cockf ight is the Balinese reflection on theirs: on its look, its uses, its force, its fascination. Drawing on almost every level of Balinese experience, it brings togetherthemes-animal savagery, male narcissism, opponent gambling, status rivalry, mass excitement, blood sacrif ice-whose main connection is their involvement with rage and the fear of rage, and, binding them into a set of rules which at once contains them and allows them play, builds a symbolic structure in which, over and over again, the reality of their inner aff iliation can be intelligibly felt. |
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8. Why is play important to culture and social life? Illustrate your answer by comparing the social function(s) of play in the following contexts: (1) preschool classrooms in Japan, China, and the U.S.; (2) the cricket matches of the Trobriand Islanders; and (3) the
Balinese cockfight. |
Games and sports, like religious rituals and festivals, can be interpreted as reflections of social relationships and cultural ideals.
Daguan in the 1980’s in Kumming, China regimented putting together puzzles to show that play had an end goal of being able to assemble the puzzle. Today, they make it a collaborative game with big blocks to realize a more collective approach to it. Children who played blocks individually did not really use their imagination. The teachers joined them in their problem solving and shred in their joys of problem solving. In Japan, play serves as a way for children to deal with complexity in daily life. However, as parents have become more protective of children over the past two decades, the director of the Komatsudani Hoikuen in Kyoto, Japan school felt that there was less chance for children to deal with these complexities. As in the 1985 video at St. Timothy’s Children’s Center in Honolulu, the teachers intervene quickly. One of the St. Timothy’s teachers use. Mistaken behavior is used instead. The child doesn’t intend to have bad behavior. In the sandbox, the children recreated a Lion dance that visited school. Trobriand Islanders sense of play was to outdo the competition with chants and gift-giving, but also in a way that would allow the home team to win in the end. This type of play substituted for the wars tribes used to have with each other, but found a way to incorporate those cultures into the British game of cricket. Balinese cockfight symbolized the masculinity of the males and being able to settle a score, but in the guise of a game. No matter what happens, all that would occur would be the cocks that get hurt, not the actual people. |
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9. Why do medical anthropologists make a distinction between disease and illness? Define both terms and discuss how they differ cross-culturally. Illustrate with TWO examples.
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Disease – biological (pathogen, virus), physical, quantifiable, measurable
Illness – social construction (cultural) experience of health problems Examples Disease – AIDS in U.S., China, Africa are all the same. Plague, Tuberculosis Illness – Anorexia à social and media driven – usually seen in N. America / Latin America – Susto – fear from scary experience à condition, could kill you – not seen outside of Latin America |
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10. What is “structural violence”? How does structural violence link to health?
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Structural violence, a term coined by Johan Galtung and by liberation theologians during the 1960’s, deescribes social structures -- economics, political, legal, religious, and cultural--that stop individuals, groups , and societies from reaching their full potential. The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people (typically, not those repsons
In its general usage, the word violence often conveys a physical image; however, according to Galtung, it is the “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs or .. the impairment of human life, which lowers the actual degree to which someone is able to meet their needs below that which would otherwise be possible.” Structural violence is often embedded in longstanding “ubiquitous social structures, normalize by stable institutions and regular experience”. Because they seem so orindary in our ways of understanding the world, they appear almost invisible. Disparate access to resources, political power, education, health care, and legal standing are just a few examples. The idea of structural violence is linked very closely to social injustice and the social machinery of oppression. |
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11. How can medical anthropology be applied to bring about social change that combats
structural violence? Illustrate by discussing the Partners In Health model and the use of “accompagnateurs” in places like Rwanda and Haiti. |
Preventing Pediatric AIDS in Rwanda: Lessons from Rural Haiti
The impact of structural violence is even more obvious in the world’s poorest countries and has profound implications for those seeking to provide clinical services there. Over the past year, working with the nonprofit organization Partners in Health (PIH), we have sought to address AIDS and TV in Africa, the world’s poorest and most heavily burdened continent. Specifically, we have transplanted and adapted the “PIH model” of care, which was designed in rural Haiti to prevent the embodiment of poverty and social inequalities as excess mortality due to AIDS, TV, malaria, and other diseases of poverty. The PIH model. In some senses, the model is simple: clinical and community barriers to care are removed as diagnosis and treatment are declared a public good and made available fre of charge to patients living in poverty. Furthermore, AIDS care is delivered not only in the conventional way at the clinic, but also within the villages in which our patients work and live. Each patient chooses an accompagnateur, usually a neighbor, trained to deliver drugs and other supportive care in the patient’s home. Using this model, we currently provide daily supervised ART to more than 2,200 patients in rural Haiti. This model, with conventional clinic-based (distal) services complemented by home-based (more proximal) care, is deemed by some to be the world’s most effective way of removing structural barriers to quality care for AIDS and other chronic diseases. It is also a way of creating jobs in rural regions in great need of them. |
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12. Why do cultures change? Discuss THREE ways cultures change and illustrate each with a specific example. What cultural values changed in each of the three contexts depicted in “Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited”?
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Innovation
Innovation is the discovery of something that is then accepted by fellow members in a society. A Hopi Indian woman firing pottery vessels. The earliest discovery that firing clay vessels makes them more durable took place in Asia, probably when clay-lined basins next to cooking fires were accidentally fired. Later, a similar innovation took place in the Americas. Diffusion The spread of certain ideas, customs, or practices from one culture to another. Tobacco: Having spread from the tropics of the western hemisphere to much of the rest of North and South America, it spread rapidly to the rest of the world after the 15th century. The Chinese hip hop group Red Star. Listen to the short interview with sociologist and scholar Michael Eric Dyson about the globalization of hip hop (Bb external links). Cultural Loss Abandonment of an existing practice or trait. In the 1960s, Saami reindeer herders in Scandinavia’s Arctic tundra adopted snowmobiles, convinced they would make herding easier and economically more advantageous. Here, a young Saami man stands beside his tent and snowmobile, searching for his reindeer with binoculars. Repressive Change People don’t always have the liberty to make their own choices and changes are forced upon them by some other group, e.g., through conquest and colonialism. |
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13. What is repressive change? How is Trobriand cricket a response to repressive change? To illustrate your answer, discuss THREE ways that Trobriand Islanders have merged cricket into existing traditions and changed it into a political competition.
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Repressive Change: People don’t always have the liberty to make their own
choices and changes are forced upon them by some other group, e.g., through conquest and colonialism. Acculturation: Cultural changes that people are forced to make as a consequence of intensive, firsthand contact between societies. Ethnocide: Violent eradication of an ethnic group’s cultural identity. Genocide: Extermination of one people by another, either as a deliberate act or as an outcome of activities carried out by people with little regard for their impact on others. Responses to Repressive Change Trobriand Cricket: When British missionaries pressed Trobriand Islanders to celebrate their yam harvests with a game of cricket rather than traditional “wild” dances, Trobrianders transformed the British sport and merged it into existing traditions and sensibilities. Syncretism: The creative blending of indigenous and foreign beliefs and practices into new cultural forms. Hybridity: New transcultural forms produced through colonization that cannot be neatly classified into a single cultural or ethnic category. |
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14. Discuss THREE examples of anthropology applied in the modern world to bring about
social change and social justice. |
Unearthing Evil: Archaeology in the Cause of Justice (2005)
Mass Execution, Ukraine. The archaeological evidence helped to solve the Mass killing by the SS, where People had been stabbed, forced down ramp in grave, lay in rows, shot in the back of he head, In the middle of the grave. The people who threw the group into the ditch also threw the watch that matched with the date of the killing. Partners in Health In Haiti and Rwanda, PIH has screened for HIV infection more than 31,000 persons in the first 6 months within the two districts in which it worked. The examples of Rwanda and Haiti show that there is little reason to beleive that thoughtful structural interventions will fail to improve HIV prevention and treatment outcomes. Any failure is more likely to be due to programmatic shortfalls than to stigma or to non-compliance on the part of the patients enrolled in the program. Structural interventions remove the onus of adherence from vulnerable patients and place it squarely on the health system and on providers. Profile of an Anthropologist: No Bone Unturned (Huyghe 1988) Clyde Snow, a 60-year-old forensic anthropologist who helped identify crime victims. For example, he solved whether or not a skull was a Chicago homicide or a Melanesian skull from tribal warfare in New Guinea. |
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15. In what ways are the everyday lives of Chinese workers depicted in “Mardi Gras: Made in China” shaped by global forces? What is changing in their lives, their families, and their communities? How would you characterize the kinds of cultural change you
identify in this context (e.g., innovation, diffusion, cultural loss, repressive change)? |
If workers don’t work, or if they make a bit of mistake on the piece, they are fined. If they do not follow the rules and try to stop the boss from stop punishing them, there will be someone else will is willing to do the work. There is a global demand to purchase the beads, which affects how much money these migrant workers can send back home.
Many families are separated to work in the cities at menial wages. Beads cost in US range from 1 to 5 dollars, or about 100 to 500 Yuan. The price of each necklace inn the US is 3 times the monthly salary of an average worker. I would classify this context as cultural loss, because there is a culture that is lost in the rural community from working in the factories rather than their traditional culture working the fields in the countryside. |
