Important Concepts from Unit 7 notes

Question 1

true/false: population pressures only determine how many people can be sustained by a given environment

Answer 1

true

Question 2

true/false: political anthropology doesn’t adopt a more holistic approach to the explanation of social organization

Answer 2

false

Question 3

when did political anthropology really emerge as a distinct specialization within the discipline?

Answer 3

during the second period, from approximately 1942 to 1971

Question 4

which two anthropologists operated during the second period of the development of political anthropology?

Answer 4

Meyer Fortes and E.E Evans-Pritchard, they were attempting to devise typologies to allow them to compare similarities/differences between different political systems of societies

Question 5

_____: relatively egalitarian forms of organizing social relations in which decisions tend to be made either through consensus or through the influence of individuals who emerge as temporary leaders

Answer 5

Uncentralized political systems

Question 6

true/false: Like bands, tribes are generally egalitarian with a decentralized decision making process

Answer 6

true

Question 7

what are the two other words used to describe tribe leaders in anthropological literature?

Answer 7

village heads or big men

Question 8

______________ political systems: distinct, permanent, public decision-making institutions (eg. a chief, a king or a queen, a formal government) and often involve an important degree of social stratification and inequality between different social groups

Answer 8

centralized

Question 9

true/false: As in bands or tribes, the social relations involved in chiefdoms are organized through kinship

Answer 9

true!

Question 10

______: a stratified society, controlled by a formal government, that possesses a territory that is defended from outside enemies with an army and from internal disorder with police

Answer 10

state (!)

Question 11

true/false: Anthropologists argue that examples of the state can be seen as early as 7,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt

Answer 11

false, 5,000 years ago!

Question 12

______: definable aspects of political power – the formal rules, structures, authorities, institutions, and procedures of decision-making

Answer 12

visible power (leadership roles and authoritary groups are the best examples, King/Queen, Police/Military)

Question 13

________: an exercise of power that results in political or social effects that individuals can identify, but where the sources, reasons, or strategies behind these effects are often less easy to trace

Answer 13

hidden power, political lobbying

Question 14

true/false: hidden forms of power can often lead to conspiracy theory or political paranoia

Answer 14

true!

Question 15

_______: a political style in which individuals link disparate events that may or may not in fact be linked together into an often-totalizing scheme of how power is operating

Answer 15

political paranoia

Question 16

____ power: the power relations that shape “people’s beliefs, sense of self, and acceptance of their own superiority or inferiority”

Answer 16

invisible power

Question 17

what is the most important example of invisible power?

Answer 17

ideology, the social beliefs, practices, or senses of self that make the existing organization of social relations, no matter how unequal they may be, appear simply natural and right, or otherwise encourage us to reproduce existing systems of power and inequality even when we recognize them as unfair

Question 18

________: a form of power that organizes social settings themselves and controls the allocation of social labor

Answer 18

structural power (colonialism, led to an unequal division of power)

Question 19

“________ _________” approach to ideology: ideology works primarily through the adoption by individuals of “false” ideas and beliefs that persuade them to accept the rule of the governing class or existing social order as simply natural and right

Answer 19

false consciousness, “The American Dream”

Question 20

true/false: Marx didn’t believe capitalism offered relative freedom

Answer 20

false!

Question 21

which philosopher came up with the idea of “cynical reason” ideology?

Answer 21

slavoj zizek

Question 22

“______ _____” approach to ideology: individuals may even be aware of the exploitative nature of capitalism or some other social system, and yet, through their actions, may nonetheless continue to participate in and reproduce this unequal social system

Answer 22

“cynical reason”

Question 23

true/false: Zizek developed his cynical reason approach to ideology in large part in relation to Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism.

Answer 23

true!

Question 24

_______ _________: even though it is human labour, intentions, and efforts that produce the value of commodities, in our everyday lives, we treat commodities as though value were inherent in these objects themselves

Answer 24

commodity fetishism

Question 25

who came up with the concept of commodity fetishism?

Answer 25

Karl Marx

Question 26

which ideology does the “jeans” example of commodity fetishism fit into the best?

Answer 26

cynical reason, we may be aware of the exploitation of labour that goes into our jeans but we continue to support the system that supplies them to us because we need new pants!

Question 27

what is Lauren Berlant’s perspective of ideology? why does she think people continue to accept and reproduce capitalism?

Answer 27

because they dream of one day being the successful ones, that capitalism will pay off for them (ideal of the “good life”)

Question 28

__________ made the concepts of hegemony and counter-hegemony

Answer 28

Antonio Gramsci

Question 29

Born in Italy in 1891, ________ was a founding member of Italy’s Communist Party

Answer 29

Antonio Gramsci, while imprisoned under Benito Mussolini, he wrote pages and pages on Marxism which were published as the “Prison Notebooks”

Question 30

________: a system of rule through political leaders and elites obtain general consent for their rule through tactics of mutual accommodation

Answer 30

hegemony, need mutual accomodation

Question 31

true/false: Gramsci insisted that hegemony is always absolute

Answer 31

false! it’s never absolute

Question 32

______ conducted research on the Beng people of the Ivory Coast of Africa, from 1979-80

Answer 32

Alma Gottlieb

Question 33

how do the Beng Kings come into power, and utilize hegemony to win over their peoples?

Answer 33

for the Beng, witches are considered immoral and illegitimate, compared to the power of the King. When a new King comes into power, he has one year in which to kill three of his matrilineal kin through witchcraft. He acts in the interest of ALL his peoples by using the power of witchcraft himself, and is then allowed to rule

Question 34

what were the two main ethnic groups involved in the Sri Lanka war?

Answer 34

Tamils (minority) and Sinhalese (dominant)

Question 35

________ studied Bolivian tin miners in the 1970’s

Answer 35

June Nash

Question 36

indigenous Bolivian tin miners demonstrated _______ resistance

Answer 36

indirect, they were cut off from family and traditions but made their own new traditions, while being deeply exploited

Question 37

_________: the accounts of reality that dominated social groups may devise, and which can sometimes compete with or offer alternate ways of explaining social experience that counter hegemonic discourses, typically stop short of overt resistance

Answer 37

hidden transcripts

Question 38

who came up with the concept of hidden transcripts?

Answer 38

James Scott

Question 39

________: process of negotiation and struggle between competing visions of reality

Answer 39

bargaining for reality

Question 40

explain the example of hidden transcripts and hegemonic view in Morocco

Answer 40

the hegemonic view of man is that women are selfish and stupid for not wanting to marry into an arranged marriage, the hidden transcript of the woman is that she needs to stay close to her family for a form of protection, so she refuses the arranged marriage who lives far away from her family. the women of the family never outright disagree with a man’s opinion, but instead give counter-arguments as to why the daughter may not want to marry far away

Question 41

who did fieldwork in the Moroccan city of Sefrou? (hidden transcripts/hegemonic view)

Answer 41

Lawrence Rosen

Question 42

who studied Malaysian peasant rice farmers in regards to indirect resistance?

Answer 42

James Scott