Midterm Review

Question 1

Define the following concept…

Questions and Answers

Answer 1

Anthropology can be defined in many ways, and one of these ways is “finding the questions to which the answer is humanity”.

Question 2

Define the following concept…

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Answer 2

The Riddle of the Sphinx is a riddle to which the answer is “humanity”. A common form of the riddle is “what walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?” referring to three stages of life - crawling as a baby, walking as an adult, and using a cane as an elder.

Question 3

Define the following concept…

Diachronic and Synchronic

Answer 3

Diachronic and synchronic are terms that refer to different perspectives we can take in analyzing things with respect to time. In a diachronic interpretation, we tend to look at a sequence of events occuring in order, while a synchronic interpretation looks at the big picture of the event as a whole rather than the order in which things took place.

Question 4

Define the following concept…

Making the Strange Familiar and the Familiar Strange

Answer 4

One interpretation of the study of Anthropology is that it seeks to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. What we initially find familiar is usually culturally defined - it’s what we grew up with, what we are used to, and what “webs of culture” we have spun ourselves into. When we study anthropology, we look at other cultures and try to make them a bit more familiar, while simultaneously looking at our own culture and realizing that some parts of it that we’ve never really thought deeply about before might be quite strange!

Question 5

Define the following concept…

Nature and Culture

Answer 5

The problem of the duality of nature and culture occurs frequently in the study of anthropology. Nature often refers to things that are percieved as part of the natural world, and which would persist and exist without humans. Culture, on the other hand, is seen as something created by humans, and thus deeply dependent on humans.

Question 6

Define the following concept…

The Story of the Blind Men and the Elephant

Answer 6

In this tale, several blind men are put in front of an elephant and are asked to identify the object. Different men grab different parts of the elephant and come to completely different conclusions about what the object they are handling must be. This anecdote is sometimes used as an analogy to describe the importance of interpretation and cultural relativism in anthropology - though we may be studying the same thing, people can come to radically different conclusions due to their perspectives. It’s in the connections and patterns we can find from these diverse observations that we find useful knowledge!

Question 7

Define the following concept…

Cultural Relativism

Answer 7

Cultural relativism is the idea that somebody’s experiences and beliefs are formed and filtered through the sieve of one’s own culture, and that no one culture is necessarily better or worse than any other - they’re just different.

Question 8

Define the following concept…

Coming of Age in Samoa

Answer 8

Coming of Age in Samoa is a work by Margaret Mead, a student of Franz Boas, in which the childhood and adolescence of young girls in Samoa was studied in order to reach larger conclusions about the cross-culture basis of adolescence. The work was important for popularizing anthropology, and it was, for a time, the best selling work of anthropology.

Question 9

Define the following concept…

Epistemology

Answer 9

Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge, knowledge formation, and the basis of knowing. Epistemological analysis questions what we know not by operating in its own framework, but by questioning the very basis of that knowledge and its establishment as “truth”.

Question 10

Define the following concept…

The Pattern that Binds

Answer 10

I think you mean “the pattern that connects”, which was a motif in “Mind and Nature” by Gregory Bateson. Bateson argues in the excerpt we read that knowledge does not lie in so-called “facts” themselves, but instead it lies in the patterns that emerge once we begin to look at groups of facts. Individual qualities may be inconsequential or arbitrary, but useful information can almost always be gleaned by looking at the patterns that leap out at you when you observe the big picture.

Question 11

Define the following concept…

Savagery and Barbarism

Answer 11

Savagery and barbarism were two early concepts of societal outsiders. In Greece, anyone who was not Greek was automatically referred to as a “barbarian”, and the term had a negative connotation of rude, wild, uncivilized and uncultured peoples. The term “savage” was later used more generally to refer to “uncivilized” peoples with no negative connotation, even at times being romanticized in the “noble savage” who had been uncorrupted by modern societies. The word savage later also picked up negative connotations, which it continues to have today.

Question 12

Define the following concept…

“Man in the State of Nature”

Answer 12

This idea was proposed by Rousseau, a Genevan philosopher who had a particular disdain for modern society, which he thought was corrupting people and leading them to vanity and excess. Rousseau theorized/fantasized about an ideal state he called “the state of nature”, or man in his natural habitat before the advent of civilization and culture. Rousseau thought that the transition from this natural state to a cultural one had plagued society with vice and sin.

Question 13

Define the following concept…

The Social Contract

Answer 13

The social contract is the idea that people obey their rulers, sacrificing their freedom, in exchange for the security provided by society. Different people view this exchange differently. Rousseau thought that this trade was not necessarily beneficial, while Hobbes used the idea to argue that people should listen without question to maintain the stability and security of society.

Question 14

Define the following concept…

Geographic Determinism

Answer 14

This is the idea that the features of a peoples’ environment (for example, climate, local plants and animals) can deeply influence their cultures. It was more popular in early anthropological study, but has since died down because it was seen as linked somewhat to eurocentric ideas.

Question 15

Define the following concept…

The Primacy of Individuality vs the Primacy of Society

Answer 15

This is a recurring question in anthropology: do people make societies, or does society produce people? Another way of phrasing this question is to ask whether the concept of “individuality” is a natural or cultural one. Western culture seems to emphasize individuality, as can be seen in the monty python clip we saw in class - “you are all individuals!”

Question 16

Define the following concept…

Social vs Cultural Anthropology

Answer 16

Malinowski was the father of social anthropology, which was a British school of thought, and was geared towards fostering understanding between cultures of the british empire. American anthropologists founded a parallel vein of cultural anthropology, which has different priorities compared to social anthropology due to different historical precedents of their development.

Question 17

Define the following concept…

Evolutionism

Answer 17

Evolutionism is the concept that cultures develop in a linear fashion, advancing constantly towards a state of civilization. This presupposes that some cultures are more advanced than others.

Question 18

Define the following concept…

Salvage Ethnography

Answer 18

Salvage ethnography is the practice of performing ethnography in an effort to preserve a culture that is just about to die out.

Question 19

Define the following concept…

Ethnology vs Ethnography

Answer 19

Ethnology is a perspective of studying cultures that asks questions about a culture and then performs fieldwork in order to answer or confirm these questions. To contrast, ethnography is the idea of attempting to record happenings in a manner as unbiased as possible, so that other people can also interpret these happenings in the future. Ethnology tried to give clear answers, while ethnography gives only interpretations.

Question 20

Define the following concept…

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

Answer 20

This is a work by Ruth Benedict, an ethnographic study of Japanese society that was comissioned by the United States government so that the US military could “know its enemy” near the end of World War 2. Since Benedict couldn’t actually go to Japan, she did her ethnography by interviewing people in Japanese internment camps in the US.

Question 21

Define the following concept…

Guilt and Shame Societies

Answer 21

These are two models of explaining how social controls in a society are enforced. In the guilt society model, people are expected to feel guilty for performing actions seen as morally wrong. In a shame society, people don’t perform actions seen as wrong because this would result in their ostracization by the rest of society.

Question 22

Define the following concept…

Armchair Anthropology

Answer 22

Armchair anthropology refers to the practice of performing anthropological analysis without actually conducting any fieldwork or gathering information first-hand. Instead, an armchair anthropologist will read other people’s works and forumate their own interpretations and ideas about the cultures described therein.

Question 23

Define the following concept…

Participant Observation

Answer 23

Participant observation is what goes on in anthropological fieldwork, and it was pioneered by Malinowski. In class, this was described as “deep hanging out” - it is trying as best you can to observe and record cultural practices without disrupting too much day-to-day life in the culture.

Question 24

Define the following concept…

Popular Anthropology

Answer 24

Popular anthroplogy is a set of erroneous ideas that society at large developed about anthropologists after it was brought into the public spotlight by people like Margaret Mead. It typically portrays fieldwork as a dangerous, glamorous adventure and romanticizes the practice of anthropology.

Question 25

# Define the following concept... Ethnographic Methods

Answer 25

Ethnographic methods is a set of practices that ethnographers perform in their studies to gather and organize data. For example, fieldwork and participant observation are often critical components of doing ethnographic work, and keeping a journal is often seen as important.

Question 26

# Define the following concept... Interpretive Anthropology

Answer 26

This school of thought was founded by Geertz. It emphasizes the relativity of perceptions and observations, but encourages ethongraphers to richly describe a situation and what they see as the meaning or significance behind the actions.

Question 27

# Define the following concept... Webs of Signification

Answer 27

Geertz said that "man is trapped in webs of signification that he himself has spun", with the web being a metaphor for culture. In the interpretive Geertzian view, culture is a set of symbols people share which enable them to communicate - in the reading, he gives an example of a wink, which can have many different meanings behind it, but due to a shared culture or web, people can generally understand the subtext of.

Question 28

# Define the following concept... Thick Description

Answer 28

Thick description is a term that Geertz coined and tried to encourage amongst anthropologists. In ethnography, it is the description not only of the actual actions observed, but also the percieved meaning behind those actions.

Question 29

# Define the following concept... The Ax Fight

Answer 29

The Ax Fight is a film produced by Napoleon Chagnon and Tim Asch, documenting a conflict that occurred amongst two Yanomamo tribes during their studies. It is considered a key work in the use of film as ethnography.

Question 30

# Define the following concept... Etic and Emic

Answer 30

Etic and emic refer to two different modes of interpretation and perspective. An etic perspective is a value-neutral outsider's perspective, while an emic perspective is an insider's perspective that may be influenced by culture.

Question 31

# Define the following concept... Subjects and Objects

Answer 31

The subject is a linguistic, psychological and political concept that refers to what is performing actions or has agency in a situation, as opposed to an object which has actions performed on it and which lacks agency. For example, in the statement "Tom loves cake", Tom is the subject and cake is the object. In a psychological sense, the self is often regarded as the most important thing, or the subject, in most situations, while other things (sometimes even other people) are viewed as objects.

Question 32

# Define the following concept... Subjectivity and Objectivity

Answer 32

Objectivity is the establishment of something that is viewed on a fact, based on attributes of something that everyone can agree upon. To contrast, a subjective conclusion depends upon (and is personal to) the person (the subject) making the judgements. For example, Tom and Tim may agree there are four apples in front of them (objective conclusion), but Tom may think apples are gross, while Tim may love apples (subjective conclusions).

Question 33

# Define the following concept... The Allegory of the Cave

Answer 33

The Allegory of the Cave is a thought experiment given by Plato, which describes prisoners who can only see the shadows of things in a cave controlled by pupeteers. Once allowed to leave the cave, the people realized that what they had been seeing and interpreting as reality this whole time was a big sham, and their entire understanding of the world had to change.

Question 34

# Define the following concept... Rosaldo's Critique of Geertz

Answer 34

While Geertz believed that culture could be described as a layered web of connections which could be unravelled through thick description, and that any action could be interpreted through this framework, Rosaldo thought that sometimes, people's basic explanations of their actions and the meaning behind them were actually sufficient - some things could only be understood through the repositioning of the subjective self, or living in their shoes to understand where they are coming from.

Question 35

# Define the following concept... Ilongot Headhunting (from Readings)

Answer 35

This is a practice of a tribe in the phillipines, where men feel an urge to hunt and behead an innocent outsider so they can throw the head away, symbolically carrying their rage at the death of their friend/family with it.

Question 36

# Define the following concept... The Yanommamo Controversy/ies

Answer 36

After a period of huge interest in the Yanomamo peoples of the amazon rainforest, who were seen as "untouched by civilization", many allegations of misdoings by anthropologists surfaced. A man associated with Napoleon Chagnon was accused of negligently infecting members of the tribe with measles while trying to vaccinate them. Kenneth Good married a young, adolescent Yanomamo woman, which was not unusual in Yanomamo society, but earned him the label of a paedophile. Finally, Jacques Lizot, a french anthropologist, was accused of introducing pedastery and prostitution to Yanomamo society.

Question 37

# Define the following concept... Yanomamo Violence

Answer 37

Napoleon Chagnon titled his book "Yanomamo: The Fierce People", and he said this was because that was how the Yanomamo saw themselves. Many theories of why there was violence in Yanomamo society surfaced. Chagnon believed they were fighting over women and sex, or that violence somehow earned men a reputation that enabled reproductive success. Others argued that the Yanomamo were fighting over western goods, which made their lives much easier, and were being given to them by the anthropologists.

Question 38

# Define the following concept... Reflexivity

Answer 38

Reflexivity is the act of observing how one's experiences have changed them, and can be applied to fieldwork, where one's observations about others can be helpful just as much as their observations about themselves. Rabinow calls for an increased focus on the importance of reflexivity in his works.

Question 39

# Define the following concept... Rabinow's Definition of Anthropology

Answer 39

Rabinow defines anthropology as "the understanding of the self by detour of the understanding of the other". In this case, the self can refer to the literal self (the one doing the anthropological work understanding themselves better by learning about others) or it can refer to a larger self, like humanity (understanding humanity by understanding other cultures).

Question 40

# Define the following concept... Power/Knowledge

Answer 40

Power/Knowledge is a concept coined by Michel Foucault that refers to power and knowledge as linked, or somehow the same at some lower or more basic level. It is in the academy that people's values are shaped as they are provided with knowledge - the academy wields immense power. In the context of anthropology, it could be used to analyze power relations between westerners doing anthropological study, and the members of the culture they are studying. Often, the anthropologist wields a lot of power over the people they are studing - they can provice medicine, tools, money, and are often much better educated.

Question 41

# Define the following concept... Activist/Engaged Anthropology

Answer 41

Activist anthroplogy is an idea supported by Nancy Sheper-Hughes that asserts that anthropologists have a moral duty to investigate and solve the suffering of the people they work with.

Question 42

# Define the following concept... Tea in Morroco

Answer 42

Though tea is not traditional in Morrocan society, it quickly became a part of everyday life. Tea, though expensive for the morrocans, is almost always provided during social visits as a token of their hospitality.

Question 43

# Define the following concept... Rabinow's Informants (from readings)

Answer 43

Rabinow had four major informants during his stay in Morocco. First, he had Maurice Richard, the french man who ran a hotel on the outskirts of the city. Ultimately, Rabinow thought Richard would not be a suitable informant because he was too much of an outsider to the morrocans. Then, Rabinow met Ibrahim, a man who owned a shop and tried to teach Rabinow arabic. Ultimately, this relationship also fell apart, because Ibrahim was somewhat guarded against Rabinow and did not want to fully open up his culture - to Ibrahim, Rabinow was simply a guest or a visitor, and he treated him as such. Then, Rabinow met Ali, who became one of his most important informants - Ali was an "insider's outsider", shunned by his society for his shady prostitution business but also very involved and informed about the community as a result. Finally, in the village where Rabinow stayed thanks to his connections through Ali, Rabinow had Mallik, who was an islamic scholar who managed his family's affairs, and provided Rabinow with information about the village and its stories as part of a business relationship.

Question 44

# Define the following concept... Emile Durkheim

Answer 44

Emile Durkheim was a frenchman who is often regarded as the founder of modern sociology. Durkheim was interested in increasing rates of suicide in French society, despite perceptions that the world was getting richer and better. He founded sociology to study this, investigating the importance of people's relationships in their lives, and proposing that people need to feel belonging to groups and

Question 45

# Define the following concept... Social Facts

Answer 45

Social facts are thoughts that may not be facts in the objective sense of the word, but are ways of doing things that have become accepted by large groups of people or an entire society, and operate as a given as a result. Social facts are often imposed on people by society at large.

Question 46

# Define the following concept... Mechanical and Organic Solidarity

Answer 46

Solidarity is a sense of belonging to a larger group that can be produced in two different ways with different effects. There is mechanical solidarity, often found in non-western societies, where a sense of belonging is provided by similarities between people. In the west, there is organic solidarity, which arises not due to our similarities, but through uniting different people into a greater whole. Durkheim says the difference between these societies is the division of labour - in mechanical solidarity societies, there is little division of labour, while in organic societies, there is a high division of labour and jobs are very specialized.

Question 47

# Define the following concept... The Division of Labour

Answer 47

The division of labour is the idea that as societies become more advanced, labour becomes more and more specialized, or "divided". It was central to Emile Durkheim's ideas of sociology.

Question 48

# Define the following concept... Malinowskian vs Durkheimian Perspectives

Answer 48

In Malinovski's view, societies are based on fulfilling basic needs people have. In class, we termed this as "food, sex, and death". In this way, society only serves to provide individuals with the things they need - they're how people get what they want. Durkheim viewed the needs for which people form societies differently - he believed that the needs were higher ones, like belonging to a greater whole, like a religion or political movement. This model focuses more on the importance of the whole.

Question 49

# Define the following concept... Communities of Affirmation

Answer 49

Gabriel Tarde was another early sociologist who theorized about the ways in which new technologies (especially mass communication) change the ways people interact. Newspapers, the radio, and the internet have all enabled people to connect and share opinions all across the world. When people with similar opinions band together to talk to each other about how right they all are, this is called a "society of affirmation".

Question 50

# Define the following concept... Kinship

Answer 50

The study of kinship is often important to anthropology, and it's the study of links between people based on family relations (blood) or common origins (bond).

Question 51

# Define the following concept... Geneaology

Answer 51

The study and organization of blood relations, often represented as family trees. This study has many purposes… it could be used to show the inheritance of land and political power, showing one's pedigree. It could also be used to simply show biological relations.

Question 52

# Define the following concept... The Mututality of Being

Answer 52

In contrast to kinship viewed as primarily "shared substance", this viewpoint sees kinship as shared experience… kin "live each others' lives, and die each others' deaths".

Question 53

# Define the following concept... Sharanahua Kinship

Answer 53

Who the fuck knows

Question 54

# Define the following concept... Selfhood

Answer 54

The concept of individuality, which can be defined in many different ways - in relation to kinship, personal interests, experiences, et cetera.

Question 55

# Define the following concept... Culture as Performance

Answer 55

Goffman talked about culture as being a set of roles and expectations that people play into - "all the world's a stage…"

Question 56

# Define the following concept... Personnages (from reading)

Answer 56

The idea that who we are is defined by the perceptions and expectations of other people, as opposed to your personal wishes.

Question 57

# Define the following concept... Impression management

Answer 57

We play different roles and wear different masks in front of different people, for example in an interview we are likely to use a cooperative, happy persona, while with friends we will be more easygoing and fun.

Question 58

# Define the following concept... Expressions Given vs Expressions Given off (from reading)

Answer 58

Expressions given is what a person will perform or present, while expressions given off is the actual message received by the interpreter.

Question 59

# Define the following concept... Performativity

Answer 59

The idea that "language changes the world" - speech doesn't just communicate ideas sometimes, but actually acts as a constructor of identity. For example, pronouncing somebody "man and wife" seems to change their status in a real way.

Question 60

# Define the following concept... Frontstage/backstage

Answer 60

The notion of what is really going on psychologically for a person (backstage) compared to what they present to the outer world (front stage)

Question 61

# Define the following concept... Face

Answer 61

The concept of masks and faces is common, and often used as a metaphor, when thinking about the self and the various personas ("masks") we adopt.

Question 62

# Define the following concept... Teaming

Answer 62

People often find other people with similar opinions and perceptions to them, and people often devote many of their actions to convincing others to join their "team".

Question 63

# Define the following concept... Facework at the Canada/US Border

Answer 63

At the border, officers often offload blame onto the computers, presenting themselves as cooperative and apologetic, when in reality they are still forcing searches etc.

Question 64

# Define the following concept... Gender and Performance

Answer 64

Gender, viewed as a set of roles imposed by society on people, can be viewed as something we perform - it's a role we play, e.g. the man as the breadwinner.

Question 65

# Define the following concept... Sex vs Gender

Answer 65

Sex is the biological or "natural" factor, representing the chromosomes and genitals one has. Gender is the constructed or "cultural" factor, which is imposed by society and can be changed.

Question 66

# Define the following concept... Waves of Feminism

Answer 66

First wave pushed for basic rights for women, e.g. the right to vote. Second wave wanted to reach greater equality in the workplace and society at large, for example by ensuring women had equal access and pay to jobs formerly held only by men. The third wave has focused on intersectionality and seeks to take care of the percieved shortcomings of the second wave, which was seen as focusing too much on middle-class, white female issues.

Question 67

# Define the following concept... Enfranchisement and the Indian Act of Canada

Answer 67

Enfranchisement is the process by which somebody loses their indian status and becomes a canadian citizen, losing special rights afforded to them to live on reserves, etc. The Indian act put controls in place that caused native women who married canadian men to lose indian status, and their children would also lose status. It also put in place many other situations in which indian status could be forcibly stripped.

Question 68

# Define the following concept... Headscarf Controversy in Turkey

Answer 68

Turkey was founded as a secular republic, but the majority of the population is muslim. As a secular state modeled after France, Turkey bans the wearing of headscarves in public institutions like schools, although much of the population desires to wear it. For a short period of time when an islamist government was elected in Turkey, the hijab was allowed. However, the ban was quickly reinstated.

Question 69

# Define the following concept... Travesti in Brazil

Answer 69

In Brazil, gender van be viewed as a male/not-male binary rather than a male/female one, as shown by the case of the travesti, who are biologically male but who are viewed by themselves and society as not-male. Female adjective endings and female standards of beauty are used for the travesti. Some view the travesti as a third gender, but this was not a view shared by _____ in this class's reading.

Question 70

# Define the following concept... Alternating Sounds

Answer 70

An observation made by Boas that in certain native american languages, some sounds were alternated repeatedly in words, and thus the word was impossible to say exactly the same way twice. This contradicted linguistic theories of symbols as fixed and arbitrary, and spurred on thought about the relationship between signs (words) and signification (how the word is interpreted as related to an object)

Question 71

# Define the following concept... The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Answer 71

This is the concept that the structure of the languages can influence and change our patterns of thought. For example, oil drums not containing liquid oil are described as "empty", which carries a connotation of safety with it, which can lead to negligence in fire prevention.

Question 72

# Define the following concept... Hopi Concepts of Time

Answer 72

In Hopi society, there is no concept of the past, present, and future; there is only earlier and later. Language and expressions of time are very different from european languages as a result, and Whorf theorized that this caused differences in perception and cognition of time, leading to differences in proactivity, etc.

Question 73

# Define the following concept... Language and Ideology

Answer 73

This is the idea that language is not "value-neutral" and that it contains embedded within it representations of social structure and power dynamics. For example, in 1984, a future version of english called "newspeak" is promoted by the government to stifle dissent by removing words for unhappiness.

Question 74

# Define the following concept... Illocutionary Acts

Answer 74

Illocution is what is meant when spoken, while locution is what is said. For example, when saying "is there any salt?" (the locution) what is really meant is "can somebody pass me some salt?" (the illocution)