Possible long answer questions Flashcards
(10 cards)
List and describe the four different types of political/societal structures examined in class
Bands:
* Least complex
* Foraging groups
* Family group(s)
* Economically self sufficient
* Nomadic
* Disperse and aggregate on a seasonal basis
* Two types:
Simple
* Composed of single extended family
* 25 - 50 individuals
* Egalitarian
-Consensus
* Leadership with elders
-Based on influence and authority
Composite:
* Composed of several extended families
* 50 - 200 members
* Egalitarian
-Certain extent
Tribes:
* Several residence groups under one leader
-Several bands
* 1,000 - 20,000 members
* Have similar language and lifestyle
* Occupy different territories
* May have common ancestor
-Kinship basis of membership
* Share organized institutions
-Sodalities
-Kin groups, age groups, warrior groups
* Leadership invested in headman
-Generosity and influence
-Responsible for group decisions
-Hunting, planting, migration
-Not full time politician
* Egalitarian
-Greater authority with headman
* Foraging
* Horticulture
* Pastoralism
Chiefdom:
* Several residence groups under one leader
-Permanently allied
* 1,000 to 30,000 members
* Similar to Tribe
* Difference is in leadership
* Authority with a hereditary chief
- Passed down familial lines
- Achievement still important
* Centralized leadership
- Leadership is an office
- Regulates production and distribution
- Settles internal conflict
- Plans/leads raids
* Controls two or more local groups
- Can have regional variation in behaviour
* Social stratification
- Superordinate – elite who have privileged access to resources
- Subordinate – underprivileged or commoners
* Inequality of wealth
* Chief responsible for religion
* Fortified towns and villages
* Pastoralism and agriculture
* Some craft specialization
State:
* Wide spread territory
* Very large population base (millions)
* Centralized political power
- Ruling elite
- Hereditary, elected, or appointed
- Power through a coup
* Development of bureaucracy
- Manage state supported structures
- Military, religion, government, social support and programs
Powers of the state:
* Defines citizenship and its rights and responsibilities
* Monopolizes use of force and maintenance of law and order
* Maintains standing armies and police
* Maintains census of citizens
- Age, wealth, marital status
* Extract resources from citizens through taxation
List and describe the five tenets of Native science as describe by Leroy Little Bear
Space/Land:
-Land is central to Indigenous identity
-Connection has led to an extensive and intimate knowledge of Creation, its beings, and its processes
-Knowledge is relayed through oral accounts of how Creation was created, how it functions, and human history within it
-Acts as an intellectual reference for history and as a guide for future behaviour and responding to new circumstances (adaptability is central to oral accounts)
Constant motion/flux:
-relationship with Creation and its natural rhythms support the development of acute observations skills and increased knowledge of the environment and environmental change
-Communities could detect what natural rhythms existed within their environments and developed cultural practices to mitigate their impact on communities
-Manifested in oral accounts as the Trickster -embraces “chaos and mystery”
Animation and spirit:
Everything is alive
* Observations over long periods of time have shown that close
relationships exist between all living things
* All things are connected and related as equals
* Therefore, all things, including humans, must be alike
* humans have a responsibility to
everything, as they have responsibilities towards us
Relationship:
* Reciprocal relationships central tenet to the whole of Creation
* All living beings have responsibilities to maintain relationships with each other
* Even if not immediately part of one’s life knowledge of and relationships with all other being must be maintained
* Acknowledges the changing nature of Creation
* Being may be encountered at an unknown future date
* Relationships and responsibilities must be forged and maintained for community to maintain their way of life
* Relationships must be proactively renewed
* Relationships can be accessed through dreaming
* Visitors that act to guide, warn, inform, and entertain the dreamer
* Dreams are non-linear
* Can interact with ancestors and other spirit beings
* Direct connection with a landscape and all the beings in it
* Must be interpreted within the specific landscape that it originates from
* Means that imagery from dreams can be incorporated into daily activity
Renewal:
* All beings must maintain relationships with each other
* Creation is an extended kinship network
* Requires that regular ceremony takes place to affirm these relationships
* Cannot assume that life will continue as it is now as it is in constant flux and undergoing change
* Failure to renew relationship can lead to disruption of the normal interactions between humans and that being
* Cannot assume that past actions will continue to happen unless an individual becomes involved in what they are observing
* Maintaining their greater responsibility to all of Creation
What three major areas of Indigenous culture did the Indian Act impact? How did these colonial policies act to erode indigenous culture in Canada?
Ending traditional self-governance practices:
* Authority removed from the hereditary chiefs
* Previously it was men who spoke for the group but women decided who the leaders were
* Traditional means of appointing leadership outlawed
* Replaced with a municipal-style band council system
* Western election system imposed to fill council roles
* Two systems do come into conflict
* Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs protests to pipeline construction on
traditional lands approved by council
Creation and management of ‘Indian status’:
* Status defined under Section 6 of the Indian Act
* Government has sole authority to decide who has status
- Creation of the Indian Registry
* Focused on male lines, not larger kinship
- Not possible for a non-Indigenous male to head up and Indigenous family
- Did not recognize traditional matrilineal lines
* Can lose status through voluntary enfranchisement
* Also through obtaining a university degree, becoming a doctor or lawyer, or entering the Christian clergy
* Major impacts for the status of women
- Woman who marries a non-status man loses her Indigenous status
- Also if her spouse receives a university degree
- Only regain it if she marries someone else with status
- Mother or grandmother did not have status
* Non-Indigenous women can get status if she marries a man with
status
* Lose all of her rights and protections under the Act
- Cannot live in home reserve communities
- Hunting, fishing, health care, and education benefits
* Enfranchisement
- Process of renouncing your Indigenous status and joining Settler society
- Giving up your Indigenous identity and communal society to live off reserve
- Different set of rights on reserve as compared with off
- By becoming enfranchised individuals would become citizens of Canada, be allowed to vote, and lived off-reserve
- Status members were the only individuals who could live on reserve
* Indian Agents
- Government officials assigned to oversee the daily operations and governance of Status Indians
- Implement the Indian Act and policies of the Department of Indian Affairs on reserves
- Supervised agricultural activities, distributed farm supplies and food rations, managed band finances, conducted elections, and paid annuities
- Kept all records for reserves – births, deaths, etc.
- Administered all contacts for work to be done on reserves
- Administered the Pass System
- Controlled who could leave the reserves
- Was not part of the Indian Act
- Patronage position in many areas
Criminalization of religion:
* Indian Act banned traditional practices
* Viewed as being wasteful or ”barbaric”
* Potlatch outlawed in 1884
* Sun Dance and Thirst Dance outlawed for Plains groups in 1895
* Bans removed in 1951
* Residential Schools
- Canadian government assumed responsibility for Indigenous education
- First Residential schools opened in Western Canada in 1883-4
- Main role of the schools was assimilation
- Education was to be provided under agreements in the numbered Treaties
- Were to be community based schools reflecting cultural beliefs and practices
* Children intentionally removed from their communities and subjected to assimilation practices and abuse
- Changed traditional hair and clothing, given Christian names
- Religious and social practices demeaned
- Could not speak their native language
- Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse
- Deaths due to malnourishment, disease, and abuse
* Estimated 150,000 individuals went through schools, 6,000 deaths
Define evolutionism and describe the major ideas that it proposes. How did it (and does it) influence perceptions of Indigenous groups in North America?
- Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881)
- Conducted fieldwork in North America
- League of the Iroquois (1851)
- Unilineal evolution
- Cultures pass through progressive stages
- Stages are marked by technological and social structures
- Three stages:
Savagery
* Fire, bow and arrow, pottery
* Nomadic hunter/gatherer subsistence
Barbarism
* Agriculture, animal domestication, metalworking
* Sedentary
Civilization
* Alphabet, writing
* State society
*Progress is inevitable
* Unilinear
- All cultures go through same stages in same order
* “Armchair anthropology”
* Ethnocentrism
* Justification for colonialism and assimilation practices
- Not cultural genocide
- Aiding the inevitable advancement of culture to its highest form
-Ignored the uniqueness of individual cultures and their non-linear concept of time
-Diminishes the continuity in time that connects the past and future, along with the bridges of the physical and spiritual world
-Fails to provide insider perspective
What is the Solutrian hypothesis and what does it propose? What are the major points that argue against this hypothesis, and why is this idea an issue today?
- European populations from the Solutré region in France crossed over to eastern North America on Atlantic pack ice
- About 21,000 years ago
- Based on the similarity in design between Clovis points in North America and Solutrean points
- Proposed in the 1970s
- Controversial
- Issue is the long period of time between the two point styles
- Solutrian points appeared about 21,000 years ago, but the oldest Clovis points are about 11,500 years ago
- Similarities likely due to independent invention in two different regions
- Has been adopted by white supremacist groups as evidence that their ancestors are the original inhabitants of North America
-Lack of specific solutrean features and tools in Clovis technology, Clovis used bifacial fluting
-Difficulty supporting the likelihood of migration of the route
-Cordilleran Ice sheet retreat proposed Asian migration route (Ice-Free corridor) between Cordilleran and Laurentide (Bering Strait)
What is appropriation? What forms does it take and how does it impact Indigenous culture?
Who were the Thule? Where and when did they live, and how did they differ technologically from previous groups? Which modern group is believed to be ascended from them?
Early Pre-thule (paleo-eskimo):
-4500 to 2800-2300 BP
-Arctic Small Tool Tradition (ASTt)
>Origins in Alaskan coast and Aleutian Islands 5000BP
>Origins within the Aldan River of Siberia
>Microlithics (small stone tools)
* Microblades
* Introduction of bow and arrow technology to North America
-Burins
* Scrapers
* Drills
* Harpoons
* Specialized toolkit
-Winter inland, summers along coast
-Focused on terrestrial animals and utilized marins resources
-Spread across Eastern Arctic (pre-dorset culture - 3200BP)
-Small bands/familial ties
Late pre-thule (paleo-eskimo)
-Emergence of dorset culture (2500-500BP)
-Developed in Western arctic and moved to east arctic and newfoundland (climate shift)
-Band society
-No evidence for drills or bow and arrow
-Largely relied on marine resources (seal and baleen)
-larger semi-subterranean houses
-Used harpoons, ice crampons, sleds, bone, ivory and metal
-Artwork: carvings, masks, wands
-Disappear from Canadian landscape due to climate limiting marine resources, Thule migration east from Alaska and disease
Thule:
-Developed in the Bering Strait region of Alaska (2200-2000BP)
-Relied on marine mammals (bowhead whales)
* Technological changes
* Watercraft – kayaks and umiaks
* Harpoon line floats
* Bows and arrows
* Dogsleds
* Using slate for tools
* Copper and iron use
* Limited pottery use
* Soapstone lamp (qulliq)
* Ulu knife
-Skin tents with rings of stone
-Excavated ground/stone walls
-Raised sleeping platform
-Igloos in winter
-Inuksuks
-Expanded east to Greenland by 1000BP due to medieval warm period (1000-700BP)
-Rapidly displaced Dorset
-Emergence of Inuit at the onset of the Little Ice Age (700-100BP)
-Aleuts (alaskan) and Eskimo (eastern arctic)
Describe the Iroquois Confederacy and the Great Law of Peace. How were agreements decided upon within the Confederacy?
- Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy
- Great Law of Peace
- Deganawidah (The Great Peacemaker), Hiawatha, and Jigonsaseh (Mother of
Nations) - Drafted between 800 – 450 BP
- Peace accord between Haudenosaunee nations
- Laws that govern the constitution of the confederacy and delineate the role of
each nation in the accord - Oral constitution that is also recorded in wampum (shell bead) belts through pictograms
- Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora
Matrial lineage
-When a matter comes to coincil it is considered first the the elder brothers’ side, initially by the Seneca and then by Mohawk. If these chiefs are in agreement, the matter is passed across the fire to the Oneida who consider it, and, if they agree, pass it on to the Cayuga. If all 4 nations agree, Onondaga decides and is then acknowledged as policy of the Haudenosaunee
What are the four major subdisciplines within anthropology? Which unique aspect of humanity does each study?
Physical:
* Examination of human biology
- Skeletal remains
* Contribute information on the life and death of an individual
- Age and sex
- General health and nutrition
- Disease and pathology
- Injury and health care where healing present
- Potential cause of death
* Genetics
- Population relationships and affinities
Archaeology:
* Study of the physical history of a culture, past and/or present
- Determine lifeways
- Everyday life and changes in behaviour
- Catastrophic events
* Examines:
- Objects/artifacts
- Features
- Spatial organization
– how people moved around and used their environment
* Can examine human behaviour on different scales
* Aspect of society
- Stone tools, diet/zooarchaeology. mortuary practices
* How people used and organized themselves in space
- Within a site
- Across large areas
- Different environments or landscapes
* Different time periods
- Pre- or post-European contact
* What environments and living conditions were like
- Landscapes and soils
* Limitations to what can be examined
* Natural factors
- What the object is made out of?
- What kind of environment is it being buried in?
* Cultural factors
- What is the object?
- How is it viewed or valued?
* Not everything makes it into the archaeological record
* Landscapes are not stable
* Under the influence of:
- Natural erosion
- Human factors
Linguistic:
* Study of human communication
- How language impacts culture and behaviour
- Differences across time and space
- History of language development and change
* Culture area concept
- Edward Sapir
* Relationships between languages
- Siberian connections in structures
* Preservation and expansion of Indigenous languages
- Estimated 75% of Canada’s Indigenous languages are endangered
- Some only spoken by a few elders
- Number of individuals who are conversive in their native language is decreasing
* 2006: 21%
* 2016: 15.6%
* Language is not just a means of conversing with each other
* Also representative of worldview, belief systems, and cultural
value
- Reaffirms relationship Indigenous groups have with the land
- Essential component of cultural revitalization and mitigating the damage
of colonial practices
* Indigenous place names are not just names
- Also conveys cultural knowledge and history
Cultural:
* Examines the current and recent past of a cultural group
* Two different methods
-
Ethnographic research:
* Conducted among living populations
* Participant observation
- Anthropologist lives with the groups that they were studying
- Have a role within society – not external to it
- Approach championed by Franz Boas
* Examine customs, practices, and daily life firsthand
- Basis for any conclusions
* Completed work called an ethnography
* Original intentions for the work:
- Study Band/Tribal/Chiefdom social structures for comparative means
- Salvage anthropology
* Work completed to meet the needs and goals of Western
researchers
- Did not consider the goals and needs of Indigenous communities
- Non-Western societies are not cultural “laboratories”
* Currently seeing an increase in Indigenous-led projects
- Ask questions that are relevant to them
- Communities creating their own research mandates
Ethnohistoric research:
* Ethnohistoric research
- Researching behaviour of the recent past
* Conducted using a variety of resources
- Past ethnographies
- Written historical records
- Must be conscious of author(s) and purpose of records
- Photographs, film, and sound recordings
- Oral histories
- Recall ethnography
Contrast the concepts of time as it is viewed by Indigenous cultures and western science. How is time culturally perceived by both communities?
Indigenous:
* Different interpretations of time between Indigenous and Western
worldviews
* Indigenous cultures view time as non-linear
- Events are stressed over creating a chronology
- Cyclic and interwoven – no distinct differences between the past, present and future
- Continuity in time connects present individuals with ancestors and the unborn
- Bridges the physical and spiritual world
- Relationships and responsibilities exist between the living, the deceased, and
those to be born
* Concept of Time Immemorial
Western science:
* Western science and archaeology is based in linear time
* Everything is placed in a set sequence and chronology
* Prior to 1950 in North American archaeology objects were placed
in relative chronologies
* After 1950 with the development of radiocarbon dating it was
possible to place a calendar date onto organic objects
- Bone, wood, charcoal
- Provide a date on when the plant, animal, or individual died
- Before Present (BP) – before 1950