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In a recent survey, “appreciating human diversity” was rated the most important outcome of an introductory anthropology course.
appreciating
D I V E R S I T Y
Culturally Appropriate Marketing
should be marketed in a culture that values large, leisurely lunches. The bag proclaimed, “You’re going to enjoy the [McDonald’s] difference,” and listed several “favorite places where you can enjoy McDonald’s
Innovation succeeds best when it is culturally
In 1980 when I visited Brazil after a seven-
products.” This list confirmed that the marketing
appropriate. This axiom of applied anthropology
year absence, I first noticed, as a manifestation
people were trying to adapt to Brazilian middle-
could guide the international spread not only of
of Brazil’s growing participation in the world
class culture, but they were making some mis-
development projects but also of businesses,
economy, the appearance of two McDonald’s
takes. “When you go out in the car with the kids”
such as fast food. Each time McDonald’s or
restaurants in Rio de Janeiro. There wasn’t
transferred the uniquely developed North Amer-
Burger King expands to a new nation, it must
much difference between Brazilian and North
ican cultural combination of highways, afford-
devise a culturally appropriate strategy for fit-
American McDonald’s. The restaurants looked
able cars, and suburban living to the very
ting into the new setting.
alike. The menus were more or less the same,
different context of urban Brazil. A similar sug-
McDonald’s has been successful interna-
as was the taste of the quarter-pounders. I
gestion was “traveling to the country place.”
tionally, with more than a quarter of its sales
picked up an artifact, a white paper bag with
Even Brazilians who owned country places could
outside the United States. One place where
yellow lettering, exactly like the take-out bags
not find McDonald’s, still confined to the cities,
McDonald’s is expanding successfully is Brazil,
then used in American McDonald’s. An adver-
on the road. The ad creator had apparently never
where more than 50 million middle-class peo-
tising device, it carried several messages about
attempted to drive up to a fast-food restaurant in
ple, most living in densely packed cities, pro-
how Brazilians could bring McDonald’s into
a neighborhood with no parking spaces.
vide a concentrated market for a fast-food
their lives. However, it seemed to me that
Several other suggestions pointed custom-
chain. Still, it took McDonald’s some time to
McDonald’s Brazilian ad campaign was missing
ers toward the beach, where cariocas (Rio na-
find the right marketing strategy for Brazil.
some important points about how fast food
tives) do spend much of their leisure time. One
>“Appreciating Diversity” boxes explore the rich diversity of cultures (past and present) that anthropologists study. These boxes supplement the extensive discussions of cultures around the world presented throughout the text.
These are just some of the reasons why three out of four Kottak adopters report that they will adopt the new edition of the text.
If you would like to participate in any of the McGraw-Hill research initiatives, please contact us at www.mhhe.com/faculty-research
Also Available from McGraw-Hill by Conrad Phillip Kottak
kot16996_fm_i-xxxiii.indd Page ii
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Cultural Anthropology: Appreciating Cultural Diversity, 14th ed. (2011)
Mirror for Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 7th ed. (2010)
Window on Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Anthropology, 4th ed. (2010)
On Being Different: Diversity and Multiculturalism in the North American Mainstream, 3rd ed. (2008, with Kathryn A. Kozaitis)
Assault on Paradise: The Globalization of a Little Community in Brazil, 4th ed. (2006)
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Anthropology
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Appreciating Human Diversity
Fourteenth Edition
Conrad Phillip Kottak University of Michigan
TM
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To my mother, Mariana Kottak Roberts
TM
Published by McGraw-Hill, a business unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. Copyright © 2011, 2009, 2008, 2006, 2004, 2002, 2000, 1997, 1994, 1991, 1987, 1982, 1978, 1974 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written consent of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., including, but not limited to, any network or other electronic storage or transmission, or broadcast for distance learning. Some ancillaries, including electronic and print components, may not be available to customers outside the United States. This book is printed on acid-free paper. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 DOW/DOW 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 ISBN: 978-0-07-811699-5 MHID: 0-07-811699-6 Vice President, Editorial: Michael Ryan Director, Editorial: Beth Mejia Sponsoring Editor: Gina Boedeker Director of Development: Rhona Robbin Developmental Editor: Emily Pecora Marketing Manager: Caroline McGillen Production Editor: Leslie Racanelli Manuscript Editor: Patricia Ohlenroth Design Manager: Cassandra Chu Interior Designer: Maureen McCutcheon Cover Designer: Cassandra Chu Map Preparations: Mapping Specialists Photo Research Coordinator: Nora Agbayani Photo Researcher: Barbara Salz Production Supervisor: Louis Swaim Media Project Manager: Jami Woy Composition: 9.5/11 Palatino by Aptara®, Inc. Printing: 45# New Era Matte by R. R. Donnelley & Sons Cover image: Keren Su/Lonely Planet Images The credits for this book begin on page 627 and are considered an extension of the copyright page. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kottak, Conrad Phillip. Anthropology: Appreciating human diversity / Conrad Phillip Kottak. — Fourteenth ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-07-811699-5 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-07-811699-6 (alk. paper) 1. Anthropology. I. Title. 2009943478
The Internet addresses listed in the text were accurate at the time of publication. The inclusion of a website does not indicate an endorsement by the authors or McGraw-Hill, and McGraw-Hill does not guarantee the accuracy of the information presented at these sites.
www.mhhe.com
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List of Boxes xx About the Author
xxii
Preface xxiii
PART 1
Introduction to Anthropology
1 WHAT IS ANTHROPOLOGY?
2
2 CULTURE 24 3 APPLYING ANTHROPOLOGY 48
PART 2
Physical Anthropology and Archaeology
4 STUDYING THE PAST 70 5 EVOLUTION AND GENETICS 92 6 HUMAN VARIATION AND ADAPTATION
114
7 THE PRIMATES 134 8 EARLY HOMININS 160 9 ARCHAIC HOMO
184
10 THE ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF MODERN HUMANS 206 11 THE FIRST FARMERS
230
12 THE FIRST CITIES AND STATES 254
PART 3
Appreciating Cultural Diversity
13 METHOD AND THEORY IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 280 14 LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION 310 15 ETHNICITY AND RACE 16 MAKING A LIVING
334
360
17 POLITICAL SYSTEMS 388 18 GENDER 416 19 FAMILIES, KINSHIP, AND DESCENT 444 20 MARRIAGE 466 21 RELIGION 490 22 ARTS, MEDIA, AND SPORTS 516
PART 4
The Changing World
23 THE WORLD SYSTEM AND COLONIALISM 546 24 GLOBAL ISSUES TODAY
572
Glossary 599 Bibliography 609 Credits 627 Index 629
v
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List of Boxes
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xx
About the Author
xxii
Preface xxiii
INTRODUCTION TO ANTHROPOLOGY
1
What Is Anthropology?
2 The Subdisciplines of Anthropology 9 Cultural Anthropology 9 Archaeological Anthropology 10 Biological, or Physical, Anthropology 12 Linguistic Anthropology 12
Anthropology and Other Academic Fields 13 THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS: Changing
Places, Changing Identities
13
Cultural Anthropology and Sociology 14 Anthropology and Psychology 14
Applied Anthropology
15
The Scientific Method
15
Theories, Associations, and Explanations 15 APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY:
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 4
Human Diversity
Anthropologist’s Son Elected President
4
When Multiple Variables Predict 18
PART 1
Adaptation, Variation, and Change 5 APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: “Give
General Anthropology
Me a Hug” 6
8
Cultural Forces Shape Human Biology 9
vi
Summary Key Terms
20 21
Test Yourself!
21
Suggested Additional Readings
23
16
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2
Culture
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24
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 26
What Is Culture?
27
Culture Is Learned
27
Culture Is Symbolic Culture Is Shared
27 28
Culture and Nature
28
Culture Is All-Encompassing Culture Is Integrated
29
29
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: Remote
Poked, Anthropology’s Dream Tribe
Culture and the Individual: Agency and Practice 37
and 30
Levels of Culture 38
Culture Can Be Adaptive and Maladaptive 32
Culture’s Evolutionary Basis
Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights 39
32
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Culture
THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS: Bulgarian
Seek Return to Whaling Past
Hospitality 33
Mechanisms of Cultural Change
What We Share with Other Primates 33 How We Differ from Other Primates 34
Universality, Generality, and Particularity Universality Generality
Clash: Makah 40
Globalization 35
35
Summary Key Terms
35
Particularity: Patterns of Culture 36
43
44 45
Test Yourself!
45
Suggested Additional Readings
3
Applying Anthropology
42
47
48
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 50
The Role of the Applied Anthropologist 52 Early Applications
52
Academic and Applied Anthropology 52 Applied Anthropology Today
52
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: Archaeologist
in New Orleans Finds a Way to Help the Living 54 Development Anthropology Equity
54
55
Strategies for Innovation Overinnovation
56
56
Underdifferentiation Indigenous Models
57 57
Anthropology and Education Urban Anthropology Urban versus Rural
58
59
Careers and Anthropology Summary
59
Medical Anthropology
Anthropology and Business
61
Key Terms
64 65
66 67
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Culturally
Test Yourself!
Appropriate Marketing
Suggested Additional Readings
64
67 69 Contents
vii
PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
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Studying the Past
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70 Molecular Anthropology 78 Paleoanthropology 79
Survey and Excavation
79
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Urge
to Cooperate Appears to be Innate and Basic to Human Society and Culture 80 Systematic Survey 80 Excavation 81
Kinds of Archaeology Dating the Past
83
84
Relative Dating 85 Absolute Dating: Radiometric Techniques 85 Absolute Dating: Dendrochronology 86 Molecular Dating 87
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 72
Ethics
Summary
73
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: The
Conundrum Methods
Kennewick
74
Key Terms
76
PART 2
78
Evolution and Genetics
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 94
Evolution 95 Theory and Fact
96
97
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Intelligent
versus Evolutionary Theory Mendel’s Experiments
Design
98
98
Independent Assortment and Recombination 101
Biochemical, or Molecular, Genetics Cell Division
102
Crossing Over Mutation
102
103
Population Genetics and Mechanisms of Genetic Evolution 103 Natural Selection
viii
Contents
89
Suggested Additional Readings
Bone Biology
Genetics
88
Test Yourself!
Multidisciplinary Approaches 76
5
88
103
101
92
91
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The Modern Synthesis
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY:
H1N1 Anyone?
106
109
Punctuated Equilibrium 110
Random Genetic Drift 108
Summary
Gene Flow 108 THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS: Adoption
in Ukraine and the United States (a Ukrainian Student’s View) 109
6
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Key Terms
111 111
Test Yourself!
112
Suggested Additional Readings
Human Variation and Adaptation
113
114
Genetic Markers Don’t Correlate with Phenotype 121 Explaining Skin Color 121 THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS: Thinking
Race
about
122
Human Biological Adaptation
124
Genes and Disease 125 Facial Features 127 Size and Body Build 127 APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: Adapting
to Thin Air
128
Lactose Tolerance 130
Summary Key Terms
131 131
Test Yourself!
132
Suggested Additional Readings
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 116
133
Race: A Discredited Concept in Biology 116 Races Are Not Biologically Distinct APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Ghana’s
Embrace of Slavery’s Diaspora
7
117
Uneasy 118
The Primates
134
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 136
Our Place among Primates
137
Homologies and Analogies
138
Primate Tendencies
139
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Wild
Orangutans
Learn Tool Use 140 Prosimians Monkeys
141 142
New World Monkeys Old World Monkeys
143 143
Contents
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Apes
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144
Gibbons
Miocene Hominoids 145
Orangutans
145
Later Miocene Apes 154
Gorillas 146 Chimpanzees
Pierolapithecus catalaunicus 155 147
Summary
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: Endangered
Primates
148
Bonobos
154
Proconsul 154
156
Key Terms
157
Test Yourself!
148
Behavioral Ecology and Fitness
157
Suggested Additional Readings
150
159
Primate Evolution 150 Chronology
150
Early Primates
151
Early Cenozoic Primates 151 Oligocene Anthropoids 153
8
Early Hominins
160 APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: Ethiopian
Paleontologist Discovers “Lucy’s Baby” Teeth
164
164
Chronology of Hominin Evolution
165
Who Were the Earliest Hominins?
166
Sahelanthropus tchadensis 166 Orrorin tugenensis 167 Ardipithecus 167 Kenyanthropus 168
The Varied Australopithecines
170
Australopithecus anamensis 170 Australopithecus afarensis 170 Gracile and Robust Australopithecines 175
The Australopithecines and Early Homo Oldowan Tools
179
A. garhi and Early Stone Tools UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES
What Makes Us Human? Bipedalism
162
162
163
Brains, Skulls, and Childhood Dependency 163 Tools
x
Contents
163
Summary Key Terms
179
180 181
Test Yourself!
181
Suggested Additional Readings
183
177
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Archaic Homo
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184
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 186
Early Homo
187
H. rudolfensis and H. habilis H. habilis and H. erectus
187
187
Out of Africa I: H. erectus
189
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Headstrong
Hominins
190
Paleolithic Tools
190
Adaptive Strategies of H. erectus
192
The Evolution and Expansion of H. erectus 193
Archaic H. Sapiens
194
Ice Ages of the Pleistocene
195
H. antecessor and H. heidelbergensis
195
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: Fossils
Are Treasure-Trove for Scientists
in Spain 196
The Neandertals 198 Cold-Adapted Neandertals
Homo Floresiensis
10
Key Terms
199
The Neandertals and Modern People
Summary
200
202 203
Test Yourself!
203
Suggested Additional Readings
201
205
The Origin and Spread of Modern Humans
206
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 208
Modern Humans
208
Out of Africa II 208 Genetic Evidence for Out of Africa II 211 APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: Improved
Science Puts Modern Humans in Europe Earlier 212 The Advent of Behavioral Modernity
212
Advances in Technology 215 Glacial Retreat Cave Art
216
217
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: South
African Cave Provides Earliest Evidence for Modern Behavior 218 The Settling of Australia Settling the Americas
219
221
The Peopling of the Pacific 223 Summary Key Terms
226 227
Test Yourself!
227
Suggested Additional Readings
229
Contents
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The First Farmers
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230 Other Old World Food Producers
238
The African Neolithic 238 The Neolithic in Europe and Asia 239
The First American Farmers
241
The Tropical Origins of New World Domestication 243 APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: The
Early Origin of New World Domestication 244 The Mexican Highlands 245
Explaining the Neolithic
246
Geography and the Spread of Food Production 247
Costs and Benefits Summary Key Terms
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 232
The Mesolithic
250 251
Test Yourself!
233
248
251
Suggested Additional Readings
The Neolithic 234
253
The First Farmers and Herders in the Middle East 235 Genetic Changes and Domestication 237 Food Production and the State 238
12
The First Cities and States
254
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 256
The Origin of the State Hydraulic Systems
256
257
Long-Distance Trade Routes 257 Population, War, and Circumscription 257
Attributes of States
259
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: Pseudo-
Archaeology
260
State Formation in the Middle East Urban Life
260
260
The Elite Level
263
Social Ranking and Chiefdoms 263 Advanced Chiefdoms The Rise of the State
Other Early States African States
266 266
268
269
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: The
Roadways of Ancient Peru
xii
Contents
Hanging 270
State Formation in Mesoamerica Early Chiefdoms and Elites 272
272
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Warfare and State Formation: The Zapotec Case 273 States in the Valley of Mexico
274
13
Key Terms
277 278
Test Yourself!
Why States Collapse 276 The Maya Decline
Summary
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278
Suggested Additional Readings
276
279
Method and Theory in Cultural Anthropology
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES
280
282
Ethnography: Anthropology’s Distinctive Strategy 283 Ethnographic Techniques
283
Observation and Participant Observation 283 APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Even
Get Culture Shock
Anthropologists
284
Conversation, Interviewing, and Interview Schedules 284 The Genealogical Method Key Cultural Consultants
286 286
Life Histories 287 Local Beliefs and Perceptions, and the Ethnographer’s 287 Problem-Oriented Ethnography Longitudinal Research 289
Culture, Space, and Scale
Survey Research
289 Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology 301
290
Structuralism 302
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: Should
Anthropologists Study Terrorism? Theory in Anthropology over Time Evolutionism
294
The Boasians
295
Functionalism
297
PART 3
Team Research
288
288
292 294
Processual Approaches 303 World-System Theory and Political Economy 303 Culture, History, Power 304
Anthropology Today
Configurationalism 298
Summary
Neoevolutionism
Key Terms
299
Cultural Materialism
300 300
Culture and the Individual
300
304
306 307
Test Yourself!
Science and Determinism
307
Suggested Additional Readings
309
Contents
APPRECIATING CULTURAL DIVERSITY
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Language and Communication
310
Language, Thought, and Culture
318
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis 318 Focal Vocabulary 319 Meaning 320 THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS: It’s
Nickname
All in the
321
Sociolinguistics
321
Linguistic Diversity 321 APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Googling
Locally
322
Gender Speech Contrasts 323 Language and Status Position 324 Stratification 325 Black English Vernacular (BEV) 326 UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES
What is Language?
312
Historical Linguistics
312
Nonhuman Primate Communication Call Systems
313
313
Sign Language
313
The Origin of Language
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: Using
Modern Technology to Preserve Linguistic and Cultural Diversity 330 Summary
315
331
Nonverbal Communication
315
Key Terms
The Structure of Language
317
Test Yourself!
Speech Sounds
15
328
Language Loss 328
317
331 332
Suggested Additional Readings
Ethnicity and Race
333
334
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 336
Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity Status Shifting
337
337
Race and Ethnicity
338
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: What’s
with Race?
Wrong
340
The Social Construction of Race
341
Hypodescent: Race in the United States 342 Race in the Census
343
Not Us: Race in Japan 343 Phenotype and Fluidity: Race in Brazil 345
Ethnic Groups, Nations, and Nationalities 347
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: The
Nationalities and Imagined Communities 347
Ethnic Tolerance and Accommodation Assimilation
348
The Plural Society
Multiculturalism and Ethnic Identity 349
350
Prejudice and Discrimination 351
xiv
Contents
Aftermaths of Oppression 355
Summary Key Terms
348
Roots of Ethnic Conflict
347
Basques
Chips in the Mosaic 354
356 357
Test Yourself!
357
Suggested Additional Readings
359
352
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Making a Living
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360
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 362
Adaptive Strategies Foraging
362
363
San: Then and Now
364
Correlates of Foraging
Cultivation
367
Horticulture Agriculture
366
367 368
The Cultivation Continuum
369
Intensification: People and the Environment 369 APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY:
A World on Fire
Distribution, Exchange
370
380
THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS: Children, Parents, and Family Economics 372
The Market Principle 380
Pastoralism
Reciprocity 380
Redistribution 380
372
Modes of Production
Coexistence of Exchange Principles 382
374
Production in Nonindustrial Societies Means of Production
Summary
375
Alienation in Industrial Economies
Economizing and Maximization Alternative Ends
Potlatching
374
376
Key Terms
377
382 385 385
Test Yourself!
377
386
Suggested Additional Readings
387
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY:
Scarcity and the Betsileo
17
378
Political Systems
388
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 390
What is “The Political”? 390 Types and Trends 391 Bands and Tribes Foraging Bands
392 392
Tribal Cultivators
395
The Village Head
395
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Yanomami Update: Venezuela Takes Charge, Problems Arise 396
The “Big Man”
398
Pantribal Sodalities and Age Grades 398 Nomadic Politics
Chiefdoms
400
402
Political and Economic Systems in Chiefdoms 403 Social Status in Chiefdoms
403
Contents
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THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS: Comparing
Social Control
Political Parties in Guatemala and the United States 404 Status Systems in Chiefdoms and States 404 Stratification
States
405
Population Control Judiciary
18
412 413
Test Yourself! 407
Fiscal Systems
Politics, Shame, and Sorcery 410
Key Terms
406
407
Enforcement
Weapons of the Weak 409
Summary
405
408
Hegemony 409
413
Suggested Additional Readings
415
407
Gender
416 Matriarchy 429
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 418
Sex and Gender
Increased Gender Stratification—PatrilinealPatrilocal Societies 430
418
Recurrent Gender Patterns 420
Gender among Agriculturalists
Gender among Foragers 412
Gender and Industrialism
Patriarchy and Violence
432 432
The Feminization of Poverty 434
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: A
Women’s Train for India Gender among Horticulturalists
431
424
Sexual Orientation
435
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: Hidden
426
Reduced Gender Stratification—Matrilineal, Matrilocal Societies 427 Reduced Gender Stratification—Matrifocal Societies 428
Women, Public Men–Public Women, Hidden Men 436 Summary
439
Key Terms
440
Test Yourself!
440
Suggested Additional Readings
442
THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS:
Motherhood as the Key Component of Female Identity in Serbia 429
19
Families, Kinship, and Descent
444
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES
Families
446
446
Nuclear and Extended Families 447 Industrialism and Family Organization 449 APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Social
Kinship Style
Security,
450
Changes in North American Kinship 450 The Family among Foragers 453
Descent
454
Descent Groups 454 Lineages, Clans, and Residence Rules 455
xvi
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Ambilineal Descent
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Bifurcate Merging Terminology 460
455
Family versus Descent
Kinship Calculation
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Generational Terminology 461
455
Bifurcate Collateral Terminology 462
456
Genealogical Kin Types and Kin Terms
457
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: When
Summary
463
Are Two Dads Better than One?—When the Women Are in Charge 458
Key Terms
Kinship Terminology
Suggested Additional Readings
Lineal Terminology
20
459
463
What Is Marriage?
468
Incest and Exogamy
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY:
Love and Marriage
Although Tabooed, Incest Does Happen 471 Instinctive Horror
472
Biological Degeneration
Marriage as Group Alliance 477 Bridewealth and Dowry 477
469
Explaining the Taboo 471
472
Attempt and Contempt 472
478
Durable Alliances 481
Divorce
482
Plural Marriages
483
Polygyny 483
Marry Out or Die Out 473
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Five
Endogamy 473
Wives and 55 Children
473
484
Polyandry 486
474
THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS: Families,
Summary
486
Kinship, and Descent (a Turkmen Student Writes) 475
Key Terms
Marital Rights and Same-Sex Marriage 475
Suggested Additional Readings
21
465
466
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 468
Royal Endogamy
Test Yourself!
460
Marriage
Caste
463
Religion
487
Test Yourself!
487 489
490
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 492
What Is Religion? 492 Origins, Functions, and Expressions of Religion 493 Animism
493
Mana and Taboo 493 Magic and Religion
495
Anxiety, Control, Solace 495 Rituals
496
Rites of Passage Totemism
496
497
Contents
xvii
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APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: A
Parisian
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Religion and Change
Celebration and a Key Tourist Destination 498
Revitalization Movements 507 Syncretisms 507
THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS: Driven
Religion or by Popular Culture
500
Religion and Cultural Ecology
500
by
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Islam
Globally, Adapting Locally
501
A New Age 511
Secular Rituals
Kinds of Religion
503
Summary
Religion in States
504
Key Terms
Protestant Values and the Rise of Capitalism 504
World Religions
22
Expanding 508
Antimodernism and Fundamentalism 510
Sacred Cattle in India 500
Social Control
506
512
512 513
Test Yourself!
513
Suggested Additional Readings
505
Arts, Media, and Sports
515
516
THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS: Visual
Hong Kong and the United States
Arts in 526
Representations of Art and Culture 526 Art and Communication 526 Art and Politics 527 The Cultural Transmission of the Arts 527 The Artistic Career 529 APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: I’ll
Get You, 530
My Pretty, and Your Little R2 Continuity and Change 531
Media and Culture
533
Using the Media 533 Assessing the Effects of Television APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: What
to Class?
535
Ever Happened
536
Sports and Culture
538
Football 538 UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 518
What Is Art?
518
Art and Religion Locating Art
Summary
519
Key Terms
520
Art and Individuality
Art, Society, and Culture
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Contents
523
542 543
Test Yourself!
522
The Work of Art 522 Ethnomusicology
What Determines International Sports Success? 539
543
Suggested Additional Readings 523
545
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The World System and Colonialism
THE CHANGING WORLD
kot16996_fm_i-xxxiii.indd Page xix
546
THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS: Education
and Colonialism Colonialism
556
556
British Colonialism 557 French Colonialism 558 Colonialism and Identity 559 Postcolonial Studies 559
Development
560
Neoliberalism 560
The Second World
561
Postsocialist Transitions 562
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 548
The World System
The World System Today
549
The Emergence of the World System 549
Reveal Some Truth in “Noble Savage” Myth 550 Industrialization
Summary
APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: Bones
552
Causes of the Industrial Revolution
552
Socioeconomic Effects of Industrialization 554
563
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY:
Sustainable?
Is Mining
564
Industrial Degradation 565
Key Terms
567 568
Test Yourself!
568
Suggested Additional Readings
Industrial Stratification 554
24
PART 4
Communism 561
Global Issues Today
570
572
UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES 574
Global Climate Change 575 APPRECIATING DIVERSITY: The
Refugees
Plight of Climate
576
Environmental Anthropology
579
Global Assaults on Local Autonomy 581 Deforestation
582
Risk Perception
583
Interethnic Contact Religious Change
584 584
Cultural Imperialism
585
Making and Remaking Culture Indigenizing Popular Culture A Global System of Images
587
587 587
A Global Culture of Consumption
People in Motion
587
Summary
589
APPRECIATING ANTHROPOLOGY: Giving
American Dream
590
up the
Key Terms
594
594 594
Test Yourself!
Indigenous Peoples 592 Identity in Indigenous Politics
The Continuance of Diversity
595
Suggested Additional Readings
597
593 Contents
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ANTHROPOLOGY
Anthropologist’s Son Elected President 16
Fossils in Spain Are Treasure-Trove for Scientists 196
Remote and Poked, Anthropology’s Dream Tribe 30
Improved Science Puts Modern Humans in Europe Earlier 212
Archaeologist in New Orleans Finds a Way to Help the Living 54
The Early Origin of New World Domestication 244
The Kennewick Conundrum
Pseudo-Archaeology
H1N1 Anyone?
74
106
Adapting to Thin Air Endangered Primates
Ethiopian Paleontologist Discovers “Lucy’s Baby” 164
appreciating “Give Me a Hug”
What’s Wrong with Race?
478
A Parisian Celebration and a Key Tourist Destination 498
340
I’ll Get You, My Pretty, and Your Little R2 530 Is Mining Sustainable?
564
Giving up the American Dream
590
D I V E R S I T Y Wild Orangutans Learn Tool Use
6
Culture Clash: Makah Seek Return to Whaling Past 40 Culturally Appropriate Marketing
64
Urge to Cooperate Appears to Be Innate and Basic to Human Society and Culture 80 Intelligent Design versus Evolutionary Theory 98 Ghana’s Uneasy Embrace of Slavery’s Diaspora 118
Headstrong Hominins
140
190
South African Cave Provides Earliest Evidence for Modern Behavior 218 The Hanging Roadways of Ancient Peru 270 Even Anthropologists Get Culture Shock 284 Googling Locally The Basques
322
Yanomami Update: Venezuela Takes Charge, Problems Arise 396 A Women’s Train for India
424
Social Security, Kinship Style Five Wives and 55 Children
450 484
Islam Expanding Globally, Adapting Locally 508 What Ever Happened to Class?
536
Bones Reveal Some Truth in “Noble Savage” Myth 550
352
Scarcity and the Betsileo
xx
Love and Marriage
260
Using Modern Technology to Preserve Linguistic and Cultural Diversity 330
148
Hidden Women, Public Men—Public Women, Hidden Men 436 When Are Two Dads Better than One?— When the Women Are in Charge 458
Should Anthropologists Study Terrorism? 292
128
A World on Fire 370
378
The Plight of Climate Refugees
576
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living anthropology VIDEOS “New” Knowledge among the Batak 10 Being Raised Canela
Unearthing Evil: Archaeology in the Cause of Justice 51 83 96
Origins of the Modern Concepts of Race
Lucy
Absolute Dating Techniques
150
Origins of the World’s Languages Agriculture and Change
211
Facts about the Australopithecines Compared with Chimps and Homo 173
240
Summary of Data on Homo Fossil Groups
Adoption into the Canela Language Acquisition
318
Seven World Areas Where Food Production Was Independently Invented 241
351
Leadership among the Canela Marginalization of Women
381
Egalitarian, Ranked, and Stratified Societies
419
Courtship among the Dinka
Globalization
The Benefits and Costs of Food Production (Compared with Foraging) 250
395
Tradition Meets Law: Families of China 481
Ethnography and Survey Research Contrasted
Language Contrasted with Call Systems
Cultural Survival through History
Types of Ethnic Interaction
586
Foragers Then and Now
through the eyes of
315
356 365
Yehude Cohen’s Adaptive Strategies (Economic Typology) Summarized 373
OTHERS
Changing Places, Changing Identities
Economic Basis of and Political Regulation in Bands, Tribes, Chiefdoms, and States 405
13
The Four Systems of Kinship Terminology, with Their Social and Economic Correlates 462
33
Adoption in Ukraine and the United States (a Ukrainian Student’s View) 109
Oppositions between Liminality and Normal Social Life 497
Thinking about Race
Anthony F. C. Wallace’s Typology of Religion
It’s All in the Nickname
122
Children, Parents, and Family Economics
372
Ascent and Decline of Nations within the World System 563
Comparing Political Parties in Guatemala and the United States 404
What Heats, What Cools, the Earth?
579
Motherhood as the Key Component of Female Identity in Serbia 429 Families, Kinship, and Descent (a Turkmen Student Writes) 475 Driven by Religion or by Popular Culture
500
Visual Arts in Hong Kong and the United States
504
Star Wars as a Structural Transformation of The Wizard of Oz 532
321
Education and Colonialism
291
Timeline and Key Works in Anthropological Theory 305
528
561
Bulgarian Hospitality
264
Archaeological Periods in Middle Eastern State Formation 267
448
505
Art of the Aborigines
195
The Transition to Food Production in the Middle East 234
288
Insurance Policies for Hunter-Gatherers?
Ritual Possession
87
Advantages and Disadvantages (Depending on Environment) of Dark and Light Skin Color 123
266
The Return Home
19
The Four Subfields and Two Dimensions of Anthropology 51
117
174
The First States
Ethnography and Ethnology—Two Dimensions of Cultural Anthropology 10 Steps in the Scientific Method
Theory of Evolution and Darwin
Apes Make Tools
RECAP Forms of Cultural and Biological Adaptation (to High Altitude) 8
29
The Necropolis of Pupput
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526
556 List of Boxes
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Conrad Phillip Kottak (A.B. Colum-
A Guide for Student Anthropologists (edited 1982)
bia College, 1963; Ph.D. Columbia
(both University of Michigan Press), and Madagascar:
University, 1966) is the Julian H.
Society and History (edited 1986) (Carolina Academic
Steward Collegiate Professor of
Press). The most recent editions (14th) of his texts An-
Anthropology at the University of
thropology: Appreciating Human Diversity (this book)
Michigan, where he has taught
and Cultural Anthropology: Appreciating Cultural Di-
since 1968. He served as anthro-
versity were published by McGraw-Hill in 2010. He
pology department chair from
also is the author of Mirror for Humanity: A Concise
1996 to 2006. In 1991 he was hon-
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (7th ed.,
ored for his teaching by the uni-
McGraw-Hill, 2009) and Window on Humanity: A Con-
versity and the state of Michigan.
cise Introduction to Anthropology (4th ed., McGraw-
In 1992 he received an excellence in teaching award
Hill, 2010). With Kathryn A. Kozaitis, he wrote On Being
from the College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts of
Different: Diversity and Multiculturalism in the North
the University of Michigan. In 1999 the American An-
American Mainstream (3rd ed., McGraw-Hill, 2008).
Conrad Phillip Kottak
thropological Association (AAA) awarded Professor
Conrad Kottak’s articles have appeared in aca-
Kottak the AAA/Mayfield Award for Excellence in the
demic journals, including American Anthropologist,
Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology. In 2005 he
Journal of Anthropological Research, American Eth-
was elected to the American Academy of Arts and
nologist, Ethnology, Human Organization, and Luso-
Sciences, and in 2008 to the National Academy of
Brazilian Review. He also has written for more popular
Sciences.
journals, including Transaction/SOCIETY, Natural His-
Professor Kottak has done ethnographic fieldwork
tory, Psychology Today, and General Anthropology.
in Brazil (since 1962), Madagascar (since 1966), and
In recent research projects, Kottak and his col-
the United States. His general interests are in the pro-
leagues have investigated the emergence of ecological
cesses by which local cultures are incorporated—and
awareness in Brazil, the social context of deforestation
resist incorporation—into larger systems. This inter-
and biodiversity conservation in Madagascar, and pop-
est links his earlier work on ecology and state forma-
ular participation in economic development planning
tion in Africa and Madagascar to his more recent
in northeastern Brazil. Professor Kottak has been ac-
research on globalization, national and international
tive in the University of Michigan’s Center for the Eth-
culture, and the mass media.
nography of Everyday Life, supported by the Alfred P.
The fourth edition of Kottak’s popular case study
Sloan Foundation. In that capacity, for a research proj-
Assault on Paradise: The Globalization of a Little Com-
ect titled “Media, Family, and Work in a Middle-Class
munity in Brazil, based on his continuing field work in
Midwestern Town,” Kottak and his colleague Lara
Arembepe, Bahia, Brazil, was published in 2006 by
Descartes have investigated how middle-class fami-
McGraw-Hill. In a research project during the 1980s,
lies draw on various media in planning, managing,
Kottak blended ethnography and survey research in
and evaluating their choices and solutions with re-
studying “Television’s Behavioral Effects in Brazil.”
spect to the competing demands of work and family.
That research is the basis of Kottak’s book Prime-Time
That research is the basis of their recent book Media
Society: An Anthropological Analysis of Television and
and Middle Class Moms: Images and Realties of Work
Culture (revised edition published by Left Coast Press
and Family (Descartes and Kottak 2009, Routledge/
in 2010)—a comparative study of the nature and im-
Taylor and Francis).
pact of television in Brazil and the United States. Kottak’s other books include The Past in the Pres-
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Conrad Kottak appreciates comments about his books from professors and students. He can be reached
ent: History, Ecology and Cultural Variation in High-
by e-mail at the following Internet address:
land Madagascar (1980), Researching American Culture:
[email protected].
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When I wrote the first edition of this book in the 1970s, the field of anthropology was changing rapidly. Anthropologists were writing about a “new archaeology” and a “new ethnography.” Studies of language as actually used in society were revolutionizing overly formal and static linguistic models. Symbolic and interpretive approaches were joining ecological and materialist ones. I strove to write a book that addressed all these changes, while also providing a solid foundation of core concepts and the basics. Anthropology continues to be an exciting field. Profound changes—including advances in communication and transportation, the expansion of global capitalism, and the challenges of a changing climate—have affected the people and societies that anthropologists study. While any competent text must present anthropology’s core, it must also demonstrate anthropology’s relevance to today’s world.
Appreciating the Experiences Students Bring to the Classroom One of my main goals for this edition has been to show students why anthropology should matter to them. Previous editions included short boxed sections titled “Understanding Ourselves.” For this edition, I’ve expanded these accounts and moved them to the beginning of each chapter. These introductions, which draw on student experience, using familiar examples, illustrate the relevance of anthropology to everyday life and set the stage for the content that follows. Another feature that draws on student experience, “Through the Eyes of Others,” offers short accounts by foreign students of how they came to perceive and appreciate key differences between their own cultures of origin and contemporary culture in the United States. These accounts point out aspects of U.S. culture that may be invisible to students who are from the United States, because they are understood as being “normal” or “just the way things are.” As these examples illustrate, the viewpoint of an outsider can help make visible particular features of one’s own culture. Both the “Understanding Ourselves” introductions and “Through the Eyes of Others” boxes tie into a key theme of this book; namely, that anthropology helps us understand ourselves. By studying other cultures, we learn to appreciate, to question, and to reinterpret aspects of our own. As one cultural variant among many, American culture is worthy of anthropological study and analysis. Any adequate study of contemporary American culture must include popular culture. I keep up with developments in American—and, increasingly, international—popular culture, and use popular culture examples to help my students, and my readers, understand and appreciate anthropological concepts and approaches. To cite just a few examples, the anthropology of Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, and Desperate Housewives are explored in this book, along with more traditional aspects of American culture. Appreciating Human Diversity No academic field has a stronger commitment to, or respect for, human diversity than anthropology does. Anthropologists routinely listen to, record, and attempt to represent voices and perspectives from a multitude of times, places, countries, and cultures. Through its various subfields, anthropology brings together biological, social, cultural, linguistic, and historical approaches. Multiple and diverse perspectives provide a fuller appreciation of what it means to be human. Newly imagined for this edition, chapters now contain boxes titled “Appreciating Diversity,” which focus on the various forms of human biological and
cultural diversity, in time and space that make anthropology so fascinating. Some of these explorations of diversity, for example the recent popularity of hugging in U.S. high schools, will likely be familiar to students. Others, like the story of a Turkish man with five wives and fifty-five children, will prompt them to consider human societies very different from their own. A key feature of today’s student body that makes anthropology more relevant than ever is its increasing diversity. Anthropologists once were the experts who introduced diversity to the students. The tables may have turned. Sometime during the 1990s the most common name in my 101 class shifted from Johnson to Kim. Today’s students already know a lot about diversity and cultural differences, often from their own backgrounds as well as from the media. For instructors, knowing one’s audience today means appreciating that, compared with us when we first learned anthropology, the undergraduate student body is likely to be (1) more diverse, (2) more familiar with diversity; and (3) more comfortable with diversity. We’re very lucky to be able to build on such student experience. Appreciating the Field of Anthropology I want students to appreciate the field of anthropology and the various kinds of diversity it studies. How do anthropologists work? How does anthropology contribute to our understanding of the world? To help students answer these questions, chapters now contain boxed sections titled “Appreciating Anthropology,” which focus on the value and usefulness of anthropological research and approaches. At its core, anthropology is grounded in both the sciences and the humanities. As a science, anthropology relies on systematic observation, careful recordkeeping, and evidence-based analysis. Anthropologists apply these tools of the scientific method to the study of human cultures. In the words of Clyde Kluckhohn (1944), “Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today: How can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together?” Anthropology reveals its roots in the humanities through the comparative and cross-cultural perspective it brings to bear on the full range of human endeavors and creative expressions. In fact, I see anthropology as one of the most humanistic academic fields because of its fundamental appreciation of human diversity. Anthropologists routinely listen to, record, and attempt to represent voices and perspectives from a multitude of times, places, countries, cultures, and fields. Multiple and diverse perspectives provide a fuller appreciation of what it means to be human.
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“Appreciating Diversity” Boxes These boxes explore the rich diversity of cultures—past and
appreciating
D I V E R S I T Y
more than 160,000
sign of coldness. In conversational pairs, the Italian or Brazilian typically moves in, while the American “instinctively” retreats from a “close talker.” Such bodily movements illustrate not instinct, but culture—behavior programmed by years of exposure to a particular cultural tradition. Culture, however, is not static, as is suggested by this recent account of hugging behavior in American schools. Appreciate as well that any nation usually contains diverse and even conflicting cultural values. One example is generational diversity, which the famed anthropologist Margaret Mead, one of my teachers, referred to as “the generation gap.” Americans (in this case parents and school officials versus teenagers) exhibit generational differences involving the propriety of PDAs and concerns about sexual harassment.
years ago in South
There is so much hugging at Pascack Hills High
present—that anthropologists study. Hugging in U.S. high schools, women-only commuter trains in large cities in India, and cave art created
“Give Me a Hug” In Winter 2008 I created and taught a course called “Experiencing Culture” to American college students in Italy. Students wrote biweekly journals reflecting on the cultural differences they observed between Europeans and Americans. One thing that really struck them was the greater frequency and intensity of PDAs—public displays of affection between romantic couples in Italy, compared with the U.S.
The world’s nations and cultures have strikingly different notions about displays of affection and personal space. Cocktail parties in international meeting places such as the United Nations can resemble an elaborate insect mating ritual as diplomats from different countries advance, withdraw, and sidestep. When Americans talk, walk, and dance, they maintain a certain distance from others. Italians or Brazilians, who need less personal space, may interpret such “standoffishness” as a
School in Montvale, N.J., that students have
Africa are just a
broken down the hugs by type: There is the basic friend hug, probably the
few of the topics
most popular, and the bear hug, of course.
explored in these
But now there is also the bear claw, when a boy embraces a girl awkwardly with his elbows
sections.
poking out. There is the hug that starts with a high-five, then moves into a fist bump, followed by a slap on the back and an embrace. There’s the shake and lean; the hug from behind; and, the newest addition, the triple— any combination of three girls and boys hugkot16996_ch15_334-359.indd Page 334
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Chapter Openers Each chapter opens
Ethnicity and Race
with a carefullychosen photograph representing the
What is social status, and how does it relate to
chapter content. These photos
ethnicity?
How are race and
present a wide
ethnicity socially constructed in
variety of cultural
various societies?
practices and
What are the
backgrounds. Three thought-provoking
positive and negative aspects of ethnicity?
questions orient students to key chapter themes and topics. This street scene in Birmingham, England shows Asian and Afro-Caribbean women in the Lozells neighborhood, a site of unrest between these two ethnic groups. What national and ethnic identities might these women claim?
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Anthropology Atlas Comprising 18 maps, this atlas presents a global view of issues important to anthropologists and to the people they study, such as world forest loss, the origin and spread of food production, and ancient civilizations. Cross references in the text tie the maps to relevant chapter discussions. kot16996_mapatlas_649-685.indd Page 678
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MAP 15 World Religions
J
J
J J JM J
M
M
J M
M C
M H
M C
M C
B H
M HM
C M
C
P C
C J
B
ecause religion is a fundamental characteristic of human culture, a depiction of the spatial distribution of religions comes close to a map of cultural patterns. More than just a set of behavior patterns having to do with worship and ceremony, religion influences the ways in which people deal with one another, with their institutions, and with their environments. An examination of this map in the context of conflict within and among nations also shows that the tension between countries and the internal stability of states are also functions of the spatial distribution of religion.
QUESTIONS Look at Map 15, “World Religions.”
C
H J Predominant Religions Christianity (C)*
Roman Catholic Protestant Mormon (LDS) Eastern Churches Mixed Islam (M) Sunni Shi’a
1. Which continent has the most diversity with respect to the major religions?
Buddhism (B) Hinayanistic
2. Which continent is most Protestant? Why do you think that is the case?
Hinduism (H) Judaism (J)
Lamaistic
Sikhism Animism (Tribal) Chinese Complex (Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism) Korean Complex (Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Chondogyo) Japanese Complex (Shinto and Buddhism) Vietnamese Complex (Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Cao Dai) Unpopulated Regions * Capital letters indicate the presence of
locally important minority adherents of nonpredominant faiths.
3. Where in the world are “tribal” religions still practiced?
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Appreciating the Experiences Students
“Understanding Ourselves” Introductions These chapter introductions (expanded from a feature previously spread throughout the book) prompt students to relate anthropology to their own culture and their own lives. Students learn that anthropology provides insights into nearly every aspect of daily life, from what we eat for breakfast, to how reliant we are on bipedalism (our own two feet), to how often baseball players spit, to cite just a few examples.
“Through the Eyes of Others” Essays Written by students raised outside the United States, these essays contrast aspects of life in contemporary American culture with similar aspects in the authors’ cultures of origin. The observations within these essays show students how cultural practices that seem familiar and natural are not seen as such by others.
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Bring to the Classroom
”Recap” Tables These tables systematically summarize the major points of a section or chapter, giving students an easily accessible studying and learning tool.
“Acing the Course” Sections These end-of-chapter sections include summaries, key terms, and self-quizzes that encourage students to review and retain the chapter content. Self-grading quizzes on the book’s online learning center (www.mhhe.com/kottak14e) provide further opportunities for practice and review.
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Appreciating the Field of Anthropology “Appreciating Anthropology” Boxes These accounts explore ways in which anthropologists are actively engaged in some of our most urgent 21st-century concerns. From studying the culture of Hurricane Katrina survivors to observing the habitats and habits of endangered primates, these boxes demonstrate that topics raised in every chapter can be found in today’s headlines.
“Living Anthropology” Video Icons These icons reference a set of videos that show practicing anthropologists at work and that can be viewed on the openaccess online learning center (www.mhhe.com/kottak14e). Students hear anthropologists describe the research they are doing and are given a glimpse of the many sites and peoples that anthropologists study.
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Early Hominins What key traits make us human, and when and how are they revealed in the fossil record?
Who were the australopithecines, and what role did they play in human evolution?
When and where did hominins first make tools?
A reconstruction of Lucy, an early upright biped, aka Australopithecus afarensis, in the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History in Frankfurt, Germany. Bipedal locomotion is the most ancient trait that makes us truly human.
Expanded Coverage of Paleoanthropology There are now three chapters on paleoanthropology rather than two (Chapters 8–10 in this edition). The addition of a chapter enabled the author to break complex material into easier-to-absorb chunks, and allowed him to add new material on the recent “Ardi” Additional Readings
skeleton, the settling of
These suggestions for
Australia and the Pacific,
further reading guide
and creative expression.
students toward more detailed and focused explorations of the key topics introduced in the book.
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Highlights of the 14th Edition CHAPTER 1 • New content on the cultural practice of friendly hugging among high school students in America
• New material on Dr. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro’s work and philosophy, and her influence on her son, Barack Obama
CHAPTER 2 • Updated coverage of the role of individualism in American culture
CHAPTER 3 • Revised discussion of culturallyappropriate marketing
CHAPTER 4 • Updated discussion of humans as social beings
CHAPTER 5 • Updated content on the relative influence of culture and genetics in human physiology
• New content on the spread of the syphilis virus as a result of Columbus’s NewWorld exploration
CHAPTER 6 • Updated discussion of an understanding of diversity that transcends race and ethnicity
• New content on genetic markers and phenotype
CHAPTER 7 • Updated content on the human strengths and weaknesses of the five senses as evidence of evolutionary biology
• New content on the traits of apes and humans as opposed to monkeys and other primates
• Updated discussion of environmental destruction and endangered primates
CHAPTER 8 • Updated content on the importance of bipedalism to human beings
• New coverage of the Sahelanthropus fossil
• New coverage of the 2009 Ardipithecus find (“Ardi”)
• Revised coverage of the Oldowan Tools CHAPTER 9 • Revised discussion of what the thick, bony walls of H. erectus skulls can tell us about their behavior
xxx
• Updated coverage of Acheulian tool making
• New content on the first controlled use of fire
• New material on recent fossil finds in Spanish caves
• New material on how H. floresiensis walked
CHAPTER 10 • This new chapter focuses on modern humans, the advent of behavioral modernity, advances in technology, glacial retreat, cave art, the settling of Australia and the Americas, and the people of the Pacific.
CHAPTER 11 • Updated discussion of the domestication and spread of agriculture throughout the world
CHAPTER 12 • Revised coverage of stratification and the state
CHAPTER 13 • Revised coverage of cultural anthropologists in a global community
• New material on Clyde Kluckhohn’s views on the public service role of anthropology
• New content on anthropologists studying terrorism
CHAPTER 14 • Revised coverage on the relationships between language and culture
• New material on the demand for Web content in local languages
CHAPTER 15 • Updated coverage of ethnicity as a shifting, culturally-determined identity
• New content on the confusion between race and ethnicity in the popular discourse, including a discussion of the Sotomayor confirmation hearings and controversy
• Expanded content on genotype and phenotype in Brazil
CHAPTER 16 • Updated content on the conflict between work and family in American culture
• New content on the impacts of deforestation and climate change on native cultures
CHAPTER 17 • Expanded content on the various levels of political control (local/tribal vs. state/ national) that most contemporary peoples live under
• Expanded discussion of diwaniyas of Kuwait
CHAPTER 18 • Updated discussion of gender equality/ inequality in America today
• Expanded discussion of gender roles and the division of labor
• New content on women-only commuter trains in major Indian cities
• Expanded discussion of gender alternatives
CHAPTER 19 • Expanded discussion of the definition of family in the contemporary United States
CHAPTER 20 • Updated information on gay-marriage laws in the United States
• Expanded discussion on dowries CHAPTER 21 • Expanded content on baseball players and magical thinking
• New material on the celebration of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 100th birthday, and an assessment of his life’s work
CHAPTER 22 • Expanded discussion of the splintering of U.S. mass media and U.S. culture
• Revised coverage of the departmentalization of art in Western culture
• Updated discussion of class in American and Brazilian mass media
CHAPTER 23 • Updated discussion of the globalization of culture and commerce
CHAPTER 24 • Expanded coverage of the earth as a global unit, rather than a compilation of national units
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Support for Students and Instructors With the CourseSmart eTextbook version of this title, students can save up to 50 percent off the cost of a print book, reduce their impact on the environment, and access powerful Web tools for learning. Faculty can also review and compare the full text online without having to wait for a print desk copy. CourseSmart is an online eTextbook, which means users need to be connected to the Internet in order to access it. Students can also print sections of the book for maximum portability.
For the Student The Student Online Learning Center website (www .mhhe.com/kottak14e) is a free Web-based student supplement featuring video clips, selfquizzes, interactive exercises and activities, anthropology web links, and other useful tools. Designed specifically to complement individual chapters of the 14th edition, the Online Learning Center gives students access to material such as the following:
• Video Library • Appendix: “Ethics and Anthropology”
• Appendix: “American Popular Culture”
• An electronic version of the in-text Anthropology Atlas
• • • •
Student Self-Quizzes Virtual Exploration Activities Interactive Exercises Chapter Outlines and Objectives
• Vocabulary Flash Cards • FAQs
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For the Instructor The Instructor Online Learning Center website (www.mhhe.com/ kottak14e) is a passwordprotected instructor-only site, which includes the following materials:
• • • •
Instructor’s Manual PowerPoint Lecture Slides Computerized Test Bank Question Bank for the Classroom Performance System (CPS)
• Image Bank • Links to Professional Resources
• Faces of Culture Video Correlation Guide
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Acknowledgments As always, I’m grateful to many colleagues at McGraw-Hill. I’m lucky to be a McGrawHill author. Thanks to Gina Boedeker, Sponsoring Editor for Anthropology, for organizing a very productive revision-planning meeting in May 2009. There I had a chance to meet Emily Pecora, who has been a wonderfully helpful, efficient, and responsive developmental editor. Emily distilled the suggestions by reviewers of the thirteenth edition along with the ideas hatched at our meeting in May. With input from several others, Emily, Gina, and I developed a new theme for this fourteenth edition—appreciation—of students, of anthropology, and of human diversity. Over summer 2009 Emily graciously, promptly, and attentively responded to the revision work I was doing, including the new “Understanding Ourselves” essays that now begin each chapter. Her help was tremendously valuable to me as I implemented the new theme and attempted to respond to as many of the reviewers’ comments as possible. Demonstrating why she’s such a great anthropology editor, Gina Boedeker has remained attentive to the revision process and timing. Marketing Manager Caroline McGillen also attended our May meeting and made helpful suggestions. I thank her and all the McGraw-Hill sales representatives for the work they do on behalf of my books. I thank Leslie Racanelli once again for her outstanding work as production editor, coordinating and overseeing the process from received manuscript through, and even beyond, pages. Louis Swaim, production supervisor, worked with the printer to make sure everything came out right. It’s always a pleasure to plan and choose photos with Barbara Salz, freelance photo researcher, with whom I’ve worked for about 20 years. Thanks, too, to Susan Mansfield, Barbara’s assistant, who also worked on the photo program for this edition. I thank Geoffrey Hughes for his work on the Instructor’s Manual and Maria Perez for her work on the Test Bank for this book. Emily McKee and Sara Cooley did an outstanding job updating the online components for the book. Gerry Williams updated the instructor PowerPoint files. Sincere thanks to Patricia Ohlenroth once again for her fine job of copyediting; and George Watson for proofreading. I am grateful to Cassandra Chu and Maureen McCutcheon for working to create and execute the attractive new design.
Nora Agbayani and Toni Michaels, photo research coordinators, also deserve thanks. For creating and updating the attractive maps, I would like to acknowledge the work of Mapping Specialists. Thanks, as well, to Jami Woy, media project manager, for creating the OLC with video clips and all the other supplements. Once again I thank Wesley Hall, who has handled the literary permissions. I’m especially indebted to the professors who reviewed the 13th edition of this book and of my Cultural Anthropology text in preparation for the 14th editions. They suggested many of the changes I’ve implemented here in the 14th edition—and others I’ll work on for subsequent editions. The names and schools of these reviewers are as follows:
James R. Bindon, University of Alabama Kira Blaisdell-Sloan, Louisiana State University Kathleen T. Blue, Minnesota State University Daniel Boxberger, Western Washington University Vicki Bradley, University of Houston Lisa Kaye Brandt, North Dakota State University Ethan M. Braunstein, Northern Arizona University Ned Breschel, Morehead State University Peter J. Brown, Emory University Margaret S. Bruchez, Blinn College Vaughn M. Bryant, Texas A&M University Andrew Buckser, Purdue University Richard H. Buonforte, Brigham Young University
Lisa Gezon, University of West Georgia
Karen Burns, University of Georgia
Brian A. Hoey, Marshall University
Richard Burns, Arkansas State University
Charles W. Houck, University of North Carolina–Charlotte
Mary Cameron, Auburn University
Cara Roure Johnson, University of Connecticut Constanza Ocampo-Raeder, University of Maine (Orono)
Joseph L. Chartkoff, Michigan State University Dianne Chidester, University of South Dakota Stephen Childs, Valdosta State University
Geoffrey G. Pope, William Patterson University
Inne Choi, California Polytechnic State University–San Luis Obispo
Robert Rubinstein, Syracuse University
Wanda Clark, South Plains College
Richard A. Sattler, University of Montana
Jeffrey Cohen, Penn State University
Michael Simonton, Northern Kentucky University
Fred Conquest, Community College of Southern Nevada
Merrily Stover, University of Maryland– University College
Barbara Cook, California Polytechnic State University–San Luis Obispo
Katharine Wiegle, Northern Illinois University
Maia Greenwell Cunningham, Citrus College
Brent Woodfill, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Sean M. Daley, Johnson County Community College
I’m also grateful to the valued reviewers of previous editions of this book and of my Cultural Anthropology text. Their names are as follows:
Karen Dalke, University of Wisconsin– Green Bay
Julianna Acheson, Green Mountain College
Michael Davis, Truman State University
Stephanie W. Alemán, Iowa State University
Hillary DelPrete, Wagner College
Mohamad Al-Madani, Seattle Central Community College
Darryl de Ruiter, Texas A&M University
Douglas J. Anderson, Front Range Community College
Norbert Dannhaeuser, Texas A&M University
Paul Demers, University of Nebraska– Lincoln Robert Dirks, Illinois State University
E. F. Aranyosi, University of Washington
William W. Donner, Kutztown University
Robert Bee, University of Connecticut
Mary Durocher, Wayne State University
Joy A. Bilharz, SUNY at Fredonia
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Paul Durrenberger, Pennsylvania State University
De Ann Pendry, University of Tennessee– Knoxville
George Esber, Miami University of Ohio
Leonard Plotnicov, University of Pittsburgh
Les W. Field, University of New Mexico
Janet Pollak, William Patterson College
Grace Fraser, Plymouth State College
Christina Nicole Pomianek, University of Missouri–Columbia
Todd Jeffrey French, University of New Hampshire, Durham Richard H. Furlow, College of DuPage
Howard Prince, CUNY–Borough of Manhattan Community College
Vance Geiger, University of Central Florida
Frances E. Purifoy, University of Louisville
Laurie Godfrey, University of Massachusetts–Amherst
Asa Randall, University of Florida
Bob Goodby, Franklin Pierce College Gloria Gozdzik, West Virginia University Tom Greaves, Bucknell University Mark Grey, University of Northern Iowa Sharon Gursky, Texas A&M University John Dwight Hines, University of California, Santa Barbara
Mark A. Rees, University of Louisiana at Lafayette Bruce D. Roberts, Minnesota State University Moorhead Rita C. Rodabaugh, Central Piedmont Community College Steven Rubenstein, Ohio University Richard Scaglion, University of Pittsburgh
Homes Hogue, Mississippi State University
Mary Scott, San Francisco State University
Kara C. Hoover, Georgia State University
James Sewastynowicz, Jacksonville State University
Stevan R. Jackson, Virginia Tech Alice James, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania Richard King, Drake University Christine Kray, Rochester Institute of Technology Eric Lassiter, Ball State University Jill Leonard, University of Illinois—Urbana– Champaign Kenneth Lewis, Michigan State University David Lipset, University of Minnesota
Brian Siegel, Furman University Megan Sinnott, University of Colorado– Boulder Esther Skirboll, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania Alexia Smith, University of Connecticut Gregory Starrett, University of North Carolina–Charlotte Karl Steinen, University of West Georgia Noelle Stout, Foothill and Skyline Colleges
Walter E. Little, University at Albany, SUNY
Elizabeth A. Throop, Eastern Kentucky University
Jon K. Loessin, Wharton County Junior College
Ruth Toulson, Brigham Young University
Brian Malley, University of Michigan Jonathan Marks, University of North Carolina–Charlotte H. Lyn Miles, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Barbara Miller, George Washington University
Susan Trencher, George Mason University Mark Tromans, Broward Community College Christina Turner, Virginia Commonwealth University Donald Tyler, University of Idaho Daniel Varisco, Hofstra University
Richard G. Milo, Chicago State University
Albert Wahrhaftig, Sonoma State University
John Nass, Jr., California University of Pennsylvania
Joe Watkins, University of New Mexico
Frank Ng, California State University– Fresno
David Webb, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania George Westermark, Santa Clara University
Divinity B. O’Connor DLR-Roberts, Des Moines Area Community College
Donald A. Whatley, Blinn College
Martin Ottenheimer, Kansas State University
Mary S. Willis, University of Nebraska– Lincoln
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Acknowledgments
Nancy White, University of South Florida
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I’m grateful for their enthusiasm and their suggestions for changes, additions, and deletions (sometimes in very different directions!). Students, too, regularly share their insights about this and my other texts via e-mail and so have contributed to this book. Anyone—student or instructor—with access to e-mail can reach me at ckottak@ bellsouth.net. As usual, my family has offered me understanding, support, and inspiration during the preparation of this book. Dr. Nicholas Kottak, who like me holds a doctorate in anthropology, regularly shares his insights with me, as does my daughter, Dr. Juliet Kottak Mavromatis, and my wife, Isabel (Betty) Wagley Kottak. Isabel has been my companion in the field and in life for more than four decades. I renew my dedication of this book to the memory of my mother, Mariana Kottak Roberts, for kindling my interest in the human condition, for reading and commenting on my writing, and for the insights about people and society she provided. After four decades of teaching, I’ve benefited from the knowledge, help, and advice of so many friends, colleagues, teaching assistants, graduate student instructors, and students that I can no longer fit their names into a short preface. I hope they know who they are and accept my thanks. I’m very grateful to my many colleagues at Michigan who regularly share their insights and suggest ways of making my books better. Thanks especially to my fellow 101ers: Kelly Askew, Tom Fricke, Stuart Kirsch, Holly Peters-Golden, and Andrew Shryock. Their questions and suggestions help me keep this book current. Special thanks to Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery for continuing to nurture the archaeologist in me. Over my many years of teaching introductory anthropology, feedback from undergraduates and graduate students has kept me up to date on the interests, needs, and views of the people for whom this book is written. I continue to believe that effective textbooks are based in enthusiasm and in the enjoyment of teaching. I hope this product of my experience will be helpful to others. Conrad Phillip Kottak Johns Island, SC and Ann Arbor, MI
[email protected]
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Anthropology
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Appreciating Human Diversity
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What distinguishes anthropology from other fields that study human beings?
How do anthropologists study human diversity in time and space?
Why is anthropology both scientific and humanistic?
Street scene with soccer in Istanbul, Turkey. Culture, including sports, helps shape our bodies, personalities, and personal health.
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What Is Anthropology?
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chapter outline
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HUMAN DIVERSITY Adaptation, Variation, and Change GENERAL ANTHROPOLOGY Cultural Forces Shape Human Biology THE SUBDISCIPLINES OF ANTHROPOLOGY Cultural Anthropology Archaeological Anthropology Biological, or Physical, Anthropology
understanding OURSELVES
W
hen you grew up, which sport
that affects our development as much as do
did you appreciate the most—
nutrition, heat, cold, and altitude. Culture also
soccer, swimming, football,
guides our emotional and cognitive growth
baseball, tennis, golf, or some
and helps determine the kinds of personalities
other sport (or perhaps none at all)? Is this be-
we have as adults.
cause of “who you are” or because of the op-
Among scholarly disciplines, anthropology
portunities you had as a child to practice and
stands out as the field that provides the cross-
participate in this particular activity? Think
cultural test. How much would we know about
ANTHROPOLOGY AND OTHER ACADEMIC FIELDS
about the phrases and sentences you would
human behavior, thought, and feeling if we stud-
use to describe yourself in a personal ad or on
ied only our own kind? What if our entire under-
a networking site—your likes and dislikes,
standing of human behavior were based on
Cultural Anthropology and Sociology
hobbies, and habits. How many of these de-
analysis of questionnaires filled out by college
Anthropology and Psychology
scriptors would be the same if you had been
students in Oregon? That is a radical question,
born in a different place or time?
but one that should make you think about the
Linguistic Anthropology
When you were young, your parents might
basis for statements about what humans are
APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY
have told you that drinking milk and eating
like, individually or as a group. A primary reason
vegetables would help you grow up “big and
why anthropology can uncover so much about
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
strong.” They probably didn’t as readily recog-
what it means to be human is that the discipline
nize the role that culture plays in shaping
is based on the cross-cultural perspective. One
Theories, Associations, and Explanations
bodies, personalities, and personal health. If
culture can’t tell us everything we need to know
nutrition matters in growth, so, too, do cultural
about what it means to be human. Often culture
When Multiple Variables Predict
guidelines. What is proper behavior for boys
is “invisible” (assumed to be normal, or just the
and girls? What kinds of work should men and
way things are) until it is placed in comparison to
women do? Where should people live? What
another culture. For example, to appreciate how
are proper uses of their leisure time? What
watching television affects us, as human beings,
role should religion play? How should people
we need to study not just North America today
relate to their family, friends, and neighbors?
but some other place—and perhaps also some
Although our genetic attributes provide a
other time (such as Brazil in the 1980s; see
foundation for our growth and development,
Kottak 1990b). The cross-cultural test is funda-
human biology is fairly plastic—that is, it is
mental to the anthropological approach, which
malleable. Culture is an environmental force
orients this textbook.
HUMAN DIVERSITY Anthropologists study human beings wherever and whenever they find them—in rural Kenya, a Turkish café, a Mesopotamian tomb, or a North American shopping mall. Anthropology is the exploration of human diversity in time and space. Anthropology
studies the whole of the human condition: past, present, and future; biology, society, language, and culture. Of particular interest is the diversity that comes through human adaptability. Humans are among the world’s most adaptable animals. In the Andes of South
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America, people wake up in villages 16,000 feet above sea level and then trek 1,500 feet higher to work in tin mines. Tribes in the Australian desert worship animals and discuss philosophy. People survive malaria in the tropics. Men have walked on the moon. The model of the USS Enterprise in Washington’s Smithsonian Institution symbolizes the desire to “seek out new life and civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.” Wishes to know the unknown, control the uncontrollable, and create order out of chaos find expression among all peoples. Creativity, adaptability, and flexibility are basic human attributes, and human diversity is the subject matter of anthropology. Students often are surprised by the breadth of anthropology, which is the study of the human species and its immediate ancestors. Anthropology is a uniquely comparative and holistic science. Holism refers to the study of the whole of the human condition: past, present, and future; biology, society, language, and culture. Most people think that anthropologists study fossils and nonindustrial, non-Western cultures, and many of them do. But anthropology is much more than the study of nonindustrial peoples: It is a comparative field that examines all societies, ancient and modern, simple and complex. The other social sciences tend to focus on a single society, usually an industrial nation like the United States or Canada. Anthropology, however, offers a unique cross-cultural perspective by constantly comparing the customs of one society with those of others. People share society—organized life in groups—with other animals, including baboons, wolves, and even ants. Culture, however, is more distinctly human. Cultures are traditions and customs, transmitted through learning, that form and guide the beliefs and behavior of the people exposed to them. Children learn such a tradition by growing up in a particular society, through a process called enculturation. Cultural traditions include customs and opinions, developed over the generations, about proper and improper behavior. These traditions answer such questions as: How should we do things? How do we make sense of the world? How do we tell right from wrong? What is right, and what is wrong? A culture produces a degree of consistency in behavior and thought among the people who live in a particular society. (This chapter’s “Appreciating Diversity” box on pp. 6–7 discusses how attitudes about displays of affection, which are transmitted culturally, can also change.) The most critical element of cultural traditions is their transmission through learning rather than through biological inheritance. Culture is not itself biological, but it rests on certain features of human biology. For more than a million years, humans have had at least some of the biological
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capacities on which culture depends. These abilities are to learn, to think symbolically, to use language, and to employ tools and other products in organizing their lives and adapting to their environments. Anthropology confronts and ponders major questions of human existence as it explores human biological and cultural diversity in time and space. By examining ancient bones and tools, we unravel the mysteries of human origins. When did our ancestors separate from those remote great-aunts and great-uncles whose descendants are the apes? Where and when did Homo sapiens originate? How has our species changed? What are we now, and where are we going? How have changes in culture and society influenced biological change? Our genus, Homo, has been changing for more than one million years. Humans continue to adapt and change both biologically and culturally.
The study of the human species and its immediate ancestors.
holistic
Adaptation, Variation, and Change Adaptation refers to the processes by which organisms cope with environmental forces and stresses, such as those posed by climate and topography or terrains, also called landforms. How do organisms change to fit their environments, such as dry climates or high mountain altitudes? Like other animals, humans use biological means of adaptation. But humans are unique in also having cultural means of adaptation. Recap 1.1 summarizes the cultural and biological means that humans use to adapt to high altitudes. Mountainous terrains pose particular challenges, those associated with high altitude and oxygen deprivation. Consider four ways (one cultural and three biological) in which humans may cope with low oxygen pressure at high altitudes. Illustrating cultural (technological) adaptation would be a pressurized airplane cabin equipped with oxygen masks. There are three ways of adapting biologically to high altitudes: genetic adaptation, long-term physiological adaptation, and short-term physiological adaptation. First, native populations of high-altitude areas, such as the Andes of Peru and the Himalayas of Tibet and Nepal, seem to have acquired certain genetic advantages for life at very high altitudes. The Andean tendency to develop a voluminous chest and lungs probably has a genetic basis. Second, regardless of their genes, people who grow up at a high altitude become physiologically more efficient there than genetically similar people who have grown up at sea level would be. This illustrates long-term physiological adaptation during the body’s growth and development. Third, humans also have the capacity for short-term or immediate physiological adaptation. Thus, when lowlanders arrive in the
Chapter 1
anthropology
What Is Anthropology?
Encompassing past, present, and future; biology, society, language, and culture.
culture Traditions and customs transmitted through learning.
5
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D I V E R S I T Y
“Give Me a Hug” In Winter 2008 I created and taught a course called “Experiencing Culture” to American college students in Italy. Students wrote biweekly journals reflecting on the cultural differences they observed between Europeans and Americans. One thing that really struck them was the greater frequency and intensity of PDAs—public displays of affection between romantic couples in Italy, compared with the U.S.
The world’s nations and cultures have strikingly different notions about displays of affection and personal space. Cocktail parties in international meeting places such as the United Nations can resemble an elaborate insect mating ritual as diplomats from different countries advance, withdraw, and sidestep. When Americans talk, walk, and dance, they maintain a certain distance from others. Italians or Brazilians, who need less personal space, may interpret such “standoffishness” as a
sign of coldness. In conversational pairs, the Italian or Brazilian typically moves in, while the American “instinctively” retreats from a “close talker.” Such bodily movements illustrate not instinct, but culture—behavior programmed by years of exposure to a particular cultural tradition. Culture, however, is not static, as is suggested by this recent account of hugging behavior in American schools. Appreciate as well that any nation usually contains diverse and even conflicting cultural values. One example is generational diversity, which the famed anthropologist Margaret Mead, one of my teachers, referred to as “the generation gap.” Americans (in this case parents and school officials versus teenagers) exhibit generational differences involving the propriety of PDAs and concerns about sexual harassment.
There is so much hugging at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, N.J., that students have broken down the hugs by type: There is the basic friend hug, probably the most popular, and the bear hug, of course. But now there is also the bear claw, when a boy embraces a girl awkwardly with his elbows poking out. There is the hug that starts with a high-five, then moves into a fist bump, followed by a slap on the back and an embrace. There’s the shake and lean; the hug from behind; and, the newest addition, the triple— any combination of three girls and boys hugging at once. “We’re not afraid, we just get in and hug,” said Danny Schneider, a junior at the school, Students at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, New Jersey, hug in the hallway before
where hallway hugging began shortly after 7 A.M.
the start of the school day. Does this behavior seem strange to you?
on a recent morning as students arrived. “The
food production An economy based on plant cultivation and/or animal domestication.
6
highlands, they immediately increase their breathing and heart rates. Hyperventilation increases the oxygen in their lungs and arteries. As the pulse also increases, blood reaches their tissues more rapidly. All these varied adaptive responses—cultural and biological—achieve a single goal: maintaining an adequate supply of oxygen to the body. Note that some athletes now are adopting techniques learned from indigenous societies and from scientific experiments to increase their own short-term physiological adaptation for sports success (specifically, using low-oxygen tents to simulate high altitudes). PART 1
Introduction to Anthropology
As human history has unfolded, the social and cultural means of adaptation have become increasingly important. In this process, humans have devised diverse ways of coping with the range of environments they have occupied in time and space. The rate of cultural adaptation and change has accelerated, particularly during the past 10,000 years. For millions of years, hunting and gathering of nature’s bounty— foraging—was the sole basis of human subsistence. However, it took only a few thousand years for food production (the cultivation of plants and domestication of animals), which
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guy friends, we don’t care. You just get right in there and jump in.” There are romantic hugs, too, but that is not what these teenagers are talking about.
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Comforting as the hug may be, principals
African American boys and men have been hugging as part of their greeting for decades,
across the country have clamped down. “Touching and physical contact is very dan-
using the word “dap” to describe a ritual involv-
gerous territory,” said Noreen Hajinlian, the
ing handshakes, slaps on the shoulders and,
Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys,
principal of George G. White School, a junior
more recently, a hug, also sometimes called
boys embracing each other—the hug has be-
high school in Hillsdale, N.J., who banned hug-
the gangsta hug among urban youth. . . .
come the favorite social greeting when teen-
ging two years ago. . . .
agers meet or part these days. . . .
Some parents find it paradoxical that a gen-
Schools that have limited hugging invoked
eration so steeped in hands-off virtual commu-
A measure of how rapidly the ritual is
longstanding rules against public displays of
spreading is that some students complain of
affection, meant to maintain an atmosphere of
“Maybe it’s because all these kids do is text
peer pressure to hug to fit in. And schools from
academic seriousness and prevent unwanted
and go on Facebook so they don’t even have
Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious
touching, or even groping.
human contact anymore,” said Dona Eichner,
era about sexual harassment or improper
But pro-hugging students say it is not a ro-
touching—or citing hallway clogging and late
mantic or sexual gesture, simply the “hello” of
arrivals to class—have banned hugging or im-
their generation. . . .
posed a three-second rule.
nication would be so eager to hug.
the mother of freshman and junior girls at the high school in Montvale. . . . Carrie Osbourne, a sixth-grade teacher at
Amy L. Best, a sociologist at George Mason
Claire Lilienthal Alternative School, said hug-
Parents, who grew up in a generation more
University, said the teenage embrace is more a
ging was a powerful and positive sign that chil-
likely to use the handshake, the low-five or the
reflection of the overall evolution of the American
dren are inclined to nurture one another,
high-five, are often baffled by the close physi-
greeting, which has become less formal since the
breaking down barriers. “And it gets to that
cal contact. “It’s a wordless custom, from what
1970s. “Without question, the boundaries of
core that every person wants to feel cared for,
I’ve observed,” wrote Beth J. Harpaz, the
touch have changed in American culture,” she
regardless of your age or how cool you are or
mother of two boys, 11 and 16, and a parenting
said. “We display bodies more readily, there are
how cool you think you are,” she said.
columnist for The Associated Press, in a new
fewer rules governing body touch and a lot more
book, “13 Is the New 18.” . . .
permissible access to other people’s bodies.”
As much as hugging is a physical gesture, it has migrated online as well. Facebook applica-
“Witnessing this interaction always makes
Hugging appears to be a grassroots phe-
me feel like I am a tourist in a country where I
nomenon and not an imitation of a character or
do not know the customs and cannot speak
custom on TV or in movies. The prevalence of
the language.” For teenagers, though, hugging
boys’ nonromantic hugging (especially of other
SOURCE:
is hip. And not hugging?
boys) is most striking to adults. Experts say that
‘How About a Hug?’” From The New York Times, May
“If somebody were to not hug someone, to
over the last generation, boys have become
28, 2009. © The New York Times. All rights reserved.
never hug anybody, people might be just a little
more comfortable expressing emotion, as
wary of them and think they are weird or pecu-
embodied by the MTV show “Bromance,” which
liar,” said Gabrielle Brown, a freshman at Fiorello
is now a widely used term for affection be-
out express written permission is prohibited. www.
H. LaGuardia High School in Manhattan.
tween straight male friends. . . .
nytimes.com
originated some 12,000–10,000 years ago, to replace foraging in most areas. Between 6000 and 5000 b.p. (before the present), the first civilizations arose. These were large, powerful, and complex societies, such as ancient Egypt, that conquered and governed large geographic areas. Much more recently, the spread of industrial production has profoundly affected human life. Throughout human history, major innovations have spread at the expense of earlier ones. Each economic revolution has had social and cultural repercussions. Today’s global economy and communications link all contemporary people,
tions allowing friends to send hugs have tens of thousands of fans. Sarah Kershaw, “For Teenagers, Hello Means
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directly or indirectly, in the modern world system. People must cope with forces generated by progressively larger systems—region, nation, and world. The study of such contemporary adaptations generates new challenges for anthropology: “The cultures of world peoples need to be constantly rediscovered as these people reinvent them in changing historical circumstances” (Marcus and Fischer 1986, p. 24). (The “Appreciating Diversity” box above discusses how American teens have reinvented standards involving bodily contact among generational peers.) Chapter 1
What Is Anthropology?
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Forms of Cultural and Biological Adaptation (to High Altitude)
FORM OF ADAPTATION
TYPE OF ADAPTATION
EXAMPLE
Technology
Cultural
Pressurized airplane cabin with oxygen masks
Genetic adaptation (occurs over generations)
Biological
Larger “barrel chests” of native highlanders
Long-term physiological adaptation (occurs during growth and development of the individual organism)
Biological
More efficient respiratory system, to extract oxygen from “thin air”
Short-term physiological adaptation (occurs spontaneously when the individual organism enters a new environment)
Biological
Increased heart rate, hyperventilation
GENERAL ANTHROPOLOGY
than 60 years ago, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict realized that “In World history, those The academic discipline of anthropology, also general who have helped to build the same culture are known as general anthropology or “four-field” anthropology not necessarily of one race, and those of the anthropology, includes four main subdisciplines or Anthropology as a same race have not all participated in one culsubfields. They are sociocultural, archaeological, whole: cultural, archaeoture. In scientific language, culture is not a funcbiological, and linguistic anthropology. (From logical, biological, and tion of race” (Benedict 1940, Ch. 2). (Note that a here on, the shorter term cultural anthropology linguistic anthropology. unified four-field anthropology did not develop will be used as a synonym for “sociocultural in Europe, where the subdisciplines tend to exist anthropology.”) Of the subfields, cultural anthroseparately.) pology has the largest membership. Most departThere are also logical reasons for the unity of ments of anthropology teach courses in all American anthropology. Each subfield considers four subfields. anthropology ATLAS variation in time and space (that is, in different There are historical reasons for the inSee Maps 8 and 9. geographic areas). Cultural and archaeologiclusion of four subfields in a single Map 8 shows the cal aanthropologists study (among many throdiscipline. The origin of anthroorigin and spread of oth other topics) changes in social life and d, pology as a scientific field, agriculture (food ccustoms. Archaeologists have used and of American anthro-production). Map 9 studies of living societies and bepology in particular, can shows ancient havior patterns to imagine what be traced back to the 19th civilizations. life might have been like in the century. Early American past. Biological anthropologists anthropologists were conexamine evolutionary changes in cerned especially with the physical form, for example, anahistory and cultures of the natomical changes that might have tive peoples of North America. been associated with the origin of Interest in the origins and divertool use or language. Linguistic sity of Native Americans brought anthropologists may reconstruct together studies of customs, social the basics of ancient languages by life, language, and physical traits. studying modern ones. Anthropologists still are ponderThe subdisciplines influence ing such questions as: Where did Native Americans come from? Early American anthropology was each other as anthropologists talk to each other, read books How many waves of migration especially concerned with the and journals, and associate in brought them to the New World? history and cultures of Native professional organizations. GenWhat are the linguistic, cultural, North Americans. Ely S. Parker, eral anthropology explores the and biological links among Naor Ha-sa-noan-da, was a Seneca basics of human biology, society, tive Americans and between and culture and considers their them and Asia? Another reason Indian who made important coninterrelations. Anthropologists for anthropology’s inclusion of tributions to early anthropology. share certain key assumptions. four subfields was an interest in Parker also served as CommisPerhaps the most fundamental is the relation between biology sioner of Indian Affairs for the the idea that sound conclusions (e.g., “race”) and culture. More United States.
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about “human nature” cannot be derived from studying a single nation, society, or cultural tradition. A comparative, cross-cultural approach is essential.
Cultural Forces Shape Human Biology For example, anthropology’s comparative, biocultural perspective recognizes that cultural forces constantly mold human biology. (Biocultural refers to the inclusion and combination of both biological and cultural perspectives and approaches to comment on or solve a particular issue or problem.) Culture is a key environmental force in determining how human bodies grow and develop. Cultural traditions promote certain activities and abilities, discourage others, and set standards of physical well-being and attractiveness. Physical activities, including sports, which are influenced by culture, help build the body. For example, North American girls are encouraged to pursue, and therefore do well in, competition involving figure skating, gymnastics, track and field, swimming, diving, and many other sports. Brazilian girls, although excelling in the team sports of basketball and volleyball, haven’t fared nearly as well in individual sports as have their American and Canadian counterparts. Why are people encouraged to excel as athletes in some nations but not others? Why do people in some countries invest so much time and effort in competitive sports that their bodies change significantly as a result? Cultural standards of attractiveness and propriety influence participation and achievement in sports. Americans run or swim not just to compete but to keep trim and fit. Brazil’s beauty standards accept more fat, especially in female buttocks and hips. Brazilian men have had some international success in swimming and running, but Brazil rarely sends female swimmers or runners to the Olympics. One reason Brazilian women avoid competitive swimming in particular may be that sport’s effects on the body. Years of swimming sculpt a distinctive physique: an enlarged upper torso, a massive neck, and powerful shoulders and back. Successful female swimmers tend to be big, strong, and bulky. The countries that produce them most consistently are the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Scandinavian nations, the Netherlands, and the former Soviet Union, where this body type isn’t as stigmatized as it is in Latin countries. Swimmers develop hard bodies, but Brazilian culture says that women should be soft, with big hips and buttocks, not big shoulders. Many young female swimmers in Brazil choose to abandon the sport rather than the “feminine” body ideal.
biocultural Combining biological and cultural approaches to a given problem.
Carly Piper, Natalie Coughlin, and Dana Vollmer, members of the U.S. swimming relay team, from left to right, celebrate after taking the gold medal and setting a new world record in the women’s 4 3 2000-meter freestyle relay at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece. Years of swimming sculpt a distinctive physique: an enlarged upper torso, a massive neck, and powerful shoulders and back.
THE SUBDISCIPLINES OF ANTHROPOLOGY Cultural Anthropology Cultural anthropology is the study of human society and culture, the subfield that describes, analyzes, interprets, and explains social and cultural similarities and differences. To study and interpret cultural diversity, cultural anthropologists engage in two kinds of activity: ethnography (based on field work) and ethnology (based on cross-cultural comparison). Ethnography provides an account of a particular community, society, or culture. During ethnographic field work, the ethnographer gathers data that he or she organizes, describes, analyzes, and interprets to build and present that account, which may be in the form of a book, article, or film. Traditionally, ethnographers have lived in small communities and studied local behavior, beliefs, customs, social life, economic activities, politics, and religion.
Chapter 1
What Is Anthropology?
cultural anthropology The comparative, crosscultural, study of human society and culture.
ethnography Fieldwork in a particular cultural setting.
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Ethnography and Ethnology—Two Dimensions of Cultural Anthropology
ETHNOGRAPHY
ETHNOLOGY
Requires field work to collect data
Uses data collected by a series of researchers
Often descriptive
Usually synthetic
Group/community specific
Comparative/cross-cultural
What kind of experience is ethnography for the ethnographer? The box offers some clues. The anthropological perspective derived from ethnographic field work often differs radically from that of economics or political science. Those fields focus on national and official organizations and policies and often on elites. However, the groups that anthropologists have traditionally studied usually have been relatively poor and powerless, as are most people in the world today. Ethnographers often observe discriminatory practices directed toward such people, who experience food shortages, dietary deficiencies, and other aspects of poverty. Political scientists tend to study programs that national planners develop, while anthropologists discover how these programs work on the local level. Cultures are not isolated. As noted by Franz Boas (1940/1966) many years ago, contact between neighboring tribes has always existed and has extended over enormous areas. “Human populations construct their cultures in interaction with one another, and not in isolation” (Wolf 1982, p. ix). Villagers increasingly participate in regional, national, and world events. Exposure to external forces comes through the mass media, migration, and modern transportation. City and nation increasingly invade local communities with the arrival of tourists, development agents, government and religious officials, and political candidates. Such linkages are prominent components of regional, national, and international systems of politics, economics, and information. These larger systems increasingly affect the people and places anthropology traditionally has studied. The study of such linkages and systems is part of the subject matter of modern anthropology. Ethnology examines, interprets, analyzes, and compares the results of ethnography—the data gathered in different societies. It uses such data to compare and contrast and to make generalizations about society and culture. Looking beyond the particular to the more general, ethnologists attempt to identify and explain cultural differences and similarities, to test hypotheses, and to build theory to enhance our understanding of how social and cultural systems work. (See the section “The Scientific Method” at the end of this chapter.) Ethnology gets its data for comparison not just from ethnography but also from the other
archaeological anthropology The study of human behavior through material remains.
ethnology The study of sociocultural differences and similarities.
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Introduction to Anthropology
subfields, particularly from archaeology, which reconstructs social systems of the past. (Recap 1.2 summarizes the main contrasts between ethnography and ethnology.)
Archaeological Anthropology Archaeological anthropology (more simply, “archaeology”) reconstructs, describes, and interprets human behavior and cultural patterns through material remains. At sites where people live or have lived, archaeologists find artifacts, material items that humans have made, used, or modified, such as tools, weapons, camp sites, buildings, and garbage. Plant and animal remains and ancient garbage tell stories about consumption and activities. Wild and domesticated grains have different characteristics, which allow archaeologists to distinguish between gathering and cultivation. Examination of animal bones reveals the ages of slaughtered animals and provides other information useful in determining whether species were wild or domesticated. Analyzing such data, archaeologists answer several questions about ancient economies. Did the group get its meat from hunting, or did it domesticate and breed animals, killing only those of a certain age and sex? Did plant food come from wild plants or from sowing, tending, and harvesting crops? Did the residents make, trade for, or buy particular items? Were raw materials available locally? If not, where did they come from? From such information, archaeologists reconstruct patterns of production, trade, and consumption.
living anthropology VIDEOS “New” Knowledge among the Batak, www.mhhe.com/kottak This clip shows Batak women, men, and children at work, making a living. It describes how they grow rice in an environmentally friendly way, unlike the destructive farming techniques of the lowlanders who have invaded their homeland. How have the Batak and conservation agencies worked together to reduce deforestation? Based on the clip, name several ways in which the Batak are influenced by forces beyond their homeland.
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Archaeologists have spent much time studying potsherds, fragments of earthenware. Potsherds are more durable than many other artifacts, such as textiles and wood. The quantity of pottery fragments allows estimates of population size and density. The discovery that potters used materials that were not locally available suggests systems of trade. Similarities in manufacture and decoration at different sites may be proof of cultural connections. Groups with similar pots may be historically related. Perhaps they shared common cultural ancestors, traded with each other, or belonged to the same political system. Many archaeologists examine paleoecology. Ecology is the study of interrelations among living things in an environment. The organisms and environment together constitute an ecosystem, a patterned arrangement of energy flows and exchanges. Human ecology studies ecosystems that include people, focusing on the ways in which human use “of nature influences and is influenced by social organization and cultural values” (Bennett 1969, pp. 10–11). Paleoecology looks at the ecosystems of the past. In addition to reconstructing ecological patterns, archaeologists may infer cultural transformations, for example, by observing changes in the size and type of sites and the distance between them. A city develops in a region where only towns, villages, and hamlets existed a few centu-
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ries earlier. The number of settlement levels (city, town, village, hamlet) in a society is a measure of social complexity. Buildings offer clues about political and religious features. Temples and pyramids suggest that an ancient society had an authority structure capable of marshaling the labor needed to build such monuments. The presence or absence of certain structures, like the pyramids of ancient Egypt and Mexico, reveals differences in function between settlements. For example, some towns were places where people came to attend ceremonies. Others were burial sites; still others were farming communities. Archaeologists also reconstruct behavior patterns and lifestyles of the past by excavating. This involves digging through a succession of levels at a particular site. In a given area, through time, settlements may change in form and purpose, as may the connections between settlements. Excavation can document changes in economic, social, and political activities. Although archaeologists are best known for studying prehistory, that is, the period before the invention of writing, they also study the cultures of historical and even living peoples. Studying sunken ships off the Florida coast, underwater archaeologists have been able to verify the living conditions on the vessels that brought ancestral African Americans to the New World
Archaeology in the coastal deserts around Nazca and Ica, Peru.
Chapter 1
What Is Anthropology?
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as enslaved people. In a research project begun in 1973 in Tucson, Arizona, archaeologist William Rathje has learned about contemporary life by studying modern garbage. The value of “garbology,” as Rathje calls it, is that it provides “evidence of what people did, not what they think they did, what they think they should have done, or what the interviewer thinks they should have done” (Harrison, Rathje, and Hughes 1994, p. 108). What people report may contrast strongly with their real behavior as revealed by garbology. For example, the garbologists discovered that the three Tucson neighborhoods that reported the lowest beer consumption actually had the highest number of discarded beer cans per household (Podolefsky and Brown 1992, p. 100)! Rathje’s garbology also has exposed misconceptions about how much of different kinds of trash are in landfills: While most people thought that fast-food containers and disposable diapers were major waste problems, in fact they were relatively insignificant compared with paper, including environmentally friendly, recyclable paper (Rathje and Murphy 2001).
Biological, or Physical, Anthropology biological anthropology The study of human biological variation in time and space.
The subject matter of biological, or physical, anthropology is human biological diversity in time and space. The focus on biological variation unites five special interests within biological anthropology:
physical anthropology
1. Human evolution as revealed by the fossil record (paleoanthropology).
Same as biological anthropology.
2. Human genetics. 3. Human growth and development. 4. Human biological plasticity (the body’s ability to change as it copes with stresses, such as heat, cold, and altitude).
linguistic anthropology The study of language and linguistic diversity in time, space, and society.
sociolinguistics The study of language in society.
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5. The biology, evolution, behavior, and social life of monkeys, apes, and other nonhuman primates. These interests link physical anthropology to other fields: biology, zoology, geology, anatomy, physiology, medicine, and public health. Osteology—the study of bones—helps paleoanthropologists, who examine skulls, teeth, and bones, to identify human ancestors and to chart changes in anatomy over time. A paleontologist is a scientist who studies fossils. A paleoanthropologist is one sort of paleontologist, one who studies the fossil record of human evolution. Paleoanthropologists often collaborate with archaeologists, who study artifacts, in reconstructing biological and cultural aspects of human evolution. Fossils and tools are often found together. Different types of tools provide informa-
PART 1
Introduction to Anthropology
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tion about the habits, customs, and lifestyles of the ancestral humans who used them. More than a century ago, Charles Darwin noticed that the variety that exists within any population permits some individuals (those with the favored characteristics) to do better than others at surviving and reproducing. Genetics, which developed later, enlightens us about the causes and transmission of this variety. However, it isn’t just genes that cause variety. During any individual’s lifetime, the environment works along with heredity to determine biological features. For example, people with a genetic tendency to be tall will be shorter if they are poorly nourished during childhood. Thus, biological anthropology also investigates the influence of environment on the body as it grows and matures. Among the environmental factors that influence the body as it develops are nutrition, altitude, temperature, and disease, as well as cultural factors, such as the standards of attractiveness we considered previously. Biological anthropology (along with zoology) also includes primatology. The primates include our closest relatives—apes and monkeys. Primatologists study their biology, evolution, behavior, and social life, often in their natural environments. Primatology assists paleoanthropology, because primate behavior may shed light on early human behavior and human nature.
Linguistic Anthropology We don’t know (and probably never will) when our ancestors acquired the ability to speak, although biological anthropologists have looked to the anatomy of the face and the skull to speculate about the origin of language. And primatologists have described the communication systems of monkeys and apes. We do know that well-developed, grammatically complex languages have existed for thousands of years. Linguistic anthropology offers further illustration of anthropology’s interest in comparison, variation, and change. Linguistic anthropology studies language in its social and cultural context, across space and over time. Some linguistic anthropologists make inferences about universal features of language, linked perhaps to uniformities in the human brain. Others reconstruct ancient languages by comparing their contemporary descendants and in so doing make discoveries about history. Still others study linguistic differences to discover varied perceptions and patterns of thought in different cultures. Historical linguistics considers variation in time, such as the changes in sounds, grammar, and vocabulary between Middle English (spoken from approximately a.d. 1050 to 1550) and modern English. Sociolinguistics investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation. No language is a homogeneous system in which everyone speaks just like everyone else. How do different speakers use a given language? How do linguistic
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features correlate with social factors, including class and gender differences (Tannen 1990)? One reason for variation is geography, as in regional dialects and accents. Linguistic variation also is expressed in the bilingualism of ethnic groups. Linguistic and cultural anthropologists collaborate in studying links between language and many other aspects of culture, such as how people reckon kinship and how they perceive and classify colors.
through the eyes of STUDENT:
Venezuela
SUPERVISING PROFESSORS: SCHOOL:
O OTHERS S
María Alejandra Pérez, Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural Anthropology
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN:
Erik Mueggler and Fernando Coronil
University of Michigan
Changing Places, Changing Identities
ANTHROPOLOGY AND OTHER ACADEMIC FIELDS As mentioned previously, one of the main differences between anthropology and the other fields that study people is holism, anthropology’s unique blend of biological, social, cultural, linguistic, historical, and contemporary perspectives. Paradoxically, while distinguishing anthropology, this breadth is what also links it to many other disciplines. Techniques used to date fossils and artifacts have come to anthropology from physics, chemistry, and geology. Because plant and animal remains often are found with human bones and artifacts, anthropologists collaborate with botanists, zoologists, and paleontologists. As a discipline that is both scientific and humanistic, anthropology has links with many other academic fields. Anthropology is a science—a “systematic field of study or body of knowledge that aims, through experiment, observation, and deduction, to produce reliable explanations of phenomena, with reference to the material and physical world” (Webster’s New World Encyclopedia 1993, p. 937). The following chapters present anthropology as a humanistic science devoted to discovering, describing, understanding, and explaining similarities and differences in time and space among humans and our ancestors. Clyde Kluckhohn (1944) described anthropology as “the science of human similarities and differences” (p. 9). His statement of the need for such a field still stands: “Anthropology provides a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today: how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together?” (p. 9). Anthropology has compiled an impressive body of knowledge that this textbook attempts to encapsulate. Besides its links to the natural sciences (e.g., geology, zoology) and social sciences (e.g., sociology, psychology), anthropology also has strong links to the humanities. The humanities include English, comparative literature, classics, folklore, philosophy, and the arts. These fields study languages, texts, philosophies, arts, music, performances, and other forms of creative expression. Ethnomusicology, which studies forms of musical expression on a worldwide basis, is especially closely related to anthropology. Also linked is folklore, the systematic
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I
was born and lived in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, for 15 years. Caracas was large and chaotic, but wonderfully cosmopolitan. Years of relatively stable democracy and a state infrastructure fueled by oil made this city attractive to many immigrants, not just from rural areas, but from the rest of South America and Europe as well. While growing up, I never thought much about how the place where we live impacts, often in very small ways, who we are. As I later came to realize, it is amazing how much what is familiar to us comes into focus when we travel and live elsewhere, far from the people and customs we are used to. Elements of our identity change, too, in different situations. In fact, plunging ourselves into a different context and carefully evaluating the complexity of this experience are a fundamental part of anthropological research. Moving from Caracas as a teenager was bad enough, but when my family and I arrived in Trinidad, a small town in southern Colorado, one blustery November night, I wondered what I had done wrong to deserve such a fate! In Trinidad, my father joked that you’d miss the town limits if you biked too fast. Many of my new high school classmates had never flown on an airplane, much less seen the ocean. Most of them had last names such as Gonzales and Salazar, and their families had lived in the area for several generations. As different as I felt from them, we shared, in the American social context, identifiers such as Hispanic or Latino, terms that never made much sense to me, since they purportedly bundled together people I viewed as not having much in common. Just as I noticed how different my classmates were from me, elements that I felt made my family “distinctly Venezuelan” stood out, both tinted and amplified, no doubt, by my nostalgia for the people and places left behind. We stayed up late, danced to salsa on Christmas Eve and New Year’s, lamented the lack of homemade hallacas (a traditional Venezuelan Christmas dish) and blabbed and joked in a Spanish that is characteristically Caraqueño (from Caracas). These seemingly trivial stereotypes became for me, during that first holiday away from home, the essence of our identity. Years later, while conducting fieldwork in rural eastern Venezuela, I would again face the challenge of defining my identity both to myself and to local people who viewed me as a foreigner. This time, after several years of graduate school, I could better understand my reactions. I now appreciate what it means to be part of one culture and not another and that what it means to be local is contextual and dynamic.
study of tales, myths, and legends from a variety of cultures. One might well argue that anthropology is among the most humanistic of all academic fields because of its fundamental respect for human diversity. Anthropologists listen to, record, and represent voices from a multitude of nations and cultures. Anthropology values local knowledge,
Chapter 1
What Is Anthropology?
science Field of study that seeks reliable explanations, with reference to the material and physical world.
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150°E
Bismarck Sea
New Ireland
Rabaul
Witu Is.
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New Britain
Bougainville
Umboi I. Lae
New Guinea
P A P U A
N E W
G U I N E A
Trobriand Is. Kiriwina I. Losuia Kitava I. Goodenough I.
Port Moresby
Woodlark (Muyua) I.
Normanby I. Milne Bay L o u i s i Misima I.
10° ade
Tagula I.
0
100 100
SOLOMON ISLANDS
D'Entrecasteaux Is. Fergusson I. Alotau
0
Arawa
Solomon Sea
Morobe
Popondetta
10°
PACIFIC OCEAN
Buka I.
Kimbe
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Arc
hip
ela go Rossel I.
300 mi
Coral Sea
200 km
150°E
FIGURE 1.1 Location of Trobriand Islands.
diverse worldviews, and alternative philosophies. Cultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology in particular bring a comparative and nonelitist perspective to forms of creative expression, including language, art, narratives, music, and dance, viewed in their social and cultural context.
Cultural Anthropology and Sociology Cultural anthropology and sociology share an interest in social relations, organization, and behavior. However, important differences between these disciplines arose from the kinds of societies each traditionally studied. Initially sociologists focused on the industrial West; anthropologists, on nonindustrial societies. Different methods of data collection and analysis emerged to deal with those different kinds of societies. To study large-scale, complex nations, sociologists came to rely on questionnaires and other means of gathering masses of quantifiable data. For many years, sampling and statistical techniques have been basic to sociology, whereas statistical training has been less common in anthropology (although this is changing as anthropologists increasingly work in modern nations). Traditional ethnographers studied small and nonliterate (without writing) populations and relied on methods appropriate to that context. “Ethnography is a research process in which the anthropologist closely observes, records, and engages in the daily life of another culture—an experience labeled as the fieldwork method—and
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then writes accounts of this culture, emphasizing descriptive detail” (Marcus and Fischer 1986, p. 18). One key method described in this quote is participant observation—taking part in the events one is observing, describing, and analyzing. In many areas and topics, anthropology and sociology now are converging. As the modern world system grows, sociologists now do research in developing countries and in other places that were once mainly within the anthropological orbit. As industrialization spreads, many anthropologists now work in industrial nations, where they study diverse topics, including rural decline, inner-city life, and the role of the mass media in creating national cultural patterns.
Introduction to Anthropology
Anthropology and Psychology Like sociologists, most psychologists do research in their own society. But statements about “human” psychology cannot be based solely on observations made in one society or in a single type of society. The area of cultural anthropology known as psychological anthropology studies cross-cultural variation in psychological traits. Societies instill different values by training children differently. Adult personalities reflect a culture’s child-rearing practices. Bronislaw Malinowski, an early contributor to the cross-cultural study of human psychology, is famous for his field work among the Trobriand Islanders of the South Pacific (Figure 1.1). The Trobrianders reckon kinship matrilineally. They consider themselves related to the mother and her relatives, but not to the father. The relative who disciplines the child is not the father but the mother’s brother, the maternal uncle. Trobrianders show a marked respect for the uncle, with whom a boy usually has a cool and distant relationship. In contrast, the Trobriand father–son relationship is friendly and affectionate. Malinowski’s work among the Trobrianders suggested modifications in Sigmund Freud’s famous theory of the universality of the Oedipus complex (Malinowski 1927). According to Freud (1918/1950), boys around the age of five become sexually attracted to their mothers. The Oedipus complex is resolved, in Freud’s view, when the boy overcomes his sexual jealousy of, and identifies with, his father. Freud lived in patriarchal Austria during the late 19th and early 20th centuries—a social milieu in which the father was a strong authoritarian figure. The Austrian father was the child’s primary authority figure and the mother’s sexual partner. In the Trobriands, the father had only the sexual role. If, as Freud contended, the Oedipus complex always creates social distance based on jealousy toward the mother’s sexual partner, this would have shown up in Trobriand society. It did not. Malinowski concluded that the authority struc-
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ture did more to influence the father–son relationship than did sexual jealousy. Although Melford Spiro (1993) has critiqued Malinowski’s conclusions (see also Weiner 1988), no contemporary anthropologist would dispute Malinowski’s contention that individual psychology is molded in a specific cultural context. Anthropologists continue to provide cross-cultural perspectives on psychoanalytic propositions (Paul 1989) as well as on issues of developmental and cognitive psychology (Shore 1996).
APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY Anthropology is not a science of the exotic carried on by quaint scholars in ivory towers. Rather, anthropology has a lot to tell the public. Anthropology’s foremost professional organization, the American Anthropological Association (AAA), has formally acknowledged a public service role by recognizing that anthropology has two dimensions: (1) academic anthropology and (2) practicing or applied anthropology. The latter refers to the application of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and methods to identify, assess, and solve contemporary social problems. As Erve Chambers (1987, p. 309) states, applied anthropology is the “field of inquiry concerned with the relationships between anthropological knowledge and the uses of that knowledge in the world beyond anthropology.” More and more anthropologists from the four subfields now work in such “applied” areas as public health, family planning, business, economic development, and cultural resource management. (This chapter’s “Appreciating Anthropology” box on pp. 16–17 discusses the career of President Barack Obama’s mother, a sociocultural and applied anthropologist, who instilled in her son an appreciation of human diversity.) Because of anthropology’s breadth, applied anthropology has many applications. For example, applied medical anthropologists consider both the sociocultural and the biological contexts and implications of disease and illness. Perceptions of good and bad health, along with actual health threats and problems, differ among societies. Various ethnic groups recognize different illnesses, symptoms, and causes and have developed different health-care systems and treatment strategies. Applied archaeology, usually called public archaeology, includes such activities as cultural resource management, contract archaeology, public educational programs, and historic preservation. An important role for public archaeology has been created by legislation requiring evaluation of sites threatened by dams, highways, and other construction activities. To decide what needs saving, and to preserve significant information about the past when sites cannot be saved, is the work of cultural resource management (CRM). CRM involves not only preserving sites but allowing their destruction
Bronislaw Malinowski is famous for his field work among the matrilineal Trobriand Islanders of the South Pacific. Does this Trobriand market scene suggest anything about the status of Trobriand women?
if they are not significant. The “management” part of the term refers to the evaluation and decisionmaking process. Cultural resource managers work for federal, state, and county agencies and other clients. Applied cultural anthropologists sometimes work with the public archaeologists, assessing the human problems generated by the proposed change and determining how they can be reduced.
applied anthropology Using anthropology to solve contemporary problems.
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD Anthropology, we have seen, is a science, although a very humanistic one. Within sociocultural anthropology, ethnology is the comparative science that attempts to identify and explain cultural differences and similarities, test hypotheses, and build theory to enhance our understanding of how social and cultural systems work. The data for ethnology come from societies located in various times and places and so can come from archaeology as well as from ethnography, their more usual source. Ethnologists compare, contrast, and make generalizations about societies and cultures.
Theories, Associations, and Explanations
A set of ideas formulated to explain something.
association
A theory is a set of ideas formulated to explain something. An effective theory offers an explanatory framework that can be applied to multiple cases. Just as ethnological theories help explain sociocultural differences and similarities, evolutionary theory is used to explain biological associations. An association is an observed relationship between two or more variables, such as the length of
Chapter 1
theory
What Is Anthropology?
An observed relationship between two or more variables.
cultural resource management Deciding what needs saving when entire archaeological sites cannot be saved.
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appreciating
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ANTHROPOLOGY
best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places.” . . .
Anthropologist’s Son Elected President
Mr. Obama . . . barely saw his father after the age of 2. Though it is impossible to pinpoint the imprint of a parent on the life of a grown child,
It is widely known that President Barack Obama is the son of a Kenyan father and a White American mother from Kansas. Less recognized is the fact that the 44th president of the United States is the son of an anthropologist—Dr. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro (usually called simply Ann Dunham). This account focuses on her life and her appreciation of human diversity, which led her to a career in anthropology and which she inculcated in her son. A sociocultural anthropologist by training, Dunham focused her attention on issues of microfinance and socioeconomic problems faced by Indonesian women. She applied anthropology, using her knowledge to identify and solve contemporary problems. She was both a cultural and an applied anthropologist. Anthropologists study humanity in varied times and places and in a rapidly changing world. By virtue of his parentage, his enculturation, and his experience abroad, Barack Obama provides an excellent symbol of the diversity and interconnections that characterize such a world. As well, his election is a tribute to an ever more diverse United States and to the ability of the American people to appreciate such a nation.
life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent
people who knew Ms. Soetoro well say they see
who most shaped Mr. Obama. . . .
her influence unmistakably in Mr. Obama. . . .
In Hawaii, she married an African student at
“She was a very, very big thinker,” said
age 18. Then she married an Indonesian,
Nancy Barry, a former president of Women’s
moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist,
World Banking, an international network of
wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant
microfinance providers, where Ms. Soetoro
blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford
worked in New York City in the early 1990s . . .
Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor.
In a Russian class at the University of Hawaii, she met the college’s first African stu-
She had high expectations for her children.
dent, Barack Obama. They married and had a
In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 A.M.
son in August 1961, in an era when interracial
for correspondence courses in English before
marriage was rare in the United States . . .
school; she brought home recordings of
The marriage was brief. In 1963, Mr. Obama
Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the Rev. Dr.
left for Harvard, leaving his wife and child.
Martin Luther King Jr., and when Mr. Obama
She then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian
asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather
student. When he was summoned home in
than return to Asia, she accepted living apart—
1966 after the turmoil surrounding the rise of
a decision her daughter says was one of the
Suharto, Ms. Soetoro and Barack followed. . . .
hardest in Ms. Soetoro’s life.
Her second marriage faded, too, in the
“She felt that somehow, wandering through
1970s. Ms. Soetoro wanted to work, one friend
uncharted territory, we might stumble upon
said, and Mr. Soetoro wanted more children.
something that will, in an instant, seem to rep-
He became more American, she once said, as
In the capsule version of the Barack Obama
resent who we are at the core,” said Maya
she became more Javanese. “There’s a Java-
story, his mother is simply the white woman
Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s half-sister. “That was
nese belief that if you’re married to someone
from Kansas. . . . On the campaign trail, he has
very much her philosophy of life—to not be
and it doesn’t work, it will make you sick,” said
called her his “single mom.” But neither de-
limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not
Alice G. Dewey, an anthropologist and friend.
scription begins to capture the unconventional
build walls around ourselves and to do our
“It’s just stupid to stay married.” . . .
a giraffe’s neck and the number of its offspring. Theories, which are more general than associations, suggest or imply multiple associations and attempt to explain them. Something, for example, the giraffe’s long neck, is explained if it illustrates a general principle (a law), such as the concepts of adaptive advantage and differential fitness. In evolutionary theory, fitness is measured by reproductive success. In this case, giraffes with longer necks have a feeding advantage compared with their shorter-necked fellows; in times of food scarcity they eat better, live longer, and have more surviving offspring. The truth of a scientific statement (e.g., evolution occurs because of differential repro-
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PART 1
Introduction to Anthropology
ductive success due to variation within the population) is confirmed by repeated observations. Any science aims for reliable explanations that predict future occurrences. Accurate predictions stand up to tests designed to disprove (falsify) them. Scientific explanations rely on data, which can come from experiments, observation, and other systematic procedures. Scientific causes are material, physical, or natural (e.g., viruses) rather than supernatural (e.g., ghosts). Science is one way of understanding the world, but not the only way (See “Understanding Ourselves,” p. 4). In their 1997 article “Science in Anthropology,” Melvin Ember and Carol R. Ember describe how
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By 1974, Ms. Soetoro was back in Honolulu,
ple from women’s organizations, representa-
a graduate student and raising Barack and
tives of community groups doing grass-roots
Maya, nine years younger. . . . When Ms. Soetoro
development. . . .
decided to return to Indonesia three years later
Ms. Soetoro-Ng . . . remembers conversa-
for her field work, Barack chose not to go . . .
tions with her mother about philosophy or
Fluent in Indonesian, Ms. Soetoro moved
politics, books, esoteric Indonesian woodwork-
with Maya first to Yogyakarta, the center of
ing motifs. . . .
Javanese handicrafts. A weaver in college, she
“She gave us a very broad understanding of
was fascinated with what Ms. Soetoro-Ng calls
the world,” her daughter said. “She hated bigotry.
“life’s gorgeous minutiae.” That interest inspired
She was very determined to be remembered for
her study of village industries, which became
a life of service and thought that service was re-
the basis of her 1992 doctoral dissertation.
ally the true measure of a life.” Many of her
“She loved living in Java,” said Dr. Dewey,
friends see her legacy in Mr. Obama—in his self-
who recalled accompanying Ms. Soetoro to a
assurance and drive, his boundary bridging, even
metalworking village. “People said: ‘Hi! How are
his apparent comfort with strong women.
you?’ She said: ‘How’s your wife? Did your
She died in November 1995, as Mr. Obama
daughter have the baby?’ They were friends.
was starting his first campaign for public office.
Then she’d whip out her notebook and she’d
After a memorial service at the University of
say: ‘How many of you have electricity? Are you having trouble getting iron?’” She became a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development on setting up a village credit program, then a Ford Foundation program officer in Jakarta specializing in women’s work. Later, she was a consultant
Hawaii, one friend said, a small group of friends President Barack Obama and his mother,
drove to the South Shore in Oahu. With the
Ann Dunham, who was a cultural and ap-
wind whipping the waves onto the rocks,
plied anthropologist, in an undated photo from the 1960s. Dunham met Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr. from Kenya, when both were students at the University of
Mr. Obama and Ms. Soetoro-Ng placed their mother’s ashes in the Pacific, sending them off in the direction of Indonesia.
Hawaii at Manoa; they married in 1960.
in Pakistan, then joined Indonesia’s oldest bank to work on what is described as the world’s larg-
SOURCE:
est sustainable microfinance program, creating
Obama’s Path.” From The New York Times, March 14,
services like credit and savings for the poor.
south, where papaya and banana trees grew in
Janny Scott, “A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set
2008. © The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of
Visitors flowed constantly through her Ford
the front yard and Javanese dishes . . . were
Foundation office in downtown Jakarta and
served for dinner. Her guests were leaders in
or retransmission of the Material without express writ-
through her house in a neighborhood to the
the Indonesian human rights movement, peo-
ten permission is prohibited. www.nytimes.com
scientists strive to improve our understanding of the world by testing hypotheses—suggested but as yet unverified explanations. An explanation must show how and why the thing to be understood (the explicandum or dependent variable) is associated with or related to something else, a predictor variable. Associations require covariation; when one thing (a variable) changes, the other one varies as well. Theories provide explanations for associations (Ember and Ember 1997). One explanation for the occurrence of an association is that it illustrates a general principle. Thus, “water solidifies (freezes) at 32 degrees” states an association between two variables: the state of the
the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution,
water and the air temperature. The truth of the statement is confirmed by repeated observations of freezing and the fact that water does not solidify at higher temperatures. Such general relationships are called laws. Explanations based on such laws allow us to understand the past and predict the future. Yesterday ice formed at 32 degrees, and tomorrow it will still form at 32 degrees. In the social sciences, associations usually are stated in the form of probability rather than as such absolute laws. The variables of interest are likely to, but don’t always, vary as predicted. They tend to be related in a predictable way, but there are exceptions (Ember and Ember 1997). For
Chapter 1
What Is Anthropology?
hypothesis A suggested but as yet unverified explanation.
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The name kwashiorkor, for a condition caused by severe protein deficiency, comes from a West African word meaning “one-two.” Some cultures abruptly wean one infant when a second one is born. In today’s world, refugees from civil wars, including the Angolan girl shown here, are among the most com-
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consciously, that having another baby too soon would jeopardize the survival of the first one. Thus, they avoid sex for more than a year after the birth of the first baby. When such abstinence becomes institutionalized, everyone is expected to respect the taboo. Theories suggest patterns, connections, and relationships that may be confirmed by new research. Whiting’s theory, for example, suggests hypotheses for future researchers to test. Because his theory proposes that the postpartum taboo is adaptive under certain conditions, one might hypothesize that certain changes would cause the taboo to disappear. By adopting birth control, for instance, families could space births without avoiding intercourse. So, too, might the taboo disappear if babies started receiving protein supplements, which would reduce the threat of kwashiorkor. What constitutes acceptable evidence that a theory or explanation probably is right? Cases that have been personally selected by a researcher don’t provide an acceptable test of a hypothesis or theory. Ideally, hypothesis testing should be done using a sample of cases that have been selected randomly from some statistical universe. (Whiting did this in choosing his cross-cultural sample.) The relevant variables should be measured reliably, and the strength and significance of the results should be evaluated by using legitimate statistical methods (Bernard 2006). Recap 1.3 summarizes the main steps in using the scientific method, as just discussed here.
mon victims of malnutrition.
When Multiple Variables Predict example, in a worldwide sample of societies, the anthropologist John Whiting (1964) found a strong (but not 100 percent) association or correlation between a sexual custom and a type of diet. A long postpartum sex taboo (a ban on sexual intercourse between husband and wife for a year or more after the birth of a child) tended to be found in societies where the diet was low in protein. After confirming the association through crosscultural data (ethnographic information from a sample of several societies), Whiting’s job was to formulate a theory that would explain why the dependent variable (in this case the postpartum sex taboo) depended on the predictor variable (a lowprotein diet). Why might societies with low-protein diets develop this taboo? Whiting’s theory was that the taboo is adaptive; it helps people survive and reproduce in certain environments. (More generally, anthropologists have argued that many cultural practices are adaptive.) In this case, with too little protein in their diets, babies may develop and die from a protein-deficiency disease called kwashiorkor. But if the mother delays her next pregnancy, her current baby, by breast-feeding longer, has a better chance to survive. Whiting suggests that parents are aware, unconsciously or
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Introduction to Anthropology
The scientific method, as shown in Recap 1.3, is not limited to ethnology but applies to any anthropological endeavor that formulates research questions and gathers or uses systematic data to test hypotheses. Nor does there have to be a single research question. Often anthropologists gather data that enable them to pose and test a number of separate hypotheses about attitudes and behavior. For example, in a research project during the 1980s, my associates and I used a combination of ethnography and survey research to study television’s behavioral effects in Brazil (see Kottak 1990a). Our most general research question was this: How has variable exposure to television affected Brazilians? We gathered data from more than 1,000 Brazilians living in seven different communities to answer this question. Uniquely, our research design permitted us to distinguish between two key measures of individual exposure to television. First was current viewing level (average daily hours spent watching TV). Such a measure is used routinely to assess the impact of television in the United States. Our second, and far more significant, variable was length of home TV exposure. Unlike us, researchers in the United States must rely solely on current viewing level to measure TV’s
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Steps in the Scientific Method
Have a research question
Why do some societies have long postpartum taboos?
Construct a hypothesis
Delaying marital sex reduces infant mortality when diets are low in protein.
Posit a mechanism
Babies get more protein when they nurse longer; nursing is not a reliable method of contraception.
Get data to test your hypothesis
Use a (random) sample of cross-cultural data (data from several societies; such datasets exist for cross-cultural research).
Devise a way of measuring
Code societies 1 when they have a postpartum taboo of one year or longer, 0 when they do not; code 1 when diet is low protein, 0 when it is not.
Analyze your data
Notice patterns in the data: long postpartum taboos generally are found in societies with low-protein diets, whereas societies with better diets tend to lack those taboos. Use appropriate statistical methods to evaluate the strength of these associations.
Draw a conclusion
In most cases, the hypothesis is confirmed.
Derive implications
Such taboos tend to disappear when diets get better or new reproductive technologies become available.
Contribute to larger theory
Cultural practices can have adaptive value because they can enhance the survival of offspring.
influence, because there is little variation in length of home exposure, except for variation based on age. Americans aged 60 and younger never have known a world without TV. Some American researchers have tried to use age as an indirect measure of TV’s long-term effects. Their assumption is that viewing has a cumulative effect, its influence increasing (up to a point) with age. However, that approach has difficulty distinguishing between the effects of years of TV exposure and other changes associated with aging. By contrast, our Brazilian sample included people in the same age groups but exposed to TV for different lengths of time— because television had reached their towns at different times. Years of age and years of home exposure were two separate variables. Having gathered detailed quantitative data, we could use a statistical method that measures the separate (as well as the combined) effects of several “potential predictors” on a dependent variable. To use a more general example, to predict “risk of heart attack” (the dependent variable), potential predictors would include sex (gender), age, family history, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol level, exercise, and cigarette smoking. Each one would make a separate contribution, and some would have more impact than others. However, someone with many “risk factors” (particularly the most significant ones) would have a greater risk of heart attack than someone with few predictors. Returning to television in Brazil, we used a standard set of nine potential predictor variables and examined their effects on hundreds of dependent variables (Kottak 1990a). Our potential predictors included gender, age, skin color, social class, education, income, religious involvement,
years of home TV exposure, and current televiewing level. We could measure the separate (as well as the combined) influence of each predictor on each dependent variable. One of our strongest statistical measures of television’s impact on attitudes was the correlation between TV exposure and liberal views on sex-gender issues. TV exposure had a stronger effect on sex-gender views than did such other predictor variables as gender, education, and income. The heavier and longer-exposed viewers were strikingly more liberal—less traditional in their opinions on such matters as whether women “belong at home,” should work when their husbands have good incomes, should work when pregnant, should go to bars, should leave a husband they no longer love, should pursue men they like; whether men should cook and wash clothes; and whether parents should talk to their children about sex. All these questions produced TV-biased answers, in that Brazilian television depicts an urban-modern society in which sex-gender roles are less traditional than in small communities. Are these effects or just correlations? That is, does Brazilian TV make people more liberal, or do already liberal people, seeking reinforcement for their views, simply watch more television? Do they look to TV and its urban-elite world for moral options that are missing, suppressed, or disapproved in their own, more traditional, towns? We concluded that this liberalization is both a correlation and an effect. There is a strong correlation between liberal social views and current viewing hours. Liberal small-town Brazilians appear to watch more TV to validate personal views that the local setting suppresses. However, confirming that
Chapter 1
What Is Anthropology?
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Family and friends watching a soccer game on TV in Brazil. Soccer and telenovelas are key features of Brazilian popular culture.
long-term TV exposure also has an effect on Brazilians’ attitudes, there is an even stronger correlation between years of home viewing by individuals and their liberal social views. It is difficult to separate effects of televiewing from mere correlations when we use current viewing level as a predictor variable. Questions like the following always arise: Does television create fears about the outside world—or do already fearful people tend to stay home and watch more TV? Effects are clearer when length of home exposure can be measured. Logically, we can compare this predictor and its influence over time to education and its effects. If the cumulative effects of formal education increase with years of schooling, then it seems
reasonable to assume some similar influence as a result of years of home exposure to television. Heavy viewers in Brazil probably are predisposed to liberal views. However, content, entering homes each day, reinforces those views over time. TV-biased and TV-reinforced attitudes spread as viewers take courage from the daily validation of their unorthodox (local) views in (national) programming. More and more townsfolk encounter nontraditional views and come to see them as normal. In this case, we measured and confirmed an association and then offered explanations for why that association is an effect as well as a correlation. Our study suggested hypotheses for future research on how people use television and how it affects them in other ways, places, and times. Indeed, recent research in a Michigan town (Descartes and Kottak 2009) has revealed forms of use and impact similar to those we discovered in Brazil.
Acing the Summary
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1. Anthropology is the holistic and comparative study of humanity. It is the systematic exploration of human biological and cultural diversity.
PART 1
Introduction to Anthropology
COURSE
Examining the origins of, and changes in, human biology and culture, anthropology provides explanations for similarities and differences. The
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four subfields of general anthropology are sociocultural, archaeological, biological, and linguistic. All consider variation in time and space. Each also examines adaptation—the process by which organisms cope with environmental stresses. 2. Cultural forces mold human biology, including our body types and images. Societies have particular standards of physical attractiveness. They also have specific ideas about what activities—for example, various sports—are appropriate for males and females. 3. Cultural anthropology explores the cultural diversity of the present and the recent past. Archaeology reconstructs cultural patterns, often of prehistoric populations. Biological anthropology documents diversity involving fossils, genetics, growth and development, bodily responses, and nonhuman primates. Linguistic anthropology considers diversity among languages. It also studies how speech changes in social situations and over time.
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Anthropologists examine creators and products in their social context. Sociologists traditionally study urban and industrial populations, whereas anthropologists have focused on rural, nonindustrial peoples. Psychological anthropology views human psychology in the context of social and cultural variation. 5. Anthropology has two dimensions: academic and applied. Applied anthropology is the use of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and methods to identify, assess, and solve contemporary social problems.
4. Concerns with biology, society, culture, and language link anthropology to many other fields— sciences and humanities. Anthropologists study art, music, and literature across cultures. But their concern is more with the creative expressions of common people than with arts designed for elites.
6. Ethnologists attempt to identify and explain cultural differences and similarities and to build theories about how social and cultural systems work. Scientists strive to improve understanding by testing hypotheses—suggested explanations. Explanations rely on associations and theories. An association is an observed relationship between variables. A theory is more general, suggesting or implying associations and attempting to explain them. The scientific method characterizes any anthropological endeavor that formulates research questions and gathers or uses systematic data to test hypotheses. Often anthropologists gather data that enable them to pose and test a number of separate hypotheses.
anthropology 5 applied anthropology 15 archaeological anthropology 10 association 15 biocultural 9 biological anthropology 12 cultural anthropology 9 cultural resource management 15 culture 5 ethnography 9
ethnology 10 food production 6 general anthropology 8 holistic 5 hypothesis 17 linguistic anthropology 12 physical anthropology 12 science 13 sociolinguistics 12 theory 15
MULTIPLE CHOICE 1. Which of the following most characterizes anthropology among disciplines that study humans? a. It studies foreign places. b. It includes biology. c. It uses personal interviews of the study population. d. It is holistic and comparative. e. It studies only groups that are thought to be “dying.” 2. What is the most critical element of cultural traditions? a. their stability due to the unchanging characteristics of human biology b. their tendency to radically change every 15 years
c. d. e.
Key Terms
their ability to survive the challenges of modern life their transmission through learning rather than through biological inheritance their material manifestations in archaeological sites
Test Yourself!
3. Over time, how has human reliance on cultural means of adaptation changed? a. Humans have become increasingly less dependent on them. b. Humans have become entirely reliant on biological means. c. Humans have become increasingly more dependent on them. d. Humans are just beginning to depend on them. e. Humans no longer use them.
Chapter 1
What Is Anthropology?
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4. The fact that anthropology focuses on both culture and biology a. is unique to the kind of anthropology found in Europe. b. is the reason it has traditionally studied primitive societies. c. is a product of the participant observation approach. d. allows it to address how culture influences biological traits and vice versa. e. is insignificant, since biology is studied by biological anthropologists while culture is studied by cultural anthropologists. 5. In this chapter, what is the point of describing the ways in which humans cope with low oxygen pressure in high altitudes? a. to illustrate human capacities of cultural and biological adaptation, variation, and change b. to expose the fact that “it is all in the genes” c. to show how culture is more important than biology d. to describe how humans are among the world’s least adaptable animals e. to stress the rising popularity of extreme sport anthropology 6. Four-field anthropology a. was largely shaped by early American anthropologists’ interests in Native Americans. b. is unique to Old World anthropology. c. stopped being useful when the world became dominated by nation-states. d. was replaced in the 1930s by the two-field approach. e. originally was practiced in Europe, because of a particularly British interest in military behavior. 7. The study of nonhuman primates is of special interest to which subdiscipline of anthropology? a. cultural anthropology b. archaeological anthropology
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c. d. e.
linguistic anthropology developmental anthropology biological anthropology
8. All of the following are true about practicing or applied anthropology except that a. it encompasses any use of the knowledge and/or techniques of the four subfields to identify, assess, and solve practical social problems. b. it has been formally acknowledged by the American Anthropological Association as one of the two dimensions of the discipline. c. it is less relevant for archaeology since archaeology typically concerns the material culture of societies that no longer exist. d. it is a growing aspect of the field, with more and more anthropologists developing applied components of their work. e. it has many applications because of anthropology’s breadth. 9. Which of the following terms is defined as a suggested but yet unverified explanation for observed things and events? a. hypothesis b. theory c. association d. model e. law 10. The scientific method a. is limited to ethnology since it is the aspect of anthropology that studies sociocultural differences and similarities. b. is a powerful tool for understanding ourselves since it guarantees complete objectivity in research. c. is the best and only reliable way of understanding the world. d. characterizes any anthropological endeavor that formulates research questions and gathers or uses systematic data to test hypotheses. e. only applies to the analysis of data that leads to predictions, not associations.
FILL IN THE BLANK 1. Anthropology is unique among other social sciences in its emphasis on both perspectives.
and
2. A approach refers to the inclusion and combination of both biological and cultural perspectives and approaches to comment on or solve a particular issue or problem. 3. 4.
provides an account of field work in a particular community, society, or culture. encompasses any use of the knowledge and/or techniques of the four subfields of anthropology to identity, assess, and solve practical problems. More and more anthropologists increasingly work in this dimension of the discipline.
5. The characterizes any anthropological endeavor that formulates research questions and gathers or uses systematic data to test hypotheses.
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Introduction to Anthropology
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CRITICAL THINKING 1. What is culture? How is it distinct from what this chapter describes as a biocultural approach? How do these concepts help us understand the complex ways that human populations adapt to their environments? 2. What themes and interests unify the subdisciplines of anthropology? In your answer, refer to historical reasons for the unity of anthropology. Are these historical reasons similar in all places where anthropology developed as a discipline? 3. If, as Franz Boas illustrated early on in American anthropology, cultures are not isolated, how can ethnography provide an account of a particular community, society, or culture? Note: There is no easy answer to this question! Anthropologists continue to deal with it as they define their research questions and projects. 4. The American Anthropological Association has formally acknowledged a public service role by recognizing that anthropology has two dimensions: (1) academic anthropology and (2) practicing or applied anthropology. What is applied anthropology? Based on your reading of this chapter, identify examples from current events where an anthropologist could help identify, assess, and solve contemporary social problems. 5. In this chapter, we learn that anthropology is a science, although a very humanistic one. What do you think this means? What role does hypothesis testing play in structuring anthropological research? What is the difference between theories, laws, and hypotheses? Multiple Choice: 1. (D); 2. (D); 3. (C); 4. (D); 5. (A); 6. (A); 7. (E); 8. (C); 9. (A); 10. (D); Fill in the Blank: 1. holistic, cross-cultural; 2. biocultural; 3. Ethnography; 4. Applied anthropology; 5. scientific method
Endicott, K. M., and R. Welsch 2009 Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Anthropology, 4th ed. Guilford, CT: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin. Thirty-eight anthropologists offer opposing viewpoints on 19 polarizing issues, including ethical dilemmas. Fagan, B. M. 2009 Archeology: A Brief Introduction, 10th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Introduction to archaeological theory, techniques, and approaches, including field survey, excavation, and analysis of materials. Geertz, C. 1995 After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. A prominent cultural anthropologist reflects on his work in Morocco and Indonesia.
Harris, M. 1989 Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going. New York: HarperCollins. Clearly written survey of the origins of humans, culture, and major sociopolitical institutions. Nash, D. 1999 A Little Anthropology, 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Short introduction to societies and cultures, with comments on developing nations and modern America. Wolf, E. R. 1982 Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Influential and award-winning study of the relation between Europe and various nonindustrial populations.
Go to our Online Learning Center website at www.mhhe.com/kottak for Internet exercises directly related to the content of this chapter.
Chapter 1
What Is Anthropology?
Suggested Additional Readings
Internet Exercises
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What is culture and why do we study it?
What is the relation between culture and the individual?
How does culture change?
Children and adults praying in Bali, Indonesia. People learn and share beliefs and behavior as members of cultural groups.
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Culture
chapter outline
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WHAT IS CULTURE? Culture Is Learned Culture Is Symbolic Culture Is Shared Culture and Nature Culture Is All-Encompassing Culture Is Integrated Culture Can Be Adaptive and Maladaptive CULTURE’S EVOLUTIONARY BASIS
understanding OURSELVES
H
ow special are you? To what ex-
exposure to particular cultural traditions.
tent are you “your own person”
Middle-class Brazilians teach their kids—both
and to what extent are you a
boys and girls—to kiss (on the cheek, two or
product of your particular culture?
three times, coming and going) every adult
How much does, and should, your cultural
relative they ever see. Given the size of Brazil-
What We Share with Other Primates
background influence your actions and deci-
ian extended families, this can mean hundreds
How We Differ from Other Primates
sions? Americans may not fully appreciate the
of people. Women continue kissing all those
power of culture because of the value their
people throughout their lives. Until they are
culture places on “the individual.” Americans
adolescents, boys kiss all adult relatives. Men
like to regard everyone as unique in some way.
typically continue to kiss female relatives and
Yet individualism itself is a distinctive shared
friends, as well as their fathers and uncles
value, a feature of American culture, transmit-
throughout their lives.
UNIVERSALITY, GENERALITY, AND PARTICULARITY Universality Generality Particularity: Patterns of Culture CULTURE AND THE INDIVIDUAL: AGENCY AND PRACTICE Levels of Culture Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights MECHANISMS OF CULTURAL CHANGE GLOBALIZATION
ted constantly in our daily lives. In the media,
Do you kiss your father? Your uncle? Your
count how many stories focus on individuals
grandfather? How about your mother, aunt, or
versus groups. From the late Mr. (Fred) Rogers
grandmother? The answer to these questions
of daytime TV to “real-life” parents, grandpar-
may differ between men and women, and for
ents, and teachers, our enculturative agents
male and female relatives. Culture can help us to
insist we all are “someone special.” That we
make sense of these differences. In America,
are individuals first and members of groups
a cultural homophobia (fear of homosexuality)
second is the opposite of this chapter’s lesson
may prevent American men from engaging in
about culture. Certainly we have distinctive
displays of affection with other men; similarly,
features because we are individuals, but we
American girls typically are encouraged to
have other distinct attributes because we be-
show affection, while American boys typically
long to cultural groups.
aren’t. It’s important to note that these cultural
For example, as we saw in the “Appreciat-
explanations rely upon example and expecta-
ing Diversity” box in Chapter 1 (pp. 6–7), a com-
tion, and that no cultural trait exists because it
parison of the United States with Brazil, Italy, or
is natural or right. Ethnocentrism is the error of
virtually any Latin nation reveals striking con-
viewing one’s own culture as superior and
trasts between a national culture (American)
applying one’s own cultural values in judging
that discourages physical affection and na-
people from other cultures. How easy is it for
tional cultures in which the opposite is true.
you to see beyond the ethnocentric blinders
Brazilians touch, embrace, and kiss one an-
of your own experience? Do you have an
other much more frequently than North Amer-
ethnocentric position regarding displays of
icans do. Such behavior reflects years of
affection?
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WHAT IS CULTURE? The concept of culture has long been basic to anthropology. Well over a century ago, in his book Primitive Culture, the British anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor proposed that cultures—systems of human behavior and thought—obey natural laws and therefore can be studied scientifically. Tylor’s definition of culture still offers an overview of the subject matter of anthropology and is widely quoted: “Culture . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 1871/1958, p. 1). The crucial phrase here is “acquired by man as a member of society.” Tylor’s definition focuses on attributes that people acquire not through biological inheritance but by growing up in a particular society where they are exposed to a specific cultural tradition. Enculturation is the process by which a child learns his or her culture.
Culture Is Learned The ease with which children absorb any cultural tradition rests on the uniquely elaborated human capacity to learn. Other animals may learn from experience; for example, they avoid fire after discovering that it hurts. Social animals also learn from other members of their group. Wolves, for instance, learn hunting strategies from other pack members. Such social learning is particularly important among monkeys and apes, our closest biological relatives. But our own cultural learning depends on the uniquely developed human capacity to use symbols, signs that have no necessary or natural connection to the things they signify or for which they stand. On the basis of cultural learning, people create, remember, and deal with ideas. They grasp and apply specific systems of symbolic meaning. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz defines culture as ideas based on cultural learning and symbols. Cultures have been characterized as sets of “control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions, what computer engineers call programs for the governing of behavior” (Geertz 1973, p. 44). These programs are absorbed by people through enculturation in particular traditions. People gradually internalize a previously established system of meanings and symbols. They use this cultural system to define their world, express their feelings, and make their judgments. This system helps guide their behavior and perceptions throughout their lives. Every person begins immediately, through a process of conscious and unconscious learning and interaction with others, to internalize, or incorporate, a cultural tradition through the process of enculturation. Sometimes culture is taught
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directly, as when parents tell their children to say “thank you” when someone gives them something or does them a favor. Culture also is transmitted through observation. Children pay attention to the things that go on around them. They modify their behavior not just because other people tell them to but as a result of their own observations and growing awareness of what their culture considers right and wrong. Culture also is absorbed unconsciously. North Americans acquire their culture’s notions about how far apart people should stand when they talk not by being told directly to maintain a certain distance but through a gradual process of observation, experience, and conscious and unconscious behavior modification. No one tells Latins to stand closer together than North Americans do, but they learn to do so anyway as part of their cultural tradition. Anthropologists agree that cultural learning is uniquely elaborated among humans and that all humans have culture. Anthropologists also accept a doctrine named in the 19th century as “the psychic unity of man.” This means that although individuals differ in their emotional and intellectual tendencies and capacities, all human populations have equivalent capacities for culture. Regardless of their genes or their physical appearance, people can learn any cultural tradition. To understand this point, consider that contemporary Americans and Canadians are the genetically mixed descendants of people from all over the world. Our ancestors were biologically varied, lived in different countries and continents, and participated in hundreds of cultural traditions. However, early colonists, later immigrants, and their descendants have all become active participants in American and Canadian life. All now share a national culture.
enculturation The process by which culture is learned and transmitted across the generations.
symbol Something, verbal or nonverbal, that stands for something else.
Culture Is Symbolic Symbolic thought is unique and crucial to humans and to cultural learning. Anthropologist Leslie White defined culture as dependent upon symbolling . . . Culture consists of tools, implements, utensils, clothing, ornaments, customs, institutions, beliefs, rituals, games, works of art, language, etc. (White 1959, p. 3) For White, culture originated when our ancestors acquired the ability to use symbols, that is, to originate and bestow meaning on a thing or event, and, correspondingly, to grasp and appreciate such meanings (White 1959, p. 3). A symbol is something verbal or nonverbal, within a particular language or culture, that comes to stand for something else. There is no obvious, natural, or necessary connection between the symbol and what it symbolizes. A pet
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Symbols may be linguistic or nonverbal. The latter include flags, which stand for countries. Here, colorful flags of several nations wave in front of the United Nations building in New York City.
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that barks is no more naturally a dog than a chien, Hund, or mbwa, to use the words for the animal we call “dog” in French, German, and Swahili. Language is one of the distinctive possessions of Homo sapiens. No other animal has developed anything approaching the complexity of language. Symbols are usually linguistic. But there are also nonverbal symbols, such as flags, that stand for countries, as arches do for a hamburger chain. Holy water is a potent symbol in Roman Catholicism. As is true of all symbols, the association between a symbol (water) and what is symbolized (holiness) is arbitrary and conventional. Water is not intrinsically holier than milk, blood, or other natural liquids. Nor is holy water chemically different from ordinary water. Holy water is a symbol within Roman Catholicism, which is part of an international cultural system. A natural thing has been arbitrarily associated with a particular meaning for Catholics, who share common beliefs and experiences that are based on learning and that are transmitted across the generations. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans have shared the abilities on which culture rests. These abilities are to learn, to think symbolically, to manipulate language, and to use tools and other cultural products in organizing their lives and coping with their environments. Every contemporary human population has the ability to use symbols and thus to create and maintain culture. Our nearest relatives—chimpanzees and gorillas—have rudimentary cultural abilities. However, no other animal has elaborated cultural abilities—to learn, to communicate, and to store, process, and use information—to the extent that Homo has.
Culture Is Shared Culture is an attribute not of individuals per se but of individuals as members of groups. Culture is transmitted in society. Don’t we learn our culture by observing, listening, talking, and interacting with many other people? Shared beliefs, values, memories, and expectations link people who grow up in the same culture. Enculturation unifies people by providing us with common experiences. Today’s parents were yesterday’s children. If they grew up in North America, they absorbed certain values and beliefs transmitted over the generations. People become agents in the enculturation of their children, just as their parents
28
PART 1
Introduction to Anthropology
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were for them. Although a culture constantly changes, certain fundamental beliefs, values, worldviews, and child-rearing practices endure. Consider a simple American example of enduring shared enculturation. As children, when we didn’t finish a meal, our parents may have reminded us of starving children in some foreign country, just as our grandparents might have done a generation earlier. The specific country changes (China, India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda—what was it in your home?). Still, American culture goes on transmitting the idea that by eating all our brussels sprouts or broccoli, we can justify our own good fortune, compared to a hungry child in an impoverished or war-ravaged country. Despite characteristic American notions that people should “make up their own minds” and “have a right to their opinion,” little of what we think is original or unique. We share our opinions and beliefs with many other people. Illustrating the power of shared cultural background, we are most likely to agree with and feel comfortable with people who are socially, economically, and culturally similar to ourselves. This is one reason why Americans abroad tend to socialize with each other, just as French and British colonials did in their overseas empires. Birds of a feather flock together, but for people, the familiar plumage is culture.
Culture and Nature Culture takes the natural biological urges we share with other animals and teaches us how to express them in particular ways. People have to eat, but culture teaches us what, when, and how. In many cultures people have their main meal at noon, but most North Americans prefer a large dinner. English people may eat fish for breakfast, while North Americans may prefer hot cakes and cold cereals. Brazilians put hot milk into strong coffee, whereas North Americans pour cold milk into a weaker brew. Midwesterners dine at 5 or 6 p.m., Spaniards at 10 p.m. Cultural habits, perceptions, and inventions mold “human nature” in many directions. People have to eliminate wastes from their bodies. But some cultures teach people to defecate squatting, while others tell them to do it sitting down. A generation ago, in Paris and other French cities, it was customary for men to urinate almost publicly, and seemingly without embarrassment, in barely shielded pissoirs located on city streets. Our “bathroom” habits, including waste elimination, bathing, and dental care, are parts of cultural traditions that have converted natural acts into cultural customs. Our culture—and cultural changes—affect the ways in which we perceive nature, human nature, and “the natural.” Through science, invention,
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and discovery, cultural advances have overcome many “natural” limitations. We prevent and cure diseases such as polio and smallpox that felled our ancestors. We use Viagra to restore and enhance sexual potency. Through cloning, scientists have altered the way we think about biological identity and the meaning of life itself. Culture, of course, has not freed us from natural threats. Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and other natural forces regularly challenge our wishes to modify the environment through building, development, and expansion. Can you think of other ways in which nature strikes back at people and their products?
Culture Is All-Encompassing For anthropologists, culture includes much more than refinement, taste, sophistication, education, and appreciation of the fine arts. Not only college graduates but all people are “cultured.” The most interesting and significant cultural forces are those that affect people every day of their lives, particularly those that influence children during enculturation. Culture, as defined anthropologically, encompasses features that are sometimes regarded as trivial or unworthy of serious study, such as “popular” culture. To understand contemporary North American culture, we must consider television, fast-food restaurants, sports, and games. As a cultural manifestation, a rock star may be as interesting as a symphony conductor, a comic book as significant as a book-award winner. (Describing the multiple ways in which anthropologists have studied the Ariaal of northern Kenya, this chapter’s “Appreciating Anthropology” demonstrates how anthropology, like culture, is all encompassing.)
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living anthropology VIDEOS Being Raised Canela, www.mhhe.com/kottak This clip focuses on Brazil’s Canela Indians. One of the key figures in the clip is the boy Carampei, who was four years old in 1975. Another is the “formal friend” of a small boy whose finger has been burned and who has been disciplined by his mother. The clip depicts enculturation among the Canela—various ways in which children learn their culture. How does the footage of Carampei show his learning of the rhythms of Canela life? The clip shows that children start doing useful work at an early age, but that the playfulness and affection of childhood are prolonged into adulthood. How does the behavior of the formal friend illustrate this playfulness? Notice how Canela culture is integrated in that songs, dances, and tales are interwoven with subsistence activity. From an emic perspective, what is the function of the hunters’ dance? Think about how the clip shows the formal and informal, the conscious and unconscious aspects of enculturation.
Culture Is Integrated Cultures are not haphazard collections of customs and beliefs. Cultures are integrated, patterned systems. If one part of the system (e.g., the economy) changes, other parts change as well. For example, during the 1950s, most American women planned domestic careers as homemakers and mothers. Most of today’s college women, by contrast, expect to get paid jobs when they graduate.
Cultures are integrated systems. When one behavior pattern changes, others also change. During the 1950s, most American women expected to have careers as wives, mothers, and domestic managers. As more and more women have entered the workforce, attitudes toward work and family have changed. On the left, Mom and kids do the dishes in 1952. On the right (taken in January 2005), nuclear expert and deputy director of ISIS (Institute for Science and International Security) Corey Hinderstein uses her office in Washington, D.C., to monitor nuclear activities all over the globe. What do you imagine she will do when she gets home?
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appreciating
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ANTHROPOLOGY
Remote and Poked, Anthropology’s Dream Tribe
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of life, diet, and cultural practices make them worthy of study. Other academics agree. Local residents say they have been asked over the years how many livestock they own (many), how many times they have had diarrhea in the last month
Anthropology, remember, is a four subfield discipline that is characteristically comparative, cross-cultural, and biocultural. Anthropologists are known for their close observation of human behavior in natural settings and their focus on human biological and cultural diversity in time and space. It is typical of the anthropological approach to go right to—and live with—the local people, whether in northern Kenya, as described here, or in middle-class America. Anthropologists study human biology and culture in varied times and places and in a rapidly changing world. This account focuses on a remote population, the Ariaal of northern Kenya, whom anthropologists have been studying since the 1970s. In the account we learn about the multifaceted research interests that anthropologists have. Among the Ariaal, anthropologists have studied a range of topics, including kinship and marriage customs, conflict, and even biomedical issues such as illness and body type and function. As you read this account, consider, too, what anthropologists get from the people being studied and vice versa.
Kenya and the Tuaregs and Bedouins else-
(often) and what they ate the day before yes-
where in Africa—are settling down. Many have
terday (usually meat, milk or blood).
emigrated closer to Marsabit, the nearest town,
Ariaal women have been asked about the
which has cellphone reception and even spo-
work they do, which seems to exceed that of
radic Internet access.
the men, and about local marriage customs,
The scientists continue to arrive in Ariaal
which compel their prospective husbands to
country, with their notebooks, tents, and bi-
hand over livestock to their parents before the
zarre queries, but now they document a semi-
ceremony can take place. . . .
isolated people straddling modern life and more traditional ways. For Benjamin C. Campbell, a biological an-
The researchers may not know this, but the Ariaal have been studying them all these years as well.
thropologist at Boston University who was in-
The Ariaal note that foreigners slather white
troduced to the Ariaal by Dr. Fratkin, their way
liquid on their very white skin to protect them
The Ariaal, a nomadic community of about 10,000 people in northern Kenya, have been seized on by researchers since the 1970s, after one anthropologist, Elliot Fratkin— stumbled upon them and began publishing his accounts of their lives. . . . Other researchers have done studies on everything from their cultural practices to their testosterone levels. National Geographic focused on the Ariaal in 1999, in an article on vanishing cultures.
Songa, Kenya. The Ariaal, a nomadic community of about 10,000 people in northern Kenya,
But over the years, more and more Ariaal—like the Masai and the Turkana in
30
Koitaton Garawale (left) is amused by questions posed by researcher Daniel Lemoille in
PART 1
have been studied since the 1970s by Elliot Fratkin and other anthropologists, representing various subfields.
Introduction to Anthropology
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from the sun, and that many favor short pants
“I was young when Elliot first arrived,” re-
Ariaal men with many wives showed less erec-
that show off their legs and the clunky boots
called an Ariaal elder known as Lenampere in
tile dysfunction than did men of the same age
on their feet. Foreigners often partake of the
Lewogoso Lukumai, a settlement that moves
with fewer spouses.
local food but drink water out of bottles and
from time to time to a new patch of sand. “He
Dr. Campbell’s body image study, published
munch on strange food in wrappers between
came here and lived with us. He drank milk
in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology this
meals, the Ariaal observe.
and blood with us. After him, so many others
year, also found that Ariaal men are much more
came.” . . .
consistent than men in other parts of the world
The scientists leave tracks as well as memories behind. For instance, it is not uncommon
Not all African tribes are as welcoming to
in their views of the average man’s body [one
to see nomads in T-shirts bearing university
researchers, even those with the necessary
like their own] and what they think women
logos, gifts from departing academics.
permits from government bureaucrats. But the
want [one like their own].
In Lewogoso Lukumai, a circle of makeshift
Ariaal have a reputation for cooperating—in
Dr. Campbell came across no billboards
huts near the Ndoto Mountains, nomads
exchange, that is, for pocket money. “They
or international magazines in Ariaal country
rushed up to a visitor and asked excitedly in
think I’m stupid for asking dumb questions,”
and only one television in a local restaurant
the Samburu language, “Where’s Elliot?”
said Daniel Lemoille, headmaster of the school
that played CNN, leading him to contend that
They meant Dr. Fratkin, who describes in
in Songa, a village outside of Marsabit for Ariaal
Ariaal men’s views of their bodies were less
his book “Ariaal Pastoralists of Kenya” how in
nomads who have settled down, and a fre-
affected by media images of burly male mod-
1974 he stumbled upon the Ariaal, who had
quent research assistant for visiting professors.
els with six-pack stomachs and rippling
been little known until then. With money from
“You have to try to explain that these same
chests.
the University of London and the Smithsonian
questions are asked to people all over the
To test his theories, a nonresearcher with-
Institution, he was traveling north from Nairobi
world and that their answers will help advance
out a Ph.D. showed a group of Ariaal men a
in search of isolated agro-pastoralist groups
science.” . . .
copy of Men’s Health magazine full of pictures
in Ethiopia. But a coup toppled Haile Selassie,
The Ariaal have no major gripes about the
of impossibly well-sculpted men and women.
then the emperor, and the border between
studies, although the local chief in Songa,
The men looked on with rapt attention and ad-
the countries was closed. So as he sat in a bar
Stephen Lesseren, who wore a Boston Univer-
mired the chiseled forms.
in Marsabit, a boy approached and, mistaking
sity T-shirt the other day, said he wished their
“That one, I like,” said one nomad who was
him for a tourist, asked if he wanted to see
work would lead to more tangible benefits for
up in his years, pointing at a photo of a curvy
the elephants in a nearby forest. When the as-
his people.
woman who was clearly a regular at the gym.
piring anthropologist declined, the boy asked
“We don’t mind helping people get their
Another old-timer gazed at the bulging pecto-
if he wanted to see a traditional ceremony at
Ph.D.’s,” he said. “But once they get their
ral muscles of a male bodybuilder in the maga-
a local village instead. That was Dr. Fratkin’s
Ph.D.’s, many of them go away. They don’t
zine and posed a question that got everybody
introduction to the Ariaal, who share cultural
send us their reports . . . We want feedback.
talking. Was it a man, he asked, or a very, very
traits with the Samburu and Rendille tribes of
We want development.”
strong woman?
Kenya.
Even when conflicts break out in the area,
Soon after, he was living with the Ariaal,
as happened this year as members of rival
learning their language and customs while
tribes slaughtered each other, victimizing the
fighting off mosquitoes and fleas in his hut of
Ariaal, the research does not cease. With ten-
SOURCE:
sticks covered with grass.
sions still high, John G. Galaty, an anthropolo-
ogy’s Dream Tribe.” From The New York Times, De-
The Ariaal wear sandals made from old tires
gist at McGill University in Montreal who studies
cember 18, 2005. © 2005 The New York Times. All
and many still rely on their cows, camels and
ethnic conflicts, arrived in northern Kenya to
goats to survive. Drought is a regular feature of
question them.
their world, coming in regular intervals and testing their durability.
In a study in The International Journal of Impotence Research, Dr. Campbell found that
Marc Lacey, “Remote and Poked, Anthropol-
rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material without express written permission is prohibited. www.nytimes.com
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core values Key, basic, or central values that integrate a culture.
hominid Member of hominid family; any fossil or living human, chimp, or gorilla.
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What are some of the social repercussions of the economic change? Attitudes and behavior regarding marriage, family, and children have changed. Late marriage, “living together,” and divorce have become more common. The average age at first marriage for American women rose from 20 in 1955 to 26 in 2007. The comparable figures for men were 23 and 28 (U.S. Census Bureau 2007). The number of currently divorced Americans more than quadrupled from 4 million in 1970 to about 23 million in 2007 (Statistical Abstract of the United States 2009). Work competes with marriage and family responsibilities and reduces the time available to invest in child care. Cultures are integrated not simply by their dominant economic activities and related social patterns but also by sets of values, ideas, symbols, and judgments. Cultures train their individual members to share certain personality traits. A set of characteristic central or core values (key, basic, or central values) integrates each culture and helps distinguish it from others. For instance, the work ethic and individualism are core values that have integrated American culture for generations. Different sets of dominant values influence the patterns of other cultures.
hominins Hominids excluding the African apes; all the human species that ever have existed.
32
Culture Can Be Adaptive and Maladaptive As we saw in Chapter 1, humans have both biological and cultural ways of coping with environmental stresses. Besides our biological means of adaptation, we also use “cultural adaptive kits,” which contain customary activities and tools. Although humans continue to adapt biologically, reliance on social and cultural means of adaptation has increased during human evolution. In this discussion of the adaptive features of our cultural behavior, let’s recognize that what’s good for the individual isn’t necessarily good for the group. Sometimes adaptive behavior that offers short-term benefits to particular individuals may harm the environment and threaten the group’s long-term survival. Economic growth may benefit some people while it also depletes resources needed for society at large or for future generations (Bennett 1969, p. 19). Despite the crucial role of cultural adaptation in human evolution, cultural traits, patterns, and inventions also can be maladaptive, threatening the group’s continued existence (survival and reproduction). Air conditioners help us deal with heat, as fires and furnaces protect us against the cold. Automobiles permit us to make a living by getting us from home to workplace. But the byproducts of such “beneficial” technology often create new problems. Chemical emissions in-
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crease air pollution, deplete the ozone layer, and contribute to global warming. Many cultural patterns, such as overconsumption and pollution, appear to be maladaptive in the long run.
CULTURE’S EVOLUTIONARY BASIS The human capacity for culture has an evolutionary basis that extends back at least 2.6 million years—to early toolmakers whose products survive in the archeological record (and most probably even further back, based on observation of tool use and manufacture by apes). Similarities between humans and apes, our closest relatives, are evident in anatomy, brain structure, genetics, and biochemistry. Most closely related to us are the African great apes: chimpanzees and gorillas. Hominidae is the zoological family that includes fossil and living humans. Also included as hominids are chimps and gorillas. The term hominins is used for the group that leads to humans but not to chimps and gorillas and that encompasses all the human species that ever have existed. Many human traits reflect the fact that our primate ancestors lived in the trees. These traits include grasping ability and manual dexterity (especially opposable thumbs), depth and color vision, learning ability based on a large brain, substantial parental investment in a limited number of offspring, and tendencies toward sociality and cooperation. Like other primates, humans have flexible, five-fingered hands and opposable thumbs: each thumb can touch all the other fingers on the same hand. Like monkeys and apes, humans also have excellent depth and color vision. Our eyes are placed forward in the skull and look directly ahead, so that their fields of vision overlap. Depth perception, impossible without overlapping visual fields, proved adaptive—e.g., for judging distance—in the trees. Having color and depth vision also facilitates the identification of various food sources, as well as mutual grooming, picking out burrs, insects, and other small objects from hair. Such grooming is one way of forming and maintaining social bonds. The combination of manual dexterity and depth perception allows monkeys, apes, and humans to pick up small objects, hold them in front of their eyes, and appraise them. Our ability to thread a needle reflects an intricate interplay of hands and eyes that took millions of years of primate evolution to achieve. Such dexterity, including the opposable thumb, confers a tremendous advantage in manipulating objects and is essential to a major human adaptive capacity: tool making. In primates, and especially in humans,
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the ratio of brain size to body size exceeds that of most mammals. Even more important, the brain’s outer layer—concerned with memory, association, and integration—is relatively larger. Monkeys, apes, and humans store an array of images in their memories, which permits them to learn more. Such a capacity for learning is a tremendous adaptive advantage. Like most other primates, humans usually give birth to a single offspring rather than a litter. Receiving more parental attention, that one infant has enhanced learning opportunities. The need for longer and more attentive care of offspring places a selective value on support by a social group. Humans have developed considerably the primate tendency to be social animals, living and interacting regularly with other members of their species.
What We Share with Other Primates There is a substantial gap between primate society (organized life in groups) and fully developed human culture, which is based on symbolic thought. Nevertheless, studies of nonhuman primates reveal many similarities with humans, such as the ability to learn from experience and change behavior as a result. Apes and monkeys, like humans, learn throughout their lives. In one group of Japanese macaques (land-dwelling monkeys), for example, a three-year-old female started washing sweet potatoes before she ate them. First her mother, then her age peers, and finally the entire troop began washing sweet potatoes as well. The ability to benefit from experience confers a tremendous adaptive advantage, permitting the avoidance of fatal mistakes. Faced with environmental change, humans and other primates don’t have to wait for a genetic or physiological response. They can modify learned behavior and social patterns instead. Although humans do employ tools much more than any other animal does, tool use also turns up among several nonhuman species, including birds, beavers, sea otters, and especially apes (see Mayell 2003). Nor are humans the only animals that make tools with a specific purpose in mind. Chimpanzees living in the Tai forest of Ivory Coast make and use stone tools to break open hard, golfball-sized nuts (Mercader, Panger, and Boesch 2002). At specific sites, the chimps gather nuts, place them on stumps or flat rocks, which are used as anvils, and pound the nuts with heavy stones. The chimps must select hammer stones suited to smashing the nuts and carry them to where the nut trees grow. Nut cracking is a learned skill, with mothers showing their young how to do it. In 1960, Jane Goodall (1996) began observing wild chimps—including their tool use and hunt-
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through the eyes of STUDENT:
Pavlina Lobb
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN:
Bulgaria
SUPERVISING PROFESSOR: SCHOOL:
O OTHERS S
Jennifer Burrell
State University of New York at Albany
Bulgarian Hospitality
A
mong those who have visited Bulgaria, discussions about the country and its customs almost always turn to traditional Bulgarian hospitality. Life in Bulgaria is organized around social relations and maintenance of those relations. Hospitality is just one expression of this social dependency. Bulgarians visit regularly with friends and relatives, needing no special occasion or purpose. “Dropping in” is not discouraged or seen as an inconvenience. Guests are always welcomed and accommodated. The idea that a guest is the most important person in the house is deeply rooted in the Bulgarian mentality and is expressed in many folk tales (so children learn the custom at a young age). Once you enter the home of your host, you are immediately invited to the table. No matter the time of day, you will be offered some kind of food and drink. Indeed, refusing to eat or drink may upset the host. In Bulgaria, sharing the bread and salt on the table symbolizes sharing one’s fortune and thus establishing a strong social relationship—you will not be left hungry or thirsty as long as you have family and friends. Bulgarian hospitality goes further when it comes to spending the night; no matter how small your host’s house or apartment, there will always be a place for you. Accepting hospitality is not seen as taking advantage because giving and sharing are reciprocal—the host will expect to be treated the same way when returning the visit. Before I came to the United States, I thought that such hospitality was universal. Not until I became acquainted with the American idea of individualism did I begin to appreciate traditional Bulgarian hospitality and what it means to its people. In the United States, independence and individualism are essential parts of the culture. There are unwritten rules when it comes to making social visits. Arriving unannounced is usually frowned upon, and punctuality is also very important. Concern for following these rules and not violating another’s personal space means that visits are usually made in response to an invitation or on special occasions. Although many Americans argue that individualism helps people become more responsible, self-confident, and independent, it is interpreted very differently through the eyes of foreigners. As a primary feature of American society, individualism has affected social relationships between family members and friends to a significant extent— making it possible for individuals to become isolated and lonely. As social contacts are reduced, people become more alienated, turning into strangers to each other.
ing behavior—at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, East Africa. The most studied form of ape tool making involves “termiting,” in which chimps make tools to probe termite hills. They
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Given our current understanding of chimp hunting and tool making, we can infer that hominids may have been hunting much earlier than the first archaeological evidence attests. Because chimps typically devour the monkeys they kill, leaving few remains, we may never find archaeological evidence for the first hominin hunt, especially if it was done without stone tools.
Primates have fivedigited feet and hands, well suited for grasping. Flexible hands and feet that
How We Differ from Other Primates
could encircle branches were important features in the early primates’ arboreal life. In
choose twigs, which they (two-footed) locomomodify by retion, hominids elimimoving leaves nated most of the and peeling off bark foot’s grasping to expose the sticky surability—illustrated face beneath. They carry here by the the twigs to termite hills, chimpanzee. dig holes with their fingers, and insert the twigs. twigs Finally, Finally they pull out the twigs and dine on termites that were attracted to the sticky surface. Given what is known about ape tool use and manufacture, it is almost certain that early hominins shared this ability, although the first evidence for hominin stone tool making dates back only 2.6 million years. Upright bipedalism would have permitted the carrying and use of tools and weapons against predators and competitors. The apes have other abilities essential to culture. Wild chimps and orangs aim and throw objects. Gorillas build nests, and they throw branches, grass, vines, and other objects. Hominins have elaborated the capacity to aim and throw, without which we never would have developed projectile technology and weaponry— or baseball. Like tool making, hunting once was cited as a distinctive human activity not shared with the apes. Again, however, primate research shows that other primates, especially chimpanzees, are habitual hunters. For example, in Uganda’s Kibale National Park chimps form large hunting parties, including an average of 26 individuals (almost always adult and adolescent males). Most hunts (78 percent) result in at least one prey item being caught—a much higher success rate than that among lions (26 percent), hyenas (34 percent), or cheetahs (30 percent). Chimps’ favored prey there is the red colobus monkey (Mitani and anthropology ATLAS Watts 1999). Map 2 locates major Archaeological evidence suggests that primate groups, humans hunted by at least 2.6 million including monkeys years ago, based on stone meat-cutting and apes. tools found at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. adapting to bipedal
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PART 1
Introduction to Anthropology
Although chimps often share meat from a hunt, apes and monkeys (except for nursing infants) tend to feed themselves individually. Cooperation and sharing are much more developed among humans. Until fairly recently (12,000 to 10,000 years ago), all humans were hunter-gatherers who lived in small social groups called bands. In some world areas, the hunter-gatherer way of life persisted into recent times, permitting study by ethnographers. In such societies, men and women bring resources back to the camp and share them. Everyone shares the meat from a large animal. Nourished and protected by younger band members, elders live past reproductive age and are respected for their knowledge and experience. Humans are among the most cooperative of the primates—in the food quest and other social activities. As well, the amount of information stored in a human band is far greater than that in any other primate group. Another difference between humans and other primates involves mating. Among baboons and chimps, most mating occurs when females enter estrus, during which they ovulate. In estrus, the vaginal area swells and reddens, and receptive females form temporary bonds with, and mate with, males. Human females, by contrast, lack a visible estrus cycle, and their ovulation is concealed. Not knowing when ovulation is occurring, humans maximize their reproductive success by mating throughout the year. Human pair bonds for mating are more exclusive and more durable than are those of chimps. Related to our more constant sexuality, all human societies have some form of marriage. Marriage gives mating a reliable basis and grants to each spouse special, though not always exclusive, sexual rights in the other. Marriage creates another major contrast between humans and nonhuman primates: exogamy and kinship systems. Most cultures have rules of exogamy requiring marriage outside one’s kin or local group. Coupled with the recognition of kinship, exogamy confers adaptive advantages. It creates ties between the spouses’ different groups of origin. Their children have relatives, and therefore allies, in two kin groups rather than just one. The key point here is that ties
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of affection and mutual support between members of different local groups tend to be absent among primates other than Homo. Other primates tend to disperse at adolescence. Among chimps and gorillas, females tend to migrate, seeking mates in other groups. Humans also choose mates from outside the natal group, and usually at least one spouse moves. However, humans maintain lifelong ties with sons and daughters. The systems of kinship and marriage that preserve these links provide a major contrast between humans and other primates.
UNIVERSALITY, GENERALITY, AND PARTICULARITY In studying human diversity in time and space, anthropologists distinguish among the universal, the generalized, and the particular. Certain biological, psychological, social, and cultural features are universal, found in every culture. Others are merely generalities, common to several but not all human groups. Still other traits are particularities, unique to certain cultural traditions.
Universality Universal traits are the ones that more or less distinguish Homo sapiens from other species (see Brown 1991). Biologically based universals include a long period of infant dependency, yearround (rather than seasonal) sexuality, and a complex brain that enables us to use symbols, languages, and tools. Psychological universals involve common ways in which humans think, feel, and process information. Most such universals probably reflect human biological universals, such as the structure of the human brain or certain physical differences between men and women, or children and adults. Among the social universals is life in groups and in some kind of family. In all human societies, culture organizes social life and depends on social interactions for its expression and continuation. Family living and food sharing are universals. Among the most significant cultural universals are exogamy and the incest taboo (prohibition against marrying or mating with a close relative). All cultures consider some people (various cultures differ about which people) too closely related to mate or marry. The violation of this taboo is
Tool use by chimps. These chimps in Liberia are using stone tools to crack palm nuts, as described in the text.
incest, which is discouraged and punished in a variety of ways in different cultures. If incest is prohibited, exogamy—marriage outside one’s group—is inevitable. Because it links human groups together into larger networks, exogamy has been crucial in human evolution.
Generality Between universals and uniqueness (see the next section) is a middle ground that consists of cultural generalities. These are regularities that occur in different times and places but not in all cultures. Societies can share the same beliefs and customs because of borrowing or through (cultural) inheritance from a common cultural ancestor. Speaking English is a generality shared by North Americans and Australians because both countries had English settlers. Another reason for generalities is domination, as in colonial rule, when customs and procedures are imposed on one culture by another one that is more powerful. In many countries, use of the English language reflects colonial history. More recently, English has spread through diffusion (cultural borrowing) to many other countries, as it has become the world’s foremost language for business and travel. Cultural generalities also can arise through independent invention of the same cultural trait or pattern in two or more different cultures. For example, farming arose through independent invention in the Eastern (e.g., the Middle East) and Western (e.g., Mexico) Hemispheres. Similar needs and circumstances have led people in different lands to innovate in parallel ways. They have independently come up with the same cultural solution to a common problem. One cultural generality that is present in many but not all societies is the nuclear family, a kinship
Chapter 2
Culture
universal Something that exists in every culture.
generality Culture pattern or trait that exists in some but not all societies.
particularity Distinctive or unique culture trait, pattern, or integration.
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the nuclear family is submerged in larger kin groups, such as extended families, lineages, and clans. However, the nuclear family is prominent in many of the technologically simple societies that live by hunting and gathering. It is also a significant kin group among contemporary middle-class North Americans and Western Europeans. Later, an explanation of the nuclear family as a basic kinship unit in specific types of society will be given.
Particularity: Patterns of Culture
Cultures use rituals to mark such universal life-cycle events as birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, and death. But particular cultures differ as to which events merit special celebration and in the emotions expressed during their rituals. Compare the wedding party (top) in Bali, Indonesia, with the funeral (bottom) among the Tanala of eastern Madagascar. How would you describe the emotions suggested by the photos?
anthropology ATLAS Map 12 shows patterns of world land use around 500 years ago. The different economic types are examples of cultural generalities.
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group consisting of parents and children. Although many middle-class Americans ethnocentrically view the nuclear family as a proper and “natural” group, it is not universal. It was absent, for example, among the Nayars, who live on the Malabar Coast of India. Traditionally, the Nayars lived in female-headed households, and husbands and wives did not live together. In many other societies,
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Introduction to Anthropology
A cultural particularity is a trait or feature of culture that is not generalized or widespread; rather, it is confined to a single place, culture, or society. Yet because of cultural borrowing, which has accelerated through modern transportation and communication systems, traits that once were limited in their distribution have become more widespread. Traits that are useful, that have the capacity to please large audiences, and that don’t clash with the cultural values of potential adopters are more likely to be borrowed than others are. Still, certain cultural particularities persist. One example would be a particular food dish (e.g., pork barbeque with a mustard-based sauce available only in South Carolina, or the pastie— beef stew baked in pie dough—characteristic of Michigan’s upper peninsula). Besides diffusion, which, for example, has spread McDonald’s food outlets, once confined to San Bernardino, California, across the globe, there are other reasons why cultural particularities are increasingly rare. Many cultural traits are shared as cultural universals and as a result of independent invention. Facing similar problems, people in different places have come up with similar solutions. Again and again, similar cultural causes have produced similar cultural results. At the level of the individual cultural trait or element (e.g., bow and arrow, hot dog, MTV), particularities may be getting rarer. But at a higher level, particularity is more obvious. Different cultures emphasize different things. Cultures are integrated and patterned differently and display tremendous variation and diversity. When cultural traits are borrowed, they are modified to fit the culture that adopts them. They are reintegrated—patterned anew—to fit their new setting. MTV in Germany or Brazil isn’t at all the same thing as MTV in the United States. As was stated in the earlier section “Culture Is Integrated,” patterned beliefs, customs, and practices lend distinctiveness to particular cultural traditions. Consider universal life-cycle events, such as birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, and death, which many cultures observe and celebrate. The occasions (e.g., marriage, death) may be the
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same and universal, but the patterns of ceremonial observance may be dramatically different. Cultures vary in just which events merit special celebration. Americans, for example, regard expensive weddings as more socially appropriate than lavish funerals. However, the Betsileo of Madagascar take the opposite view. The marriage ceremony is a minor event that brings together just the couple and a few close relatives. However, a funeral is a measure of the deceased person’s social position and lifetime achievement, and it may attract a thousand people. Why use money on a house, the Betsileo say, when one can use it on the tomb where one will spend eternity in the company of dead relatives? How unlike contemporary Americans’ dreams of home ownership and preference for quick and inexpensive funerals. Cremation, an increasingly common option in the United States, would horrify the Betsileo, for whom ancestral bones and relics are important ritual objects. Cultures vary tremendously in their beliefs, practices, integration, and patterning. By focusing on and trying to explain alternative customs, anthropology forces us to reappraise our familiar ways of thinking. In a world full of cultural diversity, contemporary American culture is just one cultural variant, more powerful perhaps, but no more natural, than the others.
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individuals and groups in the same culture. Golden arches may cause one person to salivate, while another person plots a vegetarian protest. The same flag may be waved to support or oppose a given war. Even when they agree about what should and shouldn’t be done, people don’t always do as their culture directs or as other people expect. Many rules are violated, some very often (e.g., automobile speed limits). Some anthropologists find it useful to distinguish between ideal culture and real culture. The ideal culture consists of what people say they should do and what they say they do. Real culture refers to their actual behavior as observed by the anthropologist. Culture is both public and individual, both in the world and in people’s minds. Anthropologists are interested not only in public and collective behavior but also in how individuals think, feel, and act. The individual and culture are linked because human social life is a process in which individuals internalize the meanings of public (i.e., cultural) messages. Then, alone and in groups, people influence culture by converting their private (and often divergent) understandings into public expressions (D’Andrade 1984). Conventionally, culture has been seen as social glue transmitted across the generations, binding people through their common past, rather than
CULTURE AND THE INDIVIDUAL: AGENCY AND PRACTICE Generations of anthropologists have theorized about the relationship between the “system,” on the one hand, and the “person” or “individual,” on the other. The “system” can refer to various concepts, including culture, society, social relations, and social structure. Individual human beings always make up, or constitute, the system. But, living within that system, humans also are constrained (to some extent, at least) by its rules and by the actions of other individuals. Cultural rules provide guidance about what to do and how to do it, but people don’t always do what the rules say should be done. People use their culture actively and creatively, rather than blindly following its dictates. Humans aren’t passive beings who are doomed to follow their cultural traditions like programmed robots. Instead, people learn, interpret, and manipulate the same rules in different ways—or they emphasize different rules that better suit their interests. Culture is contested: Different groups in society struggle with one another over whose ideas, values, goals, and beliefs will prevail. Even common symbols may have radically different meanings to different
Illustrating the international level of culture, Roman Catholics in different nations share knowledge, symbols, beliefs, and values transmitted by their church. Shown here is a Catholic seminary in Xian, China. Besides religious conversion, what other forces work to spread international culture?
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Culture
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subcultures Different cultural traditions associated with subgroups in the same nation.
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as something being continually created and reworked in the present. The tendency to view culture as an entity rather than a process is changing. Contemporary anthropologists now emphasize how day-to-day action, practice, or resistance can make and remake culture (Gupta and Ferguson, eds. 1997b). Agency refers to the actions that individuals take, both alone and in groups, in forming and transforming cultural identities. The approach to culture known as practice theory (Ortner 1984) recognizes that individuals within a society or culture have diverse motives and intentions and different degrees of power and influence. Such contrasts may be associated with gender, age, ethnicity, class, and other social variables. Practice theory focuses on how such varied individuals—through their ordinary and extraordinary actions and practices— manage to influence, create, and transform the world they live in. Practice theory appropriately recognizes a reciprocal relation between culture (the system—see above) and the individual. The system shapes the way individuals experience and respond to external events, but individuals also play an active role in the way society functions and changes. Practice theory recognizes both constraints on individuals and the flexibility and changeability of cultures and social systems.
Levels of Culture
national culture Cultural features shared by citizens of the same nation.
international culture Cultural traditions that extend beyond national boundaries.
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Of increasing importance in today’s world are the distinctions between different levels of culture: national, international, and subcultural. National culture refers to those beliefs, learned behavior patterns, values, and institutions that are shared by citizens of the same nation. International culture is the term for cultural traditions that extend beyond and across national boundaries. Because culture is transmitted through learning rather than genetically, cultural traits can spread through borrowing or diffusion from one group to another. Because of borrowing, colonialism, migration, and multinational organizations, many cultural traits and patterns have international scope. For example, Roman Catholics in many different countries share beliefs, symbols, experiences, and values transmitted by their church. The contemporary United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia share cultural traits they have inherited from their common linguistic and cultural ancestors in Great Britain. The World Cup has become an international cultural event, as people in many countries know the rules of, play, and follow soccer. Cultures also can be smaller than nations (see Jenks 2004). Although people who live in the same country share a national cultural tradition, all cul-
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tures also contain diversity. Individuals, families, communities, regions, classes, and other groups within a culture have different learning experiences as well as shared ones. Subcultures are different symbol-based patterns and traditions associated with particular groups in the same complex society. In a large nation like the United States or Canada, subcultures originate in region, ethnicity, language, class, and religion. The religious backgrounds of Jews, Baptists, and Roman Catholics create subcultural differences between them. While sharing a common national culture, U.S. northerners and southerners also differ in aspects of their beliefs, values, and customary behavior as a result of regional variation. Frenchspeaking Canadians contrast with Englishspeaking people in the same country. Italian Americans have ethnic traditions different from those of Irish, Polish, and African Americans. Using sports and foods, Table 2.1 gives some examples of international, national, and subculture. Soccer and basketball are played internationally. Monster-truck rallies are held throughout the United States. Bocci is a bowling-like sport from Italy still played in some Italian American neighborhoods. Nowadays, many anthropologists are reluctant to use the term subculture. They feel that the prefix “sub-” is offensive because it means “below.” “Subcultures” may thus be perceived as “less than” or somehow inferior to a dominant, elite, or national culture. In this discussion of levels of culture, I intend no such implication. My point is simply that nations may contain many different culturally defined groups. As mentioned earlier, culture is contested. Various groups may strive to promote the correctness and value of their own practices, values, and beliefs in comparison with those of other groups or of the nation as a whole. (This chapter’s “Appreciating Diversity” demonstrates how contemporary indigenous groups have to grapple with multiple levels of culture, contestation, and political regulation.)
TABLE 2.1 Levels of Culture, with Examples from Sports and Foods LEVEL OF CULTURE
SPORTS EXAMPLES
FOOD EXAMPLES
International
Soccer, basketball
Pizza
National
Monster-truck rallies
Apple pie
Subculture
Bocci
Big Joe Pork Barbeque (South Carolina)
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Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights Ethnocentrism is the tendency to view one’s own culture as superior and to use one’s own standards and values in judging outsiders. We witness ethnocentrism when people consider their own cultural beliefs to be truer, more proper, or more moral than those of other groups. However, fundamental to anthropology, as the study of human diversity, is the fact that what is alien (even disgusting) to us may be normal, proper, and prized elsewhere (see the previous discussion of cultural particularities, including burial customs). The fact of cultural diversity calls ethnocentrism into question, as anthropologists have shown all kinds of reasons for unfamiliar practices. During a course like this, anthropology students often reexamine their own ethnocentric beliefs. Sometimes as the strange becomes familiar, the familiar seems a bit stranger and less comfortable. One goal of anthropology is to show the value in the lives of others. But how far is too far? What happens when cultural practices, values, and rights come into conflict with human rights? Several cultures in Africa and the Middle East have customs requiring female genital modification. Clitoridectomy is the removal of a girl’s clitoris. Infibulation involves sewing the lips (labia) of the vagina to constrict the vaginal opening. Both procedures reduce female sexual pleasure and, it is believed in some societies, the likelihood of adultery. Although traditional in the societies where they occur, such practices, characterized as female genital mutilation (FGM), have been opposed by human rights advocates, especially women’s rights groups. The idea is that the custom infringes on a basic human right: disposition over one’s body and one’s sexuality. Indeed, such practices are fading as a result of worldwide attention to the problem and changing sex-gender roles. Some African countries have banned or otherwise discouraged the procedures, as have Western nations that receive immigration from such cultures. Similar issues arise with circumcision and other male genital operations. Is it right for a baby boy to be circumcised without his permission, as routinely has been done in the United States? Is it proper to require adolescent boys to undergo collective circumcision to fulfill cultural traditions, as is done traditionally in parts of Africa and Australia? According to an idea known as cultural relativism, it is inappropriate to use outside standards to judge behavior in a given society; such behavior should be evaluated in the context of the culture in which it occurs. Anthropologists employ cultural relativism not as a moral belief but as a methodological position: In order to understand another culture fully, we must try to
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understand how the people in that culture see things. What motivates them—what are they thinking—when they do those things? Such anthropology ATLAS an approach does not preclude making Map 10 locates moral judgments. In the FGM example, classic ethnographic one can understand the motivations for field sites—”cultures” the practice only by looking at things or societies already from the point of view of the people studied by 1950. who engage in it. Having done this, one then faces the moral question of what, if anything, to do about it. We also should recognize that different people and groups within the same society— for example, women versus men or old versus young—can have widely different views about what is proper, necessary, and moral. When ethnocentrism there are power differentials in a society, a Judging other cultures particular practice may be supported by some using one’s own cultural people more than others (e.g., old men versus standards. young men). In trying to understand the meaning of a practice or belief within any cultural context, we should ask who is relatively advantaged and disadvantaged by that custom. Can you think of a practice or belief in your own culture that is based on, and serves to maintain, social inequalities? The idea of human rights invokes a realm of human rights justice and morality beyond and superior to par- Rights based on justice ticular countries, cultures, and religions. Human and morality beyond and rights, usually seen as vested in individuals, in- superior to particular clude the right to speak freely, to hold religious countries, cultures, and religions. beliefs without persecution, and not to be murdered, injured, enslaved, or imprisoned without charge. These rights are not ordinary laws that particular governments make and enforce. Human rights are seen as inalienable (nations cannot abridge or terminate them) and international (larger than and superior to individual nations and cultures). Four United Nations documents describe nearly all the human rights that have been internationally recognized. Those documents are the UN Charter; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; and the Covenant on cultural rights Civil and Political Rights. Alongside the human rights movement has Rights vested in religious and ethnic minorities arisen an awareness of the need to preserve cul- and indigenous tural rights. Unlike human rights, cultural rights societies. are vested not in individuals but in groups, including indigenous peoples and religious and cultural relativism ethnic minorities. Cultural rights include a Idea that to know group’s ability to raise its children in the ways of another culture requires its forebears, to continue its language, and not to full understanding of be deprived of its economic base by the nation in its members’ beliefs which it is located (Greaves 1995). Many coun- and motivations. tries have signed pacts endorsing, for cultural IPR minorities within nations, such rights as self- Intellectual property determination; some degree of home rule; and the rights; an indigenous right to practice the group’s religion, culture, and group’s collective language. The related notion of indigenous intel- knowledge and its lectual property rights (IPR) has arisen in an applications.
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D I V E R S I T Y
Culture Clash: Makah Seek Return to Whaling Past
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1994. Several years later, the Makah won permission to hunt again, along with a $100,000 federal grant to set up a whaling commission. By the time they were ready, none of the Makah had witnessed a whale hunt or even tasted the meat, hearing only stories passed
Cultures are diverse but not isolated. Throughout human history links between groups have been provided by cultural practices such as marriage, kinship, religion, trade, travel, exploration, and conquest. For centuries, indigenous peoples have been exposed to a world system. Contemporary forces and events make even the illusion of autonomy hard to maintain. Nowadays, as is described here, members of local cultures and communities must heed not only their own customs but also agencies, laws, and lawsuits operating at the national and international levels. As you read this account and this chapter on culture, pay attention to the various kinds of rights being asserted—animal rights, cultural rights, economic rights, legal rights, and human rights—and how those rights might clash. Also consider the different levels of culture and of political representation (local, regional, national, and global) that determine how contemporary people such as the Makah live their lives and maintain their traditions. Think, too, about the minimal impact on whale populations of the Makah hunt compared with commercial whaling. Today, cultural connections come increasingly through the Internet, as indigenous groups, including the Makah, maintain their own websites—forums for discussions of whaling and other issues of interest to them. Check out http://www.makah.com/.
with harpoons and then killing it with a gunshot
down through the generations. They learned that
to the back of the head.
the whale was a touchstone of Makah culture—
The whaling canoes are stored in a wooden
faces serious poverty and high unemployment,
shed, idle for the past six years. They were last
were guaranteed the right to hunt whales in an
used when the Makah Indians were allowed to
1855 treaty with the United States, the only tribe
take their harpoons and a .50-caliber rifle and
with such a treaty provision. Whaling had been
set out on their first whale hunt since the late
the tribe’s mainstay for thousands of years.
That rainy spring day remains etched in the
the tribe’s logo today pictures an eagle perched
minds of many Makah as a defining moment in
on a whale—and that the tribe’s economy was
their efforts to reach back to their cultural and
built around the lucrative trade with Europeans
historical roots. It was their first kill in seven
in whale oil, used for heating and lighting, during
decades, and it was their last since they were
the 18th and early 19th centuries.
stopped by court rulings. They have asked the
For a year before the 1999 hunt, the new
federal government for permission to resume
Makah whale hunters prepared for their sacra-
hunting, and public meetings on the request
mental pursuit, training in canoes on the cold
are scheduled for October.
and choppy waters of the Pacific Ocean, pray-
The Makah, a tribe of about 1,500 near the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the
ing on the beach in the mornings and at the dock in the evenings.
Olympic Peninsula, see themselves as whalers
Animal rights groups were preparing, too.
and continue to identify themselves spiritually
When the hunt began, the small reservation
with whales.
and its surrounding waters were teeming with
“Everybody felt like it was a part of making
news helicopters and protest groups. On that
history,” Micah L. McCarty, a tribal council
May afternoon, when the protesters were
member, said of the 1999 hunt. “It’s inspired a
somewhere off the reservation, the Makah
cultural renaissance, so to speak. It inspired a
killed their whale. They held a huge celebration
lot of people to learn artwork and become
on the beach, where 15 men were waiting to
more active in building canoes; the younger
butcher the animal, its meat later kippered and
generation took a more keen interest in singing
stewed.
and dancing.” The Makah, a tribe of mostly fishermen that
But the protests and the television cameras “took a lot of the spirituality out of it,” said Dave Sones, vice chairman of the tribal council. Mr. McCarty said, “I equate it with interrupting High Mass.” The Makah went whale hunting, largely unnoticed, again in 2000, paddling out on a
But the tribe decided to stop hunting whales
32-foot cedar whaling canoe, but they did not
There were eight young men in a canoe
early in the 20th century, when commercial
catch anything. Soon after, animal rights
with a red hummingbird, a symbol of speed,
harvesting had depleted the species. Whale
groups, including the Humane Society of the
painted on the tip. There were motorboats fer-
hunting was later strictly regulated nationally
United States, sued to stop the hunting. In
rying other hunters, news helicopters, and ani-
and internationally, and the United States listed
2002, an appeals court declared the hunting il-
mal rights activists in speedboats and even a
the Northern Pacific gray whale, the one most
legal, saying the National Oceanic and Atmo-
submarine.
available to the Makah, as endangered.
spheric Administration had not adequately
1920s.
On May 17, 1999, a week into the hunt, the
The protections helped the whales rebound,
Makah killed a 30-ton gray whale, striking it
and they were taken off the endangered list in
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studied the impact of Makah hunting on the survival of the whale species.
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unlike the gray whale, is listed as endangered, said Brian Gorman, a spokesman for the oceanic agency. Despite their treaty rights, the Makah were not granted an exemption under the 1972 act. Last February, the tribe asked the agency for a waiver that would grant them permanent rights to kill up to 20 gray whales in any five-year period, which they insist they already have under their 1855 treaty. The Makah’s request is “setting a dangerous precedent,” said Naomi Rose, a marine mammal scientist for the Humane Society. The Alaska hunting, Ms. Rose said, “is a true subsistence hunt,” whereas the Makah, who view whale hunting mostly as ceremonial, are pursuing “cultural whaling” that is not essential to their diet. “There are too many other bad actors out there” who might try to apply for waivers too, she said. The Makah “have a treaty right, but we’re asking them not to exercise it,” she said. But other environmental groups, including Greenpeace, which is adamantly opposed to the commercial harvesting of whales, have remained neutral on the Makah’s quest. “No indigenous hunt has ever destroyed whale populations,” said John Hocevar, an oceans specialist with Greenpeace. “And looking at the enormous other threats to whales and putting the Makah whaling in context, it’s pretty different.” Mr. Gorman, of the federal fisheries agency, said: “They have a treaty right that the U.S. government signed. It doesn’t take an international lawyer to figure out that they do have this treaty.” Dewey Johnson and his son Michael (top) show their support for fellow Makah tribe members at Neah Bay, Washington, in their quest to hunt gray whales for the first time in 70 years.
SOURCE:
Sea Shepherd captain Paul Watson stands at Neah Bay beside a 25-foot submarine painted to
Tribe Hopes for Return to Whaling Past.” From The
look like an orca whale (below). This ship emits orca sounds that can scare away gray whales.
New York Times, September 19, 2005. © 2005 The
Watson leads the opposition against Makah whaling, which was declared illegal in 2002.
New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permis-
Sarah Kershaw, “In Petition to Government,
sion and protected by the Copyright Laws of the
Despite the strict national and international
centuries, are exempt from provisions of the
regulations on whale hunting, several tribes of
1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, allowing
or retransmission of the Material without express writ-
Alaska Natives, subsistence whale hunters for
them to hunt the bowhead whale. That species,
ten permission is prohibited. www.nytimes.com
United States. The printing, copying, redistribution,
Chapter 2
Culture
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diffusion Borrowing of cultural traits between societies.
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attempt to conserve each society’s cultural base— its core beliefs and principles. IPR are claimed as a cultural right, allowing indigenous groups to control who may know and use their collective knowledge and its applications. Much traditional cultural knowledge has commercial value. Examples include ethnomedicine (traditional medical knowledge and techniques), cosmetics, cultivated plants, foods, folklore, arts, crafts, songs, dances, costumes, and rituals. According to the IPR concept, a particular group may determine how its indigenous knowledge and the products of that knowledge are used and distributed, and the level of compensation required. (This chapter’s “Appreciating Diversity” discusses how notions of human, cultural, and animal rights may come into conflict.) The notion of cultural rights recalls the previous discussion of cultural relativism, and the issue raised there arises again. What does one do about cultural rights that interfere with human rights? I believe that anthropology, as the scientific study of human diversity, should strive to present accurate accounts and explanations of cultural phenomena. Most ethnographers try to be objective, accurate, and sensitive in their accounts of other cultures. However, objectivity, sensitivity, and a cross-cultural perspective don’t mean that anthropologists have to ignore international standards of justice and morality. The anthropologist doesn’t have to approve customs such as infanticide, cannibalism, and torture to
The notion of indigenous intellectual property rights (IPR) has arisen in an attempt to conserve each society’s cultural base, including its medicinal plants, which may have commercial value. Shown here is the hoodia plant, a cactus that grows in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa. Hoodia, which traditionally is used by the San people to stave off hunger, is used now in diet pills marketed on the Internet.
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PART 1
Introduction to Anthropology
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record their existence and determine their causes and the motivations behind them. Each anthropologist has a choice about where he or she will do field work. Some anthropologists choose not to study a particular culture because they discover in advance or early in field work that behavior they consider morally repugnant is practiced there. When confronted with such behavior, each anthropologist must make a judgment about what, if anything, to do about it. What do you think?
MECHANISMS OF CULTURAL CHANGE Why and how do cultures change? One way is diffusion, or borrowing of traits between cultures. Such exchange of information and products has gone on throughout human history because cultures have never been truly isolated. Contact between neighboring groups has always existed and has extended over vast areas (Boas 1940/1966). Diffusion is direct when two cultures trade, intermarry, or wage war on one another. Diffusion is forced when one culture subjugates another and imposes its customs on the dominated group. Diffusion is indirect when items move from group A to group C via group B without any firsthand contact between A and C. In this case, group B might consist of traders or merchants who take
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products from a variety of places to new markets. Or group B might be geographically situated between A and C, so that what it gets from A eventually winds up in C, and vice versa. In today’s world, much transnational diffusion is due to the spread of the mass media and advanced information technology. Acculturation, a second mechanism of cultural change, is the exchange of cultural features that results when groups have continuous firsthand contact. The cultures of either group or both groups may be changed by this contact (Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits 1936). With acculturation, parts of the cultures change, but each group remains distinct. In situations of continuous contact, cultures may exchange and blend foods, recipes, music, dances, clothing, tools, technologies, and languages. One example of acculturation is a pidgin, a mixed language that develops to ease communication between members of different societies in contact. This usually happens in situations of trade or colonialism. Pidgin English, for example, is a simplified form of English. It blends English grammar with the grammar of a native language. Pidgin English was first used for commerce in Chinese ports. Similar pidgins developed later in Papua New Guinea and West Africa. Independent invention—the process by which humans innovate, creatively finding solutions to problems—is a third mechanism of cultural change. Faced with comparable problems and challenges, people in different societies have innovated and changed in similar ways, which is one reason cultural generalities exist. One example is the independent invention of agriculture in the Middle East and Mexico. Over the course of human history, major innovations have spread at the expense of earlier ones. Often a major invention, such as agriculture, triggers a series of subsequent interrelated changes. These economic revolutions have social and cultural repercussions. Thus, in both Mexico and the Middle East, agriculture led to many social, political, and legal changes, including notions of property and distinctions in wealth, class, and power.
GLOBALIZATION The term globalization encompasses a series of processes, including diffusion and acculturation, working to promote change in a world in which nations and people are increasingly interlinked and mutually dependent. Promoting such linkages are economic and political forces, along with modern systems of transportation and communication. The forces of globalization include international commerce, travel and tourism, transnational migration, the media, and various high-tech infor-
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Globalization includes the internationalization of people and cultures through transnational migration and developments in commerce, transportation, and communication. This recent photo of Chinese youth in an Internet café was taken in Prato, Tuscany, Italy. For what purposes do you think these teenagers use these computers?
mation flows (see Appadurai, ed. 2001). During the Cold War, which ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, the basis of international alliance was political, ideological, and military. Thereafter, the focus of international pacts shifted to trade and economic issues. New economic unions have been created through NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), GATT (the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs), and the EU (the European Union). Long-distance communication is easier, faster, and cheaper than ever and extends to remote areas. The mass media help propel a globally spreading culture of consumption, stimulating participation in the world cash economy. Within nations and across their borders, the media spread information about threats, products, services, rights, institutions, and lifestyles. Emigrants transmit information and resources transnationally as they maintain their ties with home (phoning, faxing, e-mailing, making visits, sending money). In a sense, such people live multilocally— in different places and cultures at once. They learn to play various social roles and to change behavior and identity depending on the situation (see Cresswell 2006). Local people must increasingly cope with forces generated by progressively larger systems— region, nation, and world. An army of alien actors and agents now intrudes on people everywhere. Terrorism is a global threat. Tourism has become the world’s number one industry (see Holden 2005). Economic development agents and the media promote the idea that work should be for cash
Chapter 2
Culture
acculturation An exchange of cultural features between groups in firsthand contact.
independent invention The independent development of a cultural feature in different societies.
globalization The accelerating interdependence of nations in the world system today.
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rather than mainly for subsistence. Indigenous peoples and traditional cultures have devised various
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strategies to deal with threats to their autonomy, identity, and livelihood. New forms of political mobilization and cultural expression are emerging from the interplay of local, regional, national, and international cultural forces (see Ong and Collier, eds. 2005).
Acing the Summary
1. Culture, which is distinctive to humanity, refers to customary behavior and beliefs that are passed on through enculturation. Culture rests on the human capacity for cultural learning. Culture encompasses rules for conduct internalized in human beings, which lead them to think and act in characteristic ways. 2. Although other animals learn, only humans have cultural learning, dependent on symbols. Humans think symbolically—arbitrarily bestowing meaning on things and events. By convention, a symbol stands for something with which it has no necessary or natural relation. Symbols have special meaning for people who share memories, values, and beliefs because of common enculturation. People absorb cultural lessons consciously and unconsciously. 3. Cultural traditions mold biologically based desires and needs in particular
