Emic

Etic

Fact

Hypothesis

Validated

Independently Verified

Theory

Doctrine

The study of language in its social and cultural contxt across space and time.

a. Description of different languages

b. History of language

c. How language reflects culture

Historical Linguists

Social Linguists

1. Reconstruct ancient languages and study linguistic variation through time.

2. Investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation.

For most of the time of life on Earth species have used biological adaptation evolution to deal with the problems of survival. 

Some mammals have the capacity to learn new ways to solve problems.

This ability to learn became pronounced in our ancestors about 2.5million years ago when the genus homo first appeared with stone tools and scavenged for meat.

Humans were then no longer dependant solely on biological adaption.

Modern humans have come to rely primarily on learned traditions, behaviors and beliefs called culture.

A set of rules or standards

Shared by the members of a society

Learning

Produces behaviors

Abstract values, beliefs, and perceptions of the world

What is considered acceptable

What is culture again...

Acculturation

1. Cultures are systems of human behavior and thought. They obey natural laws, so they can be studied scientifically. Enculturation: the process by which a child learns his or her culture.

2. Assimilating to a new culture. (If I moved to Russia)

Cultural Universality

Culture includes all aspects of human group behavior. Everyone is cultured, not just those with formal education.

Traits that distinguish homo sapiens from other primates:

Biological universals such as infant dependency, year round sexuality, a complex brain that enables us to use symbols, languages and tools.

Psychological universals such as how humans think, feel, and process information (joy, sorrow, disappointment).

Social universals such as incest taboos, life in groups, families and food sharing.

Culture is transmitted in groups which tends to unify people through common experience and provides a common understanding for future events

Shared beliefs, values, memories, and expectations link people who grow up in the same culture

Enculturation unifies people by providing common experiences

An organized group of interdependent people who generally share a common territory, language culture and act together= society.

Culture is usually based on symbols that members learn to interpret.

Cultural learning is the accumulation of knowledge transmitted through symbols (usually language).

Symbolic thought is unique and crucial to cultural learning

Symbols are verbal and nonverbal

The association between symbols and what is symbolized is arbitrary and conventional

Other primates also demonstrate a ruimentary ability to use symbols

No other animal has elaborated cultural abilities to the extent of homo sapiens.

Culture takes natural biological urges and teaches us how to express them in particular ways.

Our culture and cultural changes affect the ways in which we perceive nature, human nature and the natural world.

Anthropologically, culture encompasses features sometimes regarded as trivial or unworthy of serious study

To understand North American culture we have to consider tv, fast food, retaurants, sports and games.

A culture acts like a system: changes in one aspect will likely generate changes in other aspects

Core values are sets of ideas, attitudes and beliefs.

Food

Satisfaction of emotional and psychological needs

reproduction

Enculturation of new members

Maintain internal order

maintain external relations

Religion and art

Deal with change

Ideal culture: normative description of a culture given by its members.

Real culture refers to actual behavior which can be observed by non-member

Humans have biological and cultural ways of coping with environmental stress

What's good for an individual isn't always good for the group

Adaptive behavior that offers short term benefits to particular individuals may harm the environment and threaten the groups long term survival.

National culture

International (global) culture

Subcultures (microculture) are identifiable patterns existing within a larger culture

Class: social category based on economic position

Race: defined by biological traits

ethnicity: cultural group

Gender and sexuality: cultural norms of femininty, masculinity, etc.

Age

Institution: what institutions do you identify with.

Ethnocentrism: a tendency to view one's own culture as superior ant to use one's own standards and values in judging outsiders

cultural relativism: 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.

Contributes to social solidarity and is a cultural universal

antrhopologists need to be realistic about their biases during research

Cultural imperialism: Extreme ethnocentrism where dominant groups find their own culture superior and change subordinate groups for their own interests.

The perspective that cultural values are arbitrary, and the values of one culture should not be used as standards to evaluate the behavior of other cultures

Cultural rights are vested in groups and include a group's ability to preserve its cultural tradition

The idea of universal, unalienable, individual human rights challenges cultural relativism by invoking a moral and ethical code that is superior to any country, culture or religion.

Acculturation: an exchange of features that results when groups come into consistent firsthand contact

may occur in any or all groups engaged in contact.

Independent Invention: the process by which humans innovate, creatively finding solutions to problems.

Communication in trade travel telecommunications media education migration etc.

Cultural interaction

conflict

cominance

blending

local interpretation

Borrowing of traits between cultures

direct

indirect

forced

unforced

Processes that make modern people more interlinked and mutually dependent

promoted by systems of communication trade and transportation

Studying Cultures

Ethnography

Writing about societies based on firsthand experience

Ethnographers live with the group for an extended period of time

Key cultural consultants (informants) are well-informed community members.

Longitudinal Research

Team Research

Survey

1. Long term study

2. A series of ethnogrpahers

3. Use a sample from the larger group

Intimate and personal

lifetime experiences

reveal perceptions, reactions to events

shows how they contribute to events

a good way to show diversity in a group

The researcher taking part in the activities being observed

no attempt to manipulate or control the outcome of events observed.

significance of details ethnographers record may not be apparent until much later.

Range from:

Informal

Somewhat structured

Formal

Ethnographic Realism:

Traditional View

Postmodern Critique

1. Research produces an accurate, objective, scientific account of the study community.

The personal research experience gave the writer credibility.

2. Accounts cannot be unbiased

The researcher's life colors observations and interpretations

We are all ethnocentric to some degree.

Ethnographies were often written in a romanticized and timeless ethnographic present, before westernization.

Now we recognize that cultures constantly change and change must be represented.

Evolutionary perspective

functionalists

Historical

Symbolic and interpretive approaches

Relation between culture and individual

Contemporary

Descriptive

analytical

explanatory

Tylor defined culture and proposed that it could be studied scientifically

proposed a unilinear path for religion and science: animism, polytheism, monotheism, and science.

Morgan wrote anthropology's earliest ethnography "The league of the Iroquois: Three stage evolutionary scheme: human society has evolved through savagery, barbarism, and civilization (unilinear evolutionsim).Subdivided savagery and barbarism into three substages each: lower, middle and upper.

The Boasians:

Franz Boas was the father of four field US anthropology. Contributed to cultural, biological and linguistic anthropology. Showed that human biology was plastic. Ruth Benedict: Civilization is the achievement of no single race.

Historical Particularism (Boas): Histories are not compatible; diverse paths can lead to sam cultural result. Rejected compartive method.

Independent Invention versus Diffusion (evolutionist)

Boasians stressed diffusion (or borrowing)

Bronislaw Malinowski the father of ethnography

Focused on the role of sociocultural practices in social systems

customs and institutions in society are integrated and interrelated. Humans have a set of universal biological needs.

Everything function to preserve the social structure.

Radcliffe-Brown: Social Systems are comparable to anatomical and physiological process.

Configurationalism

The view of culture as integrated and patterned.
Ruth benedict and margaret mead

described how cultures are uniquely patterned or configured rather than explaining how they got that way.

Clifford Geertz cultures are texts that natives constantly read. Ethnographers should describe and interpret that which is important to the native being studied.

Leslie white and julian steward reintroduced evolution to the study of culture in the mid-20th century

White: General evolution-energy capture is the main measure and cause of cultural advance.

Steward: proposed multilinear evolution: culture evolved along different lines.

Pioneered cultural ecology (or ecological anthropology) where we study the environment of a gorup not just the cultural traits.

Marvin Harris adapted white's and steward's multilayered model

Cultural infrastructure determines both structure and superstructure.

All societies have infrastructure

strucutre: social relations grow out of the society's infrastructure

Superstructure: religion, ideology, and play are all determined by structure and infrastructure.

Emile Durkheim called for new social science to be based in the conscience collectif.

Durkheim is a common father of anthropology

Victor Turner recongnized links between symbolic anthroplogy

Cliffor Geertz interpretive Anthropology

Agency: actions that individuals take, both alone and in groups, form and transfor cultural identities.

Practice Theory: individuals in a society or culture have diverse motives and intentions and different dgrees of power and influence. Bourdieu Giddens and ortner.

Sir Leach focused on how individuals work to achieve power and their actions can transform society.

Emphasizes economics, politics and history

Criticized in anthropology for overstressing the influence of outsiders. Eric Wolf looks at native americans in the context of world system events.

Sidney Mintz focuses on political economy, the web of interrelated economic and power relations.

Focus more on local agency, transformative actions and groups within colonized societies. Gramsci: hegemony stratified social order in which subordinates internalize their ruler's values.

Bourdieu and Foucalust easier to dominate people's minds than control their bodies.

Stoler systems of power yad yada.

Increasing specialization

Ethnography has expanded to include reional and national systems and the movement of people.

Witnessed crisis in representation questions about the role of the ethnogrpaher and the nature of ethnographic authority. Must stay aware of our biases and our inability to totally escape them.

1. Archaeology is one of the four fields of anthropology.

a. Biological, cultural, linguistic, Archaeology.

Facts- verified observations

Data- a systematic group of facts

Hypothesis- a possible explanation

Hypothesis testing- additional observation to validate or disprove

Theory- a body of validated hypotheses which can be continually tested and refined.

The earth is about 4.5 billion years old

in this class we focus on the last geological era - the cenozoic

Divided into seven epochs

People-Paleocine

Everywhere- Eocene

Order - Oligocene
Many -Miocene
Pizzas-Pliocene

Piping- Pleistocene

Hot -Holocene

6-7 m.y.a Miocene Earliest Apes

4-5 m.y.a Pliocene Hominins (human like creatures) and the earliest hominids

1-2 m.y.a Pleistocene Hominids-homo

11,000 y.a Holocene Homo Sapiens

a. Agriculture

b. Cities

c. The industrial age.

Archaeologists

Artifact

1. Study the things that people left and reconstruct the way they lived.

2.

a.

Material Objects that are the products of human behavior

b.

Artifacts accumulate and are found at residential sites or activity sites

c. Tell us how people made and used them.

d. how people threw them away and what happend to them after the fact.

1.

a. are accumulations of facts.

b. Often found by chance

c. Exposed during construction

d. May be hidden by forst growth, landslides, river deposits, blown soil.

Archaeological Data

Archaeological Survey

1.

a. Artifacts: objects created by humans, stone tools, baskets, pottery, copper ornaments.

b. Features, intentional products of human activity such as walls, structures, grave; unintentional results such as fire hearths trash middens.

c. Pollen: Plants produce distinctive pollen as part of the reproductive process. Archaeologists use pollen to reconstruct past environments.

d. Biochemical data: Analysis of isotopes in bones and teeth reveals information about diet, health and population movement.

2. To understand the enviornment

first analyze photos maps

then systematically walk the landscapes

then use geophysical technits to discover human activity.

Loacation of Artifacts

Provenience

Location and depth of artifacts, features, or fossils

Relation to one another, and to the natural landscape

Recorded by setting up a grid with a datum (point of reference).

2. Location of an excavation unit, feature or artifact. Measured from a known point.

Chronologies:

Relative

Absolute

1. Relates two or more objects in terms of their relative age.

Relative Dating: Stratigraphy (layer on bottom is usually older than layer on top). Some chemical analysis.

2. Derives actual numerical ages.

Chemical. Based on known rates of decay

a. radiocarbon

b. potassium Argon.

c. Dendrochronology

i. Count the tree rings in the wood that came out of the structure.

Technology: tools, food, clothing, shelter

economy: how people obtained those tools, food, clothing and shelter.

Organization: how they related to each other.

Ideology: how they viewed the world and the relationships between the natural and the supernatural

i. includes art, ceremony and ritual.

Trade in material goods, one way people develp and maintain "social networks."

Social networks create alliances.

Alliances help people obtain goods and knowledge, find mates, perform rituals.

Alliances involve important rituals that strengthen people's relationships with each other (finding mates) and with the supernatural (performing rituals).

Was it commor or rare?

Did every household have some?

Is the item found in graves? if yes, is it found only with certain individuals?

Burying our dead is one of the acts that sets us apart from our earliest hominid ancestors.

Disturbing burials- intentionally or unintentionally and studying human remains and the goods buried with them is an emotionally charged subject.

People are absolutely fascinated

Shows them how past people lived

It connects the past and the present

Discovering the pas is exciting

Sites are non renewable resources

Our impact on the planet includes archaological sites.

Agriculture: deep plowing, mixing, changes in the water table.

Removal of artifacts to keep or to sell.

To explain why archaeological sites are important.

Archaeological sites belong to all of us on one level.

To protect sites from destruction

To safeguard descendants interests in objects with cultural importance.

To safeguard sites so that everyone can learn about the past.

The antiquities act of 1906

i. Created national monuments.

ii. Made looting or damaging a national monument a crime.

iii. Lists credential needed for research.

The national historic preservation act of 1966 (NHPA)

i. created the national register of historic places.

ii. Developed a legas framework for protecting cultural resources.

The archaological resources protection act of 1979 (ARPA)

i. Defines archaeological resources over 100 years old

ii. Mandates preservation on public land and indian reservations.

iii. Requires locations to be kept confidential.

iiii. Lays out civil and criminal penalties.

The native american graves protection and repatriation act (1990 NAGPRA))

i. Mandates return (repatriation) of human remains, funerary objects, and sacred artifacts to descendants or related groups.

ii. Establishes procedures for repatriation

iii. and forbids trafficing of items.

Consults with living descendants of any group that may have left the remains.

Does homework before digging at a site (see: the african burial ground; the Port Angeles graving dock).

Gets as much technical training and assistance from technical experts as possible.

Keep maps photos and written records of everything.

Leaves part of the site undisturbed for future work.

Carefully stores all artifacts, photos and paper records.

Publishes the work in print or other media, but without disclosing exact location!

1. Evolution

2.Genetics

3. Biochemicalor Molecular Genetics

Population Genetics and Mechanisms of Genetic Evolution

4. The Modern Synthesis

Humans have uniquely varied ways of adapting to environmental stresses.

These are both cultural and biological.

18th Century scholars became interested in biological diversity and wondered....

Where do we fit within the classification schemes for plants and animals.

The idea that biological similarities and differences originated at the Creation; also applied in geology.

Linnaeus developed the first comprehensive classification, or taxonomy, of plants and animals.

We still use his system

Fossil discoveries during the 18th and 19th centuries raised doubts about creationism.

a modified version of creationism, also applied in geology

Divinely authored worldwide disasters wipedout the creatures represented in the fossil record.

Transformism/ evolution

Charles Darwin

1. an alternative to creationism and catastrophism was transformism.

Charles Darwin the best known of the evolutionist.

2. Served on the HMS Beagle during a scientific expedition around the world. 

His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin who said all animal species share a common ancestry

Geologists Hutton and Lyell who said the present is the key to the past- The principle of Uniformitarianism.

Darwin applied Thomas Malthus's ideas about competition to species change.

Malthus said: In the presence of competition, those individuals best adapted to the environment were most likely to survive and pass on their traits to offspring (i.e. reproduce.)

Natural Selection: The process by which nature selects the forms most suited to survive and reproduce in a given environment.

1. competition for strategic resources

2. variety within that population.

Natural Selection continues today.

All species can produce offspring faster than the food supply increases

All living things show variation, no two individuals are exactly alike.

Indiniduals with favorable variations will have more surviving offspring.

Favorable variations are inherited and passed on more frequently than less favorable ones.

Adaptation: the process by which organisms cope with environmental forces and stresses.

Adaptation is short-term

Natural selection is long-term

Humans adapt using both biological and cultural means.

The rate of change accelerated during the past 10,000 years.

Foraging was the sole basis of human subsistence for millions of years.

It took only a few thousand years to develop food production: cultivation of plants and domestication of animals.

To understand what causes biological variation we are going to cover three separate topics:

1. Mendelian genetics: how chromosomes transmit genes across generations.

2. Biochemical genetics: structure, function, and changes in DNA.

3. Population genetics: natural selection and the causes of genetic variation stability and change.

Austrian Monk experiments starting in 1856 revealed the basic principle of genetics.

Studied inheritance of seven contrasting traits in pea plants.

Discovered that heredity is determined by discrete particles or units-but he didn't know what they were.

He concluded that a dominant form of a trait could mask a recessive form.

The recessive trait was not destroyed, just masked.

The seven traits are...

Figure 5.1

Dominance produces a distinction between the genotype: hereditary makeup and Phenotype: the expressed physical characteristic.

DNA: complex molecule; sugars, phosphates, bases arranged in sequences called codes.

Chromosome: a paired length of DNA, composed of multiple genes.

Gene: a place on a chromosome that determines a particular trait.

Allele: a variant of a particular gene.

Cells divide and produce new cells:

Somatic cells: regular cells in your organs; they split and duplicate same number of chromosomes-mitosis

Sex Cells (gametes): they split, duplicate, and then split again half the number of chromosomes-meiosis.

Heterozygous: dissimilar alleles of a gene in an offspring, a different one from each parent

Homozygous: two identical alleles of a gene in an offspring, the same one from each parent.

Independent Assortment: chromosomes are inherited independently of one another.

Recombination: the combination of genetic traits in an offspring.

-Creates new types on which natural selection can operate.

For every offspring of the same set of parents, the probablilities (odds) of having a particular gene are the same each time a new offspring is conceived.

The odds are random.

Mutation: changes in the DNA molecules of which genes and chromosomes are built.

Gametes: sex cells that make new generations.

The DNA molecule is a double helix. The structure of RNA, with paired bases, matches DNA. RNA carries DNA's message to its cytoplasm (outer area). RNA helps DNA initiae and guide the construction of hundreds of proteins necessary for bodily growht, maintenance, and repair.

Populations may be very small and isolated

Mating is not random due to geography,physiology, behavior (for people, add culture!)

New variants are introduced through mutation or new people arriving.

Some individuals are more successful at producing viable offspring than others.

Base substitution mutation: substitution of one base in a triplet by another. If mutation occurs in a sex cell, the new organism will carry mutation in every cell.

Chromosomal rearrangement: pieces of a chromosome break off and reattach someplace else on that chromosom.

Approx. three mutations will occur in every sex cell.

Most mutations are neutral. Evolution depends on mutations variants produced through mutation can be especially significan if there is a change in environment.

Random genetic drift: loss of alleles from a population's gene pool through chance. lost alleles can reappear in the gene pool only through mutation.

Fixation: is more rapid in small populations.

The founder effec-small, isolated population with a limited range of genetic variation.

Population genetics

Gene Pool

Genetic evolution

1. stable and changing populations

2. alleles and genotypes within breeding population

2. the change in allele frequency in breedy population

Exchanges in genetic material between populations of the same species. Alleles spread through gene flow even when selection not operating on allel. Species: group of related organisms whose members can interbreed to produce offspring that live and reproduce.

Genotype: the genetic makeup of an organism.

Phenotype: an organism's evident biological traits. Natural selection acts only on phenotypes.

Types of selection

1. Directional

2. Sexual

3. Stabilizing

4. What is the point of natural selection?

Microevolution: small-scale changes in allele frequencies over just a few generations.

Macroevolution: large scale changes in allele frequencies in a population over a longer time period.