Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
ANTH111: Introduction to Anthropology
Section 06
Fall, 2007
Instructor: Gregory Vogel

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Week 15

These are notes from class sessions outlining key ideas that were brought up in class – keep in mind that these are not comprehensive and do not cover all of the reading material directly.  Use these outlines to help you study for the course, but don't use them as a substitute for your own class notes!

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Chapter 13: Kinship and Relatedness.

- "Much can be predicted about a child's probably path in life just by knowing the kind of social groups into which he or she is born."  Not always true, of course, but our families are largely responsible for what we turn out to be.  The American ideal is that "anyone can grow up to be a president" – how true do you think this is?

- Relatedness and kinship are "socially recognized ties" – In other words, they are cultural facts.

- "..many anthropologists [concluded] that all people everywhere based their kinship systems on the biology of reproduction.  It was but a short step to conclude that Western beliefs about which people counted as one's "real" relatives were universally valid."  - This is ethnocentric thinking, of course.

- A Kinship System is the way we organize relationships based on "relation" – not always genetic or "blood relations".  How do we define who our "real" relatives are?  In the modern U.S., for example, we have half-brothers and sisters, step-parents, etc.  We may consider many people related to us even though we share no genetics.  The ties are social, personal, and even legal.

- Sex: "Observable physical characteristics that distinguish two kinds of humans, female and male, needed for biological reproduction."

- Gender: The cultural construction of beliefs and behaviors considered appropriate for each sex."

- Sex is a biological fact, gender is a cultural fact.

- Kinship systems and kinship terminologies are highly varied.  For example, in the U.S. we have only one word for "cousin", whether or not they are male or female, and whether or not they are from our father's side of the family or our mother's side of the family.  We distinguish between the gender of aunts and uncles, but not which side of the family they come from.

- Marriage is a very interesting institution, universal to all societies, but constituting a very different set of cultural facts in many societies.  In the U.S., as in much of the world now, there are many different cultural facts surrounding marriage, based on one's background and personal feelings.  In most societies, particularly prior to globalization, marriage was much more than a union between two people – it was an important social tie between families, it was very much a public, group (thing) than a personal thing.

- In industrialized, global societies, just about everything concerning family, relations, kinship, etc. has changed.  Even the "nuclear family" of a husband, wife, and children is a relatively new invention.  Think about Ongka's family lived: a men's hut, a women's hut, multiple wives, etc.

 

Chapter 14: Social inequality.

- Recall the difference between an egalitarian society and a hierarchical society: equal or unequal access to wealth and prestige.  Ongka's society is mostly egalitarian: most everyone has equal access to wealth, and most people have equal access to prestige.  The Big Moka was for the benefit of the group as much as for Ongka – he had no true coercive power over others, he just happened to be pretty good at organizing and convincing people to do certain things.  He therefore had a little more prestige than other people, at least in this one arena, but it wasn't translated into real power.

- Human beings are categorization machines: it is difficult or even impossible for us to experience something and not try to put it into some type of category: was it a hard text or an easy one?  Is that person friendly or not?  Is that thing edible or not?  In a way, human thought is based on categorization.

- We have many different ways of categorizing people.  Kinship and relatedness are one important way we categorize people.  Some others are: Gender, class, caste, race, ethnicity, and nationality.  It is important to keep in mind that none of these categories is "natural": they would not exist if we didn't make them up.  None of these are biological facts, but all are important cultural facts.

- Some categorizations appear to be quite old in human societies (e.g. gender, class), while others may be fairly new: race, ethnicity, nationality.  Many of the new ones appear to be tied to capitalism and colonialism.

- Archaeological evidence  shows us differences between the sexes for as long as we have evidence, and we can infer that this translates to differences between genders as well.  In H/G societies, it generally appears that men did most of the hunting, particularly of large animals, while women did more of the gathering.  Gathering, it turns out, is far more important to sustain H/G societies than hunting.  Why did (and do?) men go out to hunt large animals?

- Idea of "costly signaling":
- Peacocks and Peahens

- Class: "hierarchically arranged social groups defined on economic grounds" – higher class = greater access to goods and prestige.  In our society, based of course on money, because we have a market exchange system of economics.

- Note that many of these categorizations overlap – people of a particular race or ethnicity in one population often are higher or lower class than people of other races, etc.

- Caste: "A ranked group within a hierarchically stratified society that is closed, prohibiting individuals to move from one caste to another."  Do we have castes in the U.S.?

- Idea of Heterarchy is important: multiple, overlapping hierarchies.  A person may be "up" or "down" depending on the particular context.

- Race: "A human population category whose boundaries allegedly correspond to different sets of biological attributes."  This has become an increasingly important cultural fact throughout the world, stemming in part from colonialism. 

- Ethnicity: "A principle of social classification used to create groups based on selected cultural features such as language, religion, or dress."

- Nations: "A group of people believed to share the same history, culture, and even physical substance [relatedness]."

- Nationality: "A sense of identification with and loyalty to a nation-state." (State-level society.)

Leaders within nations have a vested interest in instilling nationalism: "The attempt made by government officials to instill into the citizens of a state a sense of nationality."