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Chapter Summaries
Chapter
1: The Nature of Anthropology
Throughout
human history, people have needed to know who they are, where they came
from, and why they behave as they do. Traditionally, myths and legends
provided the answers to these questions. Anthropology, as it has emerged
over the past 200 years, offers another approach to answering the questions
people ask about themselves.
Anthropology is the study of humankind. In employing
a scientific approach, anthropologists seek to produce a reasonably objective
understanding of both human diversity and those aspects all humans have
in common. The five major branches of anthropology are biological anthropology,
archaeology, linguistic anthropology, applied anthropology, and sociocultural
anthropology. Biological anthropology focuses on humans as biological
organisms. Biological anthropologists trace the evolutionary development
of the human animal and study biological variation within the species
today. Archaeologists study material objects usually from past cultures
in order to explain human behaviour. Linguistic anthropologists, who study
human languages, may deal with descriptions of languages, with histories
of languages, or with how languages are used in particular social settings.
Applied anthropologists put to practical use the knowledge and expertise
of anthropology. Sociocultural anthropologists study humans in terms of
their cultures in the present and recent past. Ethnographers go into the
field to observe and describe human behaviour; ethnologists do comparative
studies of particular facets of a culture, such as religion or economic
practices; and ethnohistorians study cultures of the recent past using
oral histories and written accounts left by explorers, missionaries, and
traders.
Anthropology is unique among the social and natural
sciences in that it is concerned with formulating explanations of human
diversity based on a study of all aspects of human biology and behaviour
in all known societies, rather than in European and North American societies
alone. Thus anthropologists have devoted much attention to the study of
non-Western peoples.
Anthropologists are concerned with the objective
and systematic study of humankind. The data sociocultural anthropologists
use may be from a single society or from numerous societies that are then
compared.
In anthropology, the humanities and sciences come
together into a genuinely human science. Anthropology’s link with
the humanities can be seen in its concern with people’s values,
languages, arts, and literature, but above all in its attempt to convey
the experience of living as other people do. As both a science and a humanity,
anthropology has essential skills to offer the modern world, where understanding
the other people with whom we share the globe has become a matter of survival.
Chapter
2: The Nature of Culture
Culture,
to anthropologists, consists of the shared ideals, values, and beliefs
members of a society use to interpret experience and to generate behaviour
and that are reflected by their behaviour.
All cultures share certain basic characteristics;
studying these sheds light on culture’s nature and function. Culture
cannot exist without society: a group of people sharing a common homeland
who are dependent on each other for survival. Society is held together
by relationships determined by social structure or social organization.
Within any society, more than one culture can
exist. All is not uniform within a culture; one reason is that some differences
exist between male and female roles in any human society. Anthropologists
use the term gender to refer to the elaborations or meanings cultures
assign to the biological differences between men and women. Age variation
is also universal, and in some cultures other subcultural variations occur
as well. A subculture, such as the Hutterites or Acadians, shares certain
overarching assumptions of the larger culture while observing a distinctively
different set of rules. Pluralistic societies
are those with particularly marked cultural variation, often containing
several distinct cultural and subcultural groups operating under different
sets of standards.
In addition to being shared, culture is learned.
Individual members of a society learn the accepted norms of social behaviour
through the process of enculturation. Another characteristic is that culture
is based on symbols. It is transmitted through the communication of ideas,
emotions, and desires expressed in language. Finally, culture is integrated,
so all aspects of a culture function as an integrated whole. In a properly
functioning culture, though, total harmony of all elements is approximated,
rather than completely achieved.
The job of anthropologists is to understand what
they observe to explain the social behaviour of a people. To arrive at
a realistic description of a culture free from personal and cultural biases,
anthropologists must (1) examine a people’s notion of the way their
society ought to function; (2) determine how a people think they behave;
and (3) compare these with how a people actually do behave. Anthropologists
also must be as free as possible from their own cultural biases.
Cultural adaptation has enabled humans, in the
course of evolution, to survive and expand in a variety of environments.
Sometimes, though, what is adaptive in one set of circumstances, or in
the short run, is maladaptive in another set of circumstances, or in the
long run.
To survive, a culture must satisfy the basic needs
of its members, provide for their continuity, and maintain order among
them and between them and outsiders.
All cultures change over time, sometimes because
the environment they must cope with has changed, sometimes as a result
of the intrusion of outsiders, or sometimes because values within the
culture have undergone modification. Although cultures must change to
adapt to new circumstances, sometimes the unforeseen consequences of change
are disastrous for a society.
A society must strike a balance between the self-interests
of individuals and the needs of the group. If one or the other becomes
paramount, the result may be cultural breakdown.
Ethnocentrism is the belief that our own culture
is superior to all others. To avoid making ethnocentric judgements, anthropologists
adopt the approach of cultural relativism, which requires examination
of each culture in its own terms and according to its own standards. The
least biased measure of a culture’s success, however, employs criteria
indicative of the culture’s effectiveness at securing the survival
of a society in a way its members see as reasonably fulfilling.
Chapter 3: The Beginnings of Human Culture
Anthropology
includes the study of primates other than humans to explain why and how
humans developed as they did. As the early primates became tree dwellers,
various modifications occurred — in dental characteristics, sense
organs, the brain, and skeletal structure — that helped them to
adapt to their environment. In addition, learned social behaviour became
increasingly important to them. By studying the behaviour of present-day
primates, anthropologists seek clues for reconstructing behavioural patterns
that may have characterized the apelike primates ancestral to both humans
and present-day apes.
Like all monkeys and apes, chimpanzees live in
structured social groups and express their sociability through communication
by visual and vocal signals. They also exhibit learning, but unlike most
other primates, they can make and use tools.
The earliest undoubted members of the human family
were living in Africa by 4.2 million years ago. These hominines were fully
bipedal (able to walk and run erect). Best known are the australopithecines,
who were well equipped for generalized food gathering in a savanna environment.
Although still strikingly apelike from the waist up, australopithecines
had a fully human dentition with many features easily derivable from earlier
apelike primates, some of whom lived under conditions that forced them
to spend considerable time on the ground and appear to have had the capacity
for at least occasional bipedal locomotion.
It seems that an early form of australopithecine
gave rise to an early form of the genus Homo. Of major significance
is that members of this new genus were both meat eaters and makers of
stone tools. Toolmaking enabled Homo habilis to process meat
so that it could be eaten; because making tools from stone depended on
fine manipulation of the hands, it put a premium on more developed brains.
Homo erectus, the next Homo
species to develop, exhibited a nearly modern body, a brain close in size
to the modern human brain, and fully human dental characteristics. This
hominine’s ability to use fire provided a further means of controlling
the environment. The technological efficiency of H. erectus is evidenced
in refined toolmaking, with the development of the hand axe and, later,
specialized tools for hunting, butchering, food processing, hide scraping,
and defence. In addition, hunting techniques ultimately developed by H.
erectus reflected a considerable advance in organizational ability.
By 200 000 years ago, hominines possessed the
brain capacity of true Homo sapiens. Apparently several local variations
of archaic H. sapiens, including the Neanderthals, existed. Their capacity
for cultural adaptation was considerable, doubtlessly because their fully
modern brains made possible not only sophisticated technology but complex
conceptual thought as well. Those who lived in Europe used fire extensively
in their arctic climate, lived in small bands, and communicated by speech.
Remains indicate the existence of ritual behaviour, and the aged and infirm
were cared for.
Evidence indicates that at least one population
of archaic H. sapiens evolved into modern humans. Upper Paleolithic
peoples possessed physical features similar to those of present-day human
populations as sheer physical bulk gave way to smaller features. Cave
paintings found in Spain and France and rock art from southern Africa,
which served a religious purpose, attest to a highly sophisticated aesthetic
sensibility. By at least the end of the Upper Paleolithic, big-game hunters
had crossed the Bering Strait and begun dispersing through North and later
South America.
We thus have seen a close interrelation between
developing culture and developing humanity. The critical importance of
culture as the human adaptive mechanism is apparent because culture seems
to have imposed selective pressures favouring a better brain, and a better
brain, in turn, made possible improved cultural adaptation. Indeed, it
seems fair to say that modern humans look the way they do today because
cultural adaptation played such an important role in the survival of our
ancient ancestors. Because cultural adaptation worked so well, human populations
grew, probably very slowly, causing a gradual expansion into previously
uninhabited parts of the world. And this, too, affected cultural adaptation,
as humans made adjustments to meet new conditions.
Chapter 4: Language and Communication
Anthropologists
need to understand the workings of language, because it is language that
enables people in every society to share their experiences, concerns,
and beliefs, in the past and in the present, and communicate these to
the next generation. Language makes communication of infinite meanings
possible by employing sounds or gestures that, when combined according
to certain rules, result in meanings intelligible to all speakers. Linguistics
is the modern scientific study of all aspects of language. Phonetics focuses
on the production, transmission, and reception of speech sounds, or phonemes.
Phonology studies the sound patterns of language to extract the rules
that govern the way sounds are combined. Morphology is concerned with
the smallest units of meaningful combinations of sounds — morphemes
— in a language. Syntax refers to the principles with which phrases
and sentences are built. The entire formal structure of a language, consisting
of all observations about its morphemes and syntax, constitutes its grammar.
Human language is embedded in a gesture-call system
inherited from our primate ancestors that serves to “key”
speech, providing the appropriate frame for interpreting linguistic form.
The gestural component of this system consists of body motions used to
convey messages; the system of notating and recording these motions is
known as kinesics. The call component is represented by paralanguage,
consisting of extralinguistic noises involving various voice qualities
and vocalizations. Proxemics is the study of culturally defined use of
space as a form of communication, and touch communicates through physical
contact.
Descriptive linguistics registers and explains
the features of a language at a particular time in its history. Historical
linguistics investigates relationships between earlier and later forms
of the same language. A major concern of historical linguists is to identify
the forces behind the changes that have occurred in languages in the course
of linguistic divergence. Historical linguistics also provides a means
of roughly dating certain human migrations, invasions, and contacts with
other people. Efforts to save endangered languages are evident in many
parts of the world; one way to do so is through bilingual education programs.
Ethnolinguistics deals with language as it relates
to society, the rest of culture, and human behaviour. Some linguists,
following Benjamin Lee Whorf, have proposed that language shapes the way
people think and behave. Others have argued that language reflects reality.
Although linguists find language flexible and adaptable, they have found
that once a terminology is established, it tends to perpetuate itself
and to reflect much about the speakers’ beliefs and social relationships.
Kinship terms, for example, help reveal how a family is structured, what
relationships are considered close or distant, and what attitudes are
held toward relationships. Similarly, gender language reveals how the
men and women in a society relate to one another.
A social dialect is the language of a group of
people within a larger group, all of whom may speak more or less the same
language. Sociolinguists are concerned with whether dialect differences
reflect cultural differences. They also study code switching — the
process of changing from one level of language to another as the situation
demands.
One theory of language origins is that our human
ancestors, with their hands freed by their bipedalism, began using gestures
as a tool to communicate and implement intentions within a social setting.
With the movement of Homo erectus out of the tropics, the need
to plan for the future in order to survive seasons of cold temperatures
likely required structured sentences to communicate information about
events removed in time and space. By the time archaic Homo sapiens
appeared, emphasis on finely controlled movements of the mouth and throat
had probably given rise to spoken language.
All languages that have been studied, including
those of people from small-scale foraging cultures, are complex, highly
developed, and able to express a wide range of experiences.
Chapter 5: Making a Living
To
meet their requirements for food, water, and shelter, people must adjust
their behaviour to suit their environment. This adjustment, which involves
both change and stability, is a part of adaptation. Adaptation means a
moving balance exists between a society's needs and its potential. Adaptation
also refers to the interaction between an organism and its environment,
with each causing changes in the other. Human ecosystems, which tend to
be anthropogenic, must be considered in terms of all aspects of culture.
Humans
have adapted to their environments through patterns of subsistence-the
way we fulfill our basic needs. The food-foraging way of life, the oldest
and most universal type of subsistence, requires that people move their
residence according to changing food sources; thus local group size is
kept small. General characteristics of food foragers include a nomadic
way of life; small, mobile camps; food sharing; sexual division of labour;
and egalitarianism.
The
reason for the transition from food foraging to food production, which
began about 11 000 to 9000 years ago, was likely the unforeseen result
of increased management of wild food resources. One correlate of the food-producing
revolution was the eventual development of permanent settlements as people
practised horticulture using simple hand tools. One common form of horticulture
is slash and burn, or swidden farming. Intensive agriculture, a more complex
activity, requires irrigation, fertilizers, and draft animals. Pastoralism
is a means of subsistence that relies on raising herds of domesticated
animals, such as cattle, sheep, and goats. Pastoralists are usually nomads,
moving to different pastures as required for grass and water.
Cities
developed as intensified agricultural techniques created a surplus, freeing
individuals to specialize full time in other activities. Social structure
became increasingly stratified with the development of cities, and people
were ranked according to gender, the work they did, and the family they
were born into. Social relationships grew more formal, and centralized
political institutions were formed. In some parts of the world, intensive
agriculture has evolved into mechanized or industrial agriculture, a system
plagued by economic, environmental, political, and social problems in
the 21st century.
We
should not conclude that the sequence from food-foraging to horticultural/pastoral
to intensive agricultural to nonindustrial urban and then industrial societies
is inevitable. Food foraging, horticultural, pastoral, nonindustrial,
and industrial urban societies are all highly evolved adaptations, each
in its own particular way.
Chapter
6: Economic Systems
An economic system is a means of producing, distributing, and consuming goods. Studying the economics of nonliterate, nonindustrial societies can be undertaken only in the context of the total culture. Each society solves the problem of subsisting by allocating raw materials, land, labour, and technology and by distributing goods according to its own priorities.
The work people do is a major productive resource, and the allotment of work is always governed by rules according to sex and age. Instead of looking for biological imperatives to explain the sexual division of labour, a more productive strategy is to examine the kinds of work men and women do in the context of specific societies to see how it relates to other cultural and historical factors. The cooperation of many people working together is a typical feature of both nonliterate and literate societies. Specialization of craft is important even in societies with very simple technologies. Resource depletion results in cultural, social, and economic disruption.
All societies regulate the allocation of land and its valuable resources. In nonindustrial societies, individual ownership of land is rare; generally, land is controlled by kinship groups, whereas in industrial societies private ownership is more common. The technology of a people, in the form of the tools they use and associated knowledge, is related to their mode of subsistence. Sedentary communities offer greater opportunities to accumulate material belongings, and inequalities of wealth may develop. In many such communities, though, a relatively egalitarian social order may be maintained through levelling mechanisms.
Nonliterate people consume most of what they produce themselves, but they do exchange goods. The processes of distribution include reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange. Reciprocity is a transaction between individuals or groups, involving the exchange of goods and services of roughly equivalent value. Usually it is prescribed by ritual and ceremony.
Trading exchanges have elements of reciprocity, but they involve a greater calculation of the relative value of goods exchanged. Barter is one form of negative reciprocity whereby scarce goods from one group are exchanged for desirable goods from another group. Silent trade is a specialized form of barter with no verbal communication. A classic example of exchange between groups that involves both reciprocity and sharp trading is the Kula ring of the Trobriand Islanders.
Strong, centralized political organization is necessary for redistribution to occur. The government assesses each citizen a tax or tribute, uses the proceeds to support the governmental and religious elite, and redistributes the rest, usually in the form of public services. The collection of taxes and delivery of government services and subsidies in Canada is a form of redistribution. The potlatch is also a form of redistribution and serves as a levelling mechanism among First Nations northwest coastal peoples.
Display for social prestige is a motivating force in societies that produce some surplus of goods. In Canada, goods accumulated for display generally remain in the hands of those who accumulated them, whereas in other societies they are generally given away; the prestige comes from publicly divesting oneself of valuables, as in the potlatch ceremony of the northwest coast of British Columbia.
Exchange in the marketplace serves to distribute goods in a region. In nonindustrial societies, the marketplace is usually a specific site where produce, livestock, and material items the people produce are exchanged. It also functions as a social gathering place and a news medium. Canada’s market economy provides opportunities to Chinese Canadians.
In market economies, the informal sector may become more important than the formal sector as large numbers of under- and unemployed people with marginal access to the formal economy seek to survive. The informal economy consists of economic activities that escape official scrutiny and regulation.
Consumption encompasses the resources we ingest and the resources we exploit. Meaning is given to consumption through ritual and social interaction.
The anthropological approach to economics has taken on new importance in today’s world of international development and commerce. Without it, development schemes for developing countries are prone to failure, and international trade is hampered by cross-cultural misunderstandings. Globalization has brought with it many opportunities as well as many problems.
Chapter
7: Sex and Marriage
Among primates, the human female is unique in her ability to engage in sexual behaviour whenever she wants to or whenever her culture tells her it is appropriate, irrespective of whether or not she is fertile. Although such activity may reinforce social bonds between men and women, competition for sexual access also can be disruptive, so every culture has rules that govern such access. The near universality of the incest taboo, which forbids sexual relations between parents and their children, and usually between siblings, long has interested anthropologists, but a truly convincing explanation of the taboo has yet to be advanced. Related to incest are the practices of endogamy and exogamy. Endogamy is marriage within a group of individuals; exogamy is marriage outside the group. Cultures that practise exogamy at one level may practise endogamy at another. Community endogamy, for example, is a relatively common practice.
Although defined in terms of a continuing sexual relationship between a man and woman, marriage should not be confused with mating. Although mating occurs within marriage, it often occurs outside of it as well. Unlike mating, marriage is backed by social, legal, and economic forces. In Canada, legally recognized common-law relationships, in which partners enjoy all the benefits of marriage, have become increasingly common. Same-sex couples in Western society are struggling to have same-sex marriages legalized.
In some cultures, marriage arrangements exist between individuals of the same sex. An example is woman/woman marriage as practised in many African cultures. Such marriages provide a socially approved way to deal with problems for which marriages between individuals of the opposite sex offer no satisfactory solution.
Monogamy, or the taking of a single spouse, is the most common form of marriage, primarily for economic reasons. A man must have a certain amount of wealth to afford polygyny, or marriage to more than one wife at the same time. Yet in cultures where women do most of the productive work, polygyny may serve as a means of generating wealth for a household. Although few marriages in a given community may be polygynous, it is regarded as an appropriate, and even preferred, form of marriage in the majority of the world’s cultures. Since few communities have a surplus of men, polyandry, or the custom of a woman having several husbands, is uncommon. Also rare is group marriage, in which several men and several women have sexual access to one another. The levirate ensures the security of a woman by providing that a widow marry her husband’s brother; the sororate provides that a widower marry his wife’s sister. Serial monogamy means that a man or woman marries a series of partners. In recent decades, this pattern has become increasingly common among middle-class North Americans as individuals divorce and remarry.
In Canada and the United States and many of the other industrialized countries of the West, marriages run the risk of being based on an ideal of romantic love that emphasizes youthful beauty. In no other parts of the world would marriages based on such trivial and transitory characteristics be expected to work. In non-Western cultures economic considerations are of major concern in arranging marriages. Love follows rather than precedes marriage. The family arranges marriages in cultures where it is the most powerful social institution, binding two families as allies.
Preferred marriage partners in many cultures are particular cross cousins or, less commonly, parallel cousins on the paternal side. Cross-cousin marriage is a means of establishing and maintaining solidarity between groups.
In many human groups, marriages are formalized by some sort of economic exchange. Most common is bride-price, the payment of money or other valuables from the groom’s to the bride’s kin; this is characteristic of cultures where the women both work and bear children for the husband’s family. Bride service occurs when the groom is expected to work for a period for the bride’s family. A dowry is the payment of a woman’s inheritance at the time of marriage to her or her husband; its purpose is to ensure support for women in cultures where men do most of the productive work and women are valued for their reproductive potential alone.
Divorce is possible in all cultures, although reasons for divorce as well as its frequency vary widely from one group to another. In North America, factors contributing to the breakup of marriages include the trivial and transitory characteristics some marriages are based on and the difficulty of establishing a supportive, intimate bond in a culture where people are brought up to seek individual gratification, often through competition at someone else’s expense, and where women traditionally have been expected to be submissive to men.
Chapter
8: Family and Household
Dependence on group living for survival is a basic human characteristic. Nurturing children traditionally has been the adult female’s job, although men also may play a role, and in some cultures men are even more involved with their children than are women. In addition to at least some childcare, women also carry out other economic tasks that complement those of men. The presence of adults of both sexes in a residential group is advantageous, in that it provides children with adult models of the same sex, from whom they can learn the gender-appropriate roles as defined in that culture.
A definition of the family that avoids Western ethnocentrism sees it as a married or common-law couple with or without children or a lone parent with dependent children. Households, which are usually families, are the basic residential units where economic production, consumption, inheritance, childrearing, and shelter are organized and implemented.
Far from being a stable, unchanging entity, the family may take any one of a number of forms in response to particular social, historical, and ecological circumstances. Conjugal families are those formed on the basis of marital ties. The smallest conjugal unit of mother, father, and their dependent children is called the nuclear family. Contrasting with the conjugal is the consanguineal family, consisting of women, their dependent children, and their brothers. The nuclear family, which became the ideal in North American society, is also found in cultures that live in harsh environments, such as the Arctic, where individual members are strongly dependent on very few people. This form of family is well suited to the mobility required both in food-foraging groups and in industrial societies where job changes are frequent. Among food foragers, however, the nuclear family is not as isolated from other kin as in modern industrial societies.
Characteristic of many nonindustrial societies is the large extended, or conjugal-consanguineal, family. Ideally, some of an extended family’s members are related by blood, others are related by marriage, and all live and work together as members of one household. Conjugal or extended families are based on five basic residential patterns: patrilocal, matrilocal, ambilocal, neolocal, and avunculocal.
Different forms of family organization are accompanied by their distinctive problems. Polygamous families endure the potential for conflict among the several spouses of the individual they are married to. One way to ameliorate this problem is through sororal polygyny or fraternal polyandry. Under polyandry, an added difficulty for the youngest husbands is reduced opportunity for reproduction. In extended families, the matter of decision making may be the source of stress, resting as it does with an older individual whose views may not coincide with those of the younger family members. In-marrying spouses in particular may have trouble complying with the demands of the family they must now live in.
In neolocal nuclear families, individuals are isolated from the direct aid and support of kin, so husbands and wives must work out their own solutions to the problems of living together and having children. The problems are especially difficult in North American society, owing to the inequality that persists between men and women, the great emphasis placed on individualism and competition, and an absence of clearly understood patterns of responsibility between husbands and wives, as well as a clear model for childrearing.
In North America, single-parent families, usually headed by a woman, are becoming increasingly common, as are same-sex families. Female-headed families are also common in developing countries. Because the women in such households are hard pressed to provide adequately for themselves as well as for their children, many women in North America and abroad find themselves sinking into poverty.
Chapter
9: Kinship and Descent
In nonindustrial cultures, kinship groups commonly deal with problems that families and households alone cannot handle: problems such as those involving protection, the allocation of property, and the pooling of other resources. As societies become larger and more complex, formal political systems take over many of these matters; however, kinship continues to play an important role in families, even in urban societies.
A common form of kinship is the descent group, which has as its criterion of membership descent from a common ancestor through a series of parent–child links. Unilineal descent establishes kin group membership exclusively through the male or female line. Matrilineal descent is traced through the female line; patrilineal, through the male.
The descent system is closely tied to a society’s economic base. Generally, patrilineal descent predominates where the male is the breadwinner and matrilineal where the female is the breadwinner. Anthropologists now recognize that in all cultures the kin of both mother and father are important elements in the social structure, regardless of how descent group membership is defined.
The male members of a patrilineage trace their descent from a common male ancestor. A female belongs to the same descent group as her father and his brother, but her children cannot trace their descent through him. Typically, authority over the children lies with the father or his elder brother. The requirement for younger men to defer to older men and for women to defer to men, as well as to the women of a household they marry into, are common sources of tension in a patrilineal culture.
In the matrilineal pattern, descent is traced through the female line. Unlike the patrilineal pattern, which confers authority on men, matrilineal descent does not necessarily confer authority on women, although women usually have more of a say in decision making than they do in patrilineal cultures. The matrilineal system is common in cultures where women perform much of the productive work.
Double descent is matrilineal for some purposes and patrilineal for others. Ambilineal descent provides a measure of flexibility in that an individual has the option of affiliating with either the mother’s or father’s descent group.
Descent groups are often highly structured economic units that provide aid and security to their members. They also may be repositories of religious tradition, with group solidarity enhanced by worship of a common ancestor. A lineage is a corporate descent group made up of consanguineal kin who can trace their genealogical links to a common ancestor. Marriage of a group member represents an alliance of two lineages.
Fission is the splitting up of a large lineage group into new, smaller ones, with the original lineage becoming a clan. Clan members claim descent from a common ancestor but without actually knowing the genealogical links to that ancestor. Unlike lineages, clan residence is usually dispersed rather than localized. In the absence of residential unity, clan identification is often reinforced by totems, usually symbols from nature that remind members of their common ancestry. A phratry is a unilineal descent group of two or more clans that supposedly share a common ancestry. If there are but two such groups, they are called moieties.
Bilateral descent, characteristic of Western and many food-foraging cultures, is traced through both parents and recognizes several ancestors. An individual is affiliated equally with all relatives on both the mother’s and father’s sides. Such a large group is socially impractical and is usually reduced to a small circle of paternal and maternal relatives called the kindred.
Early Chinese immigrants relied on clan and district-based associations to assist in adjusting to life in Canada. As Canadian society became more accepting of Chinese Canadians, the need for these associations began to decline.
In any culture, rules dictate the way kinship relationships are defined. Factors such as sex and generational or genealogical differences help distinguish one kin from another. The Hawaiian system is the simplest system of kinship terminology. All relatives of the same generation and sex are referred to by the same term. The Eskimo system, used by Euro Canadians and Anglo Americans, emphasizes the nuclear family and merges all other relatives in a given generation into a few large, generally undifferentiated categories. In the Iroquois system, a single term is used for a father and his brother and another term for a mother and her sister. Parallel cousins are equated with brothers and sisters but distinguished from cross cousins. The same is true in the Omaha and Crow systems, except they equate cross cousins with relatives of other generations. The relatively rare Sudanese or descriptive system treats all aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings as different from one another.
Chapter
10: Social Stratification and Groupings
All cultures group people according to gender and the division of labour associated with each gender. Age grouping is another form of association that may augment or replace kinship groupings. An age grade is a category of persons, usually of the same sex, organized by age. A specific tie is often ritually established for moving from a younger to an older age grade.
Common-interest associations are linked with rapid social change and urbanization. They are increasingly assuming the roles formerly played by kinship or age groups. In urban areas they help new arrivals cope with the changes demanded by the move from their former home to a new city. Common-interest associations are also seen in traditional cultures, and their roots are likely found in the first horticultural villages. Membership may range from voluntary to compulsory. A question that remains to be resolved is why women are barred from associations in some cultures, while in others they participate on an equal basis with men.
In a system of social stratification people are ranked relative to one another. Those with lower ranks have limited access to wealth, power, and prestige. A stratified society exhibits the most stratification, with members experiencing varying degrees of inequality, while members of egalitarian cultures enjoy fairly equal wealth, power, and status. Human groups may be stratified in various ways, such as through gender, age, class and caste, ethnicity, and race.
Two conflicting theories attempt to explain the prevalence of stratification: the functionalist theory of stratification and the conflict theory of stratification. Functionalists believe inequalities are necessary to maintain complex societies, while conflict theorists believe there is a constant struggle between lower and upper classes. The concept of race, though erroneous, is the basis for racism or racial stratification, such as that experienced by First Nations peoples and Chinese Canadians. Racism is the belief that those designated to certain “races” are inferior to others.
Members of a class enjoy equal or nearly equal access to basic resources and prestige. Caste is a special form of social class in which membership is determined at birth and fixed for life. Endogamy is particularly marked within castes, and children automatically belong to their parents’ caste. Social classes are given expression through verbal evaluation, or what people say about other people in their society; patterns of association, or who interacts with whom, how, and in what context; and symbolic indicators—activities and possessions. Open-class systems are those societies with the easiest mobility, whereas closed-class systems are caste structures with limited mobility.
Gender stratification takes many forms. Anthropologists measure the degree of stratification based on gender according to the opportunities and freedoms women enjoy. Gender stratification may be due to control of resources and distribution of these resources or to the cultural organization created by constant warfare. Although race is a flawed concept, ethnicity, the shared identity of a group, is an important concept in human organization. Ethnic stratification, along with the ensuing discrimination, is common in countries like Canada, where many ethnic groups coexist.
Chapter
11: Political Organization and the Maintenance of Order
Political organization and control are the ways power is distributed and embedded in cultures. Through political organization, cultures maintain social order, manage public affairs, and reduce social disorder. No group can live together without persuading or coercing its members to conform to agreed-upon rules of conduct. To properly understand a culture’s political organization, we need to view it in the light of its ecological, social, and ideological context.
Four basic types of political systems may be identified: uncentralized bands and tribes, and centralized chiefdoms and states. The band, characteristic of food-foraging and some other nomadic groups, is an association of politically independent but related families or households occupying a common territory. Informal control is maintained by public opinion in the form of gossip and ridicule. Band leaders are older men, or sometimes women, with personal authority.
The tribe is composed of separate bands or other social units tied together by such unifying factors as descent groups, age grading, or common interest. With an economy usually based on farming or herding, the tribe’s population is larger than that of the band, although family units within the tribe are still relatively autonomous and egalitarian. As in the band, political organization is transitory, and leaders have no formal means of maintaining authority.
Chiefdoms are ranked cultures in which every member has a position in the hierarchy. Status is determined by the individual’s position in a descent group and distance of relationship to the chief. Power is concentrated in a single chief whose true authority serves to unite his community in all matters. The chief may accumulate great personal wealth, which enhances his power base and which he may pass on to his heirs.
The most centralized of political organizations is the state. It has a central power that can use force to administer a rigid code of laws and to maintain order, even beyond its borders. A large bureaucracy functions to uphold the central power’s authority. Typically, a state is a stratified society where economic functions and wealth are distributed unequally. Although thought of as stable and permanent, it is, in fact, inherently unstable and transitory. States differ from nations, which are communities of people who see themselves as “one people” with a common culture but who may or may not have a centralized form of political organization.
Historically women have rarely held important positions of political leadership. Nonetheless, in a number of cultures, women have enjoyed political equality with men, as among the Iroquoian tribes of southern Ontario and New York State. Under centralized political systems, women are most apt to be subordinate to men, and when states impose their control on cultures marked by sexual egalitarianism, the relationship changes so that men dominate women.
Two kinds of cultural control exist: internalized and externalized. Internalized controls are self-imposed by individuals. These are purely cultural in nature, as they are built into the people’s minds. They rely on such deterrents as personal shame, fear of divine punishment, and magical retaliation. Although bands and tribes rely heavily on them, internalized controls are generally insufficient by themselves. Every culture develops externalized controls, called sanctions, that mix cultural and social control. Positive sanctions, in the form of rewards or recognition, involve the position a culture or a number of its members take toward approved behaviour; negative sanctions, such as threat of imprisonment, corporal punishment, or “loss of face,” reflect societal reactions to disapproved behaviour.
Sanctions also may be classified as either formal, including actual laws, or informal, involving norms but not legal statutes. Formal sanctions are organized and reward or punish behaviour through a rigidly regulated social procedure. Informal sanctions are diffuse, involving immediate reactions of approval or disapproval by individual community members to a compatriot’s behaviour. Other important agents of social control are witchcraft beliefs and religious sanctions.
Law serves several basic functions. First, it defines relationships among a group’s members, thus dictating proper behaviour under different circumstances. Second, law allocates authority to employ coercion to enforce sanctions. In centralized political systems, this authority rests with the government and court system. In uncentralized systems, this authority is given directly to the injured party. Third, law redefines social relations and aids its own efficient operation by ensuring that it allows for change.
Western societies clearly distinguish offences against the state, called crimes, from offences against individuals, called torts. In uncentralized systems, all offences are against individuals. A dispute may be settled in two ways: negotiation and adjudication. All human groups use negotiation to settle individual disputes. In negotiation the parties to the dispute reach an agreement themselves, with or without the help of a third party. In adjudication, not found in some societies, an authorized third party issues a binding decision.
Political systems also attempt to regulate external affairs, or relations between politically autonomous units. In doing so they may resort to the threat or use of force, but they also may attempt to maintain the peace through such organizations as peacekeepers.
War is not a universal phenomenon, since some cultures do not practise warfare as Westeners know it. Usually, these are small-scale cultures that have some kind of naturalistic worldview. International terrorism is adding a new dimension to the concept of warfare.
Religion is so intricately woven into the life of the people in both industrial and nonindustrial countries that its presence is inevitably felt in the political sphere. To a greater or lesser extent, most governments the world over use religion to legitimize political power.
Chapter 12: Religion and the Supernatural
Religion is a part of all cultures. It consists of beliefs and behaviour patterns by which people try to control areas of their world otherwise beyond their control. Among food-foraging peoples, religion is a basic ingredient of everyday life. As societies become more complex, religion is less a part of daily activities and tends to be restricted to particular occasions.
Religion is characterized by a belief in supernatural beings and forces. Through prayer, sacrifice, and other religious rituals, people appeal to the supernatural world for aid. Supernatural beings may be grouped into three categories: major deities (gods and goddesses), ancestral spirits, and other sorts of spirit beings. Gods and goddesses are the greatest but most remote beings. They are usually thought of as controlling the universe or a specific part of it. Animism is a belief in spirit beings, other than ancestors, who are believed to animate all of nature. Animism is typical of peoples who see themselves as a part of nature rather than as superior to it. A belief in ancestral spirits is based on the idea that human beings are made up of a body and a soul. At death the spirit is freed from the body and continues to participate in human affairs. Animatism is a force or power directed to a successful outcome and may make itself manifest in any object. Myths serve to rationalize religious beliefs and practices.
All human cultures have specialists — priests and priestesses and/or shamans — to guide religious practices and to intervene with the supernatural world. Shamanism, with its often dramatic ritual, promotes a release of tension among members of a group. The shaman can help maintain social control.
Religious rituals reinforce social bonds. Rites of passage mark the stages in an individual’s life. Rites of intensification are rituals to mark crisis occasions in the life of the group rather than the individual. They serve to unite people, allay fear of the crisis, and prompt collective action. Funerary ceremonies are rites of intensification that provide for social readjustment after the loss of the deceased. Rites of intensification also may involve annual ceremonies to seek favourable conditions surrounding critical activities such as planting and harvesting.
Ritual practices of peasant and non-Western peoples are often an expression of the belief they can force supernatural powers to act in certain ways with certain prescribed formulas. This is the classic anthropological notion of magic. Sir James Frazer differentiated two principles of magic: “like produces like,” or imitative magic, and the law of contagion.
Witchcraft functions as an effective way for people to explain away personal misfortune. Even malevolent witchcraft may function positively in the realm of social control. It also may provide an outlet for feelings of hostility and frustration without disturbing the norms of the larger group. Neo-pagan religions, such as Wicca, are modern manifestations of ancient nature religions.
Religion (including magic and witchcraft) serves several important social functions. First, it sanctions a wide range of conduct by providing notions of right and wrong. Second, it sets precedents for acceptable behaviour and helps perpetuate an existing social order. Third, religion serves to lift the burden of decision making from individuals and places responsibility with the gods. Fourth, religion plays a large role in maintaining social solidarity. Finally, religion serves education. Ritual ceremonies enhance learning of tribal lore and thus help to ensure the perpetuation of a nonliterate culture.
Revitalization movements are a response by non-Western cultures to Western interference and domination. In the islands of Melanesia, these take the form of cargo cults that have appeared spontaneously at different times since the beginning of the 20th century. Anthony Wallace has interpreted revitalization movements as attempts to change the society. Regardless of where they appear, revitalization movements follow a common sequence. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity stem from such movements.
Chapter
13: Artistic Expression
Art is the creative use of the human imagination to interpret, understand, and enjoy life. It stems from the uniquely human ability to use symbols to give shape and significance to the physical world for more than just a utilitarian purpose. Anthropologists are concerned with art as a reflection of people’s cultural values and concerns.
Oral traditions denote a culture’s unwritten stories, beliefs, and customs. Verbal arts include narratives, dramas, poetry, incantations, proverbs, riddles, and word games. Narratives, which have received the most study, have been divided into three categories: myths, legends, and tales.
Myths are sacred narratives that explain how the world came to be as it is. By describing an orderly universe, myths function to set standards for orderly behaviour. Legends are stories told as if true that often recount the exploits of heroes, the movements of people, and the establishment of local customs. Anthropologists are interested in legends because they provide clues about what constitutes model ethical behaviour in a culture. Tales are fictional, secular, and nonhistorical narratives that instruct as they entertain. Anthropological interest in tales centres in part on the fact that their distribution provides evidence of cultural contacts or cultural isolation.
The study of music in cultural settings has developed into the specialized field of ethnomusicology.
The social function of music is most obvious in songs. Like tales, songs may express a group’s concerns, but with greater formalism because of the restrictions musical forms impose. Music also serves as a powerful way for a social or ethnic group to assert its distinctive identity. As well, it may be used to advance particular political, economic, and social agendas or for any one of a number of other purposes.
Visual art may be regarded as either representational or abstract, although in truth these categories represent polar ends of a continuum. Canadian visual art has exhibited a great deal of cultural diversity. Inuit art is one of the most successful examples of aboriginal art, nationally and internationally. Body art, in all its forms, is a way for people to express their individuality, group identity, and worldview. Despite the flourishing of diverse art forms in Canada, censorship and funding crises have not left the Canadian art community unscathed.
Chapter 14: Medical Anthropology
Medical anthropology began with the study of how cultural differences affect health and disease. The biocultural, or biomedical, approach, encompassing ecology, bioarchaeology, and evolution, takes medical science as a given and attempts to understand how illness expressed itself in given cultures and eras of history. Early biocultural studies examined the understanding of adult-onset diabetes among North American First Nations peoples, and the interaction of culture and genetics in the incidence of sickle-cell anemia among Africans and African Americans.
Later the field expanded to include the study of how different cultures conceptualize health and illness, and how Western medicine itself is immersed in a cultural and historical context. Rooted in the philosophical school known as phenomenology, the cultural interpretive, or cultural constructionist, approach distinguishes between “disease,” the clinical manifestation of a condition or syndrome, and “illness,” the subjective sense of being sick, dealing with such difficult to define health issues as “pain” and “suffering.”
The third component of the field, critical medical anthropology, arose when medical anthropologists attempted to understand the impact of larger political and economic forces, such as capitalism and industrialization, on the health of whole societies, communities, and individuals. CMA asks questions about health care for the poor within developed countries such as Canada and the United States and the more numerous and poorer developing countries. It also looks at the ways in which the economic forces of advanced capitalism shape the practice of medicine. CMA has close links to fields such as political ecology that seek to understand ways in which power relations affect humans and the environment.
Rather than being in competition, these three approaches are complementary. The point of a good analysis is to use the tools appropriate to the problem at hand. To study shamanism, the cultural interpretive approach would be the tool of choice. On the other hand, if you were interested in knowing whether a shamanic treatment was effective, you might turn to biomedical evidence for the answer. The point is that we need all three approaches, and although individual medical anthropologists may specialize in one or another approach, at their best they will not rely exclusively on just one.
As social structure evolved from bands to tribes and chiefdoms, early states, and industrial states, patterns of health and disease also changed. Contrary to expectations, as humans moved from Mesolithic (hunting and gathering) to Neolithic (farming and herding) modes of subsistence, health status declined rather than improved. The Ju/’hoansi, who transitioned from hunting and gathering to agriculture and then to incorporation into the welfare state, provide an example of a contemporary society that has undergone, in the space of decades, major changes that other societies took centuries or millennia to accomplish.
Social inequalities within and between countries have a great impact on human health: Position in the social hierarchy significantly affects life expectancy. The fact that people at the top of social hierarchies are healthier and live longer than people at the bottom is due in part to the greater stress those in subordinate positions experience, and in part to differential access to health care.
Alcohol and tobacco have devastating health repercussions for people at all levels of society. Tobacco is now known to contain substances that are both harmful and addictive. Yet the powerful tobacco lobby was able to cover up the medical evidence for over 30 years, enabling cigarettes to be advertised freely and sold to minors despite repeated cries of alarm from medical researchers and public health advocates like the Canadian Cancer Society.
Anthropologists are active as well in another branch of CMA: environmental justice, or the impact of environmental pollution on health. While research scientists determine the level of contamination by analyzing air, water, soil, and food samples, and epidemiologists determine the impact of these factors on human health, it is the role of medical anthropologists to explore the social and cultural factors that created the conditions for ecological disasters at sites such as Love Canal and Walkerton. Who profits, who pays the price, and what role government regulatory agencies play are some of the questions these researchers ask.
Medical hegemony, how medicine shapes the ways we look at the world, and medicalization, bringing into the medical sphere aspects of human behaviour that formerly lay outside it, are closely related processes that will shape the future of human health in ways we are only beginning to envision. Will medicine increasingly fall under the control of drug companies, with medical priorities driven by their agendas, or will it continue to work for the well-being of the greatest number of people? Fortunately, there are many within the field of medicine who foresee some of the looming problems and are taking steps to change course. The re-entry of midwives into the provision of birthing services; the rapid growth of complementary and alternative medical techniques such as guided imagery, and their incorporation within some medical school curricula; and the development of citizen health activism to work for better provision and more equal distribution of services are all signs of a new vitality concerning the state of biomedicine, health, and the human condition. In all these movements medical anthropology has played a constructive and critical role and will continue to do so. Given the recent flare-ups in Canada of SARS, West Nile, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and the tainted water tragedy of Walkerton, Ontario, this branch of the field of medical anthropology will have no shortage of subject matter in years to come.
Chapter
15: Cultural Change and the Future of Humanity
Although cultures may be remarkably stable, culture change is characteristic of all cultures to a greater or lesser degree. Change may be accidental, intentional, or forced upon a people, and in outcome it may or may not turn out to be beneficial. Applied anthropology arose as anthropologists sought to provide colonial administrators with a better understanding of aboriginal cultures or to try to help indigenous people cope with outside threats to their interests.
Reactions of indigenous peoples to changes forced upon them vary considerably. Some have retreated to inaccessible places in hope of being left alone, while some others have lapsed into apathy. If a culture’s values get widely out of step with reality, revitalization movements may appear. Some revitalization movements try to speed up the acculturation process to get more of the outside benefits. Others try to reconstitute a gone but not forgotten way of life. Revolutionary movements try to transform the culture from within. Rebellion differs from revolution, in that the aim is merely to replace one set of officeholders with another.
Modernization refers to a global process of cultural and socioeconomic change whereby developing societies seek to acquire characteristics of industrially “advanced” societies. The process consists of four subprocesses: technological development, agricultural development, industrialization, and urbanization. Other changes follow in the areas of political organization, education, religion, and social organization.
An example of a modernizing society is the Skolt Lapps of Finland, whose traditional reindeer-herding economy was all but destroyed when snowmobiles were adopted to make herding easier. In Ecuador, the Shuar modernized to escape the destruction visited upon many other Amazonian peoples. So far they have been successful, and others are mobilizing their resources in attempts to achieve similar success. Nevertheless, formidable forces are still arrayed against such cultures, and, on a worldwide basis, it is probably fair to say modernization has led to a deterioration, rather than improvement, of people’s quality of life.
Since future forms of culture will be shaped by decisions humans have yet to make, they cannot be predicted with any accuracy. Thus, instead of trying to foretell the future, a number of anthropologists are attempting to gain a better understanding of the existing world situation so that decisions may be made intelligently. Anthropologists are especially well suited for this, owing to their experience with seeing things in context, their long-term evolutionary perspective, their ability to recognize culture-bound biases, and their familiarity with cultural alternatives.
However humanity changes biologically, culture remains the chief means by which humans try to solve their problems of existence. Some anthropologists are concerned that there is a trend for the problems to outstrip any culture’s ability to find solutions. Rapid developments in communication, transportation, and world trade, some believe, will link people together to the point that a single more harmonious world culture will result. Most anthropologists are skeptical of the benefits of such a homogenized superculture in view of the recent tendency for ethnic groups to reassert their distinctive identities and to resist incorporation except on their own terms. Anthropologists also are concerned about those in power tending to treat many of the world’s traditional societies as archaic and backward when they appear to stand in the way of development or “progress.”
An alternative pathway is for humanity to move in the direction of cultural pluralism, where two or more cultures exist with respect for each other’s differences. Some anthropologists maintain that pluralistic arrangements are the only feasible means of achieving global equilibrium and peace. A problem associated with cultural pluralism is ethnocentrism. All too often, in the name of “nation building,” it has led one group to impose its control on others. Common consequences can be prolonged violent and bloody political upheavals, and even genocide.
Viewing the world today reveals a picture that is strikingly similar to South Africa’s apartheid system. As a world system, global apartheid serves to maintain the dominance of a wealthy minority over a disempowered majority through the social, economic, political, military, and cultural constitution of the current “New World Order.”
One consequence of any apartheid system is a great deal of structural violence exerted by situations, institutions, and social, political, and economic structures. Such violence involves problems such as overpopulation and food shortages, which anthropologists are actively working to understand and help alleviate. We face challenges to provide enough food resources to keep pace with the burgeoning population. The immediate problem, though, is not so much one of producing enough food as it is an existing food-distribution system geared to the satisfaction of appetites in the world’s richest countries at the expense of those living in poorer countries.
Pollution has become a direct threat to humanity. Western peoples have protected their environments only when some crisis forces them to do so, and even at that their consumption rates continue to drive environmental degradation in other countries. Western societies have felt no long-term responsibilities toward the earth or its resources and could learn much from those non-Western peoples who see themselves as integral parts of nature.
Solving the problems of the global society depends also on lessening the gap between the living standards of impoverished and developed countries. This calls for dramatic changes in the values of Western societies, with their materialistic consumer orientation, and development of a social responsibility that recognizes that no people has a right to expropriate important resources at the expense of others. The surprising strength of recent worldwide antiwar and antiglobalization protests is a hopeful sign of change.
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