Term
| Characteristics of Language |
|
Definition
- Arbitrary(random)
- Symbolic(vocals, non-vocals)
- Constantly changing
|
|
|
Term
| Charcteristics of Language |
|
Definition
- Shapes our worldview
- Ideological:languages are not neutral, they reflect power differences and inequalities(eg. status, prestige, value, etc)
- Connected to our identity: processes of boundaries-marking(insider/outsider), class, region,gender,race/ethnicity, sexuality etc
|
|
|
Term
| Language Loss and Cultural Identity |
|
Definition
- Position #1: when a language dies, a culture dies.( metaphor of language death:suggests that much like endangered species, some languages are in danger of extinction
- Position #2: Cultural identity is not necessarily contingent upon language: Said differently, language is not necessarily the essence of a culture, in this view it may be even problematic to insist on language as defining cultural identity
|
|
|
Term
| Position #1: When a language dies, a culture dies( Nettle and Romaine) |
|
Definition
- Nettle and Romaine use the metaphor of language death/extinction/murder and argue that languages are like dying species
- they adopt the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in that they think that because language determine our thoughts, when a language dies, then culture dies too
|
|
|
Term
| Why, when, and where is language dying? |
|
Definition
- why?: languages dissapear due to economic,social,political, and military pressures
- Why?: language death is connected to other forms of domination (e.g english is not a better language than others, it has to do with economic and political powers)
- Where?: Languages are at risk everywhere in the world and according to Nettle and Romaine's estimate, only 600 of 6000 languages currently spoken are 'safe'
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- For scientific purposes: to study linguistic diversity and understand human languages;
- For the good of humanity: to preserve language complexity, to preserve biolinguistic diversity; linguistic diversity= cultural diversity=biological diversity, to preserve the knowledge, wisdom, worldview that these languages contain, to preserve cultural distinctiveness
|
|
|
Term
| Position #2: Language does not equal Culture |
|
Definition
- languages are not the same as species; when they die, they can be revived. According to Berreby, hey are human inventions
- Languages are infinite resources and constantly reproduced and changing
- Attempts to preserve languages should not be imposed on communities who stop speaking their languages.
|
|
|
Term
| Position #2: Language does not equal Culture(Muehlmann) |
|
Definition
- Main arguement: Cucapa youth in El Mayor, Mexico do not define their cultural identity on the basis of fluence in Cucapa language
- Drawing on ethnographic research, Muehlann considers two linguistic practices that relate to swearwords to make her argument:Boundary -marking practices, Parody of authority that subverts power.
|
|
|
Term
| Boundary-Marking Practices |
|
Definition
- Muehlmann narrates three incidents: anthropologist in meeting:performing groserias, NGO worker learned swearwords as greeting and use them when meeting the chief, Jehovah witnesses learned swearwords as a way to ask for water
- these practices suggest swearwords perform a boundary-marking role of insider-outsider
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- indigenous people are called on to prove their authentiicity (as "Indians") by the Mexican state
- Indigenous-language competency is one criteria the state uses to assess indigenous authenticity
- Ywt due to centuries of racism and assimilation Cucapa youth in El Mayor do not speak anymore Cucapa language
- this means that their access to resources, work program, legal claims may be restricted
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- Muelhmann asks: what are the political implications of seeking to define a culture by language competency?
- She argues that we need to question the insistene on the link between language and culture when speaking indigenous language such as Cucapa
- Attempts to preserve languages at all cost, like in Nettle and Romaine's view, are thus problematic for her and Berreby. These attempts don't recognize that for many groups, to speak their indigenous language, means marginalization, lack of economic opportunity and racism
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- Definition:an area of anthropological inquiry concerns with the body as shaped by social and cultural processes
- This includes:
- Individual Body: the physiological and experiential aspects of the individual body
- Symbolic/Social Body: the ways people in different cultural contexts think about and/or threat the body
- Body Politics: how the body is controlled socially and disciplined, manipulated for political purposes.
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- an area of anthropological inquiry concerns with issues of health, healing, well-being, illness, disease, death and dying, and their intersections with the wider social, cultural, economic, political, and historical context
|
|
|
Term
| Reading: The Madness of Hunger (Scheper-Hughes) |
|
Definition
- Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a key figure in the discipline of anthropology as a whole, and in the field of medical anthropology
- Her approach: critical medical anthropology(an approach to medical anthropology; focuses on the political economy of health and healing; aims to effect social changes
- HEr assumption: she thinks that while sickness is a biological phenomenon experienced by individuals, it may also be coded metaphor to express feelings about social life that are normally not allowed
- Nervos= common complaint in the brazilian town where she conducted research, and which corresponds,according to hehr, to the symptoms of chronic and acute hunger
- Main argument: there is a medical appropration of nervos and failure to recognize the signs of starvation and hunger
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- Refers to the physiological manifestations of hunger as madness
- historically: on the engenho(sugar plantation) the hunger suffered by sugar cane workers is constant and chronic
- in the Alto do Cruzeiro, adults are chronically malnourished; children and babies are in a state of starvation
- Acute hunger produces changes in behaviour commonly described as "Nervos"
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- Hunger and nervo are constantly juxtaposed(e.g. children= nervous because there is nothing to eat at home)
- Nervos= a polysystemic category(anger nerves, fear nerves, overwork nerves, nervos from parasites)
- at a representational level:"a discourse on nerbos and sickness replace a discourse on angry hunger"(442)
- Nervos= a social illness but is seen as the expression of an individual weakness
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- Medicine: a form of managemnet used by the new democratic state in Brazil
- Process of medicalization of hunger with the complicity of both residents and medical officials/politicians
- Medicalization mystifies:
- "to acknowlege hunger(which is not a disease but a social illeness) would be tantamount to political suicide among leaders whose power has come traditionally from the same plantation economy that has produced that hunger in the first place"(449)
- Seeing hunger as a medical problem means that no social changes are necessary to provide access to food for all.
|
|
|
Term
| Reading: Becoming Monsters in Iraq(Gutmann and Lutz) |
|
Definition
- focus on the medicalization of war traum, more specifically on PTSD, the most common psychological problem diagnosed on returning soldiers from military missions in Iraq
- Main argument: an increasing number of war veterans think that their trauma is normal and reasonable reaction to exposure to combat and to witnessing and participating in crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan
|
|
|
Term
| Three Narratives in the Reading |
|
Definition
- Charlie Anderson: thought he would be celebrated as a hero by the civilians in Iraq; but realized that was not the case, especially when instructed to look for a 'young arab carrying an assault rifle' which resulted in violent carnage. Found little support among other vets supporting the war in Iraq
- Garrett Reppenhage: realized that despite good intentions he was "part of the problem" after being abusive with civilians at a checkpoint for fear of being bombed; thinks that soldiers "become monsters" in Iraq. Against medical solution; for him pills can't fix a political and social problem
- Ricky Clousing: went AWOL after raising critical questions about the war in Iraq, refused conscietious objector status and PTSD diagnosis
|
|
|
Term
| Lancaster:Sex in Science and Popular Culture |
|
Definition
- Sociobiology: " a set of claims organized around the assumption that biology is destiny for humans, that genetic predispositions determine or ought to determine our behaviour toward others and our institutional forms
- Evolutionary Psychology: a branch of psychology that seeks to identify universal human traits that result from evolved adaptions of the mind. These adaptations are seen as the products of natural or sexual selection
|
|
|
Term
| Lancaster: Critique of Sociobiology |
|
Definition
- too much weight is given to biology to explain gendered behaviours
- Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology reduces the complexity of human behaviours, from cheating to war
- these ideas are problematic because they rely on bad science that echoes eugenics and homophobic, Nazi pseudoscience
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- sociobiology eleaborate heteronormative tales about the nature of desire and the biology of beauty
- Heteronormativity: there should be an alignment between biological sex(male/female), and our gender identity roles(men/women) and our sexuality(heterosexual), sex=gender=sexuality
- the goal is reproductive fitness(seek mates who are more likely to serve as good reproducers)
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- the biology of beauty and the science of sexual attraction imply heterosexuality as the norm
- straight desire is produced, as a norm, rather than being discovered through scientific research
- beauty and straight desire are made to appear as a fact of nature, as universal, as a given as unquestionable
|
|
|
Term
| Gender roles and the Family |
|
Definition
- Sociobiology argues that the gender roles associated with the modern nuclear heterosexual family are rooted in our evolutionary biology(i.e genes, hormones,brain)
- Main Arguement: Lancaster argues against the idea that both gender roles withtin the family and monogamous heterosexual marriage are universal and that they have a genetic basis
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- gendered division of labour varies greatly: no universal gendered understanding of space
- the heterosexual nuclear family: seen as the basis for every human society but social history and anthropology show that this universalism is untrue
- It represents one among many possibilities if kinship formation
- Gender identities: it is ethnocentric to think that men everywhere would be competitive, pursuing women, involved in war etc, and that women everywhere are nurturing and peacefuldue to their mothering role
- Heterosexuality and reproduction: Lancaster challenges the notion that the homophobic design of many cultures result from the goal of encouraging heterosexual relations
|
|
|
Term
| The Anthropology of Masculinity |
|
Definition
- an area of anthropological inquiry concerns with the study of men as "men"
- men as gendered beings= draw on both the anthropology of gender and queer theory
|
|
|
Term
| The Anthropology of Gender |
|
Definition
- disrupts conventional understandings of masculinity
- documents the meanings associated with "being a man" in different cultural and historical contexts
- shows that men are not equally powerful and look at how masculinity is mediated by race, class, sexuality, nation etc.
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- Origins: in the 90's. Comes from feminism, gay and lesbian studies, post-structuralism, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler
- Goal: To challenge the naturalness of heterosexuality and the unnaturalness of homosexuality
- it is not concerned with the study of homosexuality but rather with questionong heterosexuality as an unmarked category
|
|
|
Term
| Judith Butler: Gender and Performance |
|
Definition
- Gender as performance: gender is what you do in different contexts, rather than a universal, core, essential who you are
- Gender is accomplished in everyday interactions in accordance with what is seen as appropriate for one's sex category
- Gender as citation. Gender is constituted through discursive practices that are constantly repeated, performed, reiterated
- Gender as repudiation. Gender is constituted through opposition to an abject other that must be rejected to reafirm the self
|
|
|
Term
| Pascoe: The Fag Discourse |
|
Definition
- Main argument: the fag discourse is a mornative discourse on masculinity for American teenagers
- the fag discourse is more than the expression of homophobia in suburban California; it's how teenagers are socialized into being boys
- the fag is an abject position. The fag discourse acts as a self policing mechanism, it is used by teenagers to aviis being labelled as a fag
|
|
|
Term
| Cameron: Performing Gender Identity |
|
Definition
- in a casual conversation between 5 men the most prominent words apart from basketball is gossip about other men identified as gay
- argues that gossip about gay men is a "sustained performance of masculinity". Te talk consitutes men as gendered beings
- in the absence of women being gay becomes the opposition category upon which these young men construct their gender identity
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- a period of accelerated changes due to:
- shifting political/economic context
- technological developments facilitating communication and transport
- cultural transformations
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- refers to the notion that our sense of time/space is different due to the advent of new technologies
- Social activities are no longer specific to geographies for things as varied as: Economic transactions, political events, education, business
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- this position considers that cultures all over the world are becoming more and more similar, mostly due to the dominance of American popular culture and corporations
- also sees globalization as cultural imperialism, and argues that in light of the economic and cultural power of the USA, it is harder to have homegrown products and local cultural identity
- globalization= modernization
- globalization- the exportation of new products= the exportation of a particular way of life
|
|
|
Term
| McWorld and McDonaldization |
|
Definition
- McWorld: the notion that the world we live in is characterized by the spreading of American corporations such as McDonalds, which are homogenizing the planet and destroying local cultures
- McDonaldization:refers to the argument that the principles of the fast-food industry are dominating more and more different sectors of American and other societies
- also the idea that the routinizing nature of McDonald's facilitates its insertion and adoption into everyday life and easily leads to the replacement of local indigenous food
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- refers to the noton that local cultures are able to manipulate global forces and to reinvent themselves according to their own particular, meaningful ways
- fusion of cultural meanings. hybrid is made up of 2 parts
- in this view, new forms of identity are seen as possible and global flows are seen as coming from different centers
|
|
|
Term
| Caldwell: Domesticating the French Fry |
|
Definition
- the Russian case reveals that Mcdonald's does not produce cultural homogeneity; it takes on local meanings, it has become personally meaningful and associated with being Russians
- Domestication:process whereby something foreign(like McDonald's) is turned into something local,authentically indigenous
|
|
|
Term
| Barber: Brave New McWorld |
|
Definition
- Barber= an advocate of the homogenization thesis
- he sees american popular culture and corporations as eroding the particularity of local cultures, as promoting a radical homogenization of taste across the world
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- 2 positions: positive view, negative view
- positive view:allow for more interactivity, flexibility and creativity, facilitates new collectivities,virtual communities,interconectedness, make new forms of activism possible
- Negative view: result in further isolation and individualization, prevent us from engaging in real social interaction, lead to slacktivism
|
|
|
Term
|
Definition
- an example of a campaign for social justice that uses social media and went viral, sparking both mobilization and controversy
- Criticism: oversimplification of the events in the region, promotion of a military solution to the conflict, glorification of the role of Kony, focus in invisible children and its founder/director rather than on the victims of mass atrocities, problematic representations of Africa
|
|
|
Term
| An Anthropology of Youtube |
|
Definition
- youtube as a mediascape(global cultural flows of printed and electronic images)
- youtube as emancipatory: user-generated and thus youtube= creative form of empowerment
- youtube as a medium to create interconnectedness: new forms of community made possible through youtube
|
|
|
