ANT2000: New Basic Concepts Study Notes


BASIC CONCEPTS: culture, social organization, and place are three very interconnected concepts in anthropology. Each works and has to be understood in terms of the other two.
  1. CULTURE and Identity
    • Identity is individual, what makes a person unique unique because everyone is shaped by different things learned, different groups belonged to, different experiences but at the same time is able to function "function" meaning be able to communicate through shared language and understandings, share values and expections about how to act socially with other people sharing his or her culture or cultures.
    • Culture pertains to a group of people other people whose own identities include those shared values, understandings, etc. of the culture providing part of their individual identities. The strongest way the culture of a group of people shapes a person's identity is when a person is born into that group.
    • Culture is learned (but it can be incorporated into a person's biology as the person grows from infant to adult, particularly in the first years when brain connections are changing rapidly in response to what the child is learning ).
      LANGUAGE is essential to enable human infants to learn culture from birth. Many anthropologists feel that an infant is born with a capability to rapidly learn language, but from then on a child learns the language of the people talking around. So language as it is learned is also part of the child's culture and as such gives meaning to units and combinations of sounds in the speech the child is hearing.
    • Culture is important for survival and making a living making a living is people being able to have food, shelter, health, and children able to grow up to continue the group enabled by shared knowledge including learned skills and knowledge of how to work together to make a living and values including rights and obligations required for cooperation in making a living.
    • Culture can be a source of harmony and comfort with others through shared knowledge and values with them if their identities are shaped by one's own culture.
    • Culture can be a source of conflict with others if their identities are shaped by different cultures than one's own.
    • Culture can be a source of internal conflict within one person whose identity is shaped by different cultures.
    • Rituals, music, talking, joking, ways of settling disputes etc can serve to reinforce the sense of belonging to a culture (a culture, not the culture since a person can be shaped by more than one culture and often may need these things to reaffirm connection to one of those cultures)
  2. SOCIAL GROUP (Social Organization)
    • Group of people related in some way, who have some way of organizing their relationships with each other and keeping them going.
    • A social group and the culture shared by the people who belong to it are closely interconnected concepts, in that the definition above requires the values and knowledge provided by the culture group members share. to enable them to organize their relationships with each other and keep them going. Furthermore social groups have to make a living and survive which requires the shared knowledge and values of a shared culture.
    • Social groups and making a living (ways of making a living also called SYSTEMS OF PRODUCTION)
      • During most of human history on earth people lived in small groups living off of nature (foraging or hunting and gathering meaning they did not use technological means to produce more food from the land (agriculture) though they did develop technologies to hunt and gather better than other animals. ), did not have much property, and did not need much organization of authority and rights.
      • This changed with invention of agriculture which enabled producing more food for more people to live in larger groups in a smaller area. This meant people had to know what land they could access for agriculture which in turn required ways of organizing relationships, rights and authority in groups.
      • As groups continued to grow larger with denser populations they developed more technology and complex economies. This required different social roles and skills resulting in further social differentiation of people (see Political Organization and Types of Exchange below).
    • Humans always have family groups connected through kinship ties of marriage and descent (parent-child). These may be smaller groups of close relatives or larger groups -- extended families or clans clan = large group of people who are related through kinship ties but who cannot trace the relationship links to everyone else in the clan.. Kinship-based groups provide strong shaping of values and norms through shared culture remember that social groups have to make a living and survive which requires the shared knowledge and values of a shared culture.
      Over generations kinship groups require a descent rule to determine what group a person belongs to (is descended from) when he or she is born. This can be:
      • The group of one parent: unilineal descent. This has the advantage that with unilineal descent everyone belongs to only one group of relatives so things are clearer for allocating kinship group rights and obligations.
        • unilineal descent through father's group: patrilineal descent
        • unilineal descent through mother's group: matrilineal descent
      • The groups of both parents: bilateral descent. This has the problem for allocating kinship group rights and obligations that beyond close relatives it is not clear who a person is related to.
      However, as noted above, groups continued to grow larger in denser populations and developed more technology and complex economies. When this happened, kinship was not enough to provide the basis for organizing relationships, rights and authority in society -- remember that "society" is a concept combining social organization, culture, and place. More complex ways of exchange and leadership in societies developed ( see Political Organization and Types of Exchange at the botton of the SYSTEMS OF PRODUCTION chart.
  3. PLACE
    • Place and social groups. Social groups have to be located somewhere, in some place. The ways members of a group organize their relationships with each other and keep them going have to work in their place which can be difficult if outside groups want to control the place.
      Within the larger group smaller kinship groups have their home places as well. This requires a decision when young people grow up and marry -- in what place will they establish their new household? If cultural rules require new households to be located in the kinship group's home place, unilineal descent requires hard choices since one of the persons marrying will have to move on marriage to the spouse's place
    • Place of the larger society and making a living. The activities of making a living (and thus survive) usually have to be done in particular locations. It is excellent if the place that is important for a social group and the shared culture of its members is also a good place to make a living. If not, group members may have to make hard choices about staying in the place vs going somewhere else away from cultural ties and values to a place where there may be better opportunities to make a living.
    • Local place in large-scale societies, particular under intensive agriculture and industrialism systems of production. In these societies local places are often divided into two kinds of areas in terms of where making a living takes place:
      1. within the family household (domestic sphere)
      2. outside the family household, area of "public business" (public sphere)
      How culturally constructed groupings of people (genders, ethnic groups, castes, etc) are located in these two spheres has a great impact on their social status, living conditions, etc.
    • Place and culture. In modern western market economy society cultural attachments to place are not so strong as in earlier times, though words like "neighborhood" indicate they still work. Outside modern western market economy as in earlier times cultural attachment to place is still very strong.
      However if in the modern western market economy world we consider the nation-state as a social group, then the connection between place and culture is very strong.
    • Place and the natural world. The activities of making a living (and thus survive) usually have to be done in particular locations. However, it has always seemed that if our local place did not work for making a living, we could make the hard choice in terms of cultural comfort to go somewhere else and do better. This assumes there is always a place to go.