AnthropologyMidtermNotes.txt

What are the four fields of anthropology?
- socio cultural
- archeology
- biological
- linguistic

What is the savage slot?
- the classification of non-western societies as primitive

Who is the founding father of American Anthropology?
- Franz Boas (1858-1942), emphasized empirical field work

What is historical particularism?
- Franz Boas, each society and culture should be understood in its own terms

Who was a key figure in the school of functionalism?
- Bronislaw Malinowski(1884–1942), british father of anthropology, stressed importance of living within community


What is reflexivity?
- An awareness of the relationship between the anthropologist and their subjects, how their biases shape the data

What ceremony did Bronislaw Malinowski study?
- The Kula

Who is associated with symbolic anthropology?
- Clifford Geertz

What is social evolution?
- belief that culture evolves in a uniform and progressive manner

What is a potlatch ceremony?
- a huge gift giving ceremony used to redistribute wealth and confer social status and rank

Which people is Evan-Pritchard’s work concerned with?
- The Azande People in Sudan

What do you understand by de-kinning?
- Deliberate destruction or severing of kinship ties and networks by state forces

What is reproductive justice?
- focus on reproductive rights, (having children, not having, raising in a stable environment)

What is a kula ceremony?
- a cycle of gifting these heirlooms (shell necklaces/armbands) that aren't inherently valuable, but represent the social connections between the Trobriand Islanders

Who was the first anthropologist to theorize the concept of “gift”?
- Marcel Mauss, wrote "The Gift"

What is a Total Social Phenomenon/Total Service?
- "Total social phenomena serve as a way to unify and define terms of society; if they disappeared completely, the culture may become unrecognizable."
- is a “present generously given even when, in the gesture accompanying the transaction, there is only a polite fiction, formalism, and social deceit, and when there is obligation and economic self-interest.

What is “alienation of labor”?
- Workers are alienated from the products they produce

What is a matsutake mushroom?
- Matsutake is a Capitalist commodity that begins and ends life as a gift

What is thick description?
- emphasizes capturing the context and meaning embedded in social practices through a detailed account of a cultural phenomenon

What is “directed writing”?
- ??? can't find anything

Who was Lewis Henry Morgan?
- American Anthropologist, worked on Kinship/social structures of indigenous people in America
- Came up with concept of savagery, barbarism, civilization

What is divide and rule?
- codifying ethnic categories to pit cultures/ethnicities against to make them easier to control

Which were the two ethnic groups involved in the Rwandan genocide?
- tutsi, hutu

What is an emic perspective?
- insiders perspective

What is an etic perspective?
- outsiders perspective

What is Ruth Behar’s concept of the “vulnerable ethnographer”?
- An invitation to be transparent, to be even confessional in your writing

Who is Edward Burnett Taylor?
- English Anthropologist, often referred to as father of cultural anthropology
- Treated Anthropology as a “scientific discipline”

What is the concept of “psychic unity of humankind”?
- we are all made up of the same "cognitive base"

What is Modernization Theory?
- Belief that all societies must pass through the same stages of development
	+ idealist: changing the way ppl think, develop materially/industrially
	+ materialist: rapidly improve economy base, and people will adopt new values

What do you understand by John Fabian’s “denial of coevalness”?
- deny that other levels of society are in the same age as ours (the "other" is seen as more backwards)

Which two explorers are considered to have heralded the Age of Exploration?
- Christopher Columbus, Vasco Da Gama

Which were the first islands to be colonized?
- Canary Island, Madiera Island

What was North America famous for trading during the early colonial period?
- Tobacco

What is the key difference between a slave and a proletarian?
- "workers were able to sell their labor, slaves do not own their bodies"
- slaves were treated as commodities

Which regions were part of the Triangular Trade system?
- thirteen colonies, Great Britain, and Africa

What is the concept of palimpsestic time?
- Suggests that past is not erased or forgotten ("again scrape")

What is Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined community”?
- nations are social constructs imagined by people who percieve themselves as part of the group

What is politics of recognition?
- demands for the acknowledgement and respect of individuals or groups identities, culture, and rights often in the contexts of inequality, marginalization and cultural diversity

What is Zomia?
- Zomia is a geographical term coined in 2002 by historian Willem van Schendel to refer to the huge mass of mainland Southeast Asia that has historically been beyond the control of governments based in the population centers of the lowlands
- "biggest remaining area of earth whose inhabitants have not been completely absorbed by nation-states"

What is monopoly over violence?
- "State has the legitimate violence within a given territory."

Who came up with the concept of monopoly over violence?
- Max Weber





Biopower




Explain Foucault’s concept of biopower and Agamben’s concept of state of exception.
	Biopower
		- the strategies and mechanisms through which human life processes are managed by governments and institutions to regulate societies
		- It's about how power is exercised not just through laws or violence but through the management of our bodies and populations. 
		- Ex: Census, Public Health Campaigns, Tuskegee Syphilis Study

	State of exception
		- a situation where normal laws of a country are suspended allowing the government or the to take control

What do you understand by cultural relativism? How did this concept impact the field of Anthropology?
	- (Franz Boas) Each culture must be understood "in its own terms", values and beliefs must be understood relative to its cultural context. As a response to European ethnocentrism, this attitude towards ethnographies tries to avoid leaking the anthropologist's cultural biases into any studies

How has the “subject” evolved in Anthropology? Comment also on the evolving relationship between the -“subject” and the anthropologist.
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Explain Karl Marx’s idea of commodity and commodity fetishism.
- 

What is Multimodal Anthropology? Write about two forms of multimodal anthropology that we studied in class.
- 

What is the plantation economy? Why is its study significant in Anthropology?
- 

What is Benedict Anderson’s understanding of imagined community?


What are some of the benefits and drawbacks of utilizing CBPR? 
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