Course Reflection Paper----social science

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Power and Culture: An Anthropologist’s View

Chapter 4

Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  • After reading this chapter, students will be able to:
  • Understand how anthropologists view power.
  • Explain the role values and beliefs play in ensuring cultural stability.
  • Understand how power relationships begin and evolve.
  • Describe how the American family has changed, and explain how these changes affected the power distribution within society.

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THE ORIGINS OF POWER

  • Power in society is exercised for four broad purposes:
  • To maintain peace, order, and stability within the society
  • To organize and direct community enterprises
  • To conduct warfare, both defensive and aggressive, against other societies
  • To rule and exploit subject peoples

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THE ORIGINS OF POWER (cont’d)

  • Family – at the base of power relationships in society.
  • Traditionally defined as a residential kin group
  • True political organizations begin with the development of power relationships among and between family and kinship groups.

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ANTHROPOLOGY’S
EXAMINATION OF POWER

  • Four subfields of anthropology
  • Archaeology—study of humans through their physical and material remains
  • Biological anthropology—study of humans as biological organisms
  • Linguistic anthropology—analyzing societies in terms of human communication
  • Socio-cultural anthropology—study of living peoples and their cultures

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CULTURE: WAYS OF LIFE

  • Cultural generalization: the description of commonly shared values, beliefs, and behaviors in a society
  • But there is a multiplicity of themes within every society, and wide variations even within a single culture.

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SUBCULTURES

  • Distinct variations in ways of life among groups of people.
  • Observed in such things as distinctive language, music, dress, and dance
  • May evolve out of opposition to beliefs, values, or norms of the dominant culture of society.

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MULTICULTURALISM

  • Refers to acknowledging and promoting multiple cultures and subcultures.
  • Seeks to protect and celebrate cultural diversity.
  • Some criticisms include that it may denigrate the unifying symbols, values, and beliefs of American society and may encourage ignorance of Western European culture.

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CULTURE IS LEARNED

  • Culture is learned and transferred from one generation to another through the socialization process.
  • Agents that work to teach culture include family, schools, peer groups, religious organizations, and the media.

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THE COMPONENTS OF CULTURE

  • Anthropologists divide culture into components to simplify thinking about it:
  • Symbols
  • Beliefs
  • Values
  • Norms
  • Religion
  • Sanctions
  • Artifacts

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THE NATURE OF CULTURE

  • Four anthropological approaches to study of culture:
  • Functionalism—examines each custom, material object, idea, belief, and institution to determine the task or function that it performs
  • Materialism—focuses on how people make their living in their specific environmental setting.
  • Idealism—focuses on the importance of ideas in determining culture.
  • Cultural Relativity—suspending judgment of other societies’ customs, practices, and institutions.

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AUTHORITY IN THE FAMILY

  • Cross-cultural comparison reveals common characteristics in families:
  • Sexual mating
  • Childbearing and child rearing
  • System of names and a method of determining kinship
  • Common habitation at some point
  • Socialization and education of the young
  • System of roles and expectations based on family membership

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MARRIAGE

  • A socially approved sexual and economic union between a man and a woman.
  • Intended to be more or less permanent.
  • Implies social roles between the spouses and their children.
  • Marriage is found in all cultures, but the institution varies from culture to culture.

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ROMANTIC LOVE AND MONOGAMY

  • Most Americans believe romantic love should be basis of marriage, but this does not characterize marriages in many other societies.
  • Monogamy—a union between one husband and one wife.
  • Most widespread marriage form—gender ratio of men to women about equal in all societies.
  • Polygyny—the union of one husband and two or more wives.
  • Polyandry--the union of one wife and two or more husbands.

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THE FAMILY IN AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES

  • Patriarchal and patrilineal – the male is the dominant authority; kinship is determined through the male line.
  • The family is an economic institution.
  • Tasks are divided:
  • Men raise crops, tend animals, and perform heavy work.
  • Women make clothes, prepare food, tend the sick, perform household services.

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THE FAMILY IN INDUSTRIALIZED SOCIETIES

  • Industrial technology provides gainful employment outside the home for both women and men.
  • Governments perform some of the traditional functions of the family.
  • Education, welfare programs, care of the aged and sick
  • Family remains the fundamental social unit by choice.

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THE AMERICAN FAMILY

  • 320 million people, 81 million families in America
  • 32% of population lives in nonfamily households:
  • People with nonfamily roommates
  • People who live alone
  • 70% of families with children have a husband and wife
  • 30% of families are single adult with children

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DIVORCE

  • Divorce uncommon before 1960s, with rates peaking in the 1970s and ‘80s
  • But divorce rates decreasing since then: American cultural change now offering greater parity between husband and wife, with many choosing to live together before marriage or waiting to marry

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POWER AND GENDER

  • Role differentiation occurs because of:

Sex-based differences–biologically rooted differences between men and women.

Gender-based differences–derived from society’s cultural expectations and accepted norms.

  • Historically, men rather than women have dominated in political leadership and warfare.

The public-private split – the idea that men dominate in the public sphere and women focus on the private or domestic sphere.

Aggression theory speculates than men more aggressive personalities on average than women

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POWER AND POLITICAL SYSTEMS

  • Political systems determine the way power is organized and distributed in society.
  • Types of political systems:
  • Family and Kinship Groups
  • Bands
  • Tribes
  • Chiefdoms
  • States
  • Nations

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POWER AND SOCIETY: SOME ANTHROPOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS

  • Physical environment plays an important role in the development of power systems.
  • Power relationships are linked to the economic patterns of a culture.
  • Patterns of warfare are linked to the development of power relationships.
  • Power relationships exist in simple forms in primitive societies, and no society is void of a power structure.

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