Anthtropology essay

Suggested Topics:

· Traditional gendered roles and ideas ensure that Gurung girls and women will remain in a subordinate position

· Clans and lineages are a form of social stratification that uses descent to determine who has higher or lower status.

· Like class, caste is a form of social stratification and is used to determine who has greater or lesser status.

· While caste still plays a major role in Gurung society, changes brought about by globalization and the involvement of state institutions means that it role in society may be declining

· Anthony F. C. Wallace described religion as “belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces” (Wallace 1966). In Tebas religion is a combination of Buddhist and traditional beliefs and acts as a social regulator

Here are examples of introductory paragraphs I wrote for a different ethnography. Note my inclusion of research location, researcher and years of research:

· Humor has always been linked to pain. Individuals as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Andre Breton and Jerry Lewis have commented on this relationship. In one essay Freud noted how humor serves as a “crucial means for evading the compulsion to suffer (Freud 1991:89 in Goldstein 2003). In Laughter Out of Place, Donna Goldstein analyzes the role humor plays in allowing the women in a Brazilian shantytown to survive in the face of tragedy and injustice. Goldstein undertook research in Brazil in the early 1990s. Research took place in a Rio de Janeiro favela she calls Felicidade Eterna, and focuses on daily structuring of class, race, gender, sexuality and violence that operates within that world. The humor she describes reveals and masks the hierarchies and structures of inequality on which it depends. In this paper, I argue that the humor displayed by the women was one of the few outlets they had to protest unendurable social and economic conditions. The intersections of humor I am most interested in are 1) the playful storytelling that Soneca uses to tell about the death of Zeca and how it reveals bitterness and a sense of betrayal by the medical establishment, 2) the humor Gloria finds in Beth’s distress over a letter she receives from her daughter and how it is revealing of the vast differences experienced by these women despite the fact that they are both citizens of the same country, and 3) Gloria’s laughter at Lucas’s threat to kill her and how it reveals the strong relationship between extreme poverty and violent behavior.

Conclusion. These examples indicate that despite Brazil’s efforts to present itself as a modern nation that has successfully dealt with its premodern history of oppression based on race and class; the extreme conditions experienced by women living in the shantytowns tell a different story. It is in the women’s humor that we witness a narrative that bears witness to the tragic, unjust society that is today’s Brazil.

Another example.

· Donna Goldstein undertook research in Brazil in the early 1990s. Research was focused on the issues of race, class and gender. She was especially interested in how structures of inequality intersected to produce the oppressive conditions experienced by women living in the favelas. She was interested in showing that despite the women’s seeming compliance to oppressive social conditions; the women were not suffering from “mystification.” Indeed, throughout the text Goldstein provides innumerable examples to show that the favela women routinely engaged in “everyday forms of resistance.” One of the most common forms of resistance observed by Goldstein was laughter. In this paper,I focus on the absurdist humor created by these women, and argue far from signaling mystification, the humor practiced by these women indicates their awareness of the absurdities of a world that dictates they live in such tragic circumstances. The examples I focus on are: