Culture

o Kulturvolker vs. Naturvolker

- Culture limited to “Civilized People”
- Edward Tylor and the culture concept, culture is that complex whole
which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs and other
capabilities
- Boisean View: Nurture and nature that makes you who you are

Characteristics of Culture
- A system of knowledge and practice that is
 Learned
 Adaptive
 Dynamic
 Holistic- the parts work together
 Stable- it comes from a share understanding of how people before
you did this
 Shared, but also…
 Heterogeneous – is different through its part, making it impossible
to define a a culture,
- We are experts on our own culture except those things we can’t talk about
 Explicit Culture
 Tacit Culture (Things that you don’t talk about)
- 2 big approaches to studying culture
 Holism- emphasis on whole, rather than the parts;
interconnectedness
 Comparatives- finding similarities and differences among human
beings.
 Global- look at culture as a global
- Real world applications of the culture concept
 Cultural Appropriation (
 Encoding and decoding systems

Language

- Language and Evolution

 There are physical features in our body that enable us to use
language
 Tripling of brain size
 Expansion of vertebrae that carry nerves for intercostal muscles
 Complex, creative culture
 Language can be created

-
 - Elements of Language
 Saussure
 Paralog and language
 Language consist of what we say to each other the sensory
side of language
 Phonemes
 Morphemes
 Grammar
- Characteristics of Language
 Discreteness
 Duality of Patterning
 Displacement
 Productivity/ Creativity
- Relativism of Language
 Each language is unique
 Language has a different capacity of carrying ideas
- Universal Structure of language
o Ethno semantics
- Sociolinguistics
 One of the four fields of anthropology
 How as a speaker we tie to a group using language man and
woman use language differently –
o Mary Bocholt
- Nerds vs Cool Kids
- White vs. Black

- Summary

 All human groups have language

 All languages are capable of expressing complex ideas and
meanings
 Language is way to symbolically dominate
 Globalization is both increasing linguistic diversity “World
English’s” and decreasing
- Language is also a way to control others, inferiority in language

Foraging and Hunting

- How humans turn their earth into their subsistence
 Hegelianism
- Hunter and gathers are Mobile 0 they don’t stay at one place
Horticultural
- Use of gardens
- Swidden/ burning the land to fertilize the soil
 - Hoes or sticks
- Animals sometimes raised for restage
o Pastoralism
- Adaptive strategy based on the hoarding of domesticated animals such as
cattle, sheep and goats
o Intensive agriculture
- Wheat, barley cultivated 12kya in Near East
- Farming communities 9kya China, 7kya Near East Europe
- “The biggest mistake” an adaptive strategy based on the intensive
cultivation of permanent land holdings
o Consequences of Farming
- The overuse of land
- Commitment to an area
- Deforestation of the area
- The climate of your location can affect your farming, since you settle
down you have to just deal
o Industrial Agriculture
- Automation
- Larger Scale
- Integrated System
- Global
Subsistence patterns are deeply tied to consciousness and culture
- But don’t think of these as bounced categories: hunters sell things in
markets and work on ranches

Globalization
o When talking about globalization people have to look I at from Europe e 1598
o World systems
- Immanuel Immersion
 The Global system sloganized to the benefit of affluent nation-
states
o Core Semi-periphery
- Periphery- New World Ruled by colonial Elite, Colonial Elite creates a
racial cast system
- Extract Wealth
- The periphery makes the world rich
o Semi-periphery
- Countries that are regional powerful
o External
- Countries that don’t contribute much into the Economy of the
o World Systems Theory
- Emphasizes wealth disparity
- Flows of wealth
 o Global Flow and Scopes
- Globalization is not a binary of the west and non-west
o Global Flows
- Many different transfers of people, places, this and ideas
- Different concerns in different places
- Transnationalism rather than globalism
 People have more independency than they get credit for, for
example Nollywood, they are creative and independent
o Globalization is the interconnectedness of people, places and things in the
world system
o Globalization can be hegemonic
 Indirect control over a group of people
o Globalization is also multidirectional
 People can fight back, and revaluated their mummeries

Race
- Race possibly does not have a biological reality
- Humans evolve independently as five different racial groped
 Once farming emerged elites evolved
- Taxonomies
 Classification of human groups
- One Drop Rule
 If you had any recognizable African treats you were considered
black, the line between white and black.
- Brazil
 Whiteness can be “earned”
 Race is a spectrum, if you become rich and susccful you
become whiter, they tie success to the white race –
completely racist idea- status = whiteness
 Kind of a gate that not everyone can pass through
 Race can vary within nuclear families
 Race is a cast system not so much biological how they make seem
 Privileges is very tied to race
 Race is real, race can actually have an effect on how long you live,
access to certain privileges affects
 How subjected you are to violence in your neighborhood have to
do with race