Transcript Why Conduct Qualitative Research?

Review for exam 2
This exam covers weeks 5 through
10 and the following topics
 Week 5: Race, sex, and gender
 Week 7: Cultural evolution
 Week 8: Language and culture
 Week 9: Status, role and kinship

Race
Race is a social construct.
 There are historically two very
different modes of thinking:

(1) typological thinking and
 (2) population thinking


Both are wrong.



In the U.S. the one-drop rule continues to
prevail, all scientific information to the
contrary notwithstanding.
Other societies, like Brazil, have different
rules for assigning social race labels.
This does not mean that other societies
lack racism.
Human biological variation
Humans do vary across populations
in things like skin color and
susceptibility to certain illnesses
…and the kind of ear wax they have.
 There is no evidence for population
level differences in intelligence.

The race and IQ myth
Every generation for the last
hundred years has seen attempts to
promote racist ideologies about
intelligence through science
 These attempts have always been
refuted successfully by science
 Why is this myth so persistent?

Variation in skin color
While race is a social construction,
skin color is a phenotypic variable.
 In tropical latitudes, increased
melanin minimizes the danger of
hypervitaminosis D and the danger
of skin cancer.

Sickle cell anemia
It is the result of a mutation in
Central Africa.
 Heterozygotes have some protection
against malaria.
 This produces a selective advantage
for this balanced polymorphism.
 This happened only a couple of
thousand years ago.

Sex and gender
Just as race is a social construct, so
is gender.
 Gender roles are social constructions
that differ across time and place.
 Some gender roles are nearly
universal, while others are
extremely plastic.


Margaret Mead’s studies in New Guinea
Cultural Evolution – The Paleolithic,
the Neolithic, and the Rise of States



Cultural evolution parallels biological evolution
for six million years, until the Late Paleolithic
and what Marvin Harris called the cultural
takeoff.
Biological evolution continues, and we see it the
distributions of skin color and lactase deficiency.
But since the Late Paleolithic, most of human
evolution is the story of rapid cultural change,
independent of biological change.


We reviewed the cultural prehistory of
humankind, from the earliest tools of the
Paleolithic, through the Mousterian
complex of the Neanderthals, and up to
the broad spectrum adaptation of the
Mesolithic, with the retreat of the glaciers
and the disappearance of the Pleistocene
megafauna.
Humans had a role in that disappearance.
The Levallois breakthrough



The transition to Archaic H. sapiens during
the Middle Paleolithic, around 300kya, brings
the Lavallois technique of producing flake
tools.
With the Levallois method, humans get a
first crack at mass production and we find
sources as far as 200 miles from the tools.
Note the experiment on making Levallois
tools: Only those with language were able to
make the tools.

More cutting edge/kg or rock through time
Upper Paleolithic


During the Upper Paleolithic, there is a
florescence of hunting culture with new
technologies, including the bow and arrow
and the atlatl.
The Upper Paleolithic horizon occurs in
North America several thousand years
later because the glacier retreated there
later:

Clovis and Folsom Paleo-Indian cultures.
Mesolithic transition
With the disappearance of the
megafauna, we see a transition to
broad spectrum gathering.
 The Natufians learn to harvest wild
wheat: settled villages without
agriculture by 10kya.


Flannery asks: Where do you go with a
ton of wheat?
Cultural horizons

The same horizon in Peru at 6kya, in
Japan at 13kya, Southern Africa at
6kya, Southern U.S. at 5kya.
Transition to the Neolithic
Food production creates surplus.
 It also creates hardships, like
increased infant mortality.
 The type sites of Ali Kosh and
Tehuacan show the transition and
similarity of horizons in two parts of
the world.

From villages to states



The Neolithic brings settled agricultural
life and eventually, states.
Two theories to account for primary
states: circumscription and hydraulic
Primary states, too, arise all over the
world, again showing the same cultural
horizons in different times and places.

This happened at least five times, perhaps
more.
The sequence in the Americas




There are parallel sequences in Mexico
and Peru, from early Neolithic villages to
fully developed states:
Olmec, Teotihuacan, Toltec, Aztec in
Mexico
Chavin, Tihuanaco, Inca in Peru
The Aztecs and the Incas were the last of
a long line of states Mexico and Peru.
Theories of the Neolithic
V. Gordon Childe and regions of
refuge
 Robert Braidwood and the hilly
flanks
 Kent Flannery and the plants-plantpeople theory


Carrying capacity and Boserup’s
observation
Neolithic evolution
There was no revolution in the usual
sense of that word.
 The first demographic transition


Fertility goes up when people shift from
hunting and gathering to agriculture.
Hydraulics and the state
States develop along the Yellow
River in China, in the TigrisEuphrates valley, in the Nile valley
and in the Indus valley.
 They also develop in the Mexican
highlands, without rivers, but with
control of water.


Hydraulic and circumscription theories
Writing and the state
Writing was invented several times.
 It is always associated with trade
and the development of the state.
 However, it is not a necessary
condition for the development of the
state.

Who discovered America?
Bering Straits
 Paleolithic seafaring along the
Northwest Coast of North America
 Neolithic seafaring from Africa and
the Pacific
 Pleistocene overkill hypothesis

Language evolution
Language may have developed
along with the capacity for making
stone tools.
 Physical evidence – the hyoid bone
and thorax in Neanderthal.

Cultural evidence
Berlin and Kay’s work on color terms
shows that lexicon evolved with
socioeconomic complexity.
 Comparative studies of creole
languages
 Study of nonhuman primate
language
 The lithics experiment

Generative grammar
Human language is generative.
 There are four components to the
grammar: phonology, morphology,
syntax, and semantics.
 Speech and writing are not the same
things.
 We have 46 phonemes in English,
and 26 characters in the alphabet.

English phonology
The phonemic difference between
[big] and [pig] is a single distinctive
feature called ‘voicing’ that produces
a change in the meaning of the
words.
 English has word-initial, aspirated
voiceless stops. Spanish does not.

Kissinger effect

The Kissinger effect refers to the
embeddedness of the phonology and
the difficulty of acquiring a native
speaker’s accent as an adult.
Some rules for morphology
The rules for forming the past tense
and plural in English are
phonologically related
 Plural
s
z
ez
 Past
t
d
ed
 part parts, bag bags, rose roses
 slip slipt, bag bagd, want wantƏd

Gender and speech
Gendered register in Japanese
 Gendered speech in American
English

Dialects and languages




Dialects are mutually intelligible varieties
of a language.
Ebonics is a dialect of American English.
No dialect of any language is better, in
any linguistic sense, than any other.
Dialects do, however, have social
consequences.

Note Labov’s study of the r’s in New York
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

The remains controversial, but there
is evidence that the structure of
language effects the way people
think in general.
Historical linguistics



Glottochronology (lexicostatistics): the
study of change in nonwritten languages
by applying known rates of change for
written languages.
English is part of the Germanic language
subfamily (is related closely to Dutch,
Swedish, German, etc.).
English is part of the Indo-European
language family that includes Hindi (via
Sanskrit).
Dual lexicons
English has a dual lexicon: Germanic
and Latin.
 Note the difference in feel in
cogitate vs. think or in expectorate
vs. spit.
 village, garage, collage

Writing
Writing was invented at least twice,
perhaps three or four times
 Spread through trade, proselytizing,
and schooling
 Middle East
3200 BCE (Uruk, S.
Iraq)
 Indus Valley
2500 BCE
 Olmecs
600 BCE

Logographic vs. alphabetic scripts









Some alphabetic scripts:
Arabic
Cyrillic
Roman
A syllabic script:
Hiragana
An ideographic script:
Kanji (Japanese)
Chinese
Status, role, and kinship
Roles comprise the set of rules for
acting out statuses properly – within
limits that can be more or less rigid
 The limits of these rules for role
behavior are a source of debate in
many societies


Note the difference between
ascribed and achieved statuses and
the ratio of achieved/ascribed
statuses in different societies
Kinship
Kinship is important for
understanding social relations in all
societies
 Kinship rules define how social ties
of descent and marriage are
established and elaborated and how
these ties relate to all other areas of
behavior

Fuzzy edges of kinship systems



Kinship systems are based on recognition
of distinctions in things like generation,
sex of relative, and consguineal vs. affinal
relation
We see the fuzzy edge of American
kinship in the rules for the term “brotherin-law”
The rules for this are clearer in traditional
Spanish and Greek kinship, but these
rules are changing now
Unilineal and bilateral kinship
Note the difference between
unilineal and bilateral kinship
 About 70% of the kinship systems in
the world are unilineal
 Matrilineal is much rarer than
patrilineal

Marriage systems
Monogamy: 24% of the world's
cultures
 Polygyny: 70%
 Polyandry: 1%
 Note the case of fraternal polyandry
in Tibet

Postmarital residence





Neolocal
Matrilocal
Patrilocal
Ambilocal
Carol and Melvin ember tested the
hypothesis that residence should follow
the gender that produces the most food.
Distant vs. close warfare was the
intervening variable
Restrictions on sexuality




Societies differ on the kinds of sexuality
that are permitted, restricted, or
encouraged
Abortion, famine, war, colonization, and
homosexuality restrict reproduction
Accounting for differences in emphasis on
virginity and tolerance for homosexuality
Note Alice Schlegel’s cross-cultural study
of virginity and economic transactions at
marriage
Dowry
Occurs where women contribute
little to subsistence, there is a
high degree of social stratification,
and monogamy
 These are necessary but
insufficient conditions
 The burning bride case in India
