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Social Anthropology 252 Exam Notes

• These notes are free. If someone sold them, you were scammed.
• Blue boxes contain multiple-choice question material.
• The rest of the text is for essay writing.
• Read each mandatory reading thoroughly. Summary notes are not as effective for understanding an author's message.
• Watch the Thursday morning lectures that were uploaded to Sunlearn.
• Avoid problematic language, particularly words like "native." If unsure, use quotation marks.
• Manage your time effectively when writing essays.
• Good luck with the exam.

Lecture 11: Lobola, Marriage, and Family Alliances

• Focuses on Southern Bantu tribes.
• Analyzes systems of bride wealth.
• Key themes include male pastoralism, female agriculture, hierarchical transactions, bride wealth and legitimate children.
• Cattle beget children (important concept).
• Aim is to better understand Southern Bantu marriage systems and cultures.
• Bride wealth (BW) systems have formal similarities but varied functions.
• Systems are linked by rule-governed transformations.
• Author, Adam Kuper, argues against older anthropological assumptions regarding isolated, well-defined, timeless tribal cultures.
• The text takes a regional, comparative approach, avoiding comparisons of far-removed cultures.
• The analysis focuses on the period before industrialization (before 1930s/1940s).

Lecture 11: Continued – Cattle Complex, and Exchanges

• Cattle-complex: Hoernle quote: "We can never hope to understand the... function of such customs as the lobola... until we realize that we are in contact with ideas of cattle radically different from our own."
• Agriculture is primarily women's work and important as a food source.
• Pastoralism is male-dominated, prestigious, and important.
• Cattle ownership is a sign of lineage and social status.
• Various exchange customs are detailed (Wife's parents receive meat, wife's mother gives beer/porridge)
• Hierarchical exchange: superiors provide cattle, fields, and fertility to retainers, who provide labor, meat, and crops in return.
• Ancestors are critical for welfare (rain, harvest, victory).
• Succession of land ownership and wealth are described in detail.
• Each person has certain responsibilities to the group.
• Ruler provides land and cattle to his followers (according to the number of wives)

Lecture 12: Local Music

• Focuses on Lesotho migrant workers and women who stayed behind.
• Sefela as a tool of resistance (important).
• Examines Basotho migrant labor, identity construction, and men-women relationships.
• Oral literature, such as Sefela, reflects popular consciousness, gives history, and provides ethnography.
• Historical culture and social values are detailed through symbolism.
• Methodological importance of Sefela for anthropology is emphasized. Sefela, a sung poetry form, is analyzed.

Lecture 13: Continued - Sefela, Consciousness and Text

• Sefela performances maintain unity between sounding, hearing, sensation, understanding, and individual/collective experience.
• Sefela is a "poetic song"--not told but sung, using both melody and image.
• Sefela avoids physical actions to focus exclusively on the sounds/texts themselves.
• Analysis of Sefela in relation to migrant experience, feelings about labor migration, patriarchal households, and self-concept despite social displacement/dehumanization are detailed.
• Travel, geography, and politics are integrated into themes of the Sefela.

Lecture 14: Whites in South Africa

• Focusing on Afrikaners and English whites, and the effects of domination on the dominant.
• Importance of understanding apartheid in a wider social and epistemological sense and analysis of racial, class, and age divisions.
• Categorization of people into strict/essentialized categories, and the justified social distance between racial groups.
• The perspective of the dominant group (white) as essentialized in a sense and having no way to conceive of others outside their rigidly defined categories/beliefs.

Lecture 15: Witchcraft and Politics

• Focuses on witchcraft allegations in Bushbuckridge and Bantustans, and the historical context of witchcraft in the region.
• Witchcraft is tied to contemporary political and economic processes, a social phenomenon that exists in particular context.
• Witchcraft is explored in relation to the emergence and evolution of Bantustans.
• Focus on how witchcraft beliefs and practice are shaped by social relations and local contexts.

Lecture 16: Sex and Gender

• Focuses on gay identities in small-town South Africa.
• Analysis of masculine vs feminine identities and how they are expressed, particularly in relation to same-sex interactions.
• Masculine gays were often seen as an oxymoron in these settings.
• The engagement ceremony is described critically as a performance, with explicit gendered roles and distinctions.
• Study of these conflicting representations of queer identity, with a particular focus on how real gay identities are expressed in a specific social context.

Lecture 17: Christianity, Mission, Prosperity, and Prophecy

• Focuses on the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) and its growth in South Africa.
• Analyzing Pentecostal Christianity in the context of South Africa, and the church's relationship with local culture(s) and social structures.
• The role of money and economic considerations in the church.
• Examining the relationship between the UCKG and South African culture in more historical depth.

Lecture 18: Conspicuous Consumption

• Introduction to Thorstein Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption to explain the cultural phenomenon of izikhothane.
• Examination of the practices within the culture through economic, historical, and social lenses.

Lecture 19: The Study of Conspicuous Consumption

• Continued analysis of izikhothane (including detailed examples and performances), their motivations, and their social and cultural significance.

Other potential essay topics

• Sefela and the struggle for identity formation.
• Female experiences during the apartheid era in South Africa.
• The impact of colonialism on Southern African social structures.
• The interplay of political and social contexts in witchcraft beliefs.
• Masculinity and identity in rural/urban contexts.
• How cultural production and exchange shapes social identities.