ANTH 204 Midterm Study Guide PDF

ANTH 204: Midterm Study Guide Week 1 - Anthropology - “The science of human beings, and their ancestors through time and space and in relation to physical character, environment, social relations, and culture” - “The Holistic study of what it means to be human”...

ANTH 204: Midterm Study Guide Week 1 - Anthropology - “The science of human beings, and their ancestors through time and space and in relation to physical character, environment, social relations, and culture” - “The Holistic study of what it means to be human” - Holistic: “The system and their properties should be viewed as wholes and not a collection of parts” - The four fields of anthropology - Anthropological Archeology - BIological Anthropology - Cultural Anthropology - Linguistic Anthropology - The Nacirema - Ethnography of people - Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange - observation of behavior written from an outside view - Medical Anthropology - Use of all the disciplines to understand health and healing as a practice and as a cultural understanding - “Draws upon social, cultural, biological, and linguistic anth to better understand those factors which influenced health and well being” - Joralemon’s 4 key points about Medical Anthropology - Biology and cultural matter equally in the human experience of disease - The political economy is a primary epidemiological factor - Economic and political systems in society - Ethnography is an essential tool to understand human suffering due to disease - Medical anthropology can help to alleviate human suffering - Examples of how Biomedical knowledge is shaped by cultural and social forces - Dano in Peru - An illness linked with society - Science and biomedicine are cultural Week 2 - Khat - Stems and leaves of the tree Catha edulis - typically chewed - Induces wakefulness, sociability, and euphoria  - Popular in many areas including Yemen, Kenya, Somalia, and Madagascar, but controversial - In Kenya, it is a source of cultural pride - In UK, it is considered harmful and should be banned - Drug (As a category) - “A substance that changes a person’s mental or physical state” - Context and cultural specific - not universal - How drugs work - Contain substances that resemble natural transmitters or force the release of natural transmitters - Ethnography - Observation and interpretation of behavior written from an outside view - Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange - Metaphors - Help us make coherent certain aspects of our experience and the only way to highlight certain aspects of our experience - Create our reality - If we change our metaphors, we can change our reality - Pharmacology - Pharmacological determinism - The harms related to drugs are innate parts of their chemical makeup, and therefore will always cause harm - ex) smoking cannabis one time will create dependency - This does not show the full picture, the effects of drugs are shaped by a culture and not just the chemical makeup of the drug - ex) inactive drugs can have placebo effects - Assemblages (pg. 5 of Carrier and Gexon Chap. 1) - How carious things come together to shape our world - Material objects, concepts and ideas, relationships between people, ect - Neurons and their parts - All sensations, movements, thoughts, memories, and feelings come from signals passing through neurons - Cell body, dendrites, axon - Synapse: where the signal passes from one neuron to another - Neurotransmitters - Vesicles release neurotransmitters from the axon terminal into the synapse and they cross from one neuron to another - ex) Adrenaline, Dopamine, Serotonin - Agonist Drugs  - Bind to specific receptors and cause a specific physiological response (natural or artificial) - ex) Endorphins and Morphine on opioid receptors - Antagonist Drugs - Opposes the action of an agnostic - block agonist from accessing receptors - ex) Narcan is an opioid antagonist - Doesn’t block the receptor itself, instead blocks the agnostic from binding to the receptor - Membrane transport inhibitors - Large proteins embedded in cell membrane - Inhibit the action of membrane transporters ( Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) - Categories of drugs - Depressants - Slow down the operations of the brain and body - Stimulants - Stimulants accelerate heart rate, elevate blood pressure, and speed up or stimulate the body - Hallucinogens - Causes the user to perceive things differently than they actually are - Dissociative Anesthetics - Drugs that inhibit pain by cutting off the brain’s perception of pain - Narcotic Analgesics (Narcotics) - Relieve pain, induce euphoria, and create mood changes in the users - Inhalants - Include a wide variety of breathable substances that produce mind-altering results and effects - Cannabis - Active ingredient: Delta 9, THC - Others - Steroids and other hormone based-drugs - Cultural relativism, methodological relativism, and “emic” approach - The idea that many things that might be seen as universal for humans are not, but all relative to particular culture and society and are best understood from the perspective of that culture - Emic approach - Inside perspective - meaning making - how people make sense of their world  - Etic approach - Outside perspective - Functionalism - A focus on how a given phenomenon serves a purpose in a given context - Thinking about the work that something does and what purpose does it serve? - Inequality and Power - Incorporating postcolonial, decolonial, and political economy perspectives - Drugs as a tool for creating or maintaining inequalities - Biopower - The ways that forms of governance regulate life and create subjectives - Materiality - The study of objects and their relationship in social life - Drugs and their “thing like” quality as an object - Thinking about real world impacts and actions Week 3 - Key physiological changes over hominid evolution - Height, arm length, size and shape of the head, body hair, body size, leg length, size and shape of hands, jaw size, presence of sagittal crest, brain space, teeth - Moves from climbing lifestyle to a walking one - Prosociality - Traits that help community to survive - Characteristics of the human niche (the socio-cognitive niche) and why this makes humans partial to drug use - Cognition, sociality, communication, social learning - enhanced by consumption of mushrooms with psilocybin - Complex, high quality diet facilitated by cooperation - Complex communication allows for cultural transmission and innovation - Homo sapiens evolved culture to help solve problems - This hyper cooperation makes human prone to drug use because: - They can help with self medicating, so less sadness - Enhance creativity, which is needed for adaptation - Improves communication - Creates shared sense of community - The stoned ape hypothesis - Terrence McKenna  - The transition from homo erectus to homo sapiens and the cognitive revolution was caused by addition of psilocybin mushrooms to dier around 100,00 yrs ago - Evolutionary catalyst from which came language, projective imagination, the arts, religion, philosophy, and human culture - Hominins who consumed mushrooms were better at the socio-cognitive nice and therefore more likely to survive and reproduce - Traits that set humans up for drug use - Our level of consciousness and a desire to alter that consciousness - Our capacity for metacognition (thinking about thinking) and a desire to turn that up or down - Awe (a complex emotion) - Our intense social and desire for group belonging and bonding - Stimulants - A CNS stimulant accelerate heart rates, elevate blood pressure, and speed up or stimulate the body - Caffeine, coffee, cocaine - Often haves functional uses like keeping people awake (capitalist undertones) - Ritual undertones - Power Week 4 - World historical substance - A material that profoundly alters the occurs of human history - But not on its own - Who made it? What made it? - Chemicals - Quinine: known to have antimalarial properties - Atabrine, chloroquine, DDT all become ways to reduce malaria, making quinine obsolete - Colonialism - Britain starts growing cinchona in Darjeeling during IMperial occupation of India - Brought people from neighboring kingdoms to Darjeeling to work the plantations - Britain is trying to make money, but is also trying to produce cheap quine for India’s population - Pice-packets first public assistance program for malaria  - Modern imperial sovereignty is about the power to control life according to Foucaly - Drugs have biopower to shape people and populations - Britain realizes it cannot produce enough quinine, and their priorities are revealed when they reserve it for troops - Plants - Labor - Archeology - Pant matter can be preserved - Material culture of past (pottery shards, amphoras, pipes, ect) tell us about what substances were used - Iconography gives clues to drug use - Materiality - Chinoca plantations still exist and people still work there even though they are not as used - In the case of alcohol, processing plants give best indicators of widespread alcohol use - Finding pipes gives evidence that tobacco and cannabis was sued - Human remains also indicate drug use - Stained teeth from betel nut chewing - Mummified bodies with coca in stomachs - Cabe art possible depicting experience of drug use - Drugs in human history - Monks in 14th century consumed 1 gallon of ale per day - Humans have always used drugs and go to great lengths to acquire them - Beer identified by calcium oxalate and brewing facilities - Wine identified by tartaric acid - Mead identified through beeswax residues - Cannabis identified by pollen seeds - Opium poppy - Chemical analysis of human hair indicates psychoactive substances - Methods for studying drugs in the archeological record - Paleobotany: study of remains of ancient plants - Organic residue analysis: identifying chemical signatures - Ancient texts: hieroglyphics Week 5 - Religion - The beliefs and behaviors related to supernatural being and/or forces  - A social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified, places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that related humanity to supernatural transcendental, or spiritual elements - Proposed functions of religion - Our earliest human ancestors needed to explain the difference between the living and the dead - Social control, conflict resolution, intensifying group solidarity, cognitive, emotional - Spirituality - This is more of an individual practice, and has to do with having peace and purpose - Ways of classifying religion - Anthony Wallace identified four principle patterns of religious organization based on “cults” - Individualistic Cults - Each person is their own religious specialist - Shamanistic Cults - Part-time religious specialists called shamans who intervene with the deities on behalf of their “clients” - Emphasize the meaningfulness of humanities connection to the earth and the supernatural - Communal Cults - Societies in which religious groups of ordinary people conduct religious ceremonies for the well being of the total community - Ecclesiastical Cults - Often standardized, religious systems employing full time priests, formally elected of appointed and devote all of most of their time to perform priestly functions - Ways drugs are used or relate to religion - They are used in rituals/rites - Prescriptions for their use - They are prohibits - Enhancers into the spiritual life - Rites and rituals - Rites of passage or conversion - Rituals: Repetitive sets of symbolic activities - can also be secular and not necessarily connected to religious beliefs - Altered states of consciousness in religion - Enhancers into the spiritual life - Ethenogen: any drug used in a religious context  - Others and othering - A social process of marginalization through which a person values their own group while denigrating and excluding those from a group different to theirs - ANTH used to be the study of the other - Changed as a society and the discipline of anthropology has changed - Ethnocentrism - The belief that one’s cultural group is centrally important and superior to others - Evaluating of other cultures according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of one’s own culture - Leads to cultural misinterpretation and it often distorts communication between people and groups - Cultural relativism - The ability to understand a culture on its own terms and not to make judgments using the standards of one’s own culture - One can only truly understand and convey the meanings a given culture ascribes to certain thing if you look at them from within that cultural framework - exoticism/exoticization - Exoticization: the romanticization, commodification, or fetishization of cultural, racial, or ethnic otherness - Can refer to ethnocentric stereotyping, where the other is defined by difference - West exoticized and romanticized the Middle eastern cultures in a problematic way - Time and the other - The tendency to see “others” as being less modern - The idea that “others” are frozen in time - Seeing ourselves as “here and now” and others as “there and then” - Power and historical context Week 6 - Counterculture - A culture whose norms and values of behavior differ substantially from those in mainstream society - LSD celebrated experimentation, the rise of hippie or alternative lifestyle - Subculture - A cultural group within a larger culture, often having beliefs or interests at variance with those of the larger culture  - Stigma and stigmatization - Stigma: the process through which people become labeled in ways that are morally discrediting - Usually against core cultural values - Reflects perceived failures to enact prevailing social norms of how people should look, act, and be - When people are stigmatized, it allows those people who are so labeled to be pushed down, in , and away by people who have more - power or the institutions they control - Stigmatized face mistreatment but also substantiation political and economic barriers that make it difficult to lead a good life Week 7 - Semiotics - The study of meaning making, the study of signs, symbols, and their use of interpretation - Sign - Anything that communicates meaning (that is not the sign itself) to the interpreter of the sign - Signified v. signifier - Signified - the way we refer to things - Signifier - the sing - Indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs - Indexical: the signifier correlates with the signified (crown) - Iconic: the signifier resembles the signified (smiley face) - Symbolic: the signifier is often disconnected from the signified (stop lights) - Indigenous use of coca - Source of income for cocaleros and people who work the fields - Exchanged for labor - Consumed in groups like coffee or tea - Medicinal uses of coca - Has been suggested as a method to wean addicts off of cocaine - Reduces pain (leaves sometimes placed on the body) - Recommended to travelers for altitude - Usually consumed by travelers as tea or candy - Mate de coca - brew of coca and water sometimes sweetened - Coca leaves are also places on the temples and forehead for strength - The chewing of coca relieves fatigue and nausea - Relationship between coca and indigeneity - Associated with people from indigenous backgrounds and laborers  - Seeing in both rural and urban settings, with agricultural workers, miners, construction, and other laborers - Ebo Morales used it in political spaces to remind people of the importance of the indigenous community - Vital source of income for many people because it fires in regions where not much else grows - Crack v. cocaine differences - A freebase form of the stimulant, can be smoked or injected - Made by dissolving powder cocaine and baking soda in boiling water and forming resulting paste into “rocks” - Short, intense high, inexpensive additive makes crack cheaper than a similar dose of cocaine - Narconomics - Cartel buys coca paste from farmers - Values is added when cocaine enters US - Most of the wealth produced through cartel stays in US - Cocaine income is used to fuel industry and buy political influence Week 8 - Political economy - The distribution of power and wealth between different groups and individuals - The process and mechanisms that create, sustain, and transform these relationships over time - Base and superstructure - Superstructure: Everything not to do with production in society - Education, family, religion, politics, media - Maintains and legitimates the base - Base: all things needed to produce - Machines, factories, land, raw materials - People’s relations to production - Shapes the superstructure - Different types of power - Individual power - Power you have over yourself - Interactional power - Power over another - Tactical/organization power - The power to control the setting - Structural power  - Organizes and orchestrates the setting/contexts within other forms of power operate - Scapegoating - The practice of singling out a person or group for unmerited blame and consequent treatment - A process in which mechanisms of projection or displacement are used in focusing feelings of aggression, hostility, frustration, ect. Upon another individual or group, the amount of blame being unwarranted - The scapegoat theory of intergroup conflict provides an explanation for the correlation between times of relative economic despair and increase in prejudice and violence towards outgroups - Drugs have been used as a scapegoat and to point to certain populations as scapegoats - Endocannabinoid system - Endocannabinoid receptors are found on nearly every organ of our body - Our body produces a number of endocannabinoids and they regulate functions like sleep, appetite, cognition, memory, and more - Unlike most brain chemicals they actually travel backwards across the synapse where they then release of out neurotransmitters - The primary goal is to help with homeostasis - Delta-9 v Delta-8 THC - THC: psychoactive ingredient - Delta 9: found in plant in high concentrations - more natural - Delta-8: A psychoactive substance that is found in cannabis - Not as strong Methods Presentations - Participant observation - Researchers want to remain discreet by being a part of daily life but still taking data - Researcher tries to keep environment undisturbed - Mainly handwritten field notes - Good ethnography - Open to gain trust, discrete enough, make presence known, confidentiality, pay attention, participate, interact with a variety of settings - Fieldnotes - Blend in and participate and understand why you’re there - Disadvantages - Time consuming, hard to document, subjective  - Autoethnography - Bridge between autobiography and ethnography - The author writes about epiphanies they have while being within a culture, rather than in a biographical context where the lived experiences aren’t done just to write about it - Wanted to reduce instances of researchers entering in a culture and exploiting the people there - Ethical considerations - Consent, privacy, POV, validity - Covert research is looked down upon in anthropology but is more popular in sociology - Interviews - Conversations for gathering info about subjects - Structured (fixed list of questions) v. unstructured v. semi-structured - Questionnaires - 15 rules - Pretesting, translation, back-translation, longitudinal study, cross-sectional study, panel studies Key Case Studies - Quinine and Colonialism - Coca and Indigenous Identity - Is associated with indigenous identity because it has been grown for thousands of years and is used in medicinal and everyday practices - Chewing coca correctly signifies that one is part of the community - Spanish made it illegal in 1600s but didn't really stop people from using it - US tried to eradicate coca during the war on drugs by replacing it with other cash crops and by dropping herbicides on fields - The role of sugar in making the modern world - The changing place of LSD in society - Effects discovered by Dr. Albert Hoffman in 1940 - Was used in psychiatric treatment to help patients recall distant and repressed memories - 1950-1965: 40,00 patients treated with LSD, 1000 papters written - Became popular in artistic and intellectual communities - Was being used by the US gov to produce mind control - Became linked with counterculture in the 60s - 1966: US made LSD illegal - Govs claimed it was to blame for left wing eruption, opposition to Vietnam War, and social changes - Other party drugs emerge to take over its place - Ayahuasca and Spiritual Tourism - Cannabis (or other drugs) and scapegoating - Cannabis was popular with Mexican migrants and was sued to blame Mexicans for American drug use - Cannabis is also seen as a “gateway” drug that will cause you to commit crimes. So dangerous communities used cannabis