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-plant-

people 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 Tigris-Euphrates 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 “brother-in-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