Cultural Anthropology

Early Humans Hunting and Gathering

2011-12-06T22:26:00.000-08:00

Early Humans Hunting and Gathering
Scientists believe that humans evolved for millions of years before they learned to use fire about 500,000 to one million years ago.

The oldest fossils so far excavated mainly in Africa put the beginning of human like creatures – hominids - at between six and seven million years ago.

From the jaws and teeth of these hominids, scientist deduce that they were primarily plant eaters or herbivores.

Our back teeth the molars, are flat like stones for grinding grain and plants and that is what we still use them for when we chew.

Scientist think that over millions of years, early humans developed two survival advantages:

Between 4 million and 2 million BC human brain size tripled, growing to what it is today, approximately 1,400 cubic centimeters
They stood upright in two feet - became bipedal - which allowed them to see farther and left their hands free to use weapons for protection and to kill animals for food.

Food historians speculate that early humans learned to like the taste of meat from small animals that could be caught and killed easily, like lizards and tortoise and from scavenging the leftover carcasses of large animals killed by other large animals.

These early humans were hunter-gatherers , nomads who followed the food wherever it wandered or grew.

Between 40,000 BC an 12,000 BC, Asian peoples went east and crossed into North and South America.

The Ice Age had dried up the seas, creating dry land between Asia and Alaska, making it possible to walk from one continent to the other. So the first people in the Americans were Asians.

Work related to food was divided by gender. Men left the home to hunt animals by following them to where they went for food, especially salt.

Women gathered fruits, nuts, berries and grasses because their lives revolved around a cycle of pregnancy, birth and child rearing.

Gathering was more reliable than hunting. Becoming carnivores – meat eaters – probably helped humans survive, too. In case of a shortage of plants , there was an alternate food source.

Scientists believe than invented tools about 1.9 million to 1.6 million years ago. Early humans butchered animal meat, even elephants, with blades made out of of stone, which is why it is called the Stone Age.

Archeologists call this people Homo habilis – “handy man.”

Then, approximately 1,5 million to 500,000 years ago, another group appeared called Homo erectus – “upright man.”

These people migrated north to Europe and east to India, China and Southeast Asia. They had better tools than any of the other groups. And for the first time, they had fire.
Early Humans Hunting and Gathering

Food for Gods

2011-07-31T18:31:00.000-07:00

Food lays a role as a commodity within a mutual transactional exchange between humans or between individual and god, a situation that manifests a connection between god, food and life in a cosmological triangle.

The abundance of food in Mesopotamia is evident in the records of what was presented to the gods and goddesses, who needed to eat four times a day.

Their main stay was bread, as it was for humans.

The main god, Anu and three main goddesses, Antu, Ishtar and Nayana, got thirty loaves a day.

The millers, bakers and butchers had to recite prayers of thanks to the gods and goddesses as they ground the grain, kneaded the bread, and slaughtered the animals.

Then the priest placed the food on golden platters and set it before the gods, perhaps on a table.

In Hinduism food plays an essential role in ancient sacrifice, religious speculation, devotional worship, and purity and pollution regulations.

Since the gods only accepted cooked food, the sacrificer is reminded of his inferior status by waiting to consume his portion on the scarifies animals.

In the most ancient scarifies herbs and plants were plucked up y the roots and burnt with their leaves and fruit before gods and this was considered a very acceptable.

By the law of Athenians were required to worship the gods with the fruits. Barley and afterwards wheat were offered in sacrifice to gods.

Sacrifice had its origin in meals, in the offering of food to the gods. This could and did at times become a matter of exchange, of offering food to god or to the gods in order to gain favor and benefit.

The offering also expresses thanks and praise for what had been received, whether the harvest of the fields, the blessing of a child, or the arriving at a new stage in life.
Food for Gods

American Indian Shaman

2011-03-23T02:52:00.000-07:00

North American Indian medicine men and shamans have played a large role in the the older literature on North America. The nineteenth century saw the first anthropology description of American medicine men and shamans.

By definitions, all shamans would be medicine man but to all medicine men would be shamans.

Shamanism means traditions of prehistoric origin that are characteristic of Mongoloid peoples, including the American Indians.

They believed and acknowledge one supreme, all powerful, and intelligent Being, or Giver of Life, who create and governs all things.

The Shaman functionary in the chief place in all religious and ceremonial activities, thus making shamanism synonymous with religion.

It is the shaman rather than the priest who is called upon to treat the sick, to foretell the future.

Medicine power is often attributed to a fetish or charm adopted to typify a tutelary demon, or mystery guardian and the superior performance of one “juggler” over another is often attributed to the fact his medicine is the stronger.

Medicine is also associated with magic numbers. The usual sacred number among Indian is four, signifying the cardinal directions, but sometimes six, adding the up and down directions.

The Medicine bundle was perhaps the most important. In the thirties the medicine bundle cult still survive among the Potawatomis along with the more recent religion or drum dance, and peyote religion, as one of the three curing cults still extant.

The medicine bundle was usually made of an animal skin as deer tails, dried fingers, and often the maw stone of a buffalo.

Characteristically, the shaman is a healer, a psychopomp (who guides the souls of the dead to their home in the afterlife), and more generally a mediator between her or his community and the world of spirits (most often animal sprits and the spirits of the forces of nature).
American Indian Shaman

History of Cooking

2011-02-08T06:41:00.000-08:00

History of Cooking
Cooking is the oldest of the arts. It is of all arts that which has most signally advanced the cause of civilization; for the need of cooking taught is the application of fire and by means of fire man became lord over nature.

One theory is that an out of control fire burned down a hut and accidently cooked some pigs. People wandered in, tried the cooked meat and liked it.

Another theory is that a forest fire first roasted meat; still others think that cooking was a more deliberate, controlled act by humans. In any case, now there were more options than raw bar and tartare.

It was cooking but how about cuisine? Cuisine can be defined a self conscious tradition of cooking and eating, with a set of attitude about food and its place in the life of man.

So cuisine requires not just a style of cooking but an awareness about how the food is prepared and consumed.

It must also a wide variety of ingredients, more than are locally available and cooks and diners willing to experiments which means they are not constricted by tradition.

In modern times, humans are the only animals that cook food, but archeological evidence indicates that this was not always the case.

In the past, other, now instinct species that were related to modern Homo sapiens, such as Neanderthals, also cooked food.

Indeed, cooking almost certainly existed 2500,000 years ago, and it may have existed 1.5 millions years ago, well before the emergence of Homo sapiens as a species.

Roasting over an open fire probably the first cooking method. Pit roasting – putting food in a pit with burning embers and covering it - might have come next.

Then spit roasting, when hunters came home with the animal already on a spear and decided to cook it by hanging it over the fire and turning it.

With sharp tools, meat could be cut into smaller pieces to make it cook faster. Food could be boiled large mollusk or turtle shells where they were available, or even in animal skins, but pots were not invented until around 10,000 BC and there were no sturdy clay boiling pits until about 5000 BC.

The invention of pottery cookware that was both waterproof and heatproof, allowing food to be easily boiled and stewed. Food was eventually enclosed in ovens; the earliest ovens discovered so far have been found in Egypt and date to about 3000 BC.

The first references to frying date from about 600 BC.
History of Cooking

The Meaning of Anthropology

2011-01-29T00:44:00.000-08:00

The Meaning of Anthropology
Anthropology is a science of humanity and its society. It is a scientific study of humanity, the similarities and diversity of cultures, and attempts to present an integrated picture of humankind.

Anthropology studies the biological, social and cultural development of humankind and seeks answers to why people are different and how they are similar. It has subdivisions linked by unifying themes. One can glean the vastness of the subject matter of anthropology by looking into its serious fields such as the following:

1. Biological or physical anthropology
2. Archeology
3. Cultural anthropology
4. Linguistics
5. Applied Anthropology

Biological or physical anthropology
This studies the evolution of man and biological variations or diversity within the species. Biological anthropologists are concerned with how biological changes occur and how all these are related to the natural and social environments of the subjects.

The study the biological processes of humans and their primate relatives in their natural and social environments.

A knowledge of human variation is important in understanding human adaptation.

Archeology
Archeology studies and reconstructs events of the past since the beginning of the culture through such cultural remains as tools, buildings and pot shards (broken pieces of pottery.)

The focus is on the discovery of people and looking into how cultures change occurs. Archeologists do this by excavating sites.
The Meaning of Anthropology

History and Prehistory Humankind

2010-11-17T23:36:00.000-08:00

History and Prehistory Humankind
Scholars customarily draw a a sharp distinction between prehistory and history. Prehistory is taken to be the long era from biological beginnings of humankind over 2 million years ago to the origins of civilization about 5,000 years ago in the first urban centers of the Near East.

The transition to civilization and the advent of written records traditionally mark the commencement of history proper.

Prehistory, because of the exclusively material nature of its artifacts, mainly in the from of stone, bone or certain products has inescapably become the province of the archeologist, while the historical era, with its documentary records, is the domain of the history.

However the single label “prehistory” obscures two distinctly different substages: the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, which held sway for around 2 million years, is marked by rudimentary stone tools, designed for collecting and processing wild food sources, while the succeeding Neolithic, or New Stone Age, which first took hold in the Near East around 12,000 years ago, entailed substantially more complex stone implements adapted to the requirements of an economy of low intensity food production in the form of gardening or herding.

The technologies of both the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras have left a rich legacy of material artifacts. In constant, only a feeble record exists of any scientific interest in these preliterate societies, mainly in the form of astronomically oriented structures. Thus, at the very outset, the evidence indicates that science and technology followed separate trajectories during 2,000 millennia of prehistory.

Technology of the crafts – formed an essential element of both the nomadic food-collecting economy of Paleolithic societies and the food–producing activities in Neolithic villages, while science , as an abstract and systematic interest in nature was essentially nonexistent, or at any rate, has left little trace.
History and Prehistory Humankind

Stonehenge a Mystical Place

2010-08-24T00:42:00.000-07:00

Stonehenge a Mystical Place
Stonehenge, a Neolithic stone structure that rises majestically out of the Salisbury Plain in England, has fascinated humans for centuries.

It is believed that Stonehenge was erected over several centuries beginning in about 2180 BC. Its purpose is still mystery, although theories abound.

At the summer solstice, the rising sun appears behind one of the main stones, giving the illusion that the sun is balancing on the stone.

This has led to the early theory that Stonehenge was a temple. Another theory first suggested in the middle of twentieth century, is that Stonehenge could have been used as an astronomical calendar, marking lunar and solar alignments.

Yet a third theory is that Stonehenge was used to predict eclipses.

The latest research now shows that Stonehenge was invented for and used as a cemetery.

Human remains, from about 3000 BC until 2500 BC when the first large stones were raised have been found.

Regardless of why it was built, there is a mystical quality about the place that defies explanation.

Enuma Elish

2010-07-23T21:00:00.000-07:00

Enuma Elish
One of the most famous accounts of the creation of the universe from the ancient Near East was the Babylonian creation epic known as the Enuma elish.

The name comes form the first three words of the first two lines of the poem:

When on high the heavens were not yet named.
And below, the earth was not called by a name.

The Enuma elish tells how the good Marduk was endowed with absolute power by the other gods to do battle with Tiamat, a primordial goddess who personified the forces of watery chaos.

Marduk defeats Tiamat in battle and proceeds to create the universe by dividing Tiamat in two, one part becoming the heavens and the other the earth with her breasts as mountains.

From her eyes came the Tigris and Euphrates river. The Enuma elish was cited during the New Year Festival celebrated in honor of Marduk in the city of Babylon, which the all-powerful god founded as an earthy residence for the gods after his creation of the universe.

The Mesopotamians viewed their city states as earthy copies of a divine model and order. Each city state was scared because it was linked to a god or goddess.

Hence Nippur , the earliest center of Sumerian religion, was dedicated to Elil, the god of wind. Moreover, located at the heart of each major city state was a temple complex.

Occupying several acres their sacred area consisted of a ziggurat with a temple at the top dedicated to the god or goddess who owned the city.

The temple complex was the true center of the community. The maim god a or goddess dwelt there symbolically in the form of a statue and the ceremony of dedication included a ritual that linked the statue to the god or goddess and thus supposedly harnessed the power of the deity for city’s benefit.
Enuma Elish

Racial Differences

2010-06-10T03:08:00.000-07:00

Racial Differences
Every human being, has traits which he does not get from his society.

Australian elders can teach a boy to throw a boomerang, but they can not permanently alter his chocolate skin by smearing paint on it.

Skin color and other physical traits are inherited not socially but by biological hereditary.

An Australian child brought up by a white rancher tends sheep instead of throwing boomerangs at kangaroos; he may learn to write, as do white children, and to drive an automobile.

But no matter how much he associates with whites the color of his skin, the shape of his skull and the width of his nose remains unaffected because they can come to him only from his parents.

Thus, every human being has a social and a racial (biological) inheritance.

The two may be in some measure related, but they are different.
Racial Differences

Bronislaw Malinowski

2010-05-01T02:41:00.000-07:00

Bronislaw Malinowski
Bronislaw Malinowski (2884-2942), generally considered one of the founding fathers of British social anthropology, has tremendous influence on the practice of ethnographic field work in the United States.

This first great anthropological field worker squarely faced the problem of running experiences such as those of Hans Staden.

Malinowski was a Polish gentleman and an Austro-Hungarian project doing field work on the South Seas when World War I broke out in 1914.

Austria-Hungary was at war with Great Britain, and one legend has it that he was caught as an enemy alien on the Trobriand Islands, territory controlled by Australia, and was forbidden to leave.

He also made two expeditions to the islands from Australian mainland during the two subsequent years.

All told, his Trobriand expeditions are among the most extensive field trips ever taken.

As a result, he published a number of very brilliant books from 1916 through the 1920s.

Malinowski was only a paper enemy as far as the British were concerned. He was sponsored by a major anthropologist, C. G Seligman from England.

He did very well socially, marrying the daughter of the governor general of Australian and later winning a chair at the London School of Economics, certainly a prize position during that period.

There, in the 1920s, he was to found the intellectual school called ‘functionalism.’
Bronislaw Malinowski

Prehistory Idea

2010-04-09T23:43:00.000-07:00

Prehistory Idea
The concept of a span of human existence before recorded history may seem intuitively obvious to the readers, but such was not always the case.

What the eminent British historian of archeology Glyn Daniel (1914-86) called “the idea of prehistory” crystallized only in the early part of the nineteenth century.

Between 1820 and 1860, the study of the past moved from an antiquarian interest in old curiosities to a scholarly discipline which recognized that there was a considerable amount of human experience before historical records and which attempted to understand and explain this period in precise and rational terms.

In its European roots the study of human prehistory evolved along two major line.

The first generally be called “antiquarian,” and it involved the exploration of sites and the connoisseurship of artifacts, usually those of later prehistory.

Beginning in the late Renaissance, antiquarianism developed through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, until came of age on the nineteenth century Romantic era.

The Past lent itself readily to the statement of this period and the collection and curation of artifacts came to be systematic. Museum and eventually university departments were organized and archeology took its place alongside other “human sciences” as a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry.
Prehistory Idea

Neolithic Age

2010-03-22T23:00:00.000-07:00

Neolithic Age
Around 9000 BC the ice that covered much of northern Europe during the Paleolithic period melted as the climate grew warmer. The sea level rose more than 300 feet, separating England from continental Europe and Spain from Africa.

The reindeer migrated north and the wooly mammoth disappeared.

The Paleolithic gave way to a transitional period, the Mesolithic, and then, for several thousands years at different times in different parts of the globe, a great new age, the Neolithic, dawned.

Human beings began to domesticate plants and animals and a settle in fixed abodes.

Their food supply assured, many groups changed form hunters to herders, to farmers and finally to townspeople.

The basis for the conventional division of prehistory into Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods is the development of stone implements.

However, a different kind of distinction may be made between and age of food gathering and an age of food production.

In this scheme, the Paleolithic period corresponds roughly to the age of food gathering and the Mesolithic period, the last phase of that age, is marked by intensified food gathering and the taming of the dog.

In the Neolithic period, agriculture and stock raising became humankind’s major food sources, the transition to the Neolithic occurred first in the ancient Near East.
Neolithic Art

Cultural anthropology is a field work

2010-03-20T09:22:00.000-07:00

Cultural anthropology is a field work
Cultural anthropology is the field study of living human beings. Cultural anthropology’s principal method is field work, the way we do natural history.

The field refer to the areas in space in which cultural anthropologists find a living population to study.

It is the “interacting field” for various forces propelled by human activities.

The field need not have a hard boundary, it may not even be a single geographical area, but all told, a particular ethnographic filed is usually some form of community.

The natural history method distinguishes cultural anthropology from the other social sciences.

This method is founded on meticulous observation. The observation interact over natural time cycles (days, seasons, years, generations, a lifetime).

This observation to be controlled and cross checked by repeating them and questioning – interviewing – the subjects for information about past activities.

By this way, repetitive charting and cross checking of human events we can distinguish pattern and processes. These in turn enable, to arrive at conclusions that are theories – statements of order, limits, probability and natural law – derived from the field itself, seen as part of nature.

Theories may descriptive, relational, prescriptive or predictive. Natural history theories are above all descriptive and relational.

They are sometimes prescriptive, especially in applied anthropology: they can indicate a recommended area of conduct.

But anthropologist seldom make predictions on the basis of their theories.

It is important to realize that prediction is not the only test of a theory.
Cultural anthropology is a field work

The trademark of Anthropology: Holism

2010-03-01T20:26:00.000-08:00

The trademark of Anthropology: Holism
It is worth to point out that anthropology , as distinct from all other social sciences is an integrated approach.

It is includes the study of the physical nature of the human species, our past, unique capabilities as well as our limitations, and the tremendous variety and startling similarities among different cultures.

The anthropological approach is sometimes described as holistic because it integrates so many different area of concern.

It is not just the study of economic behavior or the structural relations between social groups.

It tries to understand all human behavior in all contexts, in all places and at all times.

And it does this by drawing from many different disciplines as well as from the four subfields of anthropology.

The anthropologist brings to his or her study a wide background.

Biology and physiology required for graduate students in physical anthropology; geology, geography, ancient history and sometimes even architecture are needed by the archeologists; and cultural anthropologist have come from all walks of life.

To study peasant society cross culturally we have to now something about agriculture ; to study personality cross culturally he must have a background in psychology; and so on for every possible area of study within cultural anthropology.
The trademark of Anthropology: Holism

Aboriginal Australia

2010-02-11T04:58:00.001-08:00

Aboriginal Australia
The earliest humans to settle Australia arrived at least 50,000 years ago.

At the time British colonization in 1788 there were two hundred or more Aboriginal language communities within the continent.

In areas of intense colonization, the Aboriginal economy was rapidly destroyed and it is only through the reports of explorers that we have record of semi-permanent settlements, the cultivation of edible roots and the construction of eel dykes.

While such practices have recently been confirmed by archeological research in the southeast and southwest of the continent much of Australian anthropology has been conducted in areas remove from European settlement and it is from these areas that the image of the ‘typical’ indigenous cultures of Australia has been derived.
Aboriginal Australia

Fieldwork

2010-01-21T00:06:00.000-08:00

Fieldwork
Through out the nineteenth century anthropology was often a hobby of well to do scholars who are able to ravel to out of way places and study exotic people.

A number of anthropologists also analyzed accounts written by other, especially if they could not afford time and expense of a field expedition.

This armchair anthropologist, based on travel diaries and missionary accounts rather than field search, lead to a particular styles of analysis that could not hope to capture the true nature of traditional societies.

Even those who could do field research there was no systematic attempt to meet true research standards.

It was not until the twentieth century that anthropologists became really concerned with the quality of their research and began to develop a set of standard for the field worker.

A leader in the movement toward uncontrolled research methods for cultural anthropology was Bronislow Malinowski.

Born in what is called now Poland, Malinowski was trained in mathematic but early in life he became interested in anthropology.
Fieldwork

Sociology and anthropology

2009-12-31T04:05:00.001-08:00

Sociology and anthropology
One important difference between these two fields is that sociology is concerned with the study of our own society, while anthropology is a comparative discipline that focuses in all societies at all times.

Sociology is interested mainly in the present anthropology deals just as much with the past.

However, these contrasts are growing less valid every day as anthropologists adopt sociological methods and sociologists adopt the comparative approach of anthropology.

Another way of looking at the difference between sociology and anthropology is to note that sociology tends to be quantitative, while anthropology tends to be qualitative.

What this means is that the sociologists generalizes from broad surveys of large numbers of people and the anthropologists relies on close knowledge of a few members of a group to form impressions.

Although these impressions might not be valid for the society as a while (quantitative), there are valid in greater depth for the small sample studied (qualitative).

The anthropologists may spend weeks finding the answer to particular question, mainly out of intense personal involvement in the study.

The sociologists, on the other hand, cannot, afford to become badly deeply involved in surveying a larger simple of the society.

The major difference between anthropology and sociology –probably lies in the methods used. Anthropology uses intensive methods of study; sociology tend to employ broader, more extensively methods.
Sociology and anthropology

The Antiquity and Ancestry of Man

2009-11-08T08:25:00.000-08:00

The Antiquity and Ancestry of Man
The history of human culture, in which the history of science is an important, reveals at first a very slow growth with roots in the remote past.

In his various biological aspects man shows evidence of descent from ancestor related to the great apes.

Many facts suggest a vast area in south central Asia north of the Himalayan mountains as the place where the human stem arose.

The time when our ancestors became really human probably could not be stated definitely, even if all the circumstances were known, for the change must have been a very gradual one.

However, it certainly was completed before the beginning of the Pleistocene.

The geological epoch, following the Pliocene and preceding our own Recent Epoch, was distinguished by extraordinary cooling of the earth.

Four times great ice sheets spread southward over lands of the northern hemisphere, and four times they related.

During each of these Ice Ages, distinctive mammals appeared, some of gigantic proportions, and their skeleton, buried by dust storms or in the sediments of the swollen of the warm interglacial ages, enable geologist to recognize deposits laid down in any one age.

On other evidence, geologists estimate the length of these ages in years and the whole epoch is believed by American authorities to have lasted a million years ending about twenty-five thousand years ago.

Very early in the Pleistocene primitive men were living in widely separated localities, probably migrants escaping competition with more progressive races at home.

The most primitive of these is the Trinil man (Pithecanthropus) of Java. He was very ape-like, but recent discoveries (1937) shown anatomical features that distinctively human.

There is however no evidence of distinctively human behavior. It is different with Peking man (Sinanthropus), who inhibited caves eastern China at about the same time.

He had larger brain, and he made tools and fire, - activities as distinctively human as articulate speech.

When he learned a kindle a fire from sparks that flew as he chipped flints to make his crude implements, he made the first application of a physical principle to human needs.

Perhaps earlier in time, but with more modern features the Piltdown man (Eoanthropus) was established in southeastern England in the Pliocene or earliest Pleistocene.

A somewhat later type, of Mid-Pleistocene age, the Neanderthal, pursing the great beasts, overran Europe during the second interglacial period. Around their camp fires they made the first completely flaked flint implement, the hand ax- tool characteristic of the Old Stone Age, Paleolithic.

They in turn, gave way during the last Ice Age, perhaps 150,000 years ago, to modern man Homo sapiens, represented by the Brunn and Co-Magnon races.

The latter left in numerous cave dwellings implements of flint and bone and drawing and sculptures, showing fine powers or observation and great manual dexterity.
The Antiquity and Ancestry of Man