Society and Culture

Cultural Anthropology

2012-01-25T22:02:00.000-08:00

In a strict sense, we could include archeology and anthropological linguistics under cultural anthropology for they are both concerned with culture.

But since these subfields are generally considered separate from the major focus of cultural anthropology, it is better to treat them separately.

Cultural anthropology, as the term is commonly used today. Generally refers to the study of existing peoples.

Further it takes a comparative approach; that is, its aim is to understand and appreciate the diversity on human behavior, and develop a science of human behavior through comparison, of different people throughout the world.

In the United States they often distinguish between two areas of cultural anthropology; ethnology and ethnography.

Ethnology is the comparative study of culture and the investigation theoretical problems using information about –different groups.

Ethnography is simply the description of the one culture; it is not a comparative study.

In other words, an ethnological study is based on two or more ethnographies; the latter provide the raw material for the former.

Thus the word of the cultural anthropologists consists of two main tasks: to describe the culture of other peoples and to compare them.

These tasks are not easy, since putting something from another cultural context into the concepts and works available in the English language is not always possible.

In fact, it might consider an anthropologist’s description of a foreign culture to be cultural translation.
Cultural Anthropology

Color categories

2012-01-18T17:15:00.000-08:00

One of the most intriguing examples of folk categories is the colors that different language languages recognize.

We all know that there is a very wide range of colors in nature. If you ever tried to decide what color to paint your house and have pored over dozens of color charts at the paint store, you know how many variations of the same color there can be.

We can look at ten different shades of green, and even though we can see that there are different, we still call them all “green”, thus lumping them into the same category.

An interesting experiment is to take finely graded color samples (such as those in a custom-mixed paint color chart) ranging from green to blue, including perhaps 20 to 30 shades.

If you look at both extremes, you can easily say that one is green and the other one is blue.

The hard part is drawing the line between one shade and another, saying that one belongs to the category “green” and the other to the category “blue”.

In fact sometimes we get around this problem by inventing another category, “blue green”.

In our language the category “blue-green” is really not a separate category but merely a convenient label for the transition between two categories.

We know this because we do not have a separate word for it. This indicates to us that, while blue and green are significant, the transition form one to the other is less so.

But in the other language there could easily be a word that designates “blue-green” as a separate category.

Certainly there is no reason why this could not be done – after all, isn’t green a transition between blue and yellow?
Color categories

Chinese: recording Hours and Earthquakes

2012-01-10T01:02:00.000-08:00

Wang Ching, a philosopher who lives in the 1st century AD, showed that the movements of the stars and the moon and eclipses, were predictable and could not have a magical effect on people’s lives.

Other scholars were at work on mathematics. Zhang Heng calculated a value for pi – the ration of the circle’s circumference to its diameter – which matches closely the figure used today.

In the land where earthquakes were a constant treat, he also made the world’s first seismograph to detect and record them.

At about the same time, the Chinese invented a water clock, and made accurate sundials marked off into 100 equals unit.

They calculated correctly the phases of the moon and the length of the solar year, and had system for writing decimal numbers.

Not all Han ideas were quite so scientific and most people shared the traditional belief in the forces of Yin and Yang.

Yin is weak, passive, female and dark, where Yang is strong, active male and bright. One could exist without the other, and all things are in constant state of flux between the two.

The moon is yin, the sun yang; day becomes night but night will place to day. The forces were symbolized by a circle divided into dark and light halves by a curved line, each half containing a spot of the other’s color.

The Han state was run on the principles of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher born about 551 BC.

His code valued an orderly way of life and the advantages of all people knowing their place in the society, but did not cater for spiritual needs. And neither did the native Chinese beliefs – in stern ancestor spirits and nature gods – offer any hope of personal salvation.

So there was a spiritual vacuum and after the 1st century AD the religion of Taoism (or Daoism) moved to fill it.
Chinese: recording Hours and Earthquakes

Sumerians: Words and figures

2012-01-03T04:35:00.000-08:00

The Sumerians were the first people to develop a system of arithmetic.

Adding subtracting and multiplying were important skills when handling goods such as sacks of grain or heads of cattle in quantities.

The Sumerians also developed an efficient system of weights and measures and their supreme invention – that of writing – arose from the practical need to keep records of goods for the purposes of trade, or tax collection.

Those records began in the simplest way with picture images of the item - an ox head for example – and a number of dots to indicate the quantity.

Symbols were drawn on a soft clay tablet using a sharpened reed. The tablet was then baked in a kiln to harden it.

Originally list of items were arranged in vertical columns starting from the top right hand side.

Around the 3000 BC, however, scribes found that they could write better by turning the tablets and writing from left to right, in horizontal rows.

At the same times, the original pointed stylus was abandoned in favor of one with a wedge shaped tip.

Scratching with a point was prone to leave untidy ridges: the new wedge shaped stylus could be pressed into clay to leave a crisper impression.

Stylized images, composed entirely of cuneiform, or ‘wedge-shaped’, marks made up the writing system used in Mesopotamia.
Sumerians: Words and figures

Color categories

2011-12-29T20:25:00.000-08:00

Morpheme

2011-12-20T06:30:00.000-08:00

Phonetics is the study of the sounds of language. The important or critical sounds of a language are called phonemes.

Once we have identified phonemes the next step is to put sounds together into meaningful units.

A unit of meaning is called morpheme, and it may include one phoneme or several.

It may also include such things as pitch and tone, which can change the meaning of a sound - every child knows from the tone of his or her mother’s voice whether she is angry or happy.

A morpheme then is a meaningful unit of sound or sounds in a particular language.

Must remember that language is a form of symbolic communication and that the meaning of the sounds in a language are arbitrary, being what ever the people who speak them agreed upon.

We say water while the French say eau (pronounced “oh”) and the Spanish say agua. All three words mean the same thing because the people who use them agreed that they do.

Morphemes should not be thought of in terms of written words; they are more than just the sounds those words represent.

There are morphemes in languages for which there is no writing. And some morphemes can have several forms, both writing and spoken.
Morpheme

Theory of Cultural Anthropology

2011-12-13T22:22:00.000-08:00

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

The field refers to the areas in space in which cultural anthropologists find 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 field is usually some form of community.

Natural history method distinguishes cultural anthropology from the other social sciences. This method is founded on meticulous observation. First is to isolate a field of interacting people. Then observe them interact over natural time cycles (days, seasons, years, generations, a life-time).

These observation is controlled and cross check by repeating them and by questioning – interviewing – our subjects for information about past activities. In this way, by patient, repetitive charting and cross checking of human events, patterns and processes can be distinguishes.

These in turn, with some certainty, 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 be 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 anthropologists seldom make predictions on the basis of their theories. It is important to realize that a prediction is not the only test of a theory.

A theory, then, is a statement of the apparent relationship among observed facts.

Facts originally referred to deeds, events observed in the past. Toady facts refer to givens accepted as true, but they bear the connotation of deeds or event. However, emotional states or feeling can also be facts. To be accepted, both facts and theory must have been verified by repeated observations, often by several observers.
Theory of Cultural Anthropology

Theories of Meaning

2011-12-10T10:03:00.001-08:00

It would take a whole semantic theory to answer the questions raised below, but in the history of semantics a few “leading ideas” have emerged concerning the nature of meaning, and a brief look at some of these proposal is instructive.

As a preliminary we should note that in everyday English, the word mean has a number of different uses many of which are not relevant to the study of languages:

• That was no mean (insignificant) accomplishment.
• This will mean (result in) the end of our regime.
• I mean to help if I can.
• Keep off the grass! This means (refers to) you.
• His losing his jobs means (implies) that he will have to look again.
• Lucky strikes means (indicates) fine tobacco.
• Those clouds mean (are a sign of) rain.
• She doesn’t mean (believe) what she said.

These uses of word mean can all paraphrased by other expressions (indicated in parenthesis above). None of the, is appropriate for our discussion of word meaning. Rather, we will use the terms mean and meaning as they are used in the following examples:

• Procrastinate, means “to put things off.”
• In saying “it’s getting late,” she meant that we should leave.

These two uses of the word mean exemplify two important types meaning: linguistics meaning and speaker meaning.
Theories of Meaning

Phonetics

2011-11-29T16:30:00.001-08:00

The study of the sounds of language is called phonetics. If you were suddenly placed in a situation in which you could not understand what was being said, the first you would do is try to recognize the sounds people were making.

The important or critical sounds of a language are called phonemes.

The study of phonemes also includes such factors as stress or accent, and pitch and tone. One of the reasons that we have so much trouble pronouncing foreign words is that they include phonemes that are not part of our own language.

One way we can tell the phonemes or important sounds in a language from ones that are not is by recognizing minimal pairs.

This is a way of separating those sounds that change meaning from those that do not. For instance, you can recognize where certain people come from by the way they speak English.

Some people have what we call a British accent and they sound different form people raised in New England, New York City or Georgia. Yet even though they sound different we can still understand what they say because their use of sounds does not change the meaning of their words.

The use of minimal pairs allows us to see what range of sounds can be used in a word without changing its meaning.
Phonetics

The Ancient Chinese: Bronze and Silk

2011-11-22T08:36:00.001-08:00

Chinese legend says that silk was discovered in about 3000 BC by the wife of the mythical emperor Huang-di. A silkworm cocoon accidentally fell into some boiling water and when emperors took it out, she found that it was made of an enormously long and very delicate thread.

Whatever the truth about its origin, by the time of the Han dynasty the Chinese were weaving silks of a high standard, with many colored abstract designs and patterns of birds, trees and flowers.

The same sort of care was applied to other arts. Craftsmen made multicolor lacquerware bowls covered with intricate floral patterns; they painted on silk, and carved friezes on tombs and ornaments from jade.

Their glazed pottery was a forerunner of the porcelain of later dynasty. As early as the 16th century BC the Chinese had mastered the art of bronze making, and they excelled in making vessels to hold food and wine.

They were made in a variety of forms – some stood in three legs and others were shaped like animals. All were highly decorated and some were inlaid with gold and silver. Later bronze craftsmen made mirrors by giving bronze discs a highly polished surface and plaques decorated with animal figures.

Around the 5th century BC, Chinese metalwork turned their attention to iron. In the Han years iron was so important that for a time its manufacture was a state monopoly, with 48 foundries staffed largely by forced labor.

The Chinese made cast iron 15 centuries before it was possible in the West and even produced steel by combining pieces of iron with different carbon levels. Their success with cast iron came from their knowledge of bronze working, and the invention of a bellows that gave very high furnace temperatures.
The Ancient Chinese: Bronze and Silk

Element of Language

2011-11-14T22:47:00.001-08:00

An anthropologist who goes into the field faces many of the same problems that any student of new languages faces.

Anthropological linguistics tries to overcome some of these problems by looking at language in general rather than at specific languages.

In this approach there are three main areas of concern:
*sound
*meaning
*structure

Human beings are able to make wide range of sounds. If you have heard people speaking other language, you know that they sound different from English, not just because the words unfamiliar but because some of the sounds used are not used in the English language.

Hebrew for example, has many sounds made deep in the throat that are unlike anything that occurs in English. Chinese may have a “sing-song” effect when spoken by a native, a pattern quite different from the English speech.

Some African languages use clicks as part of their speech, sound like those might use in calling a horse or those you might produce when making idle (but meaningless) sounds with your tongue.
Element of Language

Folk Categories

2011-11-08T06:28:00.000-08:00

One area of the interest in anthropological linguistics is the study of folk categories, that is, the units of meaning into which a language breaks up the universe.

Every language conveys much of the content of a culture in the items that it labels with separate words. For example, in one Inuit (a native word for Eskimo) language there are 12 separate and unrelated for wind and 22 word for snow.

That is, 22 different kinds of snow are recognized and given names that not just different forms of the same root word but different words altogether.

It is not important to English speakers that there are many types of snow, so we used adjectives to describe these variations – wet snow, powder snow, and so on.

We may occasionally use different words, such as sleet or hail, but that is about all the variety our language allows. On the hand, we have a large vocabulary to deal with technological aspects of our culture that are important to us.

Look at all the words we have for the automobile: sedan, convertible, coupe, fastback, wagon, bus, van, truck and so on. Obviously, we would not expect a member of a society in which automobiles are not found to make such distinctions: to them a car is a car, period. But then, to us snow is snow, period.

The idea that the structure and content of one’s language affects one’s thought processes is fascinating one.

If you have ever studied foreign language, you have found that there are some words that simply cannot be translated into English. This illustrates the importance of language in shaping the way we look at the world.

Each language has certain words that describe experiences or feelings that are peculiar to the group of people who share that language and culture.

It is often impossible to translate such a word literally in English, for there is no way to capture its essence in a single English word.

Instead, we usually end up with several words in a rather awkward phrase that may convey some of the meaning but is never really satisfactory.

Thus learning a foreign language is not merely and exercises in memorization but a lesson in cultural anthropology as well, for by learning the language we learn something about the way other people think and about the ways in which they are different from us.

Language gives us insight into culture, and as such it is a valuable tool for studying an understanding people.
Folk Categories

Linguistic heritage with three revolutions

2011-11-01T17:10:00.001-07:00

Three successive revolutions have transformed the nature of human being communication. In all three revolutions, the communicative use of language has undergone a change of function. The first revolution began with the invention of writing system.

In principle, this freed man from the ephemeral limitations of the spoken word. But writing and reading, and thereby access to codified knowledge, remain a privileged activity of scribes and the educated minority, and the experience of the common man remained limited to a face to face oral culture.

The second revolution, with the invention of mechanized printing, made mass literacy possible. This Gutenberg revolution enabled mass education.

It dramatically expanded the horizons of the ordinary citizen’s community and made democratic participation in the government of nation states effectively possible for the first time.

One side effect was to standardize the form of written language and written text has dominated the structure of knowledge, communication and culture for five hundred years until present day.

We are now in the early stages of the third and most radical revolution of all, where computer based information and communication technologies (ICTs) give the individual the power of instant world-wide access to information through a fluid and natural mix of written text, graphic images and sound.

This information revolution is giving birth to the information society, in which the role of language itself is once again being transmuted, by the effects of screen based multimedia communication networks like the internet. Linguistic heritage with three revolutions

What is Ecological Anthropology?

2011-10-25T23:58:00.000-07:00

Ecological anthropology focuses upon the complex relations between people and their environments.

Human populations, socially organized and oriented by means of particular cultures, have ongoing contact with and impact upon the land, climate, plant and animal species and other humans in their environment and these in turn have reciprocal impacts.

Ecological anthropology directs our attention to the ways in which a particular population purposely or unintentionally shapes its environment, and the ways in which its relations with the environment shape its culture and its social, economic and political life.

There are several basic points upon which ecological anthropologists agree: any particular population is not engaged with the total environment which surrounds it, but rather with certain selected aspects and elements, which may be called its habitat, and the particular place which it occupies in that environment may be labeled its niche.

Each population has its own particular orientation, or adaptation, to the wider environment, institutionalized in the culture of the group, particularly in its technology, which includes established knowledge of plants and animals, weather and minerals, as well as tools and techniques of extracting food, clothing and shelter.

Furthermore, a population’s adaptation is often influenced by the socio cultural environment constituted by other human populations, their cultures and adaptations.
What is Ecological Anthropology?

The Zoroastrianism

2011-10-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

Zoroastrianism is the most difficult of living faiths to study because of its antiquity, the vicissitudes which it has undergone, and the loss through them, of many of its holy texts.

Its lofty original doctrines came accordingly to exert their influence throughout the Middle East - an area where Judaism developed and Christianity and Islam born.

To the east Iranian rule extended into Northern India, and there Zoroastrianism made a contribution to the development of Mahayana Buddhism.

Some knowledge of the teachings of Zoroaster and of the history of his faith is therefore needed by every serious student of world religious.

Zoroastrianism is the oldest of the revealed creedal religions, originating over 3500 years ago in a Bronze Age culture on the Asian steppes and its has probably had more influence on mankind, directly and indirectly, than any other single faith.

In its own right it was the state religion of three great Iranian empires, which flourished almost continually from the sixth century BC to the seventh century AC and dominated much of the Near and Middle East.

Iran’s power and wealth lent it immense prestige, and some of its leading doctrines were adopted by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as by a host of Gnostic faiths, while in the East it had some influence on the development of northern Buddhism.

Zoroastrianism played an important role among the Iranian speaking population, and the teaching of Zoroaster has conquered the eastern Iranian territories before Alexander’s conquest.

Today external forces have reduced the Zoroastrianism themselves to tiny scattered minorities, living mostly in Iran and India; but beliefs first taught by their prophet are still subscribed to by other people throughout the world.
The Zoroastrianism

Semantics: part of grammar

2011-10-17T18:35:00.000-07:00

Semantics has not always enjoyed a prominent role in modern linguistics. From World War 1 to the early 1969s semantics was viewed, especially in the United States as not quite respectable: its inclusion in a grammar (as linguist sometimes called a scientific description of a language) was considered by many as either a sort of methodological impurity or an objective to be reached only in the distance future.

But there is as much reason to consider semantics a part of grammar as syntax or phonology. It is often said that a grammar describes what fluent speakers know of their language – their linguistics competence.

If that is so, whatever fluent speakers know of their language is a proper part of a description of that language. In other words, appealing to what fluent speakers know about their language counts as motivation for including a phonological fact or a syntactic fact in the grammar of that language, then the same sort of consideration motivates the inclusion of semantic facts.

A more general consideration also motivates us to include semantics in the part of grammar of a language.

A language is often defined as a conventional system for communication, a system for conveying messages. Moreover, communication can be accomplished (in the system) only because words have certain meanings; therefore, to characterize this system – the language – it is necessary to describe these meanings.

Hence, if a grammar describes a language, part of it must describe meaning, and thus the grammar must contain semantics. Taking these two considerations together, it seems reasonable to conclude that semantic information is an integral part of a grammar.
Semantics: part of grammar

Nomads from Asia

2011-10-11T02:05:00.000-07:00

The steppes of central Asia in ancient times provided a vast belt of grazing land for tribes of nomadic herdsmen.

They were highly mobile people who lived according to the rhythm of the season, following the wandering of their sheep, goats, horses, cattle or yaks. Theirs was a cold and forbidding landscape of mountains and bare plains.

They had no writing and they made no stone built cities. Moreover, as wanderers they had no use for cumbersome furnishings, using only lightweight household items, chiefly of wood hides and cloth.

What is known of the nomads survives in a scattering of graves, and in texts written by observes from the settled civilizations to the east and west.

The Greeks knew the Asian nomad loosely as Scythians, applying term more specifically to a group who, from the 7th century BC, set up a kingdom north of the Black Sea.

The Scythian women were rarely seen, but kept confined to their wagons and circular tents; these tents made of felt stretched over a wood framework and known as yurts, can still be seen in central Asia today.

The men wore kaftans, distinctive pointed headgear and trousers – a major invention of Asian horsemen and one that made riding more comfortable. They also carried swords, shields and a bow and arrow case.

Notorious among ancient peoples for their cruelty, the Scythians were said to blind their slaves to make them easier to manage, and to drink from cups made from enemies’ skulls.

The Greek historians Herodotus described many of the Scythians’ outlandish customs, especially their burial rites which included the ceremonial slaughter of wives, servants and animals.

The burial of kings, he said, took place in a great square pit. The royal corps was embalmed, its belly slit open, cleaned out, and filled with chopped frankincense, parsley and anise before sewn up again. With the bodies of slaughtered attendants and horses were piled mounds of golden vessels.
Nomads from Asia

Language as Social Process

2011-10-05T01:48:00.000-07:00

Sociolinguistics is the appropriate contemporary term for the issue and problems that face language and a social community.

Although the term has become over associated with dialects and regional variations of language, it should be used in accordance with its original definition, which referred to any correlation between language use and the social occasion that prompted it.

This would include face to face encounters, speech acts, speech episodes, and the like.

A speech community is at the core of sociolinguistics and has attracted much attention, but its sense remains ambiguous. The concept of speech community is fundamental because it establishes the unit of understanding as social rather than linguistics.

One begins with the problem of a social unit (e.g., family, decision making group, couple, and organization) and then considers the entire communication system that constitutes the social unit.

Language problems are defined as problems of communications and social functioning. Some theorists used term to refer to people who use the same speech signals and thereby emphasize large scale groups who share a language.

Some linguists have used the term in this way to describe the ideal speaker in the ideal speech community.

They are concerned with identifying a language and discovering the universal features of that language.

The term is used in this case to outline a group of speakers who share a tongue. A second use of the term speech community draws on a sociological or anthropological perspective in which a “group of people” is defined according to any of the various cultural or social conditions that occasion their organization

But language is more than a social group’s mechanism for making meaning. Language, or symbol using ability, is the defining characteristics of humans.

Much philosophical inquiry has been devoted to a definition of humankind. Language was born to serve communication and is, therefore a social process; some continued understanding of language is necessary.
Language as Social Process

Anthropology Linguistics

2011-09-26T03:51:00.000-07:00

The study of language from an anthropological viewpoint is one of branch of modern anthropology. Anthropologists who specialize in linguistics today are concerned with relationship between language and cultural behavior.

They ask question about language from the point of view of the human species, rather than trying to describe the language or its structure. The central focus is still on people, and language is viewed as part of the social world.

One are of anthropological linguistics is the study of the origin of language. This could just as well be a question for physical anthropologists.

At present there is an important controversy over which of the fossil hominids was the first with the capacity for speech. Another area of interest is the role of language in social behavior.

This is a fairly new field known as sociolinguistics, and it is concerned with the way people use language people speak or various forms of it.
Anthropology Linguistics

Concepts of Phonetics

2011-09-18T22:29:00.000-07:00

Concepts of Phonetics
Phonetics is concerned with how speech sounds are produced on the vocal tract as well as with the physical properties of the speech sound waves generated by the larynx and vocal tract.

Whereas the term phonetics usually refers to the study of the articulacy and acoustic properties of sounds, the term phonology, is often used to refer to the abstract principles that govern the distribution of sounds in a language.

Physiology of Speech
At its fundamental level speech signal is a rapidly flowing series of noises that are produced inside the throat, mouth and nasal passages and that radiate out from the mouth and sometimes the nose.

One common sense view is that learning to speak a language requires only the control of a few muscles that move the lips, jaw and tongue.

These anatomical structures are the most easily observed in any case. In reality the situation is much more complex, for over 100 muscles exercise direct and continuous during the production of the sound waves that carry speech.

These sounds waves are produced by complex interaction of:
•An outward flow of air from lungs
•Modifications of the airflow at the larynx
Additional modifications of the airflow by a position and movements of the tongue and other anatomical structures of the vocal tract.
Concepts of Phonetics

Tavern

2011-09-17T21:08:00.000-07:00

Tavern is a place of business where people gather to drink alcoholic beverages and more than likely, also be served food.

A papyrus document from ancient Egypt warns, “ Do not drink in the taverns.........for fear that people repeat words which may have gone out of your mouth without you being aware of having uttered them.”

The beer tavern of ancient Egypt were furnished with mats, stools and chairs upon which customers sat side-by-side, fraternally drinking beer, wine, palm brandy, cooked and perfumed liquors.

The taverns of Babylon and Nineveh were owned by wealth merchants who employed women managers, sold liquor on credit, and received payment in grain, usually after the harvest.

Greek and Roman cities had taverns that serves food as well as drink; excavations on Pompeii (a Roman city of 20,000) have uncovered the remains of 118 bars.

In both Greece and Rome some taverns offered lodging for the night or gambling and other amusements.

The Romans were proud people who held that the business of conducting a tavern was a low form of occupation and the running of such establishments was usually entrusted to slaves.

After the fall of Roman Empire, the next taverns reappeared, they were alehouses along the trade routes which provided a stable for the horses, a place to sleep and sometimes a meal.

As time went on the tavern became a permanent institution all over Europe. There were many versions: inns, pubs, cabarets, dance halls, and “meetinghouses.”

Neighbors gathered at these establishments to exchange the latest news and gossip over a mug or a tankard.

In cities men of similar interest met for a round of drinks and good talk. The tavern was a place to enjoy life, to socialize, to exchange ideas and to be stimulated.

The spread of the tavern and its gradual rose to the status of a social stage and a necessary meeting place, a forum for conversation, are features of the early modern era.

The building of taverns and refreshment places along the main roads and in the suburbs of large cities and the appearance of the scourge of drunkenness, began to be denounced by the moral authorities on society.

When European immigrated to America. They brought the tavern with them. It was considered essential to a town’s welfare to have a palace providing drink, lodging and food.

In Wisconsin, in 1840 the first house built by a man named Lamb, who conducted it as a tavern in the area later named Green Bay near Fox River.

Often tavern was built near church so that parishioners could warm up quickly after Sunday services held in unheated meetinghouses.

Taverns became popular and not only places where hungry and tired travelers could sup and sleep. In many cases, they were political gathering places. For instance, Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at the India Queen Tavern in Philadelphia; the Green Tavern, Boston, was the site of the formation of the Ohio Land Company.

Merchants held regular meetings in taverns and sometimes even courts and legislature did also.
Tavern

Traditional Civilizations

2011-09-12T18:05:00.001-07:00

The same processes that obliged human beings to group themselves in semisettled, warring and trading tribal communities also obliged some of them, in historically distinct times and places, to settle down in cities and to develop the state out of their political behaviors.

Under pressure to reap new resources from crowded, often degraded habitat, and reacting to a more complicated internal social structure and to competition from nearby groups, certain horticulturalists develop more intensive gardening in appropriate habitats – always river valleys.

Internally, their tribal politics and competitive feasting gave way to priestly rule followed by military rule and the rise of dynasties.

Cities are accompanied by the greater factoring out of the array of human institutions into full time specialization. Rural, food producing communities fall into satellite arrangements around urban centers, two forms of such traditional civilizations are possible: one, the green city, has decentralized urban institutions and dispersed populations; the other the nucleated, walled city, has centralized cities and aggregated populations.

That is, in the one form a monarch may inhibit an isolated palace, his council may convene someplace else, his army may be scattered in barracks around the realm, and collective royal ceremonies may be performed at yet some other place – a shrine or royal tomb perhaps.

The rural population of food producers is spread more or less evenly over the cultivable land. In the other kind of city the central institutions of state, army, religion, and trade are all concentrated in a single settlement, side by side in usually distinct architecture.

Moreover, the population is densely packed around the urban center, usually defended by strong wall. The food producing population lives in village scattered around, but there is strong tendency, encouraged by defense in warfare, to bring the villagers inside the city and settle each one in an urban ward.

At this level of community, ritual becomes a full time specialty of priests at shrines, which are at once the intellectual, economic, and often – especially in start-up phases of civilization – political centers of civilization. Temples and their plazas form the stage-drop for the dialogue of civilization, that communication taking place between particular local “folk” peoples and the elites – full time leaders specializing in the emerging institutions.
Traditional Civilizations

Concept of Language

2011-09-06T18:56:00.001-07:00

How many words do we know? We all have the intuition that our vocabulary cannot be too enormous since we don’t remember having to learn a lot of words.

Yet when we think about it, we realize that the world around us appears to be infinite in scope. How do we use a finite vocabulary to deal with potential infinite number of situations we encounter in the world? Our vocabulary also has an open-endedness that contributes to our creative use of language.

Researcher said that children just entering school “command 13,000 word. A typical high school graduate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number.”

This number (120,000) may appear to be large, but think of example of all the people and all the places (streets, cities, countries, etc) can be name. In sum, any one who has mastered a language has mastered an astonishingly long list of facts encoded in the form of words. The list of words for any language (though not complete list) is referred to as its ‘lexicon’.

When we think about our native language, the existence of words seems obvious. After all, when we hear others speaking our native language we hear them uttering words. In reading a printed message, we see words on the page neatly separated by spaces.

But now imagine yourself in a situation where everyone around you is speaking a foreign language that you have just started to study. Suddenly the existence of words no longer seems obvious.

While listening to a native speaker of French, or Navajo or Japanese, all you hear is a blur of sound, as you strain to recognized words you have learned. If only the native speaker would slow down a little, you would be able to divide that blur of sound into individual words.

The physical reality of speech is that for the most part the signal is continuous, with no breaks at all between words. The ability to analyze a continuous stream of sound (spoken language) into discrete units is far from trivial and it constitutes a central part of language comprehension. When you have mastered language, you are being able to recognized individual words without effort.
Concept of Language

Study of Communities

2011-09-02T19:14:00.001-07:00

Anthropology differs from its sister disciplines because it includes human biology. Thus we see all human individual as members of natural groups: living, breeding populations we call communities.

For anthropology, community is the minimum social field necessary for the survival of the group and the transmission of its culture. Community for us, then, is a set of human beings in contact with each other through “network.”

That is, each person does not necessarily know each other else, but each is linked to everyone else through others.

Communities share space, or territory, but community populations are usually dispersed over space and come together on regular schedules, either during the solar year or during a person’s typical lifetimes, especially for the crises of coming age, getting married, or death.

Indeed, one of our broadest general principles is that community, so defined, exists for all stages of human cultural and social transformations.

Anthropologists have classified many community “fields” and arranged them in a typology that ranges from simples to complex.

Each type is more densely populated and complexly organized. With a wider array of more fully specialized and full time institutions.

Starting with the hunting and gathering human band, human behaviors have differentiated themselves into successfully more distinct and specialized institutions. Human bands originated out of earlier groups, which in turn emerged out of the primate troop.
Study of Communities

Cultural Anthropology as Natural History

2011-08-22T22:21:00.000-07:00

The scientific method that most distinguishes cultural anthropology from the other social sciences is the natural history method.

In philosophy natural history is an example of induction – that is, reasoning from a set of observations to arrive at general principles.

Thus, for anthropology the facts always come first, and the principles – inferred from the facts – come second. Cultural anthropology always goes from particular to the general.

Moreover the principles (conclusions and, statements of order or “law”) vary according to the framework shaping any particular set of facts.

The principles, for example, that governed our emergence as a species were primarily those of adaptive value of physical traits (speech and a larger brain) in relation to a new ecological niche, hunting and gathering.

As another example, the transition from bands to the tribal level of sociocultural organization reflected the pressures of human population that had filled that niche over the entire world. Principles shift their levels of generality as the focus or spotlight on particular sets of facts shifts.

In its widest framework, evolution proceeds from the situational ability of apparently random events, such as genetic mutations or behavioral patterns, to solve some problem, such as the movement of a group of living beings into a new habitat.

The result is ever more complex biological and social “designs”. Living system exhibit over time, population growth, escalation in scale and increasing specialization of functional subparts. All living systems, whether a single biological organism or a larger social group, are self regulating, responding to exterior conditions in the environment from which they must derive and transform matter, energy, and momentum in the process of reproducing both the species and the group.

They also engage in a characteristics array of activities or actions to process that matter and energy, which are propelled by momentum. These activities form cycles, in the sense that they characteristically go through a “round” and start over again with the same sequence of behaviors.

Living species group themselves into “breeding populations,” or communities. Their characteristics activities also form natural, observable divisions in their behavior, which are the basis for what can be called ‘institutions’, or sets of more or less discrete activities that, taken together, solve some problem and perform some function for the benefit of the individual and the group.

Thus, the cluster of activities that surround a chimpanzee mother’s nurturing and raising of her infants and juveniles form a coherent social complex of activities that calls the “mother-offspring family.” One way to look at human social and cultural evolution is through the successive emergence, or “factoring out’” of human institutions. That is, when an institution has fully emerged, human beings have given it a name and attached names or labels to the “roles” one must play in them.

Thus, the human “family” has the roles of “mother” and “son” or “daughter,” as well as “husband” and “father,” two roles not present in the chimpanzee family prototype.
Cultural Anthropology as Natural History