Gender and sexuality are complex and highly variable aspects of culture. Examining evidence from primates and humans as well as the archaeological record, anthropologists have concluded that humans are highly variable, capable of many expressions of gender and sexuality. Cultural…
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Intersecting with gender, the anthropological study of sexuality explores the diversity of meanings, practices, relationships, and experiences associated with erotic interactions. Since the 1980s, the study of…
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: In cultural constructions of gender, two or more genders are defined in an overall system that assigns various forms of behavior and activity to different categories or…
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: So if gender is not a “natural” expression of sex differences, then what is it? Cultural anthropologists explore how people’s ideas of gender are formed in their…
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: For many people, male and female refer to natural categories that neatly divide up the human population. Often, people associate these two categories with different abilities and personality traits. Setting aside…
Figure 12.1 “It’s a _____!”: When someone announces the birth of a new baby, a first question is often whether the infant is a boy or girl. (credit: “It’s a Boy!” by George Ruiz/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Chapter Outline 12.1 Sex, Gender, and…
Kinship is an adaptive mechanism. As a sociocultural construction, it is defined differently across cultures to adapt to the specific needs of a society. While most of us think of kinship as a biological relationship, it is, in fact, a…
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Anthropological Definition of Marriage Figure 11.14 Customers peruse goods in a market in downtown Lima, Peru. Some Indigenous people in Peru begin marriage with a practice known as servinakuy. In servinakuy,…
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: By defining relationships between individuals, cultural understandings of kinship create kinship systems or structures within society. This is the institutional aspect of kinship, and it is bigger…
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: A family can be defined as two or more people in an adaptable social and economic alliance that involves kinship, whether perceived through blood, marriage, or other permanent or…