LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Many introductory anthropological texts will examine how types of social stratification align with modes of production. This text has something of a different focus, critically considering what it means…
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Social Stratification Division of labor, in and of itself, is not hierarchical, but when different values are assigned to different types of labor and some positions or…
Figure 9.1 These images illustrate some examples of national and international movements against social inequalities. There have been movements in response to inequalities of race, class, and gender, among other characteristics. This chapter will discuss important concepts for the critical examination of…
All societies have ways of exercising authority, making decisions, and settling disputes. In the 1940s, anthropologists distinguished between those societies with informal means of accomplishing these functions and those with formal roles and systems for doing so. In acephalous societies…
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Politics includes all activities associated with governing a society. Thus far, we’ve focused on the institutions and practices of government. But politics happens both inside and outside the…
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Before 1400 or so, the world was a variegated array of empires, kingdoms, and chiefdoms with their tributary societies, loosely linked by trade with acephalous societies at…
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: As mentioned in the last section, lineage orders are commonly associated with horticultural and pastoral societies, as well as societies that practice some combination of the two.…
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: Any group without an official leader is acephalous. When you go out with a group of friends, how do you make decisions about where to go, how…
LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this section, you will be able to: As discussed in Work, Life, Value: Economic Anthropology, many European countries began developing formal colonial rule over other parts of the world in the late 1800s. Their main…
Figure 8.1 For people all over the world, newspapers provide daily information about political actors and events. (credit, clockwise from top left: “Tourist Couple” by Pedro Ribeiro Simões/flickr, CC BY 2.0; “Intensely Reading the Newspaper in Addis Ababa” by Terje Skjerdal/flickr, CC…