05.10.

2023

Social evolutionary paradigm

- Darwin – Biological to social Darwinism.

- Unilinear view of social evolution
- Psychic unity of humankind
- Societies would progress through parallel but independent evolutionary stages
Stages of development, Unilinear, and the idea of progress

Comparative method

Social philosophers – Armchair anthropologists  Giving questionnaires to the people who go

overseas or to see different cultures and make assumptions according to the gathered data. With the
assumption that “primitive” cultures were like “living fossils”.

Herbert Spencer  Survival of the fittest in the society sense. Preservation of favored races in the
struggle for life. (Racist a.hole)

Lewis Henry Morgan

Savagery – Barbarism – Civilization

Each stage correlated with specific developments in family structure, subsistence, and technology

Critiques of the Social Evolutionary Paradigm

1. British school  Functionalism (Bronislaw Malinowski and his students)

2. North American School  Historical Particularism (Franz Boas and his students)

Malinowski’s methodology

Immersion: Departing from white men and being in contact with the natives.

Building rapport and trust relationships.

Participating in society.

Skeleton: Framework of society through collecting concrete data

Flesh and Blood: The manner in which a given custom is carried out.

“The native perspective”: Their feelings, ideas, language, etc.

Franz Boas

Critique of the concept of race and biological determinism

Interested in the question Nature or Nurture?

10.10.2023

Franz Boas’ one student Margaret Mead

Published “Coming of Age in Samoa” (1928)

 Interested in the “Adolescence” period of life. Adolescence is not necessarily a time of

rebellion. It depends on how people and norms interact with the adolescents.
 Also interested in “Child rearing practices”
 Social and Cultural Construction of Gender Roles. Like women are prone to nurture, care for
children, etc. She searched if these roles of masculine men who are strong and Women who
are caretakers are universal.
 Anthropology as Cultural Critique-different possibilities: If some people were to act
differently in other cultures. It shows that the gender roles, child practices, etc. They are not
shaped by biology.
 On the nature vs. nurture debate she digs deep into the Nurture side.
 She had a huge impact on women’s movements.

Basic Assumptions
 Research in other cultures preferred over research at home enhance “objectivity”; “pristine”,
and “undiscovered” by other anthropologists
 Small community- as the appropriate unit of investigation. Presumably represented the
entire culture.
 Anthropology-assumed to be a positivist science based on a laboratory model.
 Social world//Natural world-governed by underlying order and general laws
 The data and patterns of “social facts” are out there to be discovered by the researchers,
independent of their interpretations.

1960’s: The World Turned Upside Down

Coexistence and simultaneous uprising movements. (Anti-Colonialism, Feminism, Anti-war, etc.)

Series of challenges and issues for Social studies to engage

The idea is that through a positivist model of science, “we” can discover the truth of how the world
works for ourselves through empirical investigation and construct a better society for ourselves (the
idea of progress)

The white European male can detach himself from his culture and take a comprehensive, objective
stand in his study of the world.

Implications for how we conceptualize SOCIETY and CULTURE: how do we study them? Who “we”
are? Etc.
Challenges and Critiques

 Political Economy – In the 60’s rediscovery of Marx.

-Taking into account the world-historical political economy

- Social and Economic processes that connected the different parts of the world.
- NOT treating societies as isolated entities.

 Interpretive Turn –

-Interpretive Theories (Clifford Geertz)

-Focus on interpretation and meaning rather than causality and behavior
-Culture as text- Thick description. Multiple layers of meaning: “The difference between a
wink and a twitch.”

-Interpretive Turn offers a different epistemology (How we know what we know)

Explanation / Understanding. Understanding the difference between a suicide and an
accident.

-Culture
Culture is not something bounded by place (Turkey example)
Culture is Contested rather than shared, agreed upon, or ordered. Away from Essentialism.
It is something historical rather than enduring.

 Critique of Representation –

-Who has the power to represent other societies?

-Knowledge and Power
-Focus on writing as a form of representation
-- Multivocality: Informants, active subjects rather than objects of research, hearing
multiple voices.
--Reflexivity: Being able to situate both the anthropologist and the theories used.

 Feminist Critique –

- How were the cultural “rules of the game” made, by whom, and for whom?

- “Personal is Political”

- Power relations permeate (Nüfuz eder) all levels of society.

17.10.2023

Economic Anthropology I READ: “P. FARMER’s Structural Violence”

-Production  Food production is at the core

Why can’t people feed themselves?

-Consumption

-Distribution of goods and services

These things are what the economy deals with

Patterns of Subsistence

 Foraging: Hunting and gathering wild plants and animals

Collecting food rather than producing it
Until the Neolithic Revolution – relied on hunting and gathering
 Pastoralism: Herding large domesticated animals
 Horticulture: Small-scale farming
 Intensive Agriculture: Large-scale, intensive farming

Misconceptions about foraging

 Images of harsh environment, miserable lives, on the brink of starvation

 Adequate and reliable food supply
 Relying primarily on nuts, vegetables, and fruits (outside of the subarctic region
 Leisure time

Contemporary Examples

- The Kung of Kalahari Region

- Environment too dry to support agriculture or the keeping of livestock
- Collection of roots, nuts, fruits, and vegetables; hunting of animals
- Highly nutritional food supply
- Highly selective in taking food from the environment:
- 1/3 of the edible plant foods are eaten; 17 of 223 local species of animals hunted
- 12-19 hours/week in the pursuit of food
Pastoralism

- Reliance on animals for food and other products

- Herding large domesticated animals
- Seasonal Migration
- Nomads
- Cyclical pattern of migrations
Cool highland valleys in the summer
Warmer lowland valleys in winter
- Trade their animals in markets
- Environment: Semi-arid open country where farming cannot be sustained without importing
irrigation water from great distances
- Dramatic decrease with the rise of the nation-states
19.10.2023

Farming

 Different types of farming:

 Tools
 Land Tenure
 Alteration of The Land
 Type of Soil Enrichment
 Crops
 Purpose

Farming-Horticulture

- Small-scale, low-intensity farming

- Mostly subsistence farmers
- Still practiced in tropical forest areas in the Amazon basin; on mountain slopes of South and
Central America; parts of Central Africa, Southeast Asia
- Shifting pattern of land use (Slash and Burn technique)
- Multi-cropping

(These people are growing things to feed themselves)

Colonials suggest that they are not efficient and they don’t know how to farm. Then try to take
over the land.

Small farms not being able to feed large populations.

Centers of early intensive agricultural civilizations

- Mesopotamia, Nile, Mesoamerica, etc. In early times able to feed large populations

 Intensive Agriculture
- Water management systems
- Domestication of large animals for pulling plows
- Permanent settlements
- Surplus crops – Market centers (to sell/trade the surplus)
- Changes in the concept of ownership
- Social stratification (Someone needs to divide labor, etc. Thus social stratification appears
Contemporary examples of intensive farming

- Mechanization of agriculture
- Ranching
- New sources and uses of energy

- Plantation agriculture- Large, labor-intensive farms that produce fruit, sugar, fiber, and
vegetable oil products for the international market (This also applies to colonial farming. Not
production for self-sufficient but for its trade value. Mostly monocropping) This plantation
economy changed the type of land. Collected the small pieces of land in order to create a
huge one. While changing the social stratification. Turning self-sufficient small farm owners
into wage laborers. Now these wage laborers have trouble keeping themselves fed and have
no say in the usage of the land

- More than subsistence horticulture

- Role of multinational corporations

- “Why can’t people feed themselves?”

‘STORY OF COFFE: BLACK GOLD’

Why can’t people feed themselves

- To understand hunger and underdevelopment as a process

- Scarcity-generating mechanisms rather than scarcity itself
- “The Colonial mind’ “Our West India colonies cannot be regarded as countries. The West
Indies are the place where England found it convenient to carry on the production of sugar,
coffee, and a few other tropical commodities” John Stuart Mill
- Forced production
- Suppressing Peasant Farming
- Suppressing Peasant Competition

Usage of taxation systems to make people crop what the colonial mind.

Marketing boards: People don’t have access to the international markets by themselves. So they sell
it to marketing boards for very low prices. Without too much profit.
24.10.2023

Casa Grande System in Northeast Brazil. 16th to  20th century

Master’s house, Slave quarters, Sugar cane field, Mill to process sugar cane and get Sugar.

Self-sustaining in the system way not self-sustaining in the sense of small agriculture areas.

1888 Abolishment of slavery.  It didn’t occur at once and the slaves didn’t have any way to earn
their living once they were freed. It would be a huge gap in the labor force. Freed slaves are provided
with some sort of small land and continue to work for the master.

Usina = Factory.  Transformation from the casa grande system. They don’t process the sugar
anymore but still produce sugar cane as a supplier. They destroyed the forests and mills to create
more fields to improve the production of sugar cane.

Casa Grande system to Usinas

- Consolidation of landholding
- Evictions – for more land for sugar cultivation
- End of semi-autonomous peasantry

##How can someone fuck a slave's work conditions?? It seems like Europe has found a way.

Contemporary Issues

- Meat Production and Consumption

- Land Grab
- Genetically Modified Organisms (Genetically Modified Organisms Debate)
- Highly Concentrated Seed Market  And also pesticide use
- Turning Food into Fuel (Palm Oil plantations, biofuels, etc.)
- Struggles and Alternatives

Less than %5 percent of the world population consumes %25 of the meat.

Meat production and consumption

- Has connections to lots of issues like Biodiversity, Deforestation, Climate crisis, pesticides,
inequality, etc.
- The use of antibiotics in animal husbandry is resulting in more and more microbial resistance.
- The leading producers of Pesticides- Which contaminate groundwater and harm Biodiversity.
 - Hamburger connection. Deforestation in amazons and huge use of resources just to meet the
meat demand of the U.S.A.

Landgrab

- Some dynamic close to colonialization. Governments buying lands from Africa, Russia,
Indonesia, Australia, Turkey, etc. Renting a land for 100 years and producing what that
country needs. Providing profit from the job.
- (LOTS OF MAPS ABOUT LANDGRAB SHOWING BUYERS, AND RENTERS. AND THE AMOUNT
RENTED. Mostly focusing on Africa)
- Hunger map  Countries that lease out land and hunger map overlaps.
- Also overlaps with the Colonial map.

GMO DEBATE

- GMO production of vegetables etc. GMO seeds are sterilized which means you need to buy
seeds all the time. These types of seeds should be used with certain types of pesticides which
harm the land.
- A couple of companies that dominate the seed market. More than %50 percent of seeds are
produced by 3 company
- Big 6 companies control 75%of the global pesticide market
- Seven firms control 71% of the global seed market
- We see these big companies trying to merge. The biggest pesticide firm and seed firm
merged into one. They dominate the market. Become agro-chemical giants.
- In 2017-2018 they did merge.
- MAPS!, LOTS OF MAPS!!!! Check the slides for them.

GMOs claimed to be

- Resistant to pests, weeds, disease

- Productive in adverse climates and poor soil
- Crops need less water to grow
- More resistant food-ripe for longer, transported, etc.

Problems

- Unknown possible risks

- Unintended effect of gene insertion
 - Cross Pollination  Using pesticides on a piece of land. Can spread those things with the air
etc. Harming nearby agricultural lands too.
- Spread of new, more resistant weeds
- GMO technology companies patent their crops

26.10.2023

Biofuel

- Check The Slide!!!

Palm oil plantations. Used in cosmetics and processed food. Because it has a longer shelf life. Some
of it can be used in the production of biofuel.

Indonesia and Malaysia make up nearly %85 percent of global production.

Struggles and Alternatives

There are various campaigns to help solve this issue. You can check the slide for the organizations.

Organic farming in Turkey only makes up %3 of the agricultural production in Turkey.

‘Buğday’ Association is trying to encourage organic farming in Turkey.

The USA loosened the borders during the strawberry season to reduce the cost of production. And
once the season is over ‘Right wing strikes back!’.

CHECK LA VIA CAMPESINA WEBSITE IF INTERESTED CONTACT ZAFER HOCA to maybe learn more
about the organization and if there is any way to participate
Systems of Distribution and Exchange
 Although the primary form of Exchange is standardised Money there are still different types
of Exchange which we’ll see

Potential Components of Exchange

- Pure economic gain

- Social gain  Gift, donation, help, etc. It is also some form of debt. That makes you feel like
you should give them something of similar value. With something similar.

Exchanging things is an important way to start and maintain social relationships.

(Weddings in Turkey, Veresiye, etc.)

Veresiye depends on mutual trust so ethnic and personal issues may block people from
maintaining the system. A Kurdish person in a Nationalistic Turkish neighborhood would not be
able to use veresiye as a shopping system.

 3 Different Modes of Exchange:

- Reciprocity (Reciprocal exchanges)
- Redistribution (Redistributive exchanges)
- Market Exchange

Reciprocity

Generalized Reciprocity:

- Gift giving without the expectation of an immediate return (Birthday present)

Balanced Reciprocity

- Explicit expectation of immediate return (eg. Barter)

Negative Reciprocity:

- An attempt to get someone to Exchange something that s/he may not want to give up.
(Bargaining?)

The Kula Ring (reading)

- The Trobriand Islanders (They engage in quite sophisticated economic transactions.
Contradicting the social evolutionary paradigm’s understanding.)
- An elaborate and highly ritualized Exchange of Shell bracelets and Shell necklaces that pass in
opposite directions between a ring of islands.

Malinowski argues that this is a very sophisticated economic system that combines generalized
and balanced reciprocity. This kind of exchange fulfills certain functions.  These ‘useless
objects’ are culturally important and they have stories. They have been circulating for a long time.
This is a way of maintaining trust and social relationships between these societies. There is also a
barter economy going on during the Exchange of these bracelets and necklaces.
Redistribution