Violence

1) In the Yanomamo culture, if someone is killed there is a revenge killing as their form of justice. Here, we would definitely frown upon that. When I was reading the article it reminded me a lot of the show "Sons of Anarchy". When a member of the motorcycle gang The Son's of Anarchy was killed- the first thing they spoke about was "waging a war" and getting revenge. The Yanomamo use vengeance to legitimize their killings.

2) The Yanomamo split into two groups. Essentially people who agree with the killing (the article said they were usually fueld by sexual issues) and people who do NOT agree with the killing. There is a retaliation which was described by the article to be a 'tit for tat" act. For example: you killed my brother so now i am going to kill yours.

3) Unokais are members who have killed and then been "cleansed' of their killing and released from the haunting of the person they killed's spirit. Unokais also have a higher rate of probability in finding a mate than un-unokais. The article stated that they are found to be more suitable mates than un-unokais.

4)

The Yamomamo political structure is an interesting one. Each group has a one or two leaders and then the leader of all the groups who is the headman or chief of the villiage.

The social status of the Yamomamo would probably be the Unokais. From the article it sounds liek they have an easier time gtting mates and stuff because their status is seen as desireable.

The kinship relationship with the Yamomamo is based off of the Unokais status. The family members of the Unokais is more protected than the family members of people who arent. Again because their status is considered to be more prestigious than someone who is un-unokais.


Unokais are more attractive to women because of their higer and more prestigious status. It is common for these men to have more than one wife (up to a dozen wives) at one time...also resulting in an a LOT of offspring and therefore a larger kin group to be more "protected" by the males status in the tribe or culture.



5) The revenge killings just sound insane. If that was happening here, no one would be able to leave their house half of the time. This is obviously why we have laws and run our society in a different manner than they do. It seems like it would be a never ending cycle of vengeance and revenge.

Kinship

The person I interviewed is my father. He was born in Rushden, England. He was not at all close with his dads family, infact, his father had been out of the picture since he was 5 years old. He is still alive, however, my father and my family have very little - almost next to no- contact with him. However, his mothers family (from Rome, Italy) was around more and therefore he grew up in a situation with more Italian culture and influence than British. He is not sure on the background of his father. He believe's that he is English and possibly French - but he's not too sure. His siblings aren't sure either. They don't know any of his family members that they could ask this question to. And his mother (my grandmother) is dead. 

This interview was a little awkward only because there are a lot of mixed feelings towards his own father. He has never been close with the family and I believe that his dad sometimes talks to my aunt (my dads sister) but not very rarely. I have met my grandfather once when I went to England to see other family. He did not talk to me or acknowledge me, so I did not really get to know him or what he was like. The interview was okay otherwise. If I was interviewing someone who wasn't related to me, I would not have felt the personal connection to it and therefore would not have felt as awkward or uncomfortable. 

There is definitely an emphasis on maternal lines as they do not really know anyone related to my dads father. When I was telling my mom about this assignment later (my parents are divorced and both remarried) she said that she was trying to do a family tree maybe 20 something years ago and she had written a letter to my grandfather asking him questions about his family. He wrote back telling my mom to mind her own business. My mom told my grandmother about it (my dads mom) and she said that it was because his sister was a prostitute and he and the rest of their family was ashamed by this.  My dad's mothers family is Italian. So they are very stereotypical. I have tons of cousins and "uncles" (ya know, those people who you arent really related to but they've been family friends so long they're practically an uncle. I'm not sure if this happens with really american families). In my dads family everyone is white and italian. So the ethnic differences thing doesn't really come into play. The only thing I could relate to this is that my dad, my uncle and my aunt all have "american" spouses. However, my Step mom's family is also italian so culturally we do the same kind of things that her family does and have the same attitudes about things so it made getting along with them really easy as we were all kind of on the same guido page already. 

I know my dads family pretty well. My mom's family we really only talk to her mom, (her dad ignores everyone and lives in florida), my great grandmother (we just had to get her committed over the weekend because she's 94 years old and going crazy. She's basically trying to kill herself in the hospital. very stressful), and her brothers. I do not see her brothers that often, however. I definitely am closer with my dads family. In typical Italian fashion, we would go to my dad's mothers (my grandmothers) house every sunday for family dinner when she was alive. Often, I would swing by my grandmothers work and take her home when she was off work and have dinner with her and my uncles. My dads sisters kids  and my sister and i are a month apart from eachother so my cousins and i were very close growing up. 

I am not really aware of times when situations have come up where someone needs to be the decison maker in my family. I know when my parents were married they seem to have an equal vote as to what goes on in the household. When my grandother was dying, my dad, his two brothers and his sister seemed to all be involved in the decisions that went on with that situation. This past weekend with my great grandmother drama, my grandmother, mom and great aunt all had equal say in what was happening with that as the three of them are her power of attorney and executors of the trust. 

Family members who marry into the family as opposed to people who are born into it are generally treated the same I suppose. My mom told me once that when her and my dad started dating my grandmother was mean to her but after she started having babies, she became nice. I don't know if this was the case with my aunts husband. I do know that my grandma didn't really like my uncles wife…however, no one really does. So she wasn't alone. She's really hard to get along with. 

I do not believe there are different attitudes in my family that are based in gender. If there are, I have never noticed it. 

I didn't really learn anything I wasn't already aware of. Because I grew up with no grandfathers or anything like that, these kinds of questions had already come up at an early age. My parents were always pretty open with my sister and i on the situation. So I would say that I pretty much knew all of this before diving into this assignment. 

Week 4 Blog Post: Subsistence and Economy

1) The benefits of agriculture would be having a food source local and close where you know exactly what it is. They can grow enough things for the size of their tribe (assuming that everything actually gros. I don't have a green thumb by any means so I am not sure what the ratio of things planted to things that actually sprout is). The benefit of a hunter gatherers is that you if you kill a moose or an elephant - you can feed your entire village or tribe.

2) Hunter and gatherers don't really have a "sure thing" sort to speak. If you go out and find it and kill it - then you're in luck. But if you have a less than perfect hunting day- you might arrive back at your village with nothing.  The same applies to agriculture. If your crop freezes, or is destroyed by a ton of bugs or some other kind of weird nature thing...you're also out of luck

3) I think they could be equally as healthy. A lot of people do the raw vegan thing where they only eat raw fruits and veggies. But on the other hand - you do need protein.

4) I think that some human populations moved into agriculture because of extinction of animals or lack of animals in the area to hunt. If you've killed all the cows, you need to find a new food source.

Blog Post #2: Environmental Adaptations

1.) The Zulu people live in the KwaZulu-Natal province area of South Africa. The region is described as being a lush subtropical region. On one side it is lined with the Drakensberg mountain range with peaks over 10,000 feet high. The other side is lined with the subtropical coastline with spots of forest and the middle is a savannah grassland. The climate is described as being on both ends of the spectrum - extremely hot during the summer and heavy snow in the winter.

The Andean Indians live in Central America south of Guatemala. The area is described as being entirely in the tropics. Heavy rainfall is very common and dry spots are not.

2.)  The Zulu have dark skin which is their physical adaptation. The darker skin protects them since they are closer to the equator where the suns rays are stronger.

The Andean people have larger ribcages than people who are born and raised in lower altitudes. This is because the air is thinner as you go higher and they need to breathe in more of it to get an ample amount. Also, people from lower altitudes cannot reproduce normally when in higher altitudes. The Andean Indians reproduce normally.

3.) The Zulu's cultural adaptation is their lack of clothing. Like Donald Duck, they don't wear pants. This is probably to keep them cool during times of extreme heat. The Zulu are considered a "nude tribe" because of their lack of clothing.

The Andean Indians have developed a way to farm their mountain sides, they have to do this by hand so it is physical labor because machinery - if they had any- would be nearly impossible to use at these angles.

4.)  As far as race goes I would consider the Zulu to be African or Black. I'm not sure what the official PC term is. The Andean Indians seem to be kind of a mix between native americans and hispanic.

5) The Zulu are dark because of their physical adaptation, which is why I would consider them to be African or Black. The Andean Indians physical adaptations don't really have anything to do with race, I think. Their skin looks a little darker than a caucasian person but they're also outside a lot farming. If I was outside a lot I would burn like a lobster, but then eventually get a little tan (I am using that very loosely). That wouldn't change my race, I would just be adapting to being in the sun.


http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/people/Zulu.html

http://www.talktalk.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0028672.html

http://www.native-languages.org/andean-culture.htm

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/aflang/zulu/culture.html

Week 1 Blog Post: Part A. Cultural Descriptions.

Extreme:  The part about the holy-mouth-man jabbing an awl into an exposed nerve made me cringe. That is definitely something that we wouldn't do here...well, unless you're at the dentist. It doesn't mean its completely barbaric. It just isn't up to what we do. Also, the thing about women baking their heads in an oven is a little strange.

Similar: The daily body ritual of the mouth-rite sounds a lot like some kind of weird teeth brushing to me. I think that we probably do some things similar, but just in different ways. They don't have crest and oral-b selling toothbrushes and toothpaste in their area. So maybe this is some kind of alternative? Going back to the thing about women baking their heads in an oven for an hour...it's like a day at the salon...kind of.

Primitive: Their healing rituals seem to be very primitive. Like I said in the last paragraph, they don't have the same luxuries that we have so it's like they're just working with what they have and what they know. They don't have a yale trained physician with an ample supply of medical necessities. They're working with what they've got and what has "worked" (or worked well enough) for hundreds of years for them.

Modest: The article mentions how these people do a lot of things in private and seem to be ashamed of some. Being pregnant, naked or anything having to do with the "restroom" they do in secret on their own. A lot of the time when you think of another culture that is not very "westernized" you think of them running around as savage animals just doing everything out in the open. These people seem to be the opposite of that.

Religious: The article states that each family has at least one shrine. I would think that this indicates that most have more than one and they make this a big part of their daily life. A lot of other religions do this same thing. It is interesting how that carries over to different cultures no matter what it is that you worship.



Part B


1.) As an American, I feel fine with my choice of descriptive words. I don't feel like they were too judgmental or rash.

2.) Yes, I believe that they do. I said that they were primitive. Which they are- in our society. In their world and society they are probably right up to par. I also said they were extreme for some of their rituals and customs. Compared to us, they are.

3.) For primitive I cant think of a single word I would use. But probably just "set in ways. For extreme I guess I would just say "different".

4) It would be best to approach these situations with a free and clear mind. I am in the process of studying and converting to buddhism and this assignment helped me realize that I am not bringing that aspect into all parts of my life. I should have approached this assignment at first with a 100% black mind and free slate so that I could not compare them to my own society and way of life but focus on the beauty and individuality of their ways.

environmental stresses

1)   The environmental stress I chose was heat.  Humans have adapted to almost every climate in the world. However, high temperatures (113F) causes the metabolism and human homeostasis to stop and will ultimately cause death. 

2)   When faced with heat stress an organism will reduce its metabolic activity so the heat in its body isn’t as high,  they decrease their energy levels,  humans in regions with higher temperatures usually have longer limbs because it allows more surface area on the body and the greater the surface area, the faster the body heat will dissipate into the environment and off our bodies, sweat also helps to cool our bodies.

3)   The benefits of studying human variation across different environmental regions would be useful to us because we could see the differences in peoples reactions in different climates. Do people in hotter climates sweat differently than people in cooler ones? What is the average limb length in a higher temperature climate verse a cooler climate? 

This would be beneficial to science so we could have a better understanding when we find fossils. We would be able to see if the limbs on those correspond with the current day adaptations and see when this started.

4)   Race could be used as a more in-depth way to categorize humans and these adaptations. I think that it wouldn’t really be super important to the whole thing. Region the person is from would be the most important thing.  If this was in the terms of fossils we do not know that race as a defined as it seems today. 

Body language

Part 1:

I found this part of the experiment to be fairly easy. I was engaging in conversation with my step sister. She is a big talker so it was easy to carry on a conversation without actually saying anything just nodding in agreement or shaking my head to disagree. At about the 12 minute mark she noticed I hadn’t said anything and started getting mad at me thinking I was making a joke about what she was saying, but before that – she didn’t notice that I was not verbally responding to what she was saying.  It would be hard to say who would have the advantage in communicating complex ideas. I would assume it would be the person who cannot communicate with spoken language because you could kind of act things out which even the person who spoke with language could figure out.  I used to work at the Apple Store and I once assisted someone who was deaf at first he was kind of acting things out. It took a few minutes to get on the same “page” but eventually things were okay and i got him what he was looking for.  I think that if we were making up 2 fake cultures with the same specifications of the assignment the culture that had the vocal speech would think they were superior to the culture that did not use vocal speech. They would think they were uneducated or not as advanced . My answers were kind of backwards for this section.

Part 2:

I was able to last the whole 15 minutes with only vocally communicating.  My partner wasn’t effected by it at all. I did this portion with my mom. I noticed that she uses her hands a lot to speak. I think that I noticed this a lot because I was actually paying attention to it.  I come from a really Italian family. My Italian family is always waving their hands around when they speak. I think they would go nuts if you tied their hands down while they were speaking. My mom doesn’t come from an Italian background but I think that she picked something up from my dads family because she is insane with the hand movements when talking. I am currently watching my step-dad and my mom have a conversation and he is using his hands quite a bit – not as much as my mom is. I think that in our society it’s used to express feeling and seriousness. It definitely brings something to the conversation.  If I was deaf and watching their conversation, I think I’d be able to tell the “tone” of the conversation just by watching their body language and hand movements. A lot of people have difficulty reading body language. The benefit to being able to read it would be if you were in the situation where someone was saying something to you that was “serious” but their body language showed they were joking. You would then know it was a joke and not take their statement as serious.  The environmental condition where there might be  a benefit in not reading body language would be if you were really cold and shivering.  That would probably hinder the expression of any emotion because you’d probably bundled up and shivering.