How is culture produced and reproduced? The social construction of reality is a framework that helps us begin to answer this question. Using the social construction of reality framework

• how food in one of the below case studies is connected with other facets of culture and
• how it plays a role in the production and reproduction of certain cultural practices and
• how other cultural practices produce and reproduce certain eating habits.

 

In your response,  identify examples of each of the components of the social construction of reality and explain how they work together or influence each other. Include enough explanation of the cultural beliefs and practices so that someone who has not read what you have nor is a member of the same cultural group would be able to understand the connections.

Case Studies for this post:

Name an Anthropomorphic quality of a supernatural being that is physical. Name an anthropomorphic characteristic of a supernatural entity that is emotional. Name an anthropomorphic feature that is related to a supernatural character/personality.

How and in what ways is globalization having an impact on the environment?  Drawing on Sanabria (referring to The Anthropology of Latin America and the Caribbean by Harry Sanabria), explain why this is happening.  Compare with this article https://amazonwatch.org/news/2019/0425-complicity-in-destruction-2. Drawing on Sanabria (The Anthropology of Latin America and the Caribbean by Harry Sanabria), please explain what he means by “memory work.” Please offer at least two examples from readings, class discussion,s or Discussion Board activities that illustrate why memory is culturally important and/or filtered through a cultural lens.

Why does Mary Madden find Glasser and Bridgman’s approach to urban homelessness problematic?

1. Because it exoticizes the urban poor, constructing them as reminiscent of the “primitive” peoples who were so long the favored subjects of anthropology

2. Because it dehistoricizes poverty, neglecting questions about how and why homelessness comes about and thereby making it seem natural and inevitable

3. Because it appeals to the scientific authority of ethnography without being reflexive or critical about the ethnographer’s own role in urban power structures

4. All of the above

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What do Lyon-Callo and Hyatt mean when they say “…it appears to make little sense to conduct ethnographic studies focused on specific spaces or places when the issues confronting them are part of a larger web of global interconnections?”

Answers: 1. That many of the most significant challenges faced by urban communities are caused by capital flight from cities and across national borders – a process that is difficult to theorize or even document with a narrow ethnographic focus on the communities left behind 2. That an ethnographic focus on one place, such a city or an urban neighborhood, can cause anthropologists to lose sight of crutical (especially economic) connections across places 3. That community-based ethnographic research is becoming more and more difficult as neoliberalism changes the very meaning of “community” in the first place 4. All of the above

What kind of urban change drove the anthropology of cities beginning in the 1970s, according to Mullings?

Answers: 1. Deindustrialization 2. Public retrenchment 3. Displacement 4. All of the above

 

Low organizes her article through a series of parallel subtitles such as the sacred city, the fortress city, the modernist city, and the informational city. What is she trying to convey about the city through this discursive strategy?

Answers: 1. That the city is so complex and variegated that scholars in anthropology and across the disciplines are compelled to study them through a number of different windows 2. That a city can take on a different overall character at particular moments in time 3. That cities cannot be reduced to one aspect of human existence but embody the full scope of the human experience from faith to politics to economics to technology 4. All of the above

Where in the course have we encountered an analysis similar to Carvy’s concept of racial moral panic?

Answers: 1. In the Morgen and Maskovsky article, which notes that welfare restructuring was facilitated by the construction of (especially black, female) welfare recipients as immoral, deviant and dysfunctional 2. In the Wacquant article, which argues that “moral retraining” formed part and parcel of workfare and prisonfare working in tandem to rescript urban economic failure as moral and personal failure 3. In the Valayden article, which argues that concepts of “moral degradation” are crucial to the form of racism he calls feralization 4. All of the above

 

What does “racial feralization” have to do with cities?

Answers: 1. It has become a way for western military strategists to justify a campaign of permanent “counterinsurgency” in the Global South by positing its cities as wild, contaminated, out-of-control, feral 2. It describes the way in which all cities are becoming less civilized 3. It is reminiscent of Lefebvre’s description of the decline of the traditional city

 

What does Diren Valayden mean by “racial feralization?”

Answers: 1. A form of racism founded in a fundamental fear of catastrophic regression to less human state 2. A concept of race with centuries-old roots that has been deployed in new ways in the last few decades 3. A way of problematizing heterogeneous urban populations through the concepts of both race and risk 4. All of the above

LeFebvre felt that the crisis of the traditional city was linked to another major planetary crisis. What was it?

The crisis of overpopulation Answers: 1. The crisis of agrarian civiliation 2. The crisis of urban crime 3. The crisis of global warming

Describe (and compare and contrast) the gender or sexual division of labor of two different cultures that have two different modes of subsistence (from the four modes of subsistence described in this week’s reading; foraging, pastoralism, horticulture, or agriculture). You must choose the two societies from examples in the Week 3 textbook reading and you must name the two societies from the Week 3 textbook reading and cite them. How do your chosen examples of two different cultures show that subsistence systems are linked to cultural expectations about gender roles?