Language and Power Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Explain how language can operate as a gendered form of power. Identify how racial categories and bias are expressed through linguistic practices. Describe strategies used by communities to revive their dormant languages. Gender and Language In 2018, the word “mansplaining” was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The word is defined as “what occurs when a man talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of, with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he's talking to does” (“Words We’re Watching” 2018). The word was inspired by an article written in 2008 by the feminist blogger Rebecca Solnit . In the article “Men Explain Things to Me,” Solnit described an incident at a party in which she mentioned to a man that she had recently written a book about a particular photographer. Immediately, the man interrupted to inform her about a very important book that just came out about that same photographer, a book he had read about in The New York Times. After the man had described the book in great detail, Solnit’s friend finally intervened to say that the book he was talking about was, in fact, written by Solnit. In the wake of Solnit’s article, other women writers described similar experiences in their workplaces, schools, and relationships, and the whole phenomenon came to be called “mansplaining.” Rebecca Solnit, the author of the article “Men Explain Things to Me”. The term “mansplaining” has become a well discussed topic in the years since she introduced the term. (credit: “Rebecca Solnit” by Charles Kremenak/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5) Have you ever witnessed mansplaining? Have you ever mansplained to someone? Embedded in the very term is a notion about gender and language. The idea is that men and women have different styles of speech, styles that reflect and reinforce inequality between genders. In recent years, many writers have pushed back against the term “mansplaining,” arguing that all men do not always speak this way to all women. Some argue that many men are much more respectful and sensitive to the dynamics of power in their conversations with women. Some argue that privileged White women tend to speak in a mansplaining way to male waiters and salespersons or to people of color more generally. Others suggest that older people speak in a condescending way to younger people, or vice versa. Have you ever become annoyed with a friend or relative who repeatedly interrupts you? Have you ever noticed how some people tend to end their sentences with rising intonation, making everything they say sound like a question? How about a person who ignores what you say but then rephrases your idea and takes credit for it? Many people associate these ways of speaking with gender, the way men speak or the way women speak. As noted in the discussion of language acquisition, every culture has ideas about how language operates, called language ideologies. The idea that American men and American women have distinctive styles of speech is a language ideology. Whether it is true or not is a question for linguistic research, but this idea has become a widespread way of thinking about gender, power, and language in American culture. In the 1970s, linguists inspired by the women’s movement turned their attention to the way gender shapes different patterns of speech. In her influential book Language and Woman’s Place (1975), Robin Lakoff argues that women and men are socialized to speak in distinctive ways that empower men and subordinate women. Lakoff describes women’s speech as uncertain, excessively polite, and full of hedges, emotional language, euphemism, and tag questions (“Don’t you think?”). Other linguistic researchers have found that men tend to interrupt women far more than vice versa, even when the women speaking are doctors and the men are their patients (Zimmerman and West 1975, West 1998). Building on this research, Deborah Tannen generalized beyond speech patterns to describe two entirely different communicative subcultures for American men and American women (1990). When men and women speak to one another, Tannen argues, they are speaking cross-culturally, deploying different motivations and expectations for talk. Men engage in conversation to assert their status in a social hierarchy, while women are more interested in building solidarity through social connection. Men authoritatively report information to their interlocutors, while women engage in conversational rapport with their interlocutors. In popular media, differences in the speech styles of men and women are frequently linked to purported differences in specific parts of male and female brains, such the corpus callosum, the amygdala, and the hippocampus. In this way, gendered patterns of speaking are naturalized as biological. Like the pushback against the term “mansplaining,” researchers have begun to challenge the view that women and men are embedded in different linguistic subcultures with different patterns of speech, motivation, and interpretation. Psychologist Janet Hyde conducted a meta-analysis of hundreds of quantitative studies to see if widespread notions about gender and language were actually borne out by linguistic data (2005). Along with notions of power, Hyde was interested in testing the idea that women are chattier and more deferential than men. Focusing on studies of children, Hyde found that boys and girls exhibited no differences at all in reading comprehension, verbal reasoning, and vocabulary. The tendency for boys to interrupt or speak assertively was only very slightly higher than for girls. The girls’ tendency toward self-disclosure and cooperation with their conversation partners was only slightly higher than for boys. The only significant differences Hyde found were in smiling and correct spelling (girls did more of both). How do we reconcile research demonstrating differences in the way men and women talk with data that suggests very little difference in the speech patterns of girls and boys? One could argue that children have not been entirely socialized into their assigned gender category. Perhaps the discrepancy suggests that gendered ways of speaking are cultural, not biological, and that, for children, the most intense period of socialization is yet to come in adolescence. Moreover, ethnographic research by linguistic anthropologists shows that patterns of speech associated with men and women are culturally relative. Reversing the American stereotypes, anthropologists working in Madagascar and New Guinea have found that women are expected to speak in a more confrontational and argumentative style, while men are associated with more cooperative, euphemistic, and ceremonial speech (Keenan [Ochs] 1974, Kulick 1992, both cited in Ahearn 2017). So both quantitative and ethnographic research overturn the notion that women and men are biologically engineered to use language in different ways. That leaves us with the conclusion that any differences in the ways men and women talk are entirely cultural. Literary scholar Judith Butler argues that gender identities are not biological but are performed through language and other cultural practices, particularly those centered on the body (1988). So when men and women speak in certain ways, they are socially performing their gender identities, whether consciously or unconsciously. Moreover, through their linguistic performances, people enact their own versions of gender in complicated ways that transcend the neat dichotomy of male and female. You probably have a language ideology that tells you how men and women speak in your culture, but do you always speak in the style associated with your assigned gender category? Nobody does. And some people rarely do. As these contradictory performances build up over time, the very notion of gender can change. Kira Hall 1962- Area of Anthropology: Kira Hall ’s work is situated at the intersection of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. In graduate school, she studied with Robin Lakoff in the linguistics department at the University of California–Berkeley, earning her PhD there in 1995. For her dissertation, she examined the linguistic strategies of Hindi-speaking hijras in Banaras, India. Hijras are members of a third-gender group in many Indian communities. Most hijras were raised as boys and later adopted the intersex behaviors and language of the hijra identity. Hall analyzed how hijras navigated aspects of gender embedded in Hindi, such as certain verbs and adjectives that are marked as feminine or masculine. She showed how hijras alternate between these gendered forms, code-switching as a reflection of their own ambiguous identities. She explored how hijras use obscene forms of language to shame people into giving them money. She showed how they had developed their own secret language as a way of communicating with one another, signaling their identity to others, and excluding non-hijras from understanding their conversations. Accomplishments in the Field: Reflecting her work at the boundaries of linguistics and anthropology, Hall has held academic positions in the anthropology department at Yale University and the linguistics department of Stanford University. Currently, she is professor of linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, with a joint appointment in the anthropology department. She is also director of the Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice at UC-Boulder. Since 2019, she has served as the president of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. Importance of Their Work: Hall’s work highlights how language operates within hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic class. In addition to her work on hijras, she has published articles on language and sociality in autism, female mass hysteria in upstate New York, and Donald Trump’s use of gesture and derisive humor in the 2016 Republican Party primaries. Race and Ethnicity On many government forms, people are asked to identify their “race.” Forms in the United States often include five categories: Black, White, Asian, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander. The category “Hispanic or Latino” is often listed as an ethnicity rather than a race. On the 2020 U.S. Census, people were presented with 14 racial categories to choose from: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Other Asian, Native Hawai’ian, Samoan, Chamorro, and Other Pacific Islander. Again, “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” was listed as a question of “origin.” Even with so many options, many Americans still could not find a category that represented their racial or ethnic identity. As you’ll remember from earlier chapters in this text, race is not biological. There is no accurate way to divide up the gradual spectrum of human biological variation, meaning that biological categories of race are entirely imaginary. However, we also know that social categories of race are very powerful tools of discrimination, subordination, solidarity, and affirmative action. Earlier in this chapter, we studied how sets of categories, “folk taxonomies,” are embedded in language. We saw how different cultures divide up the natural world differently. Likewise, race and ethnicity are folk taxonomies, embedded in language and organizing the social world into a neat set of groups. These categories are real insofar as they have shaped the structure of our society, advantaging some groups and disadvantaging others. And they are real insofar as they shape our thoughts and actions and even our subconscious habits and tendencies. Like gender, race and ethnicity are performed in language. We use language in conscious and unconscious ways to express racial and ethnic belonging as well as exclusion. Take the use of Spanish catchphrases by Americans who do not speak Spanish. Many Americans intend to be jokey and fun by using Spanish phrases such as “hasta la vista!” and “no problemo” as well as deliberately incorrect ones such as “buenos nachos” and “hasta la bye bye!” Anthropologist Jane Hill found that middle-class, college-educated White Americans were most likely (among other Americans) to use this “mock Spanish” (2008). People who use these phrases consider them harmless and even respectful, while Spanish speakers are often insulted by the association of Spanish with silliness. Hill argues that such phrases are only funny because they covertly draw from stereotypes of Spanish speakers as foolish, lazy, and inept. Similar arguments about cultural appropriation and stereotyping can be made about the use of Black vernacular speech by White Americans. In the United States, a variety of English called African American English (AAE), or African American Vernacular English, is spoken by many people in predominantly Black communities. With the widespread popularity of Black culture, many White Americans have picked up phrases and grammatical features of AAE while knowing very little about the vernacular and the people who speak it as their primary language. To many Americans, AAE is just imperfect English (it is not, as we’ll see in a moment). So what are White people signaling when they say things like “chillin’,” “lit,” “on fleek,” “aa’ight” (for “alright”), “ima” (for “I’m going to”) and “Yasss, Queen!” Does the use of this language convey respect for the communities associated with Black vernacular English? Or does it demean and subordinate Black Americans who speak AAE? People who use mock Spanish and mock AAE typically do not mean to insult anyone. The problem is not one of intent, but of context. In American culture, most middle-class White people speak forms of English considered standard or mainstream (Lippi-Green 2012). In fact, Standard American English (SAE) is historically based on the language of Anglo American immigrants. The adoption of White Anglo-English has always been considered critical to successful assimilation by minority and immigrant groups. Success at complete assimilation is often measured by the ability to speak SAE without an accent. But SAE is not speaking “without an accent.” SAE is an accent—the accent of White people whose ancestors emigrated from the British Isles. SAE is the dominant language of American public spaces, including schools, workplaces, government, and media. People who speak SAE without effort or accent can speak freely in these spaces, knowing that their language will be understood and respected. Americans whose primary language is Spanish or AAE often struggle to be understood and taken seriously in American public life. Given this context, it can seem disrespectful for White Americans to appropriate Spanish and AAE as tools of humor while denigrating and marginalizing the actual speakers of these languages. The issue is further complicated by the widespread and persistent notion among White Americans (and many Black Americans too) that AAE is not a language at all, but merely a hodgepodge of slang and bad grammar. This view is simply wrong, another language ideology that has no basis in fact. AAE is a rule-governed form of English with its own regular system of sounds, grammar, and vocabulary (Labov 1972b). For historical reasons, AAE shares many features with the English spoken by White southerners in the United States as well as working-class Cockney English from London (Ahearn 2017). Rooted in historical experiences of slavery and segregation, Black Americans have developed their own distinctive set of innovative linguistic features to supplement the more basic structure of American English. Consider the following three sentences: He is angry. He angry. He be angry. The first sentence is SAE, and the second and third are AAE alternatives. In SAE, this conjugation of the verb “to be” describes a situation happening in the present. But the SAE present tense of “to be” is a bit vague, as it can mean “right now, this very minute” or a more ongoing situation, perhaps describing a person who is frequently or enduringly angry. AAE helpfully distinguishes between these two possibilities. “He angry” means angry “right now,” whereas “He be angry” indicates a more ongoing situation. In linguistic terminology, the second example is called “copula deletion” and the third is called “the habitual be.” Both are used in regular ways to indicate the difference between momentary and enduring conditions. AAE is governed by many more rules and features that provide its speakers with expressive possibilities not available to speakers of SAE. In other words, AAE is not only a rule-bound vernacular; it’s a more developed and complex form of English. Linguists have been trying to convey this message to the American public since the 1970s (Labov 1972a). Read more about AAE at the Anti-Racism Daily website . Rather than recognizing the innovative contributions of vernaculars like AAE, language policy in the United States stigmatizes non-SAE vernaculars as “bad English” spoken by uneducated and unintelligent people. Linguist John Baugh calls this “linguistic profiling” (2003). With colleagues Thomas Purnell and William Idsardi , Baugh (1999) compared the response of California landlords to apartment inquiries spoken in SAE, AAE, and Chicano-American English (CAE). In Woodside, California, landlords responded to SAE inquiries 70.1 percent of the time. Inquiries in AAE received responses only 21.8 percent of the time and CAE inquiries only 28.7 percent of the time. Research in American schools and courtrooms corroborates the discriminatory effects of linguistic profiling on access to housing, education, and justice. The use of language to discriminate and marginalize is certainly not limited to American English. Elites in many cultures define their own way of speaking as “correct” and “official,” using linguistic practices in public spaces to disempower other groups based on class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. How can people respond to these forms of linguistic marginalization? For many upwardly mobile speakers of “nonstandard” vernaculars and languages, the process of becoming successful has involved the abandonment of their primary way of speaking in favor of standard, elite forms of language privileged in public discourses. But there is another alternative. As speakers of nonstandard vernaculars and languages move into public discourses, they can hold on to their primary languages, code-switching from context to context. Some language activists celebrate the genius of their “home” languages and work to nurture and revive them, as we will see in the next section. Can speakers of dominant languages contribute to the process of celebrating and revitalizing marginalized languages? Is it always insulting or racist for speakers of a dominant language to use phrases from another vernacular or language? Some people think so. Certainly it is harmful to use phrases that reference negative stereotypes (even indirectly). But what if your limited use of a few phrases can help you communicate with someone from a different background? What if SAE speakers started quoting Spanish or AAE in ways that highlight positive aspects of those speech communities? What if White people started learning AAE in order to publicize the genius and complexity of this American vernacular? What if you learn another language or vernacular in order to subvert the forces of cultural segregation in your own society? There are no easy answers to such questions. Endangered Languages: Repression and Revival In 1993, a Wampanoag woman living on a reservation in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, had a mysterious dream, recurring on three consecutive nights (Feldman 2001). In the dream, a circle of Wampanoag were singing in a language she did not understand. When she woke, words of the language stuck with her, and she longed to find out what they meant. Were these words of Wôpanâak, the language of her ancestors? Wôpanâak had died out in the mid-1800s. The woman was Jessie Little Doe Baird , a social worker and mother of five. Haunted by those words, she began reading through documents from the 1600s written in Wôpanâak, including letters, deeds to property, and the earliest translation of the Bible printed in the Western hemisphere (Sukiennik 2001). Though frustrated in her efforts to find the meaning of her dream words, she developed a passion for the language of her ancestors and began working with local Wampanoag communities to reclaim their common language of Wôpanâak. Community response was enthusiastic. Committed to the project, Baird went to MIT to study linguistics, earning a master’s degree. Based on her survey of Wôpanâak documents, she wrote a dictionary and began teaching Wampanoag students to speak the language . By learning their ancestral language, Baird and her students found themselves reconnecting with Wampanoag culture in unexpected ways. The grammar of Wôpanâak, for instance, puts the speaker at the end of the sentence rather than the beginning. Whereas English speakers would say “I see you,” Wôpanâak speakers would say something like “You are seen by me.” Baird suggests that this word order highlights the value of the community over the individual, putting awareness of the other ahead of the self. Wôpanâak displays alternative logic in the formulation of nouns as well. For instance, in English, animal names reveal little or nothing at all about the animal. The words “cat,” “mouse,” and “ant” are based on arbitrary sounds that convey no information about their referents. In Wôpanâak, however, animal names frequently contain syllables that refer to the animal’s size, movement, and behavior. The word for “ant,” for instance, incorporates syllables communicating that the animal moves about, does not walk on two legs, and puts things away. By now, you know that forms of cognition and culture are embedded in language. The languages of the world encode diverse experiences of time, space, life, death, color, emotions, and more. A language serves as a form of oral documentation of the surrounding environment, a survey of the flora, fauna, topography, and climate of an area. Forms of cultural wisdom are preserved in the stories and proverbs of a language. History is recorded in epic tales and legends. Language can be essential to maintaining cultural identity, affirming the common history and values of a people while providing them with a distinctive way of communicating with one another. Among the seven thousand languages spoken in the world today, roughly 40 percent of them are in danger of dying out in the next hundred years. A language is considered dead when it is no longer spoken by any living person. Wôpanâak was once considered a dead language. Some linguists argue that no language should ever really be considered “dead,” however, and prefer the terms “dormant” or “sleeping.” So long as there are written or audio records of a language, it can come to life again, a process called language revitalization . Returning to a language that has become dormant or endangered, community members can develop strategic programs to spread, nurture, and modernize the language, ensuring it has a future for generations to come. Languages generally become endangered or dormant through processes of colonialism and imperialism. In North America, as Native Americans were forcibly removed from their lands and confined to reservations in the 1800s, they were compelled to send their children to boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their Native languages or practice their Native cultures. As foreign settlers seized lands in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii, they established similar schools, aimed at assimilating Indigenous children by stamping out their language and culture. Elsewhere, more gradual processes of endangerment can occur when a new language offers opportunities for employment and trade only available to speakers of that language. Parents may encourage their children to learn the new language in order to take advantage of these opportunities, and children may come to reject their own language as a backward language of old people. Many, many languages have risen from dead or comatose states, among them Cornish, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Scots-Gaelic, the Ainu language of Japan, the Indigenous Australian language of Barngarla, the Indigenous New Zealand language of the Māori people, and the Native American languages of the Navaho and Blackfoot peoples. Often, as with Wôpanâak, the impetus for language revival comes from energetic community members who feel the loss of their language as a threat to their cultural survival. These concerned people create programs to document the language and teach it to children and adults. They establish contexts where the language is spoken routinely and exclusively. Sometimes they work with linguists to develop these programs. The most successful of these revitalization strategies are immersion schools and master-apprentice programs. In the early 1980s, Māori language activists developed full-immersion preschools, called Te Kōhanga Reo , or “language nests” (King 2018). In these nests, very young children are taught language and culture by Māori elders—grandmothers and grandfathers in the community. Native Hawaiians have developed a similar program of language nests, called Pūnana Leo . Early on, some parents worried that children in immersion schools would not learn the dominant national language well enough to be successful in later life, but research has shown that such children do just as well or better in later classroom performance and standardized testing. Many language revitalization projects combine early immersion with later bilingual education (Hinton 2011, 2018). The Navaho Immersion School in Arizona provides immersion education for the first three years of schooling and then introduces English as the medium of instruction through grade seven. From grades eight to twelve, children are taught in Navaho half the time and English the other half. Sign in front of a full-immersion school in Seatoun, New Zealand. All classes are held in the Māori language. (credit: “Te Kura Kaupapa Maori O Nga Mokopuna” by Tom Law/flickr, CC BY 2.0) One of the challenges of school-based revitalization programs is finding enough adults sufficiently proficient in the language to teach it to children. Among the strategies of language revitalization that target adult learners is the master-apprentice approach. The original Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program was founded in California by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (Hinton 2018). The strategy has since spread all over the world. In these programs, a proficient speaker and a motivated learner spend 20 hours a week together, using the target language plus gestures and other nonverbal communication to engage in various activities. When successful, language revitalization can empower individuals and energize communities. Learning their heritage language, people come to understand the distinctive genius and complexity of their culture while preserving a crucial means of transmitting that culture across generations. Dispute Analysis Choose a friend, relative, or acquaintance with whom you might disagree on a particular issue. Suggested issues might include musical taste, what makes a good restaurant, how to behave on a date, the best form of physical exercise, or anything else you feel comfortable talking about but might disagree on. Ask the person if they would consent to being recorded for an anonymous fieldwork exercise. If so, record a 5-to-10-minute conversation with that person in which you discuss the issue. Then, review the conversation. What seem to be the goals of the two interlocutors? What is the pattern of turn taking? What truth or knowledge claims are made by each speaker, and what are the bases of those claims? How is authority constructed and challenged? How does each one respond to the assertions of the other? How does the conversation turn out in the end? Summary Language and culture are closely entwined in the evolutionary development and contemporary diversity of human societies. Human language differs from animal communication in its complexity and flexibility, aspects of human communication made possible by unique human biological and genetic features. The complexity of language makes it a powerful tool in shaping human thought, providing categories and metaphors for organizing our information about the world. Though language shapes thought and action in universal ways, many aspects of language vary widely relative to local cultures. The social aspects of language are particularly relative, influencing how children learn languages in various sociocultural contexts as well as how people use language to create speech communities. In ritual contexts, language is used performatively to accomplish social action as well as challenging those actions. As a tool of power, language structures gender, race, and ethnic dynamics. Recognizing the fundamental importance of language to the preservation of culture, many Indigenous communities have developed strategies to revive their heritage languages using immersion schools and master-apprentice programs. Critical Thinking Questions Suggested Readings Ahearn, Laura. 2017. Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology . 2nd ed. Chichester, West Sussex, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bibliography Acoustical Society of America. 2018. “Can Chimpanzee Vocalizations Reveal the Origins of Human Language? While Closely Related to Humans, Researchers Discover that Chimpanzees' Vocalizations Resemble Human Language Less than You'd Expect.” ScienceDaily . May 8, 2018. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180508081505.htm. Afreh, Esther Serwaah. 2018. “Metaphors Otumfo? Lives By: A Cognitive Linguistic Study of Metaphors in Some Addresses by Otumfo? Osei Tutu II, Asantehene.” Cognitive Semantics 4 (1): 76–103. Ahearn, Laura. 2017. Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. 2nd ed. Chichester, West Sussex, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Alim, H. Samy, and Geneva Smitherman. 2012. Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S . New York: Oxford University Press. Arbib, Michael. 2011. “From Mirror Neurons to Complex Imitation in the Evolution of Language and Tool Use.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40:257–73. Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955 . London: Oxford University Press. Baugh, John. 2003. “Linguistic Profiling.” In Black Linguistics: Language, Society and Politics in Africa and the Americas , edited by S. Makoni, G. Smitherman, A. F. Ball, and A. K. Spears, 155–68 . New York: Routledge. Berlin, Brent, and Paul Kay. 1969. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31. Chun, Elaine W., and Adrienne Lo. 2015. “Language and Racialization.” In The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology , edited by Nancy Bonvillain. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Clarke, Esther, Ulrich H. Reichard, and Klaus Zuberbühler. 2006. “The Syntax and Meaning of Wild Gibbon Songs.” PLoS ONE 1 (1): e73. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000073. Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Epps, Patience, and Danilo Paiva Ramos. 2020. “Enactive Esthetics: The Poetics of Hup Incantation.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 30 (2): 233–257. Feldman, Orna. 2001. “Inspired by a Dream: Jessie ‘Little Doe’ Fermino, a Mashpee Indian, Is Working to Revive the Wampanoag Language.” Spectrum . http://spectrum.mit.edu/spring-2001/inspired-by-a-dream/ Frisch, Karl von. 1993. The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gibson, Kathleen, and Maggie Tallerman. 2011. “Introduction.” In The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution , edited by Kathleen Gibson and Maggie Tallerman. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hall, Kira. 1995. “Hijra/hijrin: Language and Gender Identity.” PhD diss. University of California, Berkeley. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. Haynie, Hannah, and Claire Bowern. 2016. “Phylogenetic Approach to the Evolution of Color Term Systems.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (48): 13666–71. Herrick, J. W. 1995. Iroquois Medical Botany. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Hill, Jane H. 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Hinton, Leanne. 2011. “Revitalization of Endangered Languages.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages , edited by P. K. Austin and J. Sallabank, 291–311. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hinton, Leanne. 2018. “Approaches to and Strategies for Language Revitalization.” In The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages , edited by Kenneth L. Rehg and Lyle Campbell. New York: Oxford University Press. Hyde, Janet. 2005. “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis.” American Psychologist 60 (6): 581–92. Kay, Paul, and Willett Kempton. 1984. “What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?” American Anthropologist, 86 (1): 65–79. Kay, Paul. 2015. “Linguistics of Color Terms.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences , edited by James D. Wright, 231–4 . Amsterdam, NY: Elsevier. Keenan [Ochs], Elinor. 1974. “Norm-Makers, Norm-Breakers: Uses of Speech by Men and Women in a Malagasy Community.” In Ethnography of Communication , edited by R. Bauman and J. Sherzer, 125–43 . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. King, Jeanette. 2018. “Māori: Revitalization of an Endangered Language.” In The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages , edited by Kenneth L. Rehg and Lyle Campbell. New York: Oxford University Press. Kulick, Don. 1992. Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self, and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Labov, William. 1972a. “Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence.” June 1972. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/ling001/Labov1972.pdf. Labov, William. 1972b. “The Logic of Nonstandard English.” In Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular , 201–40 . Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, William, Ash, Sharon, Boberg, Charles. 2006. Atlas of American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. New York. Mouton de Gruyter. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper and Row. Levinson, Steven. 2003. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lim, Yen Ying, and Peter Snyder. 2015. “Human Language: Evolutionary Precursors.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences , edited by James D. Wright, 329–34. Amsterdam, NY: Elsevier. Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2012. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. London and New York: Routledge. Lucy, John. 2015. “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences , edited by James D. Wright, 903–6 . Amsterdam, NY: Elsevier. Martin, Laura. 1986. “‘Eskimo Words for Snow’: A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example.” American Anthropologist , 88 (2): 418–23. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Did Humans Speak through Cave Art? Ancient Drawings and Language's Origins.” ScienceDaily. February 21, 2018. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180221122923.htm. Mensah, Adinkrah. 2020. “'If You Die a Bad Death, We Give You a Bad Burial’: Mortuary Practices and 'Bad Death’ among the Akan in Ghana.” Death Studies . doi: 10.1080/07481187.2020.1762264. Mertz, Elizabeth. 2007. The Language of Law School: Learning to “ Think Like a Lawyer .” Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Miyagawa, Shigeru, Cora Lesure, and Vitor A. Nóbrega. 2018. “Cross-Modality Information Transfer: A Hypothesis about the Relationship among Prehistoric Cave Paintings, Symbolic Thinking, and the Emergence of Language.” Frontiers in Psychology. February 20, 2018 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00115. Muehlmann, S. 2014. “The Speech Community and Beyond: Language and the Nature of the Social Aggregate.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology , edited by N. Enfield, P. Kockelman, and J. Sidnell, 577–98. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, Elinor, and Schieffelin, Bambi. (1984) 2001. “Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories and Their Implications.” In Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader , edited by A. Duranti, 263–301 . Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Patterson, Francine, and Eugene Linden. 1981. The Education of Koko . New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Purnell, Thomas, William Idsardi, and John Baugh. 1999. “Perceptual and Phonetic Experiments on American English Dialect Identification.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18 (1): 10–30. Seeley, Thomas D. 2010. Honeybee Democracy . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shatwell, Justin. 2012. “The Long-Dead Native Language Wopânâak Is Revived.” Yankee Magazine. October 9, 2012. https://newengland.com/yankee-magazine/living/profiles/wampanoag-language. Solnit, Rebecca. 2008. “Men Explain Things to Me; Facts Didn't Get in Their Way.” Common Dreams . April 13, 2008. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2008/04/13/men-explain-things-me-facts-didnt-get-their-way. Sukiennik, Greg. 2001. “Woman Brings Tribe’s Dead Language Back to Life.” Los Angeles Times . March 24, 2001. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-mar-24-mn-42039-story.html Sweet, Nicholas. 2019. “Ritual Contingency: Teasing and the Politics of Participation.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 30 (1): 86–102. Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Ballantine Books. West, C. 1998. “When the Doctor Is a Lady: Power, Status, and Gender in Physician-Patient Encounters.” In Language and Gender: A Reader , edited by J. Coates, 396–412 . Oxford, UK: Blackwell. “Words We’re Watching: Mansplaining.” 2018. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary . Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/mansplaining-definition-history. Yu, Ning. 2016. “Spatial Metaphors for Morality: A Perspective from Chinese.” Metaphor and Symbol 31 (2): 108–25. Zimmerman, D., and C. West. 1975. “Sex-Roles, Interruptions, and Silences in Conversation.” In Language, Gender and Society , edited by B. Thorne, C. Kramarae, and N. Henley, 89–101 . Rowley, MA: Newbury House. language revitalization the process of reviving an endangered or dormant language using strategies such as immersion schools and master-apprentice programs.

Social Sciences


Introduction Four entertainment professionals indicate their job satisfaction (credit: “De los Carnavales de Valdemoro” by manuel m. v./flickr, CC BY 2.0) If you are in college, someone has probably asked you the question, “So, what you want to do after you graduate?” Are they asking about the hobbies you would like to pursue? Are they asking about the vacation spots you would like to visit, the sporting events you would like to attend? No, of course not. When people ask about your plans postgraduation, they are asking about work. After you graduate, you will be faced with a similar question: “What do you do in life?” or “What do you do for a living?” It is one of the first things people ask when they meet someone new. What do people mean when they ask what someone does for a living? Certainly, they are wondering what kind of work that person does in order to meet basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter. But they are wondering more than just that. If someone answers, “I’m a circus clown,” or “I’m a tax accountant,” what does that reveal? Only where their paycheck comes from? Or does it also give some idea about where they live, what they eat, how they spend their days? Does it hint at what is important to that person? Of course, it can be misleading to generalize. But the way a person makes a living does often say something about that person’s way of life. In some cases, the question of what a person does for a living is not just an individual matter but one for the whole society. In some societies, most people meet their basic needs by doing roughly the same thing. And even in societies where different people play different roles, there is a fundamental process for making and distributing things that people need and want. Economists and anthropologists agree that this is the most basic definition of an economy: the central way in which societies meet basic material needs and wants. More specifically, an economy is a system for making, circulating, and using things, including material goods, services, and information. Economic systems are shaped by ideas about the meaning and value of objects, actions, and people. In many economic systems, some groups gain control over the work and leisure of others, structuring relations of inequality that operate through techniques of discipline (in the realm of work) and persuasion (in the realm of consumption). Like nosy strangers at a cocktail party, anthropologists always want to know what people do for a living. Archaeologists are curious about how people in the past developed strategies for making a living in response to different environmental conditions and sociocultural pressures. Physical anthropologists are interested in how human biology evolved alongside ways of using the environment to meet basic needs. Cultural anthropologists study the social and cultural implications of different ways of making a living. And linguistic anthropologists focus on the roles of language, classification, and metaphor in shaping different strategies for making a living. This chapter takes a close look at the primary ways in which humans interact and have interacted with the environment to meet their basic needs, in the past and in the present day. This area of study is called economic anthropology.

Social Sciences


Economies: Two Ways to Study Them Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Distinguish between economic anthropology and the discipline of economics. Describe the universalist and normative approaches to studying economic issues. Understand the importance of diversity, holism, environmentalism, and cultural relativism to economic anthropology. Explain how economic anthropology foregrounds social groups and power relations. Maybe you’ve had a course on economics or read a book by an economist. There are many good ones. A favorite of the author of this chapter, Jennifer Hasty , is Capital in the Twenty-First Century , by the French economist Thomas Piketty. It is an unusual book for a contemporary economist to have written. In fact, it’s almost anthropological. Most economics research is not very anthropological. Recall the three commitments of anthropology—in short, diversity, holism, and environmentalism. Across the four fields, anthropologists also value cultural relativism and reaching for an insider’s point of view. When an anthropologist considers how societies, groups, and individuals make a living, they incorporate these commitments and values. Take a look at a few of the articles featured in the January 2021 issue of Economic Anthropology : “Religious Networks and Small Businesses in Senegal” “Honesty and Economy on a Highway: Entanglements of Gifts, Money, and Affection in the Narratives of Ukrainian Sex Workers” “Gendering Human Capital Development in Western Alaska” “‘No trabajaré pa’ ellos’: Entrepreneurship as a Form of State Resistance in Havana, Cuba” Note the diversity of cultural contexts (the West African country of Senegal, the eastern European country of Ukraine, the North American state of Alaska, and the Central American island country of Cuba). Other articles in this same issue focus on economic issues in Kentucky, Spain, Italy, China, and Colombia. The titles also demonstrate an interest in linking ways of making a living to other aspects of society, such as religion, gender, and political resistance. All are based on long-term fieldwork aimed at understanding the multiple perspectives of local peoples and groups. Note also terms such as gendering and resistance , indicating an anthropological interest in social groups and power relations. Perhaps most importantly, the point of these articles is not to evaluate economic practices as better or worse compared to an ideal. Rather, economic anthropologists analyze the cultural and historical features that shape economic practices in different cultural contexts. As for environmentalism, this issue also features a discussion by five anthropologists on the topic of what economic anthropology contributes to the understanding of climate change. In this one issue, all of the central elements of anthropology are on full display. How is this approach different from the one taken by the discipline of economics? Compare Economic Anthropology with a premier economics journal, the American Economic Review (AER). The January 2021 issue of AER features such articles as the following: “Going Negative at the Zero Lower Bound: The Effects of Negative Nominal Interest Rates” “The Distributional Consequences of Public School Choice” “Politically Feasible Reforms of Nonlinear Tax Systems” “Lack of Selection and Limits to Delegation: Firm Dynamics in Developing Countries” “Job Seekers’ Perceptions and Employment Prospects: Heterogeneity, Duration Dependence, and Bias” The first thing you might notice in this list is the lack of any cultural context, with the one exception being the vague reference to “developing countries.” School choice where? Whose tax systems? Which job seekers? Although some of these articles do specify the context in the article text, that detail is not considered a sufficiently important part of the analysis to warrant inclusion in the title. This suggests that mainstream economic analysis assumes that history and culture do not play a very strong role in economic issues such as school choice, tax systems, and job seeking. Economists tend toward universalism , which assumes that economic processes operate in much the same way all over the world. In fact, a central concern of economics is to discover the universal principles that govern economies anywhere and everywhere. Implicit in most economic analysis is the idea that most realms of society work like markets, responding to universal forces of supply and demand. Moreover, economists view people as self-interested, rational actors situated within the various market-driven realms of society. Economists use statistics rather than fieldwork to evaluate these market-driven activities, sometimes searching for best policies to encourage economic growth or discourage inequality. Most of the articles in the January 2021 issue of the AER focus squarely on the economic realm, tracing relationships between factors within this realm rather than reaching beyond it, as anthropologists tend to do. And finally, in the January 2021 issue of the AER, there is no mention of environmental issues. This comparison is not intended to denigrate the discipline of economics but rather to show the difference in how anthropology frames economic issues. Anthropologists take a human-centered approach to economic issues, describing what people think and do as they make a living and how their practices change over time. Economists take a market-centered approach, describing how market mechanisms shape different areas of human life and how those processes change over time. universalism the belief that social systems have operated roughly the same way all over the world at all times past and present.

Social Sciences


Modes of Subsistence Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Define modes of subsistence. Describe the general elements of all modes of subsistence. List the four main modes of subsistence humans have used to make a living. Understand how each society has a predominant mode of subsistence but may also practice strategies from other modes. Anthropologists have a term for the way that people interact with their environments in order to make a living: mode of subsistence . There are four main modes of subsistence that have been used throughout human history: gathering-hunting, pastoralism, plant cultivation, and industrialism/post-industrialism. Each of these modes incorporates distinctive strategies for producing, exchanging, and consuming the things that people need to survive. At the most fundamental level are the basic necessities of food, clothing, shelter, and health. Modes of subsistence provide solutions to meet these needs by generating materials from the environment and developing techniques of labor and forms of technology to process those materials. Beyond these very important functions, modes of subsistence also organize society to get the necessary work done. Societies develop roles, groups, and institutions to divide up the workload of producing things. Modes of subsistence also entail specific ways of trading and circulating things within and beyond local groups. And finally, modes of subsistence emphasize certain ideals and values. This chapter will examine the four basic modes of subsistence one by one, including their development and a detailed ethnographic example of each. While each mode of subsistence is explored separately, it is important to recognize that most societies have a predominant mode of subsistence that incorporates various practices from other modes. The chapter also discusses the contemporary predicaments faced by many peoples practicing the first three strategies and why one might want to protect and support those economic lifeways. mode of subsistence a way in which people interact with the environment to meet their needs. Each mode of subsistence involves its own forms of knowledge, techniques, technologies, and social organization.

Social Sciences


Gathering and Hunting Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Define the subsistence strategy of hunting and gathering, also known as gathering-hunting. Identify and distinguish gathering-hunting groups in prehistory and contemporary societies. Articulate how gathering-hunting promotes certain other cultural forms. Overturn assumptions about the supposed “hard life” of gathering-hunting groups. Recognize the challenges facing most gathering-hunting groups today. Imagine that you were stripped of all possessions and transported to a grassland environment along with 30 or so other people. How would you begin to make a living? How would you find food and shelter? How would you keep your body comfortable and healthy? Throughout the millions of years of hominin evolution, those living in such environments practiced a strategy known as gathering-hunting . Some peoples still practice this flexible and congenial way of life. In gathering and hunting societies, people rely on the natural resources readily available in their environment. They gather fruits, nuts, berries, and roots and collect honey from wild bees. They hunt and trap wild animals, and they fish in rivers and lakes. Many gathering-hunting groups also engage in limited ways in other modes of subsistence, which will be examined later in the chapter, but their main way of making a living is through gathering and hunting. You might be surprised to see the word gathering appear before hunting in describing this subsistence strategy. The word order reflects a key debate about this subsistence strategy. Some researchers object to hunting and gathering because it privileges hunting as the most important activity of such groups. Early interest in these groups focused on the hunting activities of men as the most prestigious and valuable subsistence practices. In fact, gathering—done by both women and men—provides the vast majority of calories in the diets of such groups. This chapter will refer to this subsistence strategy as gathering-hunting and the people who practice it as gatherer-hunters . The Hadza: Gathering-Hunting as a Subsistence Strategy The Hadza of northern Tanzania are a resilient example of the way of life of gathering-hunting peoples as well as the contemporary challenges facing such groups. Like most gathering-hunting peoples, the Hadza traditionally lived in seminomadic groups of 20 to 30 people, called bands . About one-third of contemporary Hadza still practice this way of life. Hadza bands settle temporarily to gather and hunt the resources of a particular area, then move on to other areas in seasonal migrations. Sometimes, groups agglomerate into camps of several hundred to take advantage of seasonal foods such as berries. On most days, both men and women venture out into the savanna to gather food. Men seek out meat, honey, and baobab fruit, while women gather tubers, berries, and greens. When work is assigned based on a person’s sex, anthropologists call this a sexual division of labor . In Hadza society, men and women do specialize in obtaining different foods, but the division is not hard and fast; sometimes men pick berries, and sometimes women gather honey. Women of the Hazda cooking and socializing. The Hazda practice a traditional gathering-hunting lifestyle. (credit: “Day 5 - Time with the Hadza tribe” by sueomstead/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Women go out gathering in small groups, picking fruits by hand and using digging sticks to bring up edible roots. They carry foods in grass baskets and leather pouches. People feed themselves throughout the day and bring home foods to share with the whole band in the evenings. Hadza men often hunt in pairs at dawn and dusk, using bows and arrows coupled with expert tracking skills. They use animal ligaments for bowstrings and craft their arrows from wood and guinea fowl feathers. They use the sap of the desert rose plant to poison their arrow tips. Back when the area was teeming with large animals, hunters brought down zebras, giraffes, and buffalo. As the big game have diminished, they more often target antelope, monkeys, and warthogs. The Hadza have forged a mutually beneficial human-animal relationship to obtain honey, a highly valued food that contributes 10 to 20 percent of the calories they consume. Hadza men whistle or strike trees to summon a honeyguide, a gray-brown bird that eats beeswax. Hearing this summons, the bird calls back to the honey hunter in a chattering response. Using this call-and-response, the honeyguide leads the hunter to a beehive. Hunters use smoke to calm the bees while they cut into the hive to harvest the honeycomb. After eating some of the honey on the spot, hunters then leave wax for the birds. Some honey is also brought back to camp to share with other members of the band. Hadza men have forged a mutually beneficial relationship with this bird, known as a honeyguide. The bird helps the men locate beehives and, after harvesting the honey from the hives, the men leave wax from the honeycomb for the bird. (credit: “Lesser Honeyguide, Indicator minor, at Pilanesberg National Park, South Africa” by Derek Keats/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Like most gathering-hunting peoples, the Hadza are highly egalitarian , meaning that all people are considered equal and all resources are shared equally. Gathered foods brought back to the camp, including meat, are shared among all members of the band. Gathering-hunting groups deplore stinginess as the worst human fault, and people who refuse to share are met with gossip, ridicule, and even ostracism. Decisions are made through public discussions leading to group consensus. No person has any sort of leadership role. Rather, people with experience in certain areas of social knowledge provide their expertise as needed. In-group fighting is not common, but it does occur, sometimes leading to personal violence and even a split in the band if the conflict cannot be resolved. Violent conflict between groups is very rare among gatherer-hunters. The Sociocultural Complex of Gathering and Hunting Anthropologists have identified features of Hadza society as distinctive to gathering-hunting groups found all over the world. Groups such as the Martu and Pintupi in Australia, the Cuiva and Pumé in South America, the Paliyan and Kattunayakan in Asia, and the Inuit and Shoshone in North America have all constructed similar lifeways based on gathering and hunting (Lee 2018). The social features of this way of life include mobility, sexual division of labor, egalitarianism, and vast knowledge of their environments. The most common feature of gatherer-hunters is mobility. Such groups typically move in seasonal cycles over broad territories, regularly meeting up with other groups at specific spots such as water sources and patches of ripe vegetation. Bands tend to confine their subsistence activities to their own territories, but if faced with a scarcity of resources, they will commonly ask other groups for permission to gather and hunt in neighboring territories. These requests are facilitated by cross-band friendships and marriages that develop when bands camp together at certain times of the year. As a result, such requests are nearly always approved. The second feature common to gatherer-hunter societies is the sexual division of labor. Often, men do most or all of the hunting, though recent archaeological evidence suggests that some women also hunted in the past. Both women and men gather, but they often gather different things, and women bring home the majority of gathered foods. The relative equality of women in gatherer-hunter societies is linked to their primary role in supplying calories to the gatherer-hunter diet. Hunting is a prestige activity, however, giving prominence to men who are particularly successful hunters. A Hadza man returns from a successful hunt. Like other gatherer-hunter societies, the Hadza utilize a sexual division of labor, with women doing the bulk of the gathering and men doing most of the hunting. (credit: “Success” by Anja Pietsch/flickr, CC BY 2.0) The third feature of gatherer-hunters is a strong tendency toward egalitarianism. As they are so often on the move, gatherer-hunters do not typically own many material possessions, and those they have are circulated through the band on the basis of need. All gathered and hunted foods are shared among all members of the band. Generosity is praised and admired. People are considered equal and are actively discouraged from valuing themselves above others. Greed and excessive pride are stigmatized and punished with gossip and criticism. People who fight or refuse to share can be ostracized from the band. These are broad generalities. The gatherer-hunter mode of subsistence commonly coordinates with these sociocultural features, but some groups do provide exceptions. In particularly productive environments, gatherer-hunters can settle down in one place for periods of time. The year-round availability of fish allows gatherer-hunter groups in coastal or riverine areas to form permanent or semipermanent settlements. Diet and labor patterns also vary. Closer to the equator, gatherer-hunter groups rely more on gathering because plants are plentiful year-round. Farther from the equator, in cooler climates, vegetation is scarce in winter, and gatherer-hunters rely more on hunting. Degrees of inequality and conflict also vary somewhat, often in association with the availability of resources. Situations of scarcity often generate social conflict. While one can describe a general mode of subsistence, it is important to acknowledge the diversity of strategies and features within this mode. All gatherer-hunters, however, absolutely must possess deep knowledge of the plants, animals, and sources of water in their environments. Many gatherer-hunters can identify over a hundred sources of plant and animal foods in their environments, along with detailed information about where and when they can find each type. Often, they rely on a few staple foods that are readily available year-round. When the Dobe Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari Desert cannot find other foods, they count on mongongo nuts, a highly nutritious, drought-resistant food. Eating 300 mongongo nuts (a hefty serving) supplies 1,200 calories and 56 grams of protein. At certain times of the year, mongongo nuts constitute nearly half of the diet of the Dobe Ju/’hoansi. Contemporary Challenges to Gathering and Hunting Societies Originally, all Hadza lived as foragers. In the early 20th century, the British colonial government attempted to convert them to farming and Christianity, but the Hadza successfully resisted. Since the 1950s, however, farmers and herders have claimed their territory, making the Hadza squatters on land they have occupied for millennia. The plants they rely on for food have been clear-cut to make way for the onion and sweet potato crops planted by farming groups. Hadza watering holes have been appropriated for irrigation. The Tanzanian government has responded with yet another attempt to settle the Hadza, building villages on their lands and attempting to convert them to farming. About two-thirds of all Hadza people now live part-time in these villages, where they receive donations of food from the government. They live in poverty on the land stolen from them by their farming and herding neighbors, who discriminate against them as troublesome primitives. Many Hadza now farm for part of the year and then leave their villages to engage in gathering-hunting for several months. Over the past few years, however, the Hadza have won several victories in their struggle to regain control over their lands. In 2007, the local government leased 6,500 square kilometers of Hadza land to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates for use as a “personal safari playground.” Removed from the land and confined to a government reservation, the Hadza protested, and some resisters were imprisoned. Their campaign against the deal was supported by a coalition of local and international groups. The controversy garnered attention in the global news media, and the government eventually rescinded the deal. In 2011, the Hadza asserted a claim to 57,000 hectares of land, and the Tanzanian government consented, granting them title to this land. It was the first time the Tanzanian government had ever recognized the land rights of gathering-hunting peoples. Like the Hadza, all contemporary gathering and hunting groups face economic and political pressures that threaten their way of life. Herders and farmers encroach on their territories, leasing or purchasing their lands and then forcibly evicting the original inhabitants. Local and national governments attempt to settle such groups in permanent villages in order to establish their own rule of law, collect taxes, provide education and medical care, and assimilate them as citizens. Often, gathering-hunting groups agree to settle and then, after a while, abandon the villages established for them and escape to their lands to resume a gathering-hunting lifestyle. Many Hadza say they love living close to nature, making their own material culture, and working and resting at will, always on the move. The Original Affluent Society: Comparing Ancient and Contemporary Foragers In agricultural and industrial societies, people often assume that gathering-hunting peoples must live a hard life, oppressed by the struggle to find enough food and plagued by malnutrition and poor health. Archaeologists and cultural anthropologists who have studied gathering and hunting groups have found otherwise. Researchers have discovered that gatherer-hunters have stronger bones, lower blood pressure, and less heart disease than neighboring farmers, likely due to the amount of walking they do and the abundance of fruits, nuts, and vegetables in their diets (American Heart Association 2012; University of Cambridge 2014). In his ethnographic work among the Dobe Ju/’hoansi, anthropologist Richard Lee found that they worked on average three to four days a week obtaining food and spent the rest of their time socializing and enjoying life. He described the Dobe Ju/’hoansi as fit, healthy, and free of nutritional deficits (1993). Indeed, some Hadza have remarked that the notion of famine is unknown to their culture. While Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith has referred to the wealthy industrial economy of the United States as “the affluent society,” anthropologist Marshall Sahlins describes the gathering and hunting lifestyle as “the original affluent society.” For some 95 percent of evolutionary history, humans and human ancestors relied on gathering and hunting to make a living. In evolutionary terms, it is only very recently that humans have established other modes of subsistence. Farming was invented around 12,000 years ago, far too recently to have shaped humans’ biological evolution very much. By contrast, hominins were practicing gathering and hunting for more than two million years. If humans have evolved to practice any lifestyle, it would be gathering-hunting. This suggests that humans’ brains and bodies might be best suited to the lifestyle described by ethnographers who study gathering-hunting groups: long walks in nature; a diet of mostly fruits, nuts, and vegetables; and plenty of leisure time to relax and talk. Maybe humanity’s ancestors were as robust and happy in their way of life as many contemporary foragers. Maybe. The problem with this sort of thinking is that people today really don’t know what life was like for humanity’s gathering-hunting ancestors. The archaeological record of fossils and artifacts can reveal much about the diet and diseases of early hominins, but they tell very little about early social structures and cultural values. Some anthropologists have looked to contemporary gathering and hunting groups to understand the way of life of humanity’s ancestors. Maybe they, like contemporary gatherer-hunter peoples, lived in egalitarian bands with group decision-making and a flexible division of labor based on gender, valuing sharing and deploring stinginess. Certainly, they must have had impressive knowledge of the resources and dangers in their environments. And yet it is a mistake to view the way of life of contemporary gathering-hunting societies as examples of the way of life of humans’ evolutionary ancestors. Groups such as the Hadza are not frozen in time, practicing a static lifeway of the deep past, but rather constantly changing and innovating, blending new ideas and practices with older ones just as farmers, herders, and industrialists do. Most contemporary gathering-hunting groups have lived side by side with farming and herding groups for centuries, often trading with those groups and even experimenting with their subsistence methods from time to time. Most gatherer-hunters have been forced to relocate to less advantageous lands due to the encroachment of these herders and farmers. The culture of many gatherer-hunter groups has been shaped by their incorporation as marginalized minorities in larger nation-states such as Tanzania . As the way of life of contemporary gatherer-hunters has changed so dramatically just in the past century, it’s difficult to draw firm conclusions about human evolutionary history based on their example. band a form of social organization associated with gatherer-hunter societies. Bands are relatively small, often around 50 people, ideal for a nomadic or seminomadic lifestyle. egalitarian emphasizing equality and sharing. gathering-hunting the mode of subsistence in which people rely on resources readily available in their environment. Gathering-hunting peoples collect fruits, nuts, berries, and roots and harvest honey. They also hunt and trap wild animals. seminomadic the practice of settling in one place for a period of time, usually a few weeks, then moving to a new site to find fresh resources. sexual division of labor the assignment of work based on a person’s sex.

Social Sciences


Pastoralism Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Describe the process of animal domestication. List the array of practices associated with the subsistence strategy of pastoralism. Identify the cultural features associated with the herding way of life. Provide a detailed example of a pastoralist society. Discuss the challenges facing contemporary pastoralist societies. In many gathering and hunting societies, bands follow herds of wild game as they move in seasonal migrations. Researchers speculate that such hunting practices may have led to the development of a new subsistence pattern around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Relying on their expert knowledge of the behavior and biology of game animals, hunters might have begun to control the movement of wild herds, steering the animals to territories that might be especially rich in grazing resources or conducive to certain hunting strategies. These new practices may have been a response to the diminishing of key game species due to overhunting, prompting hunters to devise strategies to enhance the animals’ diet and reproduction. This human-animal relationship may have deepened over time as people discovered the nutritional resources available from live animals, such as milk and blood. Rather than killing an animal for meat, early herders figured out how to benefit from live animals and guide their reproduction to enlarge the herds. They began to selectively breed the healthiest and heartiest animals in their herds. They learned how to process animal products such as milk, hides, and hooves for use as food, textiles, and tools, and some used dung to fuel their fires. This process is called animal domestication . Humans in different environments domesticated a wide range of prey animals, including sheep, goats, cattle, water buffalo, yaks, pigs, reindeer, llamas, and alpacas. Pastoralism is the mode of subsistence associated with the care and use of domesticated herd animals. Pastoralism shares many features with gathering-hunting, in particular the practice of ranging over a broad territory in seasonal cycles. Indeed, as they move with their herds to optimal grazing lands, many pastoral peoples gather fruits and nuts or occasionally hunt small game. Unlike gathering and hunting, however, herding promotes a sense of ownership over resources, as families develop close relationships with specific herds. Rather than sharing resources as foragers do, pastoralists consider their herds to be family property. Herds associated with a family are passed down to subsequent generations, most frequently from fathers to sons. Archaeologists believe that pastoralism was developed around the same time as farming. In many regions, the two subsistence strategies are practiced by neighboring groups in symbiotic relations of trade. Often, a group will combine pastoralism with farming. Where rain is plentiful and soils are rich for cultivation, farming is used to take advantage of these resources. Pastoralism is utilized in areas with more marginal soils or unpredictable rainfall, conditions not optimal for farming but able to support herd animals if they are moved regularly to newly grown pastures and freshwater sources. Pastoralists who don’t farm usually trade meat, milk, and other animal products for the grains and vegetables grown by neighboring farmers. Most contemporary pastoralists find it necessary to supplement their diet of animal products with the vitamins and carbohydrates in cultivated plant foods and are able to do so through small farming and trade. The Bedouin: Flexible Pastoralism Across the dry grasslands of Arabia and northern Africa live about three million Arab peoples collectively known as the Bedouin . Before the 20th century, Bedouin peoples made their living primarily by herding camels, sheep, goats, and cattle. Many still do, although they often cultivate crops or work as wage laborers as well. Among those Bedouin still devoted to herding, most specialize in one or two herd animals particularly suited to the climate and available pastures in their environment. In areas around Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, sheep and goats are preferred, while cattle are kept by Bedouin groups in southern Arabia and Sudan. In very dry regions such as the Sahara and the Arabian Deserts, Bedouin groups herd camels, hardy animals with scant need for water. Camels are valued as transport but also for their high-quality milk and tasty meat. Camel herding, though a prized tradition, is becoming increasingly rare among Bedouin. Bedouin supplement their camels’ diet with feed, and many have been forced to sell off their camels as the price of feed rises. Since the 1960s, trucks and cars have replaced camels as a means of transportation for the Bedouin, sometimes used to bring food and water to herds in arid regions. A herd of goats relaxes at a Bedouin camp near Jericho, in what is now the West Bank. Bedouin peoples rely on herding animals – such as camels, sheep, cattle, and goats – for meat, milk, and fiber. (credit: “Bedouin Goats 1557” by James Emery/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Bedouin pastoralists have traditionally lived in small camps that are moved as frequently as needed to find fresh pastures for their herds, sometimes as often as every few days. This form of herding is called nomadism . Each camp consists of several tents, each one housing an extended family. Typically, a tent might house a married couple with their children and one or two siblings of the husband. Within the camp, several tents might house people who are related to each other, as sons marry and establish their own tents. For instance, a camp could comprise 70 to 100 people, including the families of several brothers, each tent housing the family of a brother, a son, or an elder. Often, the families of the camp move together during the summer months, then converge with other groups in larger camps during the winter months. Camps usually consist of 3 to 15 tents. A Bedouin tent in Jordan. Tents can be quickly constructed and easily transported, making them the perfect home for those practicing a lifestyle that requires frequent movement. (credit: “Bedouin Camp” by young shanahan/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Instead of ranging freely, other Bedouin have traditionally moved their herds between two permanent settlements, one for the summer months and the other for winter. This pattern of pastoralism is known as transhumance . In societies that practice this form of subsistence today, young children and the elderly often remain in permanent camps year-round, benefiting from government health care and schools. Some Bedouin use transhumance to combine herding with small farming. For instance, some Egyptian Bedouin plant barley in the fall and then move with their herds into the desert, leaving behind a few people to tend to the crops. In the summer, the mobile group returns to harvest the crops, and the entire group spends the summer together. Stone houses have replaced tents in many permanent camps. Both tents and houses are rectangular, divided into two or three rooms. One area is for women, with a kitchen and storeroom. One area is primarily for men, where guests and relatives are entertained. Sometimes, a third area is devoted to the care of sick or young animals. Like gatherer-hunters, pastoralists divide work according to a sexual division of labor. For the Bedouin, that division is determined by the types of animals herded by the group. When both large and small animals are kept, men take responsibility for larger animals, such as camels and cattle. Women herd, feed, and milk smaller animals, such as goats and sheep. But when only small animals are herded by a group, men usually do the herding, while women do the feeding and milking. Where sheep are kept, women spin the wool into yarn, then weave it into strips used to make tents. A Bedouin woman working at a loom. Spinning and weaving are tasks typically assigned to women in Bedouin societies. (credit: “Weaving Demonstration” by Alan Kotok/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Unlike foragers , pastoralists strongly value private property, primarily in the form of their herds. The wealth of a family is judged by the size of their herds. Bedouin sons and daughters both inherit herd animals from their fathers, though sons receive more than daughters. Because women are barred from caring for large animals, if a woman inherits camels, she usually entrusts them to a brother or cousin. All property is shared among members of the family. Bedouin who live in desert regions have extensive knowledge of their challenging environment. They have a large vocabulary for describing different kinds of sand and analyzing dune shapes and other changes in their surroundings (Eastep). Men often go on long drives through the desert, scouting out good grazing spots or looking for rabbits to hunt. Arabian Bedouin are expert trackers, able to judge the age and physical condition of a camel from its tracks as well as when the track was laid and the weight of the animal’s burden. The Sociocultural Complex of Pastoralism As with gathering-hunting, the subsistence mode of pastoralism is coordinated with particular sociocultural features. First and foremost, these are cultures that revolve around herd animals. All aspects of culture are shaped by a preoccupation with herds. The size of a family’s herds is a measure of wealth and social status. Animals are used for meat, milk, blood, cloth, and leather. Animals are gifted to cement social relationships such as marriage and slaughtered to commemorate special occasions or the visit of an honored guest. Animals are passed down from fathers to children, establishing the social position and durability of families. Many pastoralist societies have vibrant traditions of music and oral poetry celebrating their animals and their herding lifestyle. A second feature of pastoral societies is mobility. When herding is the primary livelihood, the group must constantly be on the move. Many agricultural societies also keep domestic animals, but in these cases, the people and their animals stay put on the farm, as crops are the fundamental means of survival. Therefore, farmers tend to have many fewer animals than herders. With larger herds feeding from what are often marginal lands, pastoralists must drive their animals to fresh pastures on a regular basis, often in seasonal cycles over large rangelands. The mobile life of herding groups is structured by various strategies of nomadism and transhumance, as with Bedouin groups. Mobility discourages the accumulation of private property other than herd animals, further enhancing the value of animals to herding groups. Third, pastoralists rely on a division of labor based on gender and age. And the workload is heavy. Those living in pastoralist societies must herd animals to good pasture, provide them with water, search for new pastures, protect animals from predators, care for sick and weak animals, process animal products such as meat and milk, and produce or obtain all the other elements of material culture necessary for daily life (Bollig 2018). Day-to-day herding is often carried out by boys, while older men take on more complex tasks such as providing water from hard-to-access wells and hunting down predators (Homewood 2018). Older men also manage herds, buying and selling animals to optimize ratios of male to female, old to young. And men settle arguments and make family decisions about resources and security. Women are frequently responsible for milking animals, processing milk products such as cheese and yogurt, and selling those products in local markets. Women and girls make tents and mats, set up and break down camps, gather firewood and wild foods, and do the cooking. Women also care for sick animals and people, maintaining the store of knowledge about available plant medicines. The fourth feature of herding societies is a vast store of knowledge about animals and the environment. Pastoralists have developed an intimate understanding of the vegetation and water sources necessary for their herds as well as medicinal and edible plants available in different zones of their rangelands. They have deep insight into the anatomy and behavior of their herd animals. They know the qualities associated with different species and how to mix species by gender and age to maintain the availability of animal products such as milk, meat, and wool. Previously, scholars thought that pastoralism was destructive to the environment because of overgrazing. In recent decades, however, studies have demonstrated that herding groups strategically rotate their herds across their rangelands to control the impact on the environment, creating a sustainable way of life. Contemporary Challenges to Pastoralism Like many pastoralists, the Bedouin require large tracts of land to continually provide fresh grazing for their herds. Families are associated with defined territories and rarely go beyond them. The nation-states that encompass Bedouin territories do not recognize their right to ownership, however, and consider those lands state-owned. Eager to control this land, governments have asserted various policies to settle the Bedouin, providing schools and health clinics in order to lure them away from their nomadic pastoral lifestyle. In Egypt, for instance, the government has seized desirable coastal areas from Bedouin groups and sold the land to investors who want to build hotels for the tourism industry. In 1999, the Egyptian army bulldozed a tourist campground run by local Bedouin in order to clear the way for a hotel. The Tourism Development Authority claimed that the Bedouin had only recently lived on the coastal lands and so did not have any right to remain there. In Israel, the government often destroys Bedouin camps and villages in order to make way for settlements and military zones. In November 2020, Israeli soldiers demolished Bedouin structures in the occupied West Bank. Tens of thousands of Bedouin have been displaced by such demolitions and banished from their grazing territories. Pressured by government regulations and military interventions, many Bedouin now live settled lives in villages and cities across North Africa and the Middle East . Many combine sedentary herding with small farming. Some work as taxi drivers or managers of cafés or campgrounds. Some have become wealthy by investing in the tourist economy and other ventures. Many speak nostalgically of their nomadic way of life and sometimes venture out into the desert again to pasture their herds. A Bedouin Palestinian woman in front of the remains of her home, which was destroyed by Israeli law enforcement. Tens of thousands of Bedouin have been displaced by the nation-states that now encompass Bedouin territory. (credit: Eman/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) The predicament of the Bedouin is shared by many contemporary pastoralists. Climate change has made rainfall increasingly unpredictable, threatening the sustainability of grazing herds on marginal lands. Governments and global investors are eager to gain control over land in order to cultivate crops or create tourist attractions and conservation zones (Homewood 2018). Some governments have sought to formalize land ownership among pastoralist groups, creating a competition among groups and individuals to gain title to collective rangelands (Galaty 2015). In some places, such as Botswana, elite groups of herders have seized control over land, making life difficult for small herders. Some nomadic pastoral groups, such as the Wodaabe of West Africa, have cultivated their distinctive cultural practices as forms of heritage to be protected by human rights organizations or otherwise marketed to tourists. Welcoming researchers and filmmakers to study their unique dances, the Wodaabe have been the subject of over 17 documentary films. Spectacular images of the elaborate dress, costume, and face paint of Wodaabe dancers have been featured on the cover of National Geographic , Elle magazine, a World Bank brochure, and several CD and album covers (Kratz 2018). Some Wodaabe groups perform their ceremonies for audiences of European tourists. In their geerewol and yaake dances, groups of young men compete to be selected as the most beautiful dancers by the young women judges. While such involvement in tourism can provide income to impoverished pastoral groups, many anthropologists worry about the commodification of culture and the exploitation of marginal groups for privileged Western audiences. Some question the future viability of pastoralism as a way of life, suggesting that it might give way to more sedentary forms of ranching. But the transition to ranching would require huge investments of labor and money in necessities such as fencing, feed supplements, veterinary care, permanent wells, trucks, mobile phones, and even airplanes. If herding is practiced in harmony with the environment without these costly inputs, pastoralism may continue to provide a sustainable way of life. animal domestication the processing of animal products for use as food, textiles, and tools. nomadism the practice of moving frequently in search of resources. pastoralism the mode of subsistence associated with the care and use of herd animals. transhumance a technique practiced by many pastoralist groups that combines a settled lifestyle with routine movement. Societies that practice transhumance may move between two permanent settlements in an annual cycle. Another transhumance strategy involves most people residing in a settlement and sending a smaller group out to pasture the animals at certain times of the year.

Social Sciences