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Report on cultural diversity
An article on the impact of cultural diversity
Report on cultural diversity
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The Trobrianders of Papua Guinea have a free love community and an easy-going approach to many cultural views. The Trobrianders have a matrilineal culture rather than a matriarchal, tracking their lineage through their mother’s side. Subsistence includes yams and banana leaves as well as pigs and fish. Conflicts are settled by playing cricket and women are allowed to partake. The culture also shows females having dominance over men. The Trobriander islands are located on the eastern coast of New Guinea consisting of four islands, which is part of the Kula Ring. Most of the population resides in Kiriwina, it is home to 12,000 indigenous people. Kiriwina is home to the indigenous people called the Trobrianders. Living in a western society there are any differences between cultures to which I have noticed. We have a society that is male dominant and it has consistently been that way. Western society also has a value of money, power, and status. This leaves western society strict on how one my portray them self. The Trobrianders have had influences from other cultures that they have begun to take hold of such as instruments but have continued to hold true to their beliefs. I want to study how gender affects the different aspects of The Trobrianders’ culture; to include marriage, infidelity, virginity, and gender roles. The Trobrianders …show more content…
The work to get to this country will be worth all the effort. I will learn and live how I’ve never lived before. I will experience what many have not. I will be able to share my knowledge of The Trobriander culture with my own culture and others around the world. The experience will teach me how I may research another culture. Maybe I will learn by trial and error the best ways to study a new culture. The experience to research a culture completely new will change my thoughts on culture. My anthropological research will present me with a whole new view and meaning of
In the films Paradise Bent, Muxes–Authentic, Intrepid Seekers of Danger and the Gender and Sexuality section of Explorations in Cultural Anthropology explore the identification of gender and sexuality (Croall and Altmann 2000)(Islas 2006)(Boyd and Lassiter 2011). The introduction to gender and sexuaity in the book Explorations in Cultural Anthropology, Boyd and Lassiter (2011) discuss how once a baby is born, they are being socialized “into one of the two ‘appropriate’ roles- male or female” (Boyd and Lassiter 2011: 218). The baby is expected to meet the expectations he/she is born into (Boyd and Lassiter 2011). For example, in the films, it is greatly commented by the muxes and fa’afafines that they didn’t follow the gender ideologies, the
They are a culture of hunting and gathering. The men are warriors that help to defend the tribe from other tribes, hunt for meat, and attack opposing tribes. The women stay home and cook, raise the children. Many people stay in the shibono, or community complex. The children are raised for a rough life, to be warriors. They learn that every injury suffered must be repaid. Men are the powerful gender, with all the rights. The relationships created by having in-laws are the basis for their power. If a favor is granted, it must be returned. A person is always supposed to be loyal to their family connections.
There are many different cultures and groups of people that we don’t know anything about. There are a lot of people in the world trying to close that gap. People like Catherine J. Allen, author of The Hold Life Has and Napoleon A. Chagnon, author of Yanomamo. In each of their respective books, they brought us closer to societies I had never heard of until now. We learned about the different aspects of the lives of the Sonqo (Allen) and the Yanomamo (Chagnon). They brought us insight on certain things like gender differences, family relationships and how where they live affects their lives. In this following essay, I’ll be discussing gender differences in both the Sonqo and Yanomamo societies as well as how each tribe uses kinship, reciprocity
There is one day out of the year when you see sights of couples everywhere: Valentine’s Day. You see individuals out in stores buying roses, large teddy bears and grabbing the last remaining chocolate candy boxes that are left on the shelves. But if you are imagining a man and a woman as the couple you’re visioning, you are in for a surprise. A man and a woman isn’t the only way to go through life as how a couple should look. In fact, it is estimated over 100,000 monogamous people in the Unites States are performing polygamy secretly with their partner’s full permission. These popular nonmonogamous relationships do not match to the cultural norm of a loving couple in love for life. One of the most difficult aspects of multiculturalism is the determination to adapt to some cultural groups’ needs involving certain traditional practices that might clash with the ideas of multiculturalism and self-governing civil rights. Normally, many of these exercises have religious roots, but these are not limited. Some important cases are certain rights of opening exercises: spiritual and religious. For most of the cases, a smaller group’s traditional exercises are against the norms of a typical society but also organize a substantial aspect of the way of life for that certain culture. Some samples of polygamy in Islam, female circumcision in Eastern Africa nations, or Ta-moko, as referred to as tattooing of the face, in the culture of Maori. The most crucial topic around these established practices in the multiculturalism debate is the idea of agreement. Yet, not all exercises are achieved with the agreement of the subjects. Some cultures and historic periods are seen to embrace polyamory, while other cul...
...socially directed hormonal instructions which specify that females will want to have children and will therefore find themselves relatively helpless and dependent on males for support and protection. The schema claims that males are innately aggressive and competitive and therefore will dominate over females. The social hegemony of this ideology ensures that we are all raised to practice gender roles which will confirm this vision of the nature of the sexes. Fortunately, our training to gender roles is neither complete nor uniform. As a result, it is possible to point to multitudinous exceptions to, and variations on, these themes. Biological evidence is equivocal about the source of gender roles; psychological androgyny is a widely accepted concept. It seems most likely that gender roles are the result of systematic power imbalances based on gender discrimination.9
Society has seen the male dynamic of superiority, designation as the “bread winner”, or head of household for centuries. Women were specifically assigned to the roles of wife, mother, and nurturer through the process of the sexual or gendered division of labor. However, that has not always been the case. Over centuries of change and shifts in economic development, the roles of women have changed to adapt to their specific roles in society. The status of the individuals in society was defined by sex, age, physical trai...
Marriage and Sexuality Marriage is a ritually recognized union in our society and in some cases a legal contract between spouses. The ultimate definition of marriage defers according to culture but principally it is a universal institution that consists of a bilateral decent system. According to the Webster’s dictionary, sexuality is an organism’s preparedness for engaging in sexual activity in other words, a human’s readiness to begin having sex or exploring sex. The nature of marriage and sexuality has had a solid influence on different cultures round the world even from pre-historic times. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the nature, taboos, requirements and social impact of marriage and sexuality within the Dobe Ju/’hoansi and the
In the article “An Anthropological Look at Human Sexuality” the authors, Patrick Gray and Linda Wolfe speak about how societies look at human sexuality. The core concept of anthology is the idea of culture, the systems of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors people acquire as a member of society. The authors give an in depth analysis on how human sexuality is looked at in all different situations.
Paleolithic age presents the era when key human adaptations evolved in response to a variety of environmental changes experienced at the time. This period of human evolution coincided with change within the surrounding of man. Such included cooling, drying and unpredictable climatic patterns over the time. This increased amount of variability in environmental conditions raised the level of uncertainty and instability in their respective terms of survival, necessitated the man to adopt new habits to increase adaptability to the new and changing surroundings. The evolved structures and behaviors led to specialization to enable coping with changing and unpredictable conditions.
Since the beginning of time men have played the dominant role in nearly every culture around the world. If the men were not dominant, then the women and men in the culture were equal. Never has a culture been found where women have dominated. In “Society and Sex Roles” by Ernestine Friedl, Friedl supports the previous statement and suggests that “although the degree of masculine authority may vary from one group to the next, males always have more power” (261). Friedl discusses a variety of diverse conditions that determine different degrees of male dominance focusing mainly on the distribution of resources. In The Forest People by Colin Turnbull, Turnbull describes the culture of the BaMbuti while incorporating the evident sex roles among these “people of the forest”. I believe that the sex roles of the BaMbuti depicted by Turnbull definitely follow the pattern that is the basis of Freidl’s arguments about the conditions that determine variations of male dominance. Through examples of different accounts of sex roles of the BaMbuti and by direct quotations made by Turnbull as well as members of the BaMbuti tribe, I intend on describing exactly how the sex roles of the BaMbuti follow the patterns discussed by Freidl. I also aim to depict how although women are a vital part of the BaMbuti culture and attain equality in many areas of the culture, men still obtain a certain degree of dominance.
Anthropological studies of kinship and marriage can also provide an understanding that within any society marriage and the family will change over time.
Both Brodkin and Blackwood talk about the way women are perceived by society in their article. Black wood talk about how in Indonesia, women are primarily responsible for their children and their family’s health, care and education while Brodkin discusses how women were less reliable, and more exploitable, which caused them to become lower ranking to and dependent on men. After reading Tombois in West Sumatra: Constructing Masculinity and erotic desire and Searching for “Voices”: Feminism, Anthropology, and the Global Debates over Female Genital Operations, all I could think about was cultural relativism and the quote by Franz Boas that I read in my sociology course “civilization is not something absolute, but…is relative, and…our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilizations goes.”
Gender can be identified as the subset of anthropology and was in earlier times grounded as the supposed biological differences and the “latter” of cultural structures monitored, executed, and comprehended in any given society (Oxford Index, 2012). Throughout the 20th century and the growth of sociocultural anthropology, the meaning and significance of gender transformed. Early ethnographic studies illustrated how gender was parallel to family and kinship, with very little recognition of women and family problems. Even with early female advocates in the field, gender as a particular theoretical interest did not submerge until the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. It wasn’t until then that women were no longer seen as a classification of culture and society separate from the normally functioning world.
Anthropologists have examined our assumptions about the ‘natural’ roles of men and women in society through investigating the past and present. This is important as the core of anthropology is the ability to understand and use our knowledge of not only the past, but also the present to question societal norms (Blasco, 2010). Gender roles, society’s image of expected roles and attitudes a particular gender should possess, continue to be of great interest to anthropological studies. These expectations result in many gender stereotypes and create a stigmatized definition of what it means to be a man or a women (Blasco, 2010). The purpose of this paper is to conduct a gender analysis of