The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World: Consumption, Commoditization, and Everyday Practice
In relation to the Haya of Northwest Tanzania, Brad Weiss constructs a model of coeval symmetry in which people engage in making the world around them but also engage in making themselves (4). His ethnographic analysis illustrates how relationships with commodities contribute to the constitution and reconfiguration of the Haya sociocultural world. Drawing from the phenomenological work of Merleau-Ponty, Weiss constructs the Haya lived world in terms of inhabiting both social space and time in an effort to show the relevance of this conception of the world to both the anthropology of the body and understanding sociocultural practice in general (5-6). Weiss not only argues that commodities like food or land have social value but that they "can be understood as personifications (e.g. as extensions or embodiments) of those who give and receive them" (13).
Part 1 focuses on the household production, provision, and consumption of food, which Weiss states is essential to making the lived world of the Haya. The cultural values regarding interiority, exteriority, heat, and speed are discussed as modes by which the Haya mediate with the processes of consumption. Architectural descriptions of different Haya homes are oriented to the ways in which division, enclosure, and exclusion shape the Haya habitus. Spatial configurations of social relations become embedded in Haya house opening rites, which serve to protect the house against potential conflict with guests (38). The hearth is central to the household, both literally (spatially) and metaphorically, in terms of the social relations which rest on it.
Weiss relates the consumption of different kinds of banana beer and banana gin to both the temporal nature of banana cultivation and of beverage production and consumption. Hearth-ripened bananas involve a slower process but the resulting beer (olibisi) is considered superior (taste, ascetics) to that beer produced from the pit (olutala)-ripened method, a faster and more lucrative process. Banana gin (enkonyagi), having a much higher alcohol content, commands a higher market price but is associated with "the desire for money and its deleterious consequences" (61). Not only is the banana-ripening process faster for the gin, but also patrons get drunk more quickly while rapidly losing their pocket money. Weiss suggests that the Haya associate the rapid speed of such product turnover with animosity and illness, while the hearth is more revered for both its placement in the home and its more withdrawn stance from the world of quick monetized exchange.
In the book “Sacred Rice” author and anthropologist Joanna Davidson delves into the life of Jola farmers in west Africa and explores how rice plays an important role in their lives. She uses storytelling, often personal in nature to demonstrate how rice plays a vital part not only in the gastronomical aspect in the lives of people in north-western Guinea-Bissau but also in their social, cultural, economic, religious and political aspects.
“The Sambia: Ritual, Sexuality, and Change in Papua New Guinea” is a book written by Gilbert Herdt. It is based on a case study Herdt did during the 1970’s of the culture of the Sambia people. His study took place in Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. He didn’t know much about their language, however through out his time there he was able to learn their language and customs. As he settled into their village, he mostly slept in the clubhouse with the other Nilangu villagers; however, eventually they built a house for him to stay at. Herdt had a great interest in gaining new knowledge about the Sambia culture.
Ethnographic fieldwork in Anthropology certainly requires anthropologies to understand the limits and biases they will be exposed to while preforming their research. Through the text “Ethnography and Culture”, James P. Spradley discusses some of the concepts anthropologies must be aware of just as “naive realism”, “explicit culture” and “tacit culture”. These three concepts can be appreciated when reading Richard B. Lee’s selection “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari”.
In Northern Kenya a small village of Sudanese refugees have made a makeshift village, which has served as their permanent housing for the past twenty years. This village displays the kind of poverty that is predictably featured in Time Magazine on a semi-regular basis: mud walls are adorned by straw roofs, ribs can be easily counted on shirtless bodies, flour is a resource precious enough to be rationed, and a formidable desert can be seen in all directions. What do you see when you look at this village? Do you see a primitive society, struggling to survive in a world that has long made struggling for survival antiquated, do you see the cost of western colonialism, do you see a people deprived of the dignity of humanity, do you just
Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, Prussia. A well-known philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary that studied law at the University of Bonn. He then switched to philosophy and continued education at Berlin. Together with Friedrich Engels, Marx produced some of his major works ‘The German Ideology’ (1846), ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (1848), and ‘Das Capital’ (1867). Das Capital remains to be Marx’s greatest achievement, a powerful insight that
15Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 to Heinrich and Henrietta Marx in the historical city of Trier. Karl was one of seven children raised within a comfortable middle class home provided by his father. Marx’s father worked as a counselor-at-law at the High-Court of Appeal in Trier. David McClellan believes that, “Trier first imbued Marx with his abiding passion for history.”1 Although the Marx family was linked to a long lineage of Jewish ancestry, Heinrich converted his family to Protestantism in order to keep his position at the courthouse. “Some have considered this rabbinic ancestry to be the key to Marx’s ideas and see him as a secularized version of an Old Testament prophet.”2 Overall, Marx was raised in a very loving, supportive, environment, and maintained a special relationship with his father throughout his life.3
In the documentary “Blooms of Banjeli” Candice Gaucher and Eugenia Herbert traveled to Togo in the 1980s to witness the traditional process of iron-smelting technology and it’s relationship to African conception of gender. The furnace, which is housing the iron, is represented as a woman or a womb that delivers the iron after it has been smelted. The master smelter, always a male, is the creator and provides the furnace, the female vessel, the essentials for life and birth. Before the smelting commences there are many rituals that must be completed such as the use of furnace decoration, fertility medicines, and the exclusion of women who menstruating. It is important to note that men are the only ones engaging in the procreative symbolic practice of inciting the furnace to give iron, or rather birth. Human women are excluded from this practice because they may impede the birthing process of the metaphorically female iron
Welcome to CHSBS! | Central Michigan University. Karl Marx. Retrieved January 27, 2014, from http://www.chsbs.cmich.edu/fattah/COURSES/modernthought/marx.htm
Different anthropologists such as Nowak and Laird (2010), and Butler (2006), recommended that these residents of jungles contain an exclusive background; position, morals and everyday life is entirely through big adjustment. It can be said that the Mbuti people live in their own world. This paper will discuss the kinship system and the social organization of the culture as far as how they practice equal sharing of food after engaging in hunting and gathering. This paper will also discuss how the Mbuti culture uses gender relation to determine their hunting ages.
In the book titled Around the World in 30 Years, Barbara Gallatin Anderson’s makes a precise and convincing argument regarding the acts of being a cultural anthropologist. Her humor, attention to detail, and familiar analogies really allow for a wholesome and educating experience for the reader. Her credible sources and uniform writing structure benefits the information. Simply, the book represents an insider’s look into the life of a cultural anthropologist who is getting the insider’s look to the lives of everybody
2011 Different Words, Different Worlds In Explorations in Cultural Anthropology. Colleen E. Boyd and Luke Eric Lassiter, eds. Pp. 223-241. Plymouth, UK: AltaMira Press.
Covington, Dennis. Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia. 15th ed. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2009. Print. Schiller, Anne. Small Sacrifices: Religious Change and Cultural Identity among the Ngaju of Indonesia. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Willerslev, Rane. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley [u.a.: University of California, 2007. Print.
Karl Marx was born in Trier, Germany in 1818 to a Hirschel and Henrietta Marx. Due to much anti-Semitism, Hirschel changed his name to Heinrich and left his Jewish faith to become Protestant. Later on, while Marx attended Bonn University to study Law, he mainly socialized and increased his debts. When Heinrich found out about Marx’s debt, he agreed to pay off his debt on the condition that he transfers to Berlin University. After Marx transferred to Berlin University he became serious and dedicated to working hard on his studies. A lecturer known as Brüno Bauer, a strong atheist whose radical political ideas made him a well-known figure with the police. Bauer first introduced Marx to G.W.F. Hegel, a well-known author and philosopher at the University of Berlin. Marx inevitably became infatuated with Hegel’s theories thus, becoming radically political. After Heinrich passed, Marx had to become independent and earn his own living by becoming a university lecturer. When Marx finished his doctoral thesis at the University of Jena, he hoped Brüno Bauer would be able to aid him in obtaining a teaching post; however, Bauer was dismissed in 1842 for being an outspoken atheist and couldn’t help Marx.
Karl Marx was born in 1818 into a middle-class, German family. During his studies, Marx was heavily influenced by the philosophy of Hegel. He joined a group called the “Young Hegelians.” The group, though “inspired by Hegel, [was] determined to champion the more radical aspects of the old master's system.”[i] Though he was a strong scholar, he got into trouble because of his radical political views.[ii] In 1847, together with fellow German, Freidrich Engels, Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto. The Central Authority of the Communist League approved The Communist Manifesto January of 1848, and the document began printing the next month.[iii] The manifesto was “inspired by the emergence of the modern working class, [he] developed a wholly new socialist outlook based upon the principle of socialism from below.”[iv] In Marx’s version of socialism, there were two central themes, one of which was that the working class had to liberate themselves from their oppressors, and the other involved the working people overthrowing their current government to create a new, democratic society for themselves.[v]
The Maasai People from Kenya represent a pastoral society. They rely on the taming and herding of livestock as a means for survival. Those responsible for herding livestock are the Maasai warriors and boys, especially during drought season. They had cattle, goats and sheep as their livestock. I did notice a social transformation in their society. Each individual has their job to complete daily. For example, the women formed the houses, milked the cattle, cooked for the family and supplied them with water. The men made the fence around the Kraal and secured the society and the boys were responsible for herding livestock. These multiple duties, commanded by the elderly, eventually started emerging to new and different customs such as trading with local groups. This was