1. Chapter 12
1.1. Today's Economy
1.1.1. What is an Economy?
1.1.1.1. "At the most basic level, an economy is a cultural adaptation to the environment---a set of ideas, activities, and technologies that enable a group of humans to use the available land resources, and labor to satisfy their basic needs, and if organized well, to thrive." (440).
1.1.2. Roots of Economy
1.1.2.1. Early Trade Routes
1.1.2.1.1. The Silk Road (China -> India -> Middle East)
1.1.2.1.2. Routes from North Africa to Europe led into Mediterranean ports (Alexandria, Venice, Rome, and Constantinople)
1.1.2.2. Colonialism
1.1.2.2.1. "Under colonialism, European powers redrew the map of the world and fundamentally reorganized the political and economic balance of power on a global scale." (451).
1.1.2.3. Slavery
1.1.2.3.1. "The expansion of sugarcane plantations by the Spanish and Portuguese could not be sustained by the local populations in the Caribbean and South America because they were decimated by European diseases and the grueling conditions of forced labor." (451).
1.1.2.3.2. "Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, millions of Africans were sold into slavery and transported across the Atlantic to work..." (452).
1.1.2.3.3. Slavery was incredibly beneficial to global economy.
1.1.3. The Modern System
1.1.3.1. Core and Periphery Countries
1.1.3.1.1. Core: Industrialized former colonial states that dominate the world economic system
1.1.3.1.2. Periphery: The least-developed and least-powerful nations; often exploited by the core countries as sources of raw materials, cheap labor, and markets.
1.1.3.1.3. Semi-Periphery: In between the other two categories; pretty self-explanatory.
2. Chapter 11
2.1. Types of Societies
2.1.1. Egalitarian Societies
2.1.1.1. A group based on the sharing of resources to ensure success with a relative absence of hierarchy and violence.
2.1.1.2. Reciprocity was commonplace among hunter-gatherers for the long term benefit of the group. However, reciprocity is much less common in modern times.
2.1.2. Ranked Societies
2.1.2.1. A group in which wealth is not stratified, but prestige and status are.
2.1.2.2. The act of redistribution in a ranked society preserves the well-being of the group while also raising the status of the groups leader(s).
2.2. Theories of Class
2.2.1. Karl Marx: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat
2.2.1.1. Marx defined the bourgeoisie as the class of people that owned the means of production, and the proletariat as the working class that did the actual producing.
2.2.1.2. Marx saw labor as the "key source of value and profit in the marketplace." (394). This value of labor is why company owners and employers demand workers to work harder, faster, and longer: to maximize profits.
2.2.2. Max Weber: Prestige and Life Chances
2.2.2.1. Weber measured a person's prestige by how well they could grasp their life chances. I.E. Someone who went to private school vs someone who grew up homeless.
2.2.3. Pierre Bourdieu: Education and Social Reproduction
2.2.3.1. Bourdieu's research focused on the relationship between education, social mobility and social reproduction.
2.2.3.2. He found that the educational system helped with social reproduction; education helped pass down class positions from generation to generation in a family.
2.2.4. Leith Mullings: Intersectionality among Race, Gender, and Class
2.2.4.1. Intersectionality: An analytic framework for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification.
2.2.4.2. Mullings believed that class couldn't just be steadied by itself, but that it should be considered together with race and gender as well.
3. Chapter 15
3.1. What is Religion?
3.1.1. Religion: A set of beliefs and rituals based on a unique vision of how the world ought to be, often focused on a supernatural power and lived out in community.
3.1.2. Examples:
3.1.2.1. Christian
3.1.2.2. Catholic
3.1.2.3. Protestant
3.1.2.4. Jewish
3.1.2.5. Mormon
3.1.2.6. Muslim
3.1.2.7. Buddhist
3.1.3. The Sacred and the Profane
3.1.3.1. Sacred doesn't have to be good, and profane doesn't have to mean evil. (I.E. eating pork)
3.1.3.2. Durkheim saw religion as the "glue that holds together society's many different pieces,"
4. Chapter 6
4.1. Race and Racism
4.1.1. What is race?
4.1.1.1. Race: a flawed system of classification, with no biological basis, that uses certain physical characteristics to divide the human population into supposedly discrete groups.
4.1.1.2. RACE ISN'T REAL
4.1.1.2.1. Humans share 99.9 percent of all their DNA
4.1.2. What is racism?
4.1.2.1. Racism in the Past
4.1.2.1.1. Colonialism and Racism: Race was a convenient way for European colonialists to justify their hostile takeovers of foreign lands and their abuse of non-europeans. The idea of foreigners being genetically inferior was little more than an excuse for their brutality.
4.1.2.1.2. The after-effects of colonialism are still felt to this day. Most race-related problems can be summarized by stating "It's Britain's fault"
4.1.2.2. Racism in the Present
4.1.2.2.1. Racism may be (more or less) shunned by society now, but there is still plenty of institutional racism to go around. Systems around the world are still rigged in ways that give racial majorities (usually lighter skinned people) unfair advantages. The legal system in the United States, for instance, is an egregious example of this.
4.1.2.3. Racism: Individuals' thoughts and actions and institutional patterns and policies that create or reproduce unequal access to power, privilege, resources, and opportunities based on imagined differences among groups.
4.1.2.4. The Rule of Hypodescent: Sometimes called the "one drop of blood rule" the assignment of children to racially "mixed" unions to the subordinate group
4.1.2.5. Types of Racism:
4.1.2.5.1. Individual Racism
4.1.2.5.2. Institutional Racism
4.1.2.5.3. MIcroagressions
5. Chapter 14
5.1. History of Politics
5.1.1. Levels of Order
5.1.1.1. Bands: small kinship-based groups of foragers who hunt and gather for a living over a particular territory.
5.1.1.2. Tribe: originally viewed as a culturally distinct, multiband population that imagined itself as one people descended from a common ancestor; currently used to describe an indigenous group with its own set of loyalties and leaders living to some extent outside the control of a centralized authoritative state.
5.1.1.3. Chiefdoms: An autonomous political unit composed of a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief.
5.1.1.4. State: An autonomous regional structure of political, economic, and military rule with a central government authorized to make laws and use force to maintain order and defend its territory.
5.2. Power
5.2.1. Hegemony: the ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement within a population without the use or threat of force.
5.2.1.1. In a perfect world, all of society would be able to get along and think together for the greater good.
5.2.2. Militarization: The contested social process through which a civil society organizes for the production of military violence.
5.2.2.1. Militarization leads to stronger feelings of nationalism through the glorification of the armed forces and war. This in turn leads to more willingness to militarize.