1.1. "Systems of social class create and sustain patterns of inequality, structuring the relationships between rich and poor, between the privileged and the less well off." (Guest 389)
1.2. Inequality exists in every contemporary culture, though it may be organized in very different ways. Each society develops its own patterns of stratification that differentiate people into groups or classes. Such categories serve as the basis for unequal access to wealth, power, resources, privileges, and status
2. Chapter 6: Race & Racism
2.1. "Genetically there is only one race—the human race, with all its apparent diversity. (Guest 196)
2.2. Race is a flawed system of classification, created, and re-created over time, that uses certain physical characteristics to divide the human population into a few supposedly discrete biological groups and attribute to them unique combinations of physical ability, mental capacity, personality traits, cultural patterns, and capacity for civilization.
3. Chapter 7: Ethnicity & Nationalism
3.1. "Ethnicity has been increasingly substituted for race when describing group differences. Ethnic is often paired with minority, a term signifying a smaller group that differs from the dominant, majority culture in language, food, dress, immigrant history, national origin, or religion. But this usage ignores the ethnic identity of the majority." (Guest 240)
3.2. Ethnicity is one of the most powerful identities that humans develop: it is a sense of connection to a group of people who we believe share a common history, culture, and ancestry and who are distinct from others outside the group
4. Chapter 14: Power & Politics
4.1. "Power is embedded in all human relationships, whether that power is openly displayed or carefully avoided—from the most mundane aspects of friendships and family relationships to the myriad ways humans organize institutions and the structural frameworks of whole societies." (Guest 526)
4.2. Humans have organized themselves politically by using flexible strategies to help their groups survive and make their communities a better place to live. Our earliest human ancestors appear to have evolved in small, mobile, egalitarian groups of hunter-gatherers. It is in these types of groups that core human characteristics and cultural patterns emerged.
5. Chapter 8: Gender
5.1. "People create diverse cultures with fluid categories to define complex aspects of the human experience. The same holds true for gender. Even biological sex is far more fluid and complex than people are taught." (Guest 272)
5.2. Much of what we stereotypically consider to be “natural” male or female behavior—driven by biology—might turn out, upon more careful inspection, to be imposed by cultural expectations of how men and women should behave.
6. Chapter 1: Anthropology in a Global Age
6.1. "Human history is the story of movement and interaction, not of isolation and disconnection" (Guest 11)
6.2. Anthropologists believe that all humans are connected and influenced by one another. Rapid globalization is a main contributor to this today thus furthering the notion that our choices affect one another.
7. Chapter 2: Culture
7.1. "for anthropologists, culture is much more: It encompasses people’s entire way of life" (Guest 35)
7.2. Culture is an intricate part of the world. It connects people and influences people's choices and lifestyles'. Culture has many aspects to it, the main ones being: norms, values, symbols, and mental maps of reality.
8. Chapter 15: Religon
8.1. "People make sense of the world, reach decisions, and organize their lives on the basis of their religious beliefs." (Guest 572)
8.2. Anthropologists focus on the real religious worlds in which humans experience religion physically and express it through their actions. Religion is not theoretical in people’s daily activities. People make sense of the world, reach decisions, and organize their lives on the basis of their religious beliefs.
9. Chapter 9: Sexuality
9.1. "Sexuality involves more than personal choices about who our sexual partners are and what we do with them" (Guest 312)
9.2. Sexuality is a cultural arena within which our desires are expressed, socialized and even thwarted. And it is an arena in which people debate ideas of what is moral, appropriate, and “natural” and use those ideas to create unequal access to society’s power, privileges, and resources.
