Mundurucú Culture

The next course reading, “Mundurucú Culture,” is a chapter from an important ethnography, Women of the Forest by Yolanda and Robert Murphy.

Much of the material in the chapter is a straightforward presentation of basic cultural features of the Mundurucú, a Native American society from Central South America, including discussion of the gendered division of labor in horticultural and foraging practices, kinship and marriage patterns, residence patterns, etc.

One key topic to consider when reading and thinking about the chapter is the role of architecture and the social organization of space in shaping interactions between people, especially in relation to gender. The Murphys talk a great deal about the ways in which men’s and women’s houses are constructed and laid out within a village, as well as a concentric organization of social space, with the village the inner circle, the gardens in a ring around the village, and the forest as a nearly purely men’s area surrounding that.

Another key topic is not just the presence of male domination, but the particular way in which it is organized in practice. We discussed in class June Nash’s account of the growth over time of patriarchal male domination in certain class contexts of the Aztec polity. Here we encounter another society characterized in part by male domination, though in a distinct form referred to by some anthropologists as fratriarchy.

Another issue the Murphys address, though more in other parts of their book than in this particular chapter, is the relationship between ideas or perceptions and practices. If we ask whether the Mundurucú society is male dominated, our answer depends in part on our definitions.

My inclinations are generally to define something like “male domination” in terms of regular or typical social practice. In practice, women’s actions and movements are highly restricted while men’s are not; men’s activities are more highly valued (by men, and by women much of the time); men tend to have more influence in the community in general; men occasionally physically control women through physical violence, including occasional gang rapes. At the same time, the Murphys stress that Mundurucú women, for the most part, do not see themselves as oppressed or dominated. If domination or oppression are conceptualized mainly in terms of perception (to be oppressed is to feel oppressed), then Mundurucú women are not oppressed. If domination is conceptualized in terms of practices, the Mundurucú are a male-dominated society (and the absence of publically reported feelings of being dominated can be seen as a further example of male domination in practice, in terms of influence on the culture’s discourse on what is properly masculine and feminine, i.e. women’s lack of feeling dominated in society in which their actions are thoroughly regulated can be seen as an instance of socialization of "false consciousness" – or an instance of hegemonic control, for those familiar with the thought of Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci).

Central Tendency Measurement and Non-Enumerative Data

As I suggested in my previous post, statistical measures and concepts are one set of analytical tools that can be useful for a variety of research purposes. This can even be true with regard to research on phenomena that, while quantifiable (all phenomena have quantity), are difficult or impossible to measure in a highly enumerated fashion. (Take the example of kinship. One could measure the presence or absence of matrilineality. One could count up the number of households or family groups practicing matrilineality in a given community. One could assess in rough terms whether filiation is strongly or weakly matrilineal. It’s difficult to imagine how one would precisely measure matrilineality on a numerical scale, though.)

One important statistical concept is that of central tendency, and central tendency measures can be usefully applied to a variety of quantities, including some non-enumerable entities.

For example, in his textbook Traditional Cultures, Glenn King uses the notion of modal patterns as a central measure of broad cultural patterns for a variety of world areas. This is not a “normative” approach to the representation of cultures and culture areas in the sense of presenting universal patterns that inevitably essentialize and homogenize the areas in question. Instead, King is careful to point out the identification of a modal pattern simply means to identify for any particular component of culture the pattern that is more common than any other for the spatial frame of reference at hand, and that almost by definition, to speak of modal patterns is to recognize that there will be exceptions, perhaps copious exceptions, to the identified central tendency.

The mode is a particularly useful central tendency measure for phenomena that are hard or impossible to enumerate. Take kinship again. One could say (and King’s textbook does) that among Eastern Native North Americans prior to European contact, matrilineality was the modal pattern, and that’s a useful piece of information. On the other hand, with this and much other information anthropologists are interested in, I’m not sure how one would usefully apply other central tendency measures – so I’m definitely not arguing for over-statisticalization of the discipline. For example, what would a mean or median kinship system be? (I suppose one could take possible rough measures of degree of filiation, rank them on an arbitrary scale, e.g. 1= strong patrilineal filiation, 2= weak patrilineal filiation, 3=bilateral or bilineal filiation, 4= weak matrilineal filiation, 5=strong matrilineal filiation, and collect mean or median tendencies on that basis, but that strikes me as exceedingly artificial and I’m at a loss to imagine the use for such figures.)

Even in cases where statistical concepts and measures (whether in basic terms as I’ve been discussing or through the use of more complex analyses and tests) are useful, scholarship remains simultaneously intrinsically qualitative.

To assess modal tendencies is to first define what entities are to be assessed as present or not and counted. With something like kinship, different tendencies could potentially be measured depending on whether one focused on individuals, households, or families (with those last two needing careful definition in research planning and interpretation as well). To create a hypothetical situation, I could imagine that many Iroquois communities experienced transformations in the early 19th century, through influence of things like religious conversion and revitalization, inter-marriage with Anglos, the encroachment of white settlers, etc., where within communities there may have been co-presence of many small bilaterally-trending neolocal households alongside a small number of large matrilineal matrilocal households. In some communities at certain points of time, there may have been no clear modal pattern – or rather multiple modal patterns might have co-existed. For example, the modal household may have been small and neolocal, while the modal individual may have lived in a large matrilocal household. For such a purely hypothetical context, both would be important measures that would depend on attention to qualitative details in order to be assessable.

Lastly, I am arguing for transcendence of the false qualitative/quantitative divide in social science and humanities research. I’m also arguing that as part of this statistical concepts and analysis can provide one set of tools for many research purposes, including with data that are not particularly amenable to enumeration.

I’m not arguing at all that statistics are the answer to everything. As with any task, the proper analytical tools to use depend on the task at hand. Something statistics are the wrong tool, and sometimes it’s overkill.

"The Navaho View of Life," by Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton

For the in-class section of the course, our most recent course reading is a selection from a classic ethnography, The Navaho, written by Kluckhohn and Leighton in the mid-1940s.

Both Kluckhohn and Leighton were interested in the Navaho culture (though Kluckhohn also wrote extensively on other cultures as well). Both also shared interests in the relationship between psychology and anthropology, or put a different way the relationship between culture and personality. The two worked together on a couple ethnographic works about the Navaho and their shared theoretical interests.

Of the two, Kluckhohn was the more prominent. In fact, he was one of the most prominent anthropologists of the mid-20th century. His major interests were, as said above, the relationship between culture and personality, and the value orientations typical of specific cultural contexts (with this evident in our course reading selection). (For an extended assessment of his life and work, see the lengthy obituary published in American Anthropologist by Talcott Parsons and Evon Vogt after his death in 1960.)

The following paragraph is a quotation from the Wikipedia (a reference source that should be used cautiously, but which can be useful for background information) entry on Kluckhohn:

“In 1949, Kluckhohn began a long-term study of what he and his colleagues called "Values Orientations" among five adjacent communities in Texas: Zuni, Navajo, Mormon (LDS), Spanish-American (Mexican-American), and Texas Homesteaders. A key methodological approach that he developed together with his wife Florence Rockwood Kluckhohn and colleagues Evon Z. Vogt and Ethel M. Albert, among others, was the Values Orientation Theory. They believed that cross-cultural understanding and communication could be facilitated by analyzing a given culture's orientation to five key aspects of human life: Human Nature (people seen as intrinsically good, evil, or mixed); Man-Nature Relationship (the view that humans should be subordinate to nature, dominant over nature, or live in harmony with nature); Time (primary value placed on past/tradition, present/enjoyment, or future/posterity/delayed gratification); Activity (being, becoming/inner development, or doing/striving/industriousness); and Social Relations (hierarchical, collateral/collective-egalitarian, or individualistic). The Values Orientation Method was developed furthest by Florence Kluckhohn and her colleagues and students in later years.”

In the selected reading, Kluckhohn and Leighton get at Navaho personality, culture, and value orientations through the analysis of cultural premises. Cultural premises can be seen as the basic operating assumptions typical of persons socialized within a particular cultural context. As such, the cultural premises outlined by Kluckhohn and Leighton do not represent a description of what Navajo individuals do on a day-to-day basis in their lives. Rather, they are a description of the operating assumptions that guide Navajo individuals in their choices and actions in both usual and unusual situations as they move through life.

As such, Kluckhohn and Leighton provide a dynamic model for understanding culture and individuals. It doesn’t assume that Navajo culture is static, but provides a way to understand how individuals socialized in a particular sociocultural environment might interact with ongoing and changing circumstances.

Although not many anthropologists today would claim to be “Kluckhohnians,” the approach was influential, and important affinities remain in much contemporary work, such as some varieties of contemporary practice theory (see the course reading by Sherry Ortner) or some more semiotically inclined anthropologists’ work (see the course reading by E. Valentine Daniel).

For more information on the Navajo, see the Navajo Nation’s website, as well as a web page on Navajo history.

Judith K. Brown's "Iroquois Women"

Judith K. Brown’s article “Iroquois Women” is an important text in the history of ethnography. The article was first published in 1975 as part of the collection edited by Rayna Reiter, Toward an Anthropology of Women. This book was one of the more prominent collections of feminist anthropology (also often called “the anthropology of women” at the time) in the mid-1970s. (Woman the Gatherer and Woman, Culture, and Society were two other important collections of essays and articles. The names of those two books were responses to the titles of two other important anthropological books of the 1960s, Man the Hunter and Man, Culture, and Society.)

Prior to the 1960s and 1970s, gender was an understudied aspect of culture and information on women often underreported, as male ethnographers often worked mainly with male informants or presented information collected from men as typical of a culture in general. The collection Toward an Anthropology of Women and the Brown essay were part of a broader project to redress earlier male bias in ethnography and introduce more information about women specifically and the importance of gender as a social factor generally.

Historically, Iroquois women had great influence and status within their communities and culture. Brown’s essay is in part a discussion of this status of women in Iroquois culture and of Iroquois gender relations (so it’s also very much about Iroquois men). She’s also concerned to examine the social factors that influence gender relations in any culture through the discussion of an Iroquois case study. Among the factors she discusses are economic production, the gender division of labor in relation to production, kinship and residence organization, and the control and distribution of economic goods.

For more information on Judith K. Brown, see her faculty web page at Oakland University.

For more information on the Iroquois, see the Iroquois.net web site.

John Kicza and Native American Societies

Our first course reading is "The Native Societies of the Americas before contact," from John E. Kicza's book Resilient Cultures: America's Native Peoples Confront European Colonization, 1500 - 1800.

Here's a link to Kicza's website at Washington State University, where he's the chair of the history department: http://libarts.wsu.edu/history/faculty-staff/kicza.asp

Kicza uses a somewhat different terminology from what I have introduced thus far in class to characterize general types of societies in the Americas. Specifically, he frames his discussion in terms of "sedentary imperial societies," "semisedentary societies," and "nonsedentary or nomadic societies." To translate this into terms more frequently used by anthropologists, Kicza's "sedentary imperial societies" would correspond to agricultural states, "semisedentary societies" would correspond to horticultural tribes and chiefdoms, as well as a few relatively sedentary intensive foraging societies, and "nonsedentary or nomadic societies" would correspond to nomadic foraging bands.

Charles Wagley's "On Social Race in the Americas"

Much has been written about race in the Americas since this article by Charles Wagley was first published in the 1950s. This article, though, was foundational for much of the writing on race by anthropologists since then, and with perhaps a few caveats it still functions quite well as an overview of the social organization of race in various parts of the Western Hemisphere. (The most important qualification is that Wagley’s terminology for reference to populations, “negroid,” “caucasoid,” “mongoloid,” is now anachronistic – though the terms were common parlance in social science writing of the day. The terms Wagley uses are often taken to have connotations of biological fixity of the racial groups that his own work did much to help undermine. If the terms are read as “African,” “European,” and “Native American,” that is as simply indicating geographic regions of origin, what Wagley says about the three groups and their interactions remains important.)

Wagley identifies several factors that are influential in shaping three broadly distinguished patterns of social race. Each of the patterns takes into consideration ancestry (i.e. degree of ancestral membership in any of the three areas of geographic origin), physical appearance (e.g. skin color, facial features, hair texture or other physical features that can be taken as signs of race), and cultural factors (e.g. language, dress, occupation). These factors of ancestry, physical appearance, and culture are differentially emphasized, though, generating one pattern with a strongly delineated binary distinction between European and African (i.e. black and white) with a focus on ancestry especially; a second pattern emphasizing a continuum of racial mixture between African and European, with physical appearance especially emphasized in categorization; and a third pattern emphasizing a continuum of racial mixture between Native American and European, with cultural factors particularly important in racial categorization.

Wagley points out how these three basic patterns are regionally associated, not so much with three specific regions, but with three types of regions in the Americas. These types of regions are defined by Wagley in broad ecological terms: the temperate zones of northern North America (specifically northeastern North America during the colonial period in which race patterns were first constituted) and southern South America associated with the first pattern; the tropical lowland areas of Brazil, the Caribbean, and coastal Spanish America (and to a lesser extent, the sub-tropical southeastern North America – at least for a time) associated with the second pattern; and tropical to temperate highland zones of Latin America (i.e. Mesoamerica and the Andes) associated with the third.

Equally important for Wagley are two other factors, both of which are intimately connected to the basic ecological characteristics of the different types of regions. First are the predominant economic activities of a region. For example, a critical difference between the first and second type regions is the pervasive presence of extremely labor intensive agricultural practices based for a long time in plantation slavery in tropical lowland areas in contrast to Euro-American farming practices in Northern North America and Southern South America that, while quite distinct in certain ways from one another, had in common the lack of utilization of large pools of intensive labor, i.e. the lack of plantation agriculture or slavery practiced on a large scale.

Alongside economic practices, another important consideration discussed by Wagley is population history. Although Wagley doesn’t quite put it this way, the population history of Native Americans is particularly important in playing a role in shaping the organization of race. Low population densities of Native Americans persisted at least into the 19th century in Northeastern North America and Southern South America, but without being particularly integrated with European society in the form of a laboring group. (The fur trade in North America and cattle ranching in South America certainly involved Native American labor, but with relatively small numbers of laborers involved and in ways and contexts where Europeans still thought of them as largely outside their own social universe.) High population densities of Native Americans in the tropical lowlands were largely wiped out early on, mainly by disease, and were replaced with slave labor imported from Africa on newly introduced plantation systems. Even higher population densities of Native Americas in the Latin American highlands were also decimated by disease, but large numbers of Native Americans remained even after the worst of the plague years of the 1500s and 1600s and were incorporated as labor into a variety of economic endeavors.

In this article and other writings (his work tended to focus on race in the Americas generally or on the ethnography of Brazil in particular), Wagley was an important influence on the shape of anthropological debate in the mid- to late 20th century. He especially influenced the development of ecological and economic anthropology in the 1950s through the 1970s. In most anthropologists’ conception of the history of the discipline, he is greatly overshadowed in this regard by figures such as Julian Steward, and probably rightfully so – Steward’s writings, such as Theory of Culture Change, are more widely read today and were so at the time as well. Wagley’s influence took more the form of teaching and mentorship. He taught at Columbia at a time when many scholars who were to become extremely important in ecological and economic anthropology were studying there as Ph.D. students, probably most prominently Eric Wolf (see Europe and the People without History), Sidney Mintz (see Sweetness and Power), and Marvin Harris (see Cultural Materialism and The Rise of Anthropological Theory). It is clear that Harris was especially influenced by Wagley: Harris’ early work on race in the Americas is essentially a direct development of Wagley’s work, and Harris’ cultural materialist theory builds upon Wagley’s broadly ecological approach (though obviously also drawing on many other sources of inspiration also).

Mundurucú Culture

The next course reading, “Mundurucú Culture,” is a chapter from an important ethnography, Women of the Forest by Yolanda and Robert Murphy.

Much of the material in the chapter is a straightforward presentation of basic cultural features of the Mundurucú, a Native American society from Central South America, including discussion of the gendered division of labor in horticultural and foraging practices, kinship and marriage patterns, residence patterns, etc.

One key topic to consider when reading and thinking about the chapter is the role of architecture and the social organization of space in shaping interactions between people, especially in relation to gender. The Murphys talk a great deal about the ways in which men’s and women’s houses are constructed and laid out within a village, as well as a concentric organization of social space, with the village the inner circle, the gardens in a ring around the village, and the forest as a nearly purely men’s area surrounding that.

Another key topic is not just the presence of male domination, but the particular way in which it is organized in practice. We discussed in class June Nash’s account of the growth over time of patriarchal male domination in certain class contexts of the Aztec polity. Here we encounter another society characterized in part by male domination, though in a distinct form referred to by some anthropologists as fratriarchy.

Another issue the Murphys address, though more in other parts of their book than in this particular chapter, is the relationship between ideas or perceptions and practices. If we ask whether the Mundurucú society is male dominated, our answer depends in part on our definitions.

My inclinations are generally to define something like “male domination” in terms of regular or typical social practice. In practice, women’s actions and movements are highly restricted while men’s are not; men’s activities are more highly valued (by men, and by women much of the time); men tend to have more influence in the community in general; men occasionally physically control women through physical violence, including occasional gang rapes. At the same time, the Murphys stress that Mundurucú women, for the most part, do not see themselves as oppressed or dominated. If domination or oppression are conceptualized mainly in terms of perception (to be oppressed is to feel oppressed), then Mundurucú women are not oppressed. If domination is conceptualized in terms of practices, the Mundurucú are a male-dominated society (and the absence of publically reported feelings of being dominated can be seen as a further example of male domination in practice, in terms of influence on the culture’s discourse on what is properly masculine and feminine, i.e. women’s lack of feeling dominated in society in which their actions are thoroughly regulated can be seen as an instance of socialization of "false consciousness" – or an instance of hegemonic control, for those familiar with the thought of Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci).

Language Extinction and Global Patterns

National Geographic online has posted an interesting (and depressing) article on language extinction, noting the presence of five global “hotspots” for the extinction of languages currently spoken by only small numbers of individuals. These hotspots are: the Northwest Coast of North America, Oklahoma, Central South America, Northeast Asia, and Northern Australia, which is also to say that Native American, Siberian, and Australian Aboriginal languages in particular are disappearing quickly at the present time. As the article discusses, this is a concern not just in terms of the loss of linguistic diversity, but also the loss of knowledge, e.g. of the natural environment, that was thoroughly embedded in each of these languages.

I’d simply note two things in terms of how these five hotspots reflect underlying global patterns. First, these instances don’t reflect just any random languages going extinct. Rather, they reflect particular sorts of interactional histories between quite different sorts of societies. Each is the end result of a few centuries interaction between societies (Native American, Siberian, Australian Aboriginal) with relatively low population densities and technologies that were less efficient for the specific purposes of armed conflict or intensive agricultural production (capable of supporting larger, dense populations) being faced with colonizers from much larger societies (European and Euro-American) with technologies that gave them a distinct edge in direct confrontation. (In the case of the Americas, especially, diseases brought along with Europeans were another major factor in the process of social disruption and linguistic disappearance.)

Second, the current hotspots of linguistic (and cultural) disappearance do not reflect a new phenomenon. They represent the tail end of a now centuries long process of social disruption, cultural loss, and cultural and linguistic assimilation. These hotspots represent remnant areas. What’s happening now in these areas already happened (often long ago) in other areas of the Americas with dense Euro-American settlement, in more densely populated Southern Australia, or in more westerly Siberian areas closer to the heartland of Russian culture.

Tragically, in all likelihood in the near future, very few Native American, Siberian, or Australian Aboriginal languages will remain. The ones that will remain will also not be random. They will in most cases be languages of cultural populations that had relatively high population numbers and densities prior to colonization (e.g. Mesoamerican or Andean languages and a few other North and South American languages), or populations settled in places where the effects of colonization have been particularly light on the ground.

"The Navaho View of Life," by Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton

Our next course reading is a selection from a classic ethnography, The Navaho, written by Kluckhohn and Leighton in the mid-1940s.

Both Kluckhohn and Leighton were interested in the Navaho culture (though Kluckhohn also wrote extensively on other cultures as well). Both also shared interests in the relationship between psychology and anthropology, or put a different way the relationship between culture and personality. The two worked together on a couple ethnographic works about the Navaho and their shared theoretical interests.

Of the two, Kluckhohn was the more prominent. In fact, he was one of the most prominent anthropologists of the mid-20th century. His major interests were, as said above, the relationship between culture and personality, and the value orientations typical of specific cultural contexts (with this evident in our course reading selection). (For an extended assessment of his life and work, see the lengthy obituary published in American Anthropologist by Talcott Parsons and Evon Vogt after his death in 1960.)

The following paragraph is a quotation from the Wikipedia (a reference source that should be used cautiously, but which can be useful for background information) entry on Kluckhohn:

“In 1949, Kluckhohn began a long-term study of what he and his colleagues called "Values Orientations" among five adjacent communities in Texas: Zuni, Navajo, Mormon (LDS), Spanish-American (Mexican-American), and Texas Homesteaders. A key methodological approach that he developed together with his wife Florence Rockwood Kluckhohn and colleagues Evon Z. Vogt and Ethel M. Albert, among others, was the Values Orientation Theory. They believed that cross-cultural understanding and communication could be facilitated by analyzing a given culture's orientation to five key aspects of human life: Human Nature (people seen as intrinsically good, evil, or mixed); Man-Nature Relationship (the view that humans should be subordinate to nature, dominant over nature, or live in harmony with nature); Time (primary value placed on past/tradition, present/enjoyment, or future/posterity/delayed gratification); Activity (being, becoming/inner development, or doing/striving/industriousness); and Social Relations (hierarchical, collateral/collective-egalitarian, or individualistic). The Values Orientation Method was developed furthest by Florence Kluckhohn and her colleagues and students in later years.”

In the selected reading, Kluckhohn and Leighton get at Navaho personality, culture, and value orientations through the analysis of cultural premises. Cultural premises can be seen as the basic operating assumptions typical of persons socialized within a particular cultural context. As such, the cultural premises outlined by Kluckhohn and Leighton do not represent a description of what Navajo individuals do on a day-to-day basis in their lives. Rather, they are a description of the operating assumptions that guide Navajo individuals in their choices and actions in both usual and unusual situations as they move through life.

As such, Kluckhohn and Leighton provide a dynamic model for understanding culture and individuals. It doesn’t assume that Navajo culture is static, but provides a way to understand how individuals socialized in a particular sociocultural environment might interact with ongoing and changing circumstances.

Although not many anthropologists today would claim to be “Kluckhohnians,” the approach was influential, and important affinities remain in much contemporary work, such as some varieties of contemporary practice theory (see the course reading by Sherry Ortner) or some more semiotically inclined anthropologists’ work (see the course reading by E. Valentine Daniel).

For more information on the Navajo, see the Navajo Nation’s website, as well as a web page on Navajo history.

Iroquois and Other Native American Cooking

For anyone interested in Native American cookery and recipes, check out this site of Native American recipes. The site includes two corn soup recipes from Iroquois or other Northeastern Native groups that I’ve copied in here.

Oneida Corn Soup

Corn
Water
Wild rice
Wild greens
Venison

Cook corn in water with bits of venison, wild edible greens like cowslip, ferns, or milk weed and a handful of wild rice.

My Disclaimer: Do not start collecting wild greens to cook this soup if you do not know what you are doing. Store-bought greens should substitute nicely.


Winter Corn Chowder

Yield: 1 pot

1 1/2 c Dried corn
6 sl Bacon
4 c Milk
1/2 ts Salt
3 c Broth
2 c Chopped onion
2 ts Sugar

Rinse corn and combine with broth in saucepan; bring to boil. Remove to heat and allow to stand for 2 hours, then cook for 45 minutes. Cook bacon in skillet until crisp. Drain. Cook onion in drippings. Add to corn mixture and simmer 5 minutes. Add milk, sugar, and salt; sprinkle with
bacon.

Notice that while the first recipe utilizes ingredients that would have been available to Native Americans for quite some time before contact with Europeans, the second recipe demonstrates cultural change in foodways resulting from Native contact with Euro-American culture with the inclusion of Old World ingredients – in fact everything but the corn and salt would have been unavailable to Native Americans prior to the arrival of Europeans. (I’m assuming the “broth” is chicken, beef, or pork stock – venison stock could have been available prior to European contact.)

Another interesting food and recipe site is specific to Tuscarora cooking. The Tuscarora are one of the six tribal groups of the League of the Iroquois – historically the last of the six to join.

John E. Kicza and Native Cultures of the Americas

Our first course reading is "The Native Societies of the Americas before contact," from John E. Kicza's book Resilient Cultures: America's Native Peoples Confront European Colonization, 1500 - 1800.

Here's a link to Kicza's website at Washington State University, where he's the chair of the history department: http://libarts.wsu.edu/history/faculty-staff/kicza.asp

Kicza uses a somewhat different terminology from what I have introduced thus far in class to characterize general types of societies in the Americas. Specifically, he frames his discussion in terms of "sedentary imperial societies," "semisedentary societies," and "nonsedentary or nomadic societies." To translate this into terms more frequently used by anthropologists, Kicza's "sedentary imperial societies" would correspond to agricultural states, "semisedentary societies" would correspond to horticultural tribes and chiefdoms, as well as a few relatively sedentary intensive foraging societies, and "nonsedentary or nomadic societies" would correspond to nomadic foraging bands.