(a) Animism and Deep Ecology (10 marks) (b) Marriage Regulations and Alliance Theory (10 marks) (c) Historical Particularism and…

(a) Animism and Deep Ecology

Animism, in E.B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871), is belief in spirit beings animating persons, animals, plants and landforms; he treated it as the minimum definition of religion. It differs from animatism (Marett), belief in an impersonal power such as mana. Deep Ecology, coined by Arne Naess (1973), is a philosophy, not a belief system. It asserts biocentric equality, the intrinsic value of all life irrespective of human use, and "self-realisation", the widening of the self to include the ecological whole; Naess called his own position ecosophy T.

Both reject the view that humans stand apart from nature, but animism is a lived cultural ontology, while Deep Ecology is a reasoned ethical programme against anthropocentrism. Sacred groves among the Gond, Bhil and Khasi (Law Kyntang) show animist practice producing the conservation outcomes Deep Ecology advocates.

(b) Marriage Regulations and Alliance Theory

Marriage regulations fix whom one may or must marry: endogamy (within caste or tribe), exogamy (outside clan, gotra or village), the incest taboo, and prescribed or preferred forms such as cross-cousin marriage and levirate.

Alliance theory, Lévi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), treats these rules as a system through which groups exchange women, so marriage binds groups, not merely spouses. The incest taboo is the engine: a group cannot keep its own women, so it must give them away and receive others.

He distinguished restricted exchange (two groups swap, as in bilateral cross-cousin marriage) from generalised exchange (a circle of groups, as in matrilateral cross-cousin marriage). Leach's study of the Kachin mayu-dama system illustrates generalised exchange. Bride price and dowry show the exchange character; Dravidian cross-cousin preference contrasts with North Indian gotra and village exogamy.

(c) Historical Particularism and Franz Boas

Historical particularism, the label applied to Franz Boas and his students (the term is Marvin Harris's), holds that every culture is the unique outcome of its own history, environment and borrowing from neighbours. It rejects the unilineal evolutionism of Tylor and Morgan, which ranked societies from savagery to civilisation, and demands detailed, inductive fieldwork before theory.

Boas's method relied on diffusion and trait distribution, the culture-area concept, and cultural relativism, judging a culture by its own standards. His fieldwork among the Kwakiutl and the Baffin Island Inuit, and The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), separated race, language and culture and weakened racial determinism. He institutionalised the four-field approach in American anthropology.

His students Kroeber, Lowie, Sapir, Mead and Benedict carried the programme into culture-and-personality studies. Critics say particularism avoided generalisation and comparison.

(d) "The bio-cultural approach is the hallmark of Biological Anthropology."

Biological anthropology explains human variation as the product of biology and culture acting on each other, not of either alone. The bio-cultural approach therefore asks how cultural practices alter selection and health, and how biological limits shape culture.

Culture shaping biology: dairying selected for lactase persistence, a regulatory variant near the LCT gene (in MCM6), common in pastoralist populations; yam cultivation in West Africa created standing water and malaria, raising the sickle-cell allele (Livingstone); the Tibetan EPAS1 variant permits high-altitude life, while clothing, shelter and diet add cultural buffering.

Biology shaping culture: prolonged infant dependency and a long childhood require kin cooperation and food sharing.

The approach also covers growth and nutrition, stress and disease ecology, and adaptation versus acclimatisation. It makes biological anthropology a unified science, avoiding both genetic and cultural determinism.

(e) Thermoluminescence (TL) dating

TL dating estimates the time since a material was last heated to about 400–500°C. Crystalline minerals such as quartz and feldspar in pottery, burnt flint, hearth stones and kiln floors trap electrons at lattice defects, charged by natural radiation from uranium, thorium, potassium-40 and cosmic rays. Firing empties the traps and sets the clock to zero.

In the laboratory, reheating releases the stored electrons as light, recorded as a glow curve. Age = equivalent (palaeo) dose, De (Gy) ÷ annual dose rate (Gy/year), the dose rate being measured from the sample and its burial environment.

TL suits inorganic material that radiocarbon cannot date, over a range from a few hundred to roughly 500,000 years. It dated burnt flints at Qafzeh (about 92,000 years) and detects forged ceramics. Limits are moisture and uneven dose-rate error; optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dates sunlight-reset sediments.