Ant 101 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

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ANT 101 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology Culture of the Nayar of India Everywhere in the world a person may go there are different societies and within each individual society each has developed their culture that works best for them. Each generation passes down all of the acquired knowledge and traditions to each subsequent generation. The tribe of the Nayar of Kerala of India is no exception. They have found and passed down a culture that has worked for them for thousands of years. The Nayar of India’s have subsistence which is basically a way to live of that of a forager. (Nowak & Laird, 2010) What that is basically saying is that the Nayar society relies on the land for what they need. Contained within this paper are the beliefs and values, gender relations, kinship, and social organization of the tribe of the Nayar of India and how they relate back to their foraging or subsistence lifestyle. The Nayar of India has a subsistence of that of the forager. Foragers are typically small societies that live in typically isolated places who move from one place to the next as needed. The Nayar of India lives in small societies or caste as read in the book Cultural Anthropology. In the book Cultural Anthropology by Nowak and Laird foragers are describes as hunters and gatherers. This means that they live completely off of the land and do not waste time planting crops and such. The men do the hunting and the women go out and gather things such as nuts and berries for the tribe to survive on. This hunting and gathering style is how the society of the Nayar people lives. They do not build any type of permanent shelter as they do not know how long they will live in one place. Nayar people must be able to get up and move at any given moment if the natural resources they are using become scarce. They do not supply any food of their own by planting crops. Due to

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