Anthropology 37
Fall 2000
Final Test Questions
The final test questions will be drawn from two of the questions listed below. You might think of your responses as a conversation with the issues and material we have covered in class. In conversing with the material, you want to demonstrate your familiarity with and critical reading of the materials we've covered in class, and your ability to converse intelligently and coherently with the issues the questions raise. I will be looking for careful, critical thinking about the issues, familiarity with the readings, and coherent reasoning and writing. I hope you will draw on each other as resources as you prepare for the questions.
1. In some of her most poignant writing, Benitez notes that Maria Mercedes finds the message of a group of young university students working with the Catholic Church appealing in her attempts to understand her own place and destiny within Salvadoran society. According to Benitez, what is it about this message that appeals to Maria Mercedes (make sure you identify and examine the specific passages where Benitez talks about the ideology of this group)? This movement within the Catholic Church is often called liberation theology, and the communities it formed “Christian base communities.” What are the roots of liberation theology, what are its central tenets, and what attracted peasants and the disenfranchised in El Salvador to its message? Perhaps what is most startling to us is the suggestion Benitez makes that liberation theology can lead to participation in revolutionary movements. How might one explain the revolutionary potential of liberation theology? Ultimately, liberation theology seems to have lost much of its power to mobilize people in Latin America; drawing on Green and class discussion, why do you think liberation theology has failed to bring about the social transformation it envisioned?
2. Benitez's book focuses on six women in Salvadoran society during a tumultuous period between two extraordinarily violent events (1932 and 1980). Benitez's intent, it seems, is not only to say something about conditions in El Salvador that led to these events, but also the plights and strategies of women who are often the victims (not necessarily the protagonists) in these events. Benitez (and Green) seem to suggest that women have a different perception of the social conditions that shape their lives, that they are able at negotiating their place within a society that pays little attention to their particular concerns, and that they nevertheless are doubly victimized society because of their gender. I’d like you to explore the lives of each of these six women: in what ways are each of their lives shaped by their gender in Salvadoran society? How do each of them survive within a social environment that disempowers women? Ultimately, each women is betrayed by their classes and the ideologies of those around them. How so? Finally, Green notes that women’s movements have flourished in Latin America during the last decade. What has made it possible for such movements to flourish, and around what issues have women mobilized?
3. In fine “snoop” fashion, Angus Wright pursues an investigation into who it was that killed Ramon Gonzalez. The evidence suggests that it was pesticides. I want you to examine the evidence and make the strongest case for the prosecution: that it was pesticides that killed Ramon Gonzalez. You must answer several important questions: why wasn’t it reported to the authorities as a pesticide poisoning? If pesticides actually were so dangerous, why aren’t they banned in Mexico, and why are they produced by respected companies in the US? Why didn’t anyone from Ramon Gonzalez’s family or community prosecute the case? Aren’t we assuming that it is the fault of technology, when it was Ramon Gonzalez, who after all, chose to work in Culiacan and therefore brought this on himself? And finally, even if pesticides had something to do with the death of Ramon Gonzalez, couldn’t it have simply been his own fault for unsafe handling of pesticides? Ultimately, your aim is to assign blame: who is to blame for Ramon Gonzalez’s death?
4. Angus Wright says in his introduction: “Persistence of dangerous
technologies may also be based on severe social imbalances that allow hazardous
technologies to prevail because the pattern of rewards and penalties associated
with the technology is rooted in the distribution of power.” (p. xv)
Drawing on Culiacan as a case study, dissect what Angus Wright means by
this statement. You can begin by exploring the roots of “dangerous
technologies” (why they are used, and in what way they are dangerous),
the concept of “social imbalances” in Mexican agriculture and society,
the patterns of rewards and penalties, and the distribution of power in
the Culiacan Valley and in Mexican society. Ultimately, Wright seems
to argue, pesticide poisoning isn’t as much a problem of technology as
it is a national and international political and social problem.
What does he mean by this?