Anthropology Midterm

Social business

The way people exercise power during interactions and create identities and values through social discourse.

Symbolic/interpretive anthropology

A perspective that views culture as a set of shared ideas or knowledge that informs behavior and its meanings.

Habitus

The self-perceptions, habits, and tastes of a person that are shaped by external influences over a lifetime, influencing one's worldview and social position.

Nature vs culture

A debate regarding the factors that determine human behavior and potential, including biology, genes, culture, and language.

Empiricism

A philosophical concept emphasizing experience, evidence, and observation in knowledge formation.

Fieldwork

A research strategy involving intense interaction with a local community over an extended period to understand their world.

Contextualization

the practice of placing cultural practices, beliefs, or phenomena within the specific social, historical, and environmental contexts in which they occur.

Positionality

A methodology requiring researchers and anthropologists to consider how intersecting factors like race, class, and gender influence their personal study and representation.

Reflexivity

The practice of ongoing self-evaluation and acknowledgment of how a researcher's position affects the research process and outcomes.

Armchair Anthropology

The practice of developing theories based on written accounts without direct contact with the studied populations.

Salvage Anthropology

A fieldwork strategy by Franz Boas aimed at collecting information about Indigenous populations affected by European expansion.

Experimental Ethnography

Anthropological writing that merges different genres and theoretical positions.

Intersectionality

An analytic framework assessing how race, gender, and class interact to shape an individuals life chances and societal place.

Polyvocality

The use of multiple voices in ethnographic writing to allow readers to hear directly from study participants.

Cultural Relativism

The principle that an individual's beliefs and activities should be understood based on that person's own culture, rather than be judged against the criteria of another culture. It promotes understanding and tolerance.

Multispecies ethnography

Research that considers interactions among all species to provide a more-than-human perspective.

Relatedness

A concept by Janet Carsten that explores non-standard forms of connection beyond traditional kinship.

Feminist anthropology critiques of “bloodline”

The idea that kinship is deeply intertwined with social regulations governing inheritance and power structures. “Blood” relatives are created to uphold structures of power like family dynamics.

Stratification

The unequal distribution of resources and privileges within a group or culture.

Egalitarian society

A society characterized by shared resources and minimal hierarchy and violence.

Ranked societies

Societies where wealth is not stratified, but prestige and status are.

Class-based societies

Systems where power is based on wealth and status, leading to unequal resource distribution often maintained through violence.

Social reproduction

The transmission of social and class relations from generation to generation

Cultural capital

Knowledge and tastes acquired from family that provide access to valuable societal resources.

Franz Boas

The founder of four-field anthropology, known for his anti-racist theories and belief in the primacy of nurture over nature.

Margaret Mead

A prominent figure in cultural anthropology, Mead is best known for her studies of adolescence in Samoan culture. Her work brought attention to the role of culture in shaping personality and social norms.

Bronislaw Malinowsk

A key figure in functionalism, Malinowski is famous for his ethnographic fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands. He emphasized the importance of participant observation and detailed ethnographic methods.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

 A foundational figure in structural anthropology, Lévi-Strauss focused on understanding underlying structures of human thought and culture. His work on myth and kinship has had a lasting impact on the field.

Ruth Benedict

A student of Boas, Benedict's work explored the relationship between culture and personality. Her book "Patterns of Culture" examined how different societies shape individual behaviors and values.

Cultural Diffusion

The process by which cultural elements, such as ideas, practices, or technologies, spread from one society to another. This can occur through trade, migration, or communication.

Subculture:

A group within a larger culture that has distinct values, norms, and behaviors that differ from those of the dominant culture. Examples include youth cultures, ethnic groups, or specialized professional communities.

Cultural Change

The transformation of a culture over time, influenced by various factors such as globalization, technology, and social movements. This can lead to the emergence of new practices or the decline of traditional ones

Culture

The set of beliefs, practices, norms, values, symbols, and artifacts that characterize a group of people. It encompasses everything from language and religion to customs and social structures

Disability rights movement

activists argued that it is not an individual’s actual
‘impairments’ which construct disability as a subordinate social status and devalued life
experience but socially imposed barriers.

Models of Disability

The social model of disability argues that people are disabled by the
barriers that society puts up for them, while the medical model of disability argues that
people are disabled by medical conditions.

Medical anthropology

A branch of cultural anthropology that uses a variety of analytical
perspectives to examine the wide range of experiences and practices that humans associate
with disease, illness, health, well-being, and the body—both today and in the past.

Medical ecology:

 the interaction of disease with the natural environment and human
culture.

Interpretivist approach in medical anthropology:

the study of health systems as system
of meaning: It asks: How do humans across cultures make sense of health and illness? How
do we think, talk, and feel about illness, pain, suffering, birth, and morality?

Critical medical anthropology

explores the impact of inequality on human health,
considering (1) how economic and political systems, race, class, gender, and sexuality create
and perpetuate unequal access to health care, and (2) how health systems are systems of
power that promote health disparities by defining who is sick, who gets treated, and how
treatment is provided.

Interactive vs. Indifferent kinds:

Interactive kinds are classifications that, when known by
people or by those around them, change the ways in which individuals experience
themselves; indifferent kinds are classifications that do not affect what they classify.

Idioms of distress:

patient’s description of mental distress, which directs attention to
socially and culturally mediated ways of experiencing and expressing distress

Anthropology of Mental Distress

medical anthropologists try to use neutral language,
such as “experience”, “distress”, “social suffering”, “interiority” and try to avoid “disease”,
“pathology”, “disorder”—some anthropologists even avoid the term “illness” itself

Validity:

 “A given classification that possesses intrinsic unity: it is neither a random
phenomenon nor an artifact of the techniques through which it is detected, treated,
experienced, and studied; “intrinsic unity” is what anchors any classification’s “portability”
across contexts

The “South Asia Puzzle” of Mental Health:

There are higher proportions of people with
mental illness in India—and possibly in non-Western countries more generally—than there
are in US and the West. Yet more people seem to recover spontaneously and more people
who never quite recover hold down jobs and care for families more effectively.

Language and Culture:

The study of language as social action and a cultural resource
people use where language is understood as doing something in the world, instead of just
reflecting a pre-existing world (i.e., presupposes and entails context).

Taboo language:

A form of language that is both universal and very culturally and
contextually specific, encoding or reflecting social relationships, marking identity, or serving
specific sociocultural functions

Language ideologies

attitudes, opinions, beliefs, or theories that we all have about
language, which people are often unaware of them.

Indexicality:

 meaning and effect of language closely bound to context; meaning produced
through contiguity or causality

Practice:

 structures (both linguistic and social) that simultaneously constrain and give rise to
human actions, which in turn create, recreate, or reconfigure those same structures – and so
on, with structures and actions successively giving rise to one another.

Habitus

Self-perceptions, sensibilities, and tastes develop in response to external influences
over a lifetime that shape one’s conception of the world and where one fits into it.

Multifunctionality:

 all the different kinds of work that language does, including the
expressive, conative, referential, poetic, phatic, and metalinguistic function.

Linguistic Relativity:

a perspective on the relationship between language and thought that
posits language requires/obligates speakers to pay attention to certain things about the world
but ignore other things, which in turn, shapes the ways speakers think and act.

Speech Community

any human aggregate characterized by regular or frequent interaction
by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregate by significant
differences in language use

Biomedical body:

the notion that the body is an isolated, natural and universal object

Bodily autonomy

has received significant attention in bioethics, medical ethics, and
medical law in terms of the general sanctity of a patient’s bodily sovereignty and the rights of
patients to make choices (e.g., reproductive choices) that concern their own body

Obstetric violence:

 harm inflicted during or in relation to pregnancy, childbearing, and the
post-partum period. Such violence can be both interpersonal and structural, arising from the
actions of health-care providers and also from broader political and economic arrangements
that disproportionately harm marginalized populations. By focusing on obstetric violence,
we center the long and enduring history of biological reproduction as a site of social
violence.

Humanization:

an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of approaches to childbirth,
tied together by an overall emphasis on centering women’s autonomy in their birth choices,
valorizing the natural and physiological over the technological, and promoting respectful
birth care

Language Socialization:

The process of acquiring language and the process of acquiring
sociocultural knowledge are intimately tied

Triangle trade:

The extensive exchange of enslaved people, sugar, cotton, and furs between
Europe, Africa, and the Americas that transformed economic, political, and social life in
both sides of the Atlantic

Commodification:

he process of transforming inalienable, free, or gifted things (objects,
services, ideas, nature, personal information, people or animals) into commodities, or objects
for sale

Self-devouring growth:

the ways that the super-organism of human beings is consuming
itself...Wherever you sit reading this you are in a world organized by self-devouring growth.
It is so fundamental as to be unremarkable, and yet it is eating away at the very ground
beneath our feet