IB Anthropology SL all terms

Acculturation

Cultural change related to contact with another culture.

Agency

the capacity of human beings to act in meaningful ways that

affect their own lives and those of others.

Agency-centred

research that emphasizes agency focuses on humans acting

to promote their interests and the interests of the groups to which they

belong

Alterity

“Otherness”. Used in anthropology to describe and comment on the

construction and experience of cultural difference.

Analytical categories

An outsider’s view of a culture, sometimes referred to as an “etic” view

Authority

Power is exercised with the authority of others

Beliefs and knowledge

A set of convictions, values and viewpoints regarded as “the truth” and

shared by members of a social group.

Biomedicine

A term used in medical anthropology for conventional western medicine.

Biopsychosocial model

Interactions between biological, psychological, and social factors

determine the cause, manifestation, and outcome of wellness and disease.

Capitalism

An economic and political system in which a society’s trade and industry

are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

Causation

The capacity of one cultural feature to influence another.

Change

The alteration or modification of cultural or social elements in a society.

Class

Division of people in a society based on social and economic status.

Classification

Assigning common knowledge to describe a large number of people or

things as belonging to a recognizable system.

Cohesion-centred

Some anthropologists see cohesion and consensus as central to the proper

functioning of society and culture.

Colonization

The practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another

country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically, socially

and politically.

Commodification

The transformation of goods and services, as well as concepts that normally

may not be considered goods, into a commodity, something of value.

Communication

Language influences social life, forms social identity and group membership,

organizes large-scale cultural beliefs and ideologies, and develops a common

cultural representation of natural and social worlds.

Community

A group of people who share a common interest, or a common ecology

and locality, or a common social system or structure.

Comparative

Comparison of the diverse and various ways that people make sense of

their world brings anthropologists greater understanding of communities,

cultures and societies.

Conflict

Disagreements between individuals, groups, cultures or societies may result

from differences in interests, values or actions.

Consensus

cultural values and beliefs are learned and shared to a significant extent across a society and that there is a general level of agreement about these values and beliefs.

Consumption

The meaningful use that people make of the objects that are associated

with them.

Contextualization

Making sense of anthropological data in terms of the situation or location in

which it was obtained.

Cosmology

Social groups perceive the universe and describe their relationship with it

in different ways.

Cosmopolitanism

Communities include individuals who live together with cultural difference.

Cultural boundaries

An essentialist view presumes fixed boundaries for a culture; a constructivist

view assumes individuals and groups have the capacity to define and

redefine their cultural identities and spheres of influence.

Cultural capital

The knowledge and experience individuals acquired through socialization,

which enables successful interaction in their social world.

Cultural relativism

Not making value judgments about cultural differences; understanding a

different culture in its context.

Culture

Culture refers to organized systems of symbols, ideas, explanations, beliefs

and material production that humans create and manipulate in the course of

their daily lives.

Development

more economically developed societies providing assistance and resources to less economically developed societies, either directly through bilateral aid or indirectly via other agencies.

Diachronic

seeks to understand society and culture as the product of development through time, shaped by many different forces, both internal and external.

Dialectic

Discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation.

Diaspora

The dispersal of peoples from homelands to establish new, migrated

communities in other places.

Discourse

Written or spoken intellectual communication or debate in a discipline such

as anthropology.