Cultural Anthropology: Core Concepts, Culture, and Social Identity

Comprehensive practice flashcards covering introductory anthropology fields, methodological principles of fieldwork, enculturation and social identity, and characteristics of culture and civilization.

Anthropology

The study of humankind everywhere, throughout time, seeking knowledge about what makes people different and what they all have in common.

Etymology of Anthropology

Derived from the Greek words 'anthropos', meaning human, and 'logos', meaning reason.

Physical Anthropology

The subfield of anthropology that focuses on humans as biological organisms, evolution, and human variation.

Archaeology

The subfield of anthropology that studies material remains in order to describe and explain human behavior in the past.

Linguistic Anthropology

The subfield of anthropology dedicated to the study of language within its social setting.

Cultural Anthropology

The study of customary patterns in human behavior, thought, and feelings, focusing on humans as culture-producing and culture-reproducing creatures; it comprises ethnography and ethnology.

Ethnography

A detailed description of a particular culture primarily based on firsthand observation and fieldwork.

Ethnology

The branch of cultural anthropology that takes the research compiled by ethnographers to compare and contrast different cultures.

Participant Observation

A qualitative research method where the anthropologist immerses themselves in the daily life of a community, both observing and actively participating in social activities.

Bronisław Malinowski

A Polish-British anthropologist (1884–1942) who innovated participant observation as a methodological standard and conducted immersive fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands (authoring 'Argonauts of the Western Pacific'), challenging Western assumptions about 'primitive' societies.

Franz Boas

A German-American anthropologist (1858–1942) who critiqued cultural determinism and evolutionary hierarchies, advocated for cultural relativism, and rejected claims of Western European cultural superiority.

Reflexivity

An ethical and methodological practice urging anthropologists to acknowledge and assess their own positionality, background, and biases, and understand how these shape research interactions.

Golden Rules of Cultural Understanding

Five key conditions for successful anthropological fieldwork: proper mental preparation, participant-observation, language competence, long-term residence, and luck in being at the right place at the right time.

Tabula Rasa

John Locke's 1690 theory from 'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding' proposing that the human mind is a blank slate, though modern anthropology recognizes that genetic factors also substantially influence human behavior.

Enculturation

The process by which culture is socially constructed, learned, and transmitted from one generation to the next.

Agents of Enculturation

The seven primary social institutions that transmit culture: family, peers, educational systems, religious institutions, media, government and law, and workplace and professional organizations.

Self-Awareness

The ability to identify oneself as an object, react to oneself, and appraise or evaluate oneself, which develops earlier in traditional societies due to higher mother-infant contact ($70\%$ of the time in a Kalahari desert tribe versus $20\%$ in the USA).

Aymara Personal Naming Practice

A naming custom in Bolivia where a child is given a personal name only when they begin to speak at the age of $2$; prior to this, the infant is not considered truly human.

Inuit Personal Naming Practice

A naming custom in Canada where the mother calls the names of deceased relatives during birth, and the child receives the name of the spirit that enters the infant's body.

Navajo Personal Naming Practice

A naming tradition in the USA where a child is formally given a name after they laugh for the first time.

Personality

The distinctive ways a person thinks, feels, and behaves, shaped by early childhood experiences and cultural factors.

Margaret Mead's New Guinea Study

A 1930s ethnographic study documenting distinct cultural variations in gender roles: the Arapesh exhibited equal gender relations, the Mundugamor showed masculine traits in both sexes, and the Chambri displayed female dominance over men.

Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

Margaret Mead's landmark ethnography demonstrating that emotional turmoil in adolescence is a culturally constructed phase rather than a universal biological crisis, facilitated in Samoa by relaxed attitudes toward sexuality, fluid roles, and communal child-rearing.

Dependence Training

A child-rearing pattern that promotes compliance in performing assigned tasks and dependence on the domestic group, teaching individuals to subordinate their own will to group needs.

Independence Training

A child-rearing pattern that emphasizes individual self-reliance, personal achievement, assertiveness, and competition.

National Character Studies

Studies focused on identifying generalized personality traits of entire modern nations, widely critiqued by anthropologists as unscientific and overgeneralized.

Core Values Study

An alternative approach to national character studies developed by Francis Hsu that investigates the specific fundamental values promoted by a culture, such as kin cooperation in China versus individualism in North America.

Civilization (18th-Century Concept)

An Enlightenment-era, singular concept associated with global 'progress' that assumed the civilized West was culturally and morally superior to 'savage' or 'barbarian' societies.

Culture (Edward Tylor's Definition)

Defined in 1871 as the full range of learned human behavior patterns and the knowledge that informs, embeds, shapes, and accounts for group members' routine and non-routine activities.

Culture (Haviland et al.'s Definition)

A society's shared and socially transmitted ideas, values, and perceptions that are used to make sense of experience, generate behavior, and are reflected in that behavior.

Society

An organized group or groups of interdependent people who generally share a common territory, language, and culture, and who act together for collective survival and well-being.

Subculture

A distinctive set of standards and behavior patterns by which a group within a larger society operates, while still sharing overarching common standards with that larger society.

Adaptive Mechanism of Culture

The characteristic of culture indicating it is not rigid or static, but flexible and constantly adjusting to a group's physical, economic, and social conditions.

Cultural Diffusion

The spread of cultural traits, inventions, or ideas from one society to another, serving as a primary mechanism of cultural change alongside internal invention.

Invented Tradition

A set of cultural practices that claim to be ancient but are actually recent creations, exemplified by Scottish clan tartans developed in the 19th century.

Symbol

A sign, sound, emblem, or object that is linked to something else and represents it in a meaningful way, providing the foundation for human cultural behavior.

Human Universals (Donald Brown)

A theoretical framework from Donald Brown's 1991 book arguing that anthropologists overemphasized societal differences, identifying shared cultural traits such as age grading, family, ethics, athletic sports, and bodily adornment.

Ethnocentrism

The common tendency to view one's own culture as natural and superior while regarding alien cultural traits as inferior, less sensible, or offensive.

Cultural Relativism

A methodological principle and doctrine stating that cultures are qualitatively distinct and possess their own inner logic, meaning beliefs and practices must be understood in their own cultural terms rather than ranked on an arbitrary moral scale.