Anthropology 101 Vocabulary

Flashcards for Anthropology 101 Final Exam Study Guide.

Kinship

A network of relatives within which individuals possess certain mutual rights and obligations.

Nuclear Family

A kinship group consisting of parents and children.

Descent Group

A group of people who share direct descent from a real ancestor.

Lineage

A descent group that can demonstrate their common descent from an apical ancestor.

Clan

A descent group claiming common descent from an apical ancestor but unable to demonstrate it.

Patrilineal Descent Group

Descent traced exclusively through the male line.

Affinal Relationship

Kinship established through marriage and/or alliance.

Marriage

A socially recognized relationship that may involve physical and emotional intimacy, as well as legal rights to property and inheritance.

Arranged Marriage

Marriage orchestrated by the families of the involved parties.

Companionate Marriage

Marriage built on love, intimacy, and personal choice rather than social obligation.

Polygyny

Marriage of one man with two or more women.

Polyandry

Marriage of one woman with two or more men.

Monogamy

Marriage with one spouse.

Incest Taboo

Cultural rules that forbid sexual relations with certain close relatives.

Exogamy

Marriage outside a defined social group.

Endogamy

Marriage within a defined social group.

Bridewealth

The gift of goods or money from the groom's family to the bride's family as part of the marriage process.

Dowry

The gift of goods or money from the bride's family to the groom's family.

Family of Orientation

The family in which one is born and grows up.

Family of Procreation

The family that is formed when one marries and has children.

Ethnicity

A sense of historical, cultural, and sometimes ancestral connection to a group of people who are imagined to be distinct from those outside the group.

Origin Myth

A story told about the founding and history of a particular group to reinforce a sense of common identity.

Ethnic Boundary Marker

A practice or belief used to signify who is in a group and who is not.

Situational Negotiation of Identity

An individual's self-identification with a particular group that can change depending on social context.

Identity Entrepreneurs

Political, military leaders who promote a worldview through the use of nationalist approaches, language, and symbols.

Genocide

The deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic or religious group.

Ethnic Cleansing

Efforts by representatives of one ethnic or religious group to remove or eliminate another group within their territory.

Melting Pot

A metaphor used to describe the process of immigrant assimilation into U.S. culture, wherein different cultural groups blend, lose distinct characteristics, and create a homogenous culture.

Assimilation

The process through which minorities accept the patterns and norms of the dominant culture and cease to exist as separate groups.

Multiculturalism

A pattern of ethnic relations in which new immigrants and their children enculturate into the dominant national culture and yet retain an ethnic culture.

State

An autonomous regional structure of political, economic, and military rule with a central government authorized to make laws and use force to maintain order and defend its territory.

Nation-State

A political entity, located within a geographic territory with enforced borders, where the population shares a sense of culture, ancestry, and destiny as people.

Citizenship

A legal membership in a nation-state.

Nation

A community of people who believe they share a common culture, ancestry, language, or history.

Nationality

Identification with a sense of devotion to a single nation.

Nationalism

The desire of an ethnic community to create and/or maintain a nation-state.

Imagined Community

The invented sense of connection and shared traditions that underlies identification with a particular ethnic group or nation whose members likely will never all meet.

Diaspora

A group of people living outside their ancestral homeland but maintaining emotional and material ties to home.

Band

A small kinship-based group of foragers who hunt and gather for a living over a particular territory.

Tribe

Originally viewed as a culturally distinct, multi-band population that imagined itself as one people descended from a common ancestor; currently used to describe an indigenous group with its own set of loyalties and leaders living to some extent outside the direct control of a centralized authoritative state.

Chiefdom

An autonomous political unit composed of a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief.

Hegemony

The potential power of a dominant group to lead subordinates to accept the status quo as natural.

Civil Society Organization

A local non-governmental organization that challenges state policies and uneven development, and advocated for resources and opportunities for members of its local community.

Militarization

The contested social process through which a civil society organizes for the production of military violence.

Agency

The potential power of individuals and groups to contest cultural norms, values, mental maps of reality, symbols, institutions, and structures of power.

Social Movement

Collective group actions in response to uneven development, inequality, and injustice that seek to build institutional networks to transform cultural patterns and government policies.

Framing Process

The creation of shared meanings and definitions that motivate and justify collective action by social movements.

Art

All ideas, forms, techniques, and strategies that humans employ to express themselves creatively and to communicate their creativity and meaning to others.

Fine Art

Creative expression and communication often associated with cultural elites.

Popular Art

Creative expression and communication often associated with the general population.

Universal Gaze

An intrinsic way of perceiving art - thought by many in the Western art world to be felt by most humans - that transcends cultural differences or biases; rejects the influence of culture on what people find aesthetically pleasing.

Authenticity

The perception of an object's genuineness and originality within a specific context.

Ethnomusicology

The study of music in cultural context.

Global Mediascape

Global cultural flows of media and visual images that enable linkages and communication across cultures while also disrupting and reconfiguring local cultural practices and values.

Media Worlds

An ethnographic and theoretical approach to media studies that focuses on the tensions between media practice and the cultural contexts in which media is used.

Visual Anthropology

A field of anthropology that explores the production, circulation, and consumption of visual images, focusing on the power of visual media to represent culture and identity.

Photographic Gaze

The presumed neutral viewpoint of the camera that in fact projects the photographer's own cultural values onto the people and objects being photographed.

Indigenous Media

Media (print, visual, audio) controlled by and intended for indigenous people, often to present alternative views and to strengthen cultural identity.