Anthropology Exam Review: Social Stratification, Political Systems, Race, Gender, and Indigenous Studies

Comprehensive vocabulary review flashcards covering structural inequality, socioeconomic status, political typologies, race, gender, sexuality, and Indigenous studies.

Neolithic Revolution (Stratification)

The shift to agriculture and settled food production that generated food surpluses, private property, and fixed hierarchies, marking the emergence of structural inequality in human history.

Social Standing Determinants (U.S.)

The key factors that anchor a person's socioeconomic position in the U.S., including wealth, income, parents' social standing, occupation, race, gender, and native status.

Social Mobility

An individual's shift in social status (upward or downward) within stratified societies.

Open Systems

Social structures that allow movement between levels and classes (e.g., class systems where individuals can achieve different education or employment levels than their parents and marry outside their class).

Closed Systems

Social structures that accommodate little to no change in social position (e.g., caste systems where people are born into their standing, remain there for life, and face fixed restrictions on marriage and occupation).

Class

A system of power based on wealth, income, and status that creates an unequal distribution of a society's resources.

Meritocracy

An idealized, but not realized, system where personal effort and merit alone determine social standing.

Life Chances

An individual's opportunity to improve their quality of life and realize life goals.

Karl Marx

Theorist who identified labor time as the source of value/profit, divided capitalist society into the Bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production) and Proletariat (laborers who sell their labor), and argued that the ruling class maintains control via an ideological superstructure.

Max Weber

Theorist who added power and prestige to Marx's strictly economic model, establishing a multidimensional view of social stratification composed of Class, Status/Prestige, and Party.

Pierre Bourdieu

Theorist who studied French education and introduced the concepts of Cultural Capital, Habitus, and Social Reproduction to show how schools reinforce class inequalities rather than eliminate them.

Habitus

Pierre Bourdieu's term for self-perceptions, sensibilities, and tastes developed in response to external influences over a lifetime that shape one's worldview and place in society.

Social Reproduction

The phenomenon whereby social and class relations, privileges (or lack thereof), and inequalities are passed down from one generation to the next.

Power

The ability to bring about change through action or influence; embedded in all human relationships, both violent and non-violent.

Politics

The mobilization of people's beliefs into collective action.

Political Anthropology

Subfield of anthropology that emerged after World War II, initially focused on creating typologies of political systems.

Elman Service

Anthropologist who developed the classic, four-stage evolutionary typology of political organization: Bands, Tribes, Chiefdoms, and States.

Bands

Small kinship-based groups of foragers who hunt and gather over a particular territory; decentralized with minimal stratification and wealth differences.

Christopher Boehm

Anthropologist who argues that egalitarianism in foraging bands helped shape human cooperative tendencies.

Tribes

Culturally distinct, multiband populations that imagine themselves descended from a common ancestor; emerged 10,000 to 12,000 years ago with pastoralism and horticulture, maintaining relatively egalitarian structures with limited leader power.

Chiefdoms

Autonomous political units composed of a number of villages under the permanent control of a paramount chief, where leadership is often hereditary and confirmed through rituals or festivals.

States

Autonomous regional structures of political, economic, and military rule with a central government authorized to make laws and use force; linked historically to the rise of agriculture and settled populations (e.g., Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Japan, Indus Valley).

Informal Economy

Underground, sometimes illegal economic activities that parallel formal economic structures (e.g., street vendors in Bolivia or New York City).

Race

A flawed system of classification with no biological basis that uses specific physical characteristics (phenotypes) to divide human populations into supposedly discrete groups.

Race (Sociocultural)

An explanatory approach defining race not as a biological reality, but as a social construct created to categorize people based on physical features, carrying real implications for power and inequality.

Racism

Individual thoughts, actions, and institutional patterns or policies that create or reproduce unequal access to power, privilege, resources, and opportunities based on imagined group differences.

Individual Racism

Personal prejudiced beliefs and discriminatory actions directed toward others based on race.

Microaggressions

Common, everyday verbal or behavioral indignities and slights that communicate hostile or negative messages regarding a person's race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion.

Institutional Racism

Patterns through which racial inequality is structured and maintained across key cultural institutions, policies, and societal systems.

Racial Ideology

A set of popular ideas about race that makes discriminatory behaviors of individuals and institutions seem reasonable, rational, and normal.

Colonialism

The modern European project beginning in the early 16th century in which nation-states extended political, economic, and military power beyond their own borders.

Imperialism

A system of military domination and political sovereignty exerted over foreign territories.

Coloniality

The values, attitudes, ways of knowing, and power structures (including racial hierarchies) upheld as normative by European colonizers to rationalize and perpetuate dominance.

Decolonization

The process of obtaining political independence, as well as reversing and moving beyond the systemic impacts of European expansion across economic, social, cultural, and linguistic domains.

White Supremacy

The belief that white people are biologically distinct and superior to other races, reinforced through historical legal landmarks such as the 1680 Virginia servant/slave law, the 1790 census, the Three-Fifths Compromise, 1825 blood quantum laws, and the 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act.

Racialization

The social process of categorizing, differentiating, and attributing a specific racial character to a person, population, or group.

Great Chain of Being Theorem

A historical theory assuming that the world's natural categories exist within a divinely or naturally ordained hierarchy, which was used to underpin racist cultural and behavioral frameworks.

Pierre (2018)

An ethnographic study examining post-colonial Ghana that demonstrates how racial categories and the construction of blackness were formed through proximity to whiteness during and after European colonization.

Sex

Culturally agreed-upon physical differences between male and female bodies, particularly biological tendencies linked to reproduction and physical traits, rather than absolute binaries.

Gender

The culturally learned expectations of thought and behavior assigned to individuals of different sexes, which evolve and vary across time and societies.

Sexual Dimorphism

The phenotypic traits that distinguish biological sexes within a species; roughly $1.7\%$ of humans are born with ambiguous genitalia or intersex variations.

Intersex

The condition of being born with a combination of male and female biological traits, such as variations in genitalia, gonads, or chromosomes.

Biopower

The power of the state to regulate, discipline, and manage the biological body, exemplified by surgical interventions performed on intersex infants to enforce binary sex categories.

Third Gender

Social categories recognized in diverse non-Western cultures for people who exist outside or between traditional male and female gender roles.

Transgender

Individuals whose gender identity and expression do not match the biological sex category they were assigned at birth.

Cisgender

Individuals whose gender identity and expression align with the biological sex category assigned to them at birth.

Gender Roles

Oversimplified yet strongly held cultural expectations regarding the appropriate behavioral characteristics and duties of males and females.

Gender Stratification

The unequal cultural distribution of resources, power, prestige, rights, and autonomy between men and women, reflecting their ranking in a social hierarchy.

Intersectionality

An analytical approach examining how overlapping social categories (such as race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality) interact to create distinct systemic experiences and positions of advantage or disadvantage.

Sexuality

The complex spectrum of erotic desires, beliefs, and behaviors, as well as the cultural arena wherein groups negotiate and define what physical desires are considered normal and moral.

Sexual Orientation

An individual's innate or enduring pattern of romantic, emotional, or sexual attraction toward members of the same sex, opposite sex, or all sexes.

Gloria Wekker

Anthropologist who studied the Mati women of Suriname, documenting fluid, flexible sexual and romantic relationships with both men and women that challenge rigid Western categories of sexuality.

Sex Work

The exchange of sexual services for money or goods, analyzed by anthropologists through frameworks of labor rights and economic conditions rather than purely deviance or exploitation.

Indigenous Peoples

Populations with ancestral ties and historical continuity to a specific geographic territory predating colonial conquest, maintaining distinct cultures, languages, and governance systems.

Settler Colonialism

A distinct colonial structure seeking the permanent pacification and displacement of Indigenous populations in order to expropriate and occupy their land.

Ethnographic Refusal

A deliberate political or ethical stance where research participants or communities decline to disclose sacred, cultural, or strategic knowledge to outside researchers.

Indigenous Knowledge

Place-based, holistic, collective, and adaptive systems of understanding and practice rooted in specific cultural and ecological landscapes.

George J. Sefa Dei

Scholar who defined indigeneity as an anti-colonial political reclamation, dynamic knowledge system, and self-definition uniting place, body, and spiritual consciousness.