Cultural Anthropology Midterm Terms

Ethnographic Fieldwork

A research strategy that involves living and interacting with a community over an extended period of time in order to understand people’s everyday lives.

Holism

Anthropology’s commitment to looking at the whole picture of human life across space and time.

Biological Anthropology

The study of humans from a biological perspective, particularly how humans have evolved over time and adapted to their environments.

Archaeological Anthropology

The investigation of the human past by means of excavating and analyzing artifacts.

Linguistic Anthropology

The study of how people use language to communicate, create meaning and have a social life.

Cultural Anthropology

The study of people’s everyday lives and communities, focused on the socio-cultural dimensions of human life.

Participant Observation

A key anthropological research strategy involving both participating in and observation of the daily life of the people being studied.

Ethnology

The analysis and comparison of ethnographic data across cultures.

Globalization

The worldwide intensification of interactions and the increased movement of people, money, goods and ideas across national borders.

Ethnocentrism

Putting your own “ethos” (way of life) at the center when looking at other cultures.

Nature vs. Nurture

Biological and genetic influences vs environmental factors that influence behavior and culture.

E.B. Tylor’s Definition of Culture

Culture is the “complex whole” that includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and other capabilities and habits acquired by people as members of society.

Contemporary Definition of Culture

Culture is the learned and shared meanings, beliefs, values, norms, practices and material forms through which people understand the world and organize social life.

Systemic View of Culture

Culture is not a collection of isolated traits.

Enculturation

The process through which people learn the beliefs, values, norms, and practices of a culture through socialization and participation in everyday life.

Salvage Ethnography

Fieldwork strategy developed by Franz Boas to document and record the cultures, languages, customs, and traditions of Indigenous or small-scale societies before they were believed to disappear under the pressure of colonialism and changing cultural landscapes.

Bronislaw Malinowski

The man who helped establish participant observation as a central method in cultural anthropology.

Language

A system of communication organized by rules that uses symbols such as words, sounds and gestures to convey meaning.

Phonemes

The smallest unit of sound that can distinguish meaning.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of meaning.

Semantics

The meaning carried by words and sentences.

Kinesics

Communication through body movement and physical behavior.

Paralanguage

Vocal features that shape meaning beyond the words themselves.

Linguistic Determinism

Language determines what we are capable of thinking.

Linguistic Relativism

Habitual patterns of language can influence attention, perception, memory and categorization.

ebonics

“Ebony” + “phonics” to describe speech patterns and language varieties of people of African descent.

Universalist Approach to Emotions

Some emotions have biological/evolutionary foundations.

Anthropological Approach to Emotions

Culture shapes how emotions are categorized, interpreted, expressed, valued and experienced.

The Dialogical Self

The mind is made up of multiple voices which leaves room for internal conflict between different parts of the self.

Serviceable Associated Habits

Behaviors useful in certain situations become associated with emotional states.

Antithesis

Opposite emotional states often produce opposite bodily expressions.

Direct Action of the Nervous System

Some emotional expressions result directly from physiological arousal.

James-Lange Theory of Emotion

Event → Bodily Response → Emotional Experience

Dimensional Models of Emotion

Valence (unpleasant to pleasant) and arousal (low to high intensity) as metrics of emotions.

Race

A socially created system for classifying people by presumed inherited physical differences.

Racism

Ideas, actions, and institutional arrangements that (re)produce racial inequality.

Distinction between race and racism

Race classifies; racism ranks, excludes or distributes opportunities unequally.

Historical Invention of Racial Categories

18th century European naturalists attempted to classify humanity into distinct biological groups (taxonomies).

Carl Linnaeus contributions

Proposed four geographical varieties of people.

Johann Blumenbach contributions

Proposed five geographical varieties of people subsequent to Carl Linnaeus’s classifications.

Reification

A historically produced concept becomes taken for granted as if it were an objective feature of nature.

Genotype

The inherited information an individual carries.

Phenotype

Observable (external) physical traits produced through interactions of genes and environment.

Shared ancestry

Human populations have histories of migration and genetic mixing.

Clinal variation

Many traits vary gradually across geography: eg. skin pigmentation

Non-concordance

the principle that different biological and practical traits very independently of one another rather than being packaged together.

Genetic variation

Occurs within populations rather than between major regions.

Hypodescent

Assigning individuals of mixed ancestry to the socially subordinate racial category.

The One-Drop Rule

In some periods and jurisdictions of American history, and known African Ancestry could lead to classification as Black.