ANTH100: Cultural Anthropology Final Exam Review

Key concepts and definitions for the final exam review.

Anthropology

The study of the human species and its immediate ancestors

Ethnocentrism

The tendency to view one's own culture as superior and to apply one's own cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs of people raised in other cultures.

Ethnography

A research method in which the researcher immerses themselves in the study of a particular group/culture in order to understand their way of life ; also refers to the written result of said research.

Ethnographic Fieldwork

Living among a community of people to study their culture.

Participant-observation

Prolonged period of intense social involvement with the people in their cultural setting.

Rapport

A close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other's feelings or ideas and communicate well

Informant OR interlocutor

A person who shares information about their culture with a researcher.

Key informant

A person who is extremely knowledgeable about their culture and willing to share that knowledge with a researcher.

Four-field anthropology

Linguistic Anthropology

Cultural Anthropology

Globalization

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

Time-space compression

The accelerated compression of time and space and the feeling of a world becoming smaller.

Flexible accumulation

The increasingly flexible strategies that corporations use to accumulate profits

Increasing migration

The increasing movement of people both within and between countries.

Culture

A system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, and shared by a group of people

Enculturation

The learning of culture through both informal and formal processes.

Uneven development

Differences in economic development and wealth accumulation between different areas.

Cultural relativism

The idea that each culture should be understood on its own terms.

Unilineal cultural evolutionism

The theory that all cultures evolve through the same sequence of stages.

Historical particularism

The idea that cultures arise from different causes and cannot be ranked.

British structural-functionalism

A conceptual framework positing that each element of society serves a particular function to keep the entire system in equilibrium.

Interpretive anthropology or culture and meaning

A theoretical approach that emphasizes the role of symbols and meaning in understanding culture.

Reflexivity

A critical self-examination of the role the anthropologist plays and an awareness that who one is affects what one finds out.

Quantitative data

Data expressed as numbers.

Qualitative data

Descriptive data drawn from nonstatistical sources, including personal stories, interviews, life histories, etc.

Etic

A research strategy that focuses on the researcher's perspective.

Emic

An approach to gathering data that investigates how local people think and how they understand the world.

Language

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

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

The idea that different languages create different ways of thinking.

Universal grammar

Chomsky's theory that the human brain contains a limited set of rules for organizing language, so that all languages have a common structural basis.

Social construction

A concept or perception that exists as the result of cultural or societal practice.

Race

A flawed system of classification, with no biological basis, that uses certain physical characteristics to divide the human population into supposedly discrete groups.

Racism

Individual thoughts and actions and institutional patterns and policies that create or reproduce unequal access to opportunities based on imagined differences among groups.

Racism (individual, institutional, and ideological)

The expression of racist attitudes or actions by individual people

Racism (individual, institutional, and ideological)

The way racist actions or beliefs become written into law, custom and patterns of behavior.

Racism (individual, institutional, and ideological)

A system of ideas that naturalizes racial differences.

Genotype

An organism's hereditary makeup.

Phenotype

The way genes are expressed in an organism's physical form as a result of genotype interaction with environmental factors.

White supremacy/whiteness

The belief that white people are superior to all other races.

Racialization

The process of categorizing, differentiating, and attributing a particular racial character to a person or group of people.

Intersectionality

An analytic framework for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification.

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

Any practice or thing used to signify who is in a group and who is not.

Genocide

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

Eugenics

A pseudoscience attempting to scientifically prove the existence of separate human races to improve the population's genetic composition by favoring some races over others.

Nation

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

State

An autonomous regional structure of political, economic, and military rule.

Nation-state

A political entity where the population shares a sense of culture, ancestry, and destiny as a people (nation) and is able to control its own affairs.

Nationalism

A sense of loyalty and pride in one's nation.

Sex

The physical and biological differences between males and females.

Gender

The cultural construction of beliefs and behaviors considered appropriate for each sex.

Sexual dimorphism

The phenotypical differences between males and females of the same species.

Sexuality

The complex range of desires, beliefs, and behaviors that relate to erotic physical contact and the cultural arena within which people debate about what kinds of physical desires and behaviors are right, appropriate, and natural.

Kinship

A cultural system for defining family relationships, often based on descent.

Descent

A kinship group in which primary relationships are traced through consanguine ("blood") relatives.

Clan

A type of descent group based on a claim to a founding ancestor but lacking genealogical documentation.

Lineage

A descent group that traces genealogical connection through generations by linking persons to a founding ancestor.

Bilineal

A kinship system in which individuals trace their descent through both their mother's and father's sides of the family.

Unilineal

A kinship system in which individuals trace their descent through one parent only.

Patrilineal

A kinship system in which individuals trace their descent through the father's side of the family.

Matrilineal

A kinship system in which individuals trace their descent through the mother's side of the family.

Consanguineal, affinal and “fictive"/chosen kin relationships

Related by blood ; Related by marriage ; Related by choice.

Marriage

A socially recognized relationship that may involve physical and emotional intimacy, sexual pleasure, reproduction, and raising of children.

Polygamy

Marriage between one person and two or more spouses.

Polyandry

Marriage between one woman and two or more men.

Monogamy

Marriage between one man and one woman.

Polygyny

Marriage between one man and two or more women.

Exogamy vs. endogamy (& its functions)

Marriage to someone outside the kinship group ; Marriage to someone inside the kinship group.

Incest taboo

Cultural rules that forbid sexual relations with certain close relatives.

Dowry

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

Bridewealth

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

Egalitarian v. ranked v. stratified societies

A society based on the sharing of resources to ensure group success ; a society in which individuals are ranked relative to one another ; A society in which there is differential access to resources.

Economy

A cultural adaptation to the environment that enables a group of humans to use the available resources to thrive

Food foragers

Those who gather, fish, or hunt

Food producers

Those who cultivate plants and raise animals to subsist.

Pastoralism

Dependence on domesticated animals for their livelihood.

Horticulture

The use of simple tools and small-scale farming methods.

Agriculture

Intensive farming practices that require a lot of labor and capital.

Industrialism

The use of machinery and technology to mass-produce goods.

Reciprocity

Exchange between individuals or groups.

Redistribution

A form of exchange in which accumulated wealth is collected from the members of the group and reallocated in a different pattern

Market exchange

A pattern of exchange in which supply and demand determine prices and goods are sold for money.

Colonialism

The political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended time.

Development and underdevelopment

The process by which some countries have become wealthy and powerful while others have remained poor and dependent.

Core and periphery

Industrialized former colonial states that dominate the world economic system ; The least-developed and often exploited former colonies.

Band ; Tribe ; Chiefdom ; State

A small, egalitarian group of related families ; A decentralized autonomous group, with temporary leaders ; A centralized political system with hereditary leaders ; A complex sociopolitical system that administers a territory and populace with substantial contrast in occupation, wealth, prestige, and power.

Power

The ability or potential to bring about change through action or influence.

Politics

The process through which groups compete to regulate conduct and allocate resources.

Hegemony

The ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement within a population without the use or threat of force.

Religion

A set of beliefs based on unique vision of how the world ought to be, often revealed through insights into a superpower natural or supernatural.

Sacred and profane

Anything that is considered holy ; Anything that is considered not holy.

Ritual

A sequence of actions and symbols designed to separate people from their every day routines.

Rite of passage

A category of rituals that enact cultural transitions, like graduation or marriage.

Separation, liminality, incorporation

Separation from the former self ; A period of outsiderhood ; Reincorporation back into society now with a new status.

Medical anthropology

The study of health and illness among human populations.

Disease vs. illness

A discrete, identifiable condition that can be clinically diagnosed and treated by a health professional ; The individual patient's experience of sickness, including the way they perceive, respond to, and live with a disease

Sickness and the sick role

The culturally defined understanding of disease and its treatment.

Art

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

History of human art

The development and transformation of human art over time.