Anthropolgy

Animatism

a religious system organized around a belief in an impersonal supernatural force.

Animism

a religious system organized around a belief that plants, animals, inanimate objects, or natural phenomena have a spiritual or supernatural element.

Anthropology of mediation

 focuses on the way images, speech, people, and things become socially significant or meaningful as they are communicated.

Art

The visual expression of culture. 

Biologic sex

refers to male and female identity based on internal and external sex organs and chromosomes. While male and female are the most common biological sexes, a percentage of the human population is intersex with ambiguous or mixed biological sex characteristics.

Cisgender

 a term used to describe those whose gender identity coincides with the biological sex they were assigned at birth.

Cline

differences in the traits that occur in populations across a geographical area. In a cline, a trait may be more common in one geographical area than another, but the variation is gradual and continuous, with no sharp breaks

Communitas

unity that encourages people to see themselves as members of a community.

Cosmology

an explanation for the origin or history of the world.

Culture-bound Syndrome

 An illness recognized only within a specific culture.

Dimorphism

traits that appear in both sexes of a species

Elements of Religion (4)

Cosmology, Supernatural, Rules for Behavior, Ritual

Essentialism

A belief that gender and certain other social categories are inherent, fixed, internal, stable, deeply embedded, and unchangeable.

Ethnicity

the degree to which a person identifies with and feels an attachment to a particular ethnic group.

Ethnocide

the death of a culture.

Ethno-etiologies

Cultural explanations about the underlying causes of health problems.

Gender

the set of culturally and historically invented beliefs and expectations about gender that one learns and performs. Gender is an “identity” one can choose in some societies, but there is pressure in all societies to conform to conventional gender roles and identities.

Glocalization

The adaptation of global ideas into locally palatable forms

Hegemony

Power so pervasive that it is rarely acknowledged or even recognized, yet informs everyday actions.

Heteronormativity

a term coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault to refer to the often-unnoticed system of rights and privileges that accompany normative sexual choices and family formation.

Hijra

Popular in India, individuals who are usually biologically male but adopt female clothing, gestures, and names; may eschew sexual desire and sexual activity; and go through religious rituals that give them certain divine powers, including blessing or cursing couples’ fertility and performing at weddings and births.

Hypodescent

a racial classification system that assigns a person with mixed racial heritage to the racial category that is considered least privileged.

Illness

a disease or period of sickness affecting the body or mind.

Indigenous Media

Media produced by and for indigenous communities often outside of the commercial mainstream.

Individual Racism

racism based on the individual, whether it be through deeply rooted biases and stereotypes or intrapersonal racism expressed through violence and slurs.

Institutional Racism

racism embedded into the culture we live in and government institutions such as schools, justice system, housing, healthcare, etc.

Intersex

 Individuals with ambiguous or mixed biological sex characteristics

Jim Crow Laws

a term used to describe laws passed by state and local governments in the United States during the early twentieth century to enforce racial segregation of public and private places.

Matriarchy

female-dominated societies where the range of women’s power, authority, and privilege parallels men’s in patriarchal societies.

Media Practices

The habits or behaviors of the people who produce media, the audiences who interact with media, and everyone in between.

Monotheism

religious systems that recognize a single supreme God.

Multiculturalism

maintenance of multiple cultural traditions in a single society.

Patriarchy

describes a society with a male-dominated political and authority structure and an ideology that privileges males over females in domestic and public spheres.

Personal Front

Aspects of one’s clothing, physical characteristics, comportment, and facial expressions that communicate an impression to others.

Polytheism

religious systems that recognize several gods.

Presentation of Self

The management of the impressions others have of us.

Profane

religious systems that recognize a single supreme God.

Race

an attempt to categorize humans based on observed physical differences.

Racial Formation

 the process of defining and redefining racial categories in a society.

Reified

the process by which an inaccurate concept or idea is accepted as “truth.”

Religion

the extension of human society and culture to include the supernatural.

Rite of Intensification

actions designed to bring a community together, often following a period of crisis.

Rite of Passage

a ceremony designed to transition individuals between life stages.

Rite of Revitalization

attempts to resolve serious problems, such as war, famine or poverty through a spiritual or supernatural intervention.

Rituals

practices or ceremonies that serve a religious purpose and are usually supervised by religious specialists.

Sacred

objects or ideas are set apart from the ordinary and treated with great respect or care.

Shaman

a part-time religious practitioner who carries out religious rituals when needed, but also participates in the normal work of the community.

Symbol Ethnicity

limited or occasional displays of ethnic pride and identity that are primarily for public display.

Third Gender

a gender identity that exists in non-binary gender systems offering one or more gender roles separate from male or female.

Transgender

a category for people who or people who identify as a different gender than the one that was assigned to them at birth. This may entail a social transition or a physical one, using a number of methods.

Two-Spirit

in native american cultures; individuals who do not comfortably conform to the gender roles and gender ideology normally associated with their biologic sex.