Anthropology Exam 1

Anthropology

Study of the origins and development of people and their societies

Two things that cross-cultural perspective seeks to do:

(1) Strives to make the familiar strange. Takes things that at first glance seem normal and make then seem a little unfamiliar. (2) Strives to make the strange familiar. Things, practices, beliefs, dietary habits that at first glance seem strange and make them familiar.

Holism

The study of the whole of the human condition; past, present, and future; biology, society, language, and culture.

Enculturation

Culture are traditions, customs, transmitted through learning, that form and guide that beliefs and behaviors of the people exposed to them. They are social, not biological. We are taught our culture from birth.

Four Fields of Anthropology

Cultural, Archaeological, Biological, and Linguistic.

Cultural Anthropology

The study of people's communities, behaviors, beliefs, and institutions, including how people make meaning as they live, work, and play together.

Archaeological Anthropology

Reconstructs, describes, and interprets human behavior and cultural patterns through material remains.

Biological Anthropology

The study of human biological variation in time and space.

Linguistic Anthropology

The study of human language in the past and present.

Applied Anthropology

The application of anthropological data, perspectives, and methods to identify, assess, and solve contemporary social problems.

Qualitative

Data in the form of words.

Quantitative

Data that is in numbers.

Ethnology

Based on cross-cultural comparison and "examines, compares, analyzes, and interprets the results of Ethnography".

Ethnography

Based on fieldwork and "provides an account of a particular community, society, or culture".

Participant Observation

Taking part in community life as we study it.

Bronislaw Malinowski

Rapport

A good friendly working relationship based on personal contact, basically trust.

Emic

The more local, experimental, more particular perspectives.

Etic

The more external analytical, more comparative perspective.

Genealogical Method

The documentation of family trees and how relationships are reckoned or conceptualized in a particular culture.

Key Cultural Consultants

These people may be in positions of power; in which case they may be gatekeepers to certain events and types of information.

Life History

Recollection of a lifetime of experiences that provides a more intimate and personal cultural portrait than would be possible otherwise.

Forensic Anthropology

Biological anthropologists work in a legal context, assisting coroners, medical examiners, and law enforcement agencies in recovering, analyzing, and identifying human remains and determining causes of death.

Longitudinal Research

Is a research project that is based on/organized around repeat visits. Looking at change over time.

Problem-Oriented Research

Is basically when you go in with a certain issue you want to address.

Multi-Sited Ethnography

Is our increasingly globalized world.

Team Research

Is being part of a larger research group and maybe with other subfields.

Ethics

The principles of right and wrong that guide an individual in making decisions.

Informed Consent

An agreement to take part in research, after the people being studied have been told about that research's purpose, nature, procedures, and potential impact on them.

Naive Realism

Belief that we see the world precisely as it is.

Definition of Culture

A system of shared beliefs and values guiding behavior.

Distinctive Features of Culture

(1) It is learned. (2) It is Shared. (3) It is symbolic. (4) It Shapes and Connects Nature. (5) It is all-encompassing. (6) It is integrated. (7) It is Adaptive and Maladaptive. (8) It is Changing. (9) It is Inclusive and Exclusive.

Ethnocentrism

Is the tendency to view one's culture as superior and to apply one's own cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs found in other cultures.

Cultural Relativism

Is the viewpoint that behavior in one's culture should not be judged by the standards of another culture. It should be understood relative to its own system of meaning.

Diffusion

Borrowing between cultures either directly or through intermediaries.

Acculturation

Is the ongoing exchange of cultural features that results when groups have continuous firsthand contact. In situation of acculturation, cultures have exchanged and blended foods, recipes, music, dancing, clothing, tools, languages, and technologies.

Independent Invention

The process by which humans innovate, creatively find solutions to problems. Faced with comparable problems and challenges, people in different societies have innovated and changed in similar ways, which is one reason cultural generalities exist.

Globalization

Encompasses a series of processes that work transnationally to promote change in a world in which nations and people are increasingly interlinked and mutual dependent. The forces of this include international commerce and finance, travel and tourism, transnational migration, and the media.

Internation Culture

Extends beyond and across national boundaries.

National Culture

Encompasses those beliefs, learned behavior patterns, values, and institutions that are shaped by citizens of the same nation.

Subcultures

Are different symbol-based patterns and traditions associated with particular groups in the same complex society.

Symbol

Signs that have no necessary or natural connection to the things they stand for or signify.

Universality

Biologically based universals include a long period of infant dependency; year-round sexuality; and a complex brain that enabled us to use symbols, languages, and tools.

Generalities

Occur in certain times and places but not in all cultures. One culture generality that is present in many but not all societies is the nuclear family.

Particularity

Is a trait or feature or culture that is not generalized or widespread; rather, it is confined to a single place, culture, or society.

Primate Call Systems

Language spoken or written.

Non-Human Primate Language

The communication of monkeys and apes. These vocal systems consist of a limited number of sounds - calls - that are produced only when particular environmental stimuli are encountered.

Cultural Transmission

A basic feature of language; transmission through learning.

Productivity

The ability to use rules of one's language to create new expression comprehensible to other speakers, a basic feature of language.

Displacement

A linguistic capacity that allows humans to speak of things and events that are not present.

Conventionality

The notion that, in human language, words are only arbitrarily or conventionally connected to the things for which they stand.

FOXP2

A mutated gene that helps explain why humans speak and chimps don't.

Nonverbal Communication

Communicating without using words but rather with expressions, stances, gestures, and movements.

Focal Vocabulary

Is a set of words or distinctions that are particularly important to certain groups.

Semantics

Refers to a language's meaning system.

Syntax

Refers to the arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences.

Phoneme

Is a sound contrast that makes a difference, that differentiates meaning.

Phonology

Is the study of speech sounds, considers which sounds are present and meaningful in a given language.

Minimal Pairs

Words that resemble each other in all but one sound.

Morpheme

Are words and their meaningful parts.

Morphology

Studies how sounds combine to form morphemes.

Lexicon

A dictionary containing all morphemes and their meanings.

Noam Chomsky and Universal Grammar

Humans have a biological universal grammar (deeper structure) / "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" - nonsense but it's a sentence.

Deep Structure/Surface Structure

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The idea that different languages create different ways of thinking.

Style Shifts

Variations in speech in different contexts.

Sociolinguistics

The study of relationship between social and linguistic variation; the study of language in its social context.

Symbolic Capital

Properly trained people may convert into economic and social capital.

African American Vernacular English (AAVE)

A rule-governed dialect of American English spoken by some African Americans in their casual, intimate speech.

American Tongues

Shows the different accents and vocabulary of people all around the U.S. and peoples' judgments of other accents / the guy from Boston, girls from New Orleans, guy from Texas, people from Chicago, people from Mid-West.

Human Biological Diversity

The diversity found among and between human populations that has a biological basis.

Ethnic Group

Group of people who share common ancestry, language, religion, customs, or combination of such characteristics.

Ethnicity

Identity with a group of people that share distinct physical and mental traits as a product of common heredity and cultural traditions.

Race

Identity with a group of people descended from a common ancestor.

Racism

Belief that one race is superior to another. And discrimination against that group.

Prejudice

Means devaluing a group because of its assumed behavior, values, capabilities, or attributes.

Stereotypes

Are fixed ideas - often unfavorable - about what the members of a group are like.

Discrimination

Refers to policies and practices that harms group and its members.

Thomas Theorem

Situations that are defined as real are real in their consequences.

Race and Ethnicity as Social Constructions

Ideologies of difference, racial or ethnic or both, have led to conflict and violence fueled by prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination.

Genocide

The deliberate elimination of a group through mass murder.

Ethnocide

The deliberate suppression or destruction of an ethnic culture by a dominant gorup.

Cultural Colonialism

Refers to the domination of one group and its culture or ideology over others.

Assimilation

Describes the process of change that members of an ethnic group may experience when they move to a country where another country dominates. The ethnic group member adopts the patterns and norms of the host culture.

Minority Groups

Occupy subordinate positions within a social hierarchy.

Majority Groups

Superordinate, dominant, or controlling groups in a social-political hierarchy.

Social Stratification

A system by which a society ranks categories of people in a hierarchy.

Hypodescent

A rule that automatically places the children of a union or mating between members of different socioeconomic groups in the less privileged group.

Burakumin in Japan

In this construction of race, Japanese culture regards certain ethnic groups as having a biological basis, when there is no evidence that they do.

Race in Brazil

More flexible, less exclusionary categories. no hypo-descent rule; less racial aversion.

Benedict Anderson

Imagined Communities 1983: "In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign."

Nation-States as Imagined Communities

Characteristics of a Nation-State

Territory, population, sovereignty, government.

Plural Society

A society combining ethnic contrasts, ecological specialization, and economic interdependence of those groups.

Multiculturalism

The view of cultural diversity in a country as something good and desirable. Seeks ways for people to interact that don't depend on sameness but rather on respect for differences.

Race: The Power of an Illusion

About how certain races have been classified and how they don't get the same privileges and rights of the Caucasian or white race.

Creationism

Belief that all life was created by God.

Catastrophism

Theory that states that natural disasters such as floods and volcanic eruptions shaped Earth's landforms and caused extinction of some species.

Evolutionism

Assumes that existing animal species evolved gradually out of common ancestors.

Uniformitarianism

A principle that geologic processes that occurred in the past can be explained by current geologic processes.