Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Anthropology

the study of humanity, including its prehistoric origins and contemporary human diversity

Culture

a set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all-encompassing, integrated whole that binds people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways.

Cultural determinism

the idea that behavioral differences are a result of cultural, not racial or genetic causes.

Cultural evolutionism

a discredited theory popular in nineteenth century anthropology suggesting that societies evolved through stages from simple to advanced.

Cultural relativism

the idea that we should seek to understand another person's beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their own culture and not our own.

Enculturation

the process of learning the characteristics and expectations of a culture or group.

Ethnocentrism

the tendency to view one's own culture as most important and correct and as the stick by which to measure all other cultures.

Ethnography

the in-depth study of the everyday practices and lives of a people.

Going native

becoming fully integrated into a cultural group through acts such as taking a leadership position, assuming key roles in society, entering into marriage, or other behaviors that incorporate an anthropologist into the society he or she is studying.

Hominin

Humans (Homo sapiens) and their close relatives and immediate ancestors.

Deductive

reasoning from the general to the specific; the inverse of inductive reasoning. Deductive research is more common in the natural sciences than in anthropology. In a deductive approach, the researcher creates a hypothesis and then designs a study to prove or disprove the hypothesis. The results of deductive research can be generalizable to other settings.

Inductive

a type of reasoning that uses specific information to draw general conclusions. In an inductive approach, the researcher seeks to collect evidence without trying to definitively prove or disprove a hypothesis. The researcher usually first spends time in the field to become familiar with the people before identifying a hypothesis or research question. Inductive research usually is not generalizable to other settings.

Paleoanthropologist

biological anthropologists who study ancient human relatives.

Participant-observation

a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged.

Armchair anthropology

an early and discredited method of anthropological research that did not involve direct contact with the people studied.

Functionalism

an approach to anthropology developed in British anthropology that emphasized the way that parts of a society work together to support the functioning of the whole.

Structural-Functionalism

an approach to anthropology that focuses on the ways in which the customs or social institutions in a culture contribute to the organization of society and the maintenance of social order.

Holism

taking a broad view of the historical, environmental, and cultural foundations of behavior.

Kinship

blood ties, common ancestry, and social relationships that form families within human groups.

Participant observation

a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged.

The Other

a term used to describe people whose customs, beliefs, or behaviors are "different" from one's own

Contested identity

a dispute within a group about the collective identity or identities of the group.

Diaspora

the scattering of a group of people who have left their original homeland and now live in various locations. Examples of people living in the diaspora are Salvadorian immigrants in the United States and Europe, Somalian refugees in various countries, and Jewish people living around the world.

Emic

a description of the studied culture from the perspective of a member of the culture or insider.

Etic

a description of the studied culture from the perspective of an observer or outsider.

Indigenous

people who have continually lived in a particular location for a long period of time (prior to the arrival of others) or who have historical ties to a location and who are culturally distinct from the dominant population surrounding them. Other terms used to refer to indigenous people are aboriginal, native, original, first nation, and first people. Some examples of indigenous people are Native Americans of North America, Australian Aborigines, and the Berber (or Amazigh) of North Africa.

Key Informants

individuals who are more knowledgeable about their culture than others and who are particularly helpful to the anthropologist.

Land tenure

how property rights to land are allocated within societies, including how permissions are granted to access, use, control, and transfer land.

Noble savage

an inaccurate way of portraying indigenous groups or minority cultures as innocent, childlike, or uncorrupted by the negative characteristics of "civilization."

Qualitative

anthropological research designed to gain an in-depth, contextualized understanding of human behavior.

Quantitative

anthropological research that uses statistical, mathematical, and/or numerical data to study human behavior.

Remittances

money that migrants laboring outside of the region or country send back to their hometowns and families. In Mexico, remittances make up a substantial share of the total income of some towns' populations.

Thick description

a term coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures to describe a detailed description of the studied group that not only explains the behavior or cultural event in question but also the context in which it occurs and anthropological interpretations of it.

Undocumented

the preferred term for immigrants who live in a country without formal authorization from the state. Undocumented refers to the fact that these people lack the official documents that would legally permit them to reside in the country. Other terms such as illegal immigrant and illegal alien are often used to refer to this population. Anthropologists consider those terms to be discriminatory and dehumanizing. The word undocumented acknowledges the human dignity and cultural and political ties immigrants have developed in their country of residence despite their inability to establish formal residence permissions.

Arbitrariness

the relationship between a symbol and its referent (meaning), in which there is no obvious connection between them.

Bound morpheme

a unit of meaning that cannot stand alone; it must be attached to another morpheme.

Closed system

a form of communication that cannot create new meanings or messages; it can only convey pre-programmed (innate) messages.

Code-switching

using two or more language varieties in a particular interaction.

Creole

a language that develops from a pidgin when the pidgin becomes so widely used that children acquire it as one of their first languages. Creoles are more fully complex than creoles.

Critical age range hypothesis

research suggesting that a child will gradually lose the ability to acquire language naturally and without effort if he or she is not exposed to other people speaking a language until past the age of puberty. This applies to the acquisition of a second language as well.

Cultural transmission

the need for some aspects of the system to be learned; a feature of some species' communication systems.

Design features

descriptive characteristics of the communication systems of all species, including that of humans, proposed by linguist Charles Hockett to serve as a definition of human language.

Dialect

a variety of speech. The term is often applied to a subordinate variety of a language. Speakers of two dialects of the same language do not necessarily always understand each other.

Discreteness

a feature of human speech that they can be isolated from others.

Displacement

the ability to communicate about things that are outside of the here and now.

Duality of patterning

at the first level of patterning, meaningless discrete sounds of speech are combined to form words and parts of words that carry meaning. In the second level of patterning, those units of meaning are recombined to form an infinite possible number of longer messages such as phrases and sentences.

Gesture-call system

a system of non-verbal communication using varying combinations of sound, body language, scent, facial expression, and touch, typical of great apes and other primates, as well as humans.

Historical linguistics

the study of how languages change.

Interchangeability

the ability of all individuals of the species to both send and receive messages; a feature of some species' communication systems.

Kinesics

the study of all forms of human body language.

Language

an idealized form of speech, usually referred to as the standard variety.

Language death

the total extinction of a language.

Language shift

when a community stops using their old language and adopts a new one.

Language universals

characteristics shared by all linguists.

Larynx

the voice box, containing the vocal bands that produce the voice.

Lexicon

the vocabulary of a language.

Linguistic relativity

the idea that the structures and words of a language influence how its speakers think, how they behave, and ultimately the culture itself (also known as the Whorf Hypothesis).

Middle English

the form of the English language spoken from 1066 AD until about 1500 AD.

Minimal response

the vocal indications that one is listening to a speaker.

Modern English

the form of the English language spoken from about 1500 AD to the present.

Morphemes

the basic meaningful units in a language.

Morphology

the study of the morphemes of language.

Old English

English language from its beginnings to about 1066 AD.

Open system

a form of communication that can create an infinite number of new messages; a feature of human language only.

Oralist approach

an approach to the education of deaf children that emphasizes lip reading and speaking orally while discouraging use of signed language.

Palate

the roof of the mouth.

Paralanguage

those characteristics of speech beyond the actual words spoken, such as pitch, loudness, tempo.

Pharynx

the throat cavity, located above the larynx.

Phonemes

the basic meaningless sounds of a language.

Phonology

the study of the sounds of language.

Pidgin

a simplified language that springs up out of a situation in which people who do not share a language must spend extended amounts of time together.

Pragmatic function

the useful purpose of a communication. Usefulness is a feature of all species' communication systems.

Pragmatics

how social context contributes to meaning in an interaction.

Productivity/creativity

the ability to produce and understand messages that have never been expressed before.

Proxemics

the study of the social use of space, including the amount of space an individual tries to maintain around himself in his interactions with others.

Register

a style of speech that varies depending on who is speaking to whom and in what context.

Semanticity

the meaning of signs in a communication system; a feature of all species' communication systems.

Semantics

how meaning is conveyed at the word and phrase level.

Speech act

the intention or goal of an utterance; the intention may be different from the dictionary definitions of the words involved.

Standard

the variant of any language that has been given special prestige in the community.

Symbol

anything that serves to refer to something else.

Syntax

the rules by which a language combines morphemes into larger units.

Taxonomies

a system of classification.

Universal grammar (UG)

a theory developed by linguist Noam Chomsky suggesting that a basic template for all human languages is embedded in our genes.

Unbound morpheme

a morpheme that can stand alone as a separate word.

Vernaculars

non-standard varieties of a language, which are usually distinguished from the standard by their inclusion of stigmatized forms.

Agriculture

the cultivation of domesticated plants and animals using technologies that allow for intensive use of the land.

Broad spectrum diet

a diet based on a wide range of food resources.

Built environment

spaces that are human-made, including cultivated land as well as buildings.

Carrying capacity

a measurement of the number of calories that can be extracted from a particular unit of land in order to support a human population.

Commodity chain

the series of steps a food takes from location where it is produced to the store where it is sold to consumers.

Delayed return system

techniques for obtaining food that require an investment of work over a period of time before the food becomes available for consumption. Farming is a delayed return system due to the passage of time between planting and harvest. The opposite is an immediate return system in which the food acquired can be immediately consumed. Foraging is an immediate return system.

Domestic economy

the work associated with obtaining food for a family or household.

Foodways

the cultural norms and attitudes surrounding food and eating.

Foraging

a subsistence system that relies on wild plant and animal food resources. This system is sometimes called "hunting and gathering."

Historical ecology

the study of how human cultures have developed over time as a result of interactions with the environment.

Horticulture

a subsistence system based on the small-scale cultivation of crops intended primarily for the direct consumption of the household or immediate community.

Modes of subsistence

the techniques used by the members of a society to obtain food. Anthropologists classify subsistence into four broad categories: foraging, pastoralism, horticulture, and agriculture.

Mono-cropping

the reliance on a single plant species as a food source. Mono-cropping leads to decreased dietary diversity and carries the risk of malnutrition compared to a more diverse diet.

Neolithic Revolution

a period of rapid innovation in subsistence technologies that began 10,000 years ago and led to the emergence of agriculture. Neolithic means "new stone age," a name referring to the stone tools produced during this time period.