Cultural Anthropology Midterm

Cultural Relativism

Cultural Relativism

can’t use your own norms to judge another community, you must understand that all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture; not judging a culture to our own standards of what is strange/normal or right/wrong

Ethnocentrism

the concept that you bring your own culture’s values, and use them as the standard of morality/terminology/practice for other cultures, opposes cultural relativism

Armchair anthropology

observing a society from an outside/non-involved perspective, merely doing research and not immersing oneself in another culture

Participant observation

living in a community, speaking their language, and trying to understand it from their point of view, an immersive technique

Rapport

a close, harmonious relationship in which people completely understand each other, trust goes both ways

Rapport example

Police came to cock fight and Geertz acts like he’s been there the entire time, integrates himself with Balinese people

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers’ worldview or cognition

Linguistic Relativity example

Different words for aunt/uncle in different languages reflects society and values

Cultural Access

Depending on your access to culture, you can still study the culture, but maybe not the same way you hoped

Code-switching

the concept that the way in which you present yourself switches from context to context

Code-switching example

the way you talk in professional settings is different from how you act around your friends

Shape-shifting

a choice to try on different behaviors with a playful and experimental mindset, more retaining of who you are, not letting a dominant social norm define who you are because that norm cannot be changed

Shape-shifting example

push back in ways that make you less subject to assumptions placed on you, Black female genealogies and storytelling leads to cultural transformation through empowerment

First contact

in the film Arrival, she say she can’t just work with audio file (arm-chair anthropology), need to “be there” to meet them (immersive anthropology)—> military and linguist have different ideas of first contact

Thick description

A description of human social action that describe not just physical behaviors, but their context as interpreted by the actors as well, so it can be better understood by an outside

Thick description example

winking—> how do we know what it means?

How does race come to be real?

Structural racism, science, law, sports, language, education, REDLINING

Redlining

classifying certain areas (green/red) depending on the property value of homes in an area, houses in redlined districts have lower value—> less funded schools —> poorer education—> racial gap grows

Social Fact

a changeable reality that exists before us that we must abide by, can create personal meaning for a social fact but there are constraints

Emotional apprenticeship

Learning how to be vulnerable and open to learning from your interviewees and the subgroup you are living amongst

Emotional apprenticeship example

People that Ring is living with are teaching her, becomes a way to learn how to be Pakistani

Reflexivity

how does the anthropologist reflect on themselves and their discomforts in a different cultural setting

Culture

you are not born knowing culture, it is taught and learned, change is the only constant of culture

Tradition

implies that something is learned from those who have already learned it

Mental Map of Reality

a frame of intelligibility, some things only make sense within a certain framing of it, mentally things fit in a certain place and you try to assimilate and include in the most similar/closest category

Language

a system of communication that uses symbols (words, sounds, and gestures) to convey information

Sociolinguistics

study of the ways in which culture shapes language and vice versa, intersection of language with cultural categories and systems of power as age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, etc

Museums as method

any object that you encounter in a museum because of a series of decisions that were made to put an object in the museum, bundle of relations (talking about who used the object and how to help describe culture)

Exploded Object

using the method of looking at an object in great detail and tracing its history, story, process, who is involved with it, etc to say more about how ti comes ot be what it is

Slang

language particular to a certain group of people, shows flexibility of culture, expansive nature of culture, while also remaining the same (language doesn’t change)

Social functionalists

how societies function and what holds it together

Encounter

meeting an object, seeing it for the first time (both actually and metaphorically)

Captioning

What a museum lists as the caption for a piece and what other pieces are placed around it influence your view of that object or a particular culture