Introduction to Cultural Anthropology: Comprehensive Lecture Review

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards reviewing key concepts, theorists, and cross-cultural examples across globalization, kinship, political power, and religion.

Globalization

The intensification of worldwide social relationships that link distant localities such that local events are shaped by happenings occurring many miles away and vice versa.

Transnational

A term favored by some anthropologists to describe relationships that extend beyond nation-state boundaries without assuming that they span or encompass the entire globe.

World Systems Theory

A macroeconomic theory positing that the world is divided into a dominant 'core' and a dependent 'periphery', where the core develops its wealth at the direct expense of the periphery.

Core

Dominant, technologically advanced capitalist nations that extract labor and cheap raw materials from periphery nations to drive their own economic expansion.

Periphery

Subordinate nations whose role in the world capitalist system is to supply cheap labor and raw materials to core nations, resulting in persistent local poverty and dependency.

Sapeurs

Young Bakongo men from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who utilize high-fashion European designer clothing to amass social prestige and project self-worth against elite classes.

Ethnoscapes

One of Arjun Appadurai's five scapes of globalization, describing the transnational movement and flow of persons, including migrants, refugees, exiles, and tourists.

Technoscapes

The fluid global configuration of mechanical, automated, and digital technology moving across previously impervious boundaries at high speeds.

Financescapes

The rapid and volatile movement of global capital through currency markets, stock exchanges, and international wire transfers.

Mediascapes

The global distribution of electronic and print capabilities to produce and disseminate information, images, and entertainment worldwide.

Ideoscapes

The global spread and concatenation of images, political ideologies, and counter-ideologies explicitly linked to state power, freedom, and sovereignty.

McDonaldization

A model of cultural convergence characterized by efficiency, calculability, predictability, and the substitution of mechanized techniques for human labor.

Coca-Colonization

A form of cultural imperialism or Westernization wherein powerful Western nations impose their commercial consumer products and values across the globe.

Hybridization

A cultural process highlighting ongoing cultural mixing, border-crossing, and persistent diversity rather than total homogenization.

Multi-sited Ethnography

An anthropological research methodology that tracks persons, things, metaphors, or conflicts across multiple geographic locations to study transnational processes.

Candomblé

An Afro-Brazilian syncretic religion originating in Bahia that combines Yoruban spiritual rituals and veneration of orixás with elements of Catholicism.

Umbanda

A syncretic religion developed in Rio de Janeiro during the 1930s that integrates African spirit possession, Catholicism, occultism, and Allan Kardec spiritualism.

Consanguineal Kin

Individuals who are culturally recognized as related through biological descent or blood ties.

Affinal Kin

Individuals related to one another through marital relationships or ties created by marriage.

Natal Family

The biological and social family group into which an individual is born and typically raised.

Lineage

A unilineal descent group whose members can demonstrate direct, traceable descent step-by-step from known apical ancestors.

Clan

A descent group whose members assume descent from a common ancestor without being able to specify the exact genealogical links back to that ancestor.

Patrilineal Descent

A unilineal descent reckoning system where social membership, property, and titles are traced exclusively through male ancestors.

Matrilineal Descent

A unilineal descent reckoning system where individuals belong to their mother's descent group and trace their strongest social identities through maternal kin.

Cognatic Clan

A bilateral descent group, such as in Samoa, where membership can be reckoned through either male or female lines, allowing overlapping clan affiliations.

Kinship Chart

A conventional visual diagram used by anthropologists to represent biological and social relationships, standardly mapped from the perspective of 'Ego'.

Genealogical Amnesia

The structural and selective forgetting of genealogical connections and deceased ancestors beyond a practical number of generations.

Primogeniture

A formal inheritance rule historically practiced in Western legal traditions such as Great Britain where the eldest surviving son inherits an entire estate.

Bride Price

The transfer of wealth or valuables from the groom's family to the bride's family to compensate them for the loss of her labor and reproductive capacities.

Bride Service

A customary marital compensation where a groom performs labor for his wife's kin for a specified period of time instead of paying material valuables.

Child Price

A payment made directly to a woman's family specifically intended to transfer customary rights over her offspring to another kin group.

Polygyny

A marriage pattern in which one husband is married simultaneously to two or more wives.

Polyandry

A rare marital arrangement in which one wife is married simultaneously to two or more husbands.

Incest Taboo

A nearly universal cultural prohibition barring sexual relations and marriage between designated close family members.

Westermarck Effect

An evolutionary explanation proposing that childhood co-residence produces an innate psychological absence of sexual attraction among individuals raised together.

Exogamy

A cultural requirement or social rule stating that an individual must marry outside of their own social group, lineage, or clan.

Endogamy

A cultural rule or prescriptive norm obligating an individual to choose a marriage partner from within their own specific group, community, or caste.

Culture and Personality Movement

An early 20th-century anthropological school of thought, associated with Margaret Mead, asserting that infant care and early socialization fundamentally shape adult psychology and culture.

Acephalous Society

A society lacking centralized governing institutions, formalized political offices, or permanent political heads, where order is maintained by informal mechanisms.

Structural-Functionalism

An anthropological theoretical framework associated with E. E. Evans-Pritchard asserting that cultural customs, rituals, and institutions work in concert to preserve social cohesion and order.

Age-Grades

Hierarchical age cohorts in pastoralist societies, such as the Maasai, through which cohorts of youths progress collectively to take on defined civil, ritual, and military functions.

Band

A small-scale, non-centralized sociopolitical unit characterized by egalitarian social relations, absence of formal law, and leadership functioning strictly as primus inter pares.

Tribe

A non-centralized social system integrated through unilineal descent, sodalities, or marriage alliances, often featuring temporary informal leadership by figures known as Big Men.

Chiefdom

A centralized and ranked society where political authority and economic redistribution are governed by hereditary elite offices held by chiefs.

State

A centralized sociopolitical entity possessing bureaucratic authority, codified legal structures, and an institutionalized monopoly on the legitimate deployment of physical force.

Action Theory

An anthropological approach developed in the 1960s focusing on how political actors strategically deploy normative and pragmatic rules to gain and maintain political leverage.

Structural Power

Power that organizes, configures, and limits the social and economic settings, structural possibilities, and resource distributions within a society.

Revenge Suicide

An informal deployment of power documented in Papua New Guinea where a victimized woman ends her life to transfer cultural shame onto her abuser and spur retributive violence by her kin.

Ho'oponopono

A traditional Hawaiian dispute resolution practice, meaning 'setting to right', in which extended family relationships and communal equilibrium are restored through guided mediation.

Hala Lei

A ritual garland traditionally presented at the formal resolution of ho’oponopono disputes in the custom of kahuna Makaweliweli of Moloka’i.

Adjudication

A formal conflict resolution mechanism wherein opposing parties submit their dispute to an authorized third party who issues an authoritative, binding ruling.

Animism

The belief in personal supernatural entities or spiritual souls animating non-human entities and natural objects, proposed by Edward B. Tylor as the earliest evolutionary stage of religion.

Mana

An impersonal, sacred supernatural energy recognized in Polynesian and Hawaiian traditions that can inhabit high-ranking persons, sacred locations, and physical artifacts.

Sacred and Profane

The primary dichotomy of Emile Durkheim's sociology of religion, dividing ordinary, mundane elements of existence from set-apart, forbidden things that inspire religious awe.

Worldview

A comprehensive conceptual framework through which a culture conceptualizes the fundamental nature of existence, providing both a 'model of' and a 'model for' reality.

Totemism

A system of religious belief in which a social group or clan maintains a sacred or supernatural association with a particular animal, plant, or natural object.

Shamanism

A set of religious practices conducted by part-time religious practitioners who access ecstatic altered states of consciousness to communicate with spirits on behalf of their community.

Law of Similarity

A foundational tenet of sympathetic or imitative magic asserting that like produces like, meaning an effect can be produced by simply imitating it on an effigy.

Law of Contagion

A core tenet of sympathetic magic stating that things once joined in physical contact remain supernaturally connected across time and space.

Rite of Passage

A standardized ritual marking the social transformation and formal transition of an individual from one social standing or life stage to another.

Liminality

The ambiguous, in-between threshold phase of a rite of passage where initiates are stripped of their previous status, existing temporarily outside ordinary social structure.

Communitas

An intense egalitarian fellowship, profound social solidarity, and shared experience of equality that develops among ritual initiates occupying the liminal stage.

Rites of Revitalization

Rituals organized during acute social, demographic, or ecological crises designed to transform society and resolve severe distress through supernatural assistance.

Cargo Cult

A revitalization movement, exemplified by the John Frum movement on Tanna, where communities mimic modern material behaviors to summon ancestral wealth and manufactured cargo.

Rites of Intensification

Collective rituals staged to reaffirm a group's commitment to cultural values, restore unity in times of shared crisis, or regulate changes across seasonal cycles.

Nagol Land Diving

A periodic rite of intensification practiced on Pentecost Island, Vanuatu, where men jump from high wooden towers tethered by vines to ensure agricultural fertility and group unity.

Fundamentalism

Conservative religious movements that emerge within modern nation-states to resist secularization and advocate a militant return to traditional principles and moral boundaries.