Cult. Antho. Essay study

Ethnicity

A sense of historical, cultural, and sometimes ancestral connection to a group of people who are imagined to be distinct from those outside the group.

Genocide

The deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic or religious group.

Ethnic cleansing

Efforts by representatives of one ethnic or religious group to remove or destroy another group in a particular geographic area.

Assimilation

The process through which cultural minorities accept the patterns and norms of the dominant culture and cease to exist as separate groups.

Multiculturalism

A pattern of ethnic relations in which new immigrants and their children enculturate into the dominant national culture yet retain an ethnic culture.

State

An autonomous regional structure of political, economic, and military rule with a central government authorized to make laws and use force to maintain order and defend its territory.

Nation-state

A political entity, located within a geographic territory with enforced borders, where the population shares a sense of culture, ancestry, and destiny as a people.

Citizenship

Legal membership in a nation-state.

Nation

A term once used to describe a group of people who shared a place of origin; now used interchangeably with nation-state.

Nationality

An identification with a group of people thought to share a place of origin.

Nationalism

The desire of an ethnic community to create and/or maintain a nation-state.

Imagined community

The invented sense of connection and shared traditions that underlies identification with a particular ethnic group or nation whose members likely will never all meet.

Race

A flawed system of classification, with no biological basis, that uses certain physical characteristics to divide the human population into supposedly discrete groups.

Racism

Individuals' thoughts and actions and institutional patterns and policies that create or reproduce unequal access to power, privilege, resources, and opportunities based on imagined differences among groups.

Genotype

The inherited genetic factors that provide the framework for an organism's physical form.

Phenotype

The way genes are expressed in an organism's physical form as a result of genotype interaction with environmental factors.

Colonialism

The practice by which a nation-state extends political, economic, and military power beyond its own borders over an extended period of time to secure access to raw materials, cheap labor, and markets in other countries or regions.

Hypodescent

Sometimes called the "one drop of blood rule"; the assignment of children of racially "mixed" unions to the subordinate group.

Nativism

The favoring of certain long-term inhabitants, namely White people, over new immigrants.

Racialization

The process of categorizing, differentiating, and attributing a particular racial character to a person or group of people.

Institutional racism

Patterns by which racial inequality is structured through key cultural institutions, policies, and systems.

Racial ideology

A set of popular ideas about race that allows the discriminatory behaviors of individuals and institutions to seem reasonable, rational, and normal.

Kinship

The system of meaning and power that cultures create to determine who is related to whom and to define their mutual expectations, rights, and responsibilities.

Descent group

A kinship group in which primary relationships are traced through certain consanguineal ("blood") relatives.

Lineage

A type of descent group that traces genealogical connection through generations by linking persons to a founding ancestor.

Clan

A type of descent group based on a claim to a founding ancestor but lacking genealogical documentation.

Polygyny

Marriage between one man and two or more women.

Polyandry

Marriage between one woman and two or more men.

Exogamy

Marriage to someone outside the kinship group.

Endogamy

Marriage to someone within the kinship group.

Family of orientation

The family group in which one is born, grows up, and develops life skills.

Family of procreation

The family group created when one reproduces and within which one rears children.