Anthropology and Social Theory Vocabulary

Vocabulary terms and definitions covering cultural anthropology, kinship structures, classical sociological theories, and crowd psychology.

Fieldwork (Malinowski)

Examines three components: 1. Collecting hard data (scientific statistical documentation of concrete evidence, e.g., kinship charts, census data, genealogies — 'The Skeleton'); 2. The Imponderabilia of Actual Life (immersive study of the social fabric of everyday life — 'Flesh and blood'); 3. The 'Spirit' of life (recording what people say of their beliefs/culture in their own words — 'Voice/Spirit').

Functionalism

A theoretical approach associated with Malinowski arguing that human societies/cultures form a coherent, integrated whole in which each aspect fulfills fundamental, even psychosocial needs, requiring that a society be studied in totality.

Ethnography's Authority (Malinowski)

According to Malinowski, the authority of ethnography is derived from three elements: 1. Personal experience, 2. Systemic Rigor, and 3. Inference.

Affinal

Related based on marriage instead of blood (such as in-laws, husband/wife, step-relatives). People with whom you hold this relationship are members of your 'affine'.

Consanguineal

Related based on blood or biology (such as mother, father, cousins, siblings). People with whom you hold this relationship are members of your 'descent group'.

Kinship

The organization of human relationships based on choice, intent, or biology. Originated as anthropology's means of establishing itself as 'scientific', using diagrams that illustrate social and political norms such as heterosexuality, blood relations, and parentage.

Parallel Cousins

The children of your parent's same-sex sibling.

Cross Cousins

The children of your parent's opposite-sex sibling (noted in text as children of your parent's sibling).

Matrilineal

When family descent, kinship, and relatedness are traced through the mother's side of the family rather than the father's.

Matriarchal

A society or culture ruled, controlled, or led by women.

Symbol

An abstraction, representation, and condensation of something that is collectively important (e.g., flags whose colors, shapes, and designs represent values important to a nation).

Symbolic/Interpretive Anthropology

An anthropological approach that studies people and culture through the ways they make meaning via myth, ritual, symbolic systems, and cultural meanings, emphasizing how people construct reality and express it to themselves and witnessing audiences.

Social Fact

Every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising an external constraint on the individual, or which is general over a given society while having an independent existence of its own; external, coercive, independent of individual psychology, and shared across society.

Social Current

Fluid, dynamic forces that lack the crystallized structure of established institutions yet exert external and coercive influence over individuals. They are fleeting, can temporarily override norms, and include moments of crazed panic, shared public grief, or national pride.

Collective Effervescence

The heightened, collective sense of unity, exaltation, or energy that people feel when gathering in a group, serving as a key source of solidarity.

Durkheimian 'Society'

A distinct living reality existing sui generis (of its own kind) that floats above individuals and is greater than the sum of its parts. It operates through social facts and collective consciousness, treating social facts as objective, observable things studied via trends and statistics.

Tardian 'Sociality'

A micro-sociological perspective arguing that society should be studied through imitation as a form of 'somnambulism' (sleepwalking), defining society as a group of beings who unconsciously copy one another or share ancient copies of the same model.

Freud's Crowd

A crowd dynamic held together by emotional, libidinal attachments rooted in the ego, wherein individuals displace their ego onto the leader (father figure), leading members to identify with one another.

LeBon's Crowd

A hypnotic, impulsive, and irritable group incapable of reason, in which individuals lose themselves, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, participants regress into 'primitivism', and members place themselves instinctively under the rule of a chief through contagion.

Cultural Relativism

The principle that cultures have unique characteristics and must be understood in their own perspectives (beliefs, values, norms) rather than judged against the standards of other cultures, asserting there is no such thing as a 'superior culture'.

The Color Line

A societal (social, economic, political) boundary that segregates Black and white people through an abstract social hierarchy (Du Bois).

Racial Capitalism

A socio-economic system where capitalism and racism depend on each other, expanding and generating profit by dividing people into racial hierarchies and exploiting marginalized groups.

The Veil

A metaphor for the psychological and physical barrier between black and white Americans. Very related to the color line and doubel consciousness

Recognition

Recognition is often used to refer to the recognition of a tribes rights/sovereignty/existence by the settler colonial state that occupies its lands. While often fought for and desired, this recognition is also a trap, forcing oppressed and colonized people to appeal to the authority of an external sovereign power in order to be legitimized as sovereign themselves.

Refusal

Refusal for Simpson is a practice, not just a rejection, but a means of asserting sovereignty, respecting what stories should and should not be told in ethnography, and rejecting the legitimacy of the settler state. THis can show up in a lot of ways: refusing recognition, refusing to travel on the passports of the colonizer, refusing to "tell all", refusing to participate in the politics of the colinzing stae, etc.

Sovereignty

This term only makes sense in a modern, western, imperial context. It refers to the right to self-determination, to have a monopoly on violence and political authority, the ability to determine citizenship, and implies a single, total authority of the state.

Nested Sovereignty

An idea developed by Simpson is that there can exist sovereignties within sovereignties, but that one proliferates at the other's expense. This idea becomes kind of a mess when talking about people like the Mohawk because they refuse to recognize the sovereignty of the settler state

Settler Colonialism

Settler colonialism, in relation to other forms of colonialism, is a territorial project. It seeks not just to acquire labor or other resources to extract or to govern from "afar" but to acquire territory. This is its singular focus. Settler colonialism cannot operate without attempting to eliminate, displace, and remove indigenous inhabitants. This is its endgame, its premise. Many settler colonial states remain active today, including the United States. Settler colonialism is NOT an event but an ongoing structure.