Anthro - Key Persons

sob

Clifford Geertz - concept & definition

Clifford Geertz - concept & definition

Thick Description - A description that fully dives into the action, its social context, meaning, and public perception/understanding of a behavior in a way that makes it more meaningful and understandable for outsiders.

It typically includes subjective explanations and meanings given by the action’s performer (emic descriptions), giving it scientific value for researchers.

Contrasts with thin descriptions, which is a surface-level observation of behavior

Person who came up with thick description

Clifford Geertz

Marvin Harris - concept & definition

Cultural Materialism - Idea that change in human social life occurs as a response to practical problems (material conditions). Therefore, cultural phenomena can be explained as adaptations to an environment.

Person who came up with cultural materialism

Marvin Harris

Marcel Mauss - concept & definition

Gift exchange - gifts are never free, they inherently call for a reciprocal exchange

Person who came up with gift exchange

Marcel Mauss

Victor Turner - concept & definition

Ritual process - rites of passage have a pattern: a beginning phase, liminal/transition process, and incorporation process where they are re-integrated into the group with a new social status

Person who came up with the ritual process

Victor Turner

Benedict Anderson - concept & definition

Imagined communities - sense of kinship with an ethnic/national group developed through a shared experience and shared rituals despite a lack of face-to-face interactions

like an online relationship with someone else also taking ib anthro where you two share your notes..

‘benedict anderson more like benefit and(another person) ahahha’’’’

Person who came up imagined communities

Benedict Anderson

Alexis de Toqueville - concept & definition

Equality of feeling - Ideology of equality and merit that pervades American institutions, often masks structural inequality

• think Global Maya or In Search of Respect, where both believe that their faults lie in not trying hard enough

• Maybe applies to FFBB?

Person who came up equality of feeling

Alexis de Toqueville

Max Weber - concept & definition

Class, status, party - Power takes various forms like wealth (class), prestige (status), and authority (party - political). How power is distributed in a society. Individuals use one form of power to compete for another.

Person who came up class, status, party

Max Weber

Michael Foucault

Power and resistance - Resistance exists wherever power does. It is usually found at an interpersonal level

Person who came up power and resistance

Michael Foucault

Thorstein Veblen - concepts & definition (3 of them!)

Conspicuous consumption - Lavish expenditures is used as a display of wealth & a method of achieving/maintaining status.

Conspicuous compassion - Ostentatious use of charity to improve one’s social presteige/reputation

Pecuniary emulation - The effort to equal or surpass a rich person’s socioeconomic status through economic means

• Basically, emulating the high class to appear high class; buying “high-class” overexpensive brands to achieve greater social status, even if they cannot afford it

Veblen believed that the fight to gain social class through acquiring & exhibiting wealth is what drives cultural & societal development

Person who came up conspicuous consumption, conspicuous compassion, pecuniary emulation

Thorstein Veblen

Pierre Bourdieu - concept & definition (4 of them!)

Cultural Capital - Educational or intellectual assets that propel a person’s social mobility (ex: knowledge of opera/fine art, tableside etiquette). Develops due to a difference in education/wealth/background.

• Can be split into objective, embodied, and institutionalized cultural capital

  • Objective: cultural goods, books, works of art (ex: reading War and Peace)

  • Embodied: things consciously acquired and passively inherited through socialization. Acquired over time; impressed into a person’s habitus. Language, mannerisms, preferences (ex: etiquitte in Privilege)

  • Institutionalized: qualifications, education credentials

Symbolic Violence - non-physical violence occuring due to a difference in power between social groups. Often unconsciously agreed upon by both parties to be ‘right’. May be unconsciously formed

Habitus - How a person perceives/responds to the world due to their habits, skills, and character

Field Theory: how people form social fields (environments where individuals/groups compete, like markets, academy, musical genres, etc) and how they are affected by said fields

• Incumbents: dominant players, want to maintain the current field to maintain dominant position

• Insurgents: want to alter the field so they can have the dominant position

Person who came up cultural capital, habitus, field theory

Pierre Bourdieu

Erving Goffman - concept & definition (2 concepts!)

Impression management - The way people control another person’s perception of themselves based on cultural values by regulating the information transmitted; they change how they present themselves (their image) based on the percieved audience

• Examples: making excuses (denying blame for a negative action), conforming their opinions to the target

Stigma - A negative label based on a categorical identity or physical mark that a person must adjust to

Person who came up impression management, stigma

Erving Goffman

Robert Merton - concept & definition

Social structure and anomie/modes of adaptation - Normlessness (anomie), occurs when there is a difference between a society’s values and a person’s capacity to act in accordance to those values. Result can be a range of values: conformity, rebellion, innovation…

Person who came up social structure and anomie/modes of adaptation

Robert Merton

Emile Durkheim - concept & definition

Division of labor - Modern economic specialization creates interdependence & sense of social solidarity. In primative societies, a lack of specialization creates common experiences on which social solidarity is based.

• I have 0 economic specialization. jobless & skilless :)

Person who came up division of labor

Emile Durkheim

Immanuel Wallerstein - concept & definition

World system: core and periphery

Core: dominance over the periphery

• Can be seen in trade: high-level economic activities is located at the core, and the periphery is exploited and subjugated causing underdevelopment

  • Pattern most common in colonial times, but still present today

Person who came up world system: core and periphery

Immanuel Wallerstein

Walt Whitman Rostow - concept & definition

Stages of growth - Certain preresiquites (education, infrastructure, specilaization in key industries) for growth must be met for an agricultural society to evolve into an industry society

• Entrepreneurial class and sustained level of investment

Rostow criticized for assuming that there is only one (Western) path that developing countries should follow

Person who came up stages of growth

Walt Whitman Rostow

Karl Marx - concept & definition

Commodification - transformation of things that aren’t usually regarded as commodities into commodities

• Modern society: exchange relationships are increasingly commodified, making them less social

Person who came up commodification

Karl Marx

Dean McCannell - concept & definition

Tourism as a secular ritual, search for authenticity - tourism can be interpreted as religious ritual following a set pattern to certain sacred sites

• Tourists seek authenticity in other cultures as they are alienated by banal everyday lives

Person who came up tourism as secular ritual/search for authenticity

Dean McCannell

Arjun Appadurai - concept & definition

Flows and scapes - current global flows occur under the conditions caused by differences in ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes

Person who came up flows and scapes

Arjun Appadurai