ppl

Clifford Geertz—thick description:

A charge for ethnographers to explain not only the action but also the total social context of the action so it becomes meaningful for an outsider.

Marvin Harris—cultural materialism:

The idea that human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence. Therefore, cultural phenomena can be explained as adaptations to an environment. Useful for explaining the Dobe.

Marcel Mauss—gift exchange:

Gifts are never free, they always create an obligation for a reciprocal exchange.

Victor Turner—the ritual process:

rites of passage follow a recognizable pattern of a beginning phase, a liminal or transition period, and a period of reincorporation into the group with a new social status.

Benedict Anderson—Imagined Communities:

a sense of broad horizontal kinship with an ethnic or national group, developed through a shared experience of history and shared rituals, in spite of a lack of face-to-face interactions.

Alexis de Toqueville—equality of feeling:

ideology of equality and merit that pervades American institutions often masking structural inequality.

Max Weber—class, status, party:

Power can take a variety of forms including wealth, prestige, and authority. Individuals can use one form of power to compete for another.

Michel Foucault—power and resistance:

wherever there is power, there is resistance. Often it is found at an interpersonal level.

Thorstein Veblen—conspicuous consumption/emulation:

Lavish spending on goods and services as a way of displaying wealth and achieving status. Emulation is the effort to equal or surpass another in the status associated with wealth.

Pierre Bourdieu—cultural capital: Educational or intellectual assets that can promote a person’s social mobility.

Pierre Bourdieu—symbolic violence:

denigrating the cultural capital of a competing social group as a part of boundary maintenance.

Erving Goffman—impression management:

people manage impressions of themselves strategically, based on cultural values.

Erving Goffman—stigma:

a negative label based on categorical identity or physical mark, that an individual must adjust to.

Robert Merton—social structure and anomie/modes of adaptation:

Anomie (normlessness) occurs when there is a disjuncture between the values of a society and the capacity of individuals to act in accordance with those values. The result can be a range of adaptations including conformity, innovation or rebellion.

Emile Durkheim—the division of labor:

Modern economic specialization creates interdependence and a sense of social solidarity. In primitive societies, a lack of specialization creates common experiences on which social solidarity is based.

Immanuel Wallerstein—World System, Core and Periphery:

The core has a level of dominance over the periphery which is reflected in trade. Most of high level economic activities are located at the core, with the periphery subjugated and exploited resulting in underdevelopment. This pattern was prevalent in the colonial era but can also be seen today.

Walt Whitman Rostow—the Stages of Growth:

Economic development and the transition from agriculture to industry requires societies to achieve certain prerequisites for growth including education, infrastructure and specialization in a few key industries in order to develop an entrepreneurial class and a sustained level of investment. Rostow is criticized for assuming that developing countries can and should follow the path of developed Western nations.

Karl Marx—commodification:

Commodification is the transformation of things that are not normally regarded as commodities into commodities. In modern society, exchange relationships are increasingly commodified (which may make them less social.)

Dean McCannell—tourism as secular ritual, search for authenticity:

Tourism can be interpreted as a religious ritual that follows a set pattern to invest sites with sacred meanings. Alienated by banal everyday lives, tourists seek authenticity in other cultures.

Arjun Appadurai—flows and scapes:

“This extended terminological discussion of the five terms I have coined sets the basis for a tentative formulation about the conditions under which current global flows occur: they occur in and through the growing disjunctures between ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes.”