Anthropology Short Quiz 8/28

Archaeology

The study of the past thru the use of material remains

Studies include…

• ancient stone tools

• ancient pottery

• pollen grains from plants ancient peoples ate/used

• bones of animals left behind by people

• modern garbage

Cultural Anthropology

The study of culture and modern peoples

• can include modern hunter-gatherers

• also smaller subcultures (ex: breast cancer survivors, drug users in NYC, people who play multiplayer games online)

Evolutionary Anthropology

Includes anthropologists who study the biology of humans or do cultural anthropology with an evolutionary theoretical perspective

Linguistics

The study of human language

• these kinds of anthropologists study how languages have changed in both modern cultures and cultures of the past

Koko the Gorilla

• knows sign language, able to communicate with humans

• she understood emotions and had personality

• significant anthropoligically because she demonstrates clear communication through ASL which challenges the belief of humans being the smarter “fancier” ape

Lewis Henry Morgan

• developed an evolutionary scheme by comparing cultures around the world

• believed that cultures moved through history in stages, unilineal, must make a certain piece of technology to move from one stage to the next

• this is etic

Herbert Spencer

• coined the term “survival of the fittest”

• very dangerous concept, eugenics movement will be born due to this way of thinking (selective breeding to make the most superior offspring possible)

• armchair anthropologist

Armchair anthropologist

• anthropologists that did not perform their own field work

• relied on second hand accounts or simply wrote theory

• still exist today

Charles Darwin

• outlined process of natural selection

• a creature is most reproductively successful if it is best adapted to its environment

• heavily influenced anthropologists and archaeologists

Herodotus

• coined the term “history”

• 5th century B.C. he used the term as a study of the recent past

• thought of as the first ethnographer (watched and studied people to understand their culture) and historian

• the accounts on which he retrived this data on cultures were somewhat racist, untrue, and insulting to the people being studied and described

Charles Lyell/James Hutton

• both outlined the theory of uniformitarianism

• uniformitarianism is the geological principal that past geologic events can be explained by current geologic phenomena

• the same things that happened in the past are still happening today

Etic

knowledge gained by taking an outsider perspective, more commonly used by anthropologists because it allows us to fully see and compare the culture being studied to other cultures

Emic

knowledge gained from a within culture perspective

Ethnoarchaeology

studying present cultures to gain insight about past cultures

Ethnography

idea that to understand what people do (their culture) you should watch them do it

Ethnocentrism

belief that your culture is superior to others

Cultural relativism

no one culture is better than another, all cultures should be evaluated/compared on their own terms