Anthropology: Human Universals, Modes of Subsistence, and Fieldwork Methods

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering human adaptive history, modes of subsistence, ethnographic cross-cultural samples, field research techniques, and foundational anthropological theories.

Naive Realism

The idea that human senses provide an accurate, direct understanding of objective reality.

Instinct Blindness

The tendency to treat instinctual feelings and perceptions as so obvious that they do not need explanation.

Specialized Inference Systems

Evolved systems in the human mind designed to solve specific adaptive problems faced by ancestral hunter-gatherers, such as finding food, acquiring mates, and avoiding predation.

Culture

The shared values, beliefs, practices, and symbols among groups of people living in close proximity.

Mode of Subsistence

The primary means by which a society acquires food.

Foraging

A mode of subsistence based on hunting and/or gathering wild animals and plants, including fishing.

Mobile Foragers

Nomadic or mostly nomadic foragers who live in small groups of a few dozen and do not maintain food storage facilities.

Sedentary Foragers

Foragers who live in permanent or semi-permanent villages of hundreds of residents, typically along coastlines, and utilize food storage facilities.

Ethnographic Analogy

The method of using observations from the ethnographic record of recent societies to make inferences about ancient or prehistoric societies.

Original Affluent Society

Marshall Sahlins' characterization of mobile foragers as having abundant leisure time, possessing and wanting few items, and trusting nature to provide.

Demand Sharing

An intense, insistent social pressure to share food and other valued items within a group.

Horticulture

The practice of cultivating small, non-permanent gardens or farms to meet household needs using exclusively human-powered hand tools.

Pastoralism

A mode of subsistence focused on the maintenance and breeding of herds of animals on natural pasture.

Agriculture

The cultivation and harvesting of plants and/or raising of livestock on land permanently set aside for this purpose.

Intensive Agriculture

The cultivation of land using permanent annual cropping, fertilization, and plows or motor-driven technology.

Industrialism

A system of production based on heavy machinery powered by steam or electricity that relies on individual wage labor.

Unit of Analysis Problem

The methodological issue caused by lacking a rigorous, non-arbitrary definition of 'society' or 'culture' to count groupings.

Genuine Exception

A case in cross-cultural research where a societal characteristic was truly absent in a given group.

Coder Mistake

An error in cross-cultural research where a coder inaccurately categorizes a fieldworker's written observations.

Unconstrained Search

A method of inferring universality by searching the entire ethnographic record for a topic almost always mentioned without finding exceptions.

Sexual Jealousy

An evolved feeling of proprietariness adults tend to have over their long-term sexual partners to mitigate threats of mate-poaching and cheating.

Naturalistic Fallacy

The logical fallacy of inferring how the world ought to be morally based directly on how the world is naturally.

Ethnographic Record

The cumulative collection of all ethnographies, journal articles, and historical accounts describing human cultures.

Ethnographic Atlas

An exhaustive directory of 1,264 known world cultures containing coded societal data, created under the leadership of George Peter Murdock.

Coding

The process of systematically extracting information from ethnographies into standardized variables to enable cross-cultural comparisons.

Standard Cross-Cultural Sample

A purposefully selected subset of 186 cultures from the Ethnographic Atlas designed for cross-cultural research.

HRAF Probability Sample

A randomly selected sample of 60 well-described societies drawn from the ethnographic record.

Fieldwork

The method of spending prolonged time living with a group in a real-world, non-laboratory environment to study their culture.

Cultural Relativism

The approach of understanding a group's culture first in its own context by withholding initial moral judgments and external comparisons.

Ethnocentrism

The practice of judging and evaluating other cultures by the standards and values of one's own culture.

Participant Observation

A fieldwork technique involving active participation in a group's daily activities while simultaneously observing and recording them.

Structured Interview

An interview technique in which pre-planned questions are asked in a strict, predetermined order.

Semi-structured Interview

An interview technique guided by planned topics and questions while allowing flexibility to explore new subjects as they emerge.

Non-laboratory Experiment

An artificial scenario created in a field setting to test a hypothesis by manipulating one or more variables ethically.

Ethnography

A detailed, book-length or dissertation-length written account and analysis of a group's culture based on fieldwork.

Proto-anthropologists

Self-taught early fieldworkers who conducted ethnographic work before formal academic degrees in anthropology existed.

Salvage Anthropology

Early anthropological work aimed at documenting practices, photographs, and artifacts of Indigenous cultures under the assumption that they were rapidly facing disappearance.

Unilineal Social Evolution

The outdated theoretical model asserting that all human societies progress through a single fixed sequence of stages from primitive to civilized.

Historical Particularism

A theoretical approach promoted by Franz Boas that advocates studying each culture within the specific context of its own history, environment, and neighboring influences.

Functionalism

A theoretical framework focused on understanding cultural practices by analyzing the specific purpose or function they fulfill for individuals or society.

Structural-Functionalism

A branch of functionalism associated with A.R. Radcliffe-Brown asserting that cultural practices function primarily to preserve and sustain society as a collective entity.