cultural anthropology vocab

Economic Anthropology

is the study of the various ways that people meet their needs through production, exchange, and consumption

Subsistence strategies

any culturally created means of obtaining or securing food.

Foraging (or hunting and gathering)

A subsistence strategy based on gathering plants that grow wild in the environment and hunting available animals

Horticulture

a subsistence strategy where people cultivate varieties of wild or domesticated crops, primarily for their own use, with little technology.

multicropping

allows the family to meet a variety of nutritional needs while the diversity of plants provide nutrients and support for each other.

Pastoral-ism

is a subsistence strategy based on the use of domesticated herd animals. Animals are used for transportation, trading, plowing, meat consumption, dairy provision, and for making items out of wool, skin, bone, and horns

Nomadic pastoralism

a form of pastoralism where groups move hundreds of miles per year based on land and water availability.

Transhumant pastoralism

is a form of pastoralism where herds are moved based off of the seasons. Herds are sheltered during winter months and put out to pasture during warmer months.

Agriculture

a subsistence strategy that requires constant and intensive use of permanent fields for plant cultivation.

Exchange systems

are social processes by which people give and receive goods and services.

Generalized reciprocity

is where gifts are exchanged with no precise accounting of value and no precise expectation for type or time of return.

balanced reciprocity

the exchange of materials is either immediate or happens within a short period of time. The exchange might or might not include money, but the value of the exchanged items is roughly equal.

Negative reciprocity

involves an exchange where one or both parties try to receive more than they give.

Redistribution

involves a centralized authority collecting goods and services from one group of people and redistributing them.

market economy

is a system of exchange in which people exchange their labor for money (or have jobs in which they get paid) and then use money to buy goods and services.

Culture

is described as the total way of life of a group of people. It is learned, dynamic, shared, power laden, and integrated.

Dynamic

means something that is always changing

Shared

means that culture is a group experience. There is no such thing as individual culture

Power-laden

means that not everyone is equal in a culture. There will always be the advantaged or the disadvantaged (or the haves and the have-nots).

Integrated

means that all aspects of a culture are connected. It is difficult to change one part of a culture without affecting other aspects of that culture.

cultural relativism

This states that various cultures and beliefs are best understood in relation to their entire context

Ethnocentrism

is when someone uses their own culture to measure or interpret another culture.

Xenophobia:

an intense, irrational dislike/aversion for people from other countries or cultures.

Cultural superiority:

the idea that one culture is more enlightened, advanced, or civilized than another.

Tacit Ethnocentrism:

the assumption that one's own way of life is just normal, and not a result of culture.

Archeology

is the study of material artifacts to understand a people's culture or society.

Linguistics

involves the study of language. Pure linguistics studies language as a system of sounds and rules.

Physical or biological anthropology

involves the study of human anatomy, nonhuman primates, and human origins.

Cultural anthropology

uses the concept of culture to understand human individuals and groups.

Ethnographies

when people write up their findings in accounts called

anthropological perspective

refers to how anthropologists try to explain a culture from the inside: understanding the motives, actions, and beliefs of a culture in their own terms.

Language

is defined as a system of verbal and nonverbal symbols that stands for something else.

Symbol

anything that stands for or represents something else

Historical linguistics

is the study of how language develops and changes over time and how different languages are related to each other.

linguistic morphology

the pattern and structures of words in a language, scholars connected different languages into language families.

language family

is a group of languages that derives from a common ancestor language.

protolanguage

the ancient language from which all the members of that particular language family were derived from

comparative method

to trace a language's family tree. This method studies similarities in words and sounds to help classify languages.

descriptive linguistics

is the study of a language as used by a particular group of people at a particular moment in time.

Phonetics

the study of the production, transmission, and perception of speech sounds, including all possible sounds in all human languages.

Phonology

is the study of how a single language's distinctive sounds patterned and used in its phonemic system.

Phonemes

are the distinctive sounds in any particular language.

Morphemes

are the smallest unit of language that has a sound, meaning, and function.

Sociolinguistics

is the study of how language is used by people in society.

language hierarchy;

a system in which some accents, dialects, or languages are viewed as more prestigious or elite than others.

Dialects

are distinct but understandable forms of a single language.

Gullah

(in the Lowcountry) are also spoken, as well as many other languages in immigrant populations.

creole

a new language that blends aspects of multiple languages.

Code-switching

is when individuals shift between different forms of speech or languages depending on the setting.