General Anthropology and Human Diversity Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards covering core terms, theoretical concepts, subdisciplines, key figures, and definitions from Module 1 general anthropology lectures.

Anthropology

The study of human diversity in all times and places, encompassing biological, social, and cultural aspects of the human experience across every continent and over more than six million years of human evolution and history.

Cultural Anthropology

A major subdiscipline of anthropology that focuses on patterns of behavior and thought within contemporary societies.

Linguistics

A major subdiscipline of anthropology that concentrates on the history, structure, and use of human language.

Archaeology

A major subdiscipline of anthropology that uses material remains to examine cultural variation, primarily in the ancient past.

Physical Anthropology

A major subdiscipline of anthropology that deals with biological aspects of human evolution, variation, and health.

Holistic Approach

An aspect of the anthropological perspective that approaches societies and events in a comprehensive manner, seeking to elucidate connections between various facets of life to understand overall lived experience.

Comparative Approach

An aspect of the anthropological perspective that continually compares cultural and biological phenomena across space and through time to illuminate diversity and draw general conclusions.

Cultural Relativism

The idea that one should suspend judgment of other people's practices in order to understand those practices on their own terms.

Franz Boas

The father of American anthropology who championed cultural relativism to combat the generalizations of 19th-century cultural evolutionists.

Ethnocentrism

A way of continually viewing and judging other cultures in relation to one's own.

Gregor Mendel

The monk who taught the rules of biological inheritance.

Watson and Crick

The scientists who discovered DNA and established that the ultimate source of variation is change in genetic codes, known as mutation.

Mutation

A change in the genetic codes for synthesizing proteins, serving as the ultimate source of biological variation.

Society

The organization of organisms into groups.

Thomas Hobbes

The 17th-century philosopher who asserted that the life of primitive man was 'nasty, brutish, and short.'

Unilineal Cultural Evolution

A 19th-century line of reasoning that viewed variation in human societies as a measure of progress towards 'civilization,' portraying small-scale hunter-gatherers as primitive.

Historical Turn

A strand of anthropological reasoning emerging in the 1970s that explained societal variation by focusing on long histories of interaction and connections among societies.

Applied Anthropology

The application of anthropological knowledge, theory, and method to address real-world problems.

Primatology

A specialty in biological anthropology focused on the study of humanity's closest living nonhuman relatives.

Biocultural Perspective

An anthropological perspective on the intrinsic, interconnected relationships between biology and culture.

Forensic Anthropology

An applied branch of biological anthropology that applies knowledge of human remains to the adjudication of legal disputes.

Sociolinguistics

A field dealing with the interplay between society and language.

Historical Linguistics

A field dealing with the evolution of language through long-term histories of use.

Ethnoarchaeology

A specialty where archaeologists conduct ethnographic work or read ethnographies to gather comparative materials for interpreting material remains.

Kennewick Man

An ancient skeleton discovered along the Columbia River in Washington whose skull measurements and ancient DNA sparked major interdisciplinary debates over indigenous heritage.

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)

A U.S. public law stipulating the rights of federally recognized native tribes to claim or reclaim human burials and associated artifacts of their ancestors.

Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn

Anthropologists who in the 1950s compiled 164 published definitions of culture.

Idealist Conceptions of Culture

Views defining culture primarily as a set of learned and shared beliefs, thoughts, meanings, and symbols existing in the mind.

Behaviorist Conceptions of Culture

Views defining culture primarily as actual behavior, actions, and traditions.

Culture (Textbook Definition)

A society's shared and socially transmitted ideas, values, and perceptions, which are used to make sense of experience and generate behavior.

Enculturation

The lifelong process by which culture is learned through experience within a given social environment starting at birth or in utero.

Individual Learning

A type of learning where a person learns from their own direct experiences and uses that knowledge as a basis for future action.

Social Learning

A type of learning where an individual learns from others in a group through simple imitation or formal instruction.

Symbolic Learning

A type of learning involving the use of arbitrary symbols, usually through language, which is largely restricted to humans.

Subcultures

Divisions within a society based on distinctive sets of shared ideas, values, and behaviors among overlapping groups.

Countercultures

Groups composed of individuals who share a society's cultural knowledge but actively choose to reject or subvert aspects of that culture.

Symbol

Something verbal or nonverbal that arbitrarily stands for something else.

Natufian Hunter-Gatherers

A group in the Middle East over 12,000 years ago whose daily gathering of wild wheat and barley culminated in plant domestication and agriculture.

Globalization

The process of ever-increasing interconnectedness of people, ideas, and technologies worldwide that accelerates the pace of cultural change.