Introduction to Anthropology: Key Concepts and Vocabulary

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering introductory anthropology concepts, theoretical frameworks, economic systems, political organizations, and the anthropology of religion based on lecture notes.

Anthropology

The study of humans around the world and through time, combining scientific and humanistic perspectives.

Holism

The study of the whole of the human condition.

Society

Organized life in groups.

Culture

The traditions and customs, transmitted through learning, that form and guide the beliefs and behavior of the people exposed to them.

Biocultural Perspective

An approach that uses both biological and cultural perspectives and methods to analyze and understand a problem.

Cultural Anthropology

The comparative, cross-cultural study of human society and culture.

Ethnography

Fieldwork in a particular cultural setting that provides an account of that community, society, or culture.

Ethnology

The study of sociocultural differences and similarities that examines, interprets, and analyzes the results of ethnography.

Archaeology

The study of human behavior and cultural patterns and processes through a culture's material remains.

Biological Anthropology

The study of human biological variation through time and space.

Paleoanthropology

The study of human biological evolution as revealed by the fossil record.

Primatology

The study of nonhuman primates.

Linguistic Anthropology

The study of language and linguistic diversity in time, space, and society.

Sociolinguistics

The study of language in society.

Applied Anthropology

The use of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and methods to identify, assess, and solve contemporary problems.

Hominid

A member of the hominid family; large tailless primates, including humans.

Enculturation

The process by which culture is learned and transmitted across the generations.

Symbols

Signs that have no necessary or natural connection with the things for which they stand.

Core Values

Key, basic, or central values that integrate a culture.

Generality

A culture pattern or trait that exists in some but not all societies.

Particularity

A distinctive or unique culture trait, pattern, or integration.

Diffusion

The borrowing of traits between cultures, which can be direct, forced, or indirect.

Acculturation

The exchange of cultural features that results when groups come into continuous firsthand contact.

Independent Invention

The process by which humans innovate, creatively finding solutions to problems.

Globalization

A series of processes that work transnationally to promote change in a world in which nations and people are increasingly interlinked and mutually dependent.

Participant Observation

A fieldwork technique involving taking part in community life while observing, describing, and analyzing the events taking place.

Genealogical Method

A procedure that uses diagrams and symbols to record kin connections.

Cultural Consultants

People who teach an ethnographer about their culture.

Emic

A research strategy focusing on local explanations and meanings, relying on the native viewpoint.

Etic

A research strategy emphasizing the ethnographer's explanations, categories, and interpretations.

Informed Consent

An agreement to take part in research after having been informed about its purpose, nature, procedures, and possible impacts.

Cultural Relativism

The idea that behavior should be evaluated not by outside standards, but in the context of the culture in which it occurs.

Ethnocentrism

The tendency to view one's own culture as superior and to use one's own standards and values in judging outsiders.

Human Terrain System (HTS)

A Pentagon program that used anthropologists to conduct research for the U.S. military in war zones.

Situational Negotiation of Identity

The process by which individuals express different social identities depending on context.

Ascribed Status

Social status based on limited choice that people have little or no control over occupying.

Achieved Status

Social status attained through choices, actions, efforts, talents, or accomplishments.

Phenotype

An organism's evident traits, or manifest biology, including anatomy and physiology.

Genotype

All the genes that an individual carries.

Hypodescent

A rule that automatically places children of mixed marriages into the group of the minority parent.

Adaptive Strategy

A society's main system of economic production.

Foraging

An economy based on hunting, gathering, and/or fishing.

Band

The basic social and political unit among foragers, typically consisting of fewer than 100 people who may split up seasonally.

Horticulture

Non-intensive plant cultivation with fallowing, using simple tools and shifting cultivation or slash-and-burn methods.

Agriculture

Cultivation using land and labor continuously and intensively, often employing irrigation, terracing, and domesticated animals.

Cultivation Continuum

A continuum of land and labor use ranging from horticulture to agriculture, with intermediate economies combining both features.

Pastoralism

An economic activity focused on herding domesticated animals such as cattle, sheep, goats, camels, and yaks.

Mode of Production

A specific way of organizing production.

Alienation

A condition in which a worker has manufactured a product but perceives the product as belonging to someone else.

Economizing

The rational allocation of scarce means or resources to alternative ends.

Peasants

Small-scale agriculturalists with rent fund obligations who live in state-organized societies.

Market Principle

Buying, selling, and valuation based on supply and demand, where bargaining is a characteristic feature.

Redistribution

The movement of goods from the local level into a center, and then back out to the public.

Generalized Reciprocity

Exchanges between closely related individuals characterized by no expectation of an immediate return.

Negative Reciprocity

Potentially hostile exchanges among strangers, often characterized by trying to obtain the maximum return for minimum effort.

Potlatch

A festive event within a regional exchange system among North Pacific Coast Native groups where sponsors give away wealth items in exchange for prestige.

Kula

A regional exchange of shell necklaces and armbands practiced by Trobriand Islanders that enhances the renown and prestige of participants.

Hegemony

A state in which subordinates comply with authority by internalizing rulers' values and accepting the naturalness of domination.

Village Head

A local tribal leader with limited authority who leads by example, mediates disputes, and demonstrates generosity.

Big Man

A regional political leader whose authority extends over multiple villages and whose status is achieved through wealth, hard work, and generosity.

Office

A permanent position in a chiefdom or state that must be refilled when vacated.

Public Transcript

Open, public interactions between oppressed people and their oppressors.

Hidden Transcript

The critique of power that occurs out of sight of those who hold power.

Structural Violence

Harm caused when a social institution or structure prevents people from meeting their basic needs.

Rituals

Formal, stylized, repetitive, stereotyped behaviors based on a liturgical order.

Liminality

The transitional, in-between phase of a rite of passage, characterized by humility, equality, and temporary suspension of ordinary status.

Communitas

An intense feeling of social solidarity and collective togetherness experienced during liminality.

Interiority

In Philippe Descola's framework, whether a being is recognized as having internal qualities such as intentions, a soul, a point of view, and capacity for culture.

Physicality

In Philippe Descola's framework, the bodily form, substance, and biological workings of a being.

Totemism

A system where members of a social group share interiority and physicality with ancestral beings and sacred plants, animals, or geographic features.

Analogism

An ontology based on the belief that other beings differ from humans in both interiority and physicality, requiring order to be maintained through webs of correspondence.

Naturalism

An ontology in which humans and nonhumans share physicality (nature/biology) but humans are distinguished by interiority (mind/culture).

Witchcraft

The exercise of an innate, bodily ability to produce effects, either purposely or accidentally, through magical means.

Sorcery

Learned magic that intends harm.

Imitative Magic

Magic based on understandings of similarity, intended to produce an effect by imitating it.

Contagious Magic

Magic based on understandings of contagion or physical contact, where an action done to an object affects a person previously linked to it.