cultural anthropology midterm vocabulary (study guide 1)

anthropology

the study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics

four-field anthropology

- holism**

- cultural anthropology

- linguistic anthropology

- biological anthropology

- archaeology

holism**

anthropological commitment to look at the whole picture of human life-culture, biology, history, and language-across space and time

cultural anthropology

study of human societies and cultures; no culture is either inevitable or natural, but constructed by humans struggling to make meaning in their lives

thinking anthropologically

asking the questions:

- why do people do things the way they do?

- what motivates them?

emic perspective

an approach to gathering data that investigates how local people think and how they understand the world: grasping the world according to one's interlocutors' particular points of view

etic perspective

description of local behavior and beliefs from the anthropologist's perspective in ways that can be compared across cultures

subjective vs objective research

subjective experience leads us to focus on particular issues; self-reflexivity toward understanding how who you are impacts you

anthropological method

empiricism, fieldwork, and contextualization

empiricism

philosophical and scientific concept that emphasizes the role of experience, evidence, and observation in the formation of knowledge

fieldwork

research strategy for understanding the world through intense interaction with a local community over an extended period

contextualization

research approach that elucidates the dynamic relationship between phenomena on all scales; connections between phenomena make up complex and often invisible webs of relationships

ethnography

what anthropologists write up after completing their fieldwork; deciding how to tell the stories of the people they study in fieldwork, not just representing facts but also what facts to present, which people and events to highlight, and which stories to tell

thick description

research strategy that combines a detailed description of a cultural activity with an analysis of the layers of deep cultural meaning in which those activities are embedded

perspective

from whose perspective do we understand why people do what they do; emic and etic

ethnocentrism

impulse to use one's own cultural norms to judge another's cultural beliefs and practices

power

the ability to make people think or act in certain ways, through a range of techniques from physical force to persuasion

habitus

self-perceptions, sensibilities, and tastes developed in response to external influences over a lifetime that shape one's conception of the world and where one fits in it

nature vs culture

long standing debate on what factors-such as biology, genes, culture, and language-determine or even predetermine human behavior and potential

making the familiar strange

anthropological perspective on other cultures enables us to perceive our own cultural activities in a new light; even the most familiar practice might seem exotic, bizarre, and strange when seen through the lens of anthropology

social business

how people exercise power during interaction and to how people create identities and values through social discourse

symbolic/interpretative anthropology

culture is primarily a set of ideas of knowledge shared by a group of people that provides a common body of information about how to behave, why to behave that way, and what that behavior means