ANTH203: Week 2 Culture Theory History

Vocabulary flashcards focusing on key figures, theories, and historical milestones in anthropology from the lecture.

Great Chain of Being

A 2,300-year-old hierarchical philosophy originating in 350 BC lasting through the late 19th century, asserting that God created a permanent, unchangeable hierarchy with man having dominion at the top over animals and plants.

Thomas Hobbes

A 17th-century philosopher who wrote in 1651 that without state political harmony, laws, and a legal system, humans live in constant fear and danger of violent death because primitive life is nasty, brutish, and short.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

An 18th-century philosopher who coined the term 'noble savage,' idealizing primitive life as living like innocent children in paradise in harmony with nature.

Charles Lyell

A Scottish geologist considered the grandfather of geology who published findings in 1830 showing that rock strata contain different fossils and extinctions, challenging the Great Chain's core concept of permanence.

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection

The 1859 book by Charles Darwin that introduced the theory of evolution by natural selection and transformed science, religion, and philosophy.

Variation

The first condition required for natural selection, stating that individuals within a population have different physical or mental traits, known in genetics as phenotypes.

Genetic Heritability

The second condition required for natural selection, specifying that variations in traits must be inherited biologically from parents rather than acquired through learning.

Differential Reproductive Success

The third condition required for natural selection, defined as competition resulting in some individuals with better-adapted traits surviving and reproducing more offspring than others.

Manchester Peppered Moth

An English moth species used as an example of natural selection, where soot during the Industrial Revolution favored dark moths over light ones on tree trunks until Clean Air legislation in the 1950s reversed the trend.

Fitness

The scientific measure of an individual's ability to survive and leave surviving descendants in future generations.

Evolution

A change in gene frequency over time, resulting from natural selection through differential fitness.

Herbert Spencer

A contemporary of Darwin who coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest,' which was biologically meant as having the most surviving offspring but was misinterpreted by Victorians as meaning the 'best' people.

Social Darwinism

A mid-to-late 19th-century compromise combining Great Chain hierarchical thinking with natural selection, falsely believing Western societies are culturally superior or more highly evolved than primitive societies.

Lewis Henry Morgan

A lawyer and scholar who proposed unilineal evolution in 1877 after doing legal work for the Seneca tribe and identifying shared kinship patterns between Native Americans and ancient Greeks and Romans.

Unilineal Evolution

The 19th-century theory proposed by Lewis Henry Morgan claiming that all human societies pass through necessary sequential stages of development: savagery, barbarism, and civilization.

Savagery

The initial stage in Lewis Henry Morgan's unilineal evolutionary scheme, defined as societies relying on wild foods without plant or animal domestication.

Barbarism

The middle stage in Lewis Henry Morgan's unilineal evolutionary scheme, characterized by plant and animal domestication, pottery invention (~10,000 years ago), and metal or iron use.

Civilization

The highest stage in Lewis Henry Morgan's unilineal evolutionary scheme, characterized by plant and animal domestication, large governments, taxation, cities, and written language.

Boaz

A German-born American scholar widely recognized as the father of modern anthropology, known for developing historical particularism, cultural relativism, and salvage ethnography.

Historical Particularism

The theory that each culture is an outgrowth of its unique past and environment, developing specific technologies and solutions based on its specific history and available knowledge base.

Cultural Relativism

The fundamental anthropological principle stating that cultural values and standards should be evaluated relative to their own unique culture and environment rather than judged by external cultural standards.

Ethnocentrism

The belief that one's own culture is central or superior, leading individuals to apply their own cultural values to judge people from other cultures.

Salvage Ethnography

The practice of documenting and recording as much as possible about traditional cultural ways before that knowledge is lost due to rapid change or forced migration.

NewAir

A pastoralist group in South Sudan whose survival strategies in a desert environment—including utilizing cattle milk, dry cow dung ash for fires and dental hygiene, and cow urine—exemplify cultural relativism.

Krenstell Malinowski

A Polish anthropologist who set higher standards for ethnographic fieldwork and developed the theory of functionalism while living among the Trobriand Islanders from 1915 to 1918.

Etic Perspective

The objective, outsider view of a culture observed by an external investigator.

Emic Perspective

The insider view of a culture, explaining how members of that culture understand and give meaning to their own actions.

Functionalism

The anthropological theory asserting that cultural traits, customs, and institutions exist to help members of a society meet basic survival and reproduction needs.

Kula Ring

A ceremonial trade network among Trobriand Islanders involving clockwise trading of red shell necklaces and counterclockwise trading of armbands, which served the vital underlying function of maintaining inter-island alliances, food trade, and mating pools.

Margaret Mead

A prominent student of Boaz and collaborator with Ruth Benedict who became the best-known anthropologist of all time.