Key Concept Prep

Cultural Relativism vs. Ethnocentrism

Understanding cultural practices on their own terms vs maintaining that one's own culture is the standard by which other cultures may be measured.

Unilinear Cultural Evolutionism

A nineteenth-century theory that proposed a series of stages through which all societies must go (or had gone) in order to reach civilization.

Culture

What is learned, shared, contested and changing within a society?

Historical Particularism

Study each culture on its own terms and history to understand its development.

Symbolic Anthropology

the study of symbols in their social and cultural context

Ethnographic Method

A primary research strategy used in cultural anthropology which involves thick description and participant observation.

Participant Observation (fieldwork)

A research methodology where the researcher is immersed in the day-to-day activities of the participants.

Methodic Sincerity

When the ethnographer does the work of traversing the distance between his fieldnotes of daily life observations and his analysis.

Imponderabilia of Actual Life

Repeated, usually automatic actions or interactions carried out by individuals in a society in everyday life.

Emic Perspective

the perspective of the insider, the one belonging to the cultural group in question

Etic Perspective

the perspective of the outside observer

Holistic Discipline

The study of the full scope of human diversity, past and present

Ecological Time & Space

Time and space that is experienced or defined or accounted for in relation to nature

Structural Time & Space

Time & space that is experienced or reckoned with in relation to other people, and relationships.

Kinship

A system of meaning and power to designate who is related to whom; and to define mutual expectations, rights and responsibilities

Structural Functionalism

a conceptual framework positing that each element of society serves a particular function to keep the entire system in equilibrium

Gender Ideology

a set of cultural ideas, usually stereotypical, about the essential character of different genders

Intersex

Those who cannot be assigned male or female sex at birth either due to physical or chromosomal characteristics

Gender Performance

The ways in which gender identities are expressed.

Positionality

The social and political context that creates
your identity in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability.

Thick Description

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

Cieng

Means "home", but what is considered to be "home" varies by structural distance and social context

Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser)

Ideological part of the superstructure that rules by consent like religion, family, education, culture

Consanguinity vs. Affinity

kinship/relationship by birth vs. by marriage/law

Zviaz

A Chernobyl-related receive document which qualifies holders for compensation from the state

Patrilineal vs. Matrilineal

Lineage through the father vs Lineage through the mother

Malume

maternal uncle

Lifeboat Ethics

Morality gets shaped in accordance with economic constraints and possibilities

shudan seikatsu

Japanese term for 'group living'

Uchi/Soto

Japanese cultural categories for outside, unfamiliar vs inside, comfortable

Biological Citizenship

"The complex bureaucratic process by which a population attempts to secure a state as harmfully exposed and deserving of compensation" (who said this?)

Somatization of fear

the physical (or body) expression of stress and emotions through the mind-body connection.

"No Taste for Life"

"Learning when to let go of a child who shows that it 'wants' to die or that it has no..." (who said this?)

space-time compression

Ways in which in our globalized world, spaces seem to have extremely shrunk and also expanded at the same time

Ethnographic presence, methodic sincerity, emic perspective, the imponderabilia of actual life

Malinowski's principles of ethnographic fieldwork

Calalai

A person in Bugis society who is assigned female at birth but takes on the role of a heterosexual male

Calabai

A person in Bugis society who is assigned male at birth but takes on the role of a heterosexual female

Bissu

Ritual identity that is neither male nor female among the Bugis