Cultural anthropology

Affinal: family relationships created through marriage   

Age grades: groups of men who are close to one another in age and share similar duties or responsibilities

Age sets: named categories to which men of a certain age are assigned at birth

Band: the smallest unit of political organization, consisting of only a few families and no formal leadership positions

Big man: a form of temporary or situational leadership; influence results from acquiring followers

Bilateral cross-cousin marriage: a man marries a woman who is both his mother’s brother’s daughter and his father’s sister’s daughter 

Bilateral descent: kinship (family) systems that recognize both the mother’s and the father’s “sides” of the family

Caste system: the division of society into hierarchical levels; one’s position is determined by birth and remains fixed for life

Chiefdom: large political units in which the chief, who usually is determined by heredity, holds a formal position of power

Circumscription: the enclosure of an area by a geographic feature such as mountain ranges or desert or by the boundaries of a state

Codified law: formal legal systems in which damages, crimes, remedies, and punishments are specified

Egalitarian: societies in which there is no great difference in status or power between individuals and there are as many valued status positions in the societies as there are persons able to fill them   

Feuds: disputes of long duration characterized by a state of recurring hostilities between families, lineages, or other kin groups

Ideologies: ideas designed to reinforce the right of powerholders to rule         

Legitimacy: the perception that an individual has a valid right to leadership

Lineage: individuals who can trace or demonstrate their descent through a line of males or females back to a founding ancestor

Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage: a man marries a woman who is his mother’s brother’s daughter          

Matrilineal: kinship (family) systems that recognize only relatives through a line of female ancestors

Nation: an ethnic population

Negative reinforcements: punishments for noncompliance through fines, imprisonment, and death sentences

Oaths: the practice of calling on a deity to bear witness to the truth of what one says            

Ordeal: a test used to determine guilt or innocence by submitting the accused to dangerous, painful, or risky tests believed to be controlled by supernatural forces

Patrilineal: kinship (family) systems that recognize only relatives through a line of male ancestors

Peasants: residents of a state who earn a living through farming     

Poro and sande: secret societies for men and women, respectively, found in the Mande-speaking peoples of West Africa, particularly in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, and Guinea       

Positive reinforcements: rewards for compliance; examples include medals, financial incentives, and other forms of public recognition  

Proletarianization: a process through which farmers are removed from the land and forced to take wage labor employment  

Raids: short-term uses of physical force organized and planned to achieve a limited objective 

Ranked: societies in which there are substantial differences in the wealth and social status of individuals; there are a limited number of positions of power or status, and only a few can occupy them           

Restricted exchange: a marriage system in which only two extended families can engage in this exchange

Reverse dominance: societies in which people reject attempts by any individual to exercise power           

Segmentary lineage: a hierarchy of lineages that contains both close and relatively distant family members

Social classes: the division of society into groups based on wealth and status

Sodality: a system used to encourage solidarity or feelings of connectedness between people who are not related by family ties

State: the most complex form of political organization characterized by a central government that has a monopoly over legitimate uses of physical force, a sizeable bureaucracy, a system of formal laws, and a standing military force  

Stratified: societies in which there are large differences in the wealth, status, and power of individual based on unequal access to resources and positions of power

Sumptuary rules: norms that permit persons of higher rank to enjoy greater social status by wearing  distinctive clothing, jewelry, and/or decorations denied those of lower rank           

Tribe: political units organized around family ties that have fluid or shifting systems of temporary leadership

Unilineal descent: kinship (family) systems that recognize only one sex-based “side” of the family

Arbitrariness: the relationship between a symbol and its referent (meaning), in which there is no obvious connection between them

Bound morpheme: a unit of meaning that cannot stand alone; it must be attached to another morpheme

Closed system: a form of communication that cannot create new meanings or messages; it can only convey pre-programmed (innate) messages

Code-switching: using two or more language varieties in a particular interaction

Creole: a language that develops from a pidgin when the pidgin becomes so widely used that children acquire it as one of their first languages. Creoles are more fully complex than creoles

Critical age range hypothesis: research suggesting that a child will gradually lose the ability to acquire language naturally and without effort if he or she is not exposed to other people speaking a language until past the age of puberty. This applies to the acquisition of a second language as well

Pragmatics: how social context contributes to meaning in an interaction

Productivity/creativity: the ability to produce and understand messages that have never been expressed before

Proxemics: the study of the social use of space, including the amount of space an individual tries to maintain around himself in his interactions with others

Register: a style of speech that varies depending on who is speaking to whom and in what context

Semanticity: the meaning of signs in a communication system; a feature of all species’ communication systems

Semantics: how meaning is conveyed at the word and phrase level

Speech act: the intention or goal of an utterance; the intention may be different from the dictionary definitions of the words involved

Standard: the variant of any language that has been given special prestige in the community

Symbol: anything that serves to refer to something else

Syntax: the rules by which a language combines morphemes into larger units

Taxonomies: a system of classification

Universal grammar (UG): a theory developed by linguist Noam Chomsky suggesting that a basic template for all human languages is embedded in our genes

Unbound morpheme: a morpheme that can stand alone as a separate word

Vernaculars: non-standard varieties of a language, which are usually distinguished from the standard by their inclusion of stigmatized forms

Cultural transmission: the need for some aspects of the system to be learned; a feature of some species communication systems

Design features: descriptive characteristics of the communication systems of all species, including that of humans, proposed by linguist Charles Hockett to serve as a definition of human language

Dialect: a variety of speech. The term is often applied to a subordinate variety of a language. Speakers of two dialects of the same language do not necessarily always understand each other

Discreteness: a feature of human speech that they can be isolated from others

Displacement: the ability to communicate about things that are outside of the here and now

Duality of patterning: at the first level of patterning, meaningless discrete sounds of speech are combined to form words and parts of words that carry meaning. In the second level of patterning, those

units of meaning are recombined to form an infinite possible number of longer messages such as phrases and sentences

Gesture-call system: a system of non-verbal communication using varying combinations of sound body language, scent, facial expression, and touch, typical of great apes and other primates, as well as humans

Historical linguistics: the study of how languages change

Interchangeability: the ability of all individuals of the species to both send and receive messages; a feature of some species’ communication systems

Kinesics: the study of all forms of human body language

Language: an idealized form of speech, usually referred to as the standard variety

Language death: the total extinction of a language

Language shift: when a community stops using their old language and adopts a new one

Language universals: characteristics shared by all linguists

Larynx: the voice box, containing the vocal bands that produce the voice

Lexicon: the vocabulary of a language

Linguistic relativity: the idea that the structures and words of a language influence how its speakers think, how they behave, and ultimately the culture itself (also known as the Whorf hypothesis)

Middle English: the form of the English language spoken from 1066 AD until about 1500 AD

Minimal response: the vocal indications that one is listening to a speaker

Modern English: the form of the English language spoken from about 1500 AD to the present

Morphemes: the basic meaningful units in a language

Morphology: the study of the morphemes of language

Old English: English language from its beginnings to about 1066 AD

Open system: a form of communication that can create an infinite number of new messages; a feature of human language only

Oralist approach: an approach to the education of deaf children that emphasizes lip reading and speaking orally while discouraging use of signed language

Palate: the roof of the mouth

Paralanguage: those characteristics of speech beyond the actual words spoken, such as pitch, loudness tempo

Pharynx: the throat cavity, located above the larynx

Phonemes: the basic meaningless sounds of a language

Phonology: the study of the sounds of language

Pidgin: a simplified language that springs up out of a situation in which people who do not share a language must spend extended amounts of time together

Pragmatic function: the useful purpose of a communication. Usefulness is a feature of all species’ communication system