Anthropology Midterm

Social business: how people exercise power during interactions and how people create
idenfies and values through social discourse

Symbolic/interpretive anthropology: Culture is primarily a set of ideas or knowledge
shared by a group of people that provides a shared body of informaFon about how to
behave, why behave that way, and what that behavior means

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

Empiricism: Philosophical and scientific concept that emphasizes the role of
experience, evidence, and observation in the formation of knowledge

Fieldwork: A research strategy for understanding the world through intense
interaction with a local community of people 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

Positionality: a methodology that requires researchers to identify how factors of race, class,
educational attainment, income, ability, gender, and citizenship, among others, intersect to
influence what they study, what kind of data they can access, what conclusions they come to,
and how they represent themselves and others.

Reflexivity: a continual internal dialogue and critical self-evaluation of a researcher’s
positionality as well as active acknowledgment and explicit recognition that this position may
affect the research process and outcome

Armchair Anthropology: Early anthropologist developed their theories of the human
condition based on written accounts and opinions of others, having no direct contact with
the people they wrote about.

Salvage Anthropology: Fieldwork strategy developed by Franz Boas to collect cultural,
material, linguistic, and biological information about Indigenous populations being
devastated by western expansion of European settlers

Experimental Ethnography: anthropological writing that blurs the boundaries between
genres, disciples, and theoretical positions.

Intersectionality: An analytic framework developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw
(1989) for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual
life chances and societal patterns of stratification

Polyvocality: The practice of using many different voices in ethnographic writing and
research question development, allowing the reader to hear more directly from the people in
the study

Cultural Relativism: Understanding a group’s beliefs and practices within their own cultural
context without making judgments

Multispecies ethnography: Ethnographic research that considers the interactions of all
species living on the planet to provide a more-than-human perspective on the world.

Relatedness: A concept developed by Janet Carsten that captures more nebulous forms of
connection that don’t fit into the standard idea of kinship and allows one to explore
different kinds of connection, such as how human and non-human lives get tied up with
one another.

Feminist anthropology critiques of “bloodline”: the blood that supposedly holds people
together as kin is a highly condensed and invested metaphor for social regulations
governing inheritance and property relations. Kinship is not a discrete domain of sociality
but is deeply rooted in other structures of power.

Stratification: The uneven distribution of resources and privileges among members of a
group or culture

Egalitarian society: a group based on the sharing of resources to ensure success with a
relative absence of hierarchy and violence.

Ranked societies: a group in which wealth is not stratified but prestige and status are.

Class-based societies: A system of power based on wealth, income, and status that creates
an unequal distribution of society’s resources, often maintained through violence
(symbolic, structural, and/or direct).

Social reproduction: the phenomenon whereby social and class relations of prestige or
lack of prestige are passed from one generation to the next.

Cultural capital: the knowledge, habits, and tastes learned from parents and family that
individuals can use to gain access to scarce and valuable resources in society.

Franz Boas: Founder of four-field anthropology; anti-racist in his theories, believed nurture was stronger than nature

Disability rights movement: activists argued that it is not an individual’s actual
‘impairments’ which construct disability as a subordinate social status and devalued life
experience but socially imposed barriers.

Models of Disability: The social model of disability argues that people are disabled by the
barriers that society puts up for them, while the medical model of disability argues that
people are disabled by medical conditions.

Medical anthropology: A branch of cultural anthropology that uses a variety of analytical
perspectives to examine the wide range of experiences and practices that humans associate
with disease, illness, health, well-being, and the body—both today and in the past.

Medical ecology: the interaction of disease with the natural environment and human
culture.

Interpretivist approach in medical anthropology: the study of health systems as system
of meaning: It asks: How do humans across cultures make sense of health and illness? How
do we think, talk, and feel about illness, pain, suffering, birth, and morality?

Critical medical anthropology: explores the impact of inequality on human health,
considering (1) how economic and political systems, race, class, gender, and sexuality create
and perpetuate unequal access to health care, and (2) how health systems are systems of
power that promote health disparities by defining who is sick, who gets treated, and how
treatment is provided.

Interactive vs. Indifferent kinds: Interactive kinds are classifications that, when known by
people or by those around them, change the ways in which individuals experience
themselves; indifferent kinds are classifications that do not affect what they classify.

Idioms of distress: patient’s description of mental distress, which directs attention to
socially and culturally mediated ways of experiencing and expressing distress

Anthropology of Mental Distress: medical anthropologists try to use neutral language,
such as “experience”, “distress”, “social suffering”, “interiority” and try to avoid “disease”,
“pathology”, “disorder”—some anthropologists even avoid the term “illness” itself

Validity: “A given classification that possesses intrinsic unity: it is neither a random
phenomenon nor an artifact of the techniques through which it is detected, treated,
experienced, and studied; “intrinsic unity” is what anchors any classification’s “portability”
across contexts

The “South Asia Puzzle” of Mental Health: There are higher proportions of people with
mental illness in India—and possibly in non-Western countries more generally—than there
are in US and the West. Yet more people seem to recover spontaneously and more people
who never quite recover hold down jobs and care for families more effectively.

Language and Culture: The study of language as social action and a cultural resource
people use where language is understood as doing something in the world, instead of just
reflecting a pre-existing world (i.e., presupposes and entails context).

Taboo language: A form of language that is both universal and very culturally and
contextually specific, encoding or reflecting social relationships, marking identity, or serving
specific sociocultural functions

Language ideologies: attitudes, opinions, beliefs, or theories that we all have about
language, which people are often unaware of them.

Indexicality: meaning and effect of language closely bound to context; meaning produced
through contiguity or causality

Practice: structures (both linguistic and social) that simultaneously constrain and give rise to
human actions, which in turn create, recreate, or reconfigure those same structures – and so
on, with structures and actions successively giving rise to one another.

Habitus: Self-perceptions, sensibilities, and tastes develop in response to external influences
over a lifetime that shape one’s conception of the world and where one fits into it.

Multifunctionality: all the different kinds of work that language does, including the
expressive, conative, referential, poetic, phatic, and metalinguistic function.

Linguistic Relativity: a perspective on the relationship between language and thought that
posits language requires/obligates speakers to pay attention to certain things about the world
but ignore other things, which in turn, shapes the ways speakers think and act.

Speech Community: any human aggregate characterized by regular or frequent interaction
by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregate by significant
differences in language use.

Biomedical body: the notion that the body is an isolated, natural and universal object

Bodily autonomy: has received significant attention in bioethics, medical ethics, and
medical law in terms of the general sanctity of a patient’s bodily sovereignty and the rights of
patients to make choices (e.g., reproductive choices) that concern their own body

Obstetric violence: harm inflicted during or in relation to pregnancy, childbearing, and the
post-partum period. Such violence can be both interpersonal and structural, arising from the
actions of health-care providers and also from broader political and economic arrangements
that disproportionately harm marginalized populations. By focusing on obstetric violence,
we center the long and enduring history of biological reproduction as a site of social
violence.

Humanization: an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of approaches to childbirth,
tied together by an overall emphasis on centering women’s autonomy in their birth choices,
valorizing the natural and physiological over the technological, and promoting respectful
birth care

Language Socialization: The process of acquiring language and the process of acquiring
sociocultural knowledge are intimately tied

Triangle trade: The extensive exchange of enslaved people, sugar, cotton, and furs between
Europe, Africa, and the Americas that transformed economic, political, and social life in
both sides of the Atlantic

Commodification: the process of transforming inalienable, free, or gifted things (objects,
services, ideas, nature, personal information, people or animals) into commodities, or objects
for sale

Self-devouring growth: the ways that the super-organism of human beings is consuming
itself...Wherever you sit reading this you are in a world organized by self-devouring growth.
It is so fundamental as to be unremarkable, and yet it is eating away at the very ground
beneath our feet