Montclair State University

Cultural Anthropology 100 – Handout 1

What is Anthropology: The study of the full scope of human diversity, past and present, and the application of that knowledge to help people of different backgrounds better understand one another.

What is ethnographic fieldwork: A primary research strategy in cultural anthropology involving living with a community of people over an extended period to better understand their lives.

Four-field approach:

Physical anthropology: The study of humans from a biological perspective, particularly focused on human evolution.

Archaeology: The investigation of the human past using excavating and analyzing artifacts.

Linguistic anthropology: The study of human language in the past and present.

Cultural anthropology: The study of people’s communities, behaviors, beliefs, and institutions, including how people make meaning as they live, work, and play together.

What is Paleoanthropology: The study of the history of human evolution through the fossil record.

What is culture: A system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, and shared by a group of people. Culture has norms, values, and symbols; and it is learned and shared.

What is globalization: The worldwide intensification of interactions and increased movement of money, people, goods, and ideas within and across national borders. Increasing migration, uneven development, rapid change, and flexible accumulation are some of its key characteristics.

What is hegemony: The ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement within a population without the use or threat of force.

What is cultural relativism: Understanding a group’s beliefs and practices within their cultural context, without making judgments.

Who are Some famous, pioneers, and important anthropologists: Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, E. E. Evans, Margaret Mead, Annette Weiner, and Barbara Myerhoff.

What is emic: Involves an approach to gathering data that investigates how local people think and how they understand the world.

What is etic: Involves description of local behavior and beliefs from the anthropologist’s perspective in ways that can be compared across cultures.

What is language: A system of communication organized by rules that uses symbols such as words, sounds, and gestures to convey information.

What are phonemes: The smallest units of sound that can make a difference in meaning. The study of them is called phonology.

What are morphemes: The smallest units of sound that carry meaning on their own. The study of them is called morphology.

What is focal vocabulary: The words and terminology that develop with particular sophistication to describe the unique cultural realities experienced by a group of people. The more important the object/idea is, the more words are available to address it.

What is dialect: A nonstandard variation of a language and every language has dialect(s).

What is prestige language: A particular way of speaking, or language variation that is associated with wealth, success, education, and power.

What is code-switching: Switching back and forth between one linguistic variant and another depending on the cultural context.

What is the effect of globalization on languages: Many languages that have fewer speakers are dying and a few languages that have a lot of speakers along with the economic and political power are growing.

Do men and women use the same language differently? Yes.

What is race: A flawed system of classification, with no biological basis, that uses certain physical characteristics to divide the human population into supposedly separate groups.

What is racism: Individual thoughts and actions and institutional patterns and policies that create unequal access to power, privilege, resources, and opportunities based on imagined differences among groups.

What is white supremacy: The belief that whites are biologically different from and superior to people of other races.

What is hypodescent: Sometimes called the “one drop of blood rule”; the assignment of children of racially “mixed” unions to the subordinate group.

What is nativism: The favoring of certain long-term inhabitants over new immigrants.

What is ethnicity: A sense of historical, cultural, and sometimes ancestral connection to a group of people who are imagined to be distinct from those outside the group.

What is an ethnic boundary marker: A practice or belief, such as food, clothing, language, shared name, or religion, used to signify who is in a group and who is not.

What is genocide: The deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic or religious group.

What is ethnic cleansing: Efforts by representatives of one ethnic or religious group to remove or destroy another group in a particular geographic area.

What is assimilation: The process through which minorities accept the patterns and norms of the dominant culture and cease to exist as separate groups.

What is a nation-state: A political entity, located within a geographic territory with enforced borders, where the population shares a sense of culture, ancestry, and destiny as a people.

What is nation: A term once used to describe a group of people who shared a place of origin; now used interchangeably with nation-state.

What is nationalism: The desire of an ethnic community to create and /or maintain a nation-state.

What is an origin myth: A story told about the founding and history of a particular group to reinforce a sense of common identity.