Untitled Flashcards Set

Study guide 1

1. Anthropology

2. Four field anthropology

   1. Cultural, linguistic, archaeology, and biological anthropology 

3. Cultural anthropology

   1. No culture is either inevitable or natural, but constructed by humans struggling to make meaning in their lives.

4. Thinking anthropologically

   1. Why are some things the way they are and not some other way? Do you think the way things are is natural, inevitable, or necessary?

5. Anthropological method

   1. Empiricism - philosophical and scientific concepts that emphasize the role of experience, evidence, and observation in the formation of knowledge

   2. Fieldwork - research strategy for understanding the world through intense interaction with a local community of people over an extended period

   3. Contextualiation - research approach that elucidates the dynamic relationship between phenomena on all scales, connections between phenomena make up complex and often invisible webs of relationships

6. Ethnography

   1. Research method involving studying people in their own environment 

7. Thick description

   1. Invovles the analysis of human description of social action that describes not just physical behaviors, but their context as interpreted by the actors as well (ex: winking), qualitative

8. Perspective

   1. From whose perspective do we understand why people do what they do?

      1. Emic perspective

         1. An approach to gathering data that investigates how local people think and how they understand the world, grasping the world according to ones interlocutors particular points of view

      2. Etic perspective

         1. Description of local behavior and beliefs from the anthropologists perspectives in ways that can be compared across cultures 

9. Ethnocentrism

   1. the impulse to use our own cultural norms to judge the cultural beliefs and practices of others

10. Power

11. Habitus

    1. 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

12. Nature vs. culture

    1. Long standing debate on what factors - such as biology, genes, culture, and language - determine or even predetermine human behavior and potential

13. Making the familiar strange

    1. Anthropological perspective on other cultures enables us to perceive our own cultural activities in a new light. Even the most familiar practices might seem exotic, bizarre, and strange when seen through the lens of anthropology

14. Social business 

    1. How people exercise power during interactions and to how people create identities and values through social discourse (shapes flow of social discourse, social intention and interpretation, the ends achieved in a social interaction)

15. Symbolic/interpretative

    1. Culture is primarily a set of ideas or knowledge shared by a group of people that provides a common body of information about how to behave, why to behave that way, and what that behavior means 

16. Subjective vs. objective research

    1. Self-reflexivity toward understanding how “who you are” impacts what you think

17. Holism

- Anthropological commitment to look at the whole picture of human life - culture, biology, history, and language - across time and space

Study guide 2

1. Thick description

   1. The study of how we interpret symbols

2. Ethnographic fieldwork

   1. Involves immersion of the researcher in certain cultures, gathering data about lives and cultural attitudes

3. Positionally

   1. Methodology requiring researchers to factor in race, class, education, gender, ability, income, and how they influence their studies and the 

4. Reflexivity 

   1. 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

5. Armchair anthropology

   1. Early anthropologists developed their theories of the human condition based on written accounts and opinions of others, with no direct contact with the people they wrote about. Objective voice from nowhere

6. Salvage anthropology

   1. 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

7. Experimental ethnography

   1. An approach to studying and interpreting the cultures of everyday life that uses techniques such as experimental filmmaking to create new ways of seeing the world around us

8. intersectionality

   1. An analytic framework developed by legal scholar Kimberly Crenshaw for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification 

9. Culture

   1. Learned and taught, shared yet contested, symbolic and material

      1. Norms - ideas or rules about how people should behave in particular situations or toward certain other people

      2. Values - fundamental beliefs about what is important, what makes a good life, and what is true, right, and beautiful

10. Social darwinism/cultural evolution

    1. The theory proposed by nineteenth century anthropologists that all cultures naturally evolve through the same sequence of stages from simple to complex 

11. Race

    1. A framework of categories created by Western Europeans to divide the human population. A flawed system of classification, with no biological basis, that uses certain physical characteristics to divide the human population into supposedly discrete groups

12. colonialism

    1. Practice by which a nation state extends political, economic, and military power beyond its own borders over an extended period of time to secure access to raw materials, cheap labor, and markets in other countries or regions

13. racism

    1. People’s thoughts and actions and institutions patterns and policies that create or reproduce unequal access to power, privilege, resources, and opportunities based on imaged differences among groups

14. cultural relativism

    1. The idea that a persons beliefs, values, and practices  should be understood based on their own culture and not judged against the standards of another culture, analyzing a culture through its own lens rather than judging it based on your own cultural norms

15. Polyvocality

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

16. 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 

Study guide 3

1. Kinship

   1. The system of meaning and power that cultures create to determine who is related to whom and to define their mutual expectations, rights, and responsibilities 

2. nuclear family

   1. The kinship unit of mother, father, and children

3. multispecies ethnography

   1. Ethnographic research that considers the interactions of all species living on the planet in order to provide a more than human perspective on the world

4. relatedness

   1. Captures a more nebulous form of connection that don’t fit into the standard idea of kinship. Kinships is not a natural term, but one that comes from a particular history tied to ideas of blood and biology

5. feminist anthropology critiques of bloodline

   1. The blood that holds people together is a highly condescend and invested metaphor for social regulations governing inheritance and property relations. What accounts for natural and cultural is at the service of broader form sof power

6. Stratification

   1. The uneven distribution of resources and privileges among members of a group or culture

7. Egalitarian society

   1. A group based on the sharing of resources to ensure success with a relative absence of hierarchy and violence

8. Ranked societies

   1. A group in which wealth is not stratified but prestige and status are

9. Class based societies

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

10. social reproduction

    1. The phenomenon whereby social and class relations of prestige or lack of prestige are passed from one generation to the next

11. Cultural capital

    1. The knowledge, habits, and tastes learned from parents and family that individuals can use to gain access to scarce and valuable resources in society

12. Disability rights movement 

- the political intervention: the problem is not with disabled people, the problem is with society that discriminates against disabled people. Disability as an institutionalized source of oppression, comparable to inequalities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation.

13. Politics

- Refers to a diverse range of social practices through which people negotiate power relations. Involved both the production and exercise of social relationships and the cultural construction of social meaning that support or undermine those relationships  

Readings 

• Miners, Body ritual among the nacirema

  • Describes American cultural practices as if they belong to an exotic tribe. Miner critiques how anthropologists describe other cultures by applying the same detached language to American customs

• Bohannan, shakespeare in the bush

  • Bohannan describes how she attempts to explain Hamlet to the Tiv of West Africa. Expects Shakespear’es themes to be universal but finds that they interpret the story through their own cultural lens, questioning European assumptions about universal truths in literature. Highlights cultural relativism and the impact of social context on meaning 

• Geertz, deep play - notes on the balinese cockfight

  • Analyzes the Balinese cockfight as a symbolic and deeply meaningful social event rather than just gambling or entertainment. Argues that the cockfights reflect status, masculinity, and community identity, demonstrating his interpretive approach to anthropology where culture is a text to be read 

• Hurston, mules and men

  • Collection of African American folklore gathered in the American South. blends storytelling with ethnographic methods, reflecting her unique position as an insider and an academic studying black cultural traditions

• Hurston, location of franz boas with the african american struggle

  • Hurston examines how Boas, the father of American anthropology, contributed to dismantling scientific racism and promoting cultural relativism. Argues his work challenged racist ideas about African Americans, though his impact was complex and limited

• Smedley, Race and the construction of human identity

  • Smedley critiques the social construction or race, arguing it is not a biological reality but a historical and political system made to justify inequalities. Traces the origins of racial categorization and how it has shaped human identity and societal structures

• Abu Laughed, do muslim women really need saving?

  • Challenges Western feminist narratives that depict Muslim women as oppressed victims needing Western interventions. Argues this viewpoint ignores complexities of cultural and religious practices that aims to justify i imperialist policies rather than genuinely supporting  women’s rights

• Govindrajan, the goat who died for family

  • Examines how sacrifice, kinship, and care intersect in rural India. Explores how a family’s relationship with a sacrificial goat blurs the lines between human and non human kin

• Butler, Kinship beyond the bloodline

  • Critiques traditional definitions of kinship based solely on biological ties. Argues that kinship should be understood more broadly, including chosen families and non-normative relationships, challenging assumptions about family structures

• Holens, Chapter 4: how the poor suffer

  • Examines the structural forces that perpetuate poverty and the ways in which marginalized groups experience suffering due to economic and social inequalities. Explores how system issues, rather than individual failings, create and sustain poverty