Anthro Exam Flashcards
What is anthropology?
A search for what it means to be human and a documentation of human life and possibility
What is sociocultural anthropology?
The study of cultures and societies of human beings and their recent past.
What methods do anthropologists use?
Ethnography-Observing people by interacting with them intimatley over a long period of time
Culture Definition
-Socially transmitted knowledge and behaviour shared by a group of people.
-Immersion of researchers in the lives and cultures of the people they are trying to understand in order to comprehend the meanings these people ascribe to their existence.
Key points about culture
-Critical mass: Other’s have to know what we’re doing
-Common culture identity: Something has to be common
-Integrated into daily experience: something we do daily, holidays normally mock these practices
-Dynamic and contingent: depends on specific social context, circumstances arise and culture shifts
-Uses symbols
Five key components
Norms: Shared ideals of how people should behave
Values:Beliefs about what is desirable for ourselves and society
Collective Understandings:Unconscious ways of interpreting behaviour, have to have collective understanding to have culture
Classification of Reality: we divide the world into categories, whatever doesn’t fall into the category causes pause
World views: How we perceive reality
Ethnocentrism
Measure others relative to our own values
Cultural Relativism
Not judging a culture to our own standards of what is right or wrong
Kinship
Social system that organizes people in families based on descent and marriage
Ervin Goffman
We display a series of masks, trying to set ourselves in the best light, we adapt depending on who is around us
Descent
All relationships by blood
Clan
Group of relatives who claim to descend from a single relative, could be an entity
Lineage
Ancestry through an ancestor
Polyandry
A marriage in which one woman has multiple husbands
Polygyny
A marriage in which a man has multiple wives
Compassionate marriage
Romantic love marriages
Arranged marriage
Parents pick very specific partners
Social Scripts
We have social roles that guide our behaviour, a social script is what we say in these roles
Intersectionality
The multiple dimensions of our identity intersecting to affect our experiences and opportunities
Race
Categorization based on human physical or social qualities
Ethnicity
collective identity on shared descent, usually relating to common regional or national origin
Nationalism
Shared heritage and experience on the basis of state
Anthropology and the economy
-focuses on how symbols and morals help shape a community’s economy
-Approaches economy as a category of culture
Pastoralism
Raising animals
Horticulture
raising plants
Agriculture
Intensified horticulture
Industrialized agriculture
mass production of food stuffs
Social organization in relation to production
Band-foraging
tribe-horticulture, pastoralism
Chiefdom-intensive horticulture, pastoral nomadism, agriculture
State-Agriculture, Industrialism
Production
How does how we make stuff relate to our social organizations and identity
Exchange
Transfer of something that may be material or immaterial between at least two persons, groups, or instituitions
Generalized Reciprocity
Reciprocity in which gifts are given without the expectation of return
Balanced Reciprocity
A form of reciprocity in which the giver expects a fair return
Negative reciprocity
The giver attempts to get something for nothing (haggle ones way into a favourable outcome)
Redistributions
Collection of goods by a central authority
Commodities
Something produced for the purpose of exchanging for something else
Gift
“It’s the thought that counts”
Appropriation
The process of taking possession of an object, idea, or relationship
e.g. Buying an iPhone-one must have a certain amount of money, reveals socioeconomic status
4 characteristics of globalization
Time-space compression-makes relative distances between places shorter
Global communication
Flexible accumulation-Flexible strategies that companies use to shift resources wherever it costs less
Increasing migration
Medical anthropology
draws upon social, cultural, biological and linguistic anthropology to to better understand the factors that affect health and well-being
Illness
Psychological and social experience a patient has
Disease
Purely physiological condition of being sick, determined by a physician
Medical pluralism
Coexistence of medical practices with different cultural roots in one community
Culture bound syndrome
A combination of symptoms that are considered to be recognizable disease only within a specific culture
Sick Role
What culture dictates we do when sick
Biomedicine
Illness is mainly caused by deviations from biological norms
Somatization
Body expressing itself, how the body experiences itself
Medicalization
When condition becomes categorized
Structural Violence
Social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harms way, structural because they are embedded in the political and economic social world
Linguistic anthropology
The study of human languages within the context of the culture that formed it
Types of language change
How language changes
-a culture’s changing values
-process of linguistic replication is imperfect
-how language is learned changes
Dialects
A variety of language, often the subordinate one
Register
A style of speech that depends on who is speaking to who and the context
How language and culture intersect
Language is used to transmit culture
Arbitrariness
The meaning of a symbol cannot b e guessed because there is no obvious connection between the referent and symbol
Linguistic relativity
Structures and words of language influence how a speaker thinks, behaves and ultimately culture
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
The language one speaks influences how they think about reality
Interchangeability
Ability of all individuals of a species to send and receive messages
Discreteness
Humans can isolate others speech
Duality of Patterning
- Discrete sounds put together to form words that have meaning
- Morphemes combined to create longer a message
Displacement
Ability to communicate about things outside of the here and now
Productivity/creativity
Ability to produce and understand messages that have never been expressed before or to express new ideas
Ambiguity
Speech is open to multiple interpretations
Variety
Ability to arrange words into an infinite number of ideas
Kinesics
Body language, non-verbal behaviour, facial expressions, posture etc.
Proxemics
The study of the social use of space, the space an individual tries to maintain around themselves when interacting with others
Paralanguage
Characteristics of speech beyond the words spoken (pitch, temp, loudness, duration)
Linguistic Competence
Knowing a language and knowing its grammar and having the social knowledge to know how to use the language competently
Linguistic Performance
Function of actually producing a language
Lexicon
Vocabulary of a language
Phoneme
Basic meaningless sounds of words
Morpheme
Basic meaningful units of language
Syntax
Rules by which languages join morphemes to make a larger units
Semantics
The study of meaning
Pragmatics
The social and cultural aspects of meaning and how the context of an interaction affects it
Presupposition
Assumption about the world or background belief relating to a statement whose truth is taken for granted
Speech Act Theory
Considers language as an action, people use language to do things in addition to asserting things
Constative
Conveys message, can be compared to the real world to determine wether its true or false
Performative
Denote an action, it acts upon the world rather than. conveying a message
Grice’s Cooperative Principle
Describes how people achieve effective conversational communication in common social situations, How listeners and speakers act cooperatively to understand each other
Maxim of quality
As speaker we have to tell the truth or something that is provable by evidence
Maxim of quantity
We have to e as informative as required
Maxim of relation
Our response has to be relevant to the discussion
Maxim of manner
We should avoid ambiguity, we must be straightforward
Code-switching
The ability to change from one register to another guided by context
Indexicality
A particular aspect of speech is selected as meaningful, a certain meaning is associated with that aspect, positive and negative values are attributed to the members of the group
Heteroglossia
A language has multiple voices and varieties, we each have ways of conceptualizing categorizing and evaluating our world and this reflected language
Intertextuality
Quoting, reworking part of recognizable text
Transgressive speech
Disrupting social norms and creating new indexical associations or violating rules of what is appropriate
Language ideologies
Beliefs and attitudes that shape a speakers relationships the their own and others language
Standard language
A variety that is codified and widely accepted as the most suitable for writing and speech
Linguistic prejudice
Discrimination against people that speak English with non-standard accent or grammar
Raciolinguistics
Studies the complex role that language ideologies play in the production of racial difference and the role of radicalization in linguistic difference
Language acquisition
the natural and subconscious way that children acquire (or learn to speak) their first language
Language capital
Value of linguistic capabilities used in linguistic market
Language market
Built on economic relations within which certain lingual capabilities have a higher currency than others
Language diversity
Number of distinct languages being spoken around the world
Language endangerment
Language likely to go extinct
Language ideologies surrounding multilingualism
indexical framing,
entextualization,
stylistic shifts
speech acts.
Intersection between language and identity
Language symbolizes identities and signals identities, people belong to many social groups and have many social identities
Language revitalization
Language planning
Intended to promote a systemic change among a community of a language speaker, e.g regulating and improving an existing language, creating a new language.
