Anthropology and Sociology Flashcards
It is the social science which studies man and his culture.
Anthropology
A Greek word that means ‘man’
anthropos
A Greek word that means ‘study’
logia
Sub-disciplines of Anthropology
Cultural/Social and Biological/Physical
A sub-discipline of anthropology that concerns the cultural aspects of man.
Cultural/Social
A sub-discipline of anthropology that studies the biological features of man, including physiology and skeletal anatomy.
Biological/Physical
A branch of anthropology that studies the human origin through material remains.
Archaeology
A branch of anthropology that studies how language influences the social life of those that developed it.
Linguistics
A branch of anthropology that studies cultural variation.
Ethnography and Ethnology
A branch of anthropology that studies the production of material goods and services of human societies.
Economic Anthropology
A branch of anthropology that is concerned about the comparative study of politics in historical, social, and cultural settings.
Political Anthropology
A branch of anthropology that examines human skeletal remains.
Forensic Anthropology
The social science that deals with the study of man as a member of society.
Sociology
A Greek word that means ‘group’
socius
An area of sociology that refers to a pattern of relationships between and among different groups and individual people.
Social Organization
An area of sociology that refers to any alteration in how a society is organized.
Social Change and Disorganization
An area of sociology that studies the nature and behavior of a given population and its interaction with the surrounding environment.
Human Ecology or Sociobiology
An area of sociology that is concerned with the study of population number, composition, change, and quality of how these factors influence the larger systems.
Population Education or Demography
An area of sociology that emphasizes the relationship between individual people and the larger social structures and processes in which they participate.
Social Psychology
An area of sociology that is concerned with using sociological problems to solve social problems.
Applied Sociology
He is a French Philosopher known as the “father of sociology” and the first to use the term “sociology” to refer to the scientific study of society.
Auguste Comte
He compared society to a living organism with interdependent parts and supports a societal form of natural selection. He is known for coining the term “survival of the fittest.”
Herbert Spencer
He developed the theory of ‘economic determinism.’ He believed that economics, not natural selection, determines the differences between the capitalists and the laborers.
Karl Marx
He laid the primary foundations of Structural Functionalism. He coined the term “organic solidarity”
Emile Durkheim
His theory of Structural Functionalism argues that cultural practices had physiological and psychological functions, such as the satisfaction of desires. His approach focused on biological needs.
Bronislaw Malinowski
His theory of Structural Functionalism focused on social structure. He suggested that a society is a system of relationships maintaining itself through cybernetic feedback, while institutions are orderly sets of relationships whose function is to maintain the society as a system.
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown
He is believed to be the true founder of symbolic interaction theory.
George Herbert Mead
He greatly influenced Symbolic Interactionism. He believes society is a product of human activity and argued that a society is a product of social actions.
Max Weber
His theory of Structural Functionalism focused on the conditions ensuring the conservation and stability of the social system. Thus, Symbolic Interactionism called into question whether the expectations and behaviors associated with the enactment of roles can be determined as precisely as he suggested.
Talcott Parsons
They used the most recognizable view of Psychocultural Anthropology known as the configuration approach and combined the Boasian idea of cultural relativism with psychological ideas.
Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict
His position on Symbolic Anthropology illustrates the interpretive approach. He suggested that humans are in need of symbolic “sources of illumination” to orient themselves with respect to the system of meaning in a particular culture.
Clifford Geertz
He is known for his advocacy for neoevolutionism and the scientific study of culture, which he called culturology. He inspired the innovative anthropological thought ‘Cultural Ecology.’
Leslie White
He is regarded as the father of Anthropological Structuralism. He proposed that culture is composed of hidden rules that govern the behavior of its practitioners.
Claude Levi-Strauss
It is a theory in sociology that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability.
Structural Functionalism
A theory first developed by Karl Marx that sees the society in a state of perpetual conflict because of competition for limited resources.
Conflict Theory
It is a theory in sociology that describes how societies are created and maintained through the repeated actions of individuals.
Symbolic Interactionism
A theory in anthropology that assumes that culture lies within the basis of the individuals’ interpretation of their surrounding environment, and that it does not in fact exist beyond the individuals themselves.
Symbolic Anthropology
An anthropological theory that considers how environmental forces influence humans and how human activities affect the biosphere and the Earth itself.
Cultural Ecology
An anthropological theory that suggests that the structure of human thought processes is the same in all culture, and that these mental processes exist in the form of binary oppositions.
Structuralism
Methods used in Anthropology and Sociology
- Observation
- Participant Observation
- Survey
- Interview
- Case Study
- Statistics
