Anthropology Chapter 1 Flashcards
What is Anthropology?
The study of humanity. How they behave and function as individuals and in groups, and how they have evolved physically, behaviorally, and socially, as a means of adaption.
List and identify each of the four sub-fields of Anthropology, what they specifically study, and the tools they use to accomplish this.
Cultural Anthropology: The study of human culture - what it is, how it has developed, what are its functions, and how it allows humans to adapt to their physical and social environments.
Archeological Anthropology: The study of earlier cultures and lifeways by anthropologists that specialize in the scientific recovery, analysis, and interpretation of the material remains (artifacts) of human groups of the past.
Linguistic Anthropology: The study of human speech and language, including the origins of language, for the purpose of understanding how language affects human thought processes and other human behaviors.
Physical/Biological Anthropology: The study of human biology within the framework of evolution, including the study of genetics, primatology, growth and life patterns, and the physical adaptations and culture of humanity’s ancestral species.
What is Culture
Culture is the knowledge that is learned, shared, and used by people to interpret experience and generate behavior. (Humans have a predisposition for culture and are genetically ingrained with it. As such, humans are the product of biocultural evolution. They are as much a product of their physical environment as they are of their socio-cultural environments.
What is Ethnography
The basic tool of study in cultural anthropology; is the study of one particular culture.
What is Ethnology?
A cross-cultural comparison on a specific topic such as death as an example.
What is Sociolinguistics?
One of the studies of the linguistic anthropologist as it focuses on the relationship between language, society, and culture.
How did anthropological research begin?
In the 19th century, people began noticing differences in different sub-species of humans such as cranium size.
Why the specification of either physical or biological anthropology?
Physical was seen as more crude where as biological is seen as the more proper term for more modern anthropology. Overall however, it really doesn’t particularly matter and for the purposes for this course are interchangeable.
What happened in 1859
The Origin of Species was published by Charles Darwin.
what is Paleoanthropology and what is its goal?
The study of human evolution as revealed through the fossil record as a sub-discipline of Physical anthropology. Its goal is to identify the various early hominid species and to establish a chronological sequence of relationships among them. As well as to gain insights into their adaptation and behavior to get a better understanding of how humans came to be the way they are.
What is Anthropometry?
The measurement of human body parts, both of living people and extinct, to understand human variation and adaptive significance.
What is Adaptive significance?
How human differences have helped populations adapt to their various environments around the world.
Genetics
The study of gene structure and action, as well as the patterns of inheritance of traits from parents to offspring.
What is Molecular Anthropology
The use of genetic technologies and mapping to investigate relationships between human populations, as well as between humans and nonhuman primates.
Primatology
The study of nonhuman primates for the purpose of looking at underlying factors in the evolution of our species such as social behavior, communication, and reproductive behavior, among other things.
