Anthropology Midterm Flashcards
anthropology
the study of human beings, and especially the study of human variation around the world
language
the most human and variable of all cultural traits.
what are the four disciplines of anthropology?
archaeology, biological, cultural, linguistic.
archaeology
The study of the lifeways of past cultures through excavation and
analysis of material remains
biological anthropology
The study of how humans evolved as a species, our
biological traits and proclivities, and human physical variation around the world.
cultural anthropology
the study of the beliefs and practices of living cultures and peoples.
Linguistic Anthropology
The study of human communication systems around the world.
The basis of the course
the study of language variation, why those variations exist, how those variations are used, and what those variations mean
when they are used in different contexts.
when did the discipline of anthropology begin?
19th century
Why do when people think of anthropology, they often think of the study of small-scale and indigenous cultures
Anthropologists studied subjects not yet
claimed by other disciplines. This left the non-literate indigenous peoples of
the world who were, at the time, considered “primitive” or “savage.”
the inclusion of linguistic anthropology is…
uniquely American
Where did linguistic anthropology have its beginnings in the US?
America!
salvage anthropology
the documentation of indigenous life before it became extinct
what happened when anthropology emerged in the early 1900s?
anthropologists in this country took on the task
of attempting to “salvage” the disappearing cultures of Native Americans
how would anthropologists go about salvage anthropology?
merely collecting and cataloguing the remnants of those cultures as the US began to usurp more and
more of indigenous land.
Who first carried out salvage anthropology missions?
non-anthropologists and
instead amateur ethnologists under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution beginning in 1846, and then later by the Bureau of American Ethnology founded in 1879.
John Wesley Powell
The first director of the BAE for 23 years who was an explorer and adventurer.
who is the person most identified with salvage anthropology?
Franz Boas
Franz Boas
the founder of
anthropology as a discipline in the United States. He founded the first department of anthropology at a
university in this country – Columbia University – in 1897
what was Boas trained in?
a physicist.
what was Boas’ dissertation written on?
the optical properties of
water, focusing on the color of sea water among the Inuit
what did boas learn about language and connection?
Boas investigated the different words used for the color of sea water by the Inuit and found that the Inuit have a number of different words, thereby showing that they are able to perceive slight
variations in color that other Americans could not.
why was the discovery about the different names for water important?
Forthe Inuit, since their livelihood was based on fishing, they had become so attuned to the slight
gradations in sea water because it enabled them to detect schools of fish and other things under the
water.
cultural emphasis!
what provides us with deep insight into culture?
Language.
cultural emphasis
how cognition and perception can be altered by culture. Because of the cultural
emphasis, able to perceive things in a way that others cannot.
What did Boas know about snow?
he actually stated that there were only 4 root words dealing with snow in the Inuit language.
what are the two issues about the confusion between so many different words for snow?
1) there are many “Eskimo” languages, not
just a single language.
2) what we are looking at is indeed a question of cultural emphasis, as Boaz
discussed.
what led to the publication of 4-volume series of books titled the Handbook of American Indian Languages?
he trained all of his students – the entire first
generation of American anthropologists including Margaret Mead, Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir,
Ruth Benedict, and others – to undertake a systematic study of the vocabulary and grammatical
structures of the remaining indigenous languages
what was the first work of linguistic anthropology?
the Handbook of American Indian Languages.?
What startled Boas about his student’s findings?
the differences in linguistic
structure between English and the wide array of Native American languages his students studied.
how and why do human languages
differ so dramatically if all humans are endowed with the same neurological equipment –
the brain?
to see language as a key component of culture
culture
learned set of ideas and behaviors that are acquired by people as members of a
society
linguistic particularism or linguistic relativity
each language has to be analyzed in terms of its own particular and unique structure
Cultural relativity
an understanding of a culture on its own terms
Ethnocentrism
the judging of another culture and its practices based upon the belief that
one’s own culture is correct or right.
Linguistic relativity
stresses the need to recognize that languages have
different ways of encoding information about the world, and thus different ways of experiencing the
world.
fieldwork
an in-depth knowledge of other cultures by living within them for extended
periods of time.
what is the main methodology of feildwork?
participant-observation, which requires
anthropologists to not just observe but also participate in the cultural practices they study
how did boas respond to this “the idea that there was a correlation between a given language and race, or between culture and
race for that matter”
he argued against racism and race as a biological category that includes culture, language,
personality trait
how did boas respond to this ““primitive” societies had primitive, or less complex languages”
all languages have structure. And, in fact, the languages of non-literate
cultures are often more complex in structure than Western European languages
what is a dialect?
form of the language that is spoken in a particular part of the country or by a particular group of people
