Ch. 4: Anthropological Theory and Methods

Question 1

Attitudinal data

Answer 1

Information on what people think or feel.

Question 2

Behavioral data

Answer 2

Information on what people do.

Question 3

Binary oppositions

Answer 3

Opposites

male-female, hot-cold, old-young, etc.

Question 4

Collecting data

Answer 4

The stage of fieldwork that involves selecting data-gathering techniques and gathering information pertinent to the hypothesis being studied.

Question 5

Cultural ecology

Answer 5

An approach to anthropology that assumes that people who reside in similar environments are likely to develop similar technologies, social structures, and political institutions.

Question 6

Cultural materialism

Answer 6

A contemporary orientation in anthropology holding that cultural systems are most influenced by such material things as natural resources and technology.

Question 7

Culture shock

Answer 7

A psychological disorientation a person experiences when attempting to operate in a radically different cultural environment.

Question 8

Diffusionism

Answer 8

The spreading of a cultural trait (that is, a material object, idea, or behavior pattern) from one society to another.

Question 9

Document analysis

Answer 9

Examination of data such as personal diaries, newspapers, colonial records, and so on.

Question 10

Ethnographic fieldwork

Answer 10

Research carried out by cultural anthropologists among living peoples in other societies and among subcultures of our own society.

Question 11

Ethnographic mapping

Answer 11

A data-gathering tool that locates where the people being studied love, where they keep their livestock, where public buildings are located, and so on, in order to determine how that culture interacts with its environment.

Question 12

Ethnography

Answer 12

A strategy of anthropological research, and an anthropological description of a particular contemporary culture by means of direct fieldwork.

Question 13

Ethnoscience

Answer 13

A theoretical school popular in the 1950s and 1960s that tries to understand a culture from the point of view of the people being studied.

Question 14

Event analysis

Answer 14

Photographic documentation of events such as weddings, funerals, and festivals in the culture under investigation.

Question 15

Evolutionism

Answer 15

The nineteenth-century school of cultural anthropology, represented by Tylor and Morgan, that attempted to explain variations in world cultures by the single deductive theory that they all pass through a series of evolutionary stages.

Question 16

Feminist anthropology

Answer 16

A theoretical approach that seeks to describe and explain cultural life from the perspective of both women and men.

Question 17

Fieldnotes

Answer 17

The daily descriptive notes recorded by an anthropologist during or after observing a specific phenomenon or activity.

Question 18

Fieldwork

Answer 18

The practice in which an anthropologist is immersed in the daily life of a culture in order to collect data and test cultural hypotheses.

Question 19

French structuralism

Answer 19

A theoretical orientation holding that cultures are the product of unconscious processes of the human mind.

Question 20

Functionalism

Answer 20

A theory of social stratification that holds that social inequality exists because it contributes to the overall well-being of a society.

Question 21

Interpreting data

Answer 21

The stage of fieldwork, often the most difficult, in which the anthropologist searches for meaning in the data collected while in the field.

Question 22

Interpretive anthropology

Answer 22

A contemporary theoretical orientation holding that the critical aspects of cultural systems are subjective factors such as values, ideas, and worldviews.

Question 23

Multilinear evolution

Answer 23

The mid-twentieth-century anthropological theory of Julian Steward, who suggested that specific cultures can evolve independently of all others even if they follow the same evolutionary process.

Question 24

Neoevolutionism

Answer 24

A twentieth-century school of cultural anthropology, represented by White and Steward, that attempted to refine the earlier evolutionary theories of Tylor and Morgan.

Question 25

Participatory action research

Answer 25

A mode of research whereby the anthropologist and the community work together to understand the conditions that produce the community’s problems to find solutions to those problems.

Question 26

Photography

Answer 26

The use of a still or video camera to document the ecology, material culture, and even social interactions of people during ethnographic fieldwork.

Question 27

Positivism

Answer 27

A philosophical system based on observable scientific facts and their relationship to one another.

Question 28

Postmodernism

Answer 28

A school of anthropology that advocates the switch from cultural generalization and laws to description, interpretation, and the search for meaning.

Question 29

Proxemic analysis

Answer 29

The study of how people in different cultures use space.

Question 30

Psychic unity

Answer 30

A concept popular among some nineteenth-century anthropologists who assumed that all people, when operating under similar circumstances, will think and behave in similar ways.

Question 31

Psychological anthropology

Answer 31

The sub-discipline of anthropology that looks at the relationships among cultures and such psychological phenomena as personality, cognition, and emotions.

Question 32

Qualitative data

Answer 32

People’s words, actions, records, and accounts obtained from participant-observation, interviews, group interviews, and relevant documents.

Question 33

Quantitative data

Answer 33

Data that are counted and interpreted through statistical analyses.

Question 34

Research design

Answer 34

The overall strategy for conducting research.

Question 35

Structural functionalism

Answer 35

A school of cultural anthropology, associated most closely with Radcliffe-Brown, that examines how parts of a culture function for the well-being of the society.

Question 36

Structured interview

Answer 36

An ethnographic data-gathering technique in which large numbers of respondents are asked a set of specific questions.

Question 37

Theory

Answer 37

A general statement about how two or more facts are related.

Question 38

Unstructured interview

Answer 38

An ethnographic data-gathering technique- most often used in the early stages of fieldwork- in which interviewees are asked to respond to broad, open-ended questions.

Question 39

American historicism

Answer 39

Headed by Franz Boas, a school of anthropology prominent in the first part of the twentieth century that insisted on the collection of ethnographic data (through direct fieldwork) prior to making cross-cultural generalizations.