Ch.1 Flashcards
Define anthropology including its scope and what it addresses?
Anthropology can be defined as the study of human nature, human society, human language, and the human past. 
Anthropologists want to learn about as many different human ways of life as they can. [Aim to describe in the broadest possible sense what it means to be human].
Focussing their attention on human beings and their creations. Human biology, literature, art, history, linguistics, sociology, political science, economics, etc. 
What is distinctive about the way anthropologists study human life?
What’s distinctive is the holistic, comparative, field-based, and evolutionarily, Characteristics.
What does it mean to be holistic?
Holistic: A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that describes, at the highest and most inclusive level, how anthropology tries to integrate all that is known about human beings and their activities.
This means it emphasizes that all aspects of human life intersect with one another in complex ways and become integrated with one another over time.  that the study of humans is a unified. 
How does anthropology employee comparison?
Comparison: A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that requires anthropologists to study similarities and differences across as many human societies as possible before generalizing about human beings and their activities.
To generalize about human nature, society, language, and past requires evidence from the widest possible range of human societies. It’s not enough to observe only one social group and conclude that human beings as a species do or don’t do that Behaviour. For example eat bugs.

How is evolution at the core of the anthropological perspective?
Evolution: A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that requires anthropologists place their observations about human beings and their activities in a temporal framework that takes into consideration change over time. 
Look for characteristics that unite all of humanity and that are valid across space and time.
Anthropologist emphasize that human beings are biocultural organisms: Whose defining features are co-determined by biological and cultural factors. This means our biological make up— our brain, nervous system, and anatomy is the outcome of developmental processes to which our genes and cellular chemistry contribute in fundamental ways. It also makes us capable of creating and using culture. Without this biological endowments, human culture as we know it would not exist.
Distinguish between biological evolution and cultural evolution
Biological evolution looks at how the physical features and life processes of human beings have changed over time. It examines human origins and the genetic variation and inheritance in living human populations.
Cultural evolution concerns change over time in beliefs, behaviors, and material objects that shape human development and social life.
Identify the fourth traditional areas of study in anthropology
The four traditional areas are Biological, cultural, linguistic, and archeology. A fifth known as applied anthropology.
Biological: Palaeontology, human biology, and variation primatology.
Cultural: Kinship and social organization, Material life and technology, subsistence and economic worldviews.
Linguistic: Descriptive linguistics, comparative linguistics, historical linguistics.
Archeology: prehistoric archaeology (unwritten history), historical archeology (written history). 
Replied anthropology: Medical, developmental, urban. 
What is biological anthropology?
What are the two main areas of this field?
Biological anthropology: the speciality of anthropology that looks at human beings as biological organisms and tries to discover what characteristics make them different from other organisms and what characteristics they share. 
Biological anthropologist share many methods and theories used in the natural sciences— primarily biology, ecology, chemistry, and geology. What sets a BA apart from their non-anthropological colleagues is the holistic, comparative, and evolutionary perspective training.
The two main areas are primatology and Paleoanthropology- The study of human fossils and associated remains to understand our revolutionary history.
Define primatology.
The study of nonhuman primates, the closest living relative of human beings.
What does a Paleoanthropologist investigate?
They investigate things such as fossilized bones and teeth of our earliest ancestors, and human skeletal biology (measuring and comparing the shapes and sizes—or morphology— of human bones and teeth using skeletal remains from different human populations.)
Newer specialities focus on human adaptability in different ecological settings, on human growth and development, or on the connections between a populations of illusionary history and it’s susceptibility to disease. (Paleo-demography)
What do forensic anthropologists use their knowledge of human skeletal anatomy to address?
They use their knowledge of human skeletal anatomy to aid human rights investigations Or assist law enforcers with the identification of human remains. In both these cases, biological anthropologists are participating in applied anthropology.
What is cultural anthropology?
Describe how cultural anthropologist conduct their research and collect data.
Speciality of anthropology that shows how variation in the beliefs and behaviours of members of different human groups is shaped by sets a learned behaviour is an ID is the human beings acquire as members of society—that is, by culture.
Because the field of cultural anthropology is fast, they tend to specialize in one or another domain of human cultural activities, such as gender or kinship but not limited to this. Other study the ways particular groups of human beings organize themselves to carry out collective tasks, economic, political, or spiritual. Some investigate the patterns of material life found a different human groups, the world vibrations and clothing, Houston, tools, and techniques for getting food and making material goods. Some study technologies a different societies or in the evolution of technology over time. Also do you comparative studies languages, music, dance, art, poetry, philosophy, religion, or ritual.
Regardless they ordinarily collect the data during an extended period of close involvement with people in whose way of life they’re interested. This is known as fieldwork. They gain this information from people called informants.
Distinguish between ethnography and ethnology.
Enthography: Systematic study and description of a particular culture. 
Ethnology: The comparative study of two or more cultures.
What subfield address is the study of human languages?

Define language.
Linguistic anthropology: the speciality of anthropology concerned with the study of human languages. Not only as a form of symbolic communication but also as a major carrier of important cultural information. Someone can focus on transcribing non-western languages and to produce grammars and dictionary of those languages as a means of preventing them from being lost. This sort of preservation remains important today. Contemporary linguistic anthropologists study the way language differences correlate with differences in gender, race, class, or ethnic identity.
Pidgins- what happens when speakers of unrelated languages are forced to communicate with one another, producing languages.

Language: the system of arbitrary vocal symbols used to encode ones experience of the world and of others. 
Describe the aim of archeology.
What is the main source of analysis for archaeologists?
Speciality of anthropology that studies the human past by analyzing material remains left behind by earlier societies.
Committed to the discovery and systematic study of remnants of our past —everything from piles of bones and stones to the foundations of early great cities. 
The main source of analysis is called material culture: Objects created or shaped by humans and given meaning through cultural practices.
Seek to understand past human cultural activities using a variety of methods: conduct surveys of areas to understand where people left; try to reconstruct the type of houses in which people to weld; study garbage from past societies to understand what people ate; look closely at and even re-create tools people made in the past to survive. Also excavate or dig archeological sites (Areas with high concentrations of human cultural remains) to recover artifacts. (I.e., Portable objects created or modified by humans).
Often require a large team of specialists such as geologists, botanists, wildlife biologist, metallurgists, pottery specialist, and Palaeoanthropologists as well.
Must establish a clear sequence of events, or a timeline, for the artifacts and sites. Surveys of geographical areas, can generate hypotheses about one certain societies existed, what their territorial ranges work, and what patterns of social cultural change they experienced. Archeologists are considered stewards of the past and accountable to the public for the interpretation, conservation, and preservation of the human past.

