Chapter 1 Flashcards
Q: What is dualism?
A: The philosophical view that reality consists or two equal and irreducible forces
Q: What is binary opposition?
A: A pair of opposites used as an organizing principle (e.g., body-soul; ying-yang; male-female)
Q: What is idealism?
A: The philosophical view that pure, incorruptible ideas- or the mind that produces such ideas- constitute the essence of human nature.
Q: What is materialism?
A: The philosophical view that one simple force (or a few simple forces) causes (or determines) complex events.
Q: What is essence?
A: An unchanging core of features unique to things of the same kind, making them what they are.
Q: What is culture?
A: Sets of learned behaviors and ideas that humans acquire as members of society.
Q: What is anthropology?
A: The integrated study of human nature, human society, and human history.
Q: What is anthropological perspective?
A: An approach to the human condition that is holistic, comparative, and evolutionary.
Q: What does comparative mean?
A: A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that requires anthropologists to consider similarities and differences in a wide range of human societies before generalizing about human nature, human society, or human history.
Q: What is biological evolution?
A: Change (through mutation) in the genetic makeup (the DNA/RNA) of a population that is passed on through the generations.
Q: What is cultural evolution?
A: Evolution of the beliefs and behaviors incorporated into human development through the experiences of teaching and learning.
Q: What is evolutionary?
A: A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that requires anthropologists to place their observations about human nature, human society, or human history in a flexible framework that takes into consideration change over time.
Q: What is biological (or physical) anthropology?
A: The specialty of anthropology that looks at humans as biological organisms and tries to discover what characteristics make humans different from and/or similar to other living things.
Q: What is primatology?
A: The study of non-human primates, the closest living relatives of human beings.
Q: What is paleoanthropology?
A: The study of the fossilized remains of human beings’ earliest ancestors.
Q: What is archaeology?
A: The specialty of anthropology interested in what human beings can learn from material remains left behind by earlier human societies.
Q: What is linguistic anthropology?
A: The specialty of anthropology concerned with the study of human languages.
Q: Cultural anthropology?
A: The specialty of anthropology that studies how variation in beliefs and behaviors is shaped by culture and learned by different members of human groups.
Q: What are informants?
A: People in a particular culture who work with anthropologists and provide them with insights about local ways of life.
Q: What is ethnography?
A: An anthropologist’s recorded description of a particular group of the people’s way of life.
Q: What is ethnology?
A: The comparative study of two or more cultures.
Q: What is applied anthropology?
A: The use of information gathered from other anthropological specialties to solve practical problems within and between cultures
Q: What is medical anthropology?
A: An area of anthropological inquiry that focuses on issues of well-being, health, illness, and disease as they are situated in their wider cultural contexts.
Q: What are biocultural organisms?
A: Organisms whose defining features are co-determined by biological and cultural factors.
