Chapter 3 Flashcards
Define bands
A term used by anthropologists to refer to egalitarian units of social organization, found mostly among foragers; these units usually consist of fewer than 100 people.
Define biomedical model
Also known as Western medicine, scientific medicine, or modern medicine, the model combines biology with the diagnosis and treatment of illness and views the body as a machine, independent of social context, that must be repaired periodically.
Define clans
Unilineal descent groups whose members claim descent from a common ancestor.
Define colonialism
Refers to the acquisition of new territories throughout the world by European powers from 1492 until approximately 1945. Colonizers often imposed new forms of politics, economics, and religion upon colonized Indigenous or other cultures, and frequently exploited local populations for their labour.
Define culture change
The changes in meanings that a people ascribe to experience and changes in their way of life.
Define economic development
The term used to identify an increase in level of technology, and by some, standard of living of a population. Others view it as an ideology based on three key assumptions: (1) that economic growth and development is the solution to national as well as global problems; (2) that global economic integration will contribute to solving global ecological and social problems; and (3) that foreign assistance to undeveloped countries will make things better.
Define factory system
A system of production characterized by the concentration of labour and machines in specific places. It is associated with the Industrial Revolution.
Define foragers
A term used by anthropologists to refer to societies that make their livelihood through gathering plants, hunting, or fishing.
Define industrial revolution
A period of European history, generally identified as occurring in the late eighteenth century, marked by a shift in production from agriculture to industrial goods, urbanization, and the factory system.
Define International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Created as an outcome of the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference to regulate currency transactions among countries. The IMF now makes loans and regulates the economies of lending countries.
Define the interpersonal theory of disease
A view of disease in which it is assumed that illness is caused by tensions or conflicts in social relations.
Define irrigation agriculture
A form of cultivation in which water is used to deliver nutrients to growing plants.
Define natural selection
Refers to Darwin’s idea that the survival of different species of organisms is partly contingent upon how well adapted they are to their physical environments. Those with favourable physical traits are more likely to survive to reproduce.
Define pathogen
An infectious agent such as a bacteria or a virus that can cause disease.
Define population density
The number of people in a given geographic area.
Define progress
The idea is that human history is the story of a steady advance from a life dependent on the whims of nature to a life of control and domination over natural forces.
Define “putting out” system
A means of production, common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and surviving today, in which a manufacturer or merchant supplies the materials and sometimes the tools to workers, who produce the goods in their own homes.
Define sedentary
A mode of livelihood characterized by permanent or semi-permanent settlements.
Define slash and burn or swidden agriculture
A mode of livelihood in which forests are cleared by burning trees and brush, and crops are planted among the ashes of the cleared ground.
Define states
Forms of society characterized by a hierarchical ranking of people and centralized political control.
Define unilineal evolution
A late-nineteenth-century theory of social evolution which posited that all societies go through a series of standardized stages of change. It ethnocentrically positioned Western societies at the apex of a “ladder of civilization.”
Define vector
An organism, such as a mosquito, tick, flea, or snail, that can transmit disease to another animal.
Define world bank
One of the institutions created at the 1944 Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, meeting of Allied nations. The World Bank (or the Bank for Reconstruction and Development) functions as a lending institution to nations largely for projects related to economic development.
