Chapters 1-4 Flashcards
Anthropology
The study of human nature, human society, and the human past.
Holism
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, with the result that the whole is understood to be greater than the sum of its part.
Comparison
A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that requires anthropologists to consider similarities and differences in as wide a range of human societies as possible before generalizing about human nature, human society, or the human past.
Evolution
A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that requires anthropologists to place their observations about human nature, human society, or the human past in a temporal framework that takes into consideration change over time
Culture
sets of learned behavior and ideas that human beings acquire as members of society. Human beings use culture to adapt to and to transform the world in which they live.
Biocultural organisms
Organisms whose defining features are codetermined by biological and cultural factors
Material culture
objects created or shaped by human beings and given meaning by cultural practices
Biological Anthropology
The specialty 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.
Primatology
The study of nonhuman primates, the closest living relatives of human beings.
Paleoanthropology
The search for fossilized remains of humanity’s earliest ancestors.
Cultural Anthropology
The specialty of anthropology that shows how variation in the beliefs and behaviors of members of different human groups is shaped by sets of learned behaviors and ideas that human beings acquire as members of society.
Sex
observable physical characteristics that distinguish two kinds of humans, females and males, needed for biological reproduction.
Gender
the cultural construction of beliefs and behaviors considered appropriate for each sex.
Fieldwork
An extended period of close involvement with the people in whose language or way of life anthropologists are interested, during which anthropologists ordinarily collect most of their data.
Informants
people in a particular culture who work with anthropologists and provide them with insights about their way of life
Ethnography
Anthropologist’s written or filmed description of a particular culture.
Ethnology
The comparative study of two or more cultures
Language
The system of arbitrary vocal symbols used to encode one’s experience of the world and of others.
Linguistic anthropology
The specialty of anthropology concerned with the study of human languages
Archaeology
a cultural anthropology of the human past involving the analysis of material remains left behind by earlier societies.
Applied anthropology
The subfield of anthropology that uses informative gathered from the other anthropological specialties to solve practical cross-cultural.
Medical anthropology
The specialty of anthropology that concerns itself with human health-the factors that contribute to disease or illness and the ways that human populations deal with disease or illness.
Culture
sets of learned behaviors and ideas that humans acquire as members of society. Humans use culture to adapt to and transform the world in which they live.
Socialization
The process by which human beings as material organisms living together with other similar organisms cope with the behavioral rules established by their respective societies.
Enculturation
the process of learning to be a member of a particular cultural group
Symbol
something that stands for something else
Human agency
the exercise of at least some control over their lives by human beings
Coevolution
The dialectical relationship between biological processes and symbolic cultural processes, in which each makes up an important part of the environment to which the other must adapt.
ethnocentrism
The opinion that one’s own way of life is natural or correct and, indeed, the only true way of being fully human
Cultural relativism
Understanding another culture in its own terms sympathetically enough so that the culture appears to be a coherent and meaningful design for living
participant observation
The method anthropologists use to gather information by living as closely as possible to the people whose culture they are studying while participating in their lives as much as possible.
Positivism
The view that their is a reality out there that can be known through the sense in that there is a single appropriate set of scientific methods of investigating that reality
Objective knowlegde
knowledge about reality that is absolute and true
Intersubjective meanings
the shared public symbolic systems of a culture
reflexivity
critically thinking about the way one thinks; reflecting on ones own experience
Dialect of fieldwork
The process of building a bridge of understanding between anthropologist and informants so that each can begin to understand the other
Culture shock
The feeling that develops in people living in an unfamiliar society when they cannot understand what is happening around them.
Fact
Widely accepted observation
Capitalism
An economic system dominated by the supply-demand -price mechanism called the market
Colonialism
Cultural domination with enforced social change
Political economy
A holistic term that emphasizes the centrality of material interest and the use of power to protect and enhance that interest
Neocolonialism
The persistence of profound social and economic entanglements linking former colonial territories to their former colonial rulers despite political sovereignty.
Typology
A classification system based on forms of human society
Unilineal cultural evolutionism
a 19th century theory that proposed a series of stages through which all societies must go in order to reach civilization
social structure
the enduring aspects of the social forms in a society including its political and kinship systems
band
small group of people
tribe
group of people larger than a band, farm or herd for a living
Chiefdom
form of social organization in which the leaqder and the chiefs close relatives are set apart from the rest of society
state
a stratified society tha tpossesses a territory that is defended from outside enemies with an army and from internationa; disorder with police. Separate government
structural function theory
a position that explores how particular social forms function from day to day in order to reproduce the traditional structure of the society
cultural traits
particular features or parts of a cultural tradition, such as a dance or ritual
culture area
the limits of borrowing or the diffusion of a particular cultural trait of set of traits
species
reproductive community of populations that occupy a specific niche in nature
phenotype
observable, measureable outward characteristics of an organisms
cline
the gradual integration of generic variation from population to population
globalization
reshaping of local conditions by powerful global forces on an ever-intensifying scale
cyborg anthropology
a form of anthropological analysis based on the notion of organism-machine hybrids or cyborgs that offers a new model for challenging rigid social political and economic boundaries that have been used to separate people by gender sexuality class and race boundaries proclaimed by their defenders as natural
