Culture 47

Question 1

SURVEY RESEARCH

Answer 1

• Characteristic research procedure among social scientists other than anthropologists.
• Studies society through sampling, statistical analysis, and impersonal data collection.

Question 2

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

Answer 2

• A nineteenth century concept that the strongest survive. Often called “Social Darwinism.”
• “Survival of the fittest” misrepresents the process of natural selection.
• The mechanism of natural selection is reproductive fitness, those who produce offspring.
• Social Darwinism refers to being the most powerful, which is not the mechanism for natural selection.

Question 3

SUSTAINABLE

Answer 3

Being able to continue into the future.

Question 4

SYMBOL

Answer 4

Something, verbal or nonverbal, that arbitrarily and by convention stands for something else, with which it has no necessary or natural connection.

Question 5

SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM

Answer 5

• A body of theory that emphasises the organisation of everyday social life around events and actions that act as symbols to which actors orient themselves.
• Interactionists frequently study this through observation of face to face interaction and a preferred method for doing this is ethnography.

Question 6

SYMBOLIC RACISM

Answer 6

A blend of negative affect and traditional moral values embodied in e.g., the Protestant ethic; underlying attitudes that support racist positions.

Question 7

SYMBOLS

Answer 7

Physical objects, colors, sounds, movements, scents which convey information through an arbitrary or culturally assigned meaning.

Question 8

SYNCRETISM

Answer 8

• Blending traits from two different cultures to form a new trait.
• Also called fusion.
• This occurs when a subordinate group moulds elements of a dominant culture to fit its own traditions.

Question 9

SYNCRETISMS

Answer 9

• Cultural blends, or mixtures, including religious blends, that emerge from acculturation, particularly under colonialism, such as African, Native American, and Roman Catholic saints and deities in Caribbean vodun, or “voodoo,” cults; the exchange of cultural features when cultures come into continuous firsthand contact.
• Taboo-Set apart as sacred and off-limits to ordinary people; prohibition backed by supernatural sanctions.

Question 10

SYNTAX

Answer 10

The arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences.

Question 11

SYSTEMATIC SURVEY

Answer 11

Information gathered on patterns of settlement over a large area; provides a regional perspective on the archaeological record.

Question 12

TABOO

Answer 12

• Is a strong social prohibition with grave consequences about certain areas of human activity or social custom.
• The term originally came from the Tongan language.
• The first recorded usage in English was by Captain James Cook in 1777.
• Some examples of taboo are dietary restrictions such as halal or kosher, restrictions on sexual activities such as incest, bestiality or animal-human sex, necrophilia or sex with the dead etc.

Question 13

TERMINOLOGY SYSTEMS

Answer 13

• The terminology used to refer to cousins. Two-thirds of all world cultures can be classified according to six kinship systems-Hawaiian, Eskimo, Crow, Omaha, Iroquois, Sudanese.
• The text defines these systems.

Question 14

TEXT

Answer 14

• Although this term includes the kind of thing we usually mean by ‘text’ (eg, a written document) under the conditions of the literary turn, structuralism and poststructuralism the term can be applied to almost any object in the world.
• Semioticians, for example, have considered items as diverse as wrestling matches and Coca Cola cans as ‘texts’, worthy of analysis for their cultural connotations.

Question 15

THEOCRACY

Answer 15

A form of state political organization in which the government is based on religious offices.