Culture 48 Flashcards
THEORETICAL SAMPLING
Choosing a sampling element (eg, a person, a social setting) on the basis of its likely contribution to a (grounded) theory emerging during the course of a study.
THEORY
- An explanatory framework, containing a series of statements, that helps us understand why (something exists or functions in a certain manner).
- Theories suggest patterns, connections, and relationships that may be confirmed by new research.
THICK DESCRIPTION
A term adapted by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz to convey the essence of his semiotic approach to ethnography, based on intensive observation of social life from which interpretations of cultural signs can be generated, as for example in the many layered meanings of a Balinese cock fight.
THIRD WORLD
- A very vague term used to describe those regions of the world in which levels of development, applying such measures as GDP, are significantly below those of the economically more advanced regions.
- The term is increasingly seen as an inadequate description of the prevailing world situation since it fails to describe a significant amount of internal differentiation and development.
TOPICALISING AN ACCOUNT
- Refers to an analytic approach to texts (such as an interview) in which the focus of interest is the world constructed in the text and the methodsmby which the text achieves this.
- This involves bracketing the truth claims of the text, refusing (at least temporarily) to treat it as a resource for discovering truths about some reality outside the text.
TORTS
Violations against an individual.
TRAIT
Describes regularities in behaviour, especially with reference to an individual’s personality.
TRANSACTIONALISM
This perspective sees an individual and an environment as integral aspects of a unitary system of change.
TRANSCULTURATION
- Is a term coined by Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s to describe the phenomenon of merging and converging of different cultures.
- It argues that the natural tendency of people is to resolve conflicts over time, rather than aggravating them.
- Global communication and transportation technology nowadays replaces the ancient tendency of cultures drifting or remaining apart by bringing cultures more into interaction.
- The term “Ethnoconvergence” is sometimes used in cases where tranculturation affects ethnic issues.
TRANSHUMANCE
One of two variants of pastoralism. A part of the population moves seasonally with the herds while the other part remains in home villages.
TRANSNATIONALISM
Is the system of multiple ties and interactions linking people or organizations across the borders of nation-states and identified, for example, by flows of capital, images, information and people.
TRIANGULATION
- A metaphor derived from surveying and navigation to indicate the convergence of two or more viewpoints on a single position or, in social research, truth.
- An exercise might, for example, involve seeing whether the results of a questionnaire are repeated in observational data.
- Associated with a realist approach and, largely, with early qualitative discussions of validity, triangulation is treated with scepticism by non-realists who reject the view that revelation of a single truth is the object of a research account.
TRIBE
- A type of social formation usually considered to arise from the development of agriculture.
- Tend to have a higher population density than bands and are also characterized by common descent or ancestry.
TROPICS
World area of geographic belt extending about 23 degrees north and south of the equator, between the Tropic of Cancer (north) and the Tropic of Capricorn (south).
UNCERTAINTY AVOIDANCE
Is one of the Hofstede dimensions, which he defines as “the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by uncertain or unknown situations.” (Hofstede, 1991).
