Deck 8 Flashcards
CARGO CULT
Do not confuse “cargo system” with “cargo cult” which is a revitalization movement characterized by the belief that ancestral spirits will bring wanted goods (cargo) and throw off oppressive customs and colonizers.
CARGO CULTS
Postcolonial, acculturative religious movements, common in Melanesia, that attempt to explain European domination and wealth and to achieve similar success magically by mimicking European behavior.
CARGO SYSTEM
A set of community offices and obligations a person goes through to achieve recognition and status.
CASE STUDY
- The study of a single ‘case’ - for example, a person, an institution, an event.
- How ‘caseness’ is defined depends on the logic of the particular research inquiry.
- For example, a nation might be thought of as a ‘case’ for certain purposes, even though a nation contains many people, each of which might be understood as a ‘case’ in some other inquiry.
CASTE SYSTEM
- Hereditary system of stratification. Hierarchical social status is ascribed at birth and often dictated by religion or other social norms.
- Today, it is most commonly associated with the Indian caste system and the Varna in Hinduism.
CATHARSIS
- Is a Greek word meaning “purification” or “cleansing”.
- Nowadays used to mean intense emotional release associated with talking about the underlying causes of a problem.
- In mystical traditions, catharsis is a process leading to the transcending of psychological, as well as spiritual, traumas and negativities.
- Used in modern psychotherapy, particularly Freudian psychoanalysis, to describe the act of expressing deep emotions often associated with events in the individual’s past which have never before been adequately expressed.
CENSUS
A count of the characteristics of every member of a given population (as opposed to a survey of a selected sample from that population).
CHARISMATIC
The ability to lead and influence large numbers of people.
CHARLIE
- Non-derogatory slang term used by American troops during the Vietnam War as a shorthand term for Vietnamese guerrillas.
- Shortened from “Victor Charlie”, the phonetic alphabet for Viet Cong, or VC.
- It was also a mildly derogatory term used by African Americans, in the 1960s and 1970s, for a white person (from James Baldwin’s novel, Blues For Mr. Charlie).
CHIEFDOM
- Kin-based form of sociopolitical organization between the tribe and the state.
- It comes with differential access to resources and a permanent political structure.
- The relations among villages as well as among individuals are unequal, with smaller villages under the authority of leaders in larger villages; it has a two-level settlement hierarchy.
CLAN
- Form of unilineal descent group based on stipulated descent.
- A clan is a group of people united by kinship and descent, which is defined by perceived descent from a common ancestor.
- As kinship based bonds can be merely symbolical in nature some clans share a “stipulated” common ancestor.
CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
- Is a hotly debated theory publicized by Samuel P. Huntington with his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. He argues that the world has cultural fault lines similar to the physical ones that cause earthquakes and that people’s cultural/religious identity will be the primary agent of conflict in the post-Cold War world.
- Bernard Lewis first used the term in an article in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly called “The Roots of Muslim Rage.”.
CLASS STRATIFICATION
Where members of a society are ranked from higher to lower based on wealth, prestige, position, or education.
CLINE
A gradual shift in gene frequencies between neighboring populations.
CODING
- This is done when observations, segments of text, visuaul images or responses to a questionnaire or interview are collected into groups which are like one another, and a symbol is assigned as a name for the group.
- Data may be `coded’ as they are collected, as where respondents are forced to reply to fixed-choice questions.
- Alternatively, the coding of qualitative data can form a part of an interpretive, theory building approach.
