Exam 1 Flashcards
the phenomenon whereby social and class relations of prestige or lack of prestige are passed from one generation to the next
Social Reproduction
description of local behavior and beliefs from the anthropologist’s perspective in ways that can be compared across cultures
Etic Perspective
an analytic framework developed by Kimberle Crenshaw for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification
Intersectionality
a system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, shared, and contested by a group of people
Culture
self-perceptions, sensibilities, and tastes developed in response to external influences over a lifetime that shape one’s conception of the world and where one fits in it
Habitus
a long-standing debate on what factors – such as biology, genes, culture, and language – determine or even predetermine human behavior and potential
Nature vs. Culture
a methodology that requires a researcher to identity how factors of [identity] intersect to influence what they study, what kind of data they can access, what conclusions they come to, and how how they represent themselves and others
Positionality
ethnographic research that considers the interactions of all species living on the planet to provide a more-than-human perspective on the world
Multispecies Ethnography
study of people’s everyday lives and their communities – their behaviors, beliefs, and institutions, including how people make meaning as they live, work, and play together
Cultural Anthropology
fieldwork strategy developed by Franz Boas to collect cultural, material, linguistic, and biological information about Indigenous populations being devastated by western expansion of European settlers
Salvage Anthropology
the knowledge, habits, and tastes learned from parents and family that individuals can use to gain access to scarce and valuable resources in society
Cultural Capital
a research strategy for understanding the world through intense interaction with a local community of people over an extended period
Fieldwork
the ability or potential to bring about change through actions of influence; often naturalized; profoundly culturally-constructed but appears inevitable/natural
Power
people’s thoughts and actions and institutional patterns and policies that create or reproduce unequal access to power, privilege, resources, and opportunities based on imagined differences among groups
Racism
anthropological writing that blurs the boundaries between genres, disciplines, and theoretical positions
Experimental Ethnography
understanding a group’s beliefs and practices within their own cultural context without making judgments (“seeing within”)
Cultural Relativism
research approach that elucidates the dynamic relationship between phenomena on all scales; connections between phenomena make up complex and often invisible webs of relationships
Contextualization
a group in which wealth is not stratified but prestige and status are
Ranked Societies
practice by which a nation-state extends political, economic, and military power beyond its own borders over an extended period of time to secure access to raw materials, cheap labor, and markets in other countries or regions
Colonialism
the debunked theory proposed by 19th c. anthropologists that all cultures naturally evolve through the same sequence of stages from simple to complex
Social Darwinism/Cultural Evolution
a kinship configuration developed in Western industrialized cultures; people are born into a “family of orientation” but when they reach adulthood, they are expected to detach from their family of orientation
Nuclear Family
culture is primarily a set of ideas or knowledge shared by a group of people that provides a shared body of information about how to behave, why behave that way, and what that behavior means
Symbolic/Interpretative Anthropology
early anthropologists developed their theories of the human condition based on written accounts and opinions of others, having no direct contact with the people they wrote about
Armchair Anthropology
the process of collecting anthropological data via fieldwork
AND
the product of anthropological writing and storytelling
Ethnography
use of four interrelated disciplines to study humanity: biological
anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology
Four-field Anthropology
the belief that one’s culture of way of life is normal and natural; using one’s own culture to evaluate and judge the practices and ideals of others
Ethnocentrism
a concept developed by Janet Carsten that captures more nebulous forms of connection that don’t fit into the standard idea of kinship and allows one to explore different kinds of connection, such as how human and non-human lives get tied up with one another
Relatedness
a group based on the sharing of resources to ensure success with a relative absence of hierarchy and violence
Egalitarian Society
the blood that supposedly holds people together as kin is a highly condensed and invested metaphor for social regulations governing inheritance and property relations. kinship is not a discrete domain of sociality but is deeply rooted in other structures of power
Feminist Anthropology Critiques of “Bloodline”
the uneven distribution of resources and privileges among members of a group or culture
Stratification
the system of meaning and power that cultures create to determine who is related to whom and to define their mutual expectations, rights, and responsibilities
Kinship
a framework of categories created by Western Europeans to divide the human population into discrete categories with no biological basis
Race
asking the question “why do people do the things they do?” always with a self-reflexivity toward understanding how “who you are” impacts what you think
Thinking Anthropologically
anthropological perspective on other cultures enables us to perceive our own cultural activities in a new light
Making the Familiar Strange
how people exercise power during interactions and how people create identities and values through social discourse
Social Business
a system of power based on wealth, income, and status that creates an unequal distribution of society’s resources, often maintained through violence
Class-Based Societies
an approach to gathering data that investigates how local people think and how they understand the world, grasping the world according to one’s interlocutor’s particular points of view
Emic Perspective
a continual internal dialogue and critical self-evaluation of a researcher’s positionality as well as active acknowledgment and explicit recognition that this position may affect the research process and outcome
Reflexivity
the study of the full scope of human diversity, past and present, and
applying that knowledge to help people of different backgrounds better understand one another – humanity is one undivided thing but very diverse
Anthropology
philosophical and scientific concept that emphasizes the role of experience, evidence, and observation in the formation of knowledge
Empiricism
the practice of using many different voices in ethnographic writing and research question development, allowing the reader to hear more directly from the people in the study
Polyvocality
a research strategy that combines a detailed description of a cultural activity with an analysis of the layers of deep cultural meaning in which those activities are embedded. every cultural action is more than the action itself; it is also a symbol of deeper meaning
Thick Description
