Final Flashcards
environmental determinism
environmental surroundings determine what cultures look like
cultural ecology
Study of human adaptations to their environment. Suggests humans adapt to their environment but culture is not determined by it.
political ecology
study of relationships between ecology and politics. How power and politics can influence ecological and environmental change.
Environmental anthropology: “invasive species”
Am Anishnaabe critique suggesting the idea that it is natural for the arrival of new plants/ species to be introduced to a new environment.
Ethnography
- A way of knowing actual human experience.
- A practice of research that’s qualitative, descriptive, holistic.
- attentions to the conditions and experiences of life actually lived
Ethnographic Theory
grounded in local ways of making AND making sense of the world. Grows out of lived human experience (aka. Ethnography)/
Structural-functionalism
cultural practices serve a purpose or engender meaning in relation to broader frameworks of cultural institutions, like religion, politics, economics, or family.
Ethnographic Method
- anthropologists closely observe, record, and engage in the daily life of another culture
- then writes accounts of this particular culture emphasizing with descriptive detail
Ethics of Ethnography
- being attentive to unequal power dynamics
- try to reveal the positionality of our own society/ politics
kinship
the social constructions of kin relations in a given cultural context. A system for deciding who can marry who, who inherits what from who, and how relationships are named.
nuclear families
household/ family of two married adults and their children
extended families
three or more generations living together
Marriage: the Nuer
- marriage as relation between two kin groups mediated by cattle
- accumulating ancestors, not biology
- separation, ghost marriage, women marriage
marriage
public social contract; economic implications; rights/ responsibilities; creates and recreates social relationships and culture
kinning
the ways in which non-biological kin are brought into a significant and permanent relationship that is expressed from a kin idiom
kinship with animals
practices relations with animals; reminder of how kinship is built upon unequal power relationships
Religion
belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces
ritual
symbolic actions that often involve highly formalized behavior; a way of condensing meaning. Not always religious, but assigned with belief
Magic
strategies people use to control supernatural power and accomplish specific aims. Setting a pattern for a desired event
rites of passage
socially organized ritual that changes people’s social status; methods through which society reproduces itself, people change, social structure remains
communitas
refers to an intense community spirit, a feeling of great social solidarity, equality, and togetherness during collective liminality
diaspora
groups of people dispersed from where they consider their homeland. They can form diasporic communities in new regions.
nation
people linked by common heritage, descent, culture, and/ or language in a particular country/ territory
Nationalism
the idea that a group can claim power or political autonomy because of a common language, culture, or origin.
social suffering
lived experience of social harm resulting in part from inequity. These forms of power themselves influence individual and collective responses to social problems.
structural violence
violence exerted systematically; political-economic organization of society wreaks havoc on vulnerable categories of people.
symbolic violence
domination, hierarchy and internalized insults that are legitimized as natural and “deserved”
biopolitics
the right of the state to decide who lives and who dies; impacts the political power on human life
necropolitics
the blurred boundary between state and individuals over deciding who lives and who dies.
Affect
to affect and be affected; the lived body, the life of the senses, ethics and imagination, the emotions
Affect Theory
focus on objects and embodiment and on relationality or felt experience. Embodied sense of feeling and being, thus making sense of the world.
subjectivity
the emotional life of the political subject; an individual’s opinions, judgments, beliefs, emotions, and assumptions, emergent from the context in which they live.
social structure
patterned social systems that shape individual lives.
agency
people’s ability to make free choices and shape their lives.
Practice Theory
concerned with the relationship between what people actually do and what they say they do or what society says they should do.
class
social stratification based on wealth, income and status that relies upon and creates an unequal distribution of a society’s resources and power.
prestige
theory of Max Weber suggesting class is not based purely on economic power, but also prestige: reputation, deference, influence based on position and profession.
habitus
dispositions, self-perceptions, sensibilities and tastes that develop according to one’s environment
cultural/ social capital
skill set of such tastes, knowledge and confidence that provides access to power, wealth, and scarce goods
fairly egalitarian
marked by sharing of resources, cooperation, reciprocity
ranked societies
social stratification by rank and prestige (NOT wealth).
Economic Anthropology
cultural anthro focused on the economy
economy
systems of productions, distribution, and consumption of resources through which people seek to meet their material needs and wants.
Neoliberal globalization
essentially friction: the unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference.
Deindustrialization
the decline of industrial economic activity and associated sociocultural change and precarity.
Fordism
standardized industrial production developed by the Ford Motor Company in early-mid 20th century
precarity
life without the promise of stability. Diverse forms of precarity found within the wake of neoliberal globalizaiton.
distribution
how resources (goods, money) move around a society
reciprocity
a transaction between two parties where equivalent goods and services are exchanged (ex. gifts); no free gifts
redistribution
resources/ objects move from the local level to (hierarchial center) where it is recognized, reorganized, and proportion is sent back down to the local level (ex. taxes)
market exchange
transactions through barter or monetary exchange, with prices theoretically set by supply and demand (ex. commodity purchases)
gifts
gift giving as a contract (economic and social), often entailing obligation to give, receive, and repay. An exchange of inalienable objects between people.
commodities
an exchange of alienable objects between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal independence.
“third space”
an alternative space of exchange in which participants’ distinctions of commodity space and gift space are blurred through phenomenological experiences.
social death
the condition of people who are not accepted or recognized as fully human by wider society; can include segregation, criminals, and “mentally ill.”
