Final

Question 1

environmental determinism

Answer 1

environmental surroundings determine what cultures look like

Question 2

cultural ecology

Answer 2

Study of human adaptations to their environment. Suggests humans adapt to their environment but culture is not determined by it.

Question 3

political ecology

Answer 3

study of relationships between ecology and politics. How power and politics can influence ecological and environmental change.

Question 4

Environmental anthropology: “invasive species”

Answer 4

Am Anishnaabe critique suggesting the idea that it is natural for the arrival of new plants/ species to be introduced to a new environment.

Question 5

Ethnography

Answer 5

• 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

Question 6

Ethnographic Theory

Answer 6

grounded in local ways of making AND making sense of the world. Grows out of lived human experience (aka. Ethnography)/

Question 7

Structural-functionalism

Answer 7

cultural practices serve a purpose or engender meaning in relation to broader frameworks of cultural institutions, like religion, politics, economics, or family.

Question 8

Ethnographic Method

Answer 8

• anthropologists closely observe, record, and engage in the daily life of another culture
• then writes accounts of this particular culture emphasizing with descriptive detail

Question 9

Ethics of Ethnography

Answer 9

• being attentive to unequal power dynamics
• try to reveal the positionality of our own society/ politics

Question 10

kinship

Answer 10

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.

Question 11

nuclear families

Answer 11

household/ family of two married adults and their children

Question 12

extended families

Answer 12

three or more generations living together

Question 13

Marriage: the Nuer

Answer 13

• marriage as relation between two kin groups mediated by cattle
• accumulating ancestors, not biology
• separation, ghost marriage, women marriage

Question 14

marriage

Answer 14

public social contract; economic implications; rights/ responsibilities; creates and recreates social relationships and culture

Question 15

kinning

Answer 15

the ways in which non-biological kin are brought into a significant and permanent relationship that is expressed from a kin idiom

Question 16

kinship with animals

Answer 16

practices relations with animals; reminder of how kinship is built upon unequal power relationships

Question 17

Religion

Answer 17

belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces

Question 18

ritual

Answer 18

symbolic actions that often involve highly formalized behavior; a way of condensing meaning. Not always religious, but assigned with belief

Question 19

Magic

Answer 19

strategies people use to control supernatural power and accomplish specific aims. Setting a pattern for a desired event

Question 20

rites of passage

Answer 20

socially organized ritual that changes people’s social status; methods through which society reproduces itself, people change, social structure remains

Question 21

communitas

Answer 21

refers to an intense community spirit, a feeling of great social solidarity, equality, and togetherness during collective liminality

Question 22

diaspora

Answer 22

groups of people dispersed from where they consider their homeland. They can form diasporic communities in new regions.

Question 23

nation

Answer 23

people linked by common heritage, descent, culture, and/ or language in a particular country/ territory

Question 24

Nationalism

Answer 24

the idea that a group can claim power or political autonomy because of a common language, culture, or origin.

Question 25

social suffering

Answer 25

lived experience of social harm resulting in part from inequity. These forms of power themselves influence individual and collective responses to social problems.

Question 26

structural violence

Answer 26

violence exerted systematically; political-economic organization of society wreaks havoc on vulnerable categories of people.

Question 27

symbolic violence

Answer 27

domination, hierarchy and internalized insults that are legitimized as natural and “deserved”

Question 28

biopolitics

Answer 28

the right of the state to decide who lives and who dies; impacts the political power on human life

Question 29

necropolitics

Answer 29

the blurred boundary between state and individuals over deciding who lives and who dies.

Question 30

Affect

Answer 30

to affect and be affected; the lived body, the life of the senses, ethics and imagination, the emotions

Question 31

Affect Theory

Answer 31

focus on objects and embodiment and on relationality or felt experience. Embodied sense of feeling and being, thus making sense of the world.

Question 32

subjectivity

Answer 32

the emotional life of the political subject; an individual’s opinions, judgments, beliefs, emotions, and assumptions, emergent from the context in which they live.

Question 33

social structure

Answer 33

patterned social systems that shape individual lives.

Question 34

agency

Answer 34

people’s ability to make free choices and shape their lives.

Question 35

Practice Theory

Answer 35

concerned with the relationship between what people actually do and what they say they do or what society says they should do.

Question 36

class

Answer 36

social stratification based on wealth, income and status that relies upon and creates an unequal distribution of a society’s resources and power.

Question 37

prestige

Answer 37

theory of Max Weber suggesting class is not based purely on economic power, but also prestige: reputation, deference, influence based on position and profession.

Question 38

habitus

Answer 38

dispositions, self-perceptions, sensibilities and tastes that develop according to one’s environment

Question 39

cultural/ social capital

Answer 39

skill set of such tastes, knowledge and confidence that provides access to power, wealth, and scarce goods

Question 40

fairly egalitarian

Answer 40

marked by sharing of resources, cooperation, reciprocity

Question 41

ranked societies

Answer 41

social stratification by rank and prestige (NOT wealth).

Question 42

Economic Anthropology

Answer 42

cultural anthro focused on the economy

Question 43

economy

Answer 43

systems of productions, distribution, and consumption of resources through which people seek to meet their material needs and wants.

Question 44

Neoliberal globalization

Answer 44

essentially friction: the unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference.

Question 45

Deindustrialization

Answer 45

the decline of industrial economic activity and associated sociocultural change and precarity.

Question 46

Fordism

Answer 46

standardized industrial production developed by the Ford Motor Company in early-mid 20th century

Question 47

precarity

Answer 47

life without the promise of stability. Diverse forms of precarity found within the wake of neoliberal globalizaiton.

Question 48

distribution

Answer 48

how resources (goods, money) move around a society

Question 49

reciprocity

Answer 49

a transaction between two parties where equivalent goods and services are exchanged (ex. gifts); no free gifts

Question 50

redistribution

Answer 50

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)

Question 51

market exchange

Answer 51

transactions through barter or monetary exchange, with prices theoretically set by supply and demand (ex. commodity purchases)

Question 52

gifts

Answer 52

gift giving as a contract (economic and social), often entailing obligation to give, receive, and repay. An exchange of inalienable objects between people.

Question 53

commodities

Answer 53

an exchange of alienable objects between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal independence.

Question 54

“third space”

Answer 54

an alternative space of exchange in which participants’ distinctions of commodity space and gift space are blurred through phenomenological experiences.

Question 55

social death

Answer 55

the condition of people who are not accepted or recognized as fully human by wider society; can include segregation, criminals, and “mentally ill.”