Flashcards Unit 2
What is acculturation?
Assimilation to a different culture, typically the dominant one.
What is animism?
Belief that objects, such as plants and stones, or natural events, like thunderstorms and earthquakes, have a discrete spirit and life.
What are artefacts?
An object made by a human being, typically an item of cultural or historical interest.
What is assimilation?
The process of taking in and fully understanding information or ideas.
What is the Baha’i faith?
The Baháʼí Faith is a religion founded in the 19th century that teaches the essential worth of all religions and the unity of all people.
What are behaviours?
The way in which one acts or conducts oneself, especially toward others.
What are beliefs?
Trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something.
What is bilingualism?
Fluency in or use of two languages.
What is Buddhism?
A widespread Asian religion or philosophy, founded by Siddartha Gautama in northeastern India in the 5th century BC.
What is Confucianism?
Confucianism is an ancient Chinese belief system, which focuses on the importance of personal ethics and morality. Whether it is only or a philosophy or also a religion is debated.
What is contagious diffusion?
Spread of an idea/trait/concept through a group of people or an area equally without regard to social class, economic position, or position of power.
Define creole.
A person of mixed European and Black descent, especially in the Caribbean.
What is cultural determinism?
The belief that the culture in which we are raised determines who we are at emotional and behavioural levels.
What is cultural diffusion?
Describes the spread of one culture’s practices, beliefs, and/or items, like food, music, or tools.
What is cultural ecology?
The study of human adaptations to social and physical environments.
What is cultural geography?
The study of the relationship between culture and place.
What are cultural hearths?
In the ancient past, major cultures began in an area called a cultural hearth. From these areas, cultures spread (diffused) outward, carried by people involved in trade, travel, conquest or immigration. Geographers and historians believe that there were several cultural hearths in the ancient world.
What is a cultural landscape?
Cultural attributes of an area often used to describe a place (e.g., buildings, theatres, places of worship).
What is cultural relativism?
Refers to not judging a culture to our own standards of what is right or wrong, strange or normal.
What is cultural transmission?
The process through which cultural elements, in the form of attitudes, values, beliefs, and behavioural scripts, are passed onto and taught to individuals and groups.
What is a culture complex?
A distinctive pattern of activities, beliefs, rites, and traditions associated with one central feature of life in a particular culture.
What is a culture region?
A region with people who share common cultural characteristics.
What is a culture system?
The interaction of different elements in culture.
What is a culture trait?
Any trait of human activity acquired in social life and transmitted by communication.
What is Daoism?
Taoism or Daoism refers to either a school of philosophical thought or to a religion, both of which share ideas and concepts of Chinese origin and emphasise living in harmony with the Tao; the Tao is generally defined as the source of everything and the ultimate principle underlying reality.
What is dialect?
A particular form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group.
What are diasporas?
The dispersion or spread of a people from their original homeland.
Describe Durkheim’s sacred and profane.
Durkheim was among the first to distinguish between the two. The sacred are those things we set apart as extraordinary, which inspire awe and reverence. The profane are those things considered mundane and ordinary elements of everyday life as well as those things that oppose the sacred.
Define Eastern Orthodox.
Eastern Orthodoxy is the large body of Christians who follow the faith and practices that were defined by the first seven ecumenical councils.
What is environmental determinism?
A philosophy of geography that stated that human behaviours are a direct result of the surrounding environment.
What is ethnic religion?
Religion or belief associated with a particular ethnic group.
What is ethnocentrism?
Evaluation of other cultures according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of one’s own culture.
What is an extinct language?
An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers, especially if the language has no living descendants. In contrast, a dead language is one that is no longer the native language of any community, even if it is still in use, like Latin.
What is folk culture?
Refers to the products and practices of relatively homogeneous and isolated small-scale social groups living in rural locations.
What is folk culture region?
Examples of folk culture regions in the United States are the Amish, Native American customs, and “Little Bavaria” in Frankenmuth, Michigan. The Amish, mainly concentrated in Pennsylvania, practice traditional religious customs and beliefs such as limited use of technology.
What is folk life?
The everyday and intimate creativity that all of us share and pass on to the next generation.
What is geographic region?
An area of land that has common features.
Who is Torste Hagerstrand?
Torsten Hägerstrand (October 11, 1916, in Moheda – May 3, 2004, in Lund) was a Swedish geographer. He is known for his work on migration, cultural diffusion and time geography.
What is hierarchical diffusion?
Spread of an idea from persons of authority or power to other persons.
What is Hinduism?
Hinduism is an Indian religion or dharma, a religious and universal order or way of life by which followers abide. As a religion, it is the world’s third-largest, with over 1.2–1.35 billion followers, or 15–16% of the global population, known as Hindus.
What is humanism?
An outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters. Humanist beliefs stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasise common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems.
What are independent inventions?
The process by which humans innovate, creatively finding solutions to problems.
What is an Indo-European language family?
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent.
What is Islam?
The religion of the Muslims, a monotheistic faith regarded as revealed through Muhammad (PBUH) as the Prophet of Allah.
Define isogloss.
A line on a dialect map marking the boundary between linguistic features.
What is Judaism?
Judaism is an Abrahamic, monotheistic, and ethnic religion comprising the collective religious, cultural, and legal tradition and civilisation of the Jewish people. It has its roots as an organised religion in the Middle East during the Bronze Age.
What is language?
The principal method of human communication, consisting of words used in a structured and conventional way and conveyed by speech, writing, or gesture.
What are language families?
A group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language.
What is a language sub-family?
Some group of languages can have many inner divisions. These divisions are sometimes called “families” or “sub-families”.
Define lingua franca.
A language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different.
What is linguistic fragmentation?
The number of languages and dialects used by large portions of a nation’s population.
What is linguistic geography?
Local or regional variations of a language or dialect studied as a field of knowledge.
Define Mahayana.
One of the two major traditions of Buddhism, now practiced in a variety of forms especially in China, Tibet, Japan, and Korea. The tradition emerged around the 1st century AD and is typically concerned with altruistically oriented spiritual practice as embodied in the ideal of the bodhisattva.
What is Marxism?
The political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis for the theory and practice of communism.
What is material culture?
Tools, weapons, utensils, machines, ornaments, art, buildings, monuments, written records, religious images, clothing, and any other ponderable objects produced or used by humans.
What is migrant diffusion?
When an innovation. originates and enjoys strong, but brief, adoption in a place.
What is a monotheistic religion?
Belief in the existence of one god, or in the oneness of God.
What is multilingualism?
The use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers.
What is non-material culture?
Thoughts or ideas that make up a culture are called the non-material culture.
What are norms?
A standard or pattern, especially of social behaviour, that is typical or expected of a group.
What is an official language?
An official language is a language having certain rights to be used in defined situations. These rights can be created in written form or by historic usage. 178 countries recognise an official language, 101 of them recognising more than one.
What is pidgin?
A grammatically simplified form of a language, used for communication between people not sharing a common language. Pidgins have a limited vocabulary, some elements of which are taken from local languages, and are not native languages, but arise out of language contact between speakers of other languages.
What is popular culture?
Culture based on the tastes of ordinary people rather than an educated elite.
What are Protestants?
A member or follower of any of the Western Christian churches that are separate from the Roman Catholic Church and follow the principles of the Reformation, including the Baptist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran churches.
What is regional identity?
A phenomenon where people identify themselves with the social system of a certain region.
Define religion: branches, denominations, sects relocation diffusion.
The belief in and worship of a superhuman power or powers, especially a God or gods. There are many different types and branches.
What are Roman Catholics?
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptised Catholics worldwide as of 2019. It is among the world’s oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a prominent role in the history and development of Western civilisation.
Who is Carl Sauer?
American geographer who was an authority on desert studies, tropical areas, the human geography of American Indians, and agriculture and native crops of the New World.
What is shamanism?
Shamanism is a religious practice that involves a practitioner interacting with the spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance.
What is a Shiite?
An adherent of the Shia branch of Islam.
What is Sikhism?
Sikhism, also known as Sikhi, is an Indian religion and philosophy that originated in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent, around the end of the 15th century CE.
What is standard language?
A standard language is a language variety that has undergone substantial codification of grammar and usage, although occasionally the term refers to the entirety of a language that includes a standardised form as one of its varieties.
What is stimulus diffusion?
Diffusion in which one people receives a culture element from another but gives it a new and unique form.
What is a Sunni?
The larger of the two main branches of Islam, which differs from Shia in its understanding of the Sunna, its conception of religious leadership, and its acceptance of the first three caliphs.
What is symbolic landscape?
A landscape that has significant meaning beyond what it simply looks like due to cultural associations.
What are symbols?
A mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship.
What is syncretism?
The amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.
What is Tantrayana?
The path of transformation. Its practices encourage a transformation of body, speech and mind in order to become happy.
What is Theraveda?
The more conservative of the two major traditions of Buddhism (the other being Mahayana), and a school of Hinayana Buddhism. It is practiced mainly in Sri Lanka, Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos.
What is time-distance decay?
The declining degree of acceptance of an idea or innovation with increasing time and distance from its point of origin.
What is a toponymy?
The study of place names.
What is traditional religion?
Traditional customs, beliefs, or methods are ones that have existed for a long time without changing.
What is transculturation?
Transculturation is a term coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940 to describe the phenomenon of merging and converging cultures.
What is universalising religion?
Offer belief systems that are attractive to the universal population. They look for new members and welcome anyone and everyone who wishes to adopt their belief system. Universalising religions have many diverse members, who come from different ethnic backgrounds, hence the term universal.
