key terms Flashcards
what is agency?
is the capacity of human beings to act in ways that affect their own lives and others. It implies that individuals have the capacity to change and influence events.
what is class?
a division of people in society (usually based on economic or social status).
what is commodification/commodified body?
the process of turning non-market items into products for exchange. e.g. selling organs or sex work etc.
what is community?
a group of people who share a common interest, locality, or social system.
what is cultural relativism?
not making judgements about cultural differences and understanding different cultures in its context.
what is diaspora?
the dispersal of people from their homelands to establish new communities in other places.
what is embodiment?
how individuals experience and express culture and identity through the body.
what is enculturation?
the slow adoption of culture’s traits and norms. the transmission of culture from one generation to the next.
what are ethics?
the principles of behaviour governing an individual/group. concerns for what is right or wrong/good or bad.
what is ethnicity?
a social group connected by a shared identity based on culture, language, ancestry.
what is ethnocentrism?
the tendency to view the world from the perspective of one’s own culture. causing an inability to understand other cultures.
what is globalisation?
the transmission of ideas around the world as a way to extend social relations.
what is habitus?
a concept introduced by Pierre Bourdieu.
refers to ingrained habits and skills that individuals acquire throughout their life.
it unconsciously shapes how people think and interpret their surroundings.
what is ideology?
a system of social/moral ideas of a group of people.
what is imagined community?
the idea that a community is to some extent constructed in the minds of people who belong to it.
what is the lived body?
refers to how we experience our bodies from the inside. one’s physical presence affects interactions with the world.
what is marginalisation?
process by which individuals/groups are pushed to the edge of society, limiting access to opporunities and power.
what is modernisation?
the adoption of characteristics of more developed societies by less developed societies (generally including an abandonment of traditional practices).
what is the modified body?
the human body is deliberately altered for cultural reasons or aesthetic reasons (e.g. kaningara or Azwagh women)
what is personhood?
a culturally constructed concept of the individual human being, the ‘self’.
what is a nation state?
a politically legitimate geographical area with a government and permanent population.
what is positionality?
the effect an anthropologist’s own subjectivity might have on how they interpret observations/experiences.
what is race?
a socially constructed identification of people based on physical characteristics and ancestry.
what is reflexivity?
anthropologists acknowledge that their own knowledge base, beliefs and perspectives may influence their research/writing.
what is revitilisation?
the rejection of newly introduced cultural elements and the reclamation of historical roots and traditional identity.
what is the ritualised body?
the body may be the focus of a ritual practice.
what is the self?
a socially constructed understanding of individual cultural identity that distinguishes them from ‘the other’.
what is social stratification?
the systematic organisation of persons/groups into a hierarchical structure of inequality. may be according to age, gender, class, ethnicity.
what is socialisation?
the process through which a perosn learns to become an accepted member of society (through agents like family and peers).
what is the body?
the physical form of a person and the social, cultural and symbolic meanings associated with it.
what is the other?
the other describes the way people who are a member of a particular social group perceive other people who are not members. ‘othering’ can be negative. e.g. white-kenyans or japanese-brazilians.
what is transnationalism?
connections and practices that link people and cultures across national borders.
what is community?
a geographically bounded group of people in face-to-face contact, with a shared system of beliefs and
norms operating as a socially functioning whole. communities usually exist with a common social structure and government.
definition of comparative:
anthropologists strive to capture the diversity of social action by focusing on the way in which particular aspects of society and culture are organised similarly/differently across groups.
what is cultural relativism?
it can often be interpreted as
a moral doctrine which states that the practices of one society cannot be judged according to the morality and evaluative criteria of another society.
what is social reproduction?
the concept that, over time, groups of people reproduce their social structure and patterns of behaviour. social reproduction may be contested, leading to social change.
define qualitative:
The data that anthropologists gather during fieldwork comes in many forms because anthropologists
are trying to capture the complexity and diversity of social life. This data may be textual (oral or written),
observational, or may take the form of images. Much of the data cannot be reduced usefully to quantitative forms without losing the essence of the material as perceived from an
anthropological viewpoint.
