MIDTERM VOCAB-History of Anth&Bio Anth Flashcards
Unilinear Cultural Evolution
-Society and culture thought to change gradually through time and through universally consistent ways.
Savagery-Barbarism-Civilization
-Each stage represents advancement in the food subsistence strategies, arts, language, politics, technology, education etc.
Darwinian Evolution
favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones destroyed. The result would be the formation of a new species.”
-Evolution by Natural selection
Three Age System
-Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age
-Technological progress
Social Darwinism
-used to explain the diversity of people in the 19th century
Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck
Dynamic Relationship between animals and environment-> environment leads to changes in animal traits.
-inheritance of Acquired Characteristics
-“use it or lose it”- Use-disuse theory
Ex; Giraffe Neck length
Thunderstones
Stone-Axes
Lewis Henry Morgan
Created the idea of Unilinear evolution.
-all societies “progress” through the same stages of development.
*Ethnocentric ideology
Herbert Spencer
- Accepted theory of Evolution as a natural process- “Survival of the Fittest”
-Social Evolution & Social Darwinism
-justification of Western powers having the right to dominate “unfit members of society.”
*Racist ideologies - Sociologist and theorist (1864)
Culture History
-cultural change through migration and diffusion
-Franz Boas
Uniformitarianism
-James Hutton
-effects of erosion on landscapes.
- Earth changes through continuous and uniform processes.
Carlous Linnaeus
-binomial nomenclature
-Taxonomy classification of organisms int. systems that reflects the degree of relatedness
Ex: genus, species, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family
homo-sapiens
Eugenics
- An idea that was popular in the 1920s that society should be improved by breeding ‘better’ kinds of people.
- sterilization of “feeble-minded citizens” that was involuntary. (forced sterilization)
-Nazi Ideology
Franz Boas
- founder of modern-day Anthropology
- Theorized Cultural Relativism
-Historical Particularism- each culture is a product of unique historical circumstances.
Cultural Relativism
No universal standard by which to judge human progress.
Ethnocentrism
An observational bias in which other societies are evaluated by standards relevant to the observer’s culture.