Terms

Question 1

Anthropology

Answer 1

The study of humans and what it means to be human - studies human behaviour in evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives. Looks at language systems, evolution, contemporary culture, and social systems and structures. Four fields: socio-cultural, bio-evolutionary, linguistics, archaeology.

Question 2

Culture

Answer 2

Socially transmitted knowledge and behaviour shared by a group. Symbiotic webs of meaning that are taught and inherited, integrated into our paradigms of thought.

Question 3

Worldview

Answer 3

The way people see their reality - a kind of lense that forms orientations of time/space/kinship/exchange, a symbolic map to understand environment.

Question 4

Ethnocentrism

Answer 4

Judging another culture using your own culture’s morals, values, and understandings.

Question 5

Cultural relativism

Answer 5

Ethical and methodological imperative to understand others through their own values, morals and cultural viewpoints. Emphasis on understanding rather than casting moral judgement.

Question 6

Globalisation

Answer 6

Increasing connectivity between cultures and people through physical and social barriers. Three elements: cultural imperialism (homogenizing difference as people buy into mainstream/dominate culture, creating compulsory norms), increased inequality (global flow of capital and resources is distributed equally), increased connectivity (people, goods and ideas flow transnationally, except labour).

Question 7

Orientalism

Answer 7

Form of colonial knowledge production. Categorises other (Eastern) cultures as exotic, irrational, superstitious in order to make the East the ‘ideal other,’ or the opposite of the West.

Question 8

Cultural other

Answer 8

Makes differences salient as a way to define and reproduce definitions of self and other. Uses an ‘Us vs Them’ schema. Archetype formed from historical and popular vies from western modernity, wealth, and privilege.

Question 9

Hegemony

Answer 9

Leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others. Authority and legitimacy is given to dominant groups, allowing them to impose own standards and norms on society and culture.

Question 10

Colonialism

Answer 10

Practice of acquiring political or economical control over another country for land and resources. Exploitation and unequal power relation. Tends to twist one’s worldview, sense of self, and webs of signification.

Question 11

Decolonisation

Answer 11

A colonial subject reclaiming power and independence.

Frantz Fanon: Not simply about armed resistance and material autonomy, but also cultural and psychological emancipation of one’s consciousness from colonialism,.

Question 12

Identity

Answer 12

Social and cultural membership in groups or categories. Defines the self.

Question 13

Gender

Answer 13

Social constructed hegemonic binary within Western context. Actively shaped, but also ascribed and naturalised.

Question 14

Sex

Answer 14

Often framed in Western contexts as biogenetic difference. Concepts of sex are shaped by histories of science, psychology, media, medicine. Naturalised and normalised as definitions of gender.

Question 15

Sexuality

Answer 15

A person’s sexual orientation or preference??? Sexual roles informed by gender roles.

Question 16

Language

Answer 16

Cultural anthropology looks at language through 3 lenses, and is associated with a certain anthropologist:

1) Language is interpretative - learned and inferred using context which is also cultivated (culturally constituted?) - Signification (Carol Delaney)
2) Each language described a reality - no two languages are the same - Relativism (Edward Sapir)
3) Real always mediated by reality. Language therefore mediates the Real/the world - Mediation (Alan Dundes)

Question 17

Sign System

Answer 17

Part of semiotics. System of signs and relations between signs - ie. signification.

Question 18

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Answer 18

Language correlates with perception and affects how people see and experience reality - what and how we speak affects and reflects our view of the world (worldview).

Hypothesis: “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached… We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation” (Sapir 1929)

Question 19

Pidgin

Answer 19

Language with no native speakers. Developed for and by members of a community with no common language to communicate.

Question 20

Creole

Answer 20

Stable native language that arises from pidgin - “official”.

Question 21

Language as politicization of inequality

Answer 21

Language has power a la Foucault. Controls and enforces normative ways of being, structures reality and definitions of self. ?????

Question 22

Performativity

Answer 22

Judith Butler. Body as a site for events, signification, and meaning through repeated coded actions that signify identity. Ie. performance.

Question 23

Ritual

Answer 23

Site to observe meaning and making of culture, sometimes literally. Sequence of activities and actions performed at a certain special time and space according to particular expected behaviours.

Question 24

Liminality

Answer 24

Victor Turner. Space of in-between and “person-becoming”. Unique time and space between identities and structures where meaning making takes place. ??

Question 25

Rite of passage

Answer 25

A ceremony or event marking an important stage in someone’s life, especially birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Marks transition between one stage to next. ??

Question 26

Habitus

Answer 26

MOTHERFUCKIN’ BOURDIEU. Culturally acquired practices of the body that are expected and normalised.Part of how we frame our reality. Embodiment of structures and ideologies.

Question 27

Moral economy

Answer 27

Ideas of “natural,” “good,” or “normal” bodies. Act as moral and political claims to authority, legitimacy and production of ideas of “real” or “true” existence. Rely on specific symbolic organizations (significatory systems) and cultural logics. Body = site for moral economy.

Question 28

Symbol

Answer 28

Symbols as ‘internal logic or system’ that are given meaning and value. Socially constructed.

Question 29

Culture-as-practice

Answer 29

Culture embodied and performed. Not abstract.

Sherry Ortner: “the little routines people enact, again and again, in working, eating, sleeping and relaxing, as well as the little scenarios of etiquette they play out again and again in social interaction… in enacting these routines, actors not only continue to be shaped by the underlying organizational principles [temporal, spatial, and social] involved, but continually re-endorse those principles in the world of public observation and discourse.”

Question 30

Photoehtnography

Answer 30

Critically engaged public anthropology that aims to humanise the subject. Challenges objectification by addressing and complicated simplistic, stereotypical understandings of the other.

Question 31

Structural violence

Answer 31

Systematic ways social structures harm or otherwise disadvantage individuals.

Question 32

Praxis

Answer 32

Greek term for process of enacting, embodying theory.

Question 33

Studying up

Answer 33

Karen Ho? Analysing authority and relationships of elite and others. Making visible the privileges, structures, and powers produced by elite - ie. looking at production of authority.

Question 34

Capitalism-as-lived-experience

Answer 34

Capitalism is socially constituted, and embodied by people.

Question 35

Dispossession

Answer 35

The action of depriving someone of land, property, or other possessions. Loss of belonging??? Globalisation displaces and dispossess people, which is frames lived experiences.

Question 36

Migration

Answer 36

Go from one country, region, or place to another.

Question 37

Emplacement

Answer 37

Remaking lives as modern cosmopolitan subjects, and making space/place for themselves socially and existentially in light of discourse, categories,
technologies that otherwise may not see/ recognize the.

Question 38

Critically applied anthropology

Answer 38

Imperative to engage critical theory and link theory to empirical evidence - put into practice theory in order to ignite change, and/or complicate understandings and ideas of categories and people.