Unit 2 exam review Flashcards
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Quantitative data
Can be counted or measured numerically.
Qualitative data
It is detailed descriptive data about things people do.
Fieldwork
Long term immersion in a community.
Fieldnotes
Scribbled notes an Anthropologist makes so that there is written records of the information.
Informant
The people that the Anthropologist gets information from.
Rapport
A bond or friendship
Participant observation
Almost like hanging out but as a research strategy.
Interview
A conversation with informants as a way to collect data.
Structured Interview
When you ask all the informant the same question in the same sequence. For example a census.
Open ended interview
Less structured, it allows the informants to respond in their own words and make connections with other issues in the process.
Comparative method
Systematic comparison of data from two or more societies.
Human Relation Area Files (HRAF)
A database that collects and finely indexes ethnographic accounts of several hundred societies from all parts of the world.
Genealogical Method
Systematic methodology for recording kinship relations and how kin terms are used in different societies.
Life History
Helps anthropologist understand past social institutions and how they have changed.
Document analysis
Attempting to use pieces of the document and use the information for the current project as it relates to it.
Ethnohistory
Understanding social and cultural change by combining historical and ethnographic approaches.
Secondary Materials
Sources like a regional survey or historical reports. Data collected by someone other than the field researcher.
Rapid appraisal
Short term focused ethnographic research. No more than a few weeks, about narrow research questions or problems.
Participatory action research.
Collaboration between the researcher and the subjects of the research. Major goal is for research subjects to develop the capacity to investigate and take action on their primary social, economic or political problems.
Ethnographic mapping
Maps that show spatial relationships especially showing patterns of settlement of people from the past and present.
Napoleon Chagnon
He is the guy in a man named bee. He studied the Yanomamo people.
Yanomamo
They are indigenous people who live in the amazon rainforest on the border of Venezuela and Brazil.
Variable
Something that changes
Operational definition
Procedure used to manipulate a variable
Hypothesis
A prediction about how variables are related.
Statistical association
Relationship between two random variables that makes them statistically dependent
Theory
It explains things and helps guide research by focusing the researcher’s questions and making the finding meaningful.
Social evolutionism
Stages from a primitive state to complex civilization.
Lewis Henry Morgan
One of the founding fathers of anthropology. Created theory of social evolutionism.
Historical Particularism
Cultures result from each’s own unique history of change and borrowing from other cultures.
Franz Boas
Father of American Anthropology
Zora Neale Hurston
An influential African American Folklorist.
Manuel Gamio
A Mexican anthropologist
Functionalism
A perspective that assumes that cultural practices and beliefs serve social purposes in any society.
Bronislaw Malinowski
His thoughts were that culture traits emerge to meet the needs of individuals.
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown
His thoughts were that culture traits emerge to continue the structure of society.
Structural Functionalism
Culture is systematic, its pieces working together in a balanced fashion to keep the whole society functioning smoothly.
Social Institutions
Organized sets of social relationships that link individuals to each other in a structured way in that society.
Psychological anthropology
Interested in exploring the relationship between culture and the individual in terms of psychological phenomena such as personality, cognition, and emotions.
Margaret Mead
She studied on the island of Samoa, and studied adolescent behavior and sexual patterns.
Mead-Freeman Controversy
Freeman believed that Mead’s work was influenced by Boas, and that it was fundamentally flawed.
Neoevolutionism
Concerned with long term culture change and with similar patterns of development that may be seen in unrelated, widely separated cultures.
Leslie White
She said that cultures evolve in complexity in proportion to their capacity to harness energy. Culture= Energy times technology.
Cultural ecology
explains similarities in historically separate cultures as adaptation to similar environmental conditions.
Julian Steward
The founder of cultural ecology.
French Structuralism
Thought that cultures are viewed as systems and are analyzed in terms of the structural relations among their elements.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
He came up with the idea of French Structuralism
binary oppositions
Exact opposites like male/female, animal/human.
Cultural materialism
material conditions are the primary cause of variation in cultural ideas & behaviors.
Marvin Harris
Responsible for Cultural Materialism
Regulation of resources
How land, water, and natural resources are controlled and allocated.
Production
How material resources are converted into usable commodities.
Exchange
How those commodities are distributed among the people of the society.
Foodways
The structured beliefs and behaviors surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of food.
Modes of subsistence (aka subsistence strategies)
Foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, and intensive agriculture
Foraging
Relies on collecting wild plant foods, hunting animals, and/or fishing.
Carrying capacity
The population an area can support by developing new technologies and intensifying agriculture.
Horticulture
It is small-scale crop cultivation to meet the needs of a household and characterized by the use of simple technology.
Slash-and-burn (aka swidden) method
A technique of plant cultivation in which seeds are planted in the fertile soil prepared by cutting and burning the natural growth. Relatively short periods of cultivation are followed by longer periods of letting the land lie fallow.
Pastoralism
It involves the breeding, care and use of domesticated herding animals and their products as a principal food source.
Intensive agriculture
It involves larger-scale crop production that requires techniques of intensification such as more complex technologies, soil & water control and others.
Industrial agriculture
The most intensive form of agriculture that applies industrial principles of farming.
Green Revolution
Transformation of agriculture in 3rd world countries through agricultural research, technology transfer and infrastructure development.
Nutrition transition
Combinations of changes in diet towards energy dense foods and declines in physical activity.
Ethnobiology
The subfield of ethnoscience that studies how different cultural groups name and codify living things.
Cultural landscape
The culture-specific images, knowledge & concepts of the physical landscape that affect how people will actually interact with that landscape.
Ecological footprint
A measure of what people consumer & the waste they produce, including a calculation of the area of biologically productive land & water needed to support those people.
Political ecology
The field of study that examines the links between political-economic power, social inequality and ecological destruction.
Value
The relative worth of an object of service that makes it desirable.
Theories of value
Neoclassical, Substantivism, Marxism, and Cultural Economics
Neoclassical
Value is created by competition between buyers and sellers in the market for goods produced according to a division of labor.
division of labor
The cooperative organization of work into specialized tasks and roles.
Substantivism
Value is relative, created by particular cultures & social institutions, including non-market social institutions.
Marxism
Labor is the major source of value. Capitalist economic systems pit the interests of the working classes (who sell their labor) against those of the capitalists (who own the means of production).
means of production
The machines and infrastructure required to produce goods.
Cultural economics
Value is created by the symbolic associations people make between a good or service and a social group’s norms. Economic acts are guided by local cultural beliefs rather than governed by a universal economic rationality.
Modes of distribution
Reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange.
Reciprocity
The exchange of goods and services between partners.
Generalized reciprocity
Where gifts are given freely without expectation of return.
Balanced reciprocity
Where the giver expects a fair return at some later time.
Kula ring
A ceremonial exchange system.
Negative reciprocity
Where the giver attempts to get something for nothing, to haggle his or her way into a favorable personal outcome.
Redistribution
Goods or services are collected by a central authority and reallocated to community members.
Prestige economies
Economies where people seek higher social rank, prestige, and power instead of money and material wealth.
Potlatch
A gift giving feast. Maya
Market exchange
Goods and services are bought and sold through the social institution of the market.
Consumption
The act of using and assigning meaning to a good, service or relationship.
General purpose money
Money that is used to purchase nearly any good or service.
Use value vs. exchange value
Usefulness of it vs exchange equivalent.
Corporate anthropology
practice of observing both the customer and the processes of a business critically in order to recognize unmet needs.
What are the basic goals of cultural anthropological research?
Descriptive – what differences and similarities between human cultures and societies exist?
Scientific – how might we explain these patterns of differences and similarities and the processes that cause them?
Hermeneutic – what are the meanings of a culture trait or pattern of culture traits for the people of the society?
What are the elements of Anthropology’s natural history approach?
Fieldwork, general description, classification, comparison, inductive and deductive thinking.
What are the five basic stages of field research?
Research question, research design, collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of participant observation as a research method?
Advantages: Insight, and great access. Disadvantages: Bias and very time consuming.
Describe Napoleon Chagnon’s ethnographic research among the Yanomamö. What was his principal research question? What all kinds of methods did he use to gather data? What kinds of data did he gather, and how is EACH relevant to his research question?
He is attempting to describe and explain why the tribes separated. Data gathering techniques: participant observation, interviewing, photography, ethnographic mapping. He conducted interviews with the Yanomamo people. He asked them about the myths. and observed them, and gave them goods and services such as medicine. He also took pictures of what he was observing. Lastly, he used ethnographic mapping to answer his main question and used the map as a visual for what he was being told. The center space was for play.
What is the Mead-Freeman Controversy? What do we learn about anthropological research methods from this?
Mead travels to Samoa to look at adolescents. She thinks cultural values are different there. Views on sex and family structure are different. Freeman challenges Mead’s conclusions. He thinks her observations were fundamentally flawed. We learned that her research methods could have been biased and influenced by Franz Boas.
How did Marvin Harris explain the Hindu taboo against killing cattle? How is this explanation an example of the theory of cultural materialism?
Harris explains the Hindu taboo by explaining what they do with the cows. The cows are used as breeders for cattle. Cattle are used to pull farming tools and to help with crops. They do not kill them because killing them for meat would destroy their livelihood.
Compare and contrast the different theories of culture introduced in class & reading so far. How does each propose to explain human cultural variation?
Some theories of culture are Functionalism, evolutionism, psychological anthropology, Neoevolutionism, French structuralism, and cultural materialism. They all have different thoughts on what culture is and how it relates to things. It is in their definition.
Where do disgust reactions to particular foods come from? Why are many advocating including insects as food sources in cultures more widely?
They are taught to us when we are kids like when our parents tell us not to eat dirt. It is supposed to help us not eat something that can get us sick but it can also be overactive. It is a better source of food. They contain more fiber and protein and require less land and care.
What are the four general modes of subsistence that have existed in human societies? What are the “benefits” and “costs” of each?
- Foraging, benefits- shorter work hour and more free time. Costs- food source not reliable 2. Horticulture, benefits- less intensive. Costs- low yields 3. Pastoralism, benefits- freedom of movement. Costs- they have to buy food for their animals 4. Intensive Agriculture, benefits- high yields. Costs- requires high level of specialization.
What are common characteristics of foraging societies? Why do contemporary foragers live in such marginal environments?
Small population, 30 to 200 people. 60 to 80% of diet is vegetables, average work week is only 20 hours. It is because they rely on wild plants.
What changes are linked to the shift from food collecting to food production in early food producing societies? Why did food production lead to declining health in these societies?
Increased population, more sedentary population, greater division of labor, and decline in overall health. There is more foods that are bad for you and since the population is more sedentary, there is less physical activity. Also with larger populations there is a greater change of disease.
What features of culture and society are different as one moves from less intensive (foraging) to more intensive (agriculture) modes of subsistence?
More people can be supported, declining health and more permanent settlements.
How are industrial agriculture & economic globalization linked to increasing environmental and health problems? (Welsch text)
Less work as to be done regarding agriculture, so there is less physical activity. Sometimes technology can do more harm than good, especially to the environment. Economic globalization can lead to lower environmental standards which could cause more air pollution which is harmful to people.
What are the different modes of distribution that characterize exchange in different economies cross-culturally?
Reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange.
ow is value determined in a society? Contrast how different theories of culture & economy think about this.
Neoclassical, Substantivism, Marxism, and Cultural Economics. It is their definitions.
What has the Human Generosity Project discovered so far about the different forms and consequences of generosity across cultures?
It has showed that there are different types of Reciprocity. Different societies have ones in their society. It varies culture to culture.
How does general purpose money illustrate the role of culture in defining economic use value and exchange value?
A culture can see something worth more than its face value, such as a $1.
How do pastoralists (like the Mongolian family we saw in an in-class film clip) adapt to the challenges of a monetary economy? What are the benefits and challenges that result from this?
They sell gold in order to get money that they can use to buy more animals. They can not exchange their animals, it has to be money. A benefit is that the only thing they have to worry about having to give to someone to get something in return is money.
What are some consequences of the commercialization of economies cross-culturally?
Decline of the ethic of generalized reciprocity, particularly sharing outside family. Property rights become individualized vs. collective. More unequal access to resources between different groups within a society.
n what ways is anthropology applied by for-profit businesses? Who is corporate anthropology’s typical clients, theories, methods, and ethical challenges
They look at how they can improve to appeal to the consumer more. They can see how make an improvement to their business and make more money. They look at consumers.
