Test 1

Sensorimotor Stage

0-2. Learning through senses and objects manipulation. Develops object permanence or separation anxiety.

Formal Operational

12-adult. Reasons abstractly and thinks hypothetically

Pre-operational

2-6. Uses symbols (words and images) to represent objects. Has ability to pretend. Is egocentric

Concrete Operational

7-12. Thinks logically about and thus adds and subtracts concrete objects. Understand principle of conversation

Operational Definition

A description of the procedure that is followed in measuring a variable

Culture Change and Adaption

A dramatic example of intentional cultural change was the adoption and later elimination of the custom of sepaade among the Rendille, a pastoral population that herds camels, goats, and sheep in the desert in northern Kenya.

Society

A group of people who occupy a particular territory and speak a common language not generally understood by neighboring peoples. By this definition, societies do not necessarily correspond to countries.

Cost and Benefits

A new product or process may require a manufacturing or service facility to be revamped and workers to be retrained. Before a change is made, the costs of doing so are weighed against the potential benefits.

Statistical association

A relationship or correlation between two or more variables that is unlikely to be due to chance.

Phoneme

A sound or set of sounds that makes a difference in meaning to the speakers of the language

Phones

A speech sound in a language

Socialization

A term anthropologists and psychologists use to describe the development, through the direct and indirect influence of parents and others, of children's patterns of behavior (and attitudes and values) that conform to cultural expectations. Also called enculturation.

Variable

A think or quantity that varies

Explanation

An answer to a why question. In science, there are two kinds of explanation that researchers try to achieve: associations and theories.

Nonverbal Human Communication

Anthony Wilden has put it, "every act, every pause, every movement in living and social systems is also a message; silence is communication; short of death it is impossible for an organism or person not to communicate." Humans the world over, for example, seem to understand common facial expressions in the same way; that is, they are able to recognize a happy, sad, surprised, angry, disgusted, or afraid face. For example, masks intended to be frightening often have sharp, angular features and inward- and downward-facing eyes and eyebrows. Some scholars argue that anger, for example, may be understood differently across cultures, or that the emotion term each culture associates with a facial expression may have different connotations.

Laws

Associations or relationships that almost all scientists accept

Culture is Commonly Shared

for example, we may call or refer to the cultural characteristics of societies in or derived from Europe as Western culture, or the presumed cultural characteristics of poor people the world over as the culture of poverty.

Children's Acquisition of Language

Children are equipped from birth with the capacity to reproduce all the sounds used by the world's languages and to learn any system of grammar. This is the most difficult intellectual achievement in life. But they do it with ease and enjoyment. Evidence suggests that children acquire the concept of a word as a whole and that they especially learn sequences of sounds that are stressed or at the ends of words

Children's Settings

Children who are assigned many tasks may spend their day in different kinds of settings, and these settings may indirectly influence behavior. For example, children who are asked to do many household chores are apt to be around both adults and younger children. Beatrice Whiting suggests that one of the most powerful socializing influences on children is the type of setting they are placed in and the "cast of characters" there. Results from the Six Cultures project suggest that children tend to be more aggressive the more they are in the company of other children of roughly the same age. In contrast, children tend to inhibit aggression when adults are on the scene.

Controversies about the concept of Culture

Cognitive anthropologists are most likely to say that culture refers not to behaviors but to the rules and ideas behind them, and that culture therefore resides in people's heads.

Parental Responsiveness to Infants and Baby-Holding

Consider how societies vary in how quickly parents respond to an infant's needs. In many respects—amount of time holding the infant, feeding on demand, responding to crying— parents in industrialized societies, such as the United States, tend to respond to these physical needs less often or less quickly than do parents in pre-industrialized societies. In contrast to those preindustrial societies in which babies are held more than half the day, sometimes almost all day, consider the United States, England, and the Netherlands, where babies may spend most of the day in devices such as playpens, rockers, swings, or cribs. For example, among the Efe of the Ituri Forest in central Africa, a 3-month-old infant who cries gets a response within 10 seconds 75 percent of the time. In the United States, a caregiver deliberately does not respond at all about 45 percent of the time. Ruth and Robert Munroe studied the effects of more versus less holding by the mother in infancy on Logoli children.45 The Munroes had observational information on how often infants were held, and they were able to interview many of these individuals as children 5 years later. They were interested in seeing whether children who had been held more often by their mothers were more secure, trusting, and optimistic.

Individuals as Agents of Cultural Change

Cultural ideas, values, and beliefs are personalized and are affected by our individual uniqueness—including temperament, life trajectory, social position, our social interactions with others, and experiences. So, for example, a cohort will experience a similar change in the economy or the physical or social environment.

Possible Genetic and Physiological Influences

Daniel Freedman found differences in "temperament" in newborn babies of different ethnic groups; because he observed newborns, the differences between them were presumed to be genetic. Freedman also suggested that an infant's behavior can influence how the parents respond. Behavior of children can change with short-term nutrition supplements. For example, Guatemalan children who were given nutritional supplements were observed to have less anxiety, more exploratoriness, and greater involvement in games than children who were not given supplements. Other kinds of care may also be reduced. For example, caretakers of malnourished children may interact with them less than do caretakers of healthy children.

Cultural Constraints

Direct and Indirect forms. For example, if you have a loud argument in a restaurant, you are likely to attract disapproval, an indirect constraint, but if the argument turns into a physical fight, you may be arrested for disturbing the peace, which is a direct constraint.

Theories

Explanations of associations or laws

Fieldwork

Firsthand experience with the people being studied and the usual means by which anthropological information is obtained. Regardless of other methods that anthropologists may use (e.g., censuses, surveys), fieldwork usually involves participant-observation for an extended period of time, often a year or more. See Participant-observation.

Research on Emotional Development

For example, Alice Schlegel and Herbert Barry reported that adolescence is generally not a period of overt rebelliousness. The reason, they suggested, is related to the fact that most people in most societies live with or near (and depend on) close kin before and after they grow up. Only in societies like our own, where children leave home when they grow up, might adolescents be rebellious, possibly to prepare emotionally for going out on their own. "attachment" theory, the idea that attachment of an infant to a caretaker is a major milestone in development—one that has important survival value.

Attitudes That Hinder the Study of Culture

For example, most North Americans would react negatively to child betrothal, a kind of arranged marriage, but not question their own practice of dating a series of potential partners before selecting one.

Human Rights and Relativism

For example, some cultures emphasize individual political rights; others emphasize political order. Some cultures emphasize protection of individual property; others emphasize the sharing or equitable distribution of resources. Elizabeth Zechenter says that cultural relativists claim there are no universal principles of morality but insist on tolerance for all cultures. If tolerance is one universal principle, why shouldn't there be others? In addition, she points out that the concept of cultural relativism is often used to justify traditions desired by the dominant and powerful in a society. She points to a case in 1996, in Algeria, where two teenage girls were raped and murdered because they violated the fundamentalist edict against attending school. Are those girls any less a part of the culture than the fundamentalists?

Language Change

Geographic barriers, such as large bodies of water, deserts, and mountains, may separate speakers of what was once the same language, but distance by itself can also produce divergence. For example, if we compare dialects of English in the British Isles, it is clear that the regions farthest away from each other are the most different linguistically (compare the northeast of Scotland and London).

Parent-Child Play

In Western societies, it is commonly thought that "good" parents should provide their children with toys and play with them frequently, starting from birth and continuing through adolescence. Parents who do not do this are viewed as deficient. Inuit mothers and babies are together for long periods in their houses when the weather is harsh. The Yucatec Maya believe that "a quiet baby is a healthy baby" and, rather than stimulate babies, they are lulled to sleep whenever possible.

Task Assignment

In our society, young children are not expected to help much with chores. If they do have chores, such as tidying up their rooms, these are not likely to affect the welfare of the family or its ability to survive. In contrast, in some societies known to anthropology, young children, even 3- and 4-year-olds, are expected to help prepare food, care for animals, and carry water and firewood, as well as clean. Clearly, children who babysit infrequently are less attuned to others' needs than are children who babysit often.

Culture is Patterned

In saying that a culture is mostly integrated, we mean that the elements or traits that make up that culture are not just a random assortment of customs but are mostly adjusted to or consistent with one another. Refers to a society's ideas (values and norms) about how people should feel and behave in certain situations

Phonology

The study of the sounds in a language and how they are used. Finding it difficult to make certain sounds is only one of the reasons we have trouble learning a "foreign" language.

Diffusion

Is a process by which cultural elements are borrowed from another society and incorporated into the culture of the recipient. Direct Contact: Elements of a society's culture may first be taken up by neighboring societies and then gradually spread farther and farther afield. Ex: The spread of the use of paper (a sheet of interlaced fibers) is a good example of extensive diffusion by direct contact. Indirect Contact: Diffusion by intermediate contact occurs through the agency of third parties. Ex: Frequently, traders carry a cultural trait from the society that originated it to another group. For example, Phoenician traders introduced the ancient Greeks to the first alphabet, which the Phoenicians had themselves received from the Ugarit, another Semitic culture. Stimulus: knowledge of a trait belonging to another culture stimulates the invention or development of a local equivalent. A classic example of stimulus diffusion is the Cherokee syllabic writing system created by a Native American named Sequoya so that his people could write down their language. Sequoya got the idea from his contact with Europeans.

Parents Belief Systems

Its all about how they spend time with their children and how they want their children to be when they are grown up. But parents in all cultures do have ideas about what kinds of children they want to raise and how children should be treated. Many of these ideas are culturally patterned; they have been called "ethnotheories." For example, Sara Harkness and Charles Super, who studied Dutch parents and infants, found that Dutch parents believe in what they term the "three Rs"—rust (rest), regelmaat (regularity), and reinheid (cleanliness).

Perceptual Style: Field Independence or Dependence

John Berry suggested that different perceptual and cognitive processes may be selected and trained for in societies that differ in their adaptational requirements. Field independence means being able to isolate a part of a situation from the whole. The opposite perceptual style, field dependence, means that parts are not perceived separately; rather, the whole situation is focused on.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Language is a force in its own right, and it affects how individuals in a society perceive and conceive reality Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf suggested that language is a force in its own right, that it affects how individuals in a society perceive and conceive reality. In comparing the English language with Hopi, Whorf pointed out that English-language categories convey discreteness with regard to time and space, but Hopi does not. According to Ronald Wardhaugh, Whorf believed that these language differences lead Hopi and English speakers to see the world differently.

Participant-observation

Living among the people being studied—observing, questioning, and (when possible) taking part in the important events of the group. Writing or otherwise recording notes on observations, questions asked and answered, and things to check out later are parts of participant-observation.

Lexicon

The words and morphs, and their meanings, of a language; approximated by a dictionary

Concepts of Self

Many have concluded that the concept of self in many non-Western societies is quite different from the Western conception. For example, Geertz said that the Balinese describe a person as having many different roles, like an actor who plays different characters. The unique characteristics of a person are not emphasized; what is emphasized are the "masks" people wear and the "parts" they play. Labels used to describe such Western and non-Western cultural differences are "individualism" versus "holism" or "collectivism," "egocentric" versus "sociocentric," and the like. For example, the Japanese concept of self is often described as "relational" or "situational"; people exist in networks of relationships, and the ideal person has the ability to shift easily from one social situation to another.

Who adopts innovations?

Many researchers have studied the characteristics of "early adopters." Such individuals tend to be educated, high in social status, upwardly mobile, and, if they are property owners, have large farms and businesses.

Culture is Learned

Must be learned as well as shared. Humans eat because they must; but what and when and how they eat are learned and vary from culture to culture. In 2013, the discovery in Europe that ground meat sold as beef also contained horse meat was greeted with horror. The British, perhaps because they have a high regard for the horse and view horses as pets—that is, with particular familiarity—were especially horrified.4 Yet horse meat is considered a delicacy in some parts of Europe and Central Asia. North Americans may be slightly less repelled by the idea of horse meat, but they generally react with the same horror to eating dog meat.

Hypotheses

Predictions, which may be derived from theories about how variables are related

Ethnogenesis

Process whereby new cultures are cultures are created usually in the aftermath of violent events such as depopulation, relocation, enslavement, and genocide. The transformation of some Native American cultures and they merged is a good example. Some of the most dramatic examples of ethnogenesis occur in areas where escaped slaves (called Maroons) have settled. Maroon societies emerged in the past few hundred years in a variety of New World locations, from the United States to the West Indies and northern parts of South America.

Psychological Explanations of Cultural Variation

Psychological anthropologists are interested in the possible causes of psychological differences between societies, as well as the possible consequences of psychological variation. Adam Kardiner suggested that cultural patterns influence personality development and the resulting personality characteristics influence the culture. He believed that primary institutions, such as family organization and subsistence techniques, influence personality through customary childrearing practices, which in turn give rise to certain common personality characteristics of adults. In Kardiner's view, the secondary institutions of society, such as religion and art, are shaped by these common personality characteristics. Presumably, these secondary institutions have little relation to the adaptive requirements of the society. But they may reflect and express the motives, conflicts, and anxieties of typical members of the society.

Statistically significant

Refers to a result that would occur very rarely by chance. The result (and stronger ones) would occur fewer than 5 times out of a 100 by chance

Ethnocentric

Refers to judgment of other cultures solely in terms of one's own culture.

Creole Languages

Replaced pidgin language. This incorporates much of the vocab of another language but also have a grammar that differs from it and from the grammars of laborers native language. May resemble early human languages according to Derek Bickerton. Express future and past in the same grammatical way by using particles between subject and verb and they employ double negatives.

Parental Acceptance and Rejection of Children

Ronald Rohner and his colleagues did extensive work on the effects of parental acceptance and rejection on children after infancy. In a cross-cultural comparison of 101 societies, using measures based on ethnographic materials, Rohner found that children tend to be hostile and aggressive when they are neglected and not treated affectionately by their parents. In societies in which children tend to be rejected, adults seem to view life and the world as unfriendly, uncertain, and hostile. The Rohner study suggests that rejection is likely where mothers get no relief from child care. Children who were rejected tend to reject their own children.

Falsification

Showing that a theory seems to be wrong by finding that implications or predictions derivable from it are not consistent with objectively collected data

Intentional Innovation

Some discoveries and inventions arise out of deliberate attempts to produce a new idea or object. For example, during the Industrial Revolution, there was a great demand for inventions that would increase productivity.

Attitudes Toward Aggression

Some societies actively encourage children to be aggressive, not only to each other but even to the parents. Among the Xhosa of southern Africa, 2- or 3-year-old boys will be prodded to hit each other in the face while women look on laughing. In contrast, the Semai of central Malaya are famous for their timidity. Robert Dentan reports that they say that they do not get angry. research has shown that children who are physically punished when they are aggressive (the parents trying to minimize aggression) actually exhibit more aggression than children who are not physically punished.

Theoretical Construct

Something that cannot be observed or verified directly

Norms

Standards or rules about what is acceptable behavior.

Cultural Ecology

The analysis of the relationship between a culture and its environment

Cultural Relativism

The anthropological attitude that a society's customs and ideas should be described objectively and understood in the context of that society's culture. for example, a culture practices slavery, violence against women, torture, or genocide? If the strong doctrine of relativism is adhered to, then these cultural practices are not to be judged, and we should not try to eliminate them Michael Brown concludes, is less a comprehensive theory than a useful rule of thumb that keeps anthropologists alert to perspectives in other cultures that might challenge their own cultural beliefs about what is true.

Ethnocentrism

The attitude that other societies' customs and ideas can be judged in the context of one's own culture.

Compliance or Assertiveness

The cross-cultural results indicated that agricultural and herding societies are likely to stress responsibility and obedience, whereas hunting and gathering societies tend to stress self-reliance and individual assertiveness. The investigators suggested that agricultural and herding societies cannot afford departures from established routine because departures might jeopardize the food supply for long periods. Consider the results of a cross-national comparison of eight countries in which the researchers asked parents what quality they most wanted their school-age children to have. Parents in the more rural countries (Indonesia, Philippines, and Thailand) seldom mentioned independence and self-reliance but those in the more urban countries (Korea, Singapore, and the United States) did.

Sampling Universe

The list of cases to be sampled from

Subculture

The shared customs of a subgroup within a society.

Morph

The smallest unit of language that has a meaning

Globalization

The spread of cultural features around the world. The diffusion of a cultural trait does not mean that it is incorporated in exactly the same way. Ex: music, food, cell phones, social media, fashion, etc.

Kinesics

The study of communication by nonvocal means, including posture, mannerisms, body movement, facial expressions, and signs and gestures.

Historical Linguistics

The study of how languages change over time. For example, the following brief passage from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, written in the English of the 14th century, has recognizable elements but is different enough from modern English to require a translation. Full, for example, would be translated today as very. For example, English borrowed a lot of vocabulary from French after England was conquered by the French-speaking Normans in a.d. 1066.

Morphology

The study of how sound sequences convey meaning Often these meaningful sequences of sounds make up what we call words, but a word may be composed of a number of smaller meaningful units.

Measure

To describe how something compares with other things on some scale of variation

Schooling

To investigate the effect of schooling, researchers have compared children or adults who have not gone to school with those who have. All of this research has been done in societies that do not have compulsory schooling; otherwise, we could not compare the schooled with the unschooled. We know relatively little about the influence of school on social behavior. In contrast, we know more about how schooling influences performance on cognitive tests. for example, unschooled individuals in non-Western societies are not as likely as schooled individuals to perceive depth in two-dimensional pictures, do not perform as well on tests of memory, are not as likely to classify items in certain ways, and do not display evidence of formal-operational thinking. But schooling does not always produce superior performance on tests of inferential reasoning. United States, young children usually classify by color, and they classify more often by shape as they get older. And United States, young children usually classify by color, and they classify more often by shape as they get older.

Acculturation

To the changes that occur when different cultural groups come into intensive contact. A situation in which one of the societies in contact is much more powerful than the other. Examples of such indirectly forced change abound in the history of Native Americans in the United States. Although the federal government made few direct attempts to force people to adopt American culture, it did drive many native groups from their lands, thereby obliging them to give up many aspects of their traditional ways of life.

Describing a Culture

Understanding what is cultural involves two parts—separating what is shared from what is individually variable, and understanding whether common behaviors and ideas are learned. for example, that some limitations on behavior have a practical purpose: A spectator who disrupts the game by wandering onto the field would be required to leave. Other limitations are purely traditional. In our society, it is considered proper for a man to remove his overcoat if he becomes overheated, but others would undoubtedly frown upon his removing his trousers even if the weather were quite warm. Ideal cultural traits may differ from actual behavior because the ideal is based on the way society used to be. (Consider the ideal of "free enterprise," that industry should be totally free of governmental regulation.) Distance that people stand in a culture is a good example and easy to remember.

Culture Shock

When traveling abroad and encountering a radically different culture on an intimate level one can experience or a sense of confusion and uncertainty sometimes with feelings of anxiety that may affect people exposed to an alien culture or environment without adequate preparation.

Pidgin

When you use a simplified way of speaking and using linguistic features of one or more languages. Simplified languages and lack many of the building blocks found in the languages of whole societies, building blocks such as prepositions (to and on) and auxiliary verbs.

The Anthropology of Childhood

While we may think of socialization as directive and explicit—being told what to do and what not to do—much of children's learning is by "observing and pitching in."

Maladaptive Customs

are those that diminish the chances of survival and reproduction

Sociolinguists

concerned with the ethnography of speaking, or cultural and subcultural patterns of speech variation in different social contexts.

Adaptive Customs

enhance survival and reproductive success

Culture

is a set of learned behaviors and ideas that are characteristic of a particular society or other social group. Material culture could be a part of this. In the Reading: "to the total way of life" and "everyone is cultured, in the sense of participating in some culture or other". For example, we would have to say that Canada and the United States form a single society because the two groups generally speak English, live next to each other, and share many common ideas and behaviors. That is why we refer to "North American culture."

Psychological anthropology

is a very diverse field, but we focus here on four important questions: (1) To what extent do all human beings develop psychologically in the same ways? (2) If there are differences, what are they and what may account for them? (3) How do people in different societies conceive of individuals and their psychological development? and (4) How can understanding individuals or psychological processes help us understand culture and culture change?

Ethical Relativism

is the theory that holds that morality is relative to the norms of one's culture. That is, whether an action is right or wrong depends on the moral norms of the society in which it is practiced. The same action may be morally right in one society but be morally wrong in another.

Discovery and Inventions

may originate inside or outside a society, are ultimately the sources of all culture change. According to Ralph Linton, a discovery is any addition to knowledge, and an invention is a new application of knowledge.

Morpheme

one or more morphs with the same meaning For example, the prefix in-, as in indefinite, and the prefix un-, as in unclear, are morphs that belong to the morpheme meaning not. A free morpheme has meaning standing alone—that is, it can be a separate word. A bound morpheme displays its meaning only when attached to another morpheme.

Probability value

p-value the likelihood that an observed result could have occurred by chance

Unconscious Invention

referred to as accidental juxtaposition or unconscious invention. Linton suggested that some inventions, especially those of prehistoric days, were probably the consequences of literally dozens of tiny initiatives by "unconscious" inventors. From our point of view, it is difficult to imagine such a simple invention as the wheel taking so many centuries to come into being.

Research on Cognitive Development

suggested by Jean Piaget, the renowned Swiss psychologist, the "not very hungry" guy may not have acquired the concept of conservation, which characterizes a stage of thinking normally acquired by children between the ages of 7 and 11 in Western societies.

Syntax

the rules that predict how phrases and sentences are generally formed For example, an English speaker can tell that "Child the dog the hit" is not an acceptable sentence but "The child hit the dog" is fine.

Material Culture

things such as houses, musical instruments, and tools that are the products of customary behavior.

Reverse Culture Shock

upon returning home from a long stay in the field. Realize how unconscious your behavior is.