Anthropology Theory Test

Elementary Structure of Kinship

According to Lévi-Strauss's alliance theory, there are two different structural "models" of marriage exchange. Either the women of ego's group are offered to another group "explicitly defined" by social institutions: these are the "elementary structures of kinship". Or the group of possible spouses for the women in ego's group is "indetermined and always open", to the exclusion, however, of certain kin-people (nuclear family, aunts, uncles...), as in the Western world. Lévi-Strauss call these latter "complex structures of kinship". Levi-Strauss' model attempted to offer a single explanation for cross-cousin marriage, sister-exchange, dual organisation and rules of exogamy. Marriage rules over time create social structures, as marriages are primarily forged between groups and not just between the two individuals involved. When groups exchange women on a regular basis they marry together, with each marriage creating a debtor/creditor relationship which must be balanced through the "repayment" of wives, either directly or in the next generation. Levi-Strauss proposed that the initial motivation for the exchange of women was the incest taboo, which he deemed to be the beginning and essence of culture, as it was the first rule to check natural impulses; and secondarily the sexual division of labour. The former, by prescribing exogamy, creates a distinction between marriageable and tabooed women and thus necessitates a search for women outside one's own kin group ("marry out or die out"), which fosters exchange relationships with other groups; the latter creates a need for women to do "women's tasks". By necessitating wife-exchange arrangements, exogamy therefore promotes inter-group alliances and serves to form structures of social networks. Levi-Strauss also discovered that a wide range of historically unrelated cultures had the rule that individuals should marry their cross-cousin, meaning children of siblings of the opposite sex - from a male perspective that is either the FZD (father's sister's daughter in kinship abbreviation) or the MBD (mother's brother's daughter in kinship abbreviation). Accordingly, he grouped all possible kinship systems into a scheme containing three basic kinship structures, constructed out of two types of exchange. He called the three kinship structures elementary, semi-complex and complex. Elementary structures are based on positive marriage rules that specify whom a person must marry, while complex systems specify negative marriage rules (whom one must not marry), thus leaving a certain amount of room for choice based on preference. Elementary structures can operate based on two forms of exchange: restricted (or direct) exchange, a symmetric form of exchange between two groups (also called moieties) of wife-givers and wife-takers; in an initial restricted exchange FZ marries MB, with all children then being bilateral cross-cousins (the daughter is both MBD and FZD). Continued restricted exchange means that the two lineages marry together. Restricted exchange structures are generally quite uncommon. The second form of exchange within elementary structures is called generalised exchange, meaning that a man can only marry either his MBD (matrilateral cross-cousin marriage) or his FZD (patrilateral cross-cousin marriage). This involves an asymmetric exchange between at least three groups. Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage arrangements where the marriage of the parents is repeated by successive generations are very common in parts of Asia (e.g. amongst the Kachin). Levi-Strauss considered generalised exchange to be superior to restricted exchange because it allows the integration of indefinite numbers of groups [2]. Examples of restricted exchange are found in some tribes residing in Amazonia. These tribal societies are made up of multiple moieties which often split up, thus rendering them comparatively unstable. Generalised exchange is more integrative but contains an implicit hierarchy, for instance amongst the Kachin where wife-givers are superior to wife-takers. Consequently, the last wife-taking group in the chain is significantly inferior to the first wife-giving group to which it is supposed to give its wives. These status inequalities can destabilise the entire system or can at least lead to an accumulation of wives (and in the case of the Kachin also of bridewealth) at one end of the chain. From a structural perspective, matrilateral cross-cousin marriage is superior to its patrilateral counterpart; the latter has less potential to produce social cohesion since its exchange cycles are shorter (the direction of wife exchange is reversed in each successive generation). Levi-Strauss' theory is supported by fact that patrilateral cross-cousin marriage is in fact the rarest of three types. However, matrilateral generalised exchange poses a risk, as group A depends on being given a women from a group that it has not itself given a woman to, meaning that there is a less immediate obligation to reciprocate compared to a restricted exchange system. The risk created by such a delayed return is obviously lowest in restricted exchange systems. Levi-Strauss proposed a third structure between elementary and complex structures, called the semi-complex structure, or the Crow-Omaha system. Semi-complex structures contain so many negative marriage rules that they effectively come close to prescribing marriage to certain parties, thus somewhat resembling elementary structures. These structures are found amongst societies such as the Crow and Omaha native Indians in North America. In Levi-Strauss' order of things, the basic building block of kinship is not just the nuclear family, as in structural-functionalism, but the so-called kinship atom: the nuclear family together with the wife's brother. This "mother's brother" (from the perspective of the wife-seeking son) plays a crucial role in alliance theory, as he is the one who ultimately decides whom his daughter will marry. Moreover, it is not just the nuclear family as such but alliances between families that matter in regard to the creation of social structures, reflecting the typical structuralist argument that the position of an element in the structure is more significant than the element itself. Descent theory and alliance theory therefore look at two different sides of the same coin: the former emphasising bonds of consanguinity (kinship by blood), the latter stressing bonds of affinity (kinship by law or choice).

Geertz, Clifford James (b. 1926)

American anthropologist of a hermeneutic persuasion; one of the most influential figures in American anthropology in the second half of the 20th century. Geertz did fieldwork in Marocco and, most importantly, in Indonesia (Bali, Java). In his early years, he wrote on a wide variety of subjects, including nationalism, ecology, economy and religion. He became famous for his championship of "thick description" - a methodological ideal that places primacy on the detailed, tightly contextualized empirical description that must go before any attempt at generalization. Later, his interests have mainly been directed towards symbolism and interpretive anthropology. These interests - and Geertz's colorful and poetic style of writing - made him a popular figure among the American postmodernists in the 1980's. Geertz was influenced by a number of theoreticians, see for example: Cassirer, Ernst; Langer, Susanne; Ricoeur, Paul.

Rappaport, Roy Abraham ("Skip") (1926-1997)

American anthropologist. Ph.D. at Columbia University, under Andrew Vayda (published as Pigs for the ancestors: Ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea people, 1968). Fieldwork (1962-64, 1981-82) among the Tsembaga Maring, Papua New Guinea. His research interests focus particularly on human ecology, ritual and religion. His work on self-regulating ecological systems and the sacred were influenced by Gregory Bateson. In his posthumous Holiness and humanity: Ritual in the making of religious life (1999) he engages with and substantially expands Émile Durkheim's classical work on sacrality. President of the American Anthropological Association 1987-89). Active in a number of national and international committees on environmental problems.

Douglas, Mary Tew (1921-2007)

British anthropologist; studied under Evans-Pritchard. Developed a form of structuralism, emphasizing the problems of impure, intermediate (anomalous) states and categories. She later did pioneering work on consumption.

Hegemony

Discursive power (see discourse). Concept developed e.g. by the philosopher Gramsci, used of a system of meaning in a situation or society that overshadows and dominates other meaning systems. Power binds the body; hegemony binds communication. Legitimacy binds the imagination.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude Gustave (b. 1908)

French anthropologist (of Jewish descent, born in Belgium), known as the founder of structuralism, and widely considered the most influential anthropologist of the second half of the 20th century. After studying law and philosophy in Paris, Lévi-Strauss travelled to Brazil, where he taught at the University of São Paolo for some years and conducted field studies among various tribes in the Amazon. During the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss moved to New York, where he taught at the New School of Social Research, befriended American anthropologists and a number of European intellectuals, who had fled to the U.S. to escape Nazism. The most important of his new acquaintances was the Russian semiotician Roman Jakobson, who exterted a deep influence on Lévi-Strauss's anthropology. On his return to France, Lévi-Strauss published Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949; English edition: The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1969), in which he proposed a radically different view of kinship that would later be known as "alliance theory" (as opposed to the "descent theory" propounded by the British structural functionalists). Few years later, he published an autobiography, Tristes tropiques (1955), a lyrical ethnographic meditation on the lost world of primitive man, and Anthropologie structurale (1958; English edition: Structural Anthropology, 1963). His position as the most influential anthropologist and contemporary thinker in France was by now secure, and in the course of the 1960's, as his books were belatedly translated into English, his impact was felt globally. Lévi-Strauss's work falls roughly into two periods, during which he focused, first, on kinship, and then, following his perhaps most famous book, La pensée sauvage (1962; English edition: The Savage Mind, 1966), on myth. His Mythologiques (in four volumes 1964-71; English edition: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, 1969-81) is a massive, comparative exploration of South American myth and cosmology. Aside from Jakobson, the most important influence on Lévi-Strauss was Marcel Mauss, whose theory of gift-giving underlies the structuralist theory of kinship alliances. For a further account of Lévi-Strauss's thought, see structuralism.

Mauss, Marcel-Israël (1872-1950)

French anthropologist and sociologist; nephew and colleague of Durkheim; often considered the father of modern French anthropology. Mauss cooperated with Durkheim and the circle around the journal Année sociologique on a number of projects; and after his uncle's death, became the leading figure in that circle. His written production was not extensive, and consists mainly of a number of articles on a wide variety of subjects - from sacrifice to personhood, many of which have been highly influential in anthropology. In 1925, along with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Paul Rivet, he founded the Institute d'etnologie at the University of Paris. Though he never did fieldwork, Mauss advocated a stringent methodology, which, particularly through his student, Marcel Griaule, would influence French anthropology profoundly. Mauss's most influential work is his Essay sur le don (1923-24; English translation: The Gift. Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies, 1954), a comparative essay on gift-giving and exchange in "primitive" societies. On the basis of empirical examples from a wide range of societies, Mauss describes the obligations attendent on gift-giving: the obligation to give gifts (by giving, one shows oneself as generous, and thus as deserving of respect), the obligation to receive them (by receiving the gift, one shows respect to the giver, and concommittantly proves one's own generocity), and the obligation to return the gift (thus demonstrating that one's honor is - at least - equivalent to that of the original giver). Gift-giving is thus steeped in morality, and by giving, receiving and returning gifts, a moral bond between the persons exchanging gifts. At the same time, Mauss emphasizes the competitive and strategic aspect of gift-giving: by giving more than one's competitors, one lays claim to greater respect than them, and gift-giving contests (such as the famous North-West Coast Native American potlatch), are thus common in the ethnographic record. In this work, Mauss thus lays the foundation for a theoretical understanding of the nature of social relations. The objects and services exchanged in "primitive" gift-giving are, as Mauss points out, thus laden with "power" (the Polynesian words mana and hau are used to refer to this "power in the gift"). Though a similar "power" is present to a certain extent in modern gifts as well, Mauss shows that gifts in traditional societies are more complex and multivalent than anything we know from modern society. The gift, as Mauss sees it, is more than a simple commodity or memento changing hands - it is a "total prestation" (préstation totale), which metonymically (as part for whole) stands for every aspect of the society it is part of. The gift is economic, political, kinship-oriented, legal, mythological, religious, magical, practical, personal and social. By moving such an object through the social landscape, the gift-giver so to speak rearranges the fabric of sociality - and it is this that forms the basis of the gift's power. The Gift is a short book, which has inspired complex discussions on a wide range of subjects in anthropology. Most prominently, it was a prime influence behind Lévi-Strauss's structuralism (where the gift is understood as a prototype of symbolic exchange, and interpreted as the basic mechanism underlying the creation of meaning). Lévi-Strauss acknowledges his debt to Mauss in Introduction à l'oeuvre de Marcel Mauss (1950; English translation: Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 1987). Later, the book was extensively debated by neo-Marxian and poststructuralist authors, such as Maurice Godelier, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu; it has deeply influenced for example economic anthropology (Polanyi), methodological individualist theory (Bailey), feminist and gender studies (Strathern) etc. The vastly productive anthropological subdiscipline of exchange theory (Weiner, Thomas etc.) is based on the work of Mauss (with additional founding contributions from e.g. Marx and Simmel).

Marx, Karl Heinrich (1818-1883)

German-Jewish social philosopher and revolutionary. Marx is known simultaneously as the first, and perhaps the greatest, modern sociologist, and as one of the most influential social activists of all time. His writings were destined to become baseline texts of all social theory, and ideological baselines of mass social movements, from political parties and labor unions to liberation armies and an entire "socialist" world order. More people have died in Marx's name than in any other name except Jesus's and Mohammed's. Marx is thus a gigantic historical figure, on a par with Napoleon, Hitler or Genghis Khan; but also an extremely innovative and perceptive social theorist. It is symptomatic that the works of the two other "classical sociologists" - Durkheim and Weber - are often viewed as reactions to Marx. In his sociological theory Marx is inspired by such thinkers as Vico, Rousseau, Saint-Simon, and - particularly - Hegel, as well as by the general evolutionist trend of the 19th century. There is an unusual blend of romanticism and materialism in all of his work: Marx thus describes world history and social evolution as a steadily growing accumulation of power, which, at a given historical instant, would release itself in Communist utopia. As Marshall Berman (1982) so clearly has stated, Marx was as much an artist as a scientist and a politician. His influence is - precisely for this reason - profound throughout the social sciences. Marx was the first to see society as a system, an identifiable creature, with its own dynamics, its own logic, its own inherent development. Later, others would describe this system differently, but they would still describe it as a system, and Marx was the first to do this in a systematic way. As regards Marx's own idea of what constituted the internal "glue" of the system, it was clearly biased toward what is often called "the material". This we may understand, roughly, as the physical "stuff" without which we would not even exist. It follows that social control of access to such physical "stuff" (food, fuel) is the key to social power. Marx refers to this as the infrastructure of society. On this level society is produced as such, and the basis for this production is most fundamentally, material. Through material production we create the fields and houses, roads and machines that make it possible to live in our society. On top of this production of the material base (infrastructure, basis) of existence, there exists an Überbau - a superstructure - an organization and ideology, that reflects over the infrastructure and legitimates the power relations that obtain in relation to it. Between the infrastructure and the superstructure, and between the component parts of each, there pertains a constant tension, a dialectic, which drives forth social change - towards greater and greater concentrations of power. (Except of course that suddenly, this entire dynamic would be broken and Communist egalitarianism would prevail.) Marx's legacy is complex, and cannot be summarized meaningfully here, but there are certain themes in his work that have, in time, become central to anthropology. Anthropologists were not, at the outset, particularly interested in Marxian thought. Marx was explicitly concerned with modern society, and his essays about "pre-capitalist" social formations, were often (though perceptive) quite speculative. The explicit evolutionism in Marx's writings discredited him both in the Boasian, American tradition, and in the British tradition from Malinowski. Marx was first "discovered" in anthropology by American materialist anthropologists such as Julian Steward, who could not, however, refer to his writings directly during the McCarthy era. From Steward, and from the economic historian Karl Polanyi, the interest in Marx was passed on to Steward's students (e.g. Fried, Wolf, Mintz, Sahlins), who expressed their Marxian leanings explicitly after the 1960's. Marx was also "discovered" by French anthropologists (e.g. Godelier and Meillassoux) brought up on Lévi-Straussian structuralism, who, starting in the 1960's, elaborated a major theoretical revision of Marxian thinking: The infrastructure, which produces the basis of social existence, also produces the symbolic basis of society. To produce is to produce meaning as well as material commodities and resources. This might be considered the central insight produced by neo-Marxist anthropology. It is possible that Marx himself may have thought along these same lines. His work is large and complex, and not always consistent with itself. In his early work, and in his magnum opus, Das Kapital (Vol. 1: 1867), he seems to state ideas similar to Godelier's. But at the same time, there is an "orthodox" Marx, an ideological construct that was created in the Soviet Union that states a simpler creed: a belief in the absolute primacy of the material (i.e. heavy industrial production). To understand the depth of Marx's sociology, it is necessary to forget the ideological constructs derived from his thought, and focus on the thoughts themselves. Among the most important aspects of Marxian thought that have impacted on anthropology, are: * The idea of power, which is more explicitly stated in Marx than in any other social theorist. In this respect, Marx has contributed significantly to political anthropology. * The complementary concepts of alienation and commodity fetishism. On the one hand, the worker is (through money and the market economy) distanced from the immediate fruits of his work, and thus alienated from the world, reduced from an active human being to a passive result or object. On the other hand, commodities, by the multiple distancings from productive actors that they have been subjected to, attain a mystical, fetishistic power. Marx's contribution has in this case had an impact on exchange theory and theories of consumption and identity. * The scheme of historical development in Europe - modernization. Marx's description of the rise of Capitalism, coupled with Weber's and Durkheim's versions of the same story, constitute the classical Grand Narrative of the social sciences. His historical insights are in many cases profound, and have been followed up by many modern historicans. The neo-Marxian wave of the 1960's and 70's was superceded, during the 80's, by a movement toward what has been refered to as "practice theory". This movement is, as a whole, heavily influenced by Marx, and his influence is very evident in its prime theoretician, Pierre Bourdieu, as well. Among other things, Bourdieu follows up Marx's insistence on seeing actors as concrete, physical human beings in a concrete, physical world.

Mytheme

In the study of mythology is the essential kernel of a myth—an irreducible, unchanging element,[1] a minimal unit that is always found shared with other, related mythemes and reassembled in various ways—"bundled" was Claude Lévi-Strauss's image—[2] or linked in more complicated relationships, like a molecule in a compound. For example, the myths of Adonis and Osiris share several elements, leading some scholars to conclude that they share a source, i.e., images passed down in cultures or from one to another, being ascribed new interpretations of the action depicted as well as new names in various readings of icons. Claude Lévi-Strauss, who gave the term wide circulation,[3] wrote, "If one wants to establish a parallel between structural linguistics and the structural analysis of myths, the correspondence is established, not between mytheme and word but between mytheme and phoneme."[4]

Gramsci, Antonio (1891-1937)

Italian socialist, political theorist and revolutionary, whose theories of hegemony and power became a major influence in neo-Marxian and postmodernist anthropology.

Multivocality (??)

Literally, 'many voices'; an approach to archaeological reasoning, explanation, and understanding that accepts a high degree of relativism and thus encourages the contemporaneous articulation of numerous different narratives or parallel discourses. Thus different groups will adopt different positions in relation to their interpretation of the past, and the meanings that they attach to physical remains. While respecting the right of any group or individual to develop and expound a particular interpretation of some aspect of the past there is some debate as to whether all such parallel positions should be treated as equally acceptable, especially where a particular position is being overtly used, or misused, as a political tool. Ian Hodder has argued (2000) that the misuse of the past can only be evaluated socially and ethically, while most archaeologists, however relativist, would accept that archaeological interpretation should be grounded in, and somehow answerable to, data of some kind.

The Gift

Mauss's essay focuses on the way that the exchange of objects between groups builds relationships between them. He argued that giving an object creates an inherent obligation on the receiver to reciprocate the gift. The resulting series of exchanges between groups thus provided one of the earliest forms of social solidarity used by humans. The essay drew on a wide range of ethnographic examples. Mauss drew on Bronisław Malinowski's study of kula exchange, the institution of the potlatch, and Polynesian ethnography to demonstrate how widespread practices of gift giving were in non-European societies. In later sections of the book he examined Indian history and suggested that traces of gift exchange could be found in more 'developed' societies as well. In the conclusion of the book he suggested that industrialized, secular societies such as his own could benefit from recognizing this dynamic of gift giving.

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857-1913)

Swiss linguist who advocated a strict division between the study of language as an system existing at any given point in history (langue: the synchronic rules and grammar of language), and as it changes and transfors through time parole (language in its actual, diachronic, use). Saussure's main emphasis lay on understanding the latter aspect, the workings of language here and now, the fact that we are able to speak and understand each other. Saussure's semiotics (science of signs and meaning) had at its point of departure the observation that phonetic differences that were crucially significant in one language (as in "sad", vs. "sat", in English), might be semantically irrelevant in another (Russian "sat/sad" = garden). The meaning of words was not, Saussure showed, a product of the inherent qualities of the phonemes of which they consisted, but of the differences between the phonemes. Saussure asserted langue could be reduced to an abstract structure of differences (contrasts, oppositions), whose meaning was arbitrarily assigned by society. On the basis of these observations, Saussure built a modernized semiotics, which could be applied not only to language but to the entire field of signification and symbolism. Saussure's semiotics has been hugely influential in many humanistic disciplines. It entered anthropology primarily through the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who made use of the adapted form of semiotics developed by Roman Jakobson in his work on kinship and myth. Saussure published very little, but his lectures, in Paris and Geneva, were posthumously reconstructed by two of his students and published as Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics, 1916).

World Systems Theory (??)

The World-systems approach is a view of the recent five centuries of world history, one of several historical and current applications of some, but by no means all, tenets of Marxism as well as ideas by a range of theorists from Adam Smith to Max Weber, to studying international relations, world history, and the sociology of cross-border flows and linkages. Not all the world-system analysts are Marxists and not all Marxists are world-systems thinkers. Immanuel Wallerstein, the founder of the intellectual school of world-systems theory, characterizes the world system as a set of mechanisms which redistributes resources from the periphery to the core. In his terminology, the core is the developed, industrialized part of the world, and the periphery is the "underdeveloped", typically raw materials-exporting, poor part of the world; the market being the means by which the core exploits the periphery. Wallerstein traces the origin of today's world-system to the "long 16th century" (a period that began with the discovery of the Americas by west European sailors and ended with the English Revolution of 1640), and defines it as: "...a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that it has a life-span over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others. One can define its structures as being at different times strong or weak in terms of the internal logic of its functioning."[1] Apart of these, Wallerstein defines four temporal features. Cyclical rhythms represent the short-term fluctuation of economy, while secular trends mean deeper long run tendencies, such as general economic growth or decline. The term contradiction means a general controversy in the system, usually concerning some short term vs. long term trade-offs. For example the problem of underconsumption, wherein the drive-down of wages increases the profit for the capitalists on the short-run, but considering the long run, the decreasing of wages may have a crucially harmful effect by reducing the demand for the product. The last temporal feature is the crisis: a crisis occurs, if a constellation of circumstances brings about the end of the system. Technically speaking, World-systems analysis is not a theory, but an approach to social analysis and social change. It is based in part on the works of Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein with major contributions by Christopher Chase-Dunn, Volker Bornschier, Janet Abu Lughod, Thomas D. Hall, Kunibert Raffer and others. It should be noted that World-systems analysis is not only derived from the neo-Marxist literature on development but also from the French Annales School tradition (especially Fernand Braudel), dependency theory, and several generations of close studies on the economic and political histories of Africa, Asia, Latin-America and Eastern Europe. In sociology, a primary alternative perspective is world society theory, most associated with the work of John W. Meyer.

Structuralism

Theretical school in French anthropology, founded by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Like British structural functionalism, structuralism builds in part on the work of Durkheim and Mauss, but Lévi-Strauss was also inspired by linguistic and semiotic theories of meaning (Saussure, Jakobson). There are particularly two themes that dominate in structuralist thinking: (1) the emphasis on meaning and symbolism, particularly the subconscious aspects of meaning, and (2) the emphasis on exchange. Empirically, the structuralists have done much work with myth and kinship. While the structural functionalists concentrated on social structure, the structuralists focused on structures of meaning. (See also neo-marxism, postmodernism.)

Labor Power

\is a crucial concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy. He regarded labour power as the most important of the productive forces of human beings. Labour power can be simply defined as work-capacity, the ability to do work. Labour power exists in any kind of society, but on what terms it is traded or combined with means of production to produce goods and services has historically varied greatly. Under capitalism, according to Marx, the productive powers of labour appear as the creative power of capital. Indeed "labour power at work" becomes a component of capital, it functions as working capital. Work becomes just work, workers become an abstract labour force, and the control over work becomes mainly a management prerogative. Marx introduces the concept in chapter 6 of the first volume of Capital (generally known by its original German title, Das Kapital), as follows: "By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description." [1] He adds further on that: "Labour-power, however, becomes a reality only by its exercise; it sets itself in action only by working. But thereby a definite quantity of human muscle, nerve. brain, &c., is wasted, and these require to be restored." [2] A much shorter, to-the-point explanation of labour-power can be found in the introduction and second chapter of Marx's Wage Labour and Capital: [3]

reciprocity (or reciprocal exchange)

a relationship between people that involves a mutual exchange of gifts of goods, services, or favors. Inherent in reciprocal gift giving is the obligation to return a gift in a culturally appropriate manner. Failure to do so is likely to end the reciprocal relationship. Reciprocity requires adequacy of response but not necessarily mathematical equality. Reciprocity is a common way of creating and continuing bonds between people. See generalized reciprocity, balanced reciprocity, and negative reciprocity.

homeostasis

a term used in systems thinking to describe the action of negative feedback processes in maintaining the system at a constant equilibrium state.

Victor Turner

was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals and rites of passage. His work, along with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as symbolic and interpretive anthropology. Victor Turner was born in Glasgow, Scotland, son to Normand and Violet Turner. His father was an electrical engineer and his mother a repertory actress who founded the Scottish National Players. Turner initially studied poetry and classics at the University College London. As a school boy Turner was an avid reader of the classics, religious works, epics, and poetry [1]. In 1941 Turner was drafted into World War II, and served as a noncombatant until 1944. During his five years of service he met and married Edith Turner. It was during his war experience that his interest in anthropology was sparked. He returned to University College in 1946 with a new foucus on Anthropology. He later pursued graduate studies in anthropology at Manchester University. Turner's interest in "social drama" has self-acknowledged roots in the precedent of Kenneth Burke and Erving Goffman. While at Manchester Turner developed a relationship with Max Gluckman, the head of the anthropology department at the time. This eventually lead to Turner's position as research officer for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. It was through the position that Turner started his life long study of the Ndembu tribe of Zambia. While observing the Ndembu, Turner became intrigued by ritual and rites of passage. He completed his PhD in 1955. Turner's doctoral dissertation did not reflect his interest in ritual. Due to Max Gluckman, the Rhodes-Livingston Institute, and the nature of British social anthropology Turner was discouraged from pursuing such interests. Like many of the Manchester Anthropologists of his time, he also became concerned with conflict, and created the new concept of social drama in order to account for the symbolism of conflict and crisis resolution among Ndembu villagers. Turner spent his career exploring rituals. As a professor at the University of Chicago, Turner began to apply his study of rituals and rites of passage to world religions and the lives of religious heroes. Turner gained notoriety by exploring Arnold van Gennep's threefold structure of rites of passage and expanding theories on the liminal phase. Van Gennep's structure consisted of a pre-liminal phase (separation), a liminal phase (transition), and a post-liminal phase (reincorporation). Turner noted that in liminality, the transitional state between two phases, individuals were "betwixt and between": they did not belong to the society that they previously were a part of and they were not yet reincorporated into that society. Liminality is a limbo, an ambiguous period characterized by humility, seclusion, tests, sexual ambiguity, and communitas. Communitas is defined as an unstructured community where all members are equal. Turner was also a committed ethnographer who constantly mused about his craft in his books and articles. Eclectic in his use of ideas borrowed from other theorists, he was rigorous in demanding that the ideas he developed illuminate ethnographic data; a theorist for theory's sake he was not. A powerful example of his attitudes can be found in the opening paragraph of the essay "Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors" in Victor Turner's Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (1974). There he writes, In moving from experience of social life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these become relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find very frequently that it is not a theorist's whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience. Turner's work on ritual has stood as one of the most influential theories in anthropology during the twentieth century; but recently this "Turnerian Paradigm" has been challenged. With reference to his concept of communitas, John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow's work Contesting the Sacred (1991) directly opposes it (briefly, as idealized); and more recently a compilation of essays on pilgrimage edited by John Eade & Simon Coleman, Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion (2004) have suggested that the work has rendered pilgrimage neglected as an area of anthropological study, due to Turner's assertion that pilgrimage was, by its liminal nature, extraordinary and not part of daily life (and therefore not a part of the make up of everyday society). Performance studies scholar Richard Schechner drew from Turner's theories on social drama and liminality, and the two worked collaboratively until his death. Turner's work has resurfaced in recent years (90s-00s) among a variety of disciplines, proving to be an important part of the social sciences. Edith Turner, Victor Turner's wife, has also both built upon and developed innovative ideas that complement notions of liminality, communitas, and the ritual process. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Virginia and the editor of the journal Anthropology and Humanism.

Social fact

are the values, cultural norms, and social structures external to the individual. For French sociologist Émile Durkheim, sociology was 'the science of social facts'. The task of the sociologist, then, was to search for correlations between social facts to reveal laws. Having discovered the laws of social structure, it is posited that the sociologist is then able to determine whether any given society is 'healthy' or 'pathological' and prescribe appropriate remedies. A total social fact [fait social total] is "an activity that has implications throughout society, in the economic, legal, political, and religious spheres." (Sedgewick 2002: 95) "Diverse strands of social and psychological life are woven together through what he [Marcel Mauss] comes to call 'total social facts'. A total social fact is such that it informs and organises seemingly quite distinct practices and institutions." (Edgar 2002:157) The term was popularized by Marcel Mauss in his classic The Gift where he wrote, "These phenomena are at once legal, economic, religious, aesthetic, morphological and so on. They are legal in that they concern individual and collective rights, organized and diffuse morality; they may be entirely obligatory, or subject simply to praise or disapproval. They are at once political and domestic, being of interest both to classes and to clans and families. They are religious; they concern true religion, animism, magic and diffuse religious mentality. They are economic, for the notions of value, utility, interest, luxury, wealth, acquisition, accumulation, consumption and liberal and sumptuous expenditure are all present..." (Mauss 1923-34, translation by Cunnison, 1966: 76-77).

Total Social Phenomenon

is "an activity that has implications throughout society, in the economic, legal, political, and religious spheres." (Sedgewick 2002: 95) "Diverse strands of social and psychological life are woven together through what he [Marcel Mauss] comes to call 'total social facts'. A total social fact is such that it informs and organises seemingly quite distinct practices and institutions." (Edgar 2002:157) The term was popularized by Marcel Mauss in his classic The Gift where he wrote, "These phenomena are at once legal, economic, religious, aesthetic, morphological and so on. They are legal in that they concern individual and collective rights, organized and diffuse morality; they may be entirely obligatory, or subject simply to praise or disapproval. They are at once political and domestic, being of interest both to classes and to clans and families. They are religious; they concern true religion, animism, magic and diffuse religious mentality. They are economic, for the notions of value, utility, interest, luxury, wealth, acquisition, accumulation, consumption and liberal and sumptuous expenditure are all present..." (Mauss 1923-34, translation by Cunnison, 1966: 76-77).

Avunculate

is a custom in some societies where the mother's brothers are very important in inheritance or in children's upbringing. The term avunculate is a technical term used in kinship anthropology to describe the relationship between someone and his/her maternal uncle, or, on the other side, between the person and his/her uterine (sororal) nephew or niece. The term "avunculate" comes from the Latin word "Avunculus", which is a kinship term used to describe the brother of the mother, in opposition to the brother of the father "Patruus". In the societies where maternal filiation is strongly represented, the role of a father could be taken over by a maternal uncle, who would become a "social father" of his sister's children. The first surviving written account of avunculate customs occurs in the works of Tacitus (Germania, VIII, 18-20). "Avunculate. The special relationship existing in some societies between a maternal uncle and his sister's son; maternal uncles regarded as a collective body. 1920 R. H. LOWIE Prim. Soc. v. 81 Ethnologists describe under the heading of avunculate the customs regulating in an altogether special way the relations of a nephew to his maternal uncle. Ibid. vii. 171 The Omaha are patrilineal now, but their having the avunculate proves that they once traced descent through the mother, for on no other hypothesis can such a usage be explained. .. " [1] The notion of "avunculate" does not only pertain to the line of descent (mostly rare), but can also describe an expression of matrimonial alliance. The marriage of a man with the daughter of his sister is also called "avunculate" marriage. The term "avunculate" applies to what ties the brother of the mother and the son/daughter of the sister, and it also can be used to describe the relationship between a paternal uncle and a child of his brother [2]. At avunculate time the maternal family is already headed by a man, a father or a brother of the woman given into another's family or clan. The matrilocal spousal residence is replaced with patrilocal one, the man does not move any more into the house of his wife, but just the opposite, in marriage he takes her into his house. At the same time a wife and her children retain their affiliation with the former maternal family and clan. In such system the factual father of the child, instead of the blood father, is the uncle on the maternal side. And while a mother remains in the husband's house, her children (sons) "return home". The blood father and his relatives are obligated to turn the child over to his uncle, "return" him to his family. M.O.Kosven called this order "return of the children". The nephews are all-powerful and have exclusive privileges in the family of the uncle on the maternal side. [3]

Thick Description

is a term borrowed by Geertz from Gilbert Ryle to describe and define the aim of interpretive anthropology. It can be broken down as follows. Social Anthropology is based on ethnography, or the study of culture. Culture, in turn, is based on the symbols that guide community behavior. Symbols obtain meaning from the role which they play in the patterned behavior of social life. Because of the intertwined nature of culture and behavior, they cannot be studied separately. By analyzing culture, one develops a "thick description" of a culture which details "what the natives think they are up to." This thick description is developed by looking at both the whole culture and the parts of the culture (such as laws). Thick description is an interpretation of what the natives are thinking made by an outsider who cannot think like a native. Thick description is made possible by anthropological theory (Geertz 1973d; see also Tongs 1993). To illustrate thick description, Geertz uses an example taken from Ryle which discusses the difference between a "blink" and a "wink." One, a blink, is an involuntary twitch (the thin description) and the other, a wink, is a conspiratorial signal to a friend (the thick description). While the physical movements involved in each are identical, each has a distinct meaning "as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows" (Geertz 1973d:6). A wink is a special form of communication which is: deliberate; to someone in particular; to impart a particular message; according to a socially established code; and without the knowledge of the other members (if any) of the group of which the winker and winkee are a part. In addition, the wink can be a parody of someone else's wink or an attempt to lead others to believe that a conspiracy of sorts is afoot. Each type of wink can be considered to be a separate cultural category (Geertz 1973d:6-7). The combination of the blink and the types of winks discussed above (and those that lie between them) produce "a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures" (Geertz 1973d:7) in which winks, twitches, etc. are produced and interpreted. This, Geertz argues, is the object of ethnography: to decipher this hierarchy of cultural categories. The thick description, therefore, is a description of the particular form of communication used, e.g., a parody of someone else's wink or a "normal" conspiratorial wink.

Modernization Theory

is a theory used to explain the process of Modernization within societies. The theory looks at the internal factors of a country while assuming that, with assistance, "traditional" countries can be brought to development in the same manner more developed countries have. Modernization theory attempts to identify the social variables which contribute to social progress and development of societies, and seeks to explain the process of social evolution. Not surprisingly, modernization theory is subject to criticism originating among communist and free-market ideologies, world systems theorists, globalization theory and dependency theory among others. Modernization theory not only stresses the process of change but also the responses to that change. It also looks at internal dynamics while referring to social and cultural structures and the adaptation of new technologies.

Structural Linguistics

is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units. He is thus known as the father of modern linguistics for bringing about the shift from diachronic to synchronic analysis.[1] Structural linguistics involves collecting a corpus of utterances and then applying discovery procedures to them in an attempt to classify all of the elements of the corpus at their different linguistic levels: the phonemes, morphemes, lexical categories, noun phrases, verb phrases, and sentence types.[2] One set of discovery procedures are Saussure's methods of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis that respectively define units syntactically and lexically, according to their contrast with the other units in the system. Basic theories and methods The foundation of structural linguistics is the idea that the identity of a sign is determined by its existence in a state of contrast with other signs that is either syntagmatic or paradigmatic. This idea contrasted drastically with the idea that signs can be examined in isolation from a language and stressed Saussure's point that linguistics must treat language synchronically. Paradigmatic relations are sets of units that exist in the mind, such as the phonological set cat, bat, hat, mat, fat, or the morphological set ran, run, running. The units of a set must have something in common with one another, but they must contrast too, otherwise they could not be distinguished from each other and would collapse into a single unit, which could not constitute a set on its own, since a set always consists of more than one unit. Syntagmatic relations are temporal and consist of a row of units that contrast with one another, like "the man hit the ball" or "the ball was hit by the man". What units can be used in each part of the row is determined by the units that surround them. There is therefore an interweaving effect between syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. But whereas paradigms are always part of the langue, syntagma can belong to speech or langue, and so the linguist must determine how often they have been used before they can be assured that they belong to the latter. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations provide the structural linguist with a simple method of categorization for phonology, morphology and syntax. Take morphology, for example. The signs cat and cats are associated in the mind, producing an abstract paradigm of the word forms of cat. Comparing this with other paradigms of word forms, we can note that in the English language the plural often consists of little more than adding an S to the end of the word. Likewise, through paradigmatic and syntagmatic analysis, we can discover the syntax of sentences. For instance, contrasting the syntagma je dois ("I should") and dois je? ("Should I?") allows us to realize that in French we only have to invert the units to turn a sentence into a question.

Class Consciousness

is consciousness of one's social class or economic rank in society.[1] From the perspective of Marxist theory, it refers to the self-awareness, or lack thereof, of a particular class; its capacity to act in its own rational interests; or its awareness of the historical tasks implicit (given the precepts of Marxism) to it. Another Marxist approach is to consider the transition from a "class in itself", which is defined as a category of people having a common relation to the means of production, to a "class for itself", which is defined as a stratum organized in active pursuit of its own interests.[2] Members of "lower" classes often have a greater class consciousness than do members of the "upper" class. However, this may not necessarily be the case in societies where class hierarchy is a strict and deep tradition.[citation needed] The United States has the majority of its class-related issues clouded by race. People of color in the United States are generally less well-off financially than whites. A more advanced degree of class consciousness would make one aware that all poor people in a country have a common ground that goes deeper than racial divides.[3] Defining a person's social class can be a determinant for his awareness of it. Marxists define classes on the basis of their relation to the means of production - especially their ownership or non-ownership of it. Non-marxist social scientists distinguish various social strata on the basis of income, occupation, or status.[4] Early in the nineteenth century the labels "working classes" and "middle classes" were already coming into common usage. "The old hereditary aristocracy, reinforced by the new gentry who owed their success to commerce, industry, and the professions, evolved into an "upper class". Its consciousness was formed in part by public schools (in the British sense) and Universities. The upper class tenaciously maintained control over the political system, depriving not only the working classes but the middle classes of a voice in the political process." [5]

Dependency Theory

is essentially a body of social science theories predicated on the notion that resources flow from a "periphery" of poor and underdeveloped states to a "core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. It is a central contention of dependency theory that poor states are impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way poor states are integrated into the "world system". The theory arose around 1960 as a reaction to some earlier theories of development which held that all societies progress through similar stages of development, that today's underdeveloped areas are thus in a similar situation to that of today's developed areas at some time in the past, and that therefore the task in helping the underdeveloped areas out of poverty is to accelerate them along this supposed common path of development, by various means such as investment, technology transfers, and closer integration into the world market. Dependency theory rejected this theory, arguing that underdeveloped countries are not merely primitive versions of developed countries, but have unique features and structures of their own; and, importantly, are in the situation of being the weaker members in a world market economy, whereas the developed nations were never in an analogous position; they never had to exist in relation to a bloc of more powerful countries than themselves. Dependency theorists argued, in opposition to free market economists, that underdeveloped countries needed to reduce their connectedness with the world market so that they could pursue a path more in keeping with their own needs, less dictated by external pressures.[1]The premises are that: 1. Poor nations provide natural resources, cheap labor, a destination for obsolete technology, and markets to the wealthy nations, without which the latter could not have the standard of living they enjoy. 2. Wealthy nations actively perpetuate a state of dependence by various means. This influence may be multifaceted, involving economics, media control, politics, banking and finance, education, culture, sport, and all aspects of human resource development (including recruitment and training of workers). 3. Wealthy nations actively counter attempts by dependent nations to resist their influences by means of economic sanctions and/or the use of military force. Dependency theory states that the poverty of the countries in the periphery is not because they are not integrated into the world system, or not 'fully' integrated as is often argued by free market economists, but because of how they are integrated into the system.

Interpretive Anthropology

is studying the ways in which people understand and interpret their surroundings as well as the actions and utterances of the other members of their society. These interpretations form a shared cultural system of meaning, i.e., understandings shared, to varying degrees, among members of the same society. (Des Chene 1996:1274). Symbolic anthropology studies symbols and the processes (such as myth and ritual) by which humans assign meanings to these symbols in order to address fundamental questions about human social life (Spencer 1996:535). According to Geertz, man is in need of symbolic "sources of illumination" to orient himself with respect to the system of meaning that is any particular culture (1973a:45). This shows the interpretive approach to symbolic anthropology. Turner states that symbols instigate social action and are "determinable influences inclining persons and groups to action" (1967:36). This shows the symbolic approach to symbolic anthropology. Symbolic anthropology views culture as an independent system of meaning deciphered by interpreting key symbols and rituals (Spencer 1996:535). There are two major premises governing symbolic anthropology. The first is that "beliefs, however unintelligible, become comprehensible when understood as part of a cultural system of meaning" (Des Chene 1996:1274). The second major premise is that actions are guided by interpretation, allowing symbolism to aid in interpreting ideal as well as material activities. Traditionally symbolic anthropology has focused on religion, cosmology, ritual activity, and expressive customs such as mythology and the performing arts (Des Chene 1996:1274). Symbolic anthropologists also study other forms of social organization that at first do not appear to be very symbolic, such as kinship and political organization. Studying these types of social forms allows researchers to study the role of symbols in the everyday life of a group of people (Des Chene 1996:1274).

False Consciousness

is the Marxist thesis that material and institutional processes in capitalist society are misleading to the proletariat, and to other classes. These processes betray the true relations of forces between those classes, and the real state of affairs regarding the development of pre-socialist society (relative to the secular development of human society in general). This is essentially a result of ideological control which the proletariat either do not know they are under or disregard with a view to their own POUM (probability/possibility of upward mobility)[1]. POUM (not to be confused with the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, POUM) or something like it is required in economics with its presumption of rational agency; otherwise wage laborers would be the conscious supporters of social relations antithetical to their own interests, violating that presumption[2].`

Critical Theory

is the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism. This has led to the very literal use of 'critical theory' as an umbrella term to describe theoretical critique. Critical theory, in the sociological context, refers to a style of Marxist theory with a tendency to engage with non-Marxist influences (for instance the work of Nietzsche and Freud).[1] This tendency has been referred to pejoratively by stricter Marxists as 'revisionism'. Modern critical theory arose from a trajectory extending from the nonpositivist sociology of Weber and Simmel, the neo-Marxist theory of Lukács and Gramsci, toward the milieu associated with Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. It is with the so-called 'Frankfurt School' of theorists that the term is most commonly associated: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas. With the latter, critical theory shed further its roots in German Idealism and moved closer to American Pragmatism. The theoretical concern for a cultural 'superstructure' derived from a material 'base' often remains as the only central Marxist tenet in contemporary critical theory.[2]

Alliance Theory of Kinship

is the name given to the structural method of studying kinship relations. It finds its origins in Claude Lévi-Strauss's Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), and is opposed to the functionalist theory of Radcliffe-Brown. Alliance theory has oriented most anthropological French works until the 1980s, and its influences were felt in various fields, including psychoanalysis (who shared the belief in a universal incest taboo), philosophy and political philosophy. Claude Lévi-Strauss's alliance theory was elaborated from a study of non-European societies, in which he observed close links between consanguinity and affinity. These two institutions, sometimes opposed and other times complementary, gave rise to a classification of the social world according to matrimonial rules. The hypothesis of a "marriage-alliance" emerged in this frame, pointing out towards the necessary interdependence of various families and lineages. Weddings themselves are thus seen as a form of communication, which anthropologists such as Lévi-Strauss, Louis Dumont or Rodney Needham described for us. Alliance theory hence tries to understand the basic questions about inter-individual relations, or what constitutes society. Alliance theory is based on the incest taboo: according to it, only this universal prohibition of incest pushes human groups towards exogamy. Thus, inside a given society, certain categories of kin are forbidden to inter-marry. The incest taboo is thus a negative prescription; without it, nothing would push men to go searching for women outside of their inner kinship circle, or vice versa. This theory echoes with Freud'sMarx, Karl Heinrich (1818-1883) hich one's daughter or sister is offered to someone outside a family circle, starts a circle of exchange of women: in return, the giver is entitled to a woman from the other's intimate kinship group. Thus the negative prescriptions of the prohibition have positive counterparts [1] The idea of the alliance theory is thus of a reciprocal or a generalized exchange which founds affinity. This global phenomena takes the form of a "circulation of women" which links together the various social groups in one whole: society.

Historical linguistics

is the study of language change. It has five main concerns: * to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages; * to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics); * to develop general theories about how and why language changes; * to describe the history of speech communities; * to study the history of words, i.e. etymology. History and development Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents dating back to antiquity. At first, historical linguistics was comparative linguistics. Scholars were chiefly concerned with establishing language families and reconstructing prehistoric proto-languages, using the comparative method and internal reconstruction. The focus was initially on the well-known Indo-European languages, many of which had long written histories; the scholars also studied the Uralic languages, another European language family for which less early written material exists. Since then, there has been significant comparative linguistic work expanding outside of European languages as well, such as on the Austronesian languages and various families of Native American languages, among many others. Comparative linguistics is now, however, only a part of a more broadly conceived discipline of historical linguistics. For the Indo-European languages, comparative study is now a highly specialised field. Most research is being carried out on the subsequent development of these languages, particularly the development of the modern standard varieties. Some scholars have undertaken studies attempting to establish super-families, linking, for example, Indo-European, Uralic and other families into Nostratic. These attempts have not been accepted widely. The information necessary to establish relatedness becomes less available as the time depth is increased. The time-depth of linguistic methods is limited due to chance word resemblances and variations between language groups, but a limit of around 10,000 years is often assumed. The dating of the various proto-languages is also difficult; several methods are available for dating, but only approximate results can be obtained. [edit] Evolution into other fields Initially, all modern linguistics was historical in orientation, even the study of modern dialects involved looking at their origins. Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics is fundamental to the present day organization of the discipline. Primacy is accorded to synchronic linguistics, and diachronic linguistics is defined as the study of successive synchronic stages. Saussure's clear demarcation, however, is now seen to be idealised. In practice, a purely synchronic linguistics is not possible for any period before the invention of the gramophone, as written records always lag behind speech in reflecting linguistic developments. Written records are difficult to date accurately before the development of the modern title page. Also, the work of sociolinguists on linguistic variation has shown synchronic states are not uniform: the speech habits of older and younger speakers differ in ways that point to language change. Synchronic variation is linguistic change in progress. The biological origin of language is in principle a concern of historical linguistics, but most linguists regard it as too remote to be reliably established by standard techniques of historical linguistics, such as the comparative method. Less standard techniques, such as mass lexical comparison, are used by some linguists to overcome the limitations of the comparative method, but most linguists regard them as unreliable. The findings of historical linguistics are often used as a basis for hypotheses about the groupings and movements of peoples, particularly in the prehistoric period. In practice, however, it is often unclear how to integrate the linguistic evidence with the archaeological or genetic evidence. For example, there are numerous theories concerning the homeland and early movements of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, each with its own interpretation of the archaeological record.

Articulation

labels the process by which particular classes appropriate cultural forms and practices for their own use. The term appears to have originated from the work of Antonio Gramsci, specifically from his conception of superstructure. Chantal Mouffe, Stuart Hall, and others have adopted or used it[1]. In this theory, cultural forms and practices (Antonio Gramsci's superstructure and Richard Middleton's instance or level of practice) have relative autonomy; socio-economic structures of power do not determine them, but rather they relate to them. "The theory of articulation recognizes the complexity of cultural fields. It preserves a relative autonomy for cultural and ideological elements (...) but also insists that those combinatory patterns that are actually constructed do mediate deep, objective patterns in the socio-economic formation, and that the mediation takes place in struggle: the classes fight to articulate together constituents of the cultural repe[r]toire in particular ways so that they are organized in terms of principles or sets of values determined by the position and interests of the class in the prevailing mode of production." [2] This is because "the relationship between actual culture...on the one hand, and economically determined factors such as class position, on the other, is always problematical, incomplete, and the object of ideological work and struggle....Cultural relationships and cultural change are thus not predetermined; rather they are the product of negotiation, imposition, resistance, transformation, and so on....Thus particular cultural forms and practices cannot be attached mechanically or even paradigmatically to particular classes; nor, even, can particular interpretations, valuations, and uses of a single form or practice. In Stuart Hall's words (1981: 238), 'there are no wholly separate "cultures"...attached, in a relation of historical fixity, to specific "whole" classes'. However, "while elements of culture are not directly, eternally, or exclusively tied to specific economically determined factors such as class position, they are determined in the final instance by such factors, through the operation of articulating principles which are tied to class position". (ibid, p.8) Articulating principles "operate by combining existing elements into new patterns or by attaching new connotations to them". Examples of these processes in musical culture include the re-use of elements of bourgeois marches in labor anthems or the assimilation of liberated (in the Marcusian sense) countercultural 1960s rock into a tradition of bourgeois bohemianism and the combination of elements of black and white working-class music with elements of art music that created countercultural 1960s rock. (ibid, p.8-9) Some scholars may prefer the theory of articulation, where "class does not coincide with the sign community", [3] to the theory of homology, where class does coincide with the sign community and where economic forces determine the superstructure. However, "it seems likely that some signifying structures are more easily articulated to the interests of one group than are some others" and cross-connotation, "when two or more different elements are made to connote, symbolize, or evoke each other", can set up "particularly strong articulative relationships". For example: Elvis Presley's linking of elements of "youth rebellion, working-class 'earthiness', and ethnic 'roots', each of which can evoke the others, all of which were articulated together, however briefly, by a moment of popular self-assertion". [4]

Thick description

of a human behavior is one that explains not just the behavior, but its context as well, such that the behavior becomes meaningful to an outsider. The term was used by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) to describe his own method of doing ethnography (Geertz 1973:5-6, 9-10). Since then, the term and the methodology it represents have gained currency in the social sciences and beyond. Today, "thick description" is used in a variety of fields, including the type of literary criticism known as New Historicism. In Geertz's essay, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture", (Geertz 1973:3-30) he explains that he adopted the term from philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Ryle's discussion of "thick description" appears in two essays (now reprinted in the second volume of his Collected Papers) addressed to the general question of what, as he puts it, "Le Penseur" is doing: "Thinking and Reflecting" and "The Thinking of Thoughts". Consider, he says, two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. In one, this is an involuntary twitch; in the other, a conspiratorial signal to a friend. The two movements are, as movements, identical; from an l-am-a-camera, "phenomenalistic" observation of them alone, one could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both or either was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, however unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows. The winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way: (1) deliberately, (2) to someone in particular, (3) to impart a particular message, (4) according to a socially established code, and (5) without cognizance of the rest of the company. As Ryle points out, the winker has done two things, contracted his eyelids and winked, while the twitcher has done only one, contracted his eyelids. Contracting your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public code in which so doing counts as a conspiratorial signal is winking and a wink is the same thing as a nod to a blind man.

Political Economy

originally was the term for studying production, buying and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government. Political economy originated in moral philosophy. It developed in the 18th century as the study of the economies of states—polities, hence political economy. In late nineteenth century, the term "political economy" was generally replaced by the term economics, used by those seeking to place the study of economy upon mathematical and axiomatic bases, rather than the structural relationships of production and consumption (cf. marginalism, William Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall).