ANTH 100 - Ch. 8
Reflexivity
Critically thinking about the way one thinks, reflecting on one's own experience.
Multi-sited Fieldwork
Ethnographic research on cultural processes that are not contained by social, ethnic, religious, or national boundaries, in which the ethnographer follows the process from site to site, often doing fieldwork at sites and with persons who traditionally were never subjected to ethnographic analysis.
Symbol
Something that stands for something else.
Dialectic of Fieldwork
The process of building a bridge of understanding between anthropologists and informants so that each can begin to understand the other.
Fact
A widely accepted observation, a taken-for-granted item of common knowledge. Facts do not speak for themselves but only when they are interpreted and placed in a context of meaning that makes them intelligible.
Fieldwork
An extended period of close involvement with the people in whose language or way or life an anthropologist in interested, during which anthropologists ordinarily collect most of their data.
Holism
Perspective on the human condition that assumes that mind and body, individuals and society, and individuals and the environment interpenetrate and even define one another.
Culture
Sets of learned behaviors and ideas that humans acquire as members of society. Humans use culture to adapt to and transform the world in which they live.
Coevolution
The dialectical relationship between biological processes and symbolic cultural processes, in which each makes up an important part of the environment to which the other must adapt.
Human Agency
The exercise of at least some control over their lives by human beings.
Culture Shock
The feeling, akin to panic, that develops in people living in an unfamiliar society when they cannot understand what is happening around them.
Participant-observation
The method anthropologists use to gather information by living as closely as possible to the people whose culture they are studying while participating in their lives as much as possible.
Ethnocentrism
The opinion that one's own way of life is natural or correct and, indeed, the only true way of being fully human.
Cultural Relativism
Understanding another culture in its own terms sympathetically enough so that the culture appears to be a coherent and meaningful design for living.