Anthropology 2 Test 1

Participant Observation

A key element of anthropological fieldwork. It is a systematic research strategy that is, in some respects, a matter of hanging out. One of the things that distinguishes anthropologists from college students -- who also do a lot of hanging out -- is that anthropologists record much of what transpires while we are doing it. We are also in a very different social position than we are normally accustomed to, and we must work hard to build rapport and friendships in a community where we have no friends. Establishing rapport requires a lot of discipline, as well as acceptance of local customs and practices, however peculiar, unfamiliar, or uncomfortable.

Holistic Perspective

A perspective that aims to identify and understand the whole -- that is, the systematic connections between individual cultural beliefs, practices, and social institutions rather than individual parts. This does not mean that contemporary anthropologists still see a society as wholly integrated and balanced. Rather, the holistic perspective is a methodological tool that helps show the interrelationships among different domains of society -- domains that include environmental context, history, social and political organization, economics, values, and spiritual life. Thus, the life of a community becomes expressed through the social relationships among its members, organized as they are through their social institutions. To see how changes in cultural values can lead in social institutions, consider the relationship between diet, industrialization, and sexual deviance.

Evolution

A second key influence on the development of anthropology was the rise of evolutionary theory to explain biological variation between and within species. Evolution refers to the adaptive changes organisms make across generations. English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) developed a theory of how different species of plants and animals had evolved from earlier forms. The key mechanism of his evolutionary theory was what he called "natural selection," a process through which certain inheritable traits are passed along to offspring because they are better suited to the environment. Thus in Darwin's view, in subtle ways nature was sorting out, or selecting, those forms best adapted for their environment.

Theory

A theory not only explains things, it also helps guide research by focusing the researcher's questions and making the findings meaningful. It is important to note that while many Americans assume that a theory is some wild hunch or guess, when scientists in the natural and social sciences use the term theory, they mean a carefully constructed hypothesis that has been tested and retested -- there is rarely any guessing involved.

Colonialism

A third driving force behind anthropology was colonialism, the historical practice of more powerful countries claiming possession of less powerful ones. We can think of American domination over Indian lands as a form of colonialism, particularly when government policies moved Native Americans from the southeastern states to what is now Oklahoma, largely because white settlers wanted their land. Overseas, the colonial period flourished from the 1870s until the 1970s, and whites established mines, fisheries, plantations, and other enterprises using local peoples as inexpensive labor. Colonies enriched the mother countries, often impoverishing the indigenous inhabitants. Colonial peoples everywhere had different cultures and customs, and their actions often seemed baffling to white administrators, a fact that these officials chalked up their seemingly primitive or savage nature. To understand how to govern such radically different peoples, Europeans and Americans began developing methods for studying these societies.

Scientific Method

Anthropology often uses the scientific method, the most basic pattern of scientific research. The scientific method is quite simple. It starts with the observation of a fact, a verifiable truth. Next follows the construction of a hypothesis, which is a testable explanation for the facts. Then that hypothesis is tested with experiments, further observations, or measurements. If the data, the information the tests produce, show that the hypothesis is wrong, the scientist develops a new hypothesis and then tests it. If the new tests and the data they produce seem to support the hypothesis, the scientists writes up a description of what he or she did and found, and shares it with other scientists. Other scientists then attempt to reproduce those tests or devise new ones, with goals of disproving the hypothesis.

Anthropology

Emerged in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century as an academic discipline devoted to the systematic observation and analysis of human variation. Three key concerns began to emerge by the 1850s that would shape professional anthropology: (1) The disruptions of industrialization in Europe and America, (2) The rise of evolutionary theories, and (3) The growing importance of Europe's far-flung colonies with large indigenous populations whose land, mineral wealth, and labor Europeans and Americans wanted to control. Anthropology is the study of human beings, their biology, their prehistories and histories, and their changing languages, cultures, and socal institutions.

Culture

Every human group has particular rules of behavior and a common set of explanations about how the world works. Within the community, these behaviors and explanations feel totally natural, which to say, self-evident and necessary. People who behave differently are strange, wrong, maybe even evil. What feels natural to us may seem totally arbitrary to another group of people, because the rules and explanations vary from one group to another. In anthropology, the term culture refers to these taken-for-granted notions, rules, moralities, and behaviors within a social group that feel natural and the way things should be. The idea of culture is one of anthropology's most important contributions to knowledge.

Biological Anthropology

Focuses on the biological aspects of the human species, past and present, along with those of our closest relatives, the nonhuman primates (apes, monkeys, and related species). A mainstay of biological anthropology has been the attempt to uncover human fossils and reconstruct the pathways of human evolution. By the 1950s and 1960s, biological anthropologists expanded into the study of human health and disease and began to look at the nonhuman primates (Especially monkeys and apes) to determine what is part of our basic primate biology and what comes with culture. Biological anthropology is currently a field of many specializations; researchers still explore human evolution, health and disease, and primate behavior, but they study topics such as human genetics, the impact of social stress on the body, and human diet and nutrition.

Holism

In bringing together the study of human biology, prehistory, language, and social life under one disciplinary roof, anthropology offers powerful conceptual tools for understanding the entire context of human experience. The effort to synthesize these distinct approaches and findings into a single comprehensive explanation is called holism. American anthropology has strived to be the most holistic.

Fieldnotes

Information that the anthropologist writes down or transcribes. Unlike historians who go into archives and search out documents written by others, anthropologists primarily make their own. Some of this happens in the ebb and flow of everyday life, as they jot down notes in conversation with others, or when a festival, ritual, or some other activity is taking place. Usually these scribbles are only shorthand notes made in small, unobtrusive notebooks. Unlike your professors, most people in the world are not comfortable when somebody opens a notebook and starts writing notes. But with time and plenty of explanation about what the anthropologist plans to do with the information, people become accustomed to it. Anthropologists have an ethical commitment to share their reasons for doing research with their informants openly, and explaining their goals often helps build rapport with informations.

Customs

Long-established norms may eventually become customs, and have a codified and lawlike aspect.

Fieldwork

Long-term immersion in a community is called fieldwork. It is the defining methodology of discipline. During fieldwork, anthropologists become involved in people's daily lives, observe and ask questions about what they are doing, and record those observations. Being involved in people's lives for a long period of time is critical to the method, generating insights we would not have if we simply visited the community a few hours a day, to administer a survey or questionnaire, or conduct a brief interview. As virtually every anthropologist will tell you, people may say one thing but then go on and do something completely different. Sticking around helps us put what people say in context.

Headnotes

Mental notes made while in the field.

Ethics

Moral questions about right and wrong and standards of appropriate behavior -- are at the heart of anthropology, in two senses. First, anthropologists learn about how and why people in other cultures think and act as they do by researching their moral standards.

Cross-Cultural Perspective

No other animal so thoroughly dwells in artificial, or human-made worlds of its own creation. Anthropologists stress that a cross-cultural perspective (Analyzing a human social phenomenon by comparing that phenomenon in different cultures) is necessary to appreciate just how artificial our beliefs and actions are.

Norms

Norms are typical patterns of behavior, often viewed by participants as the rules of how things should be done. In our society, for example, it would be unimaginable to try to haggle over the price of toothpaste at the grocery store because the norm is to pay the listed price, but in Arab world and Indonesia, the norm is just the opposite: no matter how small the item, it is considered rude not to haggle. In such places, taking first the asking price disrespects the seller. For more expensive items,the norm is for the starting price to go three to five times the item's actual worth, and buyers may break off negotiations and leave the shop two or three times so the seller can run after them bringing them back to the shop with in a lower price.

Genealogical Method

Old method, developed by English anthropologist William H. R. Rivers in 1898 during Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits Islanders, and observed that they had an unusually high incidence of mild color blindness. To understand whether color blindness was genetically passed only in certain families or was a more generalized trait, Rivers needed to discern the relationships between the islanders.

Ethnocentricism

One possible response to the gap in understanding that comes with being in another culture is ethnocentrism, which is a concept that assumes our ways of doing things is correct. while simply assuming other people's assumptions as wrong or ignorant. Such a position would render the attempt to understand other cultures meaningless, and can lead to bigotry and intolerance.

Armchair Anthropologists

People who never went to the field, relied on others for ethnographic data.

Applied Anthropology

Practical applications are such an important component of anthropology that some anthropologists consider them the "fifth subfield." These practical applications include those of applied anthropology, anthropological research commissioned to serve an organization's needs.

Industrialization

Refers to the economic process of shifting from an agricultural economy to a factory-based one. Industrialization disrupted American and European societies by bringing large numbers of rural people into towns and cities to work in factories. The rise of industrial towns and cities raised question about how society was changing, including how a factory-based economy and the attendant growth of cities shaped society, government, residential patterns, and culture.

Action Anthropology

Research committed to making social change, encouraged anthropologists to offer voluntary help to disenfranchised communities in airing their grievances and solving their collective problems. Tax believed in the importance of inserting one's political values into anthropological research and of treating research participants as equal partners.

Comparative Method

Since the beginning of the discipline, anthropologists have used the comparative method, which involves systematic comparison of data from several societies.

Social Institutions

Social institutions of any society are the organized sets of social relationships that link individuals to each other in a structured way in a particular society. These institutions include patterns of kinship and marriage (Domestic arrangements, the organization of sex and reproduction, raising children), economic activities (Farming, herding, manufacturing and trade), religious institutions (Rituals, religious organizations, etc.) and political forms for controlling power. Each culture has its norms, values, and traditions for how each of these activities should be organized, and in each case they can vary greatly from one society to another because each society has a different culture.

Rapid Appraisal

Sometimes jocularly referred to as parachute ethnography, because the researcher drops in for a few weeks to collect data. Such focused fieldwork requires a general knowledge of both the region and the topic under investigation. This kind of research requires that the anthropologist have considerable field experience to begin with, so she or he knows to focus on the features that distinguish the community under study from other similar ones.

Linguistic Anthropology

Studies how people communicate with one another through language, and how language use shapes group membership and identity. Linguistic anthropologists also look at how language helps people organize their cultural beliefs and ideologies. These anthropologists have traditionally studied the categories that indigenous people use in their own languages, attempting to understand how they classify parts of their social and natural worlds differently from peoples in other societies.

Interviews

Systematic conversations with informants, to collect data.

Practicing Anthropology

The broadest category of anthropological work, in which the anthropologists not only performs research but also gets involved in the design, implementation, and management of some organization, process, or product. Under both labels, anthropologists have effectively put their discipline to work addressing difficult social, health, and educational problems.

Cultural Appropriation

The debate over sports teams' Indian mascots is only one example of a conflict over who has the right to use, control, even own symbols, objects and cultural processes. Tis conflict is related to the phenomenon of cultural appropriation, the unilateral decision of one social group to take over the symbols, practices or objects of another. Cultural appropriation is as old as humanity itself. The fact that people adopt ideas, practices, and technologies from other societies demonstrates the fluidity of social boundaries and partly explains why societies and cultures are changing all the time.

Informants

The people from whom he or she gathers information. The anthropologist observes things in the field setting, observes them a second or third time, and later inquires about them, gradually pulling together an enriched sense of what has been observed. Both the anthropologist and his or her informants have been actively creating this synthesis, which becomes field data.

Social Sanction

The scowls or expressions of disapproval you might get provide a social sanction, a reaction or measure intended to enforce norms and punish their violations.

Cultural Relativism

To avoid such misunderstandings, anthropologists have traditionally emphasized cultural relativism, the moral and intellectual principle that one should withhold judgment about seemingly strange or exotic beliefs and practices.

Participatory Action Research

Today, some anthropologists use a variant of action research methods by promoting the involvement of community members in formulating the research questions, collecting data, and analyzing the data. Often called participatory research, it is based on the idea that poor people can and should do much of their own investigation, analysis, and planning. This approach not only aims to place the researcher and subjects on a more even plane; it also encourages researchers to share their methods so people can act to improve their own social, economic, and political conditions.

Tradition

Tradition usually refers to the most enduring and ritualized aspects of a culture. People often feel their traditions are very old, which justifies actions that make no logical sense in contemporary times. With such justifications, individuals and groups go to great lengths to protect their traditions. The controversy between Indians and NCAA schools over mascots illustrates how powerful traditions can be.

Life Histories

Understanding the life histories of informants has been an important tool for anthropologists in understanding past social institutions and how they have changed. During the 1920s, American anthropologists developed life histories as part of their fieldwork on Indian reservations, because the questions they were studying had to do with the American Indian societies before they had been profoundly transformed by contact with white American society. Anthropologists quickly recognized that by interviewing elders about their lives, they could get an understanding of how life was before contact.

Comparative Method

Unlike other scientists, anthropologists do not conduct experiments or make predictions. Instead, anthropologists use the comparative method. The comparative method allows anthropologists to derive insights from careful comparisons of two or more cultures and societies.

Open-Ended Interviews

Unstructured interview, informants discuss a topic and in the process make connections with other issues. Open-ended questions usually encourage informants to discuss things that the anthropologist wants to hear about, or that informants find especially meaningful.

Savage Paradigm

Until the 1920s, anthropologists pursued an approach known as the salvage paradigm, which held that it was important to observe indigenous ways of life, interview elders, and assemble collections of objects made and used by indigenous peoples because this knowledge of traditional languages and customs would soon disappear. Of course, today we know that while some Indian tribes, especially along the East Coast, largely died out, many other groups have survived and grown in population. But these Native American cultures have had to adjust and adapt to the changing American landscape and all the changes that Americans of different national origins have brought to the continent.

Values

Values are symbolic expressions of intrinsically desirable principles or qualities. They refer to that which is moral and true for a particular group of people. For example, Mom and apple pie symbolize American core values, values that express the most basic qualities central to a culture, such as patriotism or loyalty to the country. In the United States, Mom expresses the purity of selfless sacrifice for the greater good, and apple pie is a common food since colonial times, expresses America's shared heritage. Of course, not everybody eats apple pie and not every mother is loyal to her family, much less sacrifices herself for the greater good. The point is not that these ideals reflect what actually happens in the real world, rather, they orient thinking about one's obligations as a citizen, like putting aside differences with other Americans and being willing to sacrifice oneself for love of family and country.

Enculturation

Although all human beings are born with the ability to learn culture, nobody is born as a fully formed cultural being. The process of learning a culture begins at birth, and that is partly why our beliefs and conduct seem so natural: we have been doing and thinking in certain ways since we were young. For example, the Ongee, an indigenous group who live in the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, learn from a very early age that ancestors cause periodic earthquakes and tidal waves, a fact that is as given to them as it would be strange to you, who were not raised with such beliefs. Anthropologists call this process of learning the cultural rules and logic of a society enculturation.

Cultural Constructions

An individual's comprehension of anything is always based on what his or her group defines collectively as proper and improper. Anthropologists commonly refer to such definitions as cultural constructions, which refers to the fact that people collectively "build" meanings through common experience and negotiation. In the debate over college mascots, for example, both sides collectively "constructed" the significance of these images and symbols for both Indians and colleges through their debates, protests, and discussions. A "construction derives from past collective experiences in a community, as well as lots of people talking about, thinking about, and acting in response to a common set of goals and problems.

Cultural Determinism

Another reason for advocating critical relativism is that, in an extreme form, cultural relativism can be a difficult position to uphold. It can lead to cultural determinism, the idea that all human actions are the product of culture, which denies the influence of other factors like physical environment and human biology on human behavior. Some critics also argue that extreme relativism can justify atrocities like genocide, human rights abuses, and other horrific things humans can do to one another.

Qualitative Research

Anthropologists also employ qualitative methods, in which the aim is to produce an in-depth and detailed description of social behaviors and beliefs. Qualitative research involves interviews with and observations of people. Research data come in the form of words, images or objects. In contrast with quantitative methods, qualitative research does not typically use research instruments like surveys or questionnaires. The research instrument is the researcher himself or herself, whose subjective perceptions and impressions in the subject matter also become the basis for knowledge.

Secondary Materials

Anthropologists also use both published and unpublished materials to learn about other people's lives. For example, we can learn a great deal from media clippings, government reports, scientific studies, institutional memos, and correspondence, newsletter, and so on. These materials, called secondary materials because they are not primarily, that is, original sources such as fieldnotes, from someone with direct personal knowledge of the people, provide yet another level of context for what wee observe and learn in interviews.

Archaeology

Archaeology studies past cultures by excavating sites where people lived, worked, farmed, or conducted some other activity. Some archaeologists study prehistory (Life before written records), trying to understand how people lived before they had domesticated plants and animals. Or they may reconstruct the patterns of trade or warfare between ancient settlements. Two themes have been traditional concerns of prehistoric archaeology: (1) The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and (2) The rise of cities and states, when complex social, political, and economic institutions arose, along with occupational specializations, social class distinctions, and the emergence of early political forms that resemble states. Another branch of archaeology is historical archaeology, defined as the study of the material remains of past societies that are left behind documentary and oral histories. As such, historical anthropology supplements what we know about a community or society and focuses on the migration and cultural shifts that shaped humankind during the past 500 years.

Functionalism

Associated with British anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowsky and A.R. Radcliffe Brown, the theory, known as functionalism, holds that cultural practices and beliefs serve purposes for society, such as explaining how the world works, organizing people into roles so that they can get things done, and so on. Functionalists emphasize that social institutions function together in an integrated and balanced fashion to keep the whole society functioning smoothly and to minimize social change.

Quantitative Methods

Building and testing a hypothesis and theories require data. Anthropology's subfields employed a number of techniques for gathering and processing data. Some of these techniques use quantitative methods, which classify features of a phenomenon, count or measure them, and construct mathematical and statistical methods to explain what is observed. Most quantitative research takes place in the subfields of biological anthropology and archaeology, although some cultural and linguistic anthropologists use quantitative techniques as well.

Empirical

Charles Darwin asked empirical questions: Questions that could be answered by observing whether species had changed and whether new species had emerged over time. From the findings of contemporary geologists, Darwin knew that many early species such as the dinosaurs had arisen and died out. For him, such changes were evidence that the natural environment had selected some species for survival and that extinction was the outcome for those not well suited to changing environments.

Symbols

Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) was one of the best-known American anthropologists in recent times. He proposed that culture is a system of symbols -- a symbol being something that conventionally stands for something else -- though which people make sense of the world. Symbols may be verbal or non-verbal. Symbols are things that people in a given culture associate with something else, often something intangible, such as motherhood, family, God, or country.

Human Relations Area Files (HRAF)

Collects and finely indexes ethnographic accounts of several hundred societies from all parts of the world.

Ethnohistory

Combines historical and ethnographic approaches to understand social and cultural change. The approach has been most important in studying non-literate communities, where few written historical documents exist, and those documents that do exist can be enhanced with archaeological data and ethnographic data such as life histories.

Cultural Anthropology

Focuses on the social lives of living communities, until the 1970s, most cultural anthropologists conducted research in non-Western communities, spending a year or two observing social life. We call this kind of research anthropological fieldwork. These anthropologists learned the local language and studied broad aspects of the community, recording information about people's economic transactions, religious rituals, political organizations, and families, seeking to understand how these distinct domains influenced each other. In recent decades they have come to focus on more specific issues in the communities they study, such as how and why religious conflicts occur, how environmental changes affect agricultural production, and how economic interactions create social inequalities. Today, anthropologist are as likely to study modern institutions, occupational groups, ethnic minorities, and the role of computer technology or advertising in their own cultures as they are to study cultures outside their own.

Intersubjectivity

For Fabian such observations and understanding are neither objective nor subjective, but the product of intersubjectivity, which means that knowledge about other people emerges out of relationships individuals have with each other.

Interpretive Theory of Culture

Geertz's concept of culture, often called the interpretive theory of culture, is the idea that culture is embodied and transmitted through symbols. This fundamental concept helped anthropologists clarify the symbolic basis of culture, something virtually all anthropologists take for granted today. Because culture is implicit in how people think and act, they express culture in everything they do -- playing games, speaking a language, building houses, growing food, making love, raising children, and so on. The meaning of these things -- and the symbols that underlie those meanings -- differ from group to group, and as a result, peple do things and organize themselves differently around the world. The difference meanings are what make the Balinese Balinese, Zapotecs Zapotecs, and Americans American.