Anthropology 101, exam 1

Infrastructure

economic foundation of a society, including its subsistence practices & the tools &other material equipment used to make a living. Economic Base: the mode of subsistence

Amernd Language

including all the Native-American families except Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene.

Mechanics of Cultural Change

innovation, diffusion, and cultural loss.

Nostratic Language

languages issuing from a common language spoken about 15,000 years ago & giving rise to languages in families.

Structure

rules-governed relationships- with all their rights & obligations- that hold members of a society together. This includes households, families, associations, & power relations, including politics. Social Organization: the patterned social arrangements of individuals within a society.

Based on Symbols Culture

sounds, gestures, marks, and other signs that are linked to something else & represent them in a meaningful way.

Primary Innovation

the creation, invention, or chance discovery of a completely new idea, method, or device.

Cultural Relativism

the idea that one must suspend judgement of other people's practices in order to understand them in their own cultural terms.

Allophones

2 sounds that are phonetically different, but the same phoneme in language. Example; such as the aspirated K in kit or the unaspirated K in skit.

Multi-Linear Evolution

20th century social theory about the evolution of societies & cultures. Composed of many competing theories by various sociologists & anthropologists.

Behavioral Culture

A behavior that is exhibited by humans and other species, that is learned.

Ethnography

A detailed description of a particular culture primarily based on fieldwork. "On-Location research." Provides the information used to make systematic comparisons among cultures across the world. Example; Participant observation.

Pidgins

A grammatically simplified form of a language, used for communication between people not sharing a common language.

Eurasiatic Language

A hypothesis similar to nostratic proposing the relations between Indo-European, Uralo-Altaic, and Eskimo-Aleut.

Creoles

A mother tongue formed from the contact of 2 languages through an earlier pidgin stage. Examples; Swahilli, Cajun, Gullah and Yiddish.

Ethnoscience

According to Scott Atran, this is the study of the different ways the world is perceived & categorized in different cultures.

Narciema

Also known as Americans

Roots

Always 3 phonemes

Humanistic Anthropology

Anthropologists avoid from using a hypothesis, and they rely on qualitative information. • focus dates to the 1970s and particularly to the formation of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology

Allomorphs

Any of the versions of a morpheme, such as the plural endings s.

Latent Functions

Are those that are neither recognized nor intended. Example; to reinforce the bonds within the family, the sense of "belonging" to the family.

Uni-linear Evolution

Believed that we all are from the same linear path. Lamarkian was associated with this.

Glottochronology

Chronic relationship between languages

Cognates

Common ancestor

Social Structure

Concerns ruled-governed relationships- with all their rights & obligations-holds members of society together.

Manifest Functions

Consequences that people observe or expect. Example; family meal - to feed the family

Kluckhohn

Describes culture as a historically set of explicit & implicit designs of living & organizes them into "recipes"

Role

Determines what one does in relation to the total society & what we can expect form it.

Geertz

Developed an artful ethnographic research strategy in which a culturally significant event or social drama is chosen for observation & analysis as a form of "deep play" that may provide essential cultural insights.

Marvin Harris

Discovered Cultural Materialism. Argues that anthropologists can be explain ideas, values, and beliefs as adaptations to the economic & environmental conditions.

Dynamic Culture

Dynamic systems that respond to motions and actions within & around them.

Boas

Father of all modern anthropology, made anthropology common in college classes and made anthropology an instrument to combat racism & prejudice in the world.

Levi-Straus

Focuses on the mind & says that humans think in categories & they tend to symbolize.

Steward

His goal was to study the comparative impact of industrialization & urbanization upon different populations.

Infrastructural Determinism

Holds that changes in the infrastructure probabilistically determine changes in the rest of the sociocultural system.

Functionalism

Idea of Bronislaw Malinowski. View that culture is similar to a biological organism with various parts supporting the operating of a whole.

Structuralism

Idea of Claude Levi Strauss. Interested in universal structures of the mind and how they shape society as well as our understanding of it.

Participant Observation

In ethnography, the technique of learning a people's culture through social participation & personal observation within the community being studied, as well as interviews & discussion with individual members of the group over an extended period of time. Example; eating a people's food.

Austric Language

Includes Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Daic and Miao-Yao.

Indo-European Language Family

Includes most languages of Europe, Southwest, Central and South Asia. Has the widest dispersion around the world.

Integrated Culture

Includes what people do for a living, the tools they use, the way they work together, how they transform their environments, contruct their dwellings, what they eat & drink, how they worship, what they beleive is right or wrong, what gifts they exchange & when, who they marry, how they raise their children, how they deal with misfortune, sickness, death and so on.

Austronesian Language Family

Originated from Taiwan, widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia, Madagascar and the Pacific, with a few members on continental Asia, that are spoken by about 386 million people.

Semitic Language Family

Originating in the Near East whose living representatives are spoken by more than 470 million people across much of Western Asia, North Africa and the Horn of Africa, as well as in large expatriate communities in North America and Europe.

Aztec Cannibalism

Practice of human sacrifice. Marvin Harris suggested that the flesh of the victims was a part of an aristocratic diet as a reward, since the Aztec diet was lacking protein.

Cultural Materialism

Primary emphasis on the role of environment, demography, technology, and economy in determining a culture's mental and social conditions. Is the anthropological research orientation first introduced by Marvin Harris in his 1968 book, The Rise of Anthropological.

Ascribed Status

Reflects personal skills, abilities and efforts.

Lewis Henry Morgan

Saved remains of a Native American territory & divided progression into 3, which are the tracks economic system.

Whorfian (Sapir-Whorf) Hypothesis

States that there are certain thoughts of an individual in one language that cannot be understood by those who live in another language.Also states, that the way people think is strongly affected by their native language.

Proposed homeland of Indo-Europeans

Steppes

Componential Analysis

The analysis of the meaning of an expression into discrete semantic components.

Ethnocentrism

The belief that "their" way of life is superior to others or alternatives.

Secondary Innovation

The deliberate application or modification of an existing idea, method, or device.

Syntax

The patterns or rules by which words are arranged into phrases & sentences.

Morphemes

The smallest units of sound that carry a meaning in language. They are distinct from phonemes, which can alter meaning but having no meaning by themselves. Example; unknowingly (has 4 morphemes

Phonemes

The smallest units of sound that make a difference in meaning in a language. Example; Minimal-Pair Test, a researcher tries to find 2 short words that appear to be exactly alike except for one sounds, such as bit and pit.

Ethnology

The study & analysis of different cultures from a comparative or historical point of view, utilizing ethnographic accounts & development anthropological theories that help explain why certain important differences or similarities occur among groups. "Cross-Cultural." Example; the amount of time spent on domestic chores by industrialized peoples & traditional food foragers(people who rely on wild plant & animal resources for subsistence.)

Cultural Ecology

The study of human adaptations to social & physical environments. Julian Steward was the founder of this.

Historic Linguistics

The study of the history & development of languages.

Morphology

The study of the patterns of rules of word formation in a language, including the guidelines for verb tense, pluralization & compound words.

Phonetic Structure

The systematic identification & description of distinctive speech sounds in language. Example; the TH sound common in English does not exist in the Dutch language.

Ideational Culture

Within the culture are group of habits considered as ideal patterns of behavior which the members are expected to follow.

Shared Culture

a set of ideas, value, perceptions, ans standards of behavior, culture is the common denominator that makes the actions of individuals intelligible to other members of their society.

Superstructure

a society's shared sense of identity & worldview. The collective body of ideas, beliefs, and values by which members of a society make sense of the world- its shape, challenges & opportunites- & understand their place in it. This includes religion & national ideology. Worldview: the perception of self, society, and the world around us.

Descriptive Linguistics

Is defined as the branch of language science that is the structure of language as it exists today.

Semantics Analysis

Is the process of relating syntactic structures, from the levels of phrases, clauses, sentences & paragraphs to the level of writing as a whole, to their language-independent meanings.

Achieved Status

It is a position that is earned or chosen.

Bantu

Languages are spoken in a very large area, including most of Africa from southern Cameroon eastward to Kenya and southward to the southernmost tip of the continent.

Learned Culture

Learning a by growing up with it. Also known as enculturation, which is the process where culture is passed from one generation to the next.

Innovation

any new method, idea or device that gains widespread acceptance in society.

Malinowski

argued that people everywhere share certain biological & psychological needs & that the ultimate function of all cultural institutions is to fulfill those needs.