Anthropology Unit One Vocabulary

Linguistic Anthropology

***** The anthropological study of languages

Etic

An etic perspective or approach to research is much more quantitative than an emic approach. With an etic approach researchers (and this includes some anthropologists) give more weight to observation and objectifying data. It's a viewpoint that thinks that actors in a culture cannot possibly understand and interpret their own culture because they are too close to it.

Assimilation

An individual is assimilated when he is capable of entering social positions and political, economic, and educational areas of the standard society. If he cannot, he may simply remain acculturated, because he has learned the language, habits, and values of the standard or dominant culture.

Maladaptive Customs

Cultural traits that diminish the chances of survival and reproduction in a particular environment

Globalization

The ongoing spread of goods, people, information, and capital around the world.

in-Depth Interviewing

is exploratory and open-ended.

Adjustment

Also when doing fieldwork, there is a period of adjustment. This is particularly true if you are studying in another country, but it also occurs when you're studying a subculture within your own culture. Even if you know the language, people will often treat you like a child because you are a foreigner. That's good and bad. You want to learn from their point of view but it's difficult to get used to. You can't just BE AMERICAN all the time. You have to adjust, blend in as much as possible.

Ethnohistorian

An ethnologist who uses historical documents to study how a particular culture has changed over time.

Ruth Benedict

Benedict is most noted for her development of the concepts of culture configurations and culture and personality, both developed in Patterns of Culture (1934). Benedict elaborated the concept of culture configuration as a way of characterizing individual cultures as an historical elaboration of those cultures' personalities or temperaments.

Social Evolutionism

Both of these assumptions led them to study societies and cultures with the goal of explaining all cultural differences with one theory. We call the first such effort Social Evolutionism.

Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronislaw Malinowski was an early pioneer of field research and is considered the father of participant observation.

Ethnogenesis

Creation of a new culture

Cultural Ecology

Cultural ecology is the study of the adaptation of human societies or populations to their environments, emphasizing the arrangements of technique, economy, and social organization through which culture mediates the experience of the natural world.

Adaptive Customs

Cultural traits that enhance survival and reproduction success in a particular environment

Culture Shock

Culture shock refers to the unpleasant sense of confusion and disorientation upon entering the field - not only about the culture - it's also about feelings of loneliness, isolation, anxiety, homesickness, and even depression.

Neo-Evolution

Cultures evolve in direct proportion to their ability to capture energy White, Steward

Ethnoscience

Cultures must be described in terms of native categories Sturtevant, Goodenough

Evolutionism

Evolutionism was a common 19th century belief that organisms inherently improve themselves through progressive inherited change over time, and increase in complexity through evolution. The belief went on to include cultural evolution and social evolution.

Edward Taylor

Evolutionist British group was headed by Edward Tylor, and focused on the evolution of religion and magic

Lewis Henry Morgan

Evolutionist leader of american group of evolutionist a lawyer working and living in New York. He became very involved with the Iroquois in the area. His research, and those working with him, focused on marriage, family, technology, and socio-political organizations

Fieldwork

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

Coming of Age in Samoa

For example, in Coming of Age in Samoa, she argued against the idea that the biological maelstrom of adolescence meant that all people experience angst, trauma, and emotional intensity in their teen years. She argued that these experiences are actually cultural, noting that Samoan teens don't experience adolescence as traumatic. Mead contended that American teens are expected to be quite independent, quite suddenly of their families. She furthermore argued that because American culture represses sexuality, the new sexual feelings experienced by teens are traumatic. She contrasted this with the Samoan culture, which never demands people to be suddenly independent. Rather, Samoans remain deeply involved with their families throughout their lives. Furthermore, she reported that Samoans are quite accepting of and open about sexuality and sexual feelings. They therefore aren't traumatized by their feelings or experiences.

Historical Particularism

Founded by Franz Boas, historical particularism rejected the cultural evolutionary model that had dominated anthropology until Boas. It argued that each society is a collective representation of its unique historical past.

Frank Cushing

Frank Cushing was one of the early pioneers in field research in American anthropology at the end of the 19th century. But Cushing soon learned that in order to gain the respect of the Zuni he was not only going to have to observe them, but to participate in their activities.

Culture Circles

German and Austrian diffusionists argued that there were a number of culture centers, rather than just one, in the ancient world. Culture traits diffused, not as isolated elements, but as a whole culture complex, basically due to migration of individuals from one culture to another.

Post-Modernism

Human behavior stems from the way people perceive and classify the world around them Geertz

French Structuralism

Human cultures are shaped by certain preprogrammed codes in the human mind Lévi-Strauss

Functionalism

Principal Concepts: behavior must be understood in terms of individuals' motives, be they rational, 'scientifically' validated behavior or "irrational", ritual, magical, or religious behavior; cultural traits must be understood as interconnected and forming a system; a particular cultural trait must be understood by identifying its function in the current operation of that culture

Culture Ecology

The analysis of the relationship between a culture and its environment

Culture Relativism

The attitude that a society's customs and ideas should be viewed within the context of that society's problems and opportunities.

Applied Anthropology

The branch of anthropology that concerns itself with applying anthropological knowledge to achieve practical goals.

Feminist Anthropology

The point for this class is that women anthropologists began focusing on gender not because they were angry extremists, but because they came to understand that men and women will often find different things important, will have access to different kinds of information, and that what women do is actually important - even if women's activities are largely confined to "only" the home. The first feminist anthropologists did focus on women rather than gender per se. Hey, they had to revisit hundreds of cultures and ethnographies to see what their predecessors had missed!

Gender (as it relates to ethnography)

The point is - women can move easily around the world of women and men can move easily around the world of men.

Diffusion

The process by which cultural elements are borrowed from another society and incorporated into the culture of the recipient group.

Acculturation

The process of extensive borrowing of aspects of culture in the context of superordinate subordinate relations between societies; usually occurs as the result of external pressure Kroeber (1948) described acculturation as changes produced in a culture because of the influence of another culture, with the two cultures becoming similar as the end result. These changes may be reciprocal, which results in the two cultures becoming similar, or one-way and may result in the extinction of one culture, when it is absorbed by the other.

Cultural Anthropology

The study of cultural variation and universals in the past and present.

Ethnologoy

The study of how and why recent cultures differ and are similar.

Physical/Biological Anthropology

The study of humans as biological organisms, dealing with the emergence and evolution of humans and with contemporary biological variations among human populations.

Ethical dilemmas

There are times when you are in the field and something happens that you are completely morally against. It might be female circumcision, wife beating, or someone asking you to participate in an activity that you are morally opposed to or you think might cause somebody more harm than good. Anthropologists have an ethical code that simply stated says that an anthropologist must do no harm to the people they are studying. You should always put the safety and welfare of the people ahead of your own research and your own concerns.

Missionaries, early explorers, colonial officials

amateur collectors of anthropology in the 20th century

Structured Interviews

are typically referred to as surveys and have closed ended questions.

Salvage Ethnography

collecting all the details about every aspect of their lives and culture. is the recording of the practices and folklore of cultures threatened with extinction, including as a result of modernization. It is generally associated with the American anthropologist Franz Boas; he and his students aimed to record vanishing Native American cultures.

Three Basic Assumptions

cultural phenomena are to be studied in naturalistic fashion the premise that cultural differences between groups are not caused by biological differences, but rather sociocultural experiences the use of the comparative method

Semi-structured Interviews

differ from in-depth interview in that semi-structured interviews have questions that are pre-formulated. You ask the same questions to everyone, but at the same time you allow flexibility.

Emic

emic approach, which is a typical perspective and approach to doing research for an anthropologist. The emic approach is qualitative and subjective. Anthropologists investigate the culture through the eyes of the informants. They listen to how they define their world. They try to understand how the informants interpret certain aspects of their lives and give meaning to their lives

Ethnocentric

evaluating other peoples and cultures according to the standards of one's own culture.

Archaeology

subfield of anthropology. The branch of anthropology that seeks to reconstruct the daily life and customs of peoples who lived in the past and to trace and explain cultural changes. Often lacking written records and study, archaeologists must try to reconstruct history from the material remains of human culture.

Unilinear social evolution

the notion that culture generally develops (or evolves) in a uniform and progressive manner.

Historical Linguistics Descriptive (structural) Linguistics Sociolinguistics

the study of how languages change over time The study of how languages are constructed The study of cultural and subcultural patterns of speaking in different social contexts.

Primitive promiscuity

the theory that the original state of human society was characterized by the lack of incest taboos, or rules regarding sexual relations or marriage

Key Informants

this might be elders, healers, chiefs, or people who know a lot about the culture and can understand why you are there and want to ask questions

Survivals

traces of earlier customs that survive in present-day cultures

Amateur collectors

were people like missionaries, early explorers, and colonial officials who traveled the world, encountered many different people and cultures, and wrote journals about their events. They recorded events and activities of their own daily lives, but also about the daily lives of the people they encountered. They documented every event and every encounter with local people around the world. They also recorded the struggles they encountered with particular cultural groups

Armchair Anthropology

when anthropologists take others' notes about people and cultures and try to make assumptions, generalizations, and theories about those cultures without ever having spent time with them

Cultural Materialism

Material conditions determine human consciousness and behavior Harris

Holistic

Refers to an approach that studies many aspects of a multifaceted system.

Psychic unity of mankind

the belief that the human mind was everywhere essentially similar.

Ethnography

A description of a society's customary behaviors and ideas.

Anthropology

A discipline that studies humans, focusing on the study of differences and similarities, both biological and cultural, in human populations. Anthropology is concerned with typical biological an cultural characteristics of human populations in all periods and in all parts of the world.

Ethnographer

A person who spends some time living with, interviewing, and observing a group of people to describe their customs

Franz Boas

It was developed by the same immigrant, Franz Boas, who founded American anthropology. He and his students dominated American anthropology into the 1950s. Trained as a physicist and switching to anthropology later in life, Boas believed that the hard sciences could produce general laws, but the human sciences can only produce descriptions. Boas did agree that diffusionism was a good theory (except when taken to extreme) as the data supported the idea that people have been traveling and sharing/borrowing cultural traits for centuries. He also believed that all cultures are always changing, and that no culture was superior to another; in other words, he made the idea of cultural relativism central to anthropology. He furthermore believed that each culture was fundamentally unique, so it made no sense to look for general laws that govern cultures - they don't exist! Related to this idea, he argued that every cultural trait had to be understood in its own context, and made no sense to compare and contrast cultural traits cross-culturally. Boas did not feel that the grand theories of socio-political evolution or diffusion were provable. He argued that many cultures developed independently, each based on its own particular set of circumstances such as geography, climate, resources and particular cultural borrowing. Based on this argument, reconstructing the history of individual cultures requires an in-depth investigation that compares groups of culture traits in specific geographical areas. Then the distribution of these culture traits must be plotted. Once the distribution of many sets of culture traits is plotted for a general geographic area, patterns of cultural borrowing may be determined To this end, Boas and his students stressed the importance of gathering as much data as possible about individual cultures before any assumptions or interpretations are made regarding a culture or culture change within a culture. This included the recording of oral history and tradition (salvage ethnology) and basic ethnographic methods such as participant observation. Boas also stressed that linguistic, archaeological and physical evidence had to be collected. This approach became known as the four field method of anthropology and was spread to anthropology departments all over the United States by Boas' students and their students.

Life Histories

Life histories are a fantastic research methods for many reasons. They allow you to learn about the details of someone's life growing up in a particular culture. They provide a very vivid picture of that culture. They also allow you to understand the culture over time, by examining the various decades that informant is discussing. The more life histories you do, particular with elders, the most vivid the picture of culture change becomes.

Participant observation

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

Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies

Mead is also well-known for her 1935 study called Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (remember that "primitive" was a technical term at this time). She traveled to three different islands in New Guinea to study gender roles. The underlying question was, could the behavior of men and women be explained by biology? In more contemporary terms, is Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus true? She described very different gender roles in each society. Summarized, her results were In one society, there was little difference between men and women, and both were largely passive In another society, there again was little difference between men and women, and both were largely aloof and aggressive In the last society, there were differences between men and women. But the roles were reversed! Men stayed home, gossiped amongst each other, and took care of the kids; women were involved in trading (that is, they were out in the public sphere earning an income) and were aggressive She was trying to counter biological approaches that said, "men are just this way; it's their nature." And she did give us examples of how Americans tend to use biology to explain what is actually cultural in origin. Think about the fact, for example, that women in the US weren't allowed to run marathons until 1972.

Margaret Mead

Mead is well-known for her research on Samoa, and her arguments that certain behaviors were the result of culture, not of human nature in and of itself. Coming of age in Samoa

Problems with Functionalism

Problems How do you know if a trait is really functional? We can't subtract the trait and see how society works without it, after all. Cultural traits can be neutral (like men's ties. What sense do they make?) or even maladaptive. In her ethnography Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics, Nancy Scheper-Hughes studied a village in Ireland with a high rate of mental illness. She argued that the families made younger kids psychotic by mentally abusing them; these kids never left home.... which meant they were available to take care of their aging parents while older kids went off to work. Her work has since been criticized, but remains an example of how cultural traits can be maladaptive. Certainly our own cultural habits and norms are environmentally destructive, and therefore hard to defend as adaptive! Functionalism doesn't allow for cultural change. It doesn't allow for us to think about how does cultural change happens, and to evaluate the impact of those changes. Functionalism doesn't answer the question of why one culture meets human needs in one way, and another culture does so in a different way. If all humans need a sense of the supernatural to help them cope with the stresses and uncertainties of life, why are there so many expressions of a sense of the supernatural? We currently have everything from yoga studios to Harry Potter to "traditional" religions like Christianity or Islam.

Patterns of Culture

Ruth Benedict's book Benedict elaborated the concept of culture configuration as a way of characterizing individual cultures as an historical elaboration of those cultures' personalities or temperaments.

Cultural stages (savagery, barbarism, civilization)

Savagery Subsist using hunting and gathering; have fire; have the bow and arrow No families exist, rather people live as a promiscuous horde. Animism Barbarism Have invented pottery and iron; have domesticated plants and animals Loose female-male relationships, usually polygamous Polytheism Civilization Have invented an alphabet and have invented writing Nuclear, monogamous family units Monotheism

Socio-cultural Anthropology

Sociocultural anthropology studies the rules of being human, such as how we calculate who we are related to (kinship), how we make a living, how we organize the world, and all of the beliefs that are part of religion, science, and the arts

Multilinear Evolution

Steward and White developed an approach that combined technology, the environment and Marxism. Steward focused on how specific cultures adapted to their environments, theorizing that cultures in similar environments will follow similar developmental paths, and will respond in similar ways to their environment. He called his theory multilinear evolution because he believed that cultures could develop and change following any number of different patterns.

Structural Functionalism

Structural Functionalism is a sociological theory that attempts to explain why society functions the way it does by focusing on the relationships between the various social institutions that make up society (e.g., government, law, education, religion, etc).