Cultural Anthropology

Egalitarian societies

Contains no social groups with greater or lesser access to economic resources, power, or prestige.

Rank societies

Do not have unequal access to economic resources or to power, but they do contain social groups with unequal access to prestige and are partly stratified.

Steppe

Dry, low grass cover

Savanna

Tropical grasslands

Caste

A ranked group in which membership is determined at birth, and marriage is restricted to members of one's own _________.

Power

A second but related advantage, it is the ability to make others do what they do not want to do; power is influence based on the threat of force.

Socialization

A term used to describe the development, through the influence of parents, and other people, of patterns of behavior and attitudes and values, that conform to cultural expectations.

Cash crops

Cotton and tobacco are the main cash crops - that is, crops raised for sale. In this dry plains country, the success of the cotton crop depends on irrigation, and the villagers use efficient diesel pumps to distribute water.

Reciprocity

Giving or taking without the use of money; primarily takes the form of gift giving or generalized reciprocity. There may also be exchanges of equal value (barter or non-monetary trade) or balanced reciprocity, without the use of money.

Generalized reciprocity

Goods or services are given to another, without any apparent expectation of a return gift.

Class societies

Have unequal access to all three advantages → economic resources, power, and prestige.

Gender stratification

How much power and authority to men and women have over each other. What kinds of rights do men and women possess to do what they want to do? Why do women have few rights and little influence in some societies and more in other societies? Why are there variations in the degree of __________ ____________________.

Slash-and-burn

Like most shifting cultivators, the Yanomamo use a combination of techniques: slashing the undergrowth, felling trees, and using controlled burning to clear a garden spot --- in other words, slash-and-burn horticulture.

Intensive agriculture

People engaged in intensive agriculture use techniques that enable them to cultivate fields permanently. Essential nutrients may be put back in the soil through the use of fertilizers.

Commercialization

Some intensive agriculturists produce very little for sale; most of what they produce is for their own use. But there is a worldwide trend for intensive agriculturists to produce more and more for the market. This trend is called commercialization, which may occur in any area of life and which involves increasing dependence on buying and selling, usually with money as the medium for exchange.

Prestige

Someone, or some group is accorded particular respect or honor.

Project tests

Subjects are given stimuli that presumably reveal personality characteristics.

Horticulture

The growing of crops of all kinds with relatively simple tools and methods, in the absence of permanently cultivated fields.

Economic Resources

Things that have value in the culture; they include land, tools and other technology, goods, and money.

Slaves

People that do not own their own labor, and as such they represent a class.

Class

A category of people who all have about the same opportunity to obtain economic resources, power, and prestige.

Ethnicity

A group of people sharing common origins and language, shared history, and selected cultural differences such as a difference in religion.

Gender roles

All societies assign or divide labor somewhat differently between females and males, because role assignments have clear cultural components we speak of them as ____________ __________.

General-purpose money

Although market exchange need not involve money, most commercial transactions, particularly nowadays, do involve what we call money. Some anthropologists define money to the functions and characteristics of the general-purpose money used in our own and other complex societies for which nearly all goods, resources, and services can be exchanged.

Peasants

Although peasants produce food largely for their own consumption, they regularly sell parts of their surplus food to others, and land is one of the commodities they buy, rent, and sell. But although their production is somewhat commercialized, peasants are still not like the fully commercialized farmers in industrialized societies, who rely on the market to exchange all or almost all of their crops for all or almost all of the goods or services they need.

Gender differences

Because many of the differences between males and females may reflect cultural expectations, anthropologists use this term _______________________ to refer to cultural male/female differences.

Sex differences

Biological differences in the male/female.

Balanced reciprocity

Explicit or short term in its expectations of return. In contrast to generalized reciprocity or a one-way transfer, which has no expectations of a return, balanced reciprocity involves either an immediate exchange of goods or services or an agreed-upon exchange over a limited amount of time.

Primary institutions

Family organization and subsistence techniques, give rise to certain personality characteristics.

Foraging

Food collection may be generally defined as a food-getting strategy that obtains wild plant and animal resources through gathering, hunting, scavenging, or fishing.

Subsistence economics

Food production: Beginning about 10,000 years ago, certain peoples in widely separated geographic locations made the revolutionary changeover to food production. That is, they began to cultivate and then domesticate plants and animals. With domestication of these food sources, people acquired control over certain natural processes, such as animal breeding and plant seeding.

Primary subsistence activities

Gathering, hunting, fishing, herding, and farming.

Special-purpose money

In many societies, money is not an all-purpose medium of exchange. Many peoples whose food production per capita is not sufficient to support a large population of nonproducers of food have special-purpose money. This consists of objects of value for which only some goods and services can be exchanged on the spot or through balanced reciprocity.

Market or commercial exchange

In referring to market, or commercial exchange, economists and economic anthropologists are referring to exchanges or transactions in which the "prices" are subject to supply and demand, whether or not the transactions actually occur in the market place.

Potlatch

In some Melanesian societies, the pig feasts foster an element of competition among the men who give them. "Big men" may try to bolster their status and prestige by the size of their feasts. A reputation is enhanced not by keeping wealth but by giving it away. A similar situation existed among many Native American groups of the Pacific Northwest, where a chief might attempt to enhance his status by holding a potlatch. At a potlatch, a chief and his group would give away blankets, pieces of copper, canoes, large quantities of food, and other items to their guests. The host chief and his group would later be invited to other potlatches.

Corvée

Money is the customary form of tax payment in a commercial society. In a politically complex but nonmonetary society, people may pay for their taxes in other ways --- by performing a certain number of hours of labor or by giving up a certain percentage of what they produce. The Corvée, a system of required labor, existed in the Inca Empire in the central Andes before the Spanish conquest. Each male commoner was assigned three plots of land to work: a temple plot, a state plot, and his own plot. The enormous stores of food that went into state warehouses were used to supply the nobles, the army, the artisans, and all other state employees.

Pastoralism

Most agriculturists keep and breed some animals (practice animal husbandry), but a small number of societies depend mostly for their living on domesticated herds of animals that feed on natural pasture. We call such a system pastoralism. We might assume that pastoralists breed animals to eat their meat, but most do not.

Hunter-gatherers

Most of these people live in marginal areas of the earth --- deserts, the Arctic, and dense tropical forests - habitats that do not allow easy exploration by modern agricultural technologies.

Secondary institutions

Once the personality, though it can have its own impact on the culture, in Kardiner's view, the ________________________ of society such as religion and art, is shaped and is called the basic personality characteristics.

Optimal foraging theory

Researchers have tried to explain why certain economic decisions become customary and why individuals make certain economic decisions in their every day lives. A frequent source of ideas about choices is the optimal foraging theory; which was developed originally by students of animal behavior, and which has been applied to decision making of foragers.

Prairie

Taller, better watered grass

Redistribution

The accumulation of goods or labor by a particular person, or in a particular place, for the purpose of subsequent distribution.

Racism

The belief that some "races" are inferior to others. In a society composed of people with noticeably different physical features such as differences in skin color, racism is almost invariably associated with social stratification.

Enculturation

The development of a child through the influence of a parent or caretaker.

Manumission

The granting of freedom to slaves.

Secondary subsistence activities

The processing and preparation of food for eating or storing.

Sexually dimorphic

The two sexes of our species are generally different in size and appearance. Females have proportionately wider pelvises. Males are typically taller and have heavier skeletons.

Extensive (shifting) cultivation

There are two kinds of horticulture. The more common one involves dependence on extensive (shifting) cultivation. The land is worked for short periods and then left idle for years. During the years when the land is not cultivated, wild plants and brush grow; when they fields are later cleared by slash-and-burn techniques, nutrients are returned to the soil.

Personality integration of culture

Whiting and Child used this phrase to refer to the possibility that understanding of personality might help us explain connections between primary and secondary institutions.