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.