Anthropology 101 Final Review

Anthropology 101 Final Review

Chapter 1: What is Anthropology? * Phenotype: refers to an organism’s evident traits, its “manifest biology”—anatomy and physiology. Human display hundreds of evident (detectable) physical traits. They range from skin color, hair form, eye color, and facial features (which are visible ) to blood groups and enzyme production (which become evident through testing)
Chapter 2: Culture * Enculturation: is the process by which a child learns his or her culture. * Diffusion: borrowing of traits between cultures. * Direct : when two cultures trade with, intermarry among and imposes its customs on the dominated group * Indirect: when items or traits move from groups A to group C via group B without any firsthand contact between A and C. * Acculturation: a second mechanism of cultural change is the exchange of cultural feathers that results when groups have continuous firsthand contact. The cultures of either or both groups may be changed by this contact. Pidgin, a mixed language that develops to ease communication between members of different cultures in contact is a example of acculturation. * Globalization: encompasses a series of processes, including diffusion, migration and acculturation, working to promote change in a world in which nations and people are increasing interlinked and mutually dependent. Promoting such linkages are economics and political forces, as well as modern systems of transportation and communication. The forces of globalization include international commerce and finance, travel and tourism, transnational migration, the media and various high-tech information flows.
Chapter 3: Ethics and Methods * Emic: how local people think * Etic: scientific-oriented
Chapter 4: Language and communication * Descriptive linguistics: involves several interrelated areas of analysis: phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax, * Phonology: the study of speech sounds, considers which sounds are present and significant in a given language. * Morphology: studies the forms in which sound combine to form morphemes-words and their meaningful parts. * Lexicon: a dictionary containing all its morphemes and their meanings * Syntax: refers to the arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences. * Focal vocabulary: such specialized sets of terms and distinctions that are particularly important to certain groups (those with particular foci of experience or activity) are known as focal vocabulary. * Diglossia: applies to “high” and “low” variants of the same language, for example, in German and Flemish (spoken in Belgium). People employ the high variant at universities and in writing, professions and the mass media. They use the low variant for ordinary conversation with family members and friends. ---Dialect switches between one language. * Daughter language: languages descend from the same parent language and that have been changing separately for hundreds or even thousands of year. * Protolanguage: Original language which daughter language derive from. For example, Romance languages such as French and Spanish are daughters languages of Latin, their common protolanguage. German, English, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages are daughter language of Proto-Germanic. The romance languages and the Germanic languages all belong to the Indo-European language family. Their common protolanguage is called Proto-Indo-European, PIE.
Chapter 5: Making a living * Horticulture: is cultivation that makes intensive use of none of the factors of production: land, labor, capital and machinery. Horticulturalists use simple tools such as hoes and digging sticks to grow their crops. Involve slash- and burn techniques. * Agriculture: requires more labor than horticulture does because it uses land intensively and continuously. The greater labor demands associated with agriculture reflect its use of domesticated animals, irrigation, or terracing. * Pastoralists: live in North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. These herders are people whose activates focus on such domesticated animals as cattle, sheep, goats, camels, yak, and reindeer. * Generalized reciprocity: someone gives to another person and expects nothing immediate in return. Like Parents. * Balanced Reciprocity: exchanges between people who are more distantly related than are members of the same band or household. The giver expects something in return, but this may not come immediately. * Negative reciprocity: mainly in dealing with people on the fringes of or outside their social systems. Chapter 6: Political Systems * Sociopolitical typology: types as band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. * Tribe: had economies based on nonintensive food production (horticulture and pastoralism) living in villages and organized into kin groups based on common descent (clans and lineages). Tribes lacked a formal government and had no reliable means of enforcing political decisions. * Chiefdom: between tribe and state. Social relations were based mainly on kinship, marriage, descent, age, generation and gender. But they featured differential access to resources and a permanent political structure. * State: based on a formal government structure and socioeconomic stratification. * Descent groups: kin groups whose members trace descent from a common ancestor. * Village head: leadership position in many village-based tribal societies. Authority is severely limited. He can only lead by example and persuasion. The headman lacks rights to issue orders. Also very generous. Must be more generous than any other villagers. He cultivates more land. * Big man: kind of political leader. Was an elaborate version of the village head, but with one significant difference. Village head’s leadership is within one village, the big man had supporters in several villages. Big man was a regulator of regional political organization. * Status: used as a synonym for prestige. Encompasses various positions that people occupy in society, such as spouse, parent, trading partner, teacher, student, ….. * Ascribed status: no choice or little choice about occupying them. Born with, like age. * Achieved status: aren’t automatic. Gain through choices, actions, efforts, talents…Like big man, healer, convicted felon, terrorist…. * Age sets: each set included all the men-from that tribes’ component bands-born during a certain time span. Each set had its distinctive dances, songs, possessions, and privileges. Each set had to pool their wealth to buy admission to the next higher level as they moved up the age hierarchy, * Wealth: (economic status) encompasses all a person’s material assets. Like income, land and property * Power: (political status) the ability to exercises one’s will over others. * Prestige: (social status) refers to esteem, respect, or approval for acts, deeds, or qualities considered exemplary. This is a cultural capital. * Open-class system: facilitate mobility: upward or downward change in a person’s social status. * Fiscal: taxation
Chapter 7: Families, kinship, and marriage. * Descent group: a permanent social unit whose members claim common ancestry. * Patrilineal descent: people automatically have lifetime membership in their father’s group. * Matrilineal descent: people join the mother’s group automatically at birth and stay members through life. * Patrilocality: is the rule that when a couple marries, it moves to the husband’s community. * Matrilocality: married couple lives in the wife’s’ community and their children grow up in their mother’s village. * Exogamy: the practice of seeking a mate outside one’s own group * Endogamy: find mate within a group to which one belong * Incest: have sexual relations with a relative * Bridewealth: a customary gift from husband to wife and her kin. * Dowry: wife’s group provides substantial gifts to the husband’s family. * Sororate: wife die, husband marry wife’s sister * Levirate: husband die, wife marry husband’s brother * Polygamy: multiple spouses. * Polygyny: have multiple wives * Polyandry: have multiple husbands.
Chapter 9: Religion * Animism: earliest form of religion was a belief in spiritual beings. (Tylor) * Taboo: set apart as sacred and off-limits to ordinary people. * Rites of passage: customs associated with the transition from one place or stage of life to another * Liminality: occupy ambiguous social positions. Between separation and incorporation. * Communitas: an intense community spirit, a feeling of great social solidarity, equality, and togetherness. * Polytheism: beliefs in multiple gods. * Revitalization movement: social movements that occur in times of change, in which religious leaders emerge and undertake to alter or revitalize a society. Like Jesus.
Chapter 10: the world system and colonialism * World-system theory: an identifiable social system based on wealth and power differential, extends beyond individual countries. That system is formed by a set of economic and political relations that has characterized much of the globe since the 16 the century. * Core: the dominant position in the world system, strongest and most powerful nations. * Semiperiphery: between core and periphery. * Periphery: world’s least privileged and powerful countries. * Industrial revolution: the historical transformation(in Europe after 1750) * Colonialism: the political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended time. * Postcolonial: refers to the study of the interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized. (mainly after 1800)
Chapter 11: Ethnicity and Race * Ethnicity: means identification with, and feeling part of, an ethnic group and exclusion from certain other groups because of this affiliation. * Hypodescent: places the children of a union between members of different groups in the minority group. No matter how remote, is classified as a member of the monitory group. * Race: is a cultural category rather than a biological reality. That is , ethnic groups, including races, derive from contrasts perceived and perpetuated in particular societies, rather than from scientific classification based on common genes. * Racism: * Assimilation: describes the process of change that a minority ethnic group may experience when it moves to a country where another culture dominates. * Genocide: deliberate elimination of a group, physical extinction, like Jews in Nazi Germany. * Ethnocide: dominant group may try to destroy the cultures of certain ethnic groups or force them to adopt the dominant culture. (forced assimilation)
Chapter 13: Global issues today * Ecological anthropology: focus on how cultural beliefs and practices helped human populations adapt to their environments, and how people used elements of their culture to maintain their ecosystems. * Ethnoecology: any society’s set of environmental practices and perceptions-that is, its cultural model of the environment and its relation to people and society. * Westernization: the influence of western expansion on indigenous peoples and their cultures. * Cultural imperialism: refers to the spread or advance of one culture at the expense of others, or its imposition on other cultures, which it modifies, replaces, or destroys—usually because of differential economic or political influence. * Indigenized: modified to fit the local culture. * Diaspora: the offspring of an area who have spread to many lands. * Essentialism: describes the process of viewing an identity as established real and frozen, so as to hide the historical processes and politics within which identity developed .