Anthropology

101 flashcards by MentisLibrary

The study of what makes us human, across all four fields. Covers ethnography and fieldwork, kinship and exchange, ritual and belief, language, the fossil record of our ancestors, and how archaeologists read the ground.

What is anthropology?
The holistic study of humanity across all times and places, covering human biology, society, culture, and language.
What are the four fields of American anthropology, and who established that approach?
Cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological (physical) anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. Franz Boas built the four-field model by training students to study the same peoples from all four angles.
What is applied anthropology?
The use of anthropological theory and methods to address practical problems in public health, development, education, business, and policy. It is often called the fifth field.
What does holism mean in anthropology?
The principle that any aspect of human life must be understood in relation to the whole, so biology, environment, economy, politics, language, and belief are studied together.
What does cultural anthropology study?
Contemporary and recent human societies, focusing on the beliefs, practices, and social arrangements that make up culture, usually through long-term fieldwork.
What does linguistic anthropology study?
The relationship between language and social life, including language structure, change over time, and how speech creates identity and marks power.
What does biological anthropology study?
Humans as biological organisms: evolution, genetics, primates, the fossil record, growth, adaptation, and modern human variation.
What does archaeology study?
Past human societies through their material remains, including artifacts, structures, food remains, and the traces of daily activity.
How is culture usually defined in anthropology?
The learned and shared patterns of belief, behavior, and meaning that members of a society use to interpret experience and guide action, transmitted socially rather than genetically.
What is the difference between cultural relativism and ethnocentrism?
Cultural relativism understands a practice within its own cultural context; ethnocentrism judges it by the standards of the observer's culture and treats one's own way of life as natural or superior.
What is the difference between an emic and an etic perspective?
An emic account describes a culture in the categories and meanings used by insiders; an etic account uses the external comparative categories of the analyst.
What is participant observation?
The signature method of cultural anthropology: living among the people studied for an extended period, taking part in daily life while systematically observing and recording it.
What is the difference between ethnography and ethnology?
Ethnography is the detailed description and analysis of one society based on fieldwork; ethnology compares ethnographic material across societies to draw broader conclusions.
What is a key informant?
A community member with unusually deep knowledge of local life who works closely with the researcher to explain practices and provide introductions.
What is thick description?
Interpretive description that records not just an action but the layers of meaning it carries for participants, so that a wink can be distinguished from a twitch. Geertz made it central to interpretive anthropology.
What is reflexivity in anthropology?
Critical attention to how the researcher's own background, presence, and assumptions shape the data collected and the account written.
What is armchair anthropology?
The nineteenth century practice of theorizing about distant societies using reports from travelers, missionaries, and colonial officials rather than doing fieldwork.
What did Edward Burnett Tylor contribute to anthropology?
He gave an early influential definition of culture as the complex whole including knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, and custom, and proposed animism as the earliest form of religion.
What did Lewis Henry Morgan argue in Ancient Society?
That societies pass through fixed stages he called savagery, barbarism, and civilization, a scheme he tied to technology and kinship.
What is unilineal evolutionism?
The nineteenth century theory that all societies advance through the same fixed sequence of stages toward a single form of civilization.
Why did anthropologists reject unilineal evolutionism?
It ranked societies on a single ladder with the theorists' own civilization as the endpoint, ignored borrowing and local history, and rested on secondhand reports rather than fieldwork.
What is historical particularism?
Boas's position that each culture is the product of its own particular history, borrowing, and environment, so cultures must be studied individually rather than slotted into universal stages.
What were Malinowski's two main contributions?
He made intensive long-term participant observation in the local language the standard of ethnography, and he argued for functionalism, the view that institutions exist because they meet basic individual needs.
What is structural functionalism?
Radcliffe-Brown's view that institutions function to maintain the stability of the social structure as a whole, rather than to satisfy individual needs as Malinowski held.
What is structuralism in anthropology?
Levi-Strauss's approach holding that myth, kinship, and classification reflect universal properties of the human mind, especially a tendency to think in binary oppositions.
What was Margaret Mead's argument in Coming of Age in Samoa?
That adolescent experience varies with cultural setting rather than being fixed by biology, a claim central to culture and personality studies and later the subject of dispute.
What did Ruth Benedict argue in Patterns of Culture?
That each culture selects and elaborates a limited set of human possibilities, giving it a distinctive overall configuration.
What is cultural materialism?
Marvin Harris's theory that a society's infrastructure, meaning its technology, environment, and modes of production and reproduction, largely shapes its social structure and ideology.
What is descent in kinship studies?
The socially recognized tracing of ancestry that assigns people to kin groups and often determines inheritance, group membership, and obligation.
What is the difference between unilineal and bilateral descent?
Unilineal descent traces membership through one line only; bilateral descent traces kin through both parents equally and produces a personal kindred rather than a corporate group.