Cultural Anthropology Ch. 2

Front 1

Cultural Knowledge

Back 1

Information that enables people to function in their society and contributes to the survival of the society as a whole.

Front 2

Cultural Models

Back 2

Shared assumptions that people have about the world and about the ideal culture.

Front 3

Norms

Back 3

Sets of expectations and attitudes that people have about appropriate behavior.

Front 4

Subculture

Back 4

A group whose members and others think of their way of life as in some significant way different from that of other people in the larger society.

Front 5

Enculturation

Back 5

Process of learning one's culture though informal observation and formal instruction.

Front 6

Taboos

Back 6

Norms specifying behaviors that are prohibited in a culture.

Front 7

Cultural Core

Back 7

Practices by which people organize their work and produce food and other goods necessary for their survival.

Front 8

Cultural Integration

Back 8

Tendency for people's practices and beliefs to form a relatively coherent and consistent system .

Front 9

Symbol

Back 9

A word, image, or object that stands for cultural ideas or sentiments.

Front 10

Naturalized Concepts

Back 10

Ideas and behaviors so deeply embedded in a culture that they are regarded as universally normal or natural.

Front 11

Culture Wars

Back 11

Internal disagreements in a society about cultural models or about how society or the world should be organized.

Front 12

Counterculture

Back 12

An alternative cultural model within a society that expresses different views about the way that society should be organized.

Front 13

Worldview

Back 13

Culture-based, often ethnocentric, way that people see the world and other peoples.

Front 14

Culture Contact

Back 14

Direct integration between peoples of different cultures through migration, trade, invasion, or conquest.

Front 15

Syncretism

Back 15

Process by which a cultural product is created when people adapt a cultural item selectively borrowed from another culture to fit their existing culture.

Front 16

Assimilation

Back 16

Process by which a less numerous and less powerful cultural group changes its ways to blend with the dominant culture.

Front 17

Acculturation

Back 17

Process by which a group adjusts to living within a dominant culture while at the same time maintaining its original cultural identity.

Front 18

Cultural Pluralism

Back 18

Condition in a stratified society in which many diverse cultural groups ideally live together equally and harmoniously without losing their cultural identities and diversity.

Front 19

Modernization

Back 19

Complex culture change, both internal and external, based on industrialism and a transitional market economy.

Front 20

Cultural Evolution

Back 20

Belief of early anthropologists that cultures evolve through various stages from a simpler and more primitive state to a complex and more culturally advanced state.

Front 21

Social Darwinism

Back 21

Early belief that cultures compete for survival of the fittest, as in the process of natural selection in biological evolution.

Front 22

Culture History

Back 22

Ongoing culture change in which people respond and adapt to their environment.

Front 23

Ethnogenesis

Back 23

Ongoing process in which people develop, define, and direct their own cultural and ethnic identities.

Front 24

Innovation

Back 24

Process by which new technologies and systems of knowledge are based on or built from previous tools, knowledge, and skills.

Front 25

Diffusion

Back 25

Spread of ideas, material objects, and cultural practices from one society to another through direct and indirect culture contact.

Front 26

Reactive Adaptation

Back 26

Coping response of captive, conquered, or oppressed peoples to loss and deprivation.

Front 27

Revitalization Movement

Back 27

Type of nonviolent reactive adaptation in which people try to resurrect their culture heroes and restore their traditional way of life.

Front 28

Global Culture

Back 28

A constellation of technologies, practices, attitudes, values, and symbols that spread internationally from one broad cultural origin, most recently from the Anglo-European-American cultural complex.