Cultural Anthropology Terms

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Anthropology

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The broad scientific study of human culture and biology. Anthropologists are interested in what it is to be human in all of our many different societies around the world today and in the past. In North American universities, the study of anthropology is usually divided into four main sub-disciplines: cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics

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Holistic

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The view that human existence can be adequately understood only as a multifaceted whole. Human beliefs and actions must be seen in terms of their interrelatedness with all other aspects of culture, human biology, social interaction, and environmental influences

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Comparative

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Analyzing data about cultures to learn and explain patterns of similarity and difference

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Evolutionary

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Change in the form of a culture. Usually a process of internal cultural change

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Biological (Physical) Anthropology

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Branch of anthropology that studies the physical development of the human species

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Primatologist

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A person who studies non human primates

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Paleoanthropologists

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A person who studies of the origins and predecessors of the present human species, using fossils and other remains.

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Forensic Anthropologists

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Educated in osteology. Using this knowledge, a forensic anthropologist can look at human remains and determine how the person died; whether it was suicide, homicide, accidental, or from natural causes. Using human bones the forensic anthropologist can determine the age of the individuals, the sex, the height, the type of occupation they worked in and the overall health status at the time of death. This information can lead crime scene investigators to their identities is as well as how they died.

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Medical Anthropology

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The study of "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation."

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Cultural Anthropology

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The study of contemporary and recent historical cultures all over the world. The focus is on social organization, culture change, economic and political systems, and religion. Cultural anthropology is also referred to as social or sociocultural anthropology

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Development Anthropology

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Branch of anthropology that refers to the study of developing nations and the economic, social, and political issues that come up within them

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Objective knowledge

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Objective knowledge is that which can not be contested or refuted, regardless of situation

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Positivism

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A philosophy of science based on the view that in the social as well as natural sciences, data derived from sensory experience, and logical and mathematical treatments of such data, are together the exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge

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Modernism

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odern thought, character, or practice

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Postmodernism

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A view that social and cultural reality, as well as social science itself, is a human construction

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Reflexive

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The awareness of the researcher and the effect they may be having on the research

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Multisited Fieldwork

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Uses traditional methodology in various locations both spatially and temporally. Through this methodology, greater insight can be gained when examining the impact of world-systems on local and global communities.

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Culture

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The full range of learned behavior patterns that are acquired by people as members of a society.

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Informants

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Someone who is not only knowledgeable about his or her own culture but who is able and willing to communicate this knowledge in an understandable way to an anthropologist or some other outsider

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Fieldwork

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Living among a group of people for the purpose of learning about their culture

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Participant Observation

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Living in a culture that is not your own while also keeping a detailed record of your observations and interviews

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Ethnography

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Anthropological research in which one learns about the culture of another society through fieldwork and first hand observation in that society. Ethnography is also the term used to refer to books or monographs describing what was learned about the culture of a society

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Ethnology

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An anthropological study that systematically compares similar cultures. An example of an ethnological study would be a comparison of what cultures are like in societies that have economies based on hunting and gathering rather than agriculture. The data for this sort of ethnology would come from the existing ethnographies about these peoples

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Anthropological Linguistics

(Linguistic Anthropology)

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?

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Archeology

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?

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Prehistory

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?

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Applied Anthropology

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?

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Culture

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The learned patterns of behavior and thought that help a group adapt to it's surroundings

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Enculturation

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The process by which culture is learned

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Socialization

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The process by which culture is learned; also called enculturation. During socialization individuals internalize a culture's social controls, along with values and norms about right and wrong.

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Symbols

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Physical objects, colors, sounds, movements, scents which convey information through an arbitrary or culturally assigned meaning

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Ethnocentrism

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judging other cultures by the standards of your own, which you believe to be superior

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Cultural relativism

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Understanding the ways of other cultures and not judging these practices according to one's own cultural ways

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Cultural hybridization

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The process by which cultures around the world adopt a certain degree of homogenized global culture while clinging to aspects of their own traditional culture

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Language

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Any system of formalized symbols, signs, sounds, gestures, or the like used or conceived as a means of communicating thought, emotion, etc

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Langue

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The social, impersonal phenomenon of language as a system of signs

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Parole

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The individual, personal phenomenon of language as a series of speech acts made by a linguistic subject

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Discourse

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Written or spoken communication or debate

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Communicative Competence

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A speaker's internalized knowledge both of the grammatical rules of a language and of the rules for appropriate use in social contexts.

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Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

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Language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world

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Etic

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Outside view of a culture

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Emic

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Inside view of a culture