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147 Cards in this Set

  • Front
  • Back
_______ are an Eskimo (Inuit) group living in the Canadian Province of Quebec. Nanook, the people featured in the film "Nanook of the North," were a member of this group.
The Intivimiut Eskimo
________ are an American Indian "tribe" now living in northern Arizona, the descendants of the ancient Anasazi of the Four Corners area where Utah, Arizona,Colorado, and New Mexico meet. They were described in the Sourcebook reading "Hopi Social Order."
The Hopi
_________ are the people represented in the film "Ongka's Big Moka" shown on November 5th. They live on the slopes of Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea and raise pigs.
The Kawelka
__________ are described in Donald Tuzin's Social Complexity in the Making: A Case Study Among the Arapesh of New Guinea. They do not live on Mount Hagen and they are keen on yams.
The Arapesh
___________ are foraging Pymies of the Ituri forest in eastern Congo.
The BaMbuti
____________ are a people living in Uganda in a district ("kingdom") (Bunyoro) formerly ruled by a nearly-divine monarch. They have nothing to do with today's lecture. You will read about them next.
The Nyoro
Planting, raising, or harvesting crops without using a plow.
Horticulture
A tall, strong creal grass that is self-fertile and exhibits little genetic variability
Sorghum
Possible ancestor of modern maize
Teosinte
Principle food crop of prehistoric Peru
Potato
Important grain crop of Neolithic China
Millet
Stone tool technology (and way of life) associated with early agriculture
Neolithic
Synonym for "herding"
Pastoralism
Change of residence among two or more fixed sites, normally to permit season-specific pasturing of herds
Transhumance
Stone tool technology (and way of life) associated with foraging
Paleolithic
Monumental stone tablet, usually inscribed
Stele
Plural of stele
Stelae
A code used by kinship analysts to refer to a category of kinsman. For example, "SiHu" means "sister's husband," and "FaSiHuMoBr" means "father's sister's husband's mother's brother." (As far as I know, there is no English word that refers to such a person.) Perhaps the commonest use of kintypes is in identifying the referents of kinterms in various languages
kintype
(1) A term used to refer to or designate a person related by kinship (for example "mother" or "cousin").

(2) a term used to address a person related by kinship, other than a name or nickname (for example, "Mommy" or "Cuz").
kinterm
"Headless," lacking formal institutions of government such as chiefs or kings. Small-scale foraging societies, such as the traditional Eskimo or Ituri Pygmies, were typically
acephalous
Relative who cannot be traced without going through a marriage link, for example: mother's sister's husband (MoSiHu).
Affine
The relationship that obtains between affines.
Affinity
A person who shares descent with Ego from a common ancestor through male links only, for example: Ego's father's father's brother's son (FaFaBrSo) is one of Ego's agnates.
Agnate
Various means to grow more than one crop in the same field at the same time (such as inter-cropping corn, beans, and squash) or to move a crop into a field only after it has sprouted and requires more space (such as transplantation of rice).
Agricultural Intensification
Deliberate cultivation of crop plants.
Agriculture
A person from whom Ego is descended through any number of links.
Ancestor
The comparative and empirical (observation-based) study of human societies (people) and their cultures (understandings), with special emphasis upon the processes involved in the evolution of the human condition. Anthropologists have traditionally been interested in how human societies have adapted not just to their natural environments but also to each other and to themselves.
Anthropology
Endowing non-human entities like objects and animals and spirits with human qualities. For example, ancient Greek gods were anthropomorphic, i.e., they were represented as looking and to a large extent acting like humans.
Anthropomorphic
To talk to plants is to anthropomorphize them, treating them as humans able to understand what you say.
Anthromorphization
In kinship and descent, an apical ancestor is a common ancestor from whom a lineage or clan may trace its descent.
Apical Ancestor
The action or set of procedures by which physical objects are excavated from below the ground with the goal of gaining information about earlier life. The term may be applied to projects as diverse as the excavation of dinosaur bones and the excavation of ruined gas stations.
Archaeology
A state created through the expansion of a kingdom to exert authority over a range of originally similar political units, incorporating all into the political structure of the expanding state, often with tribute obligations from the conquered to the conquering group.
Archaic Empire
A rule of postmarital residence by which the newly married couple dwells in the household of the husband's mother's brother.

Avunculocality is logically related to matrilineal lineages. Although informants in matrilineal societies often claim it is a preferred residential arrangement, I have been able to find no society in which it is actually practiced with anything like universality.
Avunculcocality
A small foraging group of related men, women, and children inhabiting a distinct territory.
Band
A feature of social organization, found especially in New Guinea, in which men acquire prestige and followers not through inherited rank or wealth, but through skill as warriors, orators, and entrepreneurs in elaborate, large-scale exchanges, most often of pigs.
Big Man Complex
Descent calculated without regard to sex. (No lineage systems are known based on bilateral descent, presumably since each person would be a member of countless lineages in such a system.) See table under descent.
Bilateral Descent
A definition that identifies one or several characteristics that jointly and unambiguously distinguish any member of a class from any member of any other, contrasting class.
Boundary-focused Definition
A payment made by the groom or his family to the bride or her family in connection with a marriage.
Brideprice
A double-edged wooden blade, usually about a foot long, attached to a long cord and swung in a circle in the air to produce a low hum. Among the Arapesh this is said to be the "voice" of a spirit.
Bullroarer
A religious society, usually of brief duration, centered on the belief that, by the practice of cult activities, the members will be rewarded by the delivery of a "cargo" of material goods presented to them by cult spirits or ancestors. Sometimes members build symbolic airstrips or destroy their houses or other goods in preparation for the arrival of the cargo.

Cargo cults have arisen repeatedly in this century in New Guinea.
Cargo Cult
The number of people that a given unit of land will support. Although carrying capacity is usually described as a property of the land itself, it depends not only upon characteristics of the land (such as climate, soil, and so on) but also upon the technology and values of the people involved, and upon the length of time and moment in history when they are to be supported.
Carrying Capacity
A definition that identifies the one or several characteristics of a typical or normative member of a class to distinguish it from typical members of other, contrasting classes.
Center-focused definition
The term "chief" (or "chieftain") is loosely applied to a political or kinship-group leader in a relatively simple social system in which usually the chief (1) has personal relations with all or nearly all of those under him and (2) stands at the highest level of political authority. Among foraging peoples the chief may be elected by a band and enjoy a tenure of limited duration, but among agricultural peoples the office is most often hereditary and, once attained, is held for life.
Chiefdom
Most attempts at definition are laundry lists of "traits" thought to characterize the societies the list-maker chooses to call civilizations. Such traits often include monumental architecture, philosophy (as distinct from religion), writing, cities inhabited by non-farmers, cross-regional trade, a centralized state apparatus, a complex division of labor, a stable system of social stratification, explicitly aesthetic activities patronized by only some social classes, and the like.
Civilization
A lineage -like group in which links to a common ancestor cannot be spelled out in detail.
Clan
A kinsman placed as a stand-in in a kinship category for limited purposes only.

Classificatory kinsmen make it possible to operate many customary social relationships even when nature does not provide the right kind of kinsman.
Classificatory Kinsman
A person who shares descent with Ego from a common ancestor through any combination of male or female links, for example: father's mother's brother (FaMoBr). Also called a "consanguine."
Cognate
The conversion of any object or practice into something which can be subjected to commodity exchange. For example, performing folk dances for a paying audience represents the commoditization of folk dancing.
Commoditization
The exchange of objects and services of value, often including cash, in which the parties to the transaction may have no other relationship with each other and are, in any case, motivated only by the desire for the exchanged service or item itself.
Commodity Exchange
Akin(p): related by blood
Consanguine
Related by descent from a common ancestor
Consanguinity
(1) Building or other object that has been constructed. Derived from the verb "construct." (2) An understanding or the act of understanding. Derived from the verb "construe."
Construction
Children of opposite-sex siblings
Cross Cousins
Ego's social relations across the boundaries of groups to which he may belong. In general, the presence of many cross-cutting ties in a society is viewed by most analysts as contributing to peaceful relations between the various groups that are cross-cut.
Cross-Cutting Ties
The process of gradual change in the culture of a society, seen in retrospect as directional. Thus one may speak of the cultural evolution of Ilahita as it acquires and then discards the Tambaran cult.
Cultural Evolution
Cultural Reproduction refers to the process in which existing cultural values and norms are passed down from one generation to the next.
Cultural Reproduction
(1) (Technical Usage) The sum of the shared, morally forceful, learned understandings of a group of people (a society) or of humans in general. While culture is composed of understandings, it functions as a society's extra-somatic means of adaptation to an environment

(2) (Archaeological usage.) An ancient society as manifested in its material remains (as in "Natufian culture").

(3) (Archaeological usage.) Artifacts (collectively referred to as "material culture").

(4) (Popular usage.) A society (as in "We need to study other cultures.").

(5) (Popular usage.) Art or the arts; educational or artistic refinement (as in "San Diego's cultural institutions," "a person of culture").
Culture
The quality of being related as parent and child. Because of such cultural practices as adoption, social descent need not necessarily be identical with biological descent.
Descent
All people descended from a common ancestor through same-sex links. Hence: matriline, patriline. The ancestor need not be identified, since (unlike a lineage or clan) a descent line is a category, not a group.
Descent Line
Digging stick used in horticulture.
Dibble
A payment made by the bride or her family to the groom or his family in connection with a marriage.
Dowry
A social structure characterized by the division of society into two complementary parts called moieties.
Dual Organization
In social science, the "function" of a custom or institution is the contribution it makes to the on-going existence and character of the society. As such, "function" tends simply to mean "result."

An early XXth-century school of ethnographic analysis —"functionalism"— argued that even quite odd customs contributed to the general welfare, or anyway the continuity, of various societies.
Dysfunction
The person taken as a reference point in a kinship diagram or in discussions of kinship relations. A few specialists use the terms "Egom" and "Egof" to specify male and female egos, when necessary.
Ego
Classes of people able to monopolize resources. The usual archaeological evidence is discrepancies in the quality or quantity of grave goods or in the size of houses. Rarely is there any clear evidence about who exactly such people are: merchants, priests, nobility, or whatever. The term is convenient because this ambiguity makes it widely applicable, but it implies very little about the actual class structure of an ancient society.
Elites
A state created through the expansion of a kingdom to exert authority over a range of originally similar political units, incorporating all into the political structure of the expanding state, often with tribute obligations from the conquered to the conquering group.

(MODERN VERSION)
Empire
A marriage rule by which one must marry a member of one's own social "group" or category, however defined. Ethnic and language groups are typically endogamous.
Endogamy
The description of a society based on relatively long-term field research undertaken among its members by someone with training in ethnology. (The word "ethnography" can be used to refer to the act of doing the research or to the resultant presentation.) Ethnographic research presented in film form is called "ethnographic film."
Ethnography
The comparative study of societies, especially making use of ethnographic sources.

Usage note: While the words ethnography and ethnographic are used with great frequency, "ethnology" is today a word of low frequency, and the comparative study of human societies is simply understood within disciplinary names such as cultural anthropology, comparative sociology, or human geography.
Ethnology
In social science, the "function" of a custom or institution is the contribution it makes to the on-going existence and character of the society. As such, "function" tends simply to mean "result."

An early XXth-century school of ethnographic analysis —"functionalism"— argued that even quite odd customs contributed to the general welfare, or anyway the continuity, of various societies.
Eufunction
the act of changing one thing for another thing
Exchange
A marriage rule by which one must marry someone outside of one's own social group or category, however defined. Societies organized into significant lineage groups typically practice lineage exogamy.
Exogamy
Cultivation which requires large amounts of land, such as swidden.
Extensive Cultivation
A period during which a cultivated field is left unsown to allow it to recover its prior fertility. In swidden systems the fallow period much exceeds the period during which a field can be continuously cultivated.
Fallow
A particular kind of hierarchical socio-political system found in the premodern world and similar to the hierarchical forms of the European middle ages.
Feudalism
To gather plant or animal material. Foraging encompasses hunting, scavenging of dead animals, and plant gathering. In older works, one finds reference to "hunting societies," but the term "foraging" is preferable since in most cases the majority of caloric intake is from plant sources, not from hunted animals.
Foraging
In social science, the "function" of a custom or institution is the contribution it makes to the on-going existence and character of the society. As such, "function" tends simply to mean "result."

An early XXth-century school of ethnographic analysis —"functionalism"— argued that even quite odd customs contributed to the general welfare, or anyway the continuity, of various societies.
Function
The exchange of objects and services of value, motivated principally by the desire to maintain the relationship between the parties to the transaction. For example: presenting a birthday present to a friend because of the friendship.
Gift Exchange
In the specialized sense favored by social scientists in technical works, a "group" owns or does something together. A "category" need not. The Jones family is a group. Red-haired people are a category. A lineage, being defined technically as a group, exists ONLY in a society where it owns or does something collectively — "corporately." (The word " lineage" sometimes gets misused to refer casually to non-group descent lines.)
Group
A very small, but often multi-family, settlement, especially a geographically segregated section of a village.
Hamlet
Substantial influence or authority of one political unit, such as a chiefdom or state, over another, not necessarily with direct authority.
Hegemony
The comparative study of large numbers of societies at once in order to evaluate propositions about the general human condition. An example of a question which might be studied this way is, "Do societies which place particular stress on warfare generally have higher rates of domestic violence than societies which do not have such a stress?" The method of study would be to operationalize "stress on warfare" and "domestic violence" and then survey a wide range of ethnographic accounts of historically unrelated societies and see whether the co-occurrence is greater or less than would be predicted by chance.
Holocultural Analysis
Planting, raising, or harvesting crops without using a plow.
Horticulture
An analytical, intellectual model of a process, usually postulating causal relations, but not necessarily based on empirical evidence. (In other words, a hunch.)
Hypothesis
Cultivation which makes use of natural or artificial re-fertilization of land to enable a farmer to cultivate the same plot year after year. Re-fertilization can occur through the application of compost, dung, chemicals, or other fertilizer or through the deposit of river silts during flooding (as most famously in the Nile valley). See also agricultural intensification.
Intensive Cultivation
"King" is a term loosely applied to almost any person exercising supreme political authority.

In the context of schemes of cultural evolution, a kingdom can be considered as a chiefdom with greater institutionalization of individual parts, more clearly demarcated social classes, and under the authority of a hereditary monarch who does not have personal relations with all his subjects.
Kingdom
A relationship through common descent or marriage or a combination of these.
Kinship
A diagram showing genealogical relationships. The conventions used by most specialists are shown in the diagram at the right, where a male (top triangle) is linked to a female (top circle) by marriage (upper horizontal line below the circle and triangle), and they are parents (vertical line) to two children, one female (bottom circle) and one male (bottom triangle), who are siblings (lower horizontal line above the circle and the triangle).

Some American writers use an equal sign between spouses rather than a horizontal line above them, but this is often less efficient in systems of multiple marriage.
Kinship Diagram
A person of either sex related to Ego by kinship. Because terms for individual kinsmen vary across languages, specialists often make use of kintypes to clarify discussion.
Kinsman
(1) A term used to refer to or designate a person related by kinship (for example "mother" or "cousin").

(2) a term used to address a person related by kinship, other than a name or nickname (for example, "Mommy" or "Cuz").

In many languages terms of reference and terms of address are largely the same, but cases exist of wide discrepancy between these two kinds of kinterms.
Kinterm
A code used by kinship analysts to refer to a category of kinsman. For example, "SiHu" means "sister's husband," and "FaSiHuMoBr" means "father's sister's husband's mother's brother." (As far as I know, there is no English word that refers to such a person.) Perhaps the commonest use of kintypes is in identifying the referents of kinterms in various languages.
Kintype
The term "legend" is more often applied to fully or partially fictional tales about the doings of earlier human beings. The doings of medieval knights errant are classed as legends.
Legend
A group composed of people descended from a common ancestor (the "apical" ancestor), traced through a same-sex descent line.
Lineage
A hypothetical system of social organization in which formal public authority is vested only in women. No ethnographically documented instances of matriarchy are known, although the term is sometimes loosely used to refer to individual families or other units in which women may be particularly powerful.
Matriarchy
A descent line traced through female links.
Matriline
An ideology by which descent is figured through female lines of descent. Matrilineal descent may or may not entail organized matrilineages.
Matriliny
A lineage in which membership is traced only through female links. In a matrilineal system, both men and women belong to matrilineages, but only a woman can pass her lineage membership on to her children.
matrilineage
A rule of postmarital residence by which the newly married couple takes up residence in the household of the bride's parents. Uxorilocality is typically limited to societies with matrilineal descent, such as the Hopi. In some cases, it may be in competition with avunculocality as a preferred residence pattern. Sometimes called "matrilocality." (From Latin uxor, "wife.")
matrilocality
A type of social solidarity characterized by different people doing the same thing, typically producing and exchanging the same product (such as pigs or yams in the case of New Guinea). Although mechanical solidarity provides little motivation to group cohesion, exogamy and sometimes formalized systems of gift exchange are often the basis for group cohesion and intergroup solidarity in societies in which mechanical solidarity is otherwise pervasive.
Mechanical Solidarity
"Slash and burn" method of gardening. The term "milpa" is borrowed into English and used especially with respect to Central America.
Milpa
A description of a process that includes its parts and their relationships, including causal relationships. In other words, a theory.
Model
Either of the two highest-level, typically exogamous "halves" of a social group. These result when the group is divided through a principle of dual organization in which a pervasive rule specifies splitting any level of social organization into contrasting and reciprocally exchanging "halves."
Moiety
A relationship based simultaneously in expectations associated with two or more different connections between the parties involved. For example buying a car from a friend complicates the transaction because you are related in it both as buyer-seller and as friends.
Multiplex Relationship
Myths and legends are stories of real or fictitious events in the past, often relevant to the history of a social group or to the origins of the things and customs of the world as we know it. The term "myth" is usually associated with such stories when they are religious and when they relate in some way to the broader human condition. Thus tales of the creation of the universe are usually classed as myths.
Myth
An adaptation that involves moving one's place of residence more or less constantly in pursuit of subsistence. Nomadism is characteristic of pastoralist and foraging adaptations. A regular cycle of yearly movement between fixed sites, as between summer pastures and winter pastures, is referred to as transhumance rather than "true" nomadism.
Nomadism
A domestic unit in which any two members are related to each other as parents, children, spouses, or siblings. (Some theorists argue that units that do not include at least one parent-child pair are not technically families at all, let alone nuclear families in particular. Fine. We are back to a center-focused definition as against a boundary-focused definition again.)
Nuclear Family
The creation of a set of "operations" by which to carry out a piece of research; normally this includes generating a boundary-focused definition of each phenomenon to be studied so that any example may be unambiguously classified.
Operationalization
The creation of a set of "operations" by which to carry out a piece of research; normally this includes generating a boundary-focused definition of each phenomenon to be studied so that any example may be unambiguously classified.
Organic Solidarity
Children of same-sex siblings.
Parallel Cousins
Synonym for "herding" as a subsistence technique.

(Note than in other contexts, "pastoral" can have other connotations. For example, pastoral poetry or pastoral painting usually implies nostalgia for the shepherd's way of life. Pastoral counselling refers to advice given by a member of the clergy, who is the \"pastor\" (shepherd) to a \"flock\" of believers. And so on.)
Pastoralism
A system of social organization (specifically family organization) in which formal authority is vested only in men. Patriarchy often co-occurs with virilocality and patriliny.
Patriarchy
A descent line traced through male links.
Patriline
A lineage in which membership is traced only through male links. In a patrilineal system, both men and women belong to patrilineages, but only a man can pass his lineage membership on to his children.
Patrilineage
An ideology by which descent is figured through male lines of descent. Patrilineal descent may or may not entail formal patrilineages. For example in Europe surnames and in some cases inheritance pass by patrilineal rules, but European society is not organized into lineages.
Patriliny
A rule of postmarital residence by which the newly married couple lives in the household of the groom's parents. Virilocality is commonly practiced in societies with patrilineages. (From Latin vir, "husband.") Sometimes called "patrilocality."
Patrilocality
Group of clans. Phratries can be quite important in some societies, as in ancient Athens, where groupings of patriclans were the territorial units and units of military organization.

In comparative ethnography the term is used to refer for convenience to some alliances of clans.
Phratry
A comparatively rare marriage system in which one woman may have two or more husbands at the same time.
Polyandry
A marriage system in which a person may have multiple spouses simultaneously. Two logical subtypes are polygyny and polyandry.
Polygamy
A marriage system in which one man may have two or more wives at the same time.
Polygyny
The displacement of a person's natural personality and its replacement by the personality of a supernatural being.

Most possession occurs during trance. Trance is a physiological process. Possession is part of the system of cultural beliefs. Each can occur independently of the other, as when illness is attributed to possession, or when a person falls into a hypnotic trance. When they co-occur, the technical term "possession trance" is sometimes used. See shaman, trance.
Possession
Compulsory. A prescriptive marriage system is one that specifies whom Ego should marry, confining the choice to a single person or a narrow category.
Prescriptive
Prohibitive. A proscriptive marriage system is one that specifies whom Ego may not marry, leaving broad choice of others. All societies have incest prohibitions, so in that sense all societies have proscriptive marriage systems, and the term is rarely particularly useful compared with its opposite, prescriptive.
Proscriptive
A system for the exchange of goods in which commodities are provided to a centralized authority and then reallocated to the ultimate users. Redistribution is usually important in chiefdoms, but is found to some extent in most political systems with central authority. Redistribution is especially conspicuous in the allocation of raiding booty by the Mycenaean alliance represented in Homer's Iliad and among the Aztecs, where warriors were rewarded in a standardized way for their conquests.
Redistribution
The set of expected behaviors involved in the relationship between two parties in linked statuses (such as priest-worshiper, buyer-seller, doctor-patient). Note that a given status may have a range of roles associated with it as it relates to several other statuses. For example, the status "coach" has a different role with regard to the players than with regard to the team owner or the press.
Role
The quality of not being nomadic. The sedentism of most horticultural and agricultural societies can be contrasted with the nomadism of most pastoral and foraging societies.
Sedentism
The understanding that one (or one's group) stands in contrast to others.
self-objectification
A religious practitioner who performs at least sometimes in trance and is not part of a priestly hierarchy.

The term is borrowed from descriptions of Siberian traditional healers and has been generalized in slightly different ways by different authors. Strongly associated with shamanism in most usages are: (1) possession of the shaman by supernatural beings, (2) flight of the shaman's soul to wander outside the body, usually into spiritual realms, (3) healing of patients by a ritual of sucking intrusive pathogens out and spitting them out. Societies vary in how much training a shaman receives and in various privileges or prohibitions upon the shaman's behavior. Shamans are prominent in accounts of Siberian and circum-polar peoples, but are found in many parts of the world, including East Asia and South America.
Shaman
A relationship based in the expectations associated with only one connection between the parties involved. For example: If I work for an employer, the employer-employee relationship is simplex. If the employer is also my father, the father-child relationship and the employer-employee relationship combine to create a multiplex relationship.
Simplex Relationship
A system of mate selection in which a pair of brothers marries a pair of sisters. (In actual practice, it is often classificatory brothers or sisters — usually cousins — who are involved.) The system results in reciprocal set of obligations between the exchanging groups.
Sister Exchange
Tradition.

The term "reproduction" is used in the phrases "social reproduction" and "cultural reproduction" to refer to continuity. In most contexts, each of these phrases refers to what has usually been called "tradition."
Social Reproduction
A group of people sharing a cultural system. The members occupy culturally prescribed statuses with culturally prescribed relationships (roles) with other statuses.
society
Sorcery is the use of magical techniques with the intent to harm other people. Some writers contrast it with witchcraft in order to distinguish intentional acts (sorcery) form the unintended effects of being a supernaturally dangerous person (a witch). For these writers, witchcraft, being unintended, is ethnographically interesting largely because of accusations brought against people that they have caused evil.
sorcery
Socialization in political contexts usually refers to the government assuming control of a sector of a national economy, as in "the socialization of the steel industry."

In my classes it normally refers, instead, to the inculcation of social and cultural understandings into small children or other new members of a social group, equipping them to be functional members of whatever society they are entering. For practical purposes, it is interchangeable with the now rare term, enculturation.
socialization
An autonomous political unit having a centralized government with the power to collect taxes, draft people for work or war, and decree and enforce laws, and usually encompassing many communities within its territory.
state
A position in a social system, such as uncle or taxpayer or shaman. The occupant of a status has a range of culturally specified relationships ( roles) with occupants of other statuses. Thus a teacher has one role in the classroom, quite a different one in the teachers' union, but both are roles associated with the status of teacher.
Status
The term "sumptuary laws" refers to those regulations that restrict the use of particular things to members of particular social statuses, typically membership in a designated class or caste.
Sumptuary Processes
A form of horticulture that involves chopping down small bushes and trees, killing the larger trees by stripping the bark, then burning over the area, planting it for one or more years, and then allowing it to lie fallow for a much longer period before it is burned and planted again.
Swidden
A body of reasoning and research that seeks to interpret cultural and/or social change as the result of the interacting influences of a range of different aspects of the human situation: climate, defense, disease, soil depletion, population growth, diffusion of innovations, etc.
Systems Theory
An analytical intellectual model of a process, usually postulating causal relations, and based on credible empirical evidence. (In other words, a best guess.)
Theory
An animal, plant, object, or abstraction that functions as the emblem of a clan or lineage.

The word "totem" comes from Ojibwa, a language spoken in pre-European Ontario, Canada, in which it referred to lineage membership. In some societies clan members are considered to be descended from a totemic ancestor. If it is an animal or plant, they may abstain from eating that species because of the association.
Totem
Regular change of residence among two or more fixed sites, normally to permit season-specific pasturing of herds. Although there are a few cases of foragers who regularly follow a yearly round of different occupation sites, the term is virtually always contrasted to nomadism.
Transhumance
A physiological state of mental dissociation or altered consciousness such as occurs in hypnosis. See possession.
Trance
A poorly defined term used by different specialists in a variety of different ways. In the broadest sense, the term "tribe" has been frequently applied to groupings of exogamous bands in possession and control of their own extensive territory, whose members share a common genetic, cultural, and linguistic heritage and explicitly recognize some affinity toward one another.
Tribe
The principle that natural forces operate identically at all times and places. For example, under uniformitarianism one does not assume that the law of gravity was different in 400 BC, or that pi had a different value eighteen million years ago.
uniformitarianism
A rule of postmarital residence by which the newly married couple takes up residence in the household of the bride's parents. Uxorilocality is typically limited to societies with matrilineal descent, such as the Hopi. In some cases, it may be in competition with avunculocality as a preferred residence pattern. Sometimes called "matrilocality." (From Latin uxor, "wife.")
uxorilocality
A rule of postmarital residence by which the newly married couple lives in the household of the groom's parents. Virilocality is commonly practiced in societies with patrilineages. (From Latin vir, "husband.") Sometimes called "patrilocality."
virilocality
Sorcery is the use of magical techniques with the intent to harm other people. Some writers contrast it with witchcraft in order to distinguish intentional acts (sorcery) form the unintended effects of being a supernaturally dangerous person (a witch). For these writers, witchcraft, being unintended, is ethnographically interesting largely because of accusations brought against people that they have caused evil.
witchcraft