UW-Madison Anthropology 100 Midterm 1
Terms
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- relativism
- no behavior or belief can be judged to be odd or wrong simply because it is different from our own
- ethnocentric fallacy
- idea that our beliefs and behaviours are right and true, while those of other peoples are wrong or misguided
- relativistic fallacy
- idea that it is impossible to make moral judgements about the beliefs and behaviors of othres
- ethnographic method
- the immersion of the investigator in the lives of the people she or he is trying to understand
- participant observation
- the active participation of the observer in the lives of his or her subjects
- sedentary
- not migratory
- progress
- the idea that human history is the story of a steady advance froma life dependent on the whims of nature to a life of control and domination over natural forces
- slash and burn, swidden
- forests were cleared by burning the trees and brush, and crops were planted among the ashes of the cleared ground
- states
- because of a need for defense against other groups, settlements combined under common leaders to form states consisting of many thousands of persons
- irrigation agriculture
- plows...replaced swidden agriculture
- population density
- the number of people living in a given area
- economic development
- based on three key assumptions: 1. economic growth and development is the solution to national as well as global problems 2. global economic integration will contribute to solving global ecological and social problems 3. foreign assistance to undevelopd countries will make things better
- interpersonal theory of disease
- illness is caused not by microorganisms but by tensions or conflicts in social relations
- totenism
- the totem was some element of nature that served as a symbol for a group of clan. The totem was worshipped, was considered representation of the group. If members of the group worshipped the totem, and if the totem was a symbol of the group, was it unreasonable to suppose that it was the group that was being worshipped?
- sapir-whorf hypothesis
- suggests a link between language and culture, but not a casual like between language and thought
- domain of experience
- metaphors take language from one domain of xpecience, such as the domain of he body of the domain of animals, and apply i to another domin, sucha s persons or landscape features.
- interpretive drift
- the slow, often unacknowledged shift in someone's manner of interpreting events as they become involved witha particular activity