Anthropology
Terms
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- infrastructure
- the economic foundation of a society, including its subsistence practices, and the tools and other materials equipment used to make a living
- Cultural Relativism
- the thesis that one must suspend judgment of other people's practices in order to understand them in their own cultural terms
- ethnohistory
- the study of cultures of recent past through oral histories; accounts left by explores, missionarties and traders, and through analysis of such records as land titles, birth and death records, and other archival materials
- Gender
- the cultural elaboration and meanings assigned to the biological differentiation between the sexes
- ethnicity
- this term, rooted in the Greek word ethnikos (nation) and related to ethnos (custom) is the expression of the set of cultural idea held by an ethnic group
- Symbols
- signs emblems and other things that represents something else in a meaningful but arbitrary way
- Enculturation
- the process by whih a society's cultures is transmitted from one generation to the next and individuals become members of their society
- Subculture
- a distinctive set of a standards and behavior patterns by which a group within a larger society operates
- ethnic groups
- people who collectively and publicly identify themselves as a distinct group based on various cultural features such as shared ancestry and common origin, language, customs and traditional beliefs
- ethnocentrism
- the beliefs that the ways of one's own culture are the only proper ones.
- Culture
- a society's shared and socially transmitted ideas values and perceptions- which are used to make sense of experience and generate behavior and which are reflected as behavior
- Human Relations Area Files (HRAF)
- an ever-growing catalogue of cross- indexed ethnographic data, filed by geographic location and cultural charcteristics. Housed at Yale University, HRAF is also electronically on the internet
- Social Structure
- the rule- governed relationships- with all their rights and obligation- that hold members of a society together. This includes households, families, associations and power relations, including politics
- Society
- an organization group or groups of interdependent people who generally sharea common territory, language and culture and who act together for collective survival and well-being
- Superstructure
- a society's shared sense of identity and worldveiw. The collective body of ideas, beliefs, and values by which a group of people makes sense of the world-its shape, challenges, and opporunities - and their place in it. This includes religion and natural ideology
- Pluralistic Society
- a society in which 2 or more ethnic groups or nationalities are politically organzed into one territorial state but maintain their cultural differences