Cultural Anthropology
Terms
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- Counterculture
- A alternative cultural model within a society that expresses different views about the way that society should be organized
- Assimilation
- Process by which a less numerous and less powerful culture group changes its ways and cultural identity to blend in with the dominant culture.
- Ethical Relativism
- The belief that all rights and wrongs and relative to time, place, and culture, such that no moral judgment of behavior can be made.
- Indigenous Societies
- Peoples who are now minority in state societies but who were formerly independent and have occupied their territories for a long time.
- Diffusion
- Spread of ideas, material objects, and cultural practices from one society to another through direct and indirect culture contact.
- Subcultures
- A group whose members and other think of their way of life as in some significant way different from that of other people in the larger society.
- Applied Anthropology
- An area of anthropology that applies the techniques and theories of the field to problem solving outside of traditional academic settings.
- Symbol
- A word, image, or object that stands for cultural ideas or sentiments
- Culture Contact
- Direct interaction between peoples of different cultures through migration, trade, invasion, or conquest.
- Worldview
- Culture-based, often ethnocentric, way that people see the word and other people.
- Naturalized Concepts
- Ideas and behaviors so deeply embedded in a culture that they are regarded as universally normal or natural.
- Cultural Models
- Shared assumptions that people have about the world and about the ideal culture.
- Ethnocentrism
- The widespread human tendency to perceive the ways of doing things in one's own culture as normal and natural and that of others as strange
- Societies
- Populations of people living in organized groups with social institutions and expectations of behavior
- Ethnology
- Aspect of cultural anthropology involved with building theories about cultural behaviors and forms.
- Forensic Anthropology
- Biological anthropologists who analyze human remains in the service of criminal justice and families of disaster victims
- Cultural Pluralism
- Condition in a stratified society in which many diverse cultural groups ideally lie together equally and harmoniously without losing their cultural identities and diversity,
- Syncretism
- Process by which a cultural product is created when people adapt a cultural item selectively borrowed from another culture to fit their existing culture.
- Cultural Core
- Practices by which people organize their work and produce food and other goods necessary for their survival
- Archaeology
- The study of past cultures, both historic cultures with written records and prehistoric cultures that predate the invention of writing.
- Revolution
- Process by which people try to change their culture or overturn the social order and replace it with a new ideal society and culture.
- Cultural Anthropology
- The study of cultural behavior, especially the comparative study of living and recent human cultures.
- Cultural Knowledge
- Information that enables people to function in their society and contributes to the survival of the society as a whole.
- Biological or Physical Anthropology
- The study of human origins and biological diversity
- Paleoanthropology
- The study of the fossil record, especially skeletal remains, to understand the process and products of human evolution.
- Innovation
- Process by which new technologies and systems of knowledge are based on or built from previous tools, knowledge, and skills.
- Comparative Perspective
- An approach in anthropology that uses data about the behaviors and beliefs in many societies to document both cultural universals and cultural diversity
- Symbolic Culture
- The ideas people have about themselves, others, and the world, and the ways that people express this idea.
- Inventions
- New technologies and systems of knowledge.
- Acculturation
- Process by which a group adjusts to living within a dominant culture while at the same time maintaining its original cultural identity
- Cultural Relativism
- Stresses the importance of analyzing cultures in their own terns rather than in terms of the culture of the anthropologist.
- Reactive Adaptation
- Coping response of captive, conquered, or oppressed peoples to loss and deprivation
- Globalization
- The rapid transformation of local cultures around the world in response to the economic and other influences of a dominant culture.
- Cultural Integration
- Tendency for people's practices and beliefs to form a relatively coherent and consistent system
- Taboos
- Norms specifying behaviors that are prohibited in culture.
- Culture Change
- Changes in peoples' ways of life over time through both internal and external forces
- Culture Wars
- Internal disagreements in a society about cultural models or about how society or the world should be organized
- Norms
- Sets of expectations and attitudes that people have about appropriate behabior.
- Material Culture
- The tools people make and use, the clothing and ornaments they wear, the buildings they live in.
- Contract Archaeology
- The application of archaeology to assess the potential impact of construction on archaeological sites and to salvage archeological evidence.
- Revitalization Movement
- Type of nonviolent reactive adaptation in which people try to resurrect their culture heroes and restore their traditional way or life.
- Holistic Perspective
- A perspective in anthropology that views culture as an integrated whole no part of which can be completely understood without considering the whole.
- Enculturation
- Process of learning one's culture through informal observation and formal instruction
- Cultural Evolution
- Belief of early anthropologist that cultures evolve through various stages from a simpler and more primitive state to a complex and more culturally advanced state.
- Culture
- The learned values, beliefs, and rules of conduct shared to some extent by the members of a society that govern their behavior with one another
- Cultural Resource Management
- The application of archaeology to preserve and protect historic structures and prehistoric sites.
- Linguistic Anthropology
- The study of language and communications of different cultures.
- Modernization
- Complex culture change both internal and external bases on industrialism and a transnational market economy.
- Global Culture
- A constellation of technologies, practices, attiudes, values, and symbols that spread internationally from one broad cultural origin, most recently from the Anglo-European-American cultural complex
- Medical Anthropology
- A discipline that bridges cultural and biological anthropology, focusing on heath and disease in human populations.
- Anthropology
- The study of humanity, from its evolutionary origins millions of years ago to its current worldwide diversity
- Ethnography
- Aspect of cultural anthropology involved with observing and documenting peoples' ways of life.
- Historical Linguistics
- The study of changes in language and communication over time and between people in contact.