Introduction To Cultural Anthropology - Document2 PDF

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ANTH 101 Study Guide for Exam 1 (Wednesday, February 10) Please make sure that you can answer the sample questions as well as define the key terms and be able to provide examples of the terms if applicable. Come to class with questions Chapter 1: What is Anthropology? Sample questions: What is the definition of Anthropology? -The study of human nature, human society, and the human past. What are the five major fields of Anthropology (make sure you know a bit about them)? -Archeology -Cultural -Linguistics -Applied -Biological What elements are part of the Anthropological perspective? -Holism -Comparison -Evolution -Field-base What does it mean to say that humans are biocultural organisms? -Organisms whose defining features are codetermined by biological and cultural factors. Key terms: -Holism: describes how anthropology tries to integrate all that is known about human being and their activities, with the results that the whole world is understood to be greater than the sum of its parts. -Comparison: requires anthropologists to consider similarities & differences in as wide a range of human societies as possible before generalizing about human nature -Field-based: actual practice of anthropology-its data collection-takes place away from the office and in direct contact with the things of interest. -Evolutionary: anthropologists place their observations about human nature, human society, or the human past in a temporal framework that takes into consideration change over time. -Culture: patterns of learned behavior & ideas that human beings acquire as members of society, together with the material artifacts & structures humans create and use. -Material culture: objects created or shaped by human beings and given meaning by cultural practices. -Biological anthropology (vs. Physical Anthropology)- looks at human beings as biological organisms and tries to discover what characteristics make them different from each other organisms and what characteristics they share. Physical Anthropology is not a subfield. -Cultural anthropology: shows how variation in the beliefs and behaviors of members of different human groups is shaped by sets of learned behaviors and ideas that human beings acquire as members of society -Linguistic anthropology: concerned with the study of human languages

-Applied anthropology: uses info from other anthropological specialties to solve practical crosscultural problems -Medical anthropology: concerns itself with human health -Archaeology: cultural anthropology of the human past -Sex: observable physical characteristics that distinguish two kinds of humans -Gender: the cultural construction of beliefs and behaviors considered appropriate for each sex. -Primatology: the study of nonhuman primates, the closest living relatives of human beings. -Paleoanthropology: the search for fossilized remains of humanity’s earliest ancestors. -Fieldwork: an extended period of close involvement with the people in whose language or way of life anthropologists are interested, during which anthropologists ordinarily collect most of their data. -Informants: people in a particular culture who work with anthropologists and provide them with insights about their way of life -Participant-observation: the method anthropologists use to gather info. by living as closely as possible to the people whose culture they are studying while participating in their lives as much as possible. -Ethnography: an anthropologists’s written or filmed description of a particular culture -Ethnology: the comparative study of two or more cultures. -Language: the system of arbitrary vocal symbols used to encode one's experience of the world and of others. -Races: social groupings that allegedly reflect biological differences. -Racism: the systematic oppression of one or more socially defined “races” by another socially defined “race” that is justified in terms of the supposed inherent biological superiority of the rulers and the supposed inherent biological inferiority of those they rule. Chapter 2: Why is the concept of culture important? How and why do cultures change? Sample questions: What are the characteristics of culture? (*hint: there are 6 things we talked about in class) -Symbolic -Shared -Patterned -Learned -Adaptive How and why do cultures change? -Discovery and innovation -Unconscious invention -Intentional innovation -Diffusion -Acculturation -Revolution What distinguishes the human condition from the condition of other living species? -Culture What is the danger with the plural use of culture (*hint Culture vs cultures)?

-The plural use of culture allowed Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski to argue that, in their own ways, “primitives” were as fully human as “civilized” people. -The use of plural culture appears to condemn people to live as their ancestors did. -It stigmatizes those who do not as “inauthentic” Key terms: -Socialization: the process by which human beings as material organisms, living together with other similar organisms, cope with the behavioral rules established by their respective societies. -Enculturation: the process by which human beings living with one another must learn to come to terms with the ways of thinking and feeling that are considered appropriate in their respective cultures -Norms: standards or rules about what is acceptable behavior. -Human agency: the exercise of at least some control over their lives by human beings. -Coevolution: the dialectical relationship between biological processes and symbolic cultural processes, in which each makes up an important part of the environment to which the other must adapt. -Ethnocentrism: the opinion that one’s own way of life is natural or correct and, indeed, the only true way of being fully human. Genocide -Cultural relativism: understanding another culture in its own terms sympathetically enough so that the culture appears to be a coherent and meaningful design for living. -Symbol: something that stands for something else. Also: read page 27, section Why do Cultural Differences matter?, specifically the paragraph or so about the Peace Corps office in Botswana; read pages 31-35—discussion on genital cutting— there WILL BE exam questions

Chapter 3: What is ethnographic fieldwork? Sample questions: What is ethnographic fieldwork? What are some of the research methods used by cultural anthropologists? -Participant-observation What are the different types of fieldwork? What are the three approaches to ethnographic fieldwork? -Positivist approach -Reflexive approach -Multisited approach What does the dialectic of fieldwork refer to? -the process of building a bridge of understanding between anthropologist and informants so that each can begin to understand the other. Who do Anthropologists have ethical obligations to? How do anthropologists decide where to do fieldwork? -Money

-Permission -Funding How does the subject matter studies in the social sciences differ from that studied in the physical sciences? Key terms: -Objective knowledge: knowledge about reality that is absolute and true. “Living laboratory” -Intersubjective meanings: the shared, public symbolic systems of a culture. -Positivism: the view that there is a reality “out there” that can be known through the senses and that there is a single, appropriate set of scientific methods for investigating that reality. -Reflexivity: critically thinking about the way one thinks; reflecting on one’s own experience. -Interpretation: struggling to make sense of unfamiliar activities or events, so that you begin to understand them in the way local people understand them -Translation: learning to describe one culture in terms that can be understood by people with a different culture -Multisited ethnographic fieldwork: ethnographic research on cultural processes that are not contained by social, ethnic, religious, or national boundaries, in which the ethnographer follows the process from site to site, often doing fieldwork at sites and with persons who traditionally were never subjected to ethnographic analysis. -Culture shock: the feeling, akin to panic, that develops in people living in an unfamiliar society when they cannot understand what is happening around them. -Rich points (Michael Agar): unexpected moments when problems in cross-cultural understanding emerge. Also: read page page 57 (Japanese Corporate Wives in the United States); read pages 58-62 (The Dialectic of Fieldwork: Some examples) Chapter 4: How has Anthropological Thinking about Cultural Diversity Changed Over Time? Sample questions: What does the scientific value of a typology depend on? Why do we classify human societies? What is the current thinking on the concept of race? Key terms: -Typology: a classification system based on, in this case, forms of human society. -Unilineal cultural evolutionism: theory that proposed a series of stages through which all societies must go in order to reach civilization. -Social structure: the enduring aspects of the social forms in a society, including its political and kinship systems. -Band: the characteristic form of social organization found among foragers; a small group of people, usually with 50 or fewer members. Labor is divided according to age and sex, and social relations are highly egalitarian.

-Tribe: a form of social organization generally larger than a band; members usually farm or herd for a living. Social relations in a tribe are relatively egalitarian, although there may be a chief who speaks for the group or organizes group activities. -Chiefdom: a form of social organization in which the leader (a chief) and the chief’s close relatives are set apart from the rest of the society and allowed privileged access to wealth,power, and prestige. -State: a stratified society that possesses a territory that is defended from outside enemies with an army and from internal disorder with police. A state, which has a separate set of governmental institutions designed to enforce laws and collect taxes and tribute, is run by an elite that processes a monopoly on the use of force. -Colonialism: cultural domination with enforced social change. -Structural-functional theory: a position that explores how particular social forms function from day to day in order to reproduce the traditional structure of the society. -Culture traits: particular features or parts of a cultural tradition, such as a dance, a ritual. -Culture area: the limits of borrowing, or the diffusion, of a particular cultural trait or set of traits -Species: a reproductive community of populations (reproductively isolated from others) that occupies a specific niche in nature. -Phenotype: observable, measurable outward characteristics of an organism. -Cline: the gradual intergradation of genetic variation from population to population. Franz Boas Indirect Rule Fortes Evans Pritchard Salvage ethnography BBC’s Tales from the Jungle: Malinowski If you want to watch it again or pieces of it again: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=f22VsAlOwbc *VIDEO GUIDE!!!! BE FAMILIAR WITH THE MAJORITY OF THOSE QUESTIONS 1...