isas 55

• Anthropology


  The study of what it means to be human
• Anthropology


  • Attempts to compare societies cross-culturally and across time
  • Interested in how people interpret or make meaning of the world
• Anthropology explores what it means to be human
• Anthropological Theories


  • Evolutionism
  • Diffusionism
  • Historical Particularism
  • Functionalist School
  • Culture and Personality School
  • Structuralism
  • Cultural Materialism and Marxist Anthropology
  • Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology
  • Feminist Anthropology
• Evolutionism


  The process through which simple things, over time, become complex
• Diffusionism


  The spread of certain ideas, customs, or practices from one culture to another
• Historical Particularism


  Each culture of each society has its own uniqueness and the society has its own distinctive historical development, leading to the concept of 'cultural relativism'
• Functionalist School


  Looks for the part that some aspects of culture or social life plays in maintaining a cultural system
• Culture and Personality School


  Highlighted that personality patterns are dependent on different socialization practices
• Structuralism


  A way of thinking that works to find the fundamental basic units or elements of which anything is made; things cannot be understood in isolation- they have to be seen in a larger context of the larger structures they are part of
• Cultural Materialism and Marxist Anthropology


  Incorporates ideas from Marxism, cultural evolution, and cultural ecology; Materialism contends that the physical world impacts and sets constraints on human behavior
• Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology


  Studies the way people understand their surroundings, as well as the actions and utterances of the other members of their society; These interpretations form a shared cultural system of meaning
• Feminist Anthropology


  A four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to reduce male bias in research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge; Challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America
• There are three waves of feminist anthropology, just as there are multiple movements of feminism in general
• Culture


  The learned and shared knowledge that people use to generate behavior and interpret experiences
• 2 Basic Kinds of Culture

  • Explicit Culture
  • Tacit Culture
• Explicit Culture


  Cultural knowledge that people can talk about
• Explicit Culture


  • Words for things like clothes, actions, emotional states, ways to talk, and people
• Tacit Culture


  Cultural knowledge that people lack words for
• Tacit Culture


  • Recognizing and using sound categories like /d/, /e/, and /f/
• Tacit Culture


  • Middle-class Americans' 4 speaking distances: intimate, personal, social, public
• Ethnography


  The process of discovering and describing a particular culture
• Microculture


  Systems of cultural knowledge characteristic of subgroups within a larger society
• Microculture


  • Fraternity; Brotherhood
• Informant


  The 'teacher' who has to teach the culture to the ethnographers
• Naive realism


  The belief that people everywhere see the world in the same way
• Culture shock


  A state of anxiety that results from cross-cultural misunderstanding
• 3 Fundamental Aspects of Culture

  • Cultural behavior
  • Cultural artifacts
  • Cultural knowledge
• Symbol


  Anything we can perceive with our senses that stands for something else
• Channels for Symbolic Communication

  • Sound
  • Sight
  • Touch
  • Smell
  • Taste
• Language


  The most highly developed communication system which uses the channel of sound (or sight for deaf people)
• Speech


  The behavior that produces vocal sounds, generated and interpreted by language
• 3 Subsystems for Dealing with Vocal Sounds

  • Phonology
  • Grammar
  • Semantics
• Phonology


  The categories and rules for forming vocal sounds, concerned with the formation and recognition of speech sounds
• Phonemes


  The minimal categories of speech sounds that serve to keep utterances apart
• Grammar


  The categories and rules for combining vocal symbols
• Morphemes


  The minimal units of meaning that cannot be subdivided
• Semantics


  The categories and rules for relating vocal symbols to their referents, the study of meaning
• Socio-linguistic rules


  Rules that combine meaningful utterances with social situations into appropriate utterances
• Non-linguistic symbols


  • Speech acts, the way we speak, sit, use our eyes, dress, order food - all convey meaning