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Flashcards in Midterm 1 Deck (44)
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1
Q

What is holism?

A

Assumes that mind and body, person and society, humans and their environment interpenetrate and define one another

2
Q

What is Dualism?

A

Dualism contrasts with holism and is composed of Idealism: mind is essence of human, and Materialism: bodies and material world shape human essence

3
Q

What are the 4 fields of Anthropology?

A
  1. Biological/Physical Anthro
  2. Cultural Anthro
  3. Archaeology
  4. Linguistic Anthro
4
Q

What are the limits of holism?

A
  • Not all research questions require equal emphasis from each four fields
  • Societies are not homogeneous in globalizing world
5
Q

What is comparison?

A

To view societies across time and space in order to understand what it means to be human.

6
Q

What do anthropologists do?

A
  • Fieldwork: Extended period of time of close involvement with people of interest to collect data
  • Ethnography: Anthropologist’s written description of a culture
  • Ethnology: Comparative study of two or more cultures
7
Q

What does an Informant do?

A

They are people like friends, teachers, and respondents that help anthropologists with their work by providing them information

8
Q

What does Rich Contextualization mean?

A

It’s how different areas of social and cultural life influence one another

9
Q

What is culture?

A

Culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities, and habits acquires…as a member of society” LSD

10
Q

What are the debates of culture?

A

Some anthropologists like Franz Boas argue that culture combats racism

while other contemporary anthropologists say that current definitions of culture denies historical change, agency, internal diversity and treats non-Western cultures as exotic

11
Q

In the Walt Disney film “Saludos Amigos”, what are some things that were depicted?

A
  • Bright colored clothes and hats
  • Merchant life
  • Music called “Strange and exotic”
  • Native “costumes”
  • Put a lot of emphasis on Incas history, presuming that past is like present
  • Gave impression that tourists were celebrated
12
Q

Culture is … (2 things)

A
  1. Learned

2. Expressed in symbolic and material form

13
Q

Cultures are shaped by…

A

Global flows and exchange

There was never a point in history where cultures were isolated from each other in societies.

14
Q

Culture involves both…

A

Tradition and change

15
Q

Culture both limits and allows for agency. What is agency?

A

The ability for human beings to exercise at least some control over their lives

16
Q

Cultural Relativism vs. Ethnocentrism

A

Cultural Relativism: “the perspective that all cultures are equally valid and can only be understood in their own terms”.
- Cultural beliefs and practices must be understood

Ethnocentrism: “The opinion that one’s own way of life is the most natural, or correct way of life”
- Imposes on others’ beliefs and can lead to war and ethnic cleansings

17
Q

Problems with Cultural Relativism

A

Human right: balancing rights and cultural differences

Can lead to cultural determinism

and Cultural Relativism is not Moral Relativism, meaning that we still have to make ethical judgement
(Ex. Illongot headhunting cultural practice unethical)

18
Q

Burqas in context are used a portable seclusion. Head coverings do not equate to an absence of agency. Muslim culture of freedom and agency is different from western view

A

das it

19
Q

Structural Functionalism

A
  • Focuses on how particular social forms function to reproduce the traditional structure of the society
  • Looks at society as an organism
  • Ignored history and treated cultures as isolated
20
Q

Slave and sugar trade

A
  • Used people as commodities
  • slavery existed past colonization
  • many slaves worked in sugar plantations
  • Slave trade fuels English industrial revolution
  • Sugar provided a cheap high calorie food substitute which led to obesity
21
Q

Colonization and gender (Baule gender relations)

A
  • Pre-colonial gender equality
  • Post-colonization, French enforced ideology that men should be the head of the household and provide for family. Made Baule women labor roles obsolete by introducing factories
22
Q

Neo-colonialism

A

The persistence of profound social and economic entanglements linking former colonial territories to their former colonial rulers despite political sovereignty

23
Q

Martha of the North

A
  • Tactic used by Canada to move Inuit people farther up north to assert sovereignty in the arctic
  • Inuit were lied to many times and treated poorly
  • Starved
  • Government enforced wildlife laws which prevented them from hunting certain game
  • Severed social relations
  • Deprived of housing and education for many years
  • Way of life was away
  • Residential schools introduced more abuse and racism
24
Q

Rich Points

A

Unexpected problems in cross-cultural understanding that may come up

25
Q

Culture Shock

A

Feeling of physical and mental discomfort a person experiences when in a new or strange cultural setting

26
Q

Modes of Ethnographic Fieldwork (3)

A
  1. Positivist
    - focuses on material causes and processes that can be detected by our senses
    - knowledge that is always true in all times and places
  2. Reflexive
    - Thinking critically at the data we’ve looked at
    - Knowledge is situated, where social identity influences the research
    - Strong objectivity
    - Annette Weiner found exchange in “women’s wealth” after Malinowski’s findings
  3. Multi-sited
    - Follow process, people, things, metaphors
    - Methodological challenges
27
Q

Unilineal Evolutionism

A

“The nineteenth century theory that proposed a series of stages through which all societies must go in order to reach civilization”

  • Social Darwinism: all societies must go through the same stages on the way to civilization
28
Q

What is Historical Particularism

A

Each culture must be understood as the product of its own unique history

29
Q

How do we learn out culture(s) and cultural identities?

A
  • We learn though play and watching others doing it

- we learn through enculturation and socialization

30
Q

What is enculturation

A

the process by which human beings learn the ways of thinking and feeling that are considered appropriate in their cultures.
In society, gender plays a big role; boys = blue, girls = pink

31
Q

What is socialization

A

the process by which human beings learn to become members of a group

32
Q

Why should cultural anthropologists care about language

A

Language is culture.
Social roles go into language and language has social dynamics.
How you interact with others is through language.
Anthropologists also need the access information and interpretations through language (informants)

33
Q

What is language

A

Language is a biological phenomenon where (for most languages) you make sounds that create language and context.
All languages are equal in their ability to communicate experience, according to their speakers’ needs

34
Q

Features of language (6)

A
  1. Openness: different sounds to say what they want
  2. Displacement: ability to talk about something not currently happening
  3. Prevarication: Language can be used to form statements that are grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical
  4. Arbitrariness: There’s no meaningful connection with language and the sounds
  5. Duality of patterning: sounds and meaning; Phonemes and Morphemes
  6. Semanticity: how language means things
35
Q

Phonemes and Morphemes

A

Phonemes: The basic units of sound characteristics of a language that have no meaning by themselves but together form words

Morphemes: meaning to words

36
Q

Components of a language (5)

A
  1. Phonology: study of the sounds of language
  2. Morphology: study of how words are put together
  3. Syntax: study of sentence structure
  4. Semantics: study of meaning
  5. Pragmatics: the study of language in the context of use
37
Q

What is a metaphor

A

it is a figurative form of speech that links expression from unrelated semantic domains

38
Q

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

A

The assertion that the forms of language have the power to shape the way people see the world

39
Q

“Strong” version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: Linguistic determinism

A

The language you speak rigidly determines what you perceive and how you perceive it

40
Q

“Weak” version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

A

Gendered pronouns (he/she) naturalize binary concepts of gender without determining them.

objection to this is that many English speaking people promote gender equality

41
Q

Contemporary anthropologists reject deterministic versions of S-W hypothesis but accept that language relies on cultural knowledge and shapes interactions, identities and power

A

das it

42
Q

Ethnopragmatics

A

Study of language use in a specific culture, grounded in an ethnographic approach, with close attention to the relationships among language, communicate and social interactions

43
Q

Heteroglossia

A

Our ability to move between co-existing genres (specific way you interact with different people) and cultural knowledge

Ex. texting friends compared to writing an essay

44
Q

African American English argument

A

In the 1960s an argument that believed that African American children suffered linguistic deprivation. They didn’t follow proper English structure and grammar so they thought they were dumb but AAE just had it’s own rules and structures not found in Standard English. tl;dr black kids aint dumb