Anthro and Globalization
Define ethnocentrism.
The belief that one’s own culture or way of life is normal and natural; using one’s own culture to evaluate and judge the practices and ideals of others.
The process of learning culture is called _________ and give a concrete example of how this occurs.
Enculturation
Define cultural relativism.
Understanding a group’s beliefs and practice within their own cultural context, without making judgments.
Define phoneme AND morpheme.
•Phoneme=the smallest unit of sound that can make a difference in meaning
•Morpheme: the smallest unit of sound that carries meaning on its own
Define hypodescent and give an example of how this concept is still ingrained in western culture.
Sometimes called the “one-drop rule;” the assignment of children of racially “mixed” unions to the subordinate group.
________ is the anthropological commitment to look at the whole picture of human life—culture, biology, history, and language—across space and time.
Holism
Name at least two features of culture, as outlined by Guest.
-Learned and taught
-Shared, yet contested
-Symbolic and material
-Composed of norms, values, symbols, and mental maps
Name at least three strategies used in ethnographic fieldwork.
Participant observation, Key informants, Life history interviews, In-depth interviews, Surveys, Kinship analysis, Social network analysis, Field notes, Mapping
The extensive set of noises (such as laughs, cries, sighs, and yells) and tones of voice that convey significant information about the speaker are called ____________.
*DAILY DOUBLE*
Institutional Racism
What’s the “four-field approach” to anthropology? (What are the four fields and how does this approach strengthen anthropology as a discipline?)
•The use of four interrelated disciplines to study humanity (it’s holistic!):
–Physical
–Archaeology
–Linguistic
–Cultural
Explain what unilineal cultural evolution is and what the three stages are. Is this theory still applied in Anthropology today?
Unilineal cultural evolution suggested that human social organization “evolved” through a series of stages: Savagery, Barbarism, Civilization.
Define engaged anthropology.
Engaged anthropology: applying the research strategies and analytical perspectives of anthropology to address concrete challenges facing local communities and the world at large.
What is the example of "Shakespeare in the Bush" about? What linguistic hypothesis does this support?
•Tiv of West Africa being told the story of Hamlet, but it not translating well due to differences in worldview (i.e. ghosts vs witchcraft)
•Supports= Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: different languages create different ways of thinking. The way we think about/understand the world/create mental maps of reality can be greatly shaped by our focal vocabularies.
This term refers to how social systems, prior laws, and policies have shaped the distribution of environmental harm in such a way that there are higher levels of pollution in areas where minority communities live, which has led to higher rates of asthma, cancer, and other health conditions.
What is Environmental Racism?
Define globalization and name at least two of its four features, as outlined by Kenneth Guest.
Globalization: the worldwide intensification of interactions and increased movement of money, people, goods, and ideas within and across national borders
–Time-space compression
–Flexible accumulation
–Increasing migration
–Uneven development
Name an anthropologist from the text who worked in the structural functionalism framework, and explain how this framework differs from historical particularism.
•Bronislaw Malinowski (worked with the Trobriand Islanders)
•E.E. Evans-Pritchard (worked with the Nuer)
•Structural functionalism is a conceptual framework positing that each element of society serves a particular function to keep the entire system in equilibrium. Differs from hist part because it emphasizes the present over historical particularities.
Explain the difference between the emic and etic perspectives.
•Emic=“insider’s” perspective; etic=“outsider’s” perspective.
•Etic allows for comparison across cultures and a bird’s eye view. Emic (achieved partially through participant observation) helps the anthropologist to understand the cultural world from the perspective of the people they’re working with—important for cultural relativism.
Explain what code-switching is. Give one example of why this might occur.
Switching back and forth between one linguistic variant and another depending on the cultural context.
Compare/contrast race and ethnicity. Are the mutually exclusive? Why?
•Race is a flawed system of classification with no biological basis (but claims of such), that uses certain physical characteristics (e.g. skin color) to divide the human population into discrete groups.
•Ethnicity is a sense of historical, cultural, and sometimes ancestral connection to a group of people who are imagined to be distinct from those outside the group. Physical characteristics may be used as an “ethnic boundary marker” but are not driving the logics of the classification system.
•Not mutually exclusive. Both are social constructs and can be deployed simultaneously by a group.
*DAILY DOUBLE*
Multi-sited ethnography
–Guest’s fieldwork (From village in China to NYC)
Define hegemony and give a concrete example.
Hegemony is the ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement within a population without the use or threat of force.
What is polyvocality in anthropological research? Why is it important?
Polyvocality is the practice of using many different voices in ethnographic writing and research question development, allowing the reader to hear more directly from the people in the study.
What is the gene that is hypothesized to be important in human speech development and differs between humans and other apes?
FOXP2
Define intersectionality and give an example of how it can be used to understand complex issues.
Intersectionality is an analytic framework for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification.