Family & Marriage
Plural marriages where one has more than one wife or husband at a time.
What is Polygamy?
The system of rights and privileges that accompany normative sexual choices and family formation.
What is Heteronormativity?
An explanation for the origin or history of the world.
What is Cosmology?
The global flow of ideas.
What is the Ideoscape?
The division of society into hierarchical levels; one's position is determined by birth and remains fixed for life.
What is a Caste System?
A very large extended family that includes multiple generations.
What is a Joint Family?
A category for people who or people who identify as a different gender than the one that was assigned to them at birth.
What is Transgender?
A part time religious practitioner who carries out religious rituals when needed, but also participates in the normal work of the community.
What is a Shaman?
The adaptation of global ideas into locally palatable forms.
What is Glocalization?
Societies in which there is no great difference in status or power between individuals and there are many valued status positions in the societies as there are persons able to fill them.
What is Egalitarian?
Marriage outside of one's cultural group.
What is Exogamy?
Two people in a socially approved pairing.
What is a Dyad?
A religious system organized around a belief in an impersonal supernatural force.
What is Animatism?
A multi-faceted political and economic philosophy that emphasizes privatization and unregulated markets.
What is Neoliberalism?
A system used to encourage solidarity or feelings of connectedness between people who are not related by family ties.
What is sodality?
The pattern of culturally recognized relationships between family members.
What is a Kinship system?
What are the Hijra?
What is a Rite of Intensification?
The dispositions, attitudes, or preferences that are the learned basis for personal "taste" and lifestyles.
What is Habitus?
Norms that permit persons of higher rank to enjoy greater social status by wearing distinctive clothing, jewelry, and/or decorations denied those of lower rank.
What are Sumptuary Rules?
Residence pattern where a couple lives with the wife's mother's brother.
What is Avunculocal?
A belief that gender and certain other social categories are inherent, fixed, internal, stable, deeply embedded, and unchangeable.
What is Essentialism?
A ritual developed by the people of the Island of Tanna in response to the loss of modern conveniences brought to them by a U.S. Military base during World War 2.
What is the John Frum ritual?
The combination of different beliefs, even those that are seemingly contradictory, into a new, harmonious whole.
What is syncretism?
Secret Societies for men and women, respectively, found in the Mande-speaking peoples of West Africa, particularly in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, and Guinea.
What are Poro and Sande?