What Is Anthropology?
The comparative study of humans across time and space, from evolution to living cultures.
Anthropology
The hallmark method of cultural anthropology, in which the researcher lives inside and participates in a community’s routines while observing them.
Participant observation
Participants must understand the research and freely agree to take part. This is called this.
Informed consent
Switching between languages or language varieties during a conversation, for example speaking one way with grandparents and another with friends.
Code-switching
Relatives by birth are called this; relatives by marriage are called this.
Consanguineal; affinal
Name the four traditional subfields of anthropology in the United States.
Biological/physical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, cultural anthropology
A research method that systematically studies individual cultures, social groups, and human societies from the perspective of the subjects themselves using methods such as interviews, immersion, etc.
Ethnography
The university committee that reviews research before it begins to protect participants.
The IRB (Institutional Review Board)
Beliefs about which ways of speaking are “proper,” “educated,” or “lazy.”
Language ideology
Godparents and trading partners are examples of this kind of kin.
Fictive kin
This approach explains behavior by combining biology, history, language, and learned behavior instead of picking one cause.
Holism
Geertz’s term for ethnographic writing that interprets the layers of meaning behind a behavior, such as the difference between a wink and a blink.
Thick description
Name three groups that federal regulations say need extra protection in research.
Any three of children, prisoners, pregnant women, people with cognitive impairment, economically or educationally disadvantaged people, other vulnerable populations, eg. refugees in camps
The hypothesis that the language you speak shapes how you perceive and think about the world.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity)
This group in West Sumatra is the largest matrilineal society in the world.
The Minangkabau
Miner’s essay about the Nacirema describes this people.
Americans (Nacirema spelled backward)
This anthropologist did two years of fieldwork in Second Life as an avatar named Tom Bukowski.
Tom Boellstorff
A U.S. military program that employed anthropologists to collect cultural information in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the AAA condemned.
The Human Terrain System
“No problemo” and “hasta la bye-bye” are examples of this practice studied by Jane Hill.
Mock Spanish
In a kinship chart, a triangle, a circle, and an equals sign stand for these three things.
A man, a woman, a marriage
A fifth area of anthropology that applies anthropological training to practical problems in health, policy, and product design. Name it and give one example of where such anthropologists work.
Applied anthropology; for example a state health department, a tech company, a hospital, a museum, a development NGO
The practice of acknowledging that the anthropologist is part of the world they study and can never be fully objective.
Reflexivity; (the ethnographer writes themselves, their bias, and the power relations of fieldwork into the account instead of claiming a neutral view from nowhere)
You have detailed fieldnotes on a community that asks you not to publish. Name one of the ethical principles in conflict.
The community’s right to privacy and self-determination (“nothing about us without us”); right to withdraw consent
The study of personal space, the study of touch, and the study of body movement and gaze. Name two of the three terms.
Proxemics, haptics, kinesics
Among the Minangkabau, women own the ancestral property, but a senior man called the penghulu still makes many decisions about how land is used. This is why anthropologists say matrilineal does not mean this.
Matriarchal