Anthropology 101
The investigation of the human past by means of excavating and analyzing artifacts.
What is archaeology?
Anything that serves to refer to something else.
What is a symbol?
The in-depth study of the everyday practices and lives of a people.
What is ethnography?
The total extinction of a language.
What is language death?
The smallest group of individuals who see themselves as connected to one another.
What is a family?
The study of humans from an evolutionary perspective, particularly how they have changed over time and adapted to their environments. It is sometimes called physical anthropology.
What is biological anthropology?
The tendency to view one's own culture as most important and correct, and as the stick by which to measure all other cultures.
What is ethnocentrism?
Anthropological research designed to gain an in-depth, contextualized understanding of human behavior.
What is qualitative research?
A variety of speech, often applied to a subordinate variety of a language, whose speakers may not always understand speakers of another one of the same language.
What is a dialect?
Marriages in which there is one husband and multiple wives.
What is polygyny?
An early and discredited method of anthropological research that did not involve direct contact with the people studied.
What is armchair anthropology?
Blood ties, common ancestry, and social relationships that form families within human groups.
What is kinship?
Anthropological research that uses statistical, mathematical, and/or numerical data to study human behavior.
What is quantitative research?
The ability to communicate about things that are outside of the here and now.
What is displacement?
Descent is recognized through both the father's and the mother's sides of the family.
What is bilateral descent?
The study of how people communicate through complex systems of symbols, in the past and the present.
What is linguistic anthropology?
An approach developed in British anthropology that emphasized how the parts of a society work together to support the functioning of the whole.
What is functionalism?
A description of the studied culture from the perspective of a member of the culture, or insider.
What is emic?
The rules by which a language combines morphemes into larger units.
What is syntax?
Payments made to the groom's family by the bride's family before marriage.
What is a dowry?
Early twentieth-century work by anthropologists like Malinowski and Boas to document and preserve the traditions of cultures believed to be quickly disappearing, before they were lost.
What is salvage ethnography?
A discredited nineteenth-century theory suggesting that societies evolved through stages from simple to advanced.
What is cultural evolutionism (unilineal cultural evolution)?
A description of the studied culture from the perspective of an observer or outsider.
What is etic?
A theory developed by linguist Noam Chomsky suggesting that a basic template for all human languages is embedded in our genes.
What is Universal Grammar?
Payments made to the bride's family by the groom's family before marriage.
What is bridewealth?