Race Is a Construct
Observable physical traits such as skin color and hair form, produced by genes and environment.
Phenotype
Any repeated sequence of acts with symbolic meaning, religious or not.
A ritual
Author of Coming of Age in Samoa, who argued adolescent turmoil is cultural rather than biological.
Margaret Mead
The process of learning to be a member of a particular culture, which continues across the whole lifespan.
Enculturation
Bourgois and Schonberg’s book about homeless heroin users in San Francisco.
Righteous Dopefiend
The U.S. convention that any known African ancestry classified a person as Black. Name the rule and the general principle it illustrates.
The one-drop rule; hypodescent
Turner’s term for the ambiguous in-between stage of a rite of passage.
Liminality
Did fieldwork with the Inuit on Baffin Island and became a leading opponent of scientific racism.
Franz Boas
Name four of the six characteristics of culture.
Any four of learned, symbolic, patterned and integrated, shared, adaptive, changing
This group around Lugu Lake in China practices “walking marriage,” in which partners keep separate households.
The Mosuo
This 18th-century naturalist divided humans into four “varieties” and attached personality traits and clothing styles to each.
Carl Linnaeus
The feeling of equality and intense bonding among people going through a ritual together.
Communitas
Wrote Families We Choose about chosen family among gay men and lesbians.
Kath Weston
Judging another culture by the standards of your own and treating your own ways as natural.
Ethnocentrism
Among the Barí of Venezuela, multiple men can be recognized as contributing to one child. The term for this.
Partible paternity
A gradual change in the frequency of a trait across geographic space, which is why skin color cannot divide humans into races.
A cline
In Wallace’s classification, breaking a bottle of champagne on a new ship is this type of ritual. The Vikings did a much bloodier version.
A protective ritual (apotropaic, warding off harm)
Wrote the first systematic cross-cultural study of kinship terms after studying Native American families. (Haudenosaunee, formerly Iroquois).
Lewis Henry Morgan
The difference between an emic and an etic perspective
Emic is how insiders understand their own practices; etic is the outside analyst’s description using their own categories
Among the Minangkabau, the custom of young men leaving for years to work or study elsewhere and sending money home.
Merantau
The same person can be classified as white in Brazil and Black in the United States without their ancestry changing, yet that label still shapes their health, housing, and treatment by police. Race is therefore said to be this, but real in its effects.
Socially constructed
Sak Yant tattoos in Thailand and batok tattoos among the Kalinga are both examples of this kind of ritual practice.
Permanent alteration of the body as ritual (often a rite of passage); meanings include spiritual protection, courage and warrior status, maturity or marriage eligibility, links to mythology
Argued that in small-scale societies the horizontal ties created by marriage between groups matter more than the vertical line of descent. Name him and the theory.
Claude Lévi-Strauss; alliance theory
An anthropologist who personally disagrees with a practice is still expected to set aside her own judgment and understand it on its own terms, a commitment called this.
Cultural relativism
In Second Life, Boellstorff found that the scandals and dramas revealed the least about the culture. The real material, online or off, is found in this.
The mundane (everyday life)