LANGUAGE
The process by which people learn their culture.
What is enculturation?
A marriage payment from the groom’s family to the bride’s family.
What is bride price?
The form of exchange in which goods and services are bought and sold using money
What is market exchange?
A political organization with centralized power, formal laws, and bureaucracy.
What is a state?
The presence of multiple medical systems used by people in one setting.
What is medical pluralism?
The idea that we should understand a culture in its own terms, not judge it by our standards.
What is cultural relativism?
Descent traced only through the mother’s line.
What is matrilineal descent?
This mode of subsistence relies on wild plants, animals, and fish rather than domesticated resources.
What is foraging?
Stratified system in which one’s social position is hereditary and movement or mobility is restricted.
What is a caste system?
The era marked by significant human impact on the planet.
What is the Anthropocene?
The hypothesis that language shapes how we perceive and think about the world.
What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
Marriage in which a man marries his deceased brother’s widow.
What is levirate marriage?
The ceremonial exchange system practiced by Trobriand Islanders.
What is the Kula Ring?
A small, egalitarian political organization typically found among foragers
What is a band?
A culturally specific illness recognized by a social group.
What is a culture-bound syndrome?
The study of how people use physical distance and personal space to communicate.
What is proxemics?
Marriage between people outside one’s social group.
What is exogamy?
An economic system where goods move to a central figure who then disperses them.
What is redistribution?
A ranked society governed by a leader or chief who redistributes resources.
What is a chiefdom?
Kin related by blood rather than marriage belong to this category.
What is consanguineal kinship?
The switching between ways of speaking depending on context.
What is code-switching?
Cousins whose parents are siblings of the same gender (two brothers’ kids or two sisters’ kids).
What are parallel cousins?
The three main types of reciprocity.
What are generalized, balanced, and negative?
What refers to power structures embedded in social institutions that harm or limit groups?
What is structural violence?
This classification system automatically places a child of mixed ancestry in the subordinate racial group.
What is hypodescent?