Anthropology Foundations
The lifelong process of learning culturally shaped expectations, including ideas of success and proper behavior.
What is enculturation?
The trusting relationship a researcher develops to support respectful communication.
What is rapport?
This concept attributes spiritual power, a soul, or personality to living beings or objects.
What is animism?
A culturally produced expectation, such as a rule about appropriate clothing, that can seem natural.
What is a social construct?
A ritual uses a drawing of a flourishing garden to encourage the real garden to flourish.
What is imitative magic?
An approach that connects religious life with economics, family relationships, politics, and health.
What is holism?
A method that involves taking part in community activities while carefully observing them.
What is participant observation?
This theorist argued that religion can comfort people who are suffering while also helping maintain unequal distributions of wealth and power.
Who is Karl Marx?
This view emphasizes discovering empirical facts through scientific methods.
What is positivism?
A ritual uses a lock of hair because it remains connected to its former owner.
What is contagious magic?
A traveler labels an unfamiliar ceremony inferior because it differs from practices at home.
What is ethnocentrism?
This written permission must be obtained before interviewing a participant.
What is written consent?
This theorist emphasized how religion can bring differentiated social groups together.
Who is Émile Durkheim?
This anthropologist focused on symbols and meaning and is associated with thick description.
Who is Clifford Geertz?
Lawrence connects women’s status, kinship, and land relationships in Milne Bay to this system of descent.
What is matriliny? Also accept: descent traced through the maternal line, noting that Lawrence describes broader social relationships as well.
This concept helps explain how race, gender, class, and other identities interact to shape a person’s experience.
What is intersectionality?
“Can you tell me about your first experience at this gathering?” is this type of question.
What is an open-ended question?
This approach asks how material conditions and unequal power shape religious beliefs.
What is the Marxist approach?
Two members of the same religious community interpret a ceremony differently because of their backgrounds and experiences. This term describes realities perceived differently by individuals.
What are subjective realities?
McDonnell links many North Efate nakaemas accusations to leasing and disputes over this resource, which also carries sacred and social meaning.
What is land? Also accept: customary land.
A researcher asks how a practice makes sense locally while setting aside their own standards of what is normal.
What is cultural relativism?
McDonnell removes names, specific places, and identifying relationships from sensitive narratives. Name the ethical goal of this decision.
What is protecting participants from identification and further conflict? Ethics: confidentiality or reducing harm.
In Gmelch’s comparison, fielding resembles safer lagoon fishing; these two baseball activities resemble risky open-sea fishing
What are pitching and hitting?
A fieldnote explains who participated, what an object meant to them, and how local history shaped the ceremony.
What is thick description?
In Lawrence’s Milne Bay case, this approach brings accusers, accused people, and their kin together privately to discuss grievances and can reduce the likelihood of violence.
What is community mediation?