Other Important things to remember Flashcards
The Holistic approach
Anthropologists not only study all varieties of people; they also study many aspects of human experience.
History of the area in which the people live, the physical environment, organization of family life, general features of their language, the group’s settlement patterns, political and economic systems, religion, and styles of art and dress.
Geography
where things are and why they are there. they attempt to understand the characteristics of things. spatial science.
Economics
concerned with what decisions people make and why they make them (usually to improve well-being). macroeconomics considers the aggregated outcomes.
Political Science
very basically, POWER.
power is always an inequitable distribution in every society, government is an exercise of power and control.
Sociology
structures, and how people interact in these.
History
information about how people and societies behave (needed as a reference),
only through history can we understand how things change.
transculturation
when an individual moves into another society and adopts its culture
forces at work within a society
change: invention and culture loss (eg car culture replacing horse culture)
resist: habit and integration of culture traits
contact between society
change: diffusion, acculturation, transculturation (+assimilation)
resist: us versus them mindset, ethnocentrism
stimulus diffusion
idea diffuses from another culture, leads to a genuine invention
environmental changes
war, invention, migration