MIDTERM VOCAB-History of Anth&Bio Anth

Question 1

Unilinear Cultural Evolution

Answer 1

-Society and culture thought to change gradually through time and through universally consistent ways.
Savagery-Barbarism-Civilization
-Each stage represents advancement in the food subsistence strategies, arts, language, politics, technology, education etc.

Question 2

Darwinian Evolution

Answer 2

favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones destroyed. The result would be the formation of a new species.”
-Evolution by Natural selection

Question 3

Three Age System

Answer 3

-Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age
-Technological progress

Question 4

Social Darwinism

Answer 4

-used to explain the diversity of people in the 19th century

Question 5

Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck

Answer 5

Dynamic Relationship between animals and environment-> environment leads to changes in animal traits.
-inheritance of Acquired Characteristics
-“use it or lose it”- Use-disuse theory
Ex; Giraffe Neck length

Question 6

Thunderstones

Answer 6

Stone-Axes

Question 7

Lewis Henry Morgan

Answer 7

Created the idea of Unilinear evolution.
-all societies “progress” through the same stages of development.
*Ethnocentric ideology

Question 8

Herbert Spencer

Answer 8

• Accepted theory of Evolution as a natural process- “Survival of the Fittest”
  -Social Evolution & Social Darwinism
  -justification of Western powers having the right to dominate “unfit members of society.”
  *Racist ideologies
• Sociologist and theorist (1864)

Question 9

Culture History

Answer 9

-cultural change through migration and diffusion
-Franz Boas

Question 10

Uniformitarianism

Answer 10

-James Hutton
-effects of erosion on landscapes.
- Earth changes through continuous and uniform processes.

Question 11

Carlous Linnaeus

Answer 11

-binomial nomenclature
-Taxonomy classification of organisms int. systems that reflects the degree of relatedness
Ex: genus, species, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family
homo-sapiens

Question 12

Eugenics

Answer 12

• An idea that was popular in the 1920s that society should be improved by breeding ‘better’ kinds of people.
• sterilization of “feeble-minded citizens” that was involuntary. (forced sterilization)
  -Nazi Ideology

Question 13

Franz Boas

Answer 13

• founder of modern-day Anthropology
• Theorized Cultural Relativism
  -Historical Particularism- each culture is a product of unique historical circumstances.

Question 14

Cultural Relativism

Answer 14

No universal standard by which to judge human progress.

Question 15

Ethnocentrism

Answer 15

An observational bias in which other societies are evaluated by standards relevant to the observer’s culture.