Ch. 4: Anthropological Theory and Methods Flashcards
(39 cards)
Attitudinal data
Information on what people think or feel.
Behavioral data
Information on what people do.
Binary oppositions
Opposites
male-female, hot-cold, old-young, etc.
Collecting data
The stage of fieldwork that involves selecting data-gathering techniques and gathering information pertinent to the hypothesis being studied.
Cultural ecology
An approach to anthropology that assumes that people who reside in similar environments are likely to develop similar technologies, social structures, and political institutions.
Cultural materialism
A contemporary orientation in anthropology holding that cultural systems are most influenced by such material things as natural resources and technology.
Culture shock
A psychological disorientation a person experiences when attempting to operate in a radically different cultural environment.
Diffusionism
The spreading of a cultural trait (that is, a material object, idea, or behavior pattern) from one society to another.
Document analysis
Examination of data such as personal diaries, newspapers, colonial records, and so on.
Ethnographic fieldwork
Research carried out by cultural anthropologists among living peoples in other societies and among subcultures of our own society.
Ethnographic mapping
A data-gathering tool that locates where the people being studied love, where they keep their livestock, where public buildings are located, and so on, in order to determine how that culture interacts with its environment.
Ethnography
A strategy of anthropological research, and an anthropological description of a particular contemporary culture by means of direct fieldwork.
Ethnoscience
A theoretical school popular in the 1950s and 1960s that tries to understand a culture from the point of view of the people being studied.
Event analysis
Photographic documentation of events such as weddings, funerals, and festivals in the culture under investigation.
Evolutionism
The nineteenth-century school of cultural anthropology, represented by Tylor and Morgan, that attempted to explain variations in world cultures by the single deductive theory that they all pass through a series of evolutionary stages.
Feminist anthropology
A theoretical approach that seeks to describe and explain cultural life from the perspective of both women and men.
Fieldnotes
The daily descriptive notes recorded by an anthropologist during or after observing a specific phenomenon or activity.
Fieldwork
The practice in which an anthropologist is immersed in the daily life of a culture in order to collect data and test cultural hypotheses.
French structuralism
A theoretical orientation holding that cultures are the product of unconscious processes of the human mind.
Functionalism
A theory of social stratification that holds that social inequality exists because it contributes to the overall well-being of a society.
Interpreting data
The stage of fieldwork, often the most difficult, in which the anthropologist searches for meaning in the data collected while in the field.
Interpretive anthropology
A contemporary theoretical orientation holding that the critical aspects of cultural systems are subjective factors such as values, ideas, and worldviews.
Multilinear evolution
The mid-twentieth-century anthropological theory of Julian Steward, who suggested that specific cultures can evolve independently of all others even if they follow the same evolutionary process.
Neoevolutionism
A twentieth-century school of cultural anthropology, represented by White and Steward, that attempted to refine the earlier evolutionary theories of Tylor and Morgan.
