Exam 2 Flashcards
(54 cards)
Four-field approach
The traditional approach of American Anthropology that divides the study of anthro into the four fields of archaeological, biological, cultural, and linguistic anth
Geisteswissenschaften
Translated “human sciences,” including anth; contrasted w/ Naturwissenshaften
Naturwissenschaften
Translated “Natural scinces
idiographic
Pertaining to a particularizing approach to description and explanation; contrasted with nomothetic
nomothetic
Generalizing
Salvage Ethnography
Ethnography motivated by the need to obtain information about cultures threatened with extinction or assimilation
Super Organic
the idea that culture is distinct from and “above” biology
emphatic statement of importance of environment over heredity, nurture over nature or culture over biology (Alfred Kroeber)
Structuralism
In British social anth, the synchronic concern w/ social structure, sometimes called social morphology; in french structural ant, the concer w/ the elementary forms of minds and cultures
Structure of the conjuncture
Marshall Sahlins’s phrase describing the place of intersection between different cultural structures, where contingency produces historical change
psychological anthropology
Anth concerned w/ relationship btwn cultures and personalities
Participant-observation
the style of anthropological fieldwork requiring the fieldworker to see things from both the “native” and the fieldworker’s points of view
National Character
According to certain psychological anthropologists, the dominant personality of a nation
Kula ring
A cultural and economic exchange network among inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands, studied by Bronislaw Malinowski
Manchester School
A coterie of anthropologists trained under Max Gluckman at Manchester University in the 1950s and 1960s
French structural anthropology
The theoretical orientation of Claude Levi-strauss and his followers, invoking elementary mental structures, reciprocity, and binary oppositions
Functionalism
In British social anthropology, either Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown’s theory of how parts of a society contribute to the whole society or Bronislaw Malinowski’s theory of how culture responds to biological needs in a hierarchically organized way
cultural relativism
The proposition that cultural differences should not be judged by absolute standards
culture-at-a-distance
The study of cultures w/o the benefit of fieldwork, practised by American psychological anthropologists in the era of WWII
colonial encounter
the historical encounter btwn European colonizers and the indigenous ppls of the world, who were then often marginalized or opressed by colonialism
British Social anthropology
The School of structuralism and functionalism led b Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski
Franz Boas (6)
1)Father of American Anthropology
born and educated in 2)Germany-doctorate in physics (optical properties of color)
3)Curator of the (new) Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
4)Principally a cultural anthropologists,,but,,,
5)Published more than 700 books and articles
6)helped est: American Anthropological Association and journal, American Anthropologist
Boasian
Focus on Native Americans (Salvage anthropology)
Field-work based and focused on particulars not laws
Initiates a turn towards human interiority (personality, psyche, (ab)normalitiy)
The Boasians
Enthnography and Anth students: Robert Lowie UC Berkley Alfred Kroeber UC Berkley Melvile Herskovits; North western University E. Adamson Hoebel, legal anth
Psychological Anth
Ruth Benedict
Margaret Mead
American Indian Studies
Alexander Goldenweiser
Paul Radin
Clark Wissler
Anthropological Linguistics
Edward Sapir
Boasian “School”
-Boas seen as father of amer. anth. not necessarily school of thought bc it was more of a critique of 19th c theory rather than formulation of new theory
boas was an ardent empiricist
emphasis on salvage ethnography
critical of comparative method
protested that “nobody was living in the Stone Age”
