key terms

Question 1

what is agency?

Answer 1

is the capacity of human beings to act in ways that affect their own lives and others. It implies that individuals have the capacity to change and influence events.

Question 2

what is class?

Answer 2

a division of people in society (usually based on economic or social status).

Question 3

what is commodification/commodified body?

Answer 3

the process of turning non-market items into products for exchange. e.g. selling organs or sex work etc.

Question 4

what is community?

Answer 4

a group of people who share a common interest, locality, or social system.

Question 5

what is cultural relativism?

Answer 5

not making judgements about cultural differences and understanding different cultures in its context.

Question 6

what is diaspora?

Answer 6

the dispersal of people from their homelands to establish new communities in other places.

Question 7

what is embodiment?

Answer 7

how individuals experience and express culture and identity through the body.

Question 8

what is enculturation?

Answer 8

the slow adoption of culture’s traits and norms. the transmission of culture from one generation to the next.

Question 9

what are ethics?

Answer 9

the principles of behaviour governing an individual/group. concerns for what is right or wrong/good or bad.

Question 10

what is ethnicity?

Answer 10

a social group connected by a shared identity based on culture, language, ancestry.

Question 11

what is ethnocentrism?

Answer 11

the tendency to view the world from the perspective of one’s own culture. causing an inability to understand other cultures.

Question 12

what is globalisation?

Answer 12

the transmission of ideas around the world as a way to extend social relations.

Question 13

what is habitus?

Answer 13

a concept introduced by Pierre Bourdieu.
refers to ingrained habits and skills that individuals acquire throughout their life.
it unconsciously shapes how people think and interpret their surroundings.

Question 14

what is ideology?

Answer 14

a system of social/moral ideas of a group of people.

Question 15

what is imagined community?

Answer 15

the idea that a community is to some extent constructed in the minds of people who belong to it.

Question 16

what is the lived body?

Answer 16

refers to how we experience our bodies from the inside. one’s physical presence affects interactions with the world.

Question 17

what is marginalisation?

Answer 17

process by which individuals/groups are pushed to the edge of society, limiting access to opporunities and power.

Question 18

what is modernisation?

Answer 18

the adoption of characteristics of more developed societies by less developed societies (generally including an abandonment of traditional practices).

Question 19

what is the modified body?

Answer 19

the human body is deliberately altered for cultural reasons or aesthetic reasons (e.g. kaningara or Azwagh women)

Question 20

what is personhood?

Answer 20

a culturally constructed concept of the individual human being, the ‘self’.

Question 20

what is a nation state?

Answer 20

a politically legitimate geographical area with a government and permanent population.

Question 21

what is positionality?

Answer 21

the effect an anthropologist’s own subjectivity might have on how they interpret observations/experiences.

Question 22

what is race?

Answer 22

a socially constructed identification of people based on physical characteristics and ancestry.

Question 23

what is reflexivity?

Answer 23

anthropologists acknowledge that their own knowledge base, beliefs and perspectives may influence their research/writing.

Question 24

what is revitilisation?

Answer 24

the rejection of newly introduced cultural elements and the reclamation of historical roots and traditional identity.

Question 25

what is the ritualised body?

Answer 25

the body may be the focus of a ritual practice.

Question 26

what is the self?

Answer 26

a socially constructed understanding of individual cultural identity that distinguishes them from 'the other'.

Question 27

what is social stratification?

Answer 27

the systematic organisation of persons/groups into a hierarchical structure of inequality. may be according to age, gender, class, ethnicity.

Question 28

what is socialisation?

Answer 28

the process through which a perosn learns to become an accepted member of society (through agents like family and peers).

Question 29

what is the body?

Answer 29

the physical form of a person and the social, cultural and symbolic meanings associated with it.

Question 30

what is the other?

Answer 30

the other describes the way people who are a member of a particular social group perceive other people who are not members. 'othering' can be negative. e.g. white-kenyans or japanese-brazilians.

Question 31

what is transnationalism?

Answer 31

connections and practices that link people and cultures across national borders.

Question 32

what is community?

Answer 32

a geographically bounded group of people in face-to-face contact, with a shared system of beliefs and norms operating as a socially functioning whole. communities usually exist with a common social structure and government.

Question 33

definition of comparative:

Answer 33

anthropologists strive to capture the diversity of social action by focusing on the way in which particular aspects of society and culture are organised similarly/differently across groups.

Question 34

what is cultural relativism?

Answer 34

it can often be interpreted as a moral doctrine which states that the practices of one society cannot be judged according to the morality and evaluative criteria of another society.

Question 35

what is social reproduction?

Answer 35

the concept that, over time, groups of people reproduce their social structure and patterns of behaviour. social reproduction may be contested, leading to social change.

Question 36

define qualitative:

Answer 36

The data that anthropologists gather during fieldwork comes in many forms because anthropologists are trying to capture the complexity and diversity of social life. This data may be textual (oral or written), observational, or may take the form of images. Much of the data cannot be reduced usefully to quantitative forms without losing the essence of the material as perceived from an anthropological viewpoint.