Key Terms And Important Phrases To Include In Defn. Flashcards
(29 cards)
Survivals
Tylor’s idea of vestiges of previous cultures that are still around today
Original meaning has been lost or is no longer relevant
Examples: hand shake, bless you
Unilinear evolution
Tylor’s theory from ‘primitive culture’
All cultures evolve in the same way, same progression
From the most primitive to most civilized which was viewed as the most successful
Tylor’s definition of culture
“Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is the complex whole which includes knowledge, morals, art, beliefs, law and customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”
Historical materialism
Marx methodological approach to study society
Looked for the causes of developments and changes in human society based on things they made
Looks at the way materialism has shaped history -why did we need to do the things we did to propel us further?
Dialectical materialism
Another of Marx’s approach to studying society
Not looking at the material goods but at thesis, antithesis, synthesis pattern through time
Looking at the social capital system of production
Like a spiral through time of innovation, division of labor, class struggles, and leveling out…
Marx felt this eventually led to communism
Proletariat
Marx’s idea of the working class group of wage earners
Ruled by the Bourgeoisie class
Their only possession is their labor-power
Relations of production
Marx’s view from capital
The sum total of relationships people must enter to sustain their way of life
Conscience collective
Difficult concept to define due to language difference
Durkheim developed this idea to discuss normative behavior to one culture but can be applied to other cultures as well
Our modern day interpretation of enculturation and ideology
Anomie
Durkheim’s description of societal alienation
Breakdown of social bonds between the individual and community
Strong subject in his analysis on suicide rates
Social facts
Durkheim’s description of observable social constraints that function independent of our consciousness
Wats of thinking, acting, feeling that are a manner of “checking” that we don’t migrate outside the normative behavior acceptable for our society
Totems
Durkheim studied these in depth
Symbolic representations, often animals that associate you with a clan
Dictate clan’s behavior, worldview, and essentially their entire cosmological outlook
Total prestations
Social phenomena discussed by mauss in his theory of reciprocity mentioned in ‘the gift’
In a gift economy, total prestations are events and acts that appear voluntary, but are in fact necessary in order to keep social status
Consequences occur if you don’t adhere to what’s expected of you in terms of reciprocity
Total social phenomena
Mauss’s idea of multidimensional phenomena that encompasses juridical economical, political, moral, and religious aspects.
Believed the act of reciprocity in gift giving was an example of this
Mauss’s study of the potlatch in “the gift” was an example of this because of how it entailed multiple avers of culture
Cultural hermeneutics
Learning about the world based on the interpretation of text, such as the Bible
Weber believed this was the formula to capitalism in that predestination +the calling + ascetics =capitalism
Wertrational/value rational
One of max weber’s four action types
Main point was that sometimes people make illogical decisions based off value rational ways-the world makes us value certain things that makes us act in certain ways
Different from Marx’s idea of instrumental rational where you work only to feed your family
Charismatic authority
Leadership depends much more on the perceived legitimacy of the authority versus bloodlines
Revolutionary and temporary
Joking relationships
Radcliffe brown as all about keeping equilibrium in society
Understood joking relationships as a cure to a social problem
Diffuses stress and therefore promotes equilibrium in society
Participant-observation
Malinowski’s pioneered field method in which the observer lives and acts as the group to which he’s observing so to get an inside and outside perspective of the society
Looks at the imponderabilia of every day life as the trained observers will accurately record the emotions that may dictate an average day in the life
Synoptic charts
Malinowski felt strongly about building synoptic charts for thorough ethnography
A synoptic chart is essentially a kinship chart but with complex relations shown schematically to illustrate relationships in other dimensions of culture
Charts represented relationships between ethnographic data, genealogies, maps, palms, and diagrams that served to outline cultural actions
Superorganic
Kroeber’s idea that culture is nota development of the individual, but a product of society and history.
Culture doesn’t behave like nature does because it’s superprganic, so you have to look at it as a product of human thought and historic particularism
Cultural configurations
Benedict’s idea that culture is not just a random collection of traits but a unique patterning or organization of traits
National character study
Culture and personality study
Benedict’s “chrysanthemum and the sword”
Culture and personalities anthropologists wrote to debunk the theory that all personalities in a society are essentially homogeneous
The main contribution of Culture and Personality was to show that, revolutionary at the time, socialization continued beyond infancy and early childhood, and national discourses could have an effect on personal character
Culture as thermodynamic systems
White outlined a theory in which the measurement of energy consumption of a society is an indication of a society’s advancement
Cultural ecology
Stewards methodology of understanding how humans adapt to such a wife variety of environments
Wats in which culture change is induced by adaptation to the environment
While the environment influences the human character, it does not determine it
