Terms Flashcards
(38 cards)
Anthropology
The study of humans and what it means to be human - studies human behaviour in evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives. Looks at language systems, evolution, contemporary culture, and social systems and structures. Four fields: socio-cultural, bio-evolutionary, linguistics, archaeology.
Culture
Socially transmitted knowledge and behaviour shared by a group. Symbiotic webs of meaning that are taught and inherited, integrated into our paradigms of thought.
Worldview
The way people see their reality - a kind of lense that forms orientations of time/space/kinship/exchange, a symbolic map to understand environment.
Ethnocentrism
Judging another culture using your own culture’s morals, values, and understandings.
Cultural relativism
Ethical and methodological imperative to understand others through their own values, morals and cultural viewpoints. Emphasis on understanding rather than casting moral judgement.
Globalisation
Increasing connectivity between cultures and people through physical and social barriers. Three elements: cultural imperialism (homogenizing difference as people buy into mainstream/dominate culture, creating compulsory norms), increased inequality (global flow of capital and resources is distributed equally), increased connectivity (people, goods and ideas flow transnationally, except labour).
Orientalism
Form of colonial knowledge production. Categorises other (Eastern) cultures as exotic, irrational, superstitious in order to make the East the ‘ideal other,’ or the opposite of the West.
Cultural other
Makes differences salient as a way to define and reproduce definitions of self and other. Uses an ‘Us vs Them’ schema. Archetype formed from historical and popular vies from western modernity, wealth, and privilege.
Hegemony
Leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others. Authority and legitimacy is given to dominant groups, allowing them to impose own standards and norms on society and culture.
Colonialism
Practice of acquiring political or economical control over another country for land and resources. Exploitation and unequal power relation. Tends to twist one’s worldview, sense of self, and webs of signification.
Decolonisation
A colonial subject reclaiming power and independence.
Frantz Fanon: Not simply about armed resistance and material autonomy, but also cultural and psychological emancipation of one’s consciousness from colonialism,.
Identity
Social and cultural membership in groups or categories. Defines the self.
Gender
Social constructed hegemonic binary within Western context. Actively shaped, but also ascribed and naturalised.
Sex
Often framed in Western contexts as biogenetic difference. Concepts of sex are shaped by histories of science, psychology, media, medicine. Naturalised and normalised as definitions of gender.
Sexuality
A person’s sexual orientation or preference??? Sexual roles informed by gender roles.
Language
Cultural anthropology looks at language through 3 lenses, and is associated with a certain anthropologist:
1) Language is interpretative - learned and inferred using context which is also cultivated (culturally constituted?) - Signification (Carol Delaney)
2) Each language described a reality - no two languages are the same - Relativism (Edward Sapir)
3) Real always mediated by reality. Language therefore mediates the Real/the world - Mediation (Alan Dundes)
Sign System
Part of semiotics. System of signs and relations between signs - ie. signification.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Language correlates with perception and affects how people see and experience reality - what and how we speak affects and reflects our view of the world (worldview).
Hypothesis: “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached… We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation” (Sapir 1929)
Pidgin
Language with no native speakers. Developed for and by members of a community with no common language to communicate.
Creole
Stable native language that arises from pidgin - “official”.
Language as politicization of inequality
Language has power a la Foucault. Controls and enforces normative ways of being, structures reality and definitions of self. ?????
Performativity
Judith Butler. Body as a site for events, signification, and meaning through repeated coded actions that signify identity. Ie. performance.
Ritual
Site to observe meaning and making of culture, sometimes literally. Sequence of activities and actions performed at a certain special time and space according to particular expected behaviours.
Liminality
Victor Turner. Space of in-between and “person-becoming”. Unique time and space between identities and structures where meaning making takes place. ??
