Anthropology:
Some Key Terms in Cultural Anthropology

Caution: a glossary or dictionary is a good starting point for understanding. But please don't stop here! Memorizing definitions is hardly a way to gain a critical understanding of a discipline. The descriptions below are only cursory, and are meant to start the reader off on further directions of discovery and exploration. If you feel that the definitions below are sketchy--that's because they are meant to be!

[The following categories can be used to jump to a specific section of this glossary]

[General Terms] [Economy and Power] [Kinship and Marriage] [Religion and Worldview] [Theories]

General Terms

Cultural Relativism: the belief that each culture should be understood in its own terms, rather than being judged by the values and ideas of another system.

Culture: the beliefs, ideas, values, behaviors, language, meaning systems, and more, of a given people.

Emics: understanding a culture from "inside," from within its own frame of reference, from experiencing it as a participant...

Ethnocentrism: judging another culture's ways from the perspective of one's own. Seeing one's own culture as the central standard by which other cultures should be measured and evaluated

Ethnography: a written study, as a 'first-hand account' of one's experience of a particular culture. An ethnography is generally meant to be a description of observations about a particular culture.

Etic: the phase in one's study of a particular culture, after having experienced it and participated in it first-hand, of "stepping back" and evaluating the experience. The point at which an "emic" experience is "interpreted" into explanatory terms in one's own culture.

Fieldwork: the practice of going into a cultural context and studying it by experience, particpation and observation for an extended period of time.

Ideology: the beliefs and ideas a given culture (or group within a culture) use to understand and support its way of behaving.

Methods: practices of research through which anthropologists gather data about the cultures they wish to study.

Participant Observation: a key method of anthropological research through which anthropologists immerse themselves in the life of a given culture to experience it "from within."

Economy and Power

Colonialism

Core Economies

Deindustrialization

Global Capitalism

Global Feminization of Poverty

International Monetary Fund

Maquiladoras

Market Economies

North American Free-Trade Agreement

Peripheral Economies

Third World

World Bank

World System

Kinship and Marriage

Alliance: the patterns of connection and support formed between societies, or groups within societies, through such practices as gift-giving, trade relationships, marriage relationships, joint warring/raiding parties and more.

Bridewealth: the gifts given to a bride's family by the groom (or the kin of the groom) as part of the marriage process in some societies. This "wealth" often is in the form of the key goods (foods, cattle etc.) that are them main elements of subsistenc of a particular society.

Descent (lineage): the "line" through which one traces her/his ancestry in a given society (eg. through that of one's father, one's mother, or both)

Endogamy: the social practice and/or requirement to marry within certain specified groups in one's society.

Exogamy: the social practice and/or requirement to marry outside of certain specified groups (for example, beyond certain degrees of kinship, outside one's village, etc.).

Incest Taboo: often thought of as nearly universal in human society, it is the restriction against sexual relations between relations of a particular "close" degree (including between brother/sister, parent/child, and varying degrees of "cousins" for example).

Kinship: practices and patterns of establishing and recognizing social relations, through birth, marriage and adoption.

Matrilineal Descent: determining descent through the mother's line of kinship.

Matrilocal Residence: the practice by which a newly married couple lives with or near the wife's family.

Neolocal Residence: the practice by which a newly married couple lives in a new place, apart from both the husband's or the wife's family.

Patrilocal Residence: the practice by which a newly married couple lives with or near the husband's family.

Monogamy: the marriage practice allowing only one spouse (at a time).

Patrilineal Descent: determining one's descent through the male/father's line of kinship.

Polyandry: the marriage practice allowing a wife to have more than one husband at a time.

Polygamy: the general marriage pattern of allowing more than one spouse at a time.

Polygyny: the marriage practice of allowing a male to have more than one wife at a time.

Serial Monogamy: (or serial polygamy!) the practice of allowing only one marriage partner at a time, but allowing for a series of such individual partners over a lifetime.

Religion and Worldview

Cosmology: the "worldview" of a given culture or society, through which it understands the makeup and the workings of all things ("the cosmos," its origin, and all its beings and processes)

Initiation: a social practice through which a member or members is brought into a new realm of social experience or responsibility-- for example, into puberty, adulthood etc.

Magic: the performance of certain ritual practices which are believed to have an influence on the powers that control nature. These practices often are meant to effect desired outcomes-- for things like the insurance of good health, productive crops etc.

Myth: story (stories) told in one's culture to explain things like the creation of the world, and the behavior of its inhabitants.

Religion: a set of ideas, beliefs, practices, rituals, etc. through which a people relates to supernatural powers-- whether those powers are impersonal "forces," spirits, or "gods."

Rites of Passage: initiation practices for major steps in peoples' lives, to help them move into new social roles, positions or statuses. These include such things as marriage rituals, puberty rites, as well as rituals related to births and deaths.

Ritual: a formalized practice that follows predictable, repeated patterns within a given society; usually it is part of processes meant to relate society and its members to the supernatural forces believed to be a part of the surrounding world.

Science: an approach to "knowledge," based on the valuing of "objective" data and information about the world; such data and information is to be obtained through "objective" observation and analysis, following some form of experimental, repeatable methods of research.

Worldview: a person or society's over-all understanding of the world, how it is ordered and how it works. A "cosmology" is in fact a "worldview" on a grand scale, reflecting not only the workings of one's "world" (however big or small) but its relation to the rest of the cosmos as well.

Theories

Cultural Evolution: one of a variety of theories that have developed since at least the mid-19th century, which have attempted to explain processes and patterns of cultural change. Often such theories have have presented such change as "progress," from "earlier" forms ("less developed," "less advanced" etc.) to "later" forms ("more developed," "more advanced"). These schemes have also often reflected the ethnocentrism of the theorists themselves, who frequently put their own societies at the pinacle of "progress."

Cultural Materialism: a theoretical approach that explores and examines culture as a reflection or product of material conditions in a society. Cultural materialism is a variation on basic materialist approaches to understanding culutre. A key representative of this approach is the anthropologist Marvin Harris.

Feminist Anthropology: a range and variety of approaches could fall under this title. These include approaches to the study of culture that emphasize the need to understand the gendered nature of human societies, as well as the gendered nature of social/cultural inquiry itself.

Functionalism: such an approach often treats society as a living organism or a complex machine, the parts of which can only be understood as they function in the whole. Aspects of a culture or society are studied from this perspective in the context of how they function in the larger processes of society; they may also be considered in relation to the key "needs" they serve in a given society (eg. needs for subsistence, social law and order, etc.)

The Interpretive Approach: Such an approach sees culture as "texts," to be read and translated for their "thick" meaning. The work of Clifford Geertz most directly represents this approach.

Materialism: Represented by the work of Karl Marx and later anthropologist following Marx's analysis, this approach understands culture to be the product of the material conditions of a given society. In oversimplified terms, things like religion, law, and even artforms, reflect the power relationships of a given society as they are generated by the material order of that society.

Structuralism: Anthropology has seen the development of a number of forms of "structuralism" in its history. One such form (known often as structural-functionalism) approaches the basic structures of a given society as serving key functions in meeting basic human needs. Another form of structuralism, more recently developed by Claude Levi-Strauss, goes even further to argue that social/cultural structures are actually rooted in the fundamental structure of the human brain, which generates basic building-blocks of social/cultural systems. In this approach, culture is studied for its deeper meaning as it can be found in the careful structural analysis of meaning in such things as myth and ritual.