Key Concepts in Anthropology

Key Terms and Concepts in Anthropology

• Adaptation: The process by which organisms cope with environmental stresses.
• Anthropology: The holistic and comparative study of humanity, exploring human biological and cultural diversity across time and space, has academic and applied dimensions.
• Applied Anthropology: The application of anthropological perspectives, theory, methods, and data to identify, assess, and solve social problems.
• Archaeological Anthropology: Reconstructs, describes, and interprets human behavior and cultural patterns through material remains, focusing on prehistory and cultural resource management.
• Biological/Physical Anthropology: Documents human diversity involving fossils, genetics, growth, development, bodily responses, and nonhuman primates.
• Cultural Anthropology: Explores the cultural diversity of the present and the recent past; features ethnography and ethnology.
• Cultural Resource Management (CRM): Decides what archaeological sites need saving and preserves significant information when sites cannot be saved.
• Cultures: Customary behavior and beliefs that are passed on through enculturation, encompasses shared rules for conduct, and rests on the human capacity for cultural learning.
• Curer: Often a shaman. The curer's role has universal features and emerges through a culturally defined process of selection and training.
• Disease: Refers to a scientifically identified health threat, influenced by sociocultural context.
• Ethnography: Field work in a particular society, providing an account of a community, society, or culture.
• Ethnology: Cross-cultural comparison, involving the comparative study of ethnographic data, of society, and of culture.
• General Anthropology: This explores human biology, psychology, society, and culture and considers their interrelations.
• Health Care Systems: Beliefs, customs, specialists, and techniques aimed at ensuring health and at preventing, diagnosing, and curing illness.
• Holistic: In anthropology, this considers the integrated study of all aspects of humanity.
• Hominids: Members of the zoological family that includes fossil and living humans.
• Illness: Is a condition of poor health perceived or felt by an individual.
• Linguistic Anthropology: Considers diversity among languages.
• Medical Anthropology: The cross-cultural study of health problems and conditions, disease, illness, disease theories, and health care systems, including biological and cultural dimensions.
• Primates: The study of the biology, evolution, behavior, and social life of monkeys, apes, and other nonhuman.
• Scientific Medicine: Differs from Western medicine because it surpasses tribal treatment in many ways, such as new drugs.
• Society: Organized life in groups.

Key Terms and Concepts in Ethnicity

• Achieved Status: Attained through choices, actions, efforts, talents, and accomplishments.
• Acculturation: The exchange of cultural features that results when groups have continuous firsthand contact.
• Ascribed Status: People have little choice about occupying them, such as age, race, and gender.
• Assimilation: Describes the process of change an ethnic group undergoes when it moves to a country where another culture dominates.
• Colonialism: The political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended time.
• Cultural Colonialism: Refers to internal domination by one group and its culture/ideology over others.
• Cultural Rights: The group's ability to preserve its culture, language, and economic base.
• Cultural Relativism: The viewpoint that behavior in one culture should not be judged by the standards of another culture.
• Discrimination: Refers to policies and practices that harm a group and its members; may be de facto or de jure.
• Ethnic Group: Defined by actual, perceived, or assumed cultural similarities and differences, based on language, religion, history, geography, kinship, or "race."
• Ethnicity: Identification with, and feeling part of, an ethnic group, including exclusion from certain other groups because of this affiliation.
• Ethnocentrism: Is the tendency to view one's own culture as superior and to apply one's own cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs of others.
• Ethnocide: The destruction of the cultures of certain ethnic groups.
• Forced Assimilation: Forcing ethnic group members to adopt the dominant culture.
• Generalities: Common to several but not all human groups.
• Globalization: Encompasses a series of processes, including diffusion and acculturation, promoting change in a world of interconnected and interdependent nations.
• Hupodescent: Automatically places the children of a union or mating between members of different groups in the minority group.
• Hypodescent Rule: American racial classification, governed of having no genetic base.
• Intellectual Property Rights (IPR): Conserves each society's cultural base--its core beliefs, knowledge, and practices.
• Majority Groups: Superordinate, dominant, or controlling.
• Minority Groups: Not be need have fewer members than the majority group does but minorities in terms of income, authority, and power.
• Nation: An independent, centrally organized political unit, or a government.
• Nation-State: The combination of country and state - like the United States
• Nationalities: Ethnic groups that once had, or wish to have or regain, autonomous political status (their own country).
• Particularities: Unique to certain cultural traditions.
• Phenotype: An organism's evident traits, its "manifest biology" - physiology and anatomy, including skin color, hair form, facial features and eye color.
• Plural Society: Combines ethnic contrasts, ecological specialization, and economic interdependence.
• Prejudice: Devaluing (looking down on) a group because of its assumed behavior, values, capabilities, or attributes.
• Race: An ethnic group assumed to have a biological basis.
• Racism: Discrimination against such a group is called.
• Refugees: People have been forced with involuntary reasons, a choice to flee for esacpe, or persecution or war.
• Social Races: Groups assumed to have a biological basis but actually defined in a culturally arbitrary manner.
• State: State come to mean an independent.
• Status: Used as a synonym and to encompass and position people in society.
• Stereotypes: Fixed ideas that are fixed or unfavorable.
• Subcultures: Different symbol-based patterns and traditions associated with particular groups in the same complex society.
• Symbols: Stand for something and has a nonverbal communication in language.
• Universality: Found in every culture.

Key Terms and Concepts in Applied Anthropology

• Adaptation: The process by which organisms cope with environmental stresses.
• in Urban anthropology.
• Anthropology and Education: Refers to anthropological research in classrooms, homes, and neighborhoods.
• Ethnography and Observation: Ways of gathering data.
• expertise.
• Medical Anthropology: Examines questions like affected populations and how treated illness culturally appropriate ways.