Glossary of Key terms

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | XYZ

A

Acculturation
Major cultural changes people are forced to make owing to intensive firsthand contact between societies.

Acheulian tradition
A tool tradition associated with Homo erectus in Africa and Europe characterized by teardrop-shaped axes and flake tools. Named after the site where it was first defined, St. Acheul, France, it lasted from 1.5 million to about 150 000 years ago.

Achieved status
Status an individual earns.

Adaptation
A process organisms undergo to achieve a beneficial adjustment to an available environment and the results of that process: characteristics that fit them to the particular conditions of the environment they are generally found in.

Adjudication
Mediation with an unbiased third party making the ultimate decision.

Affinal kin
Relatives by marriage.

Age grade
An organized category of people based on age; every individual passes through a series of such categories during a lifetime.

Ambilineal descent
Descent in which the individual may affiliate with either the mother’s or the father’s descent group.

Ambilocal residence
A pattern in which a married couple may choose either matrilocal or patrilocal residence.

Animatism
A belief that the world is animated by impersonal supernatural powers.

Animism
A belief in spirit beings thought to animate nature.

Anthropogenesis
The process whereby ecosystems are influenced or altered by humans.

Anthropology
The study of humankind in all times and places.

Applied anthropology
Applied anthropologists attempt to solve or alleviate some of the social problems that humans experience using the knowledge and expertise of anthropology.

Applied anthropology
The use of anthropological knowledge and techniques for solving “practical” problems, often for a specific “client.”

Archaeology
The study of material remains, usually from the past, to describe and explain human behaviour.

Ascribed status
Status people are born into.

Australopithecus
The earliest well-known hominine, who lived between 1 million and 4.2 million years ago and includes several species.

Avunculocal residence
A pattern in which a married couple lives with the husband’s mother’s brother.

B

Balanced reciprocity
A mode of exchange whereby the giving and the receiving are specific in terms of the value of the goods and the time of their delivery.

Band
A small group of related households occupying a particular region that gather periodically but that do not yield their sovereignty to the larger collective.

Biocultural approach
An approach to medical anthropology that studies how ecological and physiological conditions affect the health and disease of populations.

Biological anthropology
The systematic study of humans as biological organisms.

Bound morpheme
A sound that can occur in a language only in combination with other sounds, as s in English does to signify the plural.

Bride service
A designated period after marriage when the groom works for the bride’s family.

Bride-price
Compensation the groom or his family pays to the bride’s family on marriage.

C

Carrying capacity
The number of people the available resources can support at a given technological level.

Caste
A special form of social class in which membership is determined by birth and remains fixed for life.

Chiefdom
A regional polity in which two or more local groups are organized under a single chief, who is at the head of a ranked hierarchy of people.

Clan
A noncorporate descent group whose members claim descent from a common ancestor without actually knowing the genealogical links to that ancestor.

Closed-class systems
Stratified societies that severely restrict social mobility.

Code switching
The process of changing from one level of language to another.

Common-interest associations
Associations not based on age, kinship, marriage, or territory but that result from the act of joining.

Conflict theory of stratification
A theory suggesting that a power struggle takes place between the upper and lower levels of society.

Conjugal bond
The bond between a man and a woman who are married.

Conjugal family
A family consisting of one (or more) man (who may be a female) married to one (or more) woman (who may be a male) and their offspring.

Consanguine family
A family unit consisting of a woman, her dependent offspring, and the woman’s brothers.

Consanguineal kin
Relatives by birth—that is, “blood” relatives.

Consensus
A general agreement among adult members of a group.

Conspicuous consumption
A term Thorstein Veblen coined to describe the display of wealth for social prestige.

Consumption
The ingestion of food and the exploitation of available resources.

Contagious magic
Magic based on the principle that beings once in contact can influence one another after separation.

Conventional gestures
Body movements that have to be learned and can vary cross-culturally.

Cooperation explanation
Forcing people outside their familial unit.

Core vocabulary
In language, pronouns, lower numerals, and names for body parts and natural objects.

Creole
A more complex pidgin language that has become the mother tongue of a significant population.

Critical medical anthropology
A branch of medical anthropology that considers the political economy of health and the effect of social inequality on people’s health.

Cross-cultural comparison
Comparing one particular aspect of a culture with the same aspect in others.

Crow system
Kinship classification usually associated with matrilineal descent in which a father’s sister and father’s sister’s daughter are called by the same term, a mother and mother’s sister are merged under another, and a father and father’s brother are given a third. Parallel cousins are equated with brother and sisters.

Cultural control
Control through beliefs and values deeply internalized in the minds of individuals.

Cultural interpretive approach
The study of how cultural beliefs and perceptions of health and illness affect people’s health and the treatment of disease.

Cultural pluralism
Social and political interaction of people with different ways of living and thinking within the same society.

Cultural relativism
The thesis that one must suspend judgement on other people’s practices to understand them in their own cultural terms.

Culture
The shared ideals, values, and beliefs that people use to interpret experience and generate behaviour and that are reflected by their behaviour.

Culture bound
Theories about the world and reality based on the assumptions and values of one’s own culture.

Culture Shock
The shock, confusion, and insecurity that many people feel when living in an unfamiliar culture.

D

Density of social relations
Roughly the number and intensity of interactions among the members of a camp or other residential unit.

Descent group
Any publicly recognized social entity requiring lineal descent from a particular real or mythical ancestor for membership.

Descriptive linguistics
The study of patterns and structure in language.

Dialects
Varying forms of a language that reflect particular regions or social classes and that are similar enough to be mutually intelligible.

Diffusion
The spread of customs or practices from one culture to another.

Diseases of civilization
Diseases such as heart disease, stroke, and cancer that are most prevalent in affluent, industrialized countries.

Displacement
The ability to refer to objects and events removed in time and space.

Divination
A magical procedure for determining the cause of a particular event, such as illness, or foretelling the future.

Double descent
A system of tracing descent matrilineally for some purposes and patrilineally for others.

Dowry
Payment of a woman’s inheritance at the time of her marriage, either to her or to her husband.

E

Economic system
The production, distribution, and consumption of goods.

Ecosystem
A system, or a functioning whole, composed of both the physical environment and the organisms living within it.

Egalitarian cultures
Groups in which members enjoy equal access to resources and positions.

Enculturation
The process that transmits a society’s culture from one generation to the next.

Endogamy
Marriage within a particular group or category of individuals.

Environmental justice
A social movement in which citizen activists organize to defend against environmental threats to community health and well-being.

Eskimo system
A system of kinship terminology, also called the lineal system, that emphasizes the nuclear family by specifically identifying the mother, father, brother, and sister while lumping together all other relatives into broad categories such as uncle, aunt, and cousin.

Ethnicity
A group of people who share a common identity, history, and territory of origin. May exhibit distinctive language, dress, cuisine, and religious practices.

Ethnocentrism
The belief that one’s own culture is superior to all others.

Ethnography
The collection of descriptive material on a culture.

Ethnohistory
The study of cultures from the recent past using oral histories, archaeological sites, and written accounts left by explorers, missionaries, and traders.

Ethnolinguistics
The study of the relation between language and culture.

Ethnology
The comparative study of cultures to explain human behaviour.

Ethnomusicology
The study of a society’s music in terms of its cultural setting.
Exogamy Marriage outside the group.

Exploitative worldview
The belief that nature exists for humans to dominate and exploit.

Extended family
A collection of nuclear families, related by ties of blood, that live together in one household.

F

Family
A married or common-law couple with or without children, or a lone parent with dependent children.

Fictive kinship
Friends not biologically related, but considered part of a kin group.

Fission
The splitting of a descent group into two or more new descent groups.

Folklore
A 19th-century term first used to refer to the traditional oral stories and sayings of European peasants and later extended to traditions preserved orally in all societies.

Folkloristics
The study of folklore (as linguistics is the study of language).

Forensic anthropology
A field of applied biological anthropology and archaeology that specializes in the identification of human skeletal remains for legal purposes.

Form classes
The parts of speech or categories of words that work the same way in any sentence.

Frame substitution
A method used to identify the syntactic units of language. For example, a category called nouns may be established as anything that will fit the substitution frame “I see a ….”

Fraternal polyandry
A woman marries several men who are brothers.

Free morphemes
Morphemes that can occur unattached in a language; for example, dog and cat are free morphemes in English.

Functionalist theory of stratification
A theory suggesting that inequality is necessary to maintain complex societies.

G

Gender
A set of standards and behaviours attached to individuals, usually, but not always, based on biological sex.

Gender stratification
Unequal access to wealth, power, and prestige, which results in a disadvantaged, subordinate position for women.

Generalized reciprocity
A mode of exchange in which the value of the gift is not calculated, nor is the time of repayment specified.

Genetic couselling
Screening for hereditary conditions and diseases, especially during pregnancy and childbirth.

Genetic explanation
Inbreeding is forbidden because cultural groups recognize the potential for impaired offspring.

Genocide
The extermination of one people by another, often in the name of “progress,” either as a deliberate act or as the accidental outcome of one people’s activities done with little regard for their impact on others.

Globalization
The process of opening up world markets using modern technology.

Glottochronology
In linguistics, a method of dating divergence in branches of language families.

Grammar
The entire formal structure of a language consisting of all observations about the morphemes and syntax.

Group marriage
Marriage in which several men and women have sexual access to one another.

Guided imagery
The use of visualization techniques and meditation in cancer and other treatments to encourage healing.

H

Hawaiian system
Kinship reckoning in which all relatives of the same sex and generation are referred to by the same term.

Historic archaeology
The study of past cultures that possessed written records of their history.

Historic linguistics
The study of language origins, language change, and the relationships between languages.

Holistic perspective
A fundamental principle of anthropology, that the various parts of culture must be viewed in the broadest possible context to understand their interconnections and interdependence.

Hominine
A subfamily of primates that includes humans and near humans.

Homo erectus
The species of Homo preceding and ancestral to Homo sapiens.

Homo habilis
The earliest species of the genus Homo, preceding and ancestral to Homo erectus.

Homo sapiens
The modern human species.

Horticulture
Cultivation of crops using hand tools such as digging sticks or hoes.

Household
The basic residential unit where economic production, consumption, inheritance, childrearing, and shelter are organized and implemented; may or may not be synonymous with family.

I

Imitative magic
Magic based on the principle that like produces like.

Incest taboo
The prohibition of sexual relations between specified individuals, usually parent-child and sibling relations at a minimum.

Incorporation
In rites of passage, reincorporation of the individual into society in his or her new status.

Informal economy
The production of marketable commodities that for various reasons escape enumeration, regulation, or any other sort of public monitoring or auditing.

Informants
Members of a society the ethnographer works in who help interpret what she or he sees taking place.

Instinct explanation
Sometimes known as “familiarity breeds contempt,” this explanation suggests long-term association with family members discourages sexual interest.

Institutionalized racism
Legally sanctioned restrictions based on the ideology that Whites are biologically and socially superior to non-Whites.

Integrated mechanisms
Cultural mechanisms that oppose a society’s differentiation forces; in modernizing societies, they include formal governmental structures, official state ideologies, political parties, legal codes, and labour and trade unions and other common-interest associations.

Integration
The tendency for all aspects of a culture to function as an interrelated whole.
Intensive agriculture Large-scale cultivators employing fertilizers, irrigation, equipment, and draft animals.

Iroquois system
Kinship terminology wherein a father and father’s brother are given a single term, as are a mother and mother’s sister, but a father’s sister and mother’s brother are given separate terms. Parallel cousins are classified with brothers and sisters, while cross cousins are classified separately but (unlike Crow and Omaha kinship) are not equated with relatives of some other generation.

K

Kindred
A group of consanguineal kin linked by their relationship to one living individual; includes both maternal and paternal kin.

Kinship
The people we are related to through blood (consanguineal) and marriage (affinal).

L

Language
A system of communication using sounds or gestures put together in meaningful ways according to a set of rules.

Language family
A group of languages ultimately descended from a single ancestral language.

Law
Formal negative sanctions.

Legends
Stories told as true and set in the postcreation world.

Levelling mechanism
A societal obligation compelling people to redistribute goods so that no one accumulates more wealth than anyone else.

Levirate
The marriage custom whereby a widow marries a brother of her dead husband.

Lineage
A corporate descent group whose members trace their genealogical links to a common ancestor.

Linguistic anthropology
The study of how people use language to relate to each other and how they develop and transmit culture.

Linguistic divergence
The development of different languages from a single ancestral language.

Linguistic nationalism
The attempt by ethnic minorities, and even countries, to proclaim independence by purging their languages of foreign terms or reviving unused languages.

Linguistics
The modern scientific study of all aspects of language.

M

Marine transhumance
Seasonal migration of people from one marine resource to the next.

Market exchange
The buying and selling of goods and services, with prices set by the powers of supply and demand.

Marriage
A relationship between one or more men (male or female) and one or more women (female or male) recognized by society as having a continuing claim to the right of sexual access to one another.

Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage
Marriage of a woman to her father’s sister’s son or of a man to his mother’s brother’s daughter (her cross cousin on the paternal side, his cross cousin on the maternal side).

Matrilineal descent
Descent traced exclusively through the female line to establish group membership.

Matrilocal residence
A pattern in which a married couple lives in the locality associated with the wife’s relatives.

Mechanized agriculture
Large-scale agriculture dependent on complex technology and biotechnology rather than human power to increase production.

Mediation
Settlement of a dispute through negotiation assisted by an unbiased third party.

Medical hegemony
The influence of the official medical establishment on society’s view of health and illness.

Medicalization
The reformulation of aspects of social and cultural life, such as childbirth, as medical problems.

Mobility
The ability to change one’s class position.

Modernization
The process of cultural and socioeconomic change, whereby developing societies acquire some of the characteristics of Western industrialized societies.

Moiety
Each group that results from a division of a society into two halves on the basis of descent.

Money
Anything used to make payments for goods or labour as well as to measure their value; may be special-purpose or multipurpose.

Monogamy
Marriage in which an individual has one spouse.

Morphemes
In linguistics, the smallest units of sound that carry meaning.

Motif
A story situation in a folktale.

Mousterian
A toolmaking tradition of the Neanderthals and their contemporaries of Europe, southwestern Asia, and North Africa.

N

Nation
Communities of people who see themselves as “one people” on the basis of common ancestry, history, society, institutions, ideology, language, territory, and (often) religion.

Natural selection
The evolutionary mechanism by which individuals with characteristics best suited to a particular environment survive and reproduce with greater frequency that those without them.

Naturalistic worldview
The belief that humans are merely one part of the natural world.

Neanderthal
The representative group of archaic Homo sapiens living in Europe and the Middle East from about 130 000 years ago to about 30 000 years ago.

Negative reciprocity
A form of exchange whereby the giver tries to get the better of the exchange.

Negotiation
The use of direct argument and compromise by the parties to a dispute to arrive voluntarily at a mutually satisfactory agreement.

Neolocal residence
A pattern in which a married couple establishes its household in a location apart from either the husband’s or the wife’s relatives.

Neo-paganism
Modern pagan religions.

Nuclear family
A married or common-law couple and their dependent children.

O

Oldowan tools
The earliest identifiable stone tools that first appeared 2.5 million years ago.

Omaha system
The patrilineal equivalent of the Crow system; the mother’s patrilineal kin are equated across generations.

Open-class systems
Stratified societies that permit a great deal of social mobility.

P

Paleoanthropology
The study of fossil remains with the goal of reconstructing human biological evolution.

Paleolithic
The Old Stone Age, characterized by chipped stone tools.

Paleopathology
The study of ancient skeletal material to reconstruct age at death, cause of death, and health, diet, and lifestyle.

Pantheon
A collection of gods and goddesses.

Paralanguage
The extralinguistic noises that accompany language, such as crying or laughing.

Participant observation
A method of learning a people’s culture through direct participation in their everyday life.

Pastoralism
A subsistence strategy that relies on domesticated herd animals, and usually requires seasonal movement to pastures.

Patrilateral cross-cousin marriage
Marriage of a man to his father’s sister’s daughter.

Patrilateral parallel-cousin marriage
Marriage of a man to his father’s brother’s daughter or of a woman to her father’s brother’s son (i.e., to a parallel cousin on the paternal side).

Patrilineal descent
Descent traced exclusively through the male line to establish group membership.

Patrilocal residence
A pattern in which a married couple lives in the locality associated with the husband’s father’s relatives.

Pattern of association
Whom we associate with and in what context, reflecting social class.

Patterns of subsistence
Food-procuring strategies.

Phonemes
In linguistics, the smallest classes of sound that make a difference in meaning.

Phonetics
The study of the production, transmission, and reception of speech sounds.

Phratry
A unilineal descent group composed of two or more clans that claim to be of common ancestry. If only two such groups exist, each is a moiety.

Pidgin
A language that combines and simplifies elements (vocabulary, syntax, and grammar) of two or more languages.

Pluralistic societies
Societies that contain several distinct cultures and subcultures.

Polyandrous family
A family consisting of a woman and her multiple husbands, along with their dependent children.

Polyandry
The marriage of one woman to two or more men simultaneously.

Polygynous family
A family consisting of a man and his multiple wives, along with their dependent children.

Polygyny
The marriage custom in which a man has two or more wives simultaneously; a form of polygamy.

Polytheism
Belief in several gods and/or goddesses (as contrasted with monotheism—belief in one god).

Potlatch
A special celebration in which the people of a community come together to enjoy elaborate feasts, ceremonial dancing, and gift giving. The potlatch serves as an opportunity for chiefs to enhance their status with public displays of generosity.

Power
The ability to reach personal, financial, and professional goals regardless of obstacles.

Prehistoric/pre-contract archaeology
The study of ancient cultures that did not possess writing systems to record their history.

Prestige
The social esteem others hold for an individual.

Priest or Priestess
A full-time religious specialist.

Primary innovation
The chance discovery or invention of a new principle.

Primate Order
The group of mammals that include lemurs, lorises, tarsiers, monkeys, apes, and humans.

Primatology
The study of non-human primates, their biology, adaptation, and social behaviour.

Proxemics
The study of cultural use of space.

Psychoanalytical explanation
Incest taboos are an attempt by offspring to repress their sexual feelings toward their parents of the opposite gender.

R

Race
Groups of people who are categorized based on biological and behavioural traits.
Racism The perception that some groups are biologically and culturally inferior to other groups.

Reciprocity
The exchange of goods and services of approximately equal value between two parties.

Reconstructionist religions
Modern-day revivals of ancient pagan religions.

Redistribution
A form of exchange in which goods flow into a central place where they are sorted, counted, and reallocated.

Religion
A set of rituals, rationalized by myth, that mobilizes supernatural powers to achieve or prevent transformations of state in people and nature.

Replacement reproduction
When birthrates and death rates are in equilibrium; people produce only enough offspring to replace themselves when they die.

Revitalization movements
Social movements, often of a religious nature, with the purpose of totally reforming a society.

Revolution
The overthrow of a government by force.

Rites of intensification
Religious rituals enacted during a group’s real or potential crisis.

Rites of passage
Rituals, often religious in nature, marking important stages in the lives of individuals, such as birth, marriage, and death.

S

Sanctions
Externalized social controls designed to encourage conformity to social norms.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
The hypothesis, proposed by linguist B.L. Whorf, that states that language, by providing habitual grooves of expression, predisposes people to see the world in a certain way and thus guides their thinking and behaviour.

Secondary innovation
Something new that results from the deliberate application of known principles.

Segmentary lineage system
A form of political organization in which a large group is broken up into clans that are further divided into lineages.

Separation
In rites of passage, the ritual removal of the individual from society.

Serial monogamy
A marriage form in which a man or a woman marries or lives with a series of partners in succession.

Shaman/medicine person
A part-time religious specialist who has unique power acquired through his or her initiative; such individuals are thought to possess exceptional abilities for dealing with supernatural beings and powers.

Signal
A sound or gesture that has a natural or self-evident meaning.

Silent trade
A form of barter with no verbal communication.

Social class
A category of individuals who enjoy equal or nearly equal prestige according to the evaluation system.

Social control
Control over groups through coercion.

Social explanation
Sometimes known as the “peace in the family” theory, this explanation suggests that competition over mates would interfere with normal family functions, such as acquiring adequate food resources.

Social stratification
Institutionalized inequality resulting in some groups receiving differential access to power, wealth, and prestige.

Social structure
The relationships of groups within a society that hold it together.

Society
A group of people who live in the same region, speak the same language, and are interdependent.

Sociocultural anthropology
The study of human behaviour in contemporary culture.

Sociolinguistics
The study of language within its social setting.

Sociolinguistics
The study of the structure and use of language as it relates to its social setting.

Sororal polygyny
A man marries several women who are sisters.

Sororate
The marriage custom whereby a widower marries his dead wife’s sister.

State
In anthropology, a centralized political system with the power to coerce.

Stratified societies
Societies in which ranking and inequality among members vary.

Structural differentiation
The division of single traditional roles, which embrace two or more functions (for example, political, economic, and religious), into two or more roles, each with a single specialized function.

Structural violence
Violence exerted by situations, institutions, and social, political, and economic structures.

Subculture
A group of people within a larger society who have distinctive standards and patterns of behaviour.

Sudanese or descriptive system
The system of kinship terminology whereby a father, father’s brother, and mother’s brother are distinguished from one another; as are a mother, mother’s sister, and father’s sister; cross and parallel cousins are distinguished from each other as well as from siblings.

Swidden farming
An extensive form of horticulture in which the natural vegetation is cut, the slash is subsequently burned, and crops then are planted among the ashes.

Symbolic indicators
In a stratified society, activities and possessions indicative of social class.

Symbols
Sounds or gestures that stand for meanings among a group of people.

Syntax
In linguistics, the rules or principles of phrase and sentence making.

T

Tale
A creative narrative recognized as fiction for entertainment.

Technology
Tools and other material equipment, together with the knowledge of how to make and use them.

Terrorism
Violence against persons or property designed to elicit fear, usually based on ideological, religious, and political motivations.

Totemism
The belief that people are related to particular animals, plants, or natural objects by virtue of descent from common ancestral spirits.

Touch
A form of body language involving physical contact.

Transition
In rites of passage, a state where the individual is isolated following separation and prior to incorporation into society.

Tribe
A group of nominally independent communities occupying a specific region and sharing a common language and culture integrated by some unifying factor.

U

Unilineal descent
Descent that establishes group membership exclusively through either the mother’s or the father’s line.

Upper Paleolithic peoples
The first people of modern appearance, who lived in the last part (Upper Paleolithic) of the Old Stone Age.

V

Verbal evaluation
The way people in a stratified society evaluate society members.

Vocal characterizers
In paralanguage, sound productions such as laughing or crying that humans “speak” through.

Vocal qualifiers
In paralanguage, sound productions of brief duration that modify utterances in terms of intensity.

Vocal segregates
In paralanguage, sound productions that are similar to the sounds of a language but do not appear in sequences that can be properly called words.

Vocalizations
Identifiable paralinguistic noises turned on and off at perceivable and relatively short intervals.

Voice qualities
In paralanguage, the background characteristics of a speaker’s voice.

W

Wealth
Accumulation of financial resources, material possessions, wives and children, and the potential for future earnings.

Wicca
A neo-pagan belief system involving magic.

Witchcraft
An explanation of events based on the belief that certain individuals possess an innate psychic power capable of causing harm, including sickness and death. Also includes beliefs and practices of benevolent magic.

Worldviews
The conceptions, explicit and implicit, an individual or a group has of the limits and workings of its world.