Chapter 2
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19 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 biological race | the illusion that humans can be subdivided into discrete groups (races) on the basis of physical attributes. It has no scientific basis. |
| clines | the steady slope in the measure of an attribute. Humans show physical variation on many attributes (skin color, hair form, and so on) but most variation is clinical. |
| cultural construction | refers to the particular spin that particular cultures put on such biologically rooted behavior as handedness or language or food patterns |
| cultural race | the schemas, or cultural ideas, that people have in their minds about how humans are divided into significant and discrete groups based on, especially, physical characteristics, but implicitly including cultural, mental, and moral attitudes also. It has no biological basis. |
| culture | a working definition: learned, shared ideas about behavior |
| ethnicity | a person's culture or cultural identity; or a euphemism for "race." |
| enculturation | learning of of cultural patterns during childhood (socialization) |
| ethnographic present | a convenient fiction. Describing a culture as it presumably existed before some particular outside intrusion began to modernize it. |
| fuzzy categories | a group of things with no precisely bounded definition of membership but usually a clear or clear exemplar. You may share in much British culture, but you are either a British citizen or not. |
| hyperstartler | appearing in any population, those people who have extreme reactions to being startled. In some cultures, culturally elaborated. |
| latah | the Malay cultural elaboration of hyperstartling, where people (usually dependent, older women) eact to a startle with imitative behavior and obscene language. |
| modernization | an ethnocentric Western notion of culture change that makes other cultures more like us. |
| national culture | that which is shared by most of the people of a nation, overarching their regional cultures; usually promoted through radio and television |
| race | a pseudoscientific term for a group of people with the same physical attributes. Biologically it doesn't make sense, but culturally people believe and act on their notions of race. |
| schema | a set of cultural ideas that give coherent meaning to something. An elaboration on the idea of culture. |
| socialization | same as enculturation; learning of cultural patterns during childhood |
| social unit | a smaller social group within a larger society |
| society | organized group of individuals, human or otherwise |
| subculture | a convenient (and nonderogatory) way to refer to various cultural patterns shared by smaller numbers of people within a broader culture. |
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