ANTH100 - Ch. 1
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33 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Anthropology | The study of human nature, human society, and the human past. |
| Holism | A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that describes, at the highest and most inclusive level, how anthropology tries to integrate all that is known about human beings and their activities. |
| Comparison | A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that requires anthropologists to consider similarities and differences in as wide a range of human societies as possible before generalizing about human nature, human society or the human past. |
| Evolution | A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that requires anthropologists to place their observations about human nature, human society, or the human past in a temporal framework that takes into consideration change over time. |
| Culture | Sets of learned behavior and ideas that human beings acquire as members of society. Human beings use culture to adapt to and to transform the world in which they live. |
| Biocultural Organisms | Organisms (in this case humans) whose defining features are codetermined by biological and cultural factors. |
| Races | Social groupings that allegedly reflect biological differences. |
| Racism | The systematic oppression of one of more socially defined "races" by another socially defined "race" that is justified in terms of the supposed inherent biological superiority of the rulers and the supposed inherent biological inferiority of those they rule. |
| Biological/Physical Anthropology | The specialty of anthropology that looks at human beings as biological organisms and tries to discover what characteristics they share. |
| Primatology | The study of nonhuman primates, the closest living relatives of human beings. |
| Paleoanthropology | The search for fossilized remains of humanity's earliest ancestors. |
| Cultural Anthropology | The specialty of anthropology that shows how variation in the beliefs and behaviors of members of different human groups is shaped by sets of learned behaviors and ideas that human beings acquire as members of society-that is, by culture. |
| Sex | Observable physical characteristics that distinguish two kinds of humans, females and males, needed for biological reproduction. |
| Gender | The cultural construction of beliefs and behaviors considered appropriate for each sex. |
| Fieldwork | An extended period of close involvement with the people in whose language or way of life anthropologists are interested, during which anthropologists ordinarily collect most of their data. |
| Informants | People in a particular culture who work with anthropologists and provide them with insights about their way of life. Also called respondents, teachers and friends. |
| Ethnography | An anthropologist's written or filmed description of one focused culture. |
| Ethnology | The comparative study of two or more cultures. |
| Linguistic Anthropology | The specialty of anthropology concerned with the study of human languages. |
| Archaeology | A cultural anthropology of the human past involving the analysis of material remains left behind by earlier societies. |
| Applied Anthropologists | Specialists who use information gathered from the other anthropological specialties to solve practical cross-cultural problems. |
| Medical Anthropology | The specialty of anthropology that concerns itself with human health-the factors that contribute to disease or illness and the ways that human populations deal with disease or illness. |
| Myths | Stories that recount how various aspects of the world came to be the way they are. Their power comes from their ability to make life meaningful for those who accept them. The truth of them seem self-evident because they effectively integrate personal experiences with a wider set of assumptions about the way society, or the world in general, must operate. |
| Science | The invention of explanations about what things are, how they work and how they came to be that can be tested against evidence in the world itself. |
| Assumptions | Basic, unquestioned understandings about the way the world works. |
| Evidence | What is seen when a particular part of the world is examined with great care. Scientists use two different kinds of this: material and inferred. |
| Hypotheses | Statements that assert a particular connection between fact and interpretation. |
| Testability | The ability of scientific hypotheses to be matched against nature to see whether they are confirmed or refuted. |
| Scientific Theory | A coherently organized series of testable hypotheses used to explain a body of material evidence. |
| Objectivity | The separation of observation and reporting from the researcher's wishes. |
| Essentialism | The theory that organisms are imperfect reflections of the perfect, ideal organism. |
| Adaptation | The kind of aptation where the same function is still performed. |
| Exaptation | The kind of aptation followed by re-shaping for a new purpose. |
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