Deep time
A framework for considering the span of human history within the much larger age of the universe and planet Earth.
Fossils
The remains of an organism that have been preserved by a natural chemical process that turns them partially or wholly into rock. (page 158)
DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid; the feature of a cell that provides the genetic code for the organism. (page 162)
Paleogeneticist
Scientist who studies the past through the examination of preserved genetic material. (page 162)
Theory of evolution
The theory that biological adaptations in organisms occur in response to changes in the natural environment and develop in populations over generations. (page 162)
Creationism
A belief that God created Earth and all living creatures in their present form as recently as six thousand years ago. (page 164)
Intelligent design
An updated version of creationism that claims to propose an evidence-based argument to contradict the theory of evolution.
Mutation
A deviation from the standard DNA code.
Mutagen
Any agent that increases the frequency or extent of mutations.
Natural selection
The evolutionary process by which some organisms, with features that enable them to adapt to the environment, preferentially survive and reproduce, thereby increasing the frequency of those features in the population.
Gene migration
The movement of genetic material within a population and among diverse populations. (page 169)
Genetic drift
The process whereby one segment of a population is removed from the larger pool, thereby limiting the flow of genetic material between the two groups.
Species
A group of related organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile, viable offspring.
Bipedalism
The ability to habitually walk on two legs; one of the key distinguishing characteristics of humans and our immediate ancestors.
Oldowan tools
Stone tools shaped for chopping and cutting found in the Olduvai Gorge and associated with Australopithecus garhi.
Acheulian stone tools
Stone tools associated with Homo erectus, including specialized hand axes for cutting, pounding, and scraping
Neandertal
A late variety of archaic Homo sapien prevalent in Europe.
Multiregional continuity thesis
The theory that modern Homo sapiens evolved directly from archaic Homo sapiens living in regions across the world.
Out of Africa" theory
The theory that modern Homo sapiens evolved first in Africa, migrated outward, and eventually replaced the archaic Homo sapiens. Also called replacement theory.
Genetic adaptation
Changes in genetics that occur at a population level in response to certain features of the environment.
Developmental adaptation
The way in which human growth and development can be influenced by factors other than genetics, such as nutrition, disease, and stress.
Acclimatization
The process of the body temporarily adjusting to the environment.
Cultural adaptation
A complex innovation, such as fans, furnaces, and lights, that allows humans to cope with their environment.
Melanin
The pigment that gives human skin its color.
Race
A flawed system of classification, with no biological basis, that uses certain physical characteristics to divide the human population into supposedly discrete groups.
Racism
Individual thoughts and actions and institutional patterns and policies that create unequal access to power, resources, and opportunities based on imagined differences among groups. (page 197)
Genotype
The inherited genetic factors that provide the framework for an organism's physical form.
Phenotype
The way genes are expressed in an organism's physical form as a result of genotype interaction with environmental factors. (page 200)
Colonialism
A system of economic, military, and political control of one country over another.
Miscegenation
A demeaning historical term for interracial marriage.
White supremacy
The belief that whites are biologically different and superior to people of other races. (page 215)
Jim Crow
Laws implemented after the U.S. Civil War to legally enforce segregation, particularly in the South, after the end of slavery. (page 215)
Hypodescent
Sometimes called the 'one drop of blood rule'; the assignment of children of racially 'mixed' unions to the subordinate group. (page 216)
Nativism
Favoring native inhabitants over new immigrants.
Eugenics
A pseudoscience attempting to scientifically prove the existence of separate human races to improve the population's genetic composition by favoring some races over others.
Racialization
To categorize, differentiate, and attribute a particular racial character to a person or group of people.
Individual racism
Personal prejudiced beliefs and discriminatory actions based on race.
Institutional racism
Patterns by which racial inequality is structured through key cultural institutions, policies, and systems
Racial ideology
A set of popular ideas about race that allows the discriminatory behaviors of individuals and institutions to seem reasonable, rational, and normal. (page 225)
Ethnicity
A sense of historical, cultural, and sometimes ancestral connection to a group of people who are imagined to be distinct from those outside the group. (page 240)
Origin myth
A story told about the founding and history of a particular group to reinforce a sense of common identity. (page 241)
Ethnic boundary marker
A practice or belief, such as food, clothing, language, shared name, or religion, used to signify who is in a group and who is not. (page 242)
Genocide
The deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic or religious group. (page 242)
Situational negotiation of identity
An individual's self-identification with a particular group that can shift according to social location. (page 242)
Ethnic cleansing
Efforts by representatives of one ethnic or religious group to remove or destroy another group in a particular geographic area. (page 248)
Melting pot
A metaphor used to describe the process of immigrant assimilation into U.S. dominant culture. (page 253)
Assimilation
The process through which minorities accept the patterns and norms of the dominant culture and cease to exist as separate groups. (page 253)
Multiculturalism
A pattern of ethnic relations in which new immigrants and their children enculturate into the dominant national culture and yet retain an ethnic culture. (page 254)
State
A regional structure of political, economic, and military rule. (page 254)
Nation-state
A political entity, located within a geographic territory with enforced borders, where the population shares a sense of culture, ancestry, and destiny as a people. (page 254)
Nationalism
The desire of an ethnic community to create and/or maintain a nation-state. (page 255)
Imagined community
The invented sense of connection and shared traditions that underlies identification with a particular ethnic group or nation whose members likely will never meet. (page 255)
Gender studies
Research into the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity across cultures as flexible, complex, and historically and culturally constructed categories. (page 270)
Sex
The observable physical differences between male and female, especially biological expressions related to human reproduction. (page 271)
Gender
The expectations of thought and behavior that each culture assigns to people of different sexes. (page 271)
Sexual dimorphism
The phenotypic differences between males and females of the same species. (page 271)
Cultural construction of gender
The ways humans learn to behave as a man or woman and to recognize behaviors as masculine or feminine within their cultural context. (page 273)
Gender performance
The way gender identity is expressed through action. (page 279)
Intersexual
An individual who is born with a combination of male and female genitalia, gonads, and/or chromosomes. (page 282)
Transgender
A gender identity or performance that does not fit with cultural norms related to one's assigned sex at birth. (page 284)
Gender stratification
An unequal distribution of power and access to a group's resources, opportunities, rights, and privileges based on gender. (page 292)
Gender stereotype
A preconceived notion about the attributes of, differences between, and proper roles for men and women in a culture. (page 293)
Gender ideology
A set of cultural ideas, usually stereotypical, about the essential character of different genders that functions to promote and justify gender stratification. (page 293)
Gender violence
Forms of violence shaped by the gender identities of the people involved. (page 297)
Structural gender violence
gendered societal patterns of unequal access to wealth, power, and basic resources such as food, shelter, and health care that differentially affect women in particular. (page 298)
Sexuality
The complex range of desires, beliefs, and behaviors that are related to erotic physical contact and the cultural arena within which people debate about what kinds of physical desires and behaviors are right, appropriate, and natural. (page 311)
Heterosexuality
Attraction to and sexual relations between individuals of the same sex. (page 320)
Bisexuality
Attraction to and sexual relations with members of both sexes. (page 320)
Asexuality
A lack of erotic attraction to others. (page 320)
Sexual violence
Violence perpetuated through sexually related physical assaults such as rape. (page 335)
Sex tourism
Travel, usually organized through the tourism sector, to facilitate commercial sexual relations between tourists and local residents. (page 338)
Sex work
Labor through which one provides sexual services for money. (page 339)
Kinship
The system of meaning and power that cultures create to determine who is related to whom and to define their mutual expectations, rights, and responsibilities. (page 350)
Nuclear family
The kinship unit of mother, father, and children. (page 350)
Descent group
A kinship group in which primary relationships are traced through consanguine ('blood') relatives. (page 352)
Lineage
A type of descent group that traces genealogical connection through generations by linking persons to a founding ancestor. (page 352)
Clan
A type of descent group based on a claim to a founding ancestor but lacking genealogical documentation. (page 352)
Affinal relationship
A kinship relationship established through marriage and/or alliance, not through biology or common descent. (page 360)
Marriage
A socially recognized relationship that may involve physical and emotional intimacy as well as legal rights to property and inheritance. (page 360)
Arranged marriage
Marriage orchestrated by the families of the involved parties. (page 361)
Companionate marriage
Marriage built on love, intimacy, and personal choice rather than social obligation. (page 362)
Polygyny
Marriage between one man and two or more women. (page 362)
Polyandry
Marriage between one woman and two or more men. (page 362)
Monogamy
A relationship between only two partners. (page 362)
Incest taboo
Cultural rules that forbid sexual relations with certain close relatives. (page 363)
Exogamy
Marriage to someone outside the kinship group. (page 364)
Endogamy
Marriage to someone within the kinship group. (page 364)
Bridewealth
The gift of goods or money from the groom's family to the bride's family as part of the marriage process. (page 365)
Dowry
The gift of goods or money from the bride's family to the groom's family as part of the marriage process. (page 365)
Family of orientation
The family group in which one is born, grows up, and develops life skills. (page 378)
Family of procreation
The family group created when one reproduces and within which one rears children. (page 378)
Class
A system of power based on wealth, income, and status that creates an unequal distribution of a society's resources. (page 395)
Egalitarian society
A group based on the sharing of resources to ensure success with a relative absence of hierarchy and violence. (page 396)
Reciprocity
The exchange of resources, goods, and services among people of relatively equal status; meant to create and reinforce social ties. (page 396)
Ranked society
A group in which wealth is not stratified but prestige and status are. (page 397)
Redistribution
A form of exchange in which goods are collected from the members of the group and reallocated in a different pattern. (page 398)
Potlach
Elaborate redistribution ceremony practiced among the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest. (page 398)
Bourgeoisie
Marxist term for the capitalist class that owns the means of production. (page 400)
Means of production
The factories, machines, tools, raw materials, land, and financial capital needed to make things. (page 400)
Proletariat
Marxist term for the class of laborers who own only their labor. (page 400)
Prestige
The reputation, influence, and deference bestowed on certain people because of their membership in certain groups. (page 402)
Life chances
An individual's opportunities to improve quality of life and achieve life goals. (page 402)
Social mobility
The movement of one's class position, upward or downward, in stratified societies. (page 402)
Social reproduction
The -phenomenon whereby social and class relations of prestige or lack or prestige are passed from one -generation to the next. (page 404)
Habitus
Bourdieu's term to describe the self-perceptions and beliefs that develop as part of one's social identity and shape one's -conceptions of the world and where one fits in it. (page 404)
Cultural capital
The knowledge, habits, and tastes learned from parents and family that individuals can use to gain access to scarce and valuable resources in society. (page 404)
Intersectionality
An analytic framework for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification. (page 406)
Income
What people earn from work, plus dividends and interest on investments, along with rents and royalties. (page 411)
Wealth
The total value of what someone owns, minus any debt. (page 413)
Caste
A closed system of stratification in a society. (page 430)
Achieved status
Social position established and changeable during a person's lifetime. (page 430)
Ascribed status
Social position inherited, assigned at birth, and passed down from generation to generation with enforced boundaries. (page 430)
Dalits
Members of India's 'lowest' caste; literally, 'broken people.' Also called 'Untouchables.' (page 431)
Leith Mullings argues that class cannot be studied in isolation but rather must be considered together with race and gender as interlocking systems of:
power
Which of the following individuals is among four key theorists of class and inequality who wrote in the nineteenth century and is likely the most widely read theorist of class?
karl marx
Karl Marx examined social inequality by distinguishing between which two distinct classes of people?
bourgeoisie and proletariat
Pierre Bourdieu worked to understand the relationship between class, culture, and power by examining which of the following phenomenon in schools?
social reproduction
For Bourdieu, which of the following concepts is defined as a set of common perceptions that shape expectations and aspirations and guide an individual in assessing his or her life chances and the potential for social mobility?
habitus
Given the poverty rates reported in the 2009 U.S. Census Bureau report, it is important to recognize that most of the nation's poor are:
white and live in rural and suburban areas.
According to Karl Marx, the bourgeoisie consisted of a capitalist class of individuals who owned the means of:
production
In India's caste system, the population is divided into how many different castes, or varna?
four
In ranked societies, positions of high prestige such as that of a chief are largely:
hereditary
Globalization has produced unprecedented opportunities for the creation of wealth:
but it has also produced widespread poverty worldwide.
Which of the following is defined as a closed system of social stratification in which members are organized into hierarchically ranked groups with unequal access to rewards and privileges based on ascribed status?
caste
India's recent economic transformations are resulting in:
the development of new occupations and social mobility that are challenging the power of caste boundaries to maintain a system of stratification.
Archaeological evidence suggests that hierarchy, violence, and aggression:
emerged relatively recently in human history
Which of the following is a system of power based on wealth, income, and status that creates an unequal distribution of a society's resources?
class
The unequal distribution of a society's resources within a class system typically:
involves moving surpluses steadily upward into the hands of the elite.
According to Max Weber, the reputation, influence, and deference bestowed on certain people because of their membership in certain groups are called:
prestige
For a chief in a ranked society, his or her rank and status are reinforced through reciprocity and
generosity
Which of the following is a theory of poverty that considers poverty as pathology in that it is a result of an individual's personal failings stemming from a combination of dysfunctional behaviors, attitudes, and values that make and keep the poor person
culture of poverty
Anthropologists such as Setha Low have demonstrated that class is largely invisible in the United States due to which of the following actions carried out by portions of the population?
voluntary isolation
Patterns of reciprocity:
still exist, even in contemporary societies that base economic relations on the exchange of money for services.
Societies in which prestige and status are stratified but wealth is not are considered:
ranked
Karl Marx argued that capitalists increased their wealth by extracting the surplus labor value from which of the following?
workers
The movement of one's class position-whether upward or downward-in stratified societies is called:
social mobility
Systems of stratification and power such as class:
are not intrinsic to human culture
Countries such as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are among those that have explicitly worked to narrow stratification through high taxation of wealth and which of the following efforts?
generous social benefits
The work of which of the following more recent theorists has led anthropologists to reexamine class by analyzing the deep connections between class, race, and gender?
leith mullings
Theorist Pierre Bourdieu found that which of the following systems did not provide opportunities for social class mobility, but instead helped reproduce the social class relations that already existed?
educational
Efforts to establish more egalitarian systems of economic and social relations within highly stratified societies include which of the following communities?
hutterite
The income gaps between the highest earners and the lowest earners in the United States have:
increased substantially during the past five decades due to changes in the tax code and stagnating salaries.
Of all the systems of stratification and power in a society, which of the following is commonly the most difficult to see clearly and to discuss openly?
class
Proponents of poverty as a structural problem trace its roots to dysfunctional aspects of the:
economic systems
Hunger reflects growing global inequality and is a result of
the uneven distribution of food despite the sufficient amount of food available to feed the world's poor.
Egalitarian societies depend on sharing which of the following in order to ensure group success?
resources
In the United States, an individual's life chances are:
stratified by class as well as race and gender
Which of the following statements is true?
Wealth in the United States is even more unevenly distributed than income, and the gap continues to widen.
In ranked societies, the social rank of each member of the society is determined by:
heredity
For a chief in a ranked society, his or her rank and status are reinforced through reciprocity and:
generosity
Anthropologists trace the roots of which of the following patterns of social stratification to the rise of intensive agriculture and populous market
extreme stratification
Theorist Max Weber argued that analyzing emerging structures of stratification required an examination of which of the following?
power and prestige
Which of the following reveal the way power is distributed in a society?
income patterns
Stratification and inequality became:
more pronounced in industrialized capitalist economies over recent centuries, resulting in the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer people.
Which of the following statements is true?
Class is rarely discussed in the United States and consequently is largely off the radar screen regarding public discourse.
anthropologists gregory mantsios contends that the media play a significant role in hiding class stratification in the united states by largely
ignoring class
As a ritual ceremony, the potlatch serves to establish social status not by wealth and power but by the prestige earned via a person's capacity for which of the following?
generosity
Which of the following is a pattern of relationship in which group members equally share resources and responsibilities over time based on mutual exchange?
reciprocity