Urgent Anthropology

Ethnographic research that documents endangered cultures; also known as salvage ethnography.

Advocacy Anthropology

Research that is community based and politically involved.

Multi-sited Ethnography

The investigation and documentation of peoples and cultures embedded in the larger structures of a globalizing world, utilizing a range of methods in various locations of time and space.

Digital Enthnography

An ethnographic study of social networks, communicative practices, and other cultural expressions in cyberspace by means of digital visual and audio technologies; also called cyberethnography or netnography.

Ethnographic Fieldwork

Extended on-location research to gather detailed and in-depth information on a society's customary ideas, values, an practices through participation in its collective social life.

Key Consultant

A member of the society being studied who provides information that helps researchers understand the meaning of what they observe; early anthropologists referred to such individuals as informants.

Quantitative Data

Statistical or measurable information, such as demographic composition, the types and quantities of crops grown, or the ratio of spouses born and raised within or outside the community.

Informal Interview

An unstructured, open-ended conversation in everyday life.

Formal Interview

A structured question/answer session carefully notated as it occurs and based on prepared questions.

Eliciting Devices

Activities and objects used to draw out individuals and encourage them to recall and share information.

Theory

A coherent statement that provides an explanatory framework for understanding; an explanation or interpretation supported by a reliable body of data.

Human Relations Area Files (HRAF)

A vast collection of cross-indexed enthographic, bicultural, and archaeological data catalogued by cultural characteristics and geographic location; archived in about 300 libraries on microfiche and/or online.

Idealist Perspective

A theoretical approach stressing the primacy of superstructure in cultural research and analysis.

Materialist Perspective

A theoretical approach stressing the primary of infrastructure (material conditions) in cultural research and analysis.

Language

A system of communication using sounds, gestures, or marks that are put together in meaningful ways according to a set of rules, resulting in meanings that are intelligible to all who share that language.

Signals

Instinctive sounds and gestures that have a natural or self-evident meaning.

Lingustics

The modern scientific study of all aspects of language.

Phonetics

The systematic identification and description of distinctive speech sounds in a language.

Phonology

The study of language sounds.

Phonemes

The smallest units of sound that make a difference in meaning in a language.

Morphology

The study of the patterns or rules of world formation in a language, including the guidelines for each verb tense, pluralization, and compound words.

Morphemes

The smallest unites of sound that carry a meaning in language .They are distinct from phonemes, which can alter meaning but have no meaning by themselves.

Syntax

The patterns or rules by which words are arranged into phrases and sentences.

Grammar

The entire formal structure of a language, including morphology and syntax.

Language Family

A group of languages descended from a single ancestral language.

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 language of foreign terms.

Sociolingustics

The study of the relationship between language an society through examining how social categories - such as age, gender, ethnicity, religion, occupation, and class - influence the use and significance of distinctive styles of speech.

Gendered Speech

Distinct male and female speech patterns, which vary across social and cultural settings.

Dialects

The varying forms of a language that reflect particular regions, occupations, or social classes and that are similar enough to be mutually intelligible

Code Switching

The practice of changing from one mode of speech to another as the situation demands, whether from one language to another or from one dialect of a language to another.

Ethnolinguistics

A branch of linguistics that studies the relationships between language and culture and who they mutually influence and inform each other.

Linguistic Relativity

The theoretical concept directly linking language and culture, holding that the words and grammar of a language affect how its speakers perceive and think about the world.

Gestures

Facial expressions and body postures and motions that convey intended as well as subconscious messages.

Kinesics

The study of nonverbal signals in body language including facial expressions and bodily postures and motions.

Proxemics

The cross-cultural study of people's perception and use of space.

Paralanguage

Voice effects that accompany language and convey meaning. These include vocalizations such as giggling, groaning, or sighing, as well as voice qualities such as pitch and tempo.

Tonal Language

A language in which the sound pitch of a spoken word is an essential part of its pronunciation and meaning

Whistled Speech

An exchange of whistled words using a phonetic emulation of the sounds produced in spoken voice; also known as whistled language.

Displacement

Referring to things and events removed in time and space.

Writing System

A set of visible or tactile signs used to represent units of language in systematic way.

Alphabet

A series of symbols representing the sounds of a language arranged in a traditional order.

Self-awareness

The ability to identify oneself as an individual, to reflect on oneself, and to evaluate oneself.

Naming Ceremony

A special event or ritual to mark the naming of a child

Personality

The distinctive way a person thinks, feels, and behaves

Dependence Training

Childrearing practices that foster compliance in the performance of assigned tasks and dependence on the domestic group, rather than reliance on oneself.

Independence Training

Childrearing practices that foster independence, self-reliance, and personal achievement.

Modal Personality

Those character traits that occur with the highest frequency in a social group and are therefore the most representative of its culture.

Core Values

Those values especially promoted by a particular culture.

Intersexuals

People born with reproductive organs, genitalia, and/or sex chromosomes that are not exclusively male or female.

Transgender

People who cross over or occupy an intermediate position in the binary male-female gender construction.

Culture-bound syndrome

A mental disorder specific to a particular cultural group; also known as ethnic psychosis.

Ecosystem

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

Cultural Evolution

Cultural change over time - not to be confused with progress

Progress

In anthropology, a relative concept signifying that a society or country is moving forward to a better, more advanced stage in its cultural development toward greater perfection.

Convergent Evolution

In cultural evolution, the development of similar cultural adaptations to similar environment conditions by different peoples with different ancestral cultures.

Parallel Evolution

In cultural evolution, the development of similar cultural adaptations to similar environmental conditions by peoples whose ancestral cultures were already somewhat alike.

Culture area

A geographic region in which a number of societies follow similar patterns of life.

Food foraging

A mode of subsistence involving some recombination of hunting, fishing, and gathering of wild plant foods.

Carrying capacity

The number of people that the available resources can support at a given level of food getting techniques.

Neolithic

The New Stone Age; a prehistoric period beginning about 10,000 years ago in which peoples possessed stone-based technologies an depended on domesticated plants and/or animals for subsistence.

Neolithic revolution

The domestication of plants an animals by peoples with stone-based technologies, beginning about 10,000 years ago and reading to radical transformations in cultural systems, sometimes referred to as the Neolithic transition.

Horticulture

The cultivation of crops in food gardens, carried out with simple hand tools such as digging sticks and hoes.

Slash-and-burn cultivation

An extensive form of horticulture in which the natural vegetation is cut, the slash is subsequently burn, and crops are then planted among the ashes; also known as swidden farming.

Agriculture

Intensive crop cultivation, employing plows, fertilizers, and or irrigation.

Pastoralism

The breeding and managing of migratory herds of domesticated grazing animals, such as goats, sheep, cattle, llamas, and camels.

Peasant

A small scale producer of crops or livestock living on land self-owned or rented in exchange for labor, crops, or money and exploited by more powerful groups in a complex society.

Industrial Society

A society in which human labor, hand tools, and animal power are largely replaced by machines, with an economy primarily based on big factories.

Industrial Food Production

Large-scale businesses involved in mass food production, processing, and marketing, which primarily rely on labor-saving machines.

Economic System

An organized arrangement for producing, distributing and consuming goods.

Technology

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

Reciprocity

The exchange of good and services, of approximately equal value, between two parties.

Generalized reciprocity

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

Balanced reciprocity

A mode of exhale in which the giving an the receiving are specific as to the value of the goods or services and the time of their delivery.

Negative reciprocity

A mode of exchange in which the aim is to gt something for as little as possible. Neither fair nor balanced, it may involve hard-bargaining, manipulation, outright cheating, theft.

Silent Trade

Echange of goods between mutually distrusting ethnic groups so as to avoid direct personal contact.

Kula Ring

A mode of balanced reciprocity that reinforces trade and social relations among the seafaring Melanesians who inhabit a large ring of islands in the southwestern Pacific Ocean.

Redistribution

A mode of exchange in which goods glow into a central place, where they are sorted, counted, and reallocated.

Conspicuous consumption

A showy display of wealth of social prestige

Potlatch

On the northwestern cost of North America, an indigenous ceremonial event in which a village chief publicly gives away stockpiled food and other goods that signify wealth.

Prestige Economy

The creation of a surplus for the express purpose of displaying wealth and giving it away to raise one's status.

Leveling Mechanism

A cultural obligation compelling prosperous members of a community to give away goods, host public feasts, provide free service, or otherwise demonstrate generosity so that no one permanently accumulates significantly more wealth than anyone else.

Market Exchange

The buying and selling of good and services, with prices set by rules of supply and demand.

Money

A means of exchange used to make payments for other goods and services as well as to measure their value.

Informal Economy

A network of producing and circulating marketable commodities, labor, and services that for various reasons escapes government control.