Flashcards About Anthro Exam 2
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What is a key feature of language that explains why anthropologists are always interested in studying it?
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Language is always changing.
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Do chimpanzee call systems include displacement and cultural transmission?
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No.
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What is the ability to describe things and events that are not present called?
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Displacement.
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What does the term productivity refer to with regard to language?
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The ability to create new expressions by combining other expressions.
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Recent research on the origin of language suggests that a key mutation might have something to do with it. What is the name of this mutation?
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FOXP2.
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Describe kinesics.
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The study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions.
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What does the term morphology refer to?
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The study of the forms in which sounds combine to form words.
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The lexicon of a language is?
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Its degree of complexity.
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What does the term syntax refer to?
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The arrangement and order of words into sentences.
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What did Chomsky mean when he discussed universal grammar?
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He was referring to his hypothesis that the human brain contains a limited set of rules for organizing language, so that all languages have a common structural basis.
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What are phonemes?
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The minimal sound contrasts that distinguish meaning in language.
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What do studies on the differences between female and male Americans in regard to the color terms they use suggest? (Think Sapir and Whorf)
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Changes in American economy, society, and culture have had no impact on the use of color terms, or any terms, for that matter.
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What did Sapir and Whorf study?
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The influence of language on thought.
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What is a focal vocabulary?
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The specialized set of terms and distinctions that are particularly important to certain groups.
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What does a sociolinguist study?
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Speech in its social context.
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Are sociolinguists more interested in the rules that govern language rather than the actual use of language in every day life?
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No.
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What is style shifting?
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Variations in speech due to different contexts or situations.
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What is diglossia?
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The existence of high and low dialects within a single language.
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What does the term honorific refer to?
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Term used to convey or imply a status difference between the speaker and the person being referred to or addressed.
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What was Bourdieu referring to when he discussed symbolic domination with regard to language?
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In a stratified society, even peopl ewho do not speak the prestige dialect tend to accept it as a standard or superior.
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What does ethnicity refer to?
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Identification with, and feeling part of a cultural tradition and exclusion from other cultural traditions.
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What does status refer to?
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Any position, no matter what the prestige, that someone occupies in a society.
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What is ascribed status?
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Status that people have little or no choice about occupying.
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Has the concept of race been discredited in biology?
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Yes.
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Why do anthropologists believe that human races do not exist?
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Human populations have not been isolated enough from one another to develop such discrete groups.
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What does phenotype refer to?
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An organism's evident traits, its manifest biology.
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An examination of racial taxonomies around the world indicates what?
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The classification of racial types is an arbitrary and culturally specific process.
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What did Franz Boas find when he examined changes in skull form among the children of Europeans who had migrated to the U.S.?
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That phenotypical similarities and differences don't neccessarily have a genetic basis.
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Why is it important to understand that racial categories are based upon perceptions of phenotypic features, and not genotype?
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This means that race is socially constructed, not biologically determined.
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According to Kottak, what is skin color the result of?
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A biological similarity such as skin color is also the result of natural selection working among different populations that face similar environmental changes.
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Why do recent East Asian immigrants have higher incidence of rickets and osteoporosis than the general British population?
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Because natural selection continues today.
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Kottak provides explanations to explain skin color variation, what are these explanations called?
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Explanatory approaches to human biological diversity.
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Is race a cultural category?
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Yes.
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What does the term hypodescent refer to?
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The arbitrary rule that automatically places the children of a union between members of different socioeconomic groups in the less-privileged group.
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Why have La Raza and the NAACP opposed a multiracial category on the census?
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Racial classification is a political issue.
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Is race determined at birth in Brazil?
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No.
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What is discrimination?
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The policies and practices that harm a group and its members.
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What is genocide?
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The physical destruction of an ethnic or religious group through mass murder.
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What is forced assimilation?
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The use of force by a dominant group to compel a minority to adopt the dominant culture.
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What do all foraging economies share?
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The reliance on available natural resources for their subsistence, rather than controlling the reproduction of plants and animals.
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What do Cohen's adaptive strategies suggest?
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That there is an association between the economy of societies and their features.
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Are permanent villages a characteristic of band-level societies?
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No.
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Is egalitarianism a characteristic of foraging societies?
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Yes.
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What does not occur as you move along the cultivating continuum?
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Societies become more egalitarian.
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What are characteristics of intensive agriculture?
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Deforestation, water pollution, and reduction of ecological diversity.
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What is a mode of production?
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The way a society's social relations are organized to produce the labor necessary for generating the society's subsistence and energy needs.
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What are the means, or factors, of production?
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A society's major productive resources, such as land, labor, technology, and captial.
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How are nonindustrial economic systems "embedded" in society?
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The economic system cannot easily be separated from the other systems, such as kinship.
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Are economic relationships embedded in states?
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Yes.
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What questions are economic anthropologists concerned with answering?
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What motivates people in different cultures to produce, distribute or exchange, and consume?
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How does Kottak define peasants?
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As rural people who produce food for their own subsistence, but also sell their surpluses.
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Is kin-based generalized reciprocity associated with the market principle?
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No.
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What is generalized reciprocity a characteristic of?
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The characteristic form of exchange in egalitarian societies.
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Is profit-maximizing a human universal?
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No.
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Can bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states be studied as self-contained forms of political organization?
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No.
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Foraging economies are usually associated with what type of political organization?
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Band.
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What does Susan Kent warn against?
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Stereotype of culturally deprived people forced by states, colonialism, or world events into marginal environments.
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Why study modern day foragers?
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They can illustrate links between a foraging economy and other aspects of society and culture, such as their sociopolitical organization.
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Do the Inuit use traditional courts of law to handle disputes?
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No.
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What is the Inuit song battle sometimes the occasion for?
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A treacherous feast.
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Do political leaders in foraging bands have authority?
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No.
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What is a big man?
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A person who creates his reputation through entrepreneurship and generosity to others.
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What is an age set?
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A group uniting all men or women born during a certain span of time.
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What kind of society is stratum endogamy most likely to occur?
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A state.
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What kind of society is socially stratified?
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A state.
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Weber identified three related dimensions of social stratification, what are they?
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Wealth, power, and prestige.
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What is the most important factor in determining an individual's power and prestige?
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Ancestry.
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What is hegemony?
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A stratified social order in which subordinates comply with domination by internalizing their rulers' values and accepting the "naturalness" of domination.
