Anthropology Chapter 2 – Flashcards

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In the opening story of Chapter 2, what action caused such a big reaction?
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Richard Geer kissing Shilpa Shetty on the cheek at an event to raise awareness about the need for HIV/AIDS prevention in the Indian trucking community.
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What is our "manual" for understanding and interacting with the people and the world around us.
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culture
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What does culture include?
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shared norms, values, symbols, mental maps of reality, and material objects as well as structures of power - including the media, education, religion, and politics - in which our understanding of the world is shaped, reinforced, and challenged.
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What is culture?
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A system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, and shared by a group of people.
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Is culture learned or taught?
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both
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what is enculturation
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the process of learning culture
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How do we learn culture?
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throughout our lives from the people and cultural institutions that surround us
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What are some formal instruction that teach us culture?
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English classes in school; religious instruction, visits to the doctor, history lessons, dance classes.
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What is the process of enculturation
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passing cultural information within populations and across generations
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Is enculturation only for humans
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no, animals can learn culture too
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How is culture taught?
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humans establish cultural institutions as mechanisms for enculturating their members; schools, medical systems, media, and religious institutions
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Does enculturation occur as a group or individually?
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Enculturation occurs as part of a group. No individual has his or her own culture.
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_______ is a shared experience developed as a result of living as a member of a group.
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Culture
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Culture is never ______.
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static (it is constantly contested, negotiated, and changing)
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Most anthropologist argue that a common cultural core exists _______
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at least among the dominant segments of the culture
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What are four elements that an anthropologist may consider in attempting to understand the complex workings of a culture?
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norms, values, symbols, and mental maps of reality
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What are norms?
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Ideas or rules about how people should behave in particular situations or toward certain other people; what is considers "normal" and appropriate behavior
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What are some examples of norms
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What to wear on certain occasions; what you can say in polite company; who you can date/kiss;
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What types of norms are formalized in writing and made publicly available?
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a country's laws, a system of medical or business ethics, or the code of academic integrity in your college or university
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What was a landmark case concerning norms between races?
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Mildred and Richard Loving, 1958, interracial marriage
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what is exogamy
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marriage outside one's "group"
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what is endogamy
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marriage within one's "group"
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What are values
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Fundamental beliefs about what is important, what makes a good life, and what is true, right, and beautiful.
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_____ are powerful cultural tools for clarifying cultural goals and motivating people to action. Many people are willing to kill or die for them.
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Values
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What are symbols
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Anything that signifies something else
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Give examples of symbols
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language, art, religion, politics, and economics
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_________ is nonverbal, action-based, and unconscious.
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symbolic communication
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____ change in meaning over time and from culture to culture.
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symbols
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There are ___ spatial comfort zones specific to US culture that differ from other cultures.
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4
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_____ of 12 feet or more is the comfortable amount of space in a public forum between a speaker and an audience
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public zone
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_____ of 4 to 12 feet is appropriate for people who do not know each other well but need to communicate directly.
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social zone
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______ from 1.5 to 4 feet is appropriate for casual friends sitting together or chatting.
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personal zone
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____ from 1.5 feet to contact
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intimate zone
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What are mental maps of reality
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Cultural classifications of what kinds of people and things exist, and the assignment of meaning to those classifications; organize the world into categories that help us sort out our experiences and what they mean.
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our brains create shortcuts to navigate our experience and organize all the data that comes our way called ________
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mental maps of reality
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Mental maps are shaped through ______
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enculturation
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Mental maps are not _____
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fixed
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What are the two important functions of mental maps?
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classify reality; assign meaning to what has been classified
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cultural relativism
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Understanding a groups beliefs and practices within their own cultural context, without making judgements
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What counteracts the effects of ethnocentrism on anthropologists work?
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cultural relativism
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What does AAA stand for?
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The American Anthropological Association
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The AAA Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights draws heavily on what?
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international principles; warns against an overreliance on the abstract legal uniformity of Western traditions
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Geer's kiss sparked an intense debate over what?
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cultural ideas and patterns of behavior, including ideas about sexuality, religion, nationalism, and even globalization
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What is the key theoretical framework for anthropologist to use to understand humans and their interactions?
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culture
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What is unilineal cultural evolution
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The theory proposed by nineteenth-century anthropologists that all cultures naturally evolve through the same sequence of stages from simple to complex
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Anthropologist plotted the world's cultures along a continuum from most simple to most complex using what terms?
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savage, barbarian, civilized
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Which approach did Franz Boas advocate?
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historical particularism
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What is historical particularism?
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The idea, attributed to Franz Boas, that cultures develop in specific ways because of their unique histories; cultures arise from different causes, not uniform processes.
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What is diffusion?
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the borrowing of cultural traits and patterns from other cultures
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Who became the most famous anthropologist of the twentieth century by exploring the seeming sexual freedom and experimentation of young Samoan women and compared it with the repressed sexuality of young women in the US
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Margaret Mead
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Mead turned her attention particularly to _____ and its powerful effects on cultural patterns and personality types
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enculturation
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What is structural functionalism
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A conceptual framework viewed by the British social anthropologists positing that each element of society serves a particular function to keep the entire system in equilibrium
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What is the interpretivist approach?
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A conceptual framework that sees culture primarily as a symbolic system of deep meaning
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What do anthropologist consider a "system of ideas"?
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culture
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What is power?
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The ability or potential to bring about change through action or influence
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Power in a culture reflects ______?
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stratification
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What is stratification?
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The uneven distribution of resources and privileges among participants in a group or culture
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______ may be stratified along lines of gender, racial or ethnic group, class, age, family, religion, sexuality, or legal status.
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Power
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What large range of institutions play central roles in the enculturation process?
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schools, religious institutions, media, family, medicine, government, courts, police, and the military
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What are 2 components of power?
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material and hegemony
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What is material power?
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it includes political, economic, or military power; they exerts through coercion or brute force.
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What is hegemony?
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The ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement within a population without the use or threat of force.
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Explain the hegemonic aspect of power?
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some thoughts and actions become unthinkable, and group members develop a set of "beliefs" about what is normal and appropriate that come to seen as natural "truths"; the ability to make people discipline their own behavior so that they believe and act in certain "normal" ways - ofter against their own interests, even without a tangible threat of punishment for misbehavior.
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What are antimiscegenation laws in the history of the US?
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These laws drew upon cultural beliefs in "natural" biological differences among races and the seemingly unnatural, deviant practice of intermarriage.
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What is agency?
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The potential power of individuals and groups to contest cultural norms, values, symbols, mental maps of reality, institutions, and structures of power.
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What happened at Jena High School?
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In 2006, 3 nooses were hung in a tree to warn blacks not to stand/sit under the "white" tree where white students stand.
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Shared biological needs do not ensure shared _______?
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cultural patterns
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Many popular debates claim that basic patterns of human behavior, intellectual capacity, and psychological tendencies are determined by ______
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biology
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Anthropologists argue that _____ drives human behavior
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(1) patterns of survival, which developed when humans were primarily hunters and gatherers, selected for different physical and mental abilities among men and women, and (2) these patterns continue to evidence themselves in patterns of life today and drive much of human behavior
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____ is learned from the the people around us. It is not written into our ____.
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Culture, DNA
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Anthropologists question the ______ basis for most if not all of human behavior
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biological
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It is important to separate human ______ from human ______.
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nature, culture
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_________ have replaced genetic adaptations as the primary way humans adapt to and manipulate their physical and social environments.
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Cultural adaptations
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How is culture created?
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over time, shaped by people and the institutions they establish
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Culture and ______ are closely linked.
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economics
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What formed the core culture of Western civilization and enabled early capitalism to flourish.
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the "Protestant ethic"
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The _____________ includes norms, values, beliefs, practices, and institutions that have become commonplace and accepted as normal, and that cultivate the desire to acquire consumer goods to enhance one's lifestyle.
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culture of consumerism
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In many parts of the world, _____ has become more than an economic activity. It is a way of life, a way of looking at the world - a culture.
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consumerism
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Who is William Ury?
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He works to resolve conflicts by mobilizing the surrounding community - the "third side"- around the conflict.
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The _______ is key in arousing our desires for goods and services.
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advertising industry
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Children in the US watch up to ____ TV commercials a year.
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40,000
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_____ is a powerful tool of enculturation, teaching us how to be "successful" in consumer culture, how to be cool and normal.
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Advertising
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What are the three key interrelated effects of globalization on local cultures?
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homogenization; a two-way transference of culture through migration; increased cosmopolitanism
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What is a homogenized effect?
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the development of global corporations, products and markets that will diminish the diversity of the wold's cultures as foreign influences inundate local practices, products, and ways of thinking as the Western think.
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Explain migration and the Two-Way transference of Culture
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The migration of people reveal how global flows of people are transforming local culture in both the sending and receiving countries.
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What is cosmopolitanism?
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A global outlook emerging in response to increasing globalization.
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_______ means that communities in the most remote parts of the world increasingly participate in experiences that bridge and link cultural practices, norms, and values across great distances, leading to what some scholar have called a new ________
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cosmopolitanism
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______ a very broad, sometimes global, outlook, rather than a limited, local one - an outlook that combines both universality and difference.
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Cosmopolitanism is
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culture is
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a system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behaviors, artifacts and institutions that are created, learned and shared by a group of people
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Why is culture important
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unlike other species, we attain our needs through culture
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Culture is
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human's primary adaptive tool; we change our environments to suit us rather than biologically adapting to them
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what is the single biggest debate in anthropology
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how to define it
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How does Dames Spradley define culture
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The acquired knowledge that people use to interpret experience and generate social behavior
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Similarities and Differences between Theories: what are the similarities
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acquired/transmitted through human interactions; governs or directs behavior; givens symbolic meaning to experiences
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Similarities and Differences between Theories: what are the differences
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internal vs external (how we study culture; individual vs group/society (how we learn our culture); starts with individual experiences
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Characteristics of culture
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learned; shared yet contested; symbolic and material
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learned culture
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by enculturation
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enculturation
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the process of learning culgure
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culture is shared, yet contest - explain
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sharing makes culture predictable; it is not permanent, so parts that people don't like are changed; culture changes first and then laws are changed to reflect the changed culture
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integrated culture
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all components come together to function as a whole
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culture is abstract/symbolic - explain
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artifacts; norms; values; symbols
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artifacts of culture
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man-mad
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norms of culture
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social rules based on values; can be flexible
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values of culture
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proper way of doing things: can be flexible
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symbols of culture
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may take material form
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dynamics of culture
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dynamic = flexible; sharing = predictable
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cultural continuum
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things getting added or deleted from a culture; if these practices are not taught to next generation, they get lost; if culture change continuum is broken; whole cultures can become extinct
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2 biggest threats to culture
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globalization and Westernization
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enculturation
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makes us biased to our own culture; called "naive realism - the subconscious perception that our culture is the way all things are
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cultural relativism
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an adopted approach to crosscultural research used to counteract the effects of ethnocentrism on work.; called for the suspension of judgement while attempting to understand a groups beliefs and practices within their own cultural context
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Insider vs Outsider (how we understand culture)
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emic; etic
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emic
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insiders perspective
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etic
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outsiders perspective
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Where do cultural differences come from
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changes from within; diffusion
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changes from within culture
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discovery and invention
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diffusion of culture
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borrow things from other cultures; adopted practices are modified
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Origins of Cultural practices
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discovery; invention
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discovery
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you find the knowledge; the addition to a body of knowledge
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invention
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you apply the knowledge; the application of knowledge
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2 types of invention
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unconscious and intentional
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unconscious invention
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more common in earlier history; flint knapping (making stone tools); long process and time and effort
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intentional invention
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made for a specific problem
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Define diffusion
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the borrowing of cultural traits and patterns from other culture to explain similarities
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patterns of diffusion
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direct contact; intermediate contact; stimulus diffusion
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stimulus diffusion
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observe it and try to make it themselves
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example of a diffusion
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pizza, pasta
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the first pizza
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margaretta pizza; named after Queen Margaritta; became national food for Italians (Italy)
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pizza: curry chicken, red peppers & curry sauce
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Jamaca
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pizza: shrimp, tofu, fish eggs, and squid ink
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Japan
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pizza: eggplant, pesto sauce, feta cheese and pine nuts
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Morroco
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pizza: potatoes, sausage, egg, cheese and bay leaves
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Germany
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___ does not happen evenly and can be forced
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diffusion
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forced diffusion
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used to dominate another culture to become like them; used like a weapon
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example of forced diffusion
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British Empire
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British empire
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forced christianity on people (caused the most damage); formed British form of govt.; forced native population to conform to British society
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Day of the Dead
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practiced in Mexico; Catholic practices + Aztec practices; combination of Catholic worship and indigenous beliefs; celebrate life and honor the dead; offerings given at gravesites
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cathologism
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catholic
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