Cultural Anthropology Definitions

(for quiz Wednesday, March 26)

Acculturation	Exchange of features that results when groups come into continuous, firsthand contact.
Agriculture	The practice of raising domesticated crops.
Band	A fairly small, usually nomadic local group that is politically autonomous.
Caste	A ranked group in which membership is determined at birth and marriage is restricted to members of one’s own group.
Chiefdom	A political unit, headed by a chief, integrating more than one community but not necessarily the whole society.
Civilization	Urban society, from the Latin for “city.”
Clan	A set of kin whose members believe they are descended from a common ancestor but cannot specify exactly how.
Class societies	A society containing social groups that have unequal access to economic resources, power, and prestige.
Cultural relativism	Cultural values are arbitrary, and therefore the values of one culture should not be used as standards to evaluate the behavior or persons from outside that culture.
Cultural universals	Features that are found in every culture; those that distinguish Homo sapiens from other species.
Culture	A set of learned behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, values, and ideals that are characteristic of a particular society or population.
Diffusion	The spread of cultural traits through borrowing from one culture to another.
Domestication	Modification or adaptation of plants and animals for use by humans.
Egalitarian societies	A society in which all persons of a given age-sex category have equal access to economic resources, power, and prestige.
Enculturation	The process by which a child learns his or her culture.
Endogamy	Marriage to a person within one’s own group (kin, caste, community).
Ethnocentrism	The use of values, ideals, and mores from one’s own culture to judge the behavior of someone from another culture.
Exogamy	Marriage to a person from outside one’s own group (kin or community).
Foragers	People who subsist on the collection of naturally occurring plants and animals. Also referred to as hunter-gatherers.
Gender differences	Differences between males and females that reflect cultural expectations and experiences.
Horticulture	Plant cultivation carried out with relatively simple tools and methods.
Hunter-gatherers	See foragers.
Ideal culture	Normative descriptions of a culture given by its natives.
Incest taboo	Prohibition of sexual intercourse or marriage between mother and son, father and daughter, and brother and sister. Cultural universal.
Intensive agriculture	Characterized by the permanent cultivation of fields made possible by use of the plow, fertilizers, and irrigation.
Kindred	A bilateral set of close relatives.
Lineage	Set of kin whose members trace descent from a common ancestor through known links.
Marriage	Socially-approved sexual and economic union, usually of a male and a female, that is assumed to be more or less permanent.
Matrilocal residence	Pattern of residence in which a married couple lives with or near the wife’s parents.
Monogamy	Marriage between one man and one woman at a time.
Neolocal residence	Pattern of residence in which a married couple lives separately, usually at some distance, from the kin of both spouses.
Norms	Standards or rules about what is acceptable behavior.
Nuclear family	A family consisting of a married couple and their young children.
Pastoralism	Food-getting is based directly or indirectly on the maintenance of domesticated animals.
Patrilocal residence	Pattern of residence in which a married couple lives with or near the husband’s parents.
Polyandry	Marriage of one woman to more than one man at a time.
Polygamy	Plural marriage; marriage to more than one spouse at one time.
Polygyny	Marriage of one man to more than one woman at a time.
Potlatch	A feast among Native American groups during which great quantities of food and goods are given to the guests in order to gain prestige for the host.
Priests	Full-time religious specialist with high status thought to be able to communicate with superior being.
Real culture	Actual behavior as observed by an anthropologist.
Reciprocity	Giving and taking without the use of money.
Redistribution	Accumulation of goods or labor by a particular person or in a particular place and their subsequent distribution.
Religion	Any set of attitudes, beliefs, and practices pertaining to supernatural power, whether that power rests in forces, gods, spirits, ghosts, or demons.
Sedentarism	Settled life.
Shaman	A part-time religious intermediary whose primary function is to cure people through sacred songs, pantomime, and other means.
Society	A group of people who occupy a particular territory and speak a common language and share a common culture.
State	Form of political organization with a centralized bureaucratic institutions to establish power and authority over large populations in defined territories.
Subsistence patterns	The methods humans use to procure food.
Tribe	A territorial population in which horticulturalist and pastoralist groups are united into a political system.