Anthro Midterm 2 Vocab

Ecological Anthropology: Specialization within anthropology that focuses on subsistence strategies and how people exploit and adapt to their environment.

Subsistence Patterns: Methods of obtaining food using available land and resources, available labor and energy, and technology.

Foragers: People whose subsistence pattern is hunting and gathering.

Food Producers: Users of a subsistence strategy that transform and manages the environment in order to obtain food.

Pastoralism: A subsistence strategy focusing on raising and caring for large herds of domesticated animals.

Horticulture: A subsistence strategy that focuses on small-scale farming using relatively simple technology

Agriculture: A subsistence strategy focusing on intensive farming, investing a great a great deal of time, energy, and technology.

Carrying Capacity: The number of people who can be sustained by the resources and environment in which they live.

Settlement Pattern: The way people distribute themselves in their environment, including where they locate their dwellings, how they group dwellings into settlements, and how permanent or transitory those settlements are.

Reciprocity: Principles of mutual gift giving.

Redistribution: The gathering together and reallocation of food and resources to ensure everyone’s survival.

Nomads: People who do not have permanent homes but travel to sources of food as the food becomes seasonably available.

Complex Foragers: Foraging societies that have developed permanent settlements, territorial exclusiveness, property accumulation, and social stratification of the basis of food storage technologies.

Transhumance: The practice among pastoralists of moving to new pastureland on a seasonal basis.

Sedentism: A settlement pattern involving long-term, permanent settlements.

Slash-and-burn (Swidden) Cultivation: A farming technique for preparing new fields by cutting down trees and brushes and then burning them in order to clear the land and enrich the soil with nutrients.

Peasants: Rural agriculturalists who are partly enmeshed in a larger social and economic system. Part of their production is devoted to supporting the larger system and its dominant elite.

Economic System: Methods of allocating resources, and the production, distribution, consumption, and exchange of goods and services.

Capital Goods: Items that are produced for the purpose of producing other goods rather than for production.

Social Capital: Bonds of reliable friendship and support that a person can call on to achieve a goal.

Generalized Reciprocity: The exchange of goods and services without keeping track of their exact value but often with the expectation that their value will balance out over time.

Balanced Reciprocity: Exchange of goods and services of a specified value.

Negative Reciprocity: Exchange of goods and services in which each party seeks to benefit and the expense of the other, thus making a profit.

Barter: An exchange of products in which one person gives one type of product in exchange for another type of product.

Redistributive Networks: - Economic systems in which food and other goods are amassed by an organizer and then distributed to community members or guest at large public gatherings.

General Purpose Money: Money that can be used to acquire any of the resources, goods, and services within an economic system

Special Purpose Money: Money that can be used for only a limited range of transactions.

Market Economy: Economic system in which products are traded in impersonal exchanges between buyers and sellers using and all-purpose currency.

Commodity: A product that can be sold or traded in return for money or other products.

Capitalism: An economic mod of production in which the goal is to amass wealth in the form of money in order to gain control over the means of production and then use this control to accumulate even greater wealth.

Surplus Value: The amount of value produced by workers in capitalist production that is greater than the wage paid to them.

Consumerism: Culture of consumption of goods and services.

Colonialism: Policies in which countries establish colonies in distant places in order to exploit their resources and labor and possibly to establish settlements of their own citizens abroad.

Poll Taxes: Taxes levied on households.

Post-Industrialism: An economic order based on the expansion of the service economy, especially within the knowledge sector, and on globally organized corporations and institutions.

Political Organization: The ways in which societies are organized to plan group activities, make decisions affecting members of the group, select leadership, and settle disputes both within the group and with other groups.

Political Anthropology: The study of the ways that communities plan group actions, make decisions affecting the group, select leadership, and resolve conflicts and disputes both within the group and with other groups.

Bands: Small, loosely organized groups of people held together by informal means.

Tribes: Societies with some degree of formalization of structure and leadership, including village and intervillage councils whose members regularly meet to settle disputes and plan community activities.

Associations: Sociopolitical groups that link people in a community on the basis of shared interests and skills.

Age Grade (Age Set):A sociopolitical association of people of more or less similar age who are given specific social functions.

States: Highly organized centralized political systems with a hierarchical structure of authority.

Terrorism: A criminal act intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes.

Factionalism: The tendency for groups to split into opposing parties over political issues, often a cause of violence and a threat to political unity.

Revolution: An attempt to overthrow the existing government.

Religion: Beliefs and practices about spirit beings and supranormal and superhuman forces and their relationship to everyday life.

Religious Speech: Invocations, prayers, prophecies, songs of praise, and curses that are powerful means of transmitting messages about the world.

Animism: Belief in the existence of souls.

Animatism: Belief that all things, including men and women, are endowed with a pervasive spiritual power.

Belief in the existence of numerous deities that have specific attributes, powers, and functions.

Monotheistic Religions: Belief systems that hold to the existence of one supreme deity who has knowledge and powers that affect all aspects of life.

Ancestor Worship: Belief in the importance of ancestors as they affect the lives of their survivors, protecting their descendants in the return for the rituals of honor performed to show them respect.

Totemism: Belief system in which people believe they are descendants of spirit beings.

Secret Societies: Organizations that control the use of special objects used in religious rituals.

Mediums: Persons having special gifts to make contact with the spirit world, often in a state of trance.

Diviners: Persons with the power to predict the future through messages and omens from the spirit world.

Healers: Religious practitioners who acquire spirit power to diagnose the spirit cause of illness and effect cures.

Shamans: Religious practitioners who are believed to make contact with the spirit world through prayer, ritual, and trance.

Priests: Full-time religious practitioners who lead a religious organization and officiate at rituals but are not expected to be able to communicate directly with the spirit world.

Rituals: Activities, including religious speech, ceremonies, and behaviors that are demonstrations of belief

Sacred Rituals: Activities, places, or objects that are connected to the spirit realm and are imbued with power.

Rites of Renewal: Rituals performed with the goal of renewing the bounty of the earth.

Prayer: Religious speech or though through which believers transmit messages to spirit beings.

Sacrifice: Offerings made to spirit beings in order to show gratitude and honor.

Puberty Rites: Rituals performed to mark the passage of an individual from childhood to adulthood; also called initiation rites.

Calendric Rituals: Ceremonies performed at specific times during the year, for example, agricultural rituals performed for planting, growing, and harvesting crops.

Funerary Rites: Rituals performed to mark a person’s death and passage to the afterworld.

Spirit Possession: Belief that spirits can enter a person’s body and take over their thoughts and actions.

Imitative Magic: Magic that operates on the principle of “like causes like.”

Contagious Magic: Magic that operates on the principle that positive and negative qualities can be transferred through proximity or contact.

Cosmology: Religious worldview of a people, including beliefs about the origin of the world, the pantheon of deities that exist, and their relationships to the spirit realm.

Syncretism: The blending of two religious traditions to form a new one.

Prophets: Religious leaders who receive divine inspiration, often in a vision or trance.

Natvistic Movements: Revitalization movements attempting to rid society of foreign elements and return to what is conceived to be a prior state of cultural purity.

Millinerian Movements: Revitalization movements incorporating apocalyptic themes, prophesying and abrupt end to the world as we know it, leading to the establishment of a new way of life of form of existence.

Messianic Movements: Revitalization movements stressing the role of a prophet or messiah as a savior for his or her people.

Cargo Cults: Revitalization movements arising in Melanesia in the early twentieth century with the aim of obtaining material wealth though magical means.

Proselytism: The attempt to convert a person or group from one religion to another.

Fundamentalism: A term coined in the United States in 1920 meaning a commitment to defend traditional religious beliefs.