Федоров В.Г. Шарпарь В.Д. Романов А.М. acculturation:cultural change that occurs in response to extended firsthand contacts between two or more previously autonomous groups

acculturation: cultural change that occurs in response to extended firsthand contacts between two or more previously autonomous groups.

achieved status: social standing and prestige reflecting the ability of an individual to acquire an established position in society as a result of individual accomplishments (cf. ascribed status).

affinal kin: persons related by marriage.

alienation: the fragmentation of individuals' relations to their work, the things they produce, and the resources with which they produce them.

altruistic act: a behavior characterized by self-sacrifice that benefits others.

anthropological linguistics: the scientific study of human communication within its sociocultural context and the origin and evolution of language.

anthropology: the study of humanity - our physical characteristics as animals, and our unique non-biological characteristics we call culture. The subject is generally broken down into three subdisciplines: biological (physical) anthropology, cultural (social) anthropology, and archaeology.

archaeology: a subdiscipline of anthropology involving the study of the human past through its material remains.

are held to characterize particular individuals or social

ascribed status: social standing or prestige which is the result of inheritance or hereditary factors.

authority: the ability to exert influence because of one's personal prestige or the status of one's office.

autonomy: taking commands from only one authoritative source, oneself, and rejecting all attempts to override one's autonomy. Moral autonomy entails making the final decisions about what one should do. Political autonomy entails having the liberty to act upon the decision one has made.

band: a small territorially-based social group consisting of 2 or more nuclear families. A loosely integrated population sharing a sense of common identity but few specialized institutions.

bifurcation: a basis of kin classification that distinguishes the mother's side of the family from the father's side.

bourgeoisie: a Marxian term referring to the middle class.

bride price: payment made by a man to the family from whom he takes a daughter in marriage.

bride service: service rendered by a man as payment to a family from whom he takes a daughter in marriage.

bride wealth: property given by the family of the groom to the family of the bride to compensate them for the loss of their daughter's services.

caste: a social category in which membership is fixed at birth and usually unchangeable.

centralization: concentration of political and economic decisions in the hands of a few individuals or institutions.

chiefdom: a term used to describe a society that operates on the principle of ranking, i.e. differential social status. Different lineages are graded on a scale of prestige, calculated by how closely related one is to the chief. The chiefdom generally has a permanent ritual and ceremonial center, as well as being characterized by local specialization in crafts.

civilization: a term used by anthropologists to describe any society that has cities.

clan: a unilineal descent group usually comprising more than ten generations consisting of members who claim a common ancestry even though they cannot trace step-by-step their exact connection to a common ancestor.

class: a ranked group within a stratified society characterized by achieved status and considerable social mobility.

communal cult: a society with groups of ordinary people who conduct religious ceremonies for the well-being of the total community.

community identity: an effort by speakers to identify themselves with a specific locality and to distinguish themselves from outsiders.

conflict: in its political manifestation, conflict exacts an ever-increasing toll in human lives and misery.

conjugal relationship: the relationship between spouses.

control: in the scientific method, a situation in which a comparison can be made between a specific situation and a second situation that differs, ideally, in only one aspect from the first.

creation-science: the idea that scientific evidence can be and has been gathered for creation as depicted in the Bible. Mainstream scientists and the Supreme Court discount any scientific value of creation-science statements.

creole: a pidgin language than has evolved into a fully developed language, with a complete array of grammatical distinctions and a large vocabulary.

cross-cultural research: (holocultural research) a method that uses a global sample of societies in order to test hypotheses.

cultural anthropology: a subdiscipline of anthropology concerned with the non-biological, behavioral aspects of society; i.e. the social, linguistic, and technological components underlying human behavior. Two important branches of cultural anthropology are ethnography (the study of living cultures) and ethnology (which attempts to compare cultures using ethnographic evidence). In Europe, it is referred to as social anthropology.

cultural diffusion: the spreading of a cultural trait (e.g., material object, idea, or behavior pattern) from one society to another.

cultural environment: the complex of products of human endeavor, including technology and social institutions.

cultural evolution: the theory that societal change can be understood by analogy with the processes underlying the biological evolution of species.

cultural materialism: the theory, espoused by Marvin Harris, that ideas, values, and religious beliefs are the means or products of adaptation to environmental conditions (" material constraints").

cultural relativism: the ability to view the beliefs and customs of other peoples within the context of their culture rather than one's own.

cultural universal: those general cultural traits found in all societies of the world. culture shock a psychological disorientation experienced when attempting to operate in a radically different cultural environment.

culture of poverty: a self-perpetuating complex of escapism, impulse gratification, despair, and resignation; an adaptation and reaction of the poor to the marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individuated, capitalistic society.

culture: learned, nonrandom, systematic behavior and knowledge that can be transmitted from generation to generation.

deep structure: an abstract two-part mental model consisting of a noun phrase and a verb phrase, with the optional addition of an adverb or adverbial phrase.

Deist / Deism. A religious philosophy that bases belief in the existence and nature of God on reason, rather than, like Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, upon divine revelation through sacred scriptures. Deists generally reject the supernatural, believing that God does not intervene in human affairs. Often associated with Enlightenment thought, Deism was influential in Britain and America in the eighteenth century.

demographic transition: a rapid increase in a society's population with the onset of industrialization, followed by a leveling off of the growth rate due to reduced fertility.

demography: the study of the processes which contribute to population structure and their temporal and spatial dynamics..

diachronic studies: use of descriptive data from one society or population that has been studied at many points in time.

diffusion: when elements of one culture spread to another without wholesale dislocation or migration.

division of labor: the set of rules found in all societies dictating how the day to day tasks are assigned to the various members of a society.

Domesticity. In the nineteenth century, domesticity was the dominant belief of the upper and middle classes in the United States and Europe that the ideal woman was delicate, virtuous, and submissive to male authority in society. The private home was regarded as the proper sphere of women and parenting their proper role. The ideal of feminine domesticity waned in the early twentieth century with the rise of feminism and the movement for women’s voting rights, but then revived in a more modern form in the United States in the 1950s, when the stay-at-home mother with children and working father were seen as the ideal family.

dowry: payment made by the bride's family to the groom or to the groom's family.

Dualism. A moral or spiritual belief that accepts the existence of two fundamental concepts, which often are equal but opposed to each other, such as harmony and conflict, or good and evil.

economic system: the ideas and institutions that people draw upon and the behaviors in which they engage in order to secure resources to satisfy their needs and desires.

egalitarian society: a society that recognizes few differences in wealth, power, prestige, or status.

empirical: received through the senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste), either directly or through extensions.

empiricism: reliance on observable and quantifiable data.

enculturation: the process by which human infants learn their culture.

endogamy: a rule requiring marriage within a specified social or kinship group.

Enlightenment: an eighteenth-century European intellectual movement that advocated human reason as the primary basis of authority, and questioned the authority of such institutions as the Church and the aristocracy.

ethnicity: a basis for social categories that are rooted in socially perceived differences in national origin, language, and/or religion.

ethnocentrism: the tendency to judge the customs of other societies by the standards of one's own ethnographic present: describes the point in time at which a society or culture is frozen when ethnographic data collected in the field are published in a report.

ethnography: that aspect of cultural anthropology concerned with the descriptive documentation of living cultures.

ethnohistory: the study of ethnographic cultures through historical records.

ethnology: a subset of cultural anthropology concerned with the comparative study of contemporary cultures, with a view to deriving general principles about human society.

exogamy: marriage outside a particular group with which one is identified.

extended family household: a multiple-family unit incorporating adults of two or more generations.

family household: a household formed on the basis of kinship and marriage.

Feminism: a number of social, cultural, and political movements, theories, and philosophies, emerging particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which are concerned with gender inequalities and rights for women.

Feudalism: a political and social system, prominent in Europe from the early Middle Ages to the fifteenth century that was based upon the giving of a grant of land by a ruler or noble to a knight or lesser noble in return for military service. In the later Middle Ages, services given by vassals could be legal, political, economic, or domestic, as well as military.

folktales: traditional stories found in a culture (generally transmitted orally) that may or may not be based on fact.

formalism: a school of economic anthropology which argues that if the concepts of formal economic theory are broadened, they can serve as analytic tools for the study of any economic system.

freehold: private ownership of property.

French structuralism: the theoretical school founded by Claude Levi-Strauss that finds the key to cultural diversity in cognitive structures.

function: the contribution that a particular cultural trait makes to the longevity of the total culture.

functionalism: the theory that all elements of a culture are functional in that they serve to satisfy culturally defined needs of the people in that society or requirements of the society as a whole.

gender: a cultural construct consisting of the set of distinguishable characteristics associated with each sex.

genetic determinism: the idea that all behavior, including very specific behavior, is biologically based, in contrast to cultural determinism.

genetics: the study of the mechanisms of heredity and biological variation.

haplotype: a set of genes that determine different antigens but are closely enough linked to be inherited as a unit; also: the antigenic phenotype determined by a haplotype.

hegemony: preponderant influence or authority of one individual or social group over another.

heliocentric: a sun-centered model of the universe.

hermeneutics: formal study of methods of interpretation. Following Gadamer, the hermeneutical process is often regarded as involving complex interaction between the interpreting subject and the interpreted object.

historic period: the time after European contact, or the beginning of written recording.

historical archaeology: the archaeological study of historically documented cultures.

historical linguistics: the study of how languages change over time.

historical particularism: a detailed descriptive approach to anthropology associated with Franz Boas and his students, and designed as an alternative to the broad generalizing approach favored by anthropologists such as Morgan and Tylor.

historiographic approach: a form of explanation based primarily on traditional descriptive historical frameworks.

holism: the philosophical view that no complex entity can be considered to be only the sum of its parts; as a principle of anthropology, the assumption that any given aspect of human life is to be studied with an eye to its relation to other aspects of human life.

household: a domestic residential group whose members live together in intimate contact, rear children, share the proceeds of labor and other resources held in common, and in general cooperate on a day-to-day basis.

hunting and gathering: involves the systematic collection of vegetable foods, hunting of game, and fishing.

hybrid: the result of a cross or mating between two different kinds of parents.

iconography: an important component of cognitive archaeology, this involves the study of artistic representations which usually have an overt religious or ceremonial significance; e.g. individual deities may be distinguished, each with a special characteristic, such as corn with the corn god, or the sun with a sun goddess etc.

idealist explanation: a form of explanation that lays great stress on the search for insights into the historical circumstances leading up to the event under study in terms primarily of the ideas and motives of the individuals involved.

incest taboo: the prohibition of sexual intimacy between people defined as close relatives.

incest: sexual intercourse between closely related persons.

individualistic cult: the least complex form of religious organization in which each person is his or her own religious specialist.

induction: a method of reasoning in which one proceeds by generalization from a series of specific observations so as to derive general conclusions.

Industrial Age: a cultural stage characterized by the first use of complex machinery, factories, urbanization, and other economic and general social changes from strictly agricultural societies.

industrial society: a society consisting of largely urban populations that engage in manufacturing, commerce, and services.

industrialism: a form of social organization in which the population's needs for food, manufactured products, transportation, and many services are met through the use of machines powered largely by fossil fuel.

industry: all the artifacts in a site that are made from the same material, such as the bone industry.

innovation: the process of adopting a new thing, idea, or behavior pattern into a culture.

instinct: a genetically-determined pattern of behavior that is characteristic of a species and is often a response to specific internal or environmental stimuli.

institutions: a society's recurrent patterns of activity, such as religion, art, a kinship system, law, and family life.

invention: any new thing, idea, or way of behaving that emerges from within a society.

language: a highly flexible and complex system of communication that allows for the exchange of detailed information about both interior and exterior conditions. As a creative and open system, new signals may be added and new ideas transmitted.

law: a rule of social conduct enforced by sanctions administered by a particular source of legitimate power.

legitimacy: the right to rule on the basis of recognized principles.

lineage: a unilineal descent group composed of people who trace their genealogies through specified links to a common ancestor.

lingua franca: any language used as a common tongue by people who do not speak one another's native language.

linguistic anthropology: a subdivision of anthropology that is concerned primarily with unwritten languages (both prehistoric and modern), with variation within languages, and with the social uses of language; traditionally divided into three branches: descriptive linguistics, the systematic study of the way language is constructed and used; historical linguistics, the study of the origin of language in general and of the evolution of the languages people speak today; and sociolinguistics, the study of the relationship between language and social relations.

linguistics: the scientific study of language.

logistics: the process of transporting, supplying and supporting a field project.

marginal people: those individuals who are not in the mainstream of their society.

market exchange: a mode of exchange which implies both a specific location for transactions and the sort of social relations where bargaining can occur. It usually involves a system of price-making through negotiation.

material culture: the buildings, tools, and other artifacts that includes any material item that has had cultural meaning ascribed to it, past and present.

matrix: the physical material within which artifacts are embedded or supported.

mercantile system: a system of ownership common in Europe and elsewhere after the eighteenth century in which land became the private property of individual owners.

microenvironment: a specific set of physical, biological, and cultural factors immediately surrounding the organism.

model: a system of hypothetical principles that represents the characters of a phenomenon and from which predictions can be made.

Modern: Historians use the term “Modern” generally to describe the period beginning in the eighteenth century and running to the present; however, the term also is used to refer to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries only or even to only portions of the latter.

Modernism: A term that describes a series of late nineteenth- and early twentieth century cultural movements in art, literature, music, architecture, and the applied arts.

Modernity: Of or related to the Modern period and the cultural phenomena that comprise it.

monogamy: an exclusive union of one man and one woman.

myth: stories that are told about the deeds that supernatural beings played in the creation of human beings and the universe itself.

Natural Law. An ethical theory that posits the existence of a set of moral norms which can be defined by the rational observation of the nature of the world and human beings and therefore in effect everywhere. Originating in pre-modern religious and philosophical

nonverbal communication: the various means by which humans send and receive messages without using words (e.g., gestures, facial expressions, touching).

norm: the most frequent behavior that the members of a group will show in a specific situation.

nouveau riche: people with newly acquired wealth.

ordeal: a painful and possibly life-threatening test inflicted on someone suspected of a wrongdoing.

order: a major division of a class, consisting of closely related families.

paleoanthropology: the study of the fossil record and archaeology.

paradigmatic view: approach to science, developed by Thomas Kuhn, which holds that science develops from a set of assumptions (paradigm) and that revolutionary science ends with the acceptance of a new paradigm which ushers in a period of normal science.

pastoralism: a form of social organization based on herding.

patriclan: a group that claims but cannot brace their descent through the male line from a common male ancestor.

patrilineage: a lineage whose members brace their genealogies through specified male links to a common male ancestor.

patrimonial system: a system of ownership, followed in northern and central Europe during the Middle Ages, in which land was controlled by feudal lords who held their domains by hereditary right.

patron client relationship: a mutually obligatory arrangement between an individual who has authority, social status, wealth, or some other personal resource (the patron) and another person who benefits from his or her support or influence (the client).

peasants: farmers who lack control over the means of their production: the land, the other resources, and the capital they need to grow their crops, and the labor they contribute to the process.

pedigree: a diagrammatic reconstruction of past mating in a family.

petroglyph: pictures, symbols, or other art work pecked, carved or incised on natural rock surfaces.

phratry: a group that typically consists of several clans that extend the rights and obligations of kinship to one another but retain distinct identities.

pidgin: a language based on a simplified grammar and lexicon taken from one or more fully developed languages.

plastic arts: those forms of art such as sculpture, carving, pottery, and weaving.

politics: the process by which a community's decisions are made, rules for group behavior are established, competition for positions of leadership is regulated, and the disruptive effects of disputes are minimized.

polity: a politically independent or autonomous social unit, whether simple or complex, which may in the case of a complex society (such as a state) comprise many lesser dependent components.

polyandry: marriage between one woman and two or more men simultaneously.

polygamy: plural marriage.

polygenic: the result of the interaction of several genes.

polygyny: marriagebetween one man and two or more women simultaneously.

polymorphism: the presence of several distinct forms of a gene or phenotypic trait within a population with frequencies greater than 1 percent.

polytypic: a situation in which a species is composed of several distinct populations.

populationist viewpoint: the concept that only individuals have reality and that the type is illusory. Since no two individuals are exactly alike, variation underlies all existence.

Positivism: a philosophy that declares the only authentic knowledge to be scientific knowledge, which can only be gained from affirmation of theories through strict application of the scientific method. Positivism was developed by Auguste Comte in the mid-nineteenth century, and, in various versions, became one of the dominant strains of British and American philosophy in the twentieth century. It is theoretical position that explanations must be empirically verifiable, that there are universal laws in the structure and transformation of human institutions, and that theories which incorporate individualistic elements, such as minds, are not verifiable.

Postcolonialism: a set of theories and concepts in philosophy, literature, the arts, and political science that deal with the cultural legacy of imperial or colonial rule.

Postmodernism: a wide-ranging set of ideas, theories, and developments in philosophy, art, literature, architecture, and culture that are generally characterized as either emerging from, reacting to, or superseding the ideas and characteristics of Modernism.

power: the ability to exert influence because one's directives are backed by negative sanctions of some sort.

prehistory: the period of human history before the advent of writing.

primitive: a derogatory term used to describe small-scale, preliterate, and technologically simple societies.

production: the conversion of natural resources to usable forms.

productivity: the amount of work a person accomplishes in a given period of time.

profane: the sphere of the ordinary and routine; the everyday, natural world.

psychological anthropology: the study of the relationship between culture and individual personality.

race: a subgroup of human population that shares a greater number of physical traits with one another than they do with those of other subgroups.

radioactive decay: the regular process by which radioactive isotopes break down into their decay products with a half-life which is specific to the isotope in question (see also radiocarbon dating).

radiocarbon dating: an absolute dating method based on the radioactive decay of Carbon-14 contained in organic materials.

radiometric dating: a type of chronometric dating that involves methods based upon the decay of radioactive materials; examples are radiocarbon and potassium-argon dating.

ranked societies: societies in which there is unequal access to prestige and status e.g. chiefdoms and states.

rebellion: an attempt within a society to disrupt the status quo and redistribute the power and resources.

reciprocity: a mode of exchange in which transactions take place between individuals who are symmetrically placed, i.e. they are exchanging as equals, neither being in a dominant position.

relativism: the concept that a cultural system can be viewed only in terms of the principles, background, frame of reference, and history that characterize it.

religion: a framework of beliefs relating to supernatural or superhuman beings or forces that transcend the everyday material world.

revitalization movements: conscious efforts to build an ideology that will be relevant to changing cultural needs.

revolution: an attempt to overthrow the existing form of political organization, the principles of economic production and distribution, and the allocation of social status.

ritual: behavior that has become highly formalized and stereotyped.

role: a set of behavioral expectations appropriate to an individual's social position.

Romanticism: a cultural movement arising in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe that emphasized individuality and imagination. Responding to the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the technologies of the Industrial Revolution, Romanticism was most strongly embodied in the visual arts, music, and literature. The complex movement stressed aesthetic experience and strong emotion over reason and social norms and brought a new appreciation to folk art, the exotic, and the inspiration provided by the natural world.

sacred: the sphere of extraordinary phenomena associated with awesome supernatural forces.

science: a method of reaming about the world by applying the principles of the scientific method, which includes making empirical observations, proposing hypotheses to explain those observations, and testing those hypotheses in valid and reliable ways; also refers to the organized body of knowledge that results from scientific study.

scientific theory: a statement that postulates ordered relationships among natural phenomena.

scientism: the belief that there is one and only one method of science and that it alone confers legitimacy upon the conduct of research.

self-organization: the product of a theory derived from thermodynamics which demonstrates that order can arise spontaneously when systems are pushed far from an equilibrium state. The emergence of new structure arises at bifurcation points, or thresholds of instability.

semantics: the study of the larger system of meaning created by words.

slavery: a practice that permits some people within a society to own other persons and to claim the right to their labor.

social class: a category of people who have generally similar educational histories, job opportunities, and social standing and who are conscious of their membership in a social group that is ranked in relation to others and is replicated over generations.

social division of labor: the process by which a society is formed by the integration of its smaller groups or subsets.

social mobility: the ability of people to change their social position within the society.

social norm: an expected form of behavior.

social pressure: a means of social control in which people who venture over the boundaries of society's rules are brought back into line.

social stratification: the ranking of subgroups in a society according to wealth, power, and prestige..

socialization: the process by which a person acquires the technical skills of his or her society, the knowledge of the kinds of behavior that are understood and acceptable in that society, and the attitudes and values that make conformity with social rules personally meaningful, even gratifying; also termed enculturation.

society: a group of interacting people who share a geographical region, a sense of common identity, and a common culture.

sociocultural anthropology: a branch of anthropology that deals with variations in patterns of social interaction and differences in cultural behavior.

sociolinguistics: a branch of anthropological linguistics that studies how language and culture are related and how language is used in different social contexts.

state: a term used to describe a social formation defined by distinct territorial boundedness, and characterized by strong central government in which the operation of political power is sanctioned by legitimate force. In cultural evolutionist models, it ranks second only to the empire as the most complex societal development stage.

statistical analysis: the application of probability theory to quantified descriptive data.

status: a position in a pattern of reciprocal behavior.

strata: (1) depositional units or layers of sediment distinguished by composition or appearance. (singular: " stratum"), (2) individually sampled subareas in a " stratified-random" probabilistic sampling scheme.

stratification: the division of a society into groups that have varying degrees of access to resources and power.

stratified society: a society in which extensive subpopulations are accorded differential treatment.

style: according to the art historian, Ernst Gombrich, style is " any distinctive and therefore recognizable way in which an act is performed and made." Archaeologists and anthropologists have defined " stylistic areas" as areal units representing shared ways of producing and decorating artifacts.

substantivism: a school of economic anthropology that seeks to understand economic processes as the maintenance of an entire cultural order.

symbol: something that can represent something distant from it in time and space.

synchronic studies: rely on research that does not make use of or control for the effects of the passage of time.

synchronic: referring to phenomena considered at a single point in time; i.e. an approach which is not primarily concerned with change.

syncretism: the attempt to reconcile and integrate disparate or contradictory religious or philosophical beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought.

system: a series of interrelated parts wherein a change in one part brings about changes in all parts.

territory: an area that a group defends against other members of its own species.

theory: a step in the scientific method in which a statement is generated on the basis of highly confirmed hypotheses and is used to generalize about conditions not yet tested.

thought, its influence is evident in the Enlightenment and modern ideas of human rights.

tradition: a continuum of gradational culture change through time representing the unbroken development of a single culture.

type: a distinctive formal artifact class defined by the consistent clustering of attributes and restricted in space and time.

typology: the systematic organization of artifacts into types on the basis of shared attributes.

unconformity: the surface of a stratum that represents a break in the stratigraphic sequence.

urbanization: the proportionate rise in the number of people living in cities in comparison to the number living in rural areas.

urbanized society: a society in which a majority of people live in cities.

value: the judgement of perceived attributes, and of paths to

wealth: the accumulation of material objects that have value within a society.

world system: a term coined by the historian Wallerstein to designate an economic unit, articulated by trade networks extending far beyond the boundaries of individual political units (nation states), and linking them together in a larger functioning unit.

worldview: a distinctive set of attitudes, beliefs and values that

X-ray diffraction analysis: a technique used in identifying minerals present in artifact raw materials; it can also be used in geomorphological contexts to identify particular clay minerals in sediments, and thus the specific source from which the sediment was derived.

X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF): a method used in the analysis of artifact composition, in which the sample is irradiated with a beam of X-rays which excite electrons associated with atoms on the surface.

 

 

Федоров В.Г. Шарпарь В.Д. Романов А.М.