Medical Anthropology Key Terms 2

• Acculturation - culture change resulting from contact between cultures. A process of external culture change.

• Adaptation - patterns of behavior which enable a cultureto cope with its surroundings.

• Affinal - members of one's kindred who are related through a marital linkage.

• Ambilineal - a corporate kin group that traces relationships through either the female or male lines.

Medical Anthropology Key Terms 2

• Acculturation - culture change resulting from contact between cultures. A process of external culturechange.• Adaptation - patterns of behavior which enable a cultureto cope with its surroundings.• Affinal - members of one's kindred who are related through a marital linkage.• Ambilineal - a corporate kin group that traces relationships through either the female or male lines.

• Animism - a belief that natural phenomena such as rocks, trees, thunder, or celestial bodies have life or divinity.

• anthropocentric - the idea that humans are the most important beings in the universe.

• anthropological linguistics - the branch of anthropology that studies human language. Linguistic anthropology is mainly concerned with the technical analysis of language.

• apartheid - racial, political, and economic segregation of non-European peoples.

• assimilation - when one ethnic group absorbs another, so that the cultural traits of the assimilated group become indistinguishable.

• bilineal - descent in which the individual figures kinship through both the father's and mother's descent group.

• bilingual education - teaching a second language by relying heavily on the native language of the speaker. The theory is that maintaining a strong sense of one's own culture and language is necessary to acquire another language and culture.

• bilocal - residence after marriage is with either the wife's or husband's relatives.

• brideprice - an economic exchange by the groom's family to compensate the bride's family upon marriage.

• cannibalism - consuming human flesh. This is reported to occur in the context of warfare, as part of a funeral rite or, rarely, in cases of extreme hunger or stress.

• caste system - the ranking of members in a society by birth and not by academic or other achievements. It is a system which believes in the degree of purity or pollution as determined by their birth. The caste system is widely practised in India

• charismatic - the ability to lead and influence large numbers of people.

• clan - a noncorporate descent group in which genealogical links to a common ancestor are assumed but are not actually known.

• class stratification - where members of a society are ranked from higher to lower based on wealth, prestige, position, or education.

• consanguineal - members of one's kindred who are related by blood line.

• conspicuous consumption - the display of material items for the purpose of impressing others.

• core values - attitudes and beliefs thought to uniquely pattern a culture.

• cross-cousin - children of the opposite-sexed siblings of one's parents, e.g., mother's brother's and father's sister's children.

• cultural ecology - the study of human interaction with ecosystems to determine how nature influences and is influenced by human social organization and culture.

• cultural relativism - understanding the ways of other cultures and not judging these practices according to one's own cultural ways.

• cultural transmission - how culture is passed on through learning from one generation to another. Also referred to as enculturation or socialization.

• culture - The learned patterns of behavior and thought that help a group adapt to it's surroundings.

• communist: Society works best when each person contributes according to ability and each person receives according to need.

• egalitarian: A society everyone has a say in decisions and no person feels they will be injured by choices made by the group.

• divination - obtaining factual knowledge by magical means which have no apparent empirical connection to the information sought.

• dowry - the woman's share of her inheritance from the group of her birth, which is taken with her upon marriage to her husband’s home.

• egalitarian - a society without formalized differences in the access to power, influence, and wealth.

• endogamy - rules requiring selecting of a marriage partner from within a particular group.

• ethnic boundary markers - overt characteristics used to denote ethnic group membership.

• ethnocentrism - judging other cultures by the standards of your own, which you believe to be superior.

• ethnography - description of a culture, usually based on the method of participant observation.

• exogamy - rules requiring selection of a marriage partner from outside a particular group.

• extended family - a composite family composed of other relatives besides the nuclear families.

• extinction - when a culture dies out. Often the people die out too. Some may become peasants or pass into contemporary society.

• guru – An Indian word denoting a spiritual master or teacher. It implies an initiatory relation between master and disciple. The guru passes on oral tradition and ascetic regimen to the student.

• key informants - a few individuals selected on the basis of criteria such as knowledge, compatibility, age, experience, or reputation who provide information about their culture.

• magic - practices designed to gain control over the supernatural. Magic and religion are separated in several ways in anthropology. For some anthropologists magic tries to gain control over the supernatural. Others see magic as being individual, while religion is a group phenomena that creates lasting social bonds. Malinowski saw magic as a means to an end, while religion was the end in itself. Other anthropologists find separating magic and religion very difficult.

• monogamy - marriage in which an individual has one spouse.

• nature-nurture debate contrasting the biological verses cultural or environmental basis for behavior.

• nirvana – An Indian concept which indicates the state of peace and happiness in achieving freedom from the endless cycles of reincarnation. A state of freedom from pain, worry, and the external world.

• nuclear family - a woman and/or husband and dependent children.

• paralanguage - the use of accent, cadence, pitch, tone and other non-word forms to convey meaning.

• parallel-cousin - children of the same-sexed siblings of one's parents, e.g., mother's sister's and father's brother's children.

• participant observation - living in a culture that is not your own while also keeping a detailed record of your observations and interviews for the purposes of learning or research.

• patriarchy - where a father figure and males have authority.

• patrilineal - tracing kinship, inheritance, power through the male line.

• peer group - a subgroup of a society in which membership is determined by similar age, sharing the same social status, etc.

• serial monogamy - a pattern of divorce and monogamous remarriage.

• social network - the relationships an individual has with family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, and people in groups to which the person belongs, e.g. church, recreation, political, social, and other groups. See also family, kinship, caste, class.

• topophilia - all emotional connections with a place, having a strong sense of place.