|
|
A |
| Aboriginal Peoples (Canada)
|
First Nations, Metis and Inuit. |
| Absolute Poverty
|
A standard of poverty based on a
minimum level of subsistence below which families should not be expected
to exist. |
| Acculturation
|
The exchange of cultural features that
results when groups come into continuous firsthand contact; the original
cultural patterns of either or both groups may be altered, but the groups
remain distinct. |
| Acephalous Society
|
a society without a political head
such as a president, chief, or king. |
| Achieved Status
|
Social status that comes through
talents, choices, actions, efforts, activities, and accomplishments,
rather than ascription. |
| Adult Socialization
|
The process of socialization that
occurs after childhood and that prepares people for adult roles. Adult
socialization also involves more active selection and intervention by the
person being socialized, with more personal choice being made as to what
status, identities, or roles are acceptable, and to what degree. |
| Affinal Kin
|
Relatives by marriage, whether of
lineals (e.g., son's wife) or collaterals (e.g., sister's husband). |
| Affluent Society
|
An account of American society that
emphasizes the apparent wealth and material fascination and wellbeing of a
large segment of the population, namely the middle-classes and
above. |
| Age Grade
|
a group of people of the same sex and
approximately the same age who share a set of duties and privileges. |
| Age Set
|
Group uniting all men or women born
during a certain time span; this group controls property and often has
political and military functions. |
| Agency
|
The ability of individuals to act as
self-conscious, willful social agents, and to exert their will through
involvement in social practices, relationships, and decision-making. |
| Agrarian Society
|
The most technologically advanced form
of preindustrial society. Members are primarily engaged in the production
of food but increase their crop yield through such innovations as the
plow. |
| Agriculture
|
Nonindustrial systems of plant
cultivation characterized by continuous and intensive use of land and
labor. |
| Agriculture (hydraulic
societies) |
There have been five great hydraulic
societies in human history: the first what in Persia along the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers. The second was along the Nile in Egypt; the third along
the Ganges in India; the fourth along the Yellow River in China and the
fifth in around what is now called Mexico City. Hydraulic agriculture
required social differentiation [specialization]; it did not require
social stratification as so many historians argue. But both occurred to
change forever the ways in which people live. |
| Agrippa
|
3rd Century Greek philosopher who laid
the basis for a postmodern philosophy of knowledge in five tropes
[headings]. 1) There is no sure basis for deciding among different
philosophical claims. 2) All data are relative to the beholder. 3) Every
proof rests upon assumptions which in turn have to be proved ad infinitum.
4) One cannot trust the hypotheses when the truth value of its premises
are unknown. 5) There is a vicious circle in which sense data are used to
inform reason which, in turn, is used to establish what is to be taken as
data. |
| Alienation
|
the fragmentation of individuals'
relations to their work, the things they produce, and the resources with
which they produce them. |
| Allocation
|
The process of matching people to
positions in the labour force on the basis of their schooling. |
| Allomorphs
|
forms contained in morphemes that
differ in sound but not in meaning. |
| Allophones
|
sounds that belong to the same
phoneme. |
| Ambilineal Descent
|
Principle of descent that does not
automatically exclude the children of either sons or daughters. |
| Ambilocality
|
residence of a married couple with or
near the kin of either husband or wife, as they choose. |
| Ancestor Worship
|
The religious worship of ancestors
based on the belief that they possess supernatural power. |
| Animism
|
Belief in souls or doubles. |
| Anomie
|
Normlessness (lit. without order.
a=without; nomy=order). A term used by Durkheim to indicate "the collapse
of the normative order." The term implies that conformity to norms is
natural and normal; that resistance is pathological. Then too, embedded in
the concept is the idea that norms are above and beyond the individuals
who are said to organize their behavior in terms of the normative
structure. |
| Anthropophagy
|
The practice of eating human
flesh. |
| Anticipatory Socialization
|
A process by which aspirants to a
particular role begin to discern what it would be like to function in that
role. |
| Appropriation
|
The means by which the surplus value
of labor is appropriated directly and controlled by those who do not
produce are varied indeed. These mechanisms include sharecropping,
tenancy, tribute, debt peonage, slavery, wage relations and impressment
into work crews. Indirect ways to appropriate labor power and its products
include taxes, profits, interest, rents, tithes, tolls, and fees. Think
about the social relations such mechanisms require, and the kind of
political apparatus necessary to enforce them as well as the costs to a
society to pay for these mechanisms of appropriate of wealth. |
| Ascribed Status
|
Social status (e.g., race or gender)
that people have little or no choice about occupying. |
| Assimilation
|
The process of change that a minority
group may experience when it moves to a country where another culture
dominates; the minority is incorporated into the dominant culture to the
point that it no longer exists as a separate cultural unit. |
| Authority
|
Many societies allocate more social
power to some statuses and require those in 'lower' status comply with the
orders, commands, wishes or expectations of 'higher' authority. When social
power is vested in an office or person, such person has 'authority.' Weber
lists three kinds: traditional [that of a parent or priest],
legal-rational [that of a formal organization with rules and people to
enforce them] as well as charismatic. As Simmel noted, such "power" is
always a social product and lasts only as long as the "subordinates"
continue to reify the person/office as an "authority." However, when
authority is naively reified, people do give up some of their autonomy and
allow others to direct their behavior. Both human agency and personal
morality are thereby subverted. |
| Automation
|
The practice of controlling machines
with machines. The transformation from labor intensive production to
capital intensive production. Up until 1960, most of the time automation
replaced unskilled workers. Now automation threatens to replace lower
level white collar workers. IBM, Xerox and other "word processor" are
developing machines controlled by computers to process words. Secretaries,
teachers, professors, postal workers, and others who use words become
surplus to the corporate needs as "artificial intelligence" systems are
designed. Automation in capitalist societies increases production and
prices while eliminating wage workers. Without work, demand falls and the
surplus population grows. |
| Avunculocal Residence
|
residence of a married couple with or
near a brother of the husband's mother who is usually a senior member of
his matrilineage. |
TOP
|
B |
| Back Stage
|
A term used by Goffman to make the
point that in a dramaturgical society, there is much hidden from the view
of those who are caught up in social institutions. In conflict ridden
societies, teams rehearse performances back stage and then offer the
dramaturgical facsimile of service, quality, or honest agency to those who
are in the audience [front stage]. In markets, politics, religion and
education, such hidden routines invalidate most of the assumptions of
symbolic interaction theory about how symbols are shared and call forth
the same responses and feelings in all parties to such interaction. |
| Balance of Payments
|
The flow of wealth from one country to
another measured by dollars, francs, pounds, yen or shillings. There are
lots of ways this occurs including trade, foreign investment, duties on
goods, loans and interests on loans by international banks. When a U.S.
company builds a factory (invests) in Brazil, it has to spend money in
that country, hiring workers and buying raw materials. Once that factory
is operating, money flows back to the U.S. in the form of profits.
Military operations and foreign "aid" also involve major dollar flows. The
difference between the number of dollars that flow into and out of the
U.S. is the balance of payments, a major indicator of the international
strength and power of the U.S. economy. The U.S. has a balance of payments
deficits lately (1977-) since large corporations move their factories to
the poor nations where cheap labor, cheap materials, and new markets are
found. |
| Balance of Trade
|
If you go buy a Volkswagen, you pay
for it in dollars at your local dealer. Most of these dollars go back to
the German firm that produced the car; dollars flow from the U.S. to
Germany. The dollar value of all U.S.-made goods sold abroad (exports)
minus the dollar value of all foreign-made goods sold in the U.S.
(imports) is the balance of trade. This indicates how effectively U.S.
firms are competing with their foreign rivals. When balance of trade is
positive for a nation, its factories are busy and the surplus population
small. When negative, the surplus population grows, welfare and other
costs go up and the state has a fiscal crises. |
| Balanced Reciprocity
|
gift giving that clearly carries the
obligation of an eventual and roughly equal return. |
| Band
|
Basic unit of social organization
among foragers. A band includes fewer than 100 people; it often splits up
seasonally. |
| Bandity, social
|
A form of pre-theoretical rebellion in
which particular nobles or capitalists are the target of violence or
theft. The bandit steals from, kidnaps, or murders rich and/or famous
persons and shares out the wealth to kin and friends. Banditry tends to
disappear as social justice increases. Robin Hood and Pretty Boy Floyd are
among the better known bandits. Many viewed Jesse and Frank James as
social bandits since they robbed the banks which were thought to be
robbing the worker and farmer. |
| Base, economic
|
The means of production of material
culture and the relations of production is found in the economic base. The
tools, factories, techniques, and lines of commodity production form one
part of the base. The other part of the base consists of the way the
producers of value relate to each other and to those who do not produce
value. In slavery, the relationship is that of slave and master; in
feudalism, of Lord and Serf; in capitalism, that of worker and owner; in
socialism, that of worker and state; in communism, that of worker to other
workers and to the unpaid but important labor force. In capitalism, there
is a tendency to improve the means of production and to destroy the
relations of production. |
| Belief
|
A mental act by which a social fact
comes into being. The everyday use of the word does not begin to be
adequate in pointing to the utter, complete, and naive acceptance of a
social fact as really true. Many sociologists and anthropologists treat
"beliefs" as something ignorant and superstitious folk have while
civilized and educated people are interested in "true facts." The later
position, inappropriately, assumes that social facts exist apart from
intending, wanting, hoping, believing human beings. One's capacity to
believe and to trust is greatly exploited in monopoly capitalism. |
| Bifurcate Collateral Kinship
Terminology |
Kinship terminology employing separate
terms for M, F, MB, MZ, FB, and FZ. |
| Big Man
|
Regional figure often found among
tribal horticulturalists and pastoralists. The big man occupies no office
but creates his reputation through entrepreneurship and generosity to
others. Neither his wealth nor his position passes to his heirs. |
| Bilateral Descent
|
a descent ideology in which
individuals define themselves as being at the center of a group of kin
composed more or less equally of kin from both paternal and maternal
lines. |
| Bilateral Kinship Calculation
|
A system in which kinship ties are
calculated equally through both sexes: mother and father, sister and
brother, daughter and son, and so on. |
| Bilocal Residence
|
regular alternation of a married
couple's residence between the household or vicinity of the wife's kin and
of the husband's kin. |
| Biological Determinists
|
Those who argue that human behavior
and social organization are biologically determined. |
| Biological Reductionism
|
The practice of explaining all human
behavior in terms of purely biological processes; genes, instincts,
hormones, and pre-programmed brain activity. Stratification, sexual
dominance, territoriality, acquisition and conflict are said to be basic
biological behaviors. Actually we do not know just how much social
behavior is grounded firmly in biology nor do we know when and how biology
is mediated by sociology. The interactions may be so complex that only
loose generalizations are possible. |
| Black English Vernacular (BEV)
|
A rule-governed dialect of American
English with roots in southern English. BEV is spoken by African-American
youth and by many adults in their casual, intimate speech-sometimes called
"ebonics." |
| Boas, Franz
|
(1858-1942)- Boas is the
early-twentieth-century scholar most responsible for discrediting the
then-dominant scientific theories of racial superiority. Through his
elaboration of cultural relativism as an alternative theoretical
framework, he came to have an enormous influence on the development of
American anthropology. He reexamined the premises of physical anthropology
and became an early critic of race rather than environment as an
explanation for difference in the natural and social sciences. Perhaps his
most influential book, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), demonstrated that
there was no such thing as a "pure" race or a superior one. Not
surprisingly, his books were banned in Hitler's Germany. A student of
Native American languages, Boas emphasized the importance of linguistic
analysis from internal linguistic structure. Long outspoken against
totalitarianism in its many guises, he was a fierce advocate of
intellectual freedom, supported many democratic causes, and was the
founder of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom.
Boas added cultural relativism to the body of anthropological theory and
believed in historical particularism; cultural relativism pointed out that
the differences in peoples were the results of historical, social and
geographic conditions and all populations had complete and equally
developed culture. Historical particularism deals with each culture as
having a unique history and one should not assume universal laws govern
how cultures operate. This view countered the early evolutionist view of
Louis Henry Morgan and Edward Tylor, who had developed stages that each
culture went through during their development. |
| Bound Morphemes
|
morphemes that must be attached to
other morphemes to convey meaning. |
| Bourgeoisie
|
One of Marx's opposed classes; owners
of the means of production (factories, mines, large farms, and other
sources of subsistence). |
| 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. |
| Bureaucracy
|
French; bureau = writing desk and,
later, drawer. It has come to mean any work requiring the keeping of
files; later a form of social organization in which order, rationality and
hierarchy are key elements. In more general terms, a way of organizing
social life such that an elite can control the behavior of a large mass of
people by means of a staff (or cadre). Lenin said that a bureaucracy was
first a military (police) apparatus and then a judiciary apparatus; that
it corrupts from above and below. It is also an apparatus which locates
moral agency in the hands of a few. Marked by formal and uniform
application of rules, bureaucracies are supposed to be "rational"
instruments by which goals determined by an elite may be achieved.
Bureaucratic organization typifies modern industrial corporations,
military organizations and a managed society. |
TOP
|
C |
| Cannibalism
|
See Anthropophagy |
| Cannibalism, Ritual
|
Involves consuming either an actual
part of a human body (ashes mixed in drink or inhaled as snuff, or eating
cooked pieces) for symbolic and spiritual purposes, not as a dietary
practice. |
| Capital
|
Wealth or resources invested in
business, with the intent of producing a profit. |
| Capital, Accumulation of
|
The transformation of surplus value
into machines and technology to produce more goods and services with fewer
and fewer workers. All economic systems need to accumulate and improve
capital goods; only capitalism tries, as well, to dis-employ more and more
people in the process. Marxists, socialists, and communists as well as
liberal economists hold that part of surplus value should be set aside for
essential but low profit services: child care, health care, teaching,
elder care, environment, and such. Capitalists tend to argue that capital
accumulation should a) follow demand and b) be invested in the goods and
services which yield the highest profit rates. |
| Capitalism
|
Capitalism is the dominant economic
system in the world today. Loosely definable as a system of private
enterprise whose primary aim is the production of profit, capitalism has
been developing since at least the fifteenth century, and underwrites many
of the economic and cultural institutions that we take for granted today,
such as private property, individual freedom and the imperative of
economic growth. In capitalist economies, the means of creating,
distributing and exchanging wealth lies mainly in the hands of individuals
and corporations (which have the rights of individuals in North America),
rather than in public or state hands. The value of goods and of labour is
defined not by its social usefulness or significance, but by how much it
can be exchanged for. The main goal of individuals in capitalism is to
maximize profit or the wages they receive. Proponents believe that through
the dance of supply and demand, goods and services are optimally and
efficiently distributed throughout society. Detractors point to the
growing gap between the wealthy and the poor, who often generate wealth
for those at the top. |
| Capitalist World Economy
|
The single world system, which emerged
in the 16th century, committed to production for sale, with the object of
maximizing profits rather than supplying domestic needs. |
| Cargo Cults
|
Postcolonial, acculturative religious
movements, common in Melanesia, that attempt to explain European
domination and wealth and to achieve similar success magically by
mimicking European behavior. |
| Carib
|
An indigenous people of the Caribbean
Region and northern South American shelf. |
| Carrying Capacity
|
the point at or below which a
population tends to stabilize. |
| Caste System
|
Closed, hereditary system of
stratification, often dictated by religion; hierarchical social status is
ascribed at birth, so that people are locked into their parents' social
position. |
| Cattle Complex
|
an East African socioeconomic system
in which cattle represent social status as well as wealth. |
| Ceremonial Fund
|
the portion of the peasant budget
allocated to religious and social activities. |
| Charisma
|
The term refers to the extraordinary
quality which some people perceive in an individual. This perception, if
widely shared, inspires others to follow her/his lead and to organize
political, religious or family life in ways impossible to predict from
previous conditions. The person so perceived usually embodies some
cherished cultural value or promise of an ideal and thus is revolutionary.
The term means, "gifted with grace." |
| Charter Peoples
|
British and French Canadians. |
| Chiefdom
|
Form of sociopolitical organization
intermediate between the tribe and the state; kin-based with differential
access to resources and a permanent political structure. A rank society in
which relations among villages as well as among individuals are unequal,
with smaller villages under the authority of leaders in larger villages;
has a two-level settlement hierarchy. |
| Civic Nationalism
|
A form of nationalism where the social
boundaries of the nation are defined in territorial and geographic
terms. |
| Clan
|
Unilineal descent group based on
stipulated descent. |
| Class
|
a ranked group within a stratified
society characterized by achieved status and considerable social mobility.
|
| Class Conflict
|
Also referred to as class struggle.
Class conflict is essentially the inevitable struggle (due to social
stratification) between social classes or parts of them having conflicting
interests, to redistribute existing power, prestige, wealth, control,
means of production, etc. |
| Class Consciousness
|
An awareness of one's own class
interests, a rejection of the interests of other classes, and a readiness
to use political means to realize one's class interests (From C.W. Mills).
Most people identify themselves as middle class even if they don't get
paid much and even if they can be fired tomorrow with no warning. Many
people go to college and learn they are better; more successful than are
'common laborers' and thus try to distance themselves from their brothers
and sisters who work at unskilled jobs. Workers, too, look down upon the
underclass and thus the 'working class' is fragmented into sectors with
little interest in class struggle. |
| Class Consciousness, Theory of
|
Marx' theory of class consciousness is
that industrialism and the factory system brings thousands of workers
together in the same place. Being together, they begin to realize their
own social power and see more clearly the conflict between workers and
owners. |
| Cline
|
A gradual shift in gene frequencies
between neighboring populations. |
| Closed Corporate Community
|
a community that strongly emphasizes
community identity and discourages outsiders from settling there by
restricting land use to village members and prohibiting the sale or lease
of property to outsiders. |
| Cognates
|
words so similar from one language to
the next as to suggest that both are variants of a single ancestral
prototype. |
| Cognitive Development
Perspective |
A theoretical perspective on
socialization that focuses on the growth of mental abilities to make
increasingly complex judgments about ourselves as well as our physical and
social environments. |
| Cognitive processes
|
ways of perceiving and ordering the
world. |
| Cohort
|
A set of persons born within the same
5-year period. One can follow the life cycles of a given cohort and
discover the larger patterns shape and pre-shape human behavior. Cohort
analysis is a powerful tool in macro-social psychological work. |
| Cohort Effect
|
Effects on people's lives that arise
from the characteristics of the historical periods during which they
experienced stages of life such as childhood or middle age. |
| Collateral Household
|
Type of expanded family household
including siblings and their spouses and children. |
| Collateral relatives
|
people to whom one is related through
a connecting person. |
| Collective Conscience
|
Durkheim's term for the moral
consensus that is violated by deviant acts. |
| Collective Representations
|
From Emile Durkheim's sociology. It
refers to a symbol having common-shared meaning (intellectual and
emotional) to members of a social group or society. Collective
representations are first and foremost, historical - that is, they reflect
the history of a social group; the collective experiences of a group over
time. Collective representations refer not only to symbols in the form of
objects (such as the American flag), but also to the basic concepts that
determine the way in which an individual views and relates to the world in
which he lives. God is a collective representation, as are time and space,
for example. The particular function that collective representations serve
for society or social groups in expressing the collective sentiments or
ideas that give the social group or society its unity and uniqueness is
that of producing social cohesion or social solidarity. This is not
surprising, for one of the central concerns of Durkheim's functional
sociology was social solidarity or social order. |
| Colonialism
|
The political, social, economic, and
cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for
an extended time. |
| Commodification
|
Rendering any artifact, action,
object, or idea into something that can be bought or sold. Popular culture
is often maligned for its commodification of formerly more authentic
cultural forms, with the assumption that through commodification things
lose their implicit value. |
| Commodities
|
Objects and services produced for
consumption or exchange by someone other than their producers. Although
humans have always exchanged the goods that they produced for other goods,
in the nineteenth century a new focus on the consumption of an
increasingly diverse array of commodities by greater numbers of consumers
was partly responsible for the gradual shift to a consumer culture. Marx
employed the term “commodity fetishism” to describe the almost magical
value attributed to objects in a capitalist economy—value derived not from
how they are used or the labour that produced them, but from the price
they command on the market. The most significant, and most damaging,
aspect of commodity culture from a Marxist perspective is its tendency to
attribute value to things and the relations between them rather than to
people and human relationships. |
| Communal Cult
|
a society with groups of ordinary
people who conduct religious ceremonies for the well-being of the total
community. |
| Communal Religions
|
In Wallace's typology, these religions
have, in addition to shamanic cults, communal cults in which people
organize community rituals such as harvest ceremonies and rites of
passage. |
| Communitas
|
Intense community spirit, a feeling of
great social solidarity, equality, and togetherness; characteristic of
people experiencing liminality together. |
| Conditioning
|
Denotes the learning process by which
some stimulus becomes linked with some behavior in such a way that the
stimulus will cause the behavior to occur. People use it to help break bad
habits or phobias; corporations use it to control workers or customers;
states use it to control students, prisoners, patients or those who resist
and rebel. Conditioning defeats cognitive processes and replaces
interaction with determinism as the relevant causal model. |
| Conflict Perspective
|
A theoretical perspective that focuses
on the struggle among different social groups over scarce rewards. |
| Conjugal Relationship
|
the relationship between
spouses. |
| Consanguineal Kin
|
persons related by birth. |
| Consensus Theory
|
The view that all structures in
society are useful and necessary; that most well adjusted persons in
society share values and norms; that those who do not are either deviant
or subversives in need of sanctioning. Among the structures viewed as
'functionally necessary' are class, gender, occupational and national
divisions. |
| Conspicuous Consumption
|
A pattern of behaviour, initially
observed by Thorstein Veblen, that began in the nineteenth century as a
result of increased incomes and leisure time along with the growth of
marketing. “Wasted” consumption (that which exceeds what is strictly
necessary for life) began to be used by members of different classes in a
way that was “conspicuous”—obvious, noticeable, visible—in order to signal
or symbolize social distinction. |
| Consumerism
|
The name for the complex set of
dominant values and practices produced by and arising from life in a
consumer society: a historically unique form of society in which
consumption plays an important, if not central role. Central to
consumerism is the (generally implicit) belief that the organization of
life around the purchase of commodities is the optimal way to address the
needs and wants of individuals, and even to allocate social goods. |
| Content Analysis
|
An empirical examination of the
frequency of a particular social characteristic or feature of a society.
This can also be done on books, magazines, journal articles, newspapers,
etc. |
| Contract Societies
|
Defined by Henry Maine, a cultural
evolutionist, in terms of societies that stress individualism, where
property is held in private, and where social control is maintained by
legal sanctions. |
| Control Theory
|
A theory put forward by T. Hirschi
which claims that crime occurs when social controls are weak. While a
strong and pro-social self-system is important as are rewards and
sanctions of significant others, still the theory ignores a lot of crime
which occurs within well organized, highly controlled social groups; most
political crime, most organized crime, almost all corporate crime and a
lot of street crime involves strong, certain and direct application of
reward and punishment. This theory and others provides ideological support
for more control rather than for more social justice as a way to reduce
very real crime rates. |
| Convergence Theory
|
Le Bon's belief that crowds consist of
like-minded people who assemble in one place. |
| Core
|
Dominant structural position in the
world system; consists of the strongest and most powerful states with
advanced systems of production. |
| Core values
|
Key, basic, or central values that
integrate a culture and help distinguish it from others. |
| Cornucopian Thesis
|
The Cornucopian Thesis theorizes that
growth is limited only when science and technology do not make any further
advances. However, there is no reason why these advances should stop. As
long as we have these advances, the earth is not finite, because new
technologies create new resources. |
| Counterculture
|
Groups that express antagonism toward
the existing social and political order, and propose alternative ways of
organizing society. The term counterculture is most commonly used to refer
collectively to the alternative politics expressed by a variety of groups
in the 1960s (feminists, civil rights and anti-war activists, etc.). More
generally, “the” counterculture describes all those groups who challenge
and contradict the “common sense” of everyday life with the aim of
creating a better society. |
| Credentialing
|
The process of giving diplomas and
other formal recognition of school achievement, which in turn makes
candidates elegible for jobs. |
| Creole Language
|
a pidgin language than has evolved
into a fully developed language, with a complete array of grammatical
distinctions and a large vocabulary. |
| Crime
|
From the Sanskrit, Karma, meaning that
which a person is responsible in contrast from that over which a person
has no choice. In American criminology crime is defined as: 1) a violation
of a legal specification, 2) enacted by a competent law making body, 3)
involving both culpable intent and 4) overt action which 5) carries a
specific penalty. This definition safely confines the policing of behavior
to that which is defined as illegal; itself often under control of an
elite. |
| Cross-Cousins
|
mother's brothers' children and
father's sisters' children. |
| Cult of the Leader
|
When people invest great authority and
power in the person of a single individual, they help form such a cult.
Often, leaders surround themselves with people who are paid one way or
another by promoting the infallibility of the leader. This happens in
politics, religion, business and military systems. The needs and interests
of single persons then become more important than the collective needs of
a community, congregation or company. |
| Cultivation Continuum
|
A continuum based on the comparative
study of nonindustrial cultivating societies in which labor intensity
increases and fallowing decreases. |
| Cultural Determinists
|
Those who relate behavior and social
organization to cultural or environmental factors. This view focuses on
variation rather than universals and stresses learning and the role of
culture in human adaptation. |
| Cultural Evolution
|
the theory that societal change can be
understood by analogy with the processes underlying the biological
evolution of species. |
| Cultural Imperialism
|
Cultural Imperialism: A term
describing the ideological infiltration of the cultural products of
dominant nations (typically, the United States) into less globally
powerful ones, at the expense of some aspects of indigenous culture.
Globalization theorists have cast some doubt on the concept of cultural
imperialism, pointing to its problematic assumption of a passive,
colonized global audience, as well as its simplistic reading of actual
processes of global production and consumption. |
| 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 position that the values and
standards of cultures differ and deserve respect. Extreme relativism
argues that cultures should be judged solely by their own standards. |
| Cultural Rights
|
Doctrine that certain rights are
vested not in individuals but in identifiable groups, such as religious
and ethnic minorities and indigenous societies. Cultural rights include a
group's ability to preserve its culture, to raise its children in the ways
of its forebears, to continue its language, and not to be deprived of its
economic base by the nation-state in which it is located. |
| 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
|
Distinctly human; transmitted through
learning; traditions and customs that govern behavior and beliefs. |
| Culture Area
|
a region in which several groups have
similar culture complexes. |
| Culture of Poverty Thesis
|
The theory that some ethnic groups do
not readily assimilate, and hence are poor, because their culture does not
value economic success, hard work, and achievement. |
| Custom
|
A practice followed by a people of a
particular group or region. |
TOP
|
D |
| Data (sing. datum)
|
From Latin: that which is given. One
collects data and analyses them in order to confirm or reject a
hypothesis. The term thus refers to a set of observations from nature
(physical or social) which are independent from the interests and
cognitive processes of the scientist. There is no such independence in the
Marxian philosophy of science nor in most postmodern philosophies of
science. |
| De-centering
|
A postmodern objective: the result of
re-examining truth claims of, say patriarchy, stratification, or truth
itself and showing the human hand and human agenda which brought the
claim, theory or practice to the fore-front and celebrates it as eternally
valid and objectively existent. |
| Decideability
|
One of three characteristics of a
hypothesis or theory; the other two being completeness and consistency.
Decideability depends upon the existence of a method of proof available
with a finite number of steps. No method, unlimited steps, no proof, no
knowledge. This is why Agrippa held that sure and certain knowledge was
impossible. But see prediction, replicability. |
| Deconstruction
|
Deconstruction: A method of analysis
initially articulated in the work of Jacques Derrida that involves
exposing the submerged philosophical assumptions that underpin texts and
concepts. Derrida asserted that all Western thought is founded upon
countless sets of binary oppositions (black and white, speech and writing,
man and woman, etc.) wherein one term is invariably considered to be
superior to its “opposite,” a valuation with vast cultural consequences.
Deconstructionist readings attempt to discover how such unarticulated
ideologies underpin seemingly straightforward surface meanings. |
| Dediction (deductive logic)
|
Latin: de = from; ducere = to lead, to
draw out. In logic, a deduction is a conclusion which follows from two or
more given assumptions, which if true, make the conclusion true. In social
science, a deduction is a conclusion from the logical implications of a
theory; thus one deducts hypothesis and collects data in order to confirm
or deny the truth of it. |
| Definition of the Situation
|
The meaning that people ascribe to a
particular setting for social interaction. |
| Delinquency
|
The behavior of young people defined
as criminal by a law making body and ruled as such by a judge in court.
Generally young people are not held to the same standards of
responsibility as are adults. On the other hand, they are required to obey
the rules of home and school else be labelled 'delinquent.' See Status
crimes. Young people became a special category around 1850 when both laws
and social control systems were set up. The changing labor market required
children stay in school and learn skills appropriate to industrial
capitalism, hence the legal system began to create a new age grade: the
adolescent. |
| Demographic Transition Theory
|
Under this theory, populations go
through three stages: a preindustrial stage, in which both the birth rate
and mortality rate are high; an early industrialization stage, in which
the birth rate is high and mortality declines [therefore there is a
'population explosion']; and a mature industrialization stage, in which
both the birth rate and the mortality rate are low. The theory that sees
population change as related to the process of industrialization and its
concomitant social changes. |
| Demography
|
the study of the processes which
contribute to population structure and their temporal and spatial
dynamics. |
| Demonization
|
The social practice of treating
someone or some people as if they were demons, monsters, devils or the
source of all bad things which happen. Most capitalists demonized
communists; many communists demonize capitalists; most racists demonize
minority groups; some minority groups demonize Anglos; some women demonize
men while man men blame women for their own troubles. The
marxist/socialist position is that the enemy is to be found in alienated
social relationships rather than in people as such. It is true enough that
there are thoroughly despicable people but most people work within social
institutions with social values to which they were socialized as
children. |
| Dependency Theory
|
A theory of colonial imperialism which
informs anti-American sentiment in Latin America and elsewhere. The theory
correctly asserts that capitalist imperialism distorts local economics and
creates a surplus population but is often an effort to substitute foreign
exploitation with that of local capitalists. A country becomes dependent
upon the U.S., Germany, England, or Japan by selling cash crops or natural
resources and dependent upon the same countries for food and luxury goods.
The developed capitalist countries set the terms which benefit
multinational corporations and banks and give "aid" subsidized by workers
in capitalist countries to repair some of the distortions, especially
those of hunger as cotton, coffee, cocoa, tea, beef or other foods are
exported to capitalist countries. By 1976, total debt of non OPEC nations
to capitalist countries was $180 billion, up 15 fold from 1967. |
| Descartes, Rene
|
(1596-1650): Descartes is one of the
more important architects of modern science. A French philosopher and
mathematician, Descartes was both rationalist and empiricist; a difficult
combination to sustain in a world marked by non-linear dynamics. Descartes
is well known for his formula for the possibility of knowledge as against
pure skepticism; he offered as evidence of that possibility the saying,
that "cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) by which he meant that
there was at least one unassailable proposition which can stand against
doubt: I think, therefore there must be a thinker who thinks, namely me.
Therefore I exist. Descartes wrote extensively on the god concept, the
short version is that such a Being exists and is infinite, eternal,
immutable and independent of all that He creates. His main contribution to
mathematics is analytic geometry which charts the movement of events in
time-space in what is called cartesian space. The new science of Chaos
uses cartesian space extensively to chart the changing mixture of order
and disorder in the behavior of complex and fractal systems. |
| Descent Group
|
A permanent social unit whose members
claim common ancestry; fundamental to tribal society. |
| Determinism
|
The philosophical position that
phenomena are best explained in terms of the events that have immediately
proceeded them; rigid cause and effect. This idea assumes social
significance when it is applied to the behavior of individuals. If a
person and the brain are rigidly bound by cause and effect, how can that
person be "free" to do what (s)he "wants?" The argument runs that what one
wants, and will do are rigidly determined by prior considerations. It is
further claimed that one's behavior could be accurately predicted if only
enough information were available. The logical conclusion of this idea is
that a human is merely a complicated machine. |
| Development
|
Theories of progress assume that a
society becomes developed when it: 1) industrializes, 2) commodifies all
goods and services and exchanges them in a market, 3) discards all
traditional stratifications in favor of class stratification and 4)
replaces social status (kinship, ethnicity, race or gender) with money as
a nexus for the exchange of goods and services. Societies which do not
accept these changes are said to be underdeveloped. |
| Deviance
|
Nonconformity with
existing/traditional social norms. This nonconformity is often said to be
pathological when it challenges power and privilege; it is said to be
innovation or creativity when it is approved by the gate-keepers of
morality. All societies in a changing environment require sufficient
deviance adequate to reduce mismatch between system and environment. A
loaded term, deviancy is a negative asset when the environment is stable
but can be a positive asset to a society when the environment is
irreversibly changing (see Ashby's law), depending of course on the nature
of the variation. |
| Deviant
|
Someone who is noticeably different
from the average within some dimensions of social behavior. As it applies
to behavior that is generally considered to be beyond the tolerance limits
of the community. |
| Dialectic
|
Greek: dialektos = discourse, debate.
In everyday life, dialectics refers to a dynamic tension within a given
system: a process by which change occurs on the basis of that tension and
resultant conflict. Fichte coined the triadic process in which a dialectic
has a 1) thesis, 2) an antithesis, and 3) a synthesis when the dialectic
has run its course. Schelling applied the dialectic to nature and to
history. Marx used a more open and progressive conceptualization taken
from Hegel's Negation of the Negation; thus a class system, possessing
many 'negations' will produce a political economy which will negate it. In
orthodox marxist views, dialectics is raised to science of the general
laws of society and knowledge (after Engels). In this formulation, the
three forms of the dialectic are: 1) struggle and unity of opposites; 2)
the transition of quantity into quality and 3) the negation of a prior
negation. An example of the first form of a dialectic would be class
struggle in which workers and owners clash and out of which a new, more
humane economic system might/will arise. Of the second, an example might
be the transformation of water into steam with a small quantitative rise
in temperature and for the third 'law,' a good example might be when
capitalism (a negative) is destroyed by revolution (another
negation). |
| Dialectical Materialism
|
A view espoused by Marx, Engels, and
Lenin that revolutionary change comes as a result of the contradictions in
the concretely existing modes of production rather than by supernatural or
mystical reasons. The idea of 'telos' or fate is pushed aside as well.
Natural stage theory, historical cycles and metaphysical causes are
rejected in favor of human action and activity in changing the nature of a
society. For Marx, each economic system may have 'tendencies' which can be
seen but they should not be taken to be inevitable. |
| Diaspora
|
Diaspora: From the Greek word for “to
disperse,” diaspora refers to the voluntary or forced migration of peoples
from their homelands to new regions. In areas that are greatly affected by
large diasporic movements (i.e., in the West Indies via colonization and
the slave trade) distinct, or creolized, cultures have developed, which
blend indigenous with homeland cultures. These unique diasporic cultures
challenge essentialist models of culture or the nation. |
| Differential Access
|
Unequal access to resources; basic
attribute of chiefdoms and states. Superordinates have favored access to
such resources, while the access of subordinates is limited by
superordinates. |
| Differential Association
|
A "theory" of crime which holds than
an excess of definitions-to-commit-crime over
definitions-to-be-law-abiding produces crime. It cannot be a theory of
crime since it is a good theory of all social behavior; Baptists are
Baptists if and only if they differentially associate with Baptists;
Buddhists do not become Baptists even if they do associate with them. Nor
does the theory account for white collar crime. It does emphasize the
learned character of antisocial behavior. |
| Diffusion
|
Borrowing of cultural traits between
societies, either directly or through intermediaries. |
| Diglossia
|
The existence of "high" (formal) and
"low" (informal, familial) dialects of a single language, such as
German. |
| Discourse
|
Discourse: A concept articulated by
Michel Foucault to describe the way speech and writing work in conjunction
with specific structures and institutions to shape social reality.
Discourse refers to distinct areas of social knowledge (typically, broad
subjects such as law, science, or medicine) and the linguistic practices
that are associated with them, but also establishes rules about the
context of this speech or writing, such as who is permitted and authorized
to address these subjects. nowledge, according to the concept of
discourse, is power, since it comes into being through the operations of
power and also exercises power by determining what truths will be
endorsed. Discourses thus have immediate, material effects on the way a
culture operates. |
| Discrimination
|
Policies and practices that harm a
group and its members. |
| Disengagement Theory
|
The view that all connections between
persons and social role-sets/statuses are affirmed or withdrawn within
social rituals. The more common social processes which disengage a person
from a role include: divorce from marriage; defrocking from a ministry;
disbarment from the practice of law; decertification from medical
practice; dismissal from the military via Court Martial. It is the final
rite of passage after which one has lost all rights to embody a social
role. Some include funerals as disengagement routines since the person
concerned is treated as no longer a member of a social group; some
societies hold funerals for living persons to make the point. |
| Displacement
|
A basic feature of language; the
ability to speak of things and events that are not present. |
| Distinction
|
To be set apart and considered
different or special, usually through the achievement of a specific
honour, and connected to value. In the study of popular culture,
distinction is often linked to consumption, with the implicit idea of a
capitalist system being that one can achieve distinction through one’s
purchases. |
| Division of Labour
|
the set of rules found in all
societies dictating how the day to day tasks are assigned to the various
members of a society. |
| Domestic
|
public dichotomy-Contrast between
women's role in the home and men's role in public life, with a
corresponding social devaluation of women's work and worth. |
| Domestic Mode of Production
|
the organization of economic
production and consumption primarily in the household. |
| Dowry
|
payment made by the bride's family to
the groom or to the groom's family. |
| Dramaturgical Approach
|
Erving Goffman's approach to social
interaction, in which he emphasizes that we are all actors and also
audiences for one another. |
| Dramaturgical Society
|
A society in which the technology of
theatre is used to manage the masses via electronics media and with the
aid of the sciences of sociology and/or psychology. The world of
make-believe enters the world of serious discourse as an alien and
dominating force. In politics, a cadre of hired specialists now use
dramaturgy to generate a public for a candidate or issue. Such practice
converts politics from a cultural item into a commodity to be purchased by
the highest bidder. The same is true in sports, medicine, religion and
other activities which used to be cultural activities. |
| Durkheim, Emile
|
(1857-1951) Durkheim made many
contributions to the study of society, suicide, the division of labor,
solidarity and religion. Raised in a time of troubles in France, Durkheim
spent much of his genius justifying order and commitment to order. He said
that the god concept was a false reification (collective representation)
of the power of groups to shape the behavior of members; of religion as a
solution to the problem of solidarity (how to hold people together when
they have conflicting interests); that suicide increases when society
falls apart (anomie) and that there were other ways to get solidarity
rather than by religion. He spoke of mechanical solidarity and organic
solidarity as different ways to bind people together. Organic solidarity
was supposed to emerge out of a complex and functionally interdependent
division of labor. |
TOP
|
E |
| Economy
|
A population's system of production,
distribution, and consumption of resources. |
| Egalitarian society
|
a society that recognizes few
differences in wealth, power, prestige, or status. |
| Ego
|
In Freudian theory, this is the
reactional and conscious part of the human personality, which seeks to
reconcile the conflicting demands of the id and the superego. |
| Ego (in kinship charts)
|
Latin for I. In kinship charts, the
point from which one views an egocentric genealogy. |
| Empiricism
|
reliance on observable and
quantifiable data. |
| Enculturation
|
The social process by which culture is
learned and transmitted across the generations. ethnocentrism-The tendency
to view one's own culture as best and to judge the behavior and beliefs of
culturally different people by one's own standards. |
| Endogamy
|
a rule requiring marriage within a
specified social or kinship group. |
| Essentialism
|
The belief that categories, or
individuals and groups of human beings have innate, defining features
exclusive to their category (e.g., the belief that different races have
inherent characteristics that differentiate them from other races).
Essentialism has been challenged by social constructivist theories that
point to the ways in which identity and meaning are culturally
produced. |
| Ethnic Group
|
Group distinguished by cultural
similarities (shared among members of that group) and differences (between
that group and others); ethnic group members share beliefs, values,
habits, customs, and norms, and a common language, religion, history,
geography, kinship, and/or race. |
| Ethnicity
|
Identification with, and feeling part
of, an ethnic group, and exclusion from certain other groups because of
this affiliation. |
| Ethnocentrism
|
The tendency to judge other cultures
by the standards of one's own. |
| Ethnography
|
Field work in a particular culture.
The systematic description of a culture based on firsthand
observation. |
| Ethnology
|
Cross-cultural comparison; the
comparative study of ethnographic data, of society, and of culture. |
| Etic
|
a perspective in ethnography that uses
the concepts and categories of the anthropologist's culture to describe
another culture. |
| Evolutionary Theories of Social
Change |
Theories that argue that all societies
develop along predetermined paths that take them from inferior to superior
forms, from simple to complex, and from "primitive" to "civilized.". |
| Ex-nomination
|
A term used by Roland Barthes to
identify one of the ways in which the dominance of the ruling class goes
unexamined precisely because it is not named as such : the process of
ex-nomination ensures that we see the values or attributes of dominant
groups not as the product of particular class interests, but simply as
apolitical, intrinsic human values that are, therefore, as unsuitable for
critique as a grapefruit or any other “real thing.” Ex-nomination also
works to legitimate the dominance of specific racial and cultural groups
by failing to acknowledge or “mark” their distinctive qualities (e.g.,
white, heterosexual), thereby assuming their universality. |
| Exchange Value
|
The attribution of value to goods or
services based upon how much can be gotten for them in exchange for other
goods and services. |
| Exogamy
|
marriage outside a particular group
with which one is identified. |
| Expressive Action
|
"[A]ction that is undertaken for the
sake of the interaction itself (e.g., sharing an emotional problem,
exchanging personal experiences" (p. 204). Source: Beggs, John, Jeanne S.
Hurlbert, and Valerie A. Haines. 1996. “Situational Contingencies
Surrounding the Receipt of Informal Support.” Social Forces
75:201-22. |
| Extended Family
|
Expanded household including three or
more generations. |
| Extradomestic
|
Outside the home; within or pertaining
to the public domain. |
TOP
|
F |
| False Consciousness
|
Any belief, idea, ideology, etc., that
interferes with an exploited and oppressed person or group being able to
perceive the objective nature and source of their oppression. |
| Family of Orientation
|
Nuclear family in which one is born
and grows up. |
| Family of Procreation
|
Nuclear family established when one
marries and has children. |
| Feudalism
|
The social system that characterized
medieval - Europe and other preindustrial societies, based upon mutual
obligation between nobility and serfs. |
| Fictive Kin
|
persons such as godparents, compadres,
"blood brothers," and old family friends whom children call "aunt" and
"uncle". |
| Fiscal
|
Pertaining to finances and
taxation. |
| Focal Vocabulary
|
A set of words and distinctions that
are particularly important to certain groups (those with particular foci
of experience or activity), such as types of snow to Eskimos or
skiers. |
| Foraging
|
collecting wild plants and hunting
wild animals for subsistence. |
| Forces of Production
|
The combination of raw materials,
means of production, technology, energy, knowledge, skill, and labor that
go into the production of goods and services. |
| Fordism
|
A highly mechanized and standardized
manner of production, pioneered on the assembly lines of automaker Henry
Ford in order to improve worker efficiency by duplicating the specialized
precision of a machine. Fordism now refers not only to a seminal
development in the history of industrialization that enabled hitherto
unimaginable levels of mass production/consumption, but also to a type of
culture (or a particular aspect of a culture) that displays
similarly—generally negative—qualities of uniformity and conformity.
Fordism has been supplanted in much of the North American economy by
post-Fordism , a mode of production characterized by smaller, more
flexible decentralized networks of labour and work organization, catering
to more specialized ranges of consumer demands (though not necessarily a
freer workforce). |
| Formal Curriculum
|
What is formally prescribed to be
taught in schools. |
| Formal Organization
|
a group that restricts membership and
makes use of officially designated positions and roles, formal rules and
regulations, and a bureaucratic structure. |
| 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. |
| Frankfurt School
|
Name given to a group of innovative
social theorists, established in 1923 at University of Frankfurt, whose
ideas remain important decades after the School was formally dissolved.
Though there is no “Frankfurt School” approach to popular culture per se
(the individual members agreed on no fixed set of ideas or concepts, and
often disagreed with one another), the School’s name is used to describe
approaches that emphasize the production of popular culture and insist on
its ideological constraints. The goal of members of the University’s
Institute for Social Research was the elaboration of a “critical theory”
of society. Critical theory has since become the name for a diverse set of
practices in social and cultural theory, philosophy, and literary studies.
Members of the Frankfurt School included Horkheimer, Adorno, Herbert
Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Otto Kirchheimer, and Leo Lowenthal. Some of the key
texts produced by members of the school include Theodor Adorno’s Negative
Dialectics and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. |
| Fraternal Polyandry
|
marriage of one woman with a set of
brothers. |
| Front
|
In the dramaturgical approach, a
person's physical appearance and behavior, that helps define the
situation. |
| Frustration-Aggression Theory
|
A theory that argues that collective
behavior is an aggressive response to feelings of frustration. |
| Function
|
the contribution that a particular
cultural trait makes to the longevity of the total culture. |
| Functional Perspective
|
A theoretical perspective that focuses
on the ways in which cultural ideas and social structures contribute to or
interfere with the maintenance or adaptation of a social system. |
| Functional Rationality
|
A concept Karl Mannheim expropriated
from Max Weber (Weber's term was "formal rationality") and renamed it.
Functional rationality prevails in an organization of human activities in
which the thought, knowledge, and reflection of the participants are
virtually unnecessary; men become part of a mechanical process in which
each is assigned a functional position and role. Their purposes, wishes,
and values become irrelevant and superfluous in an eminently "rational"
process. What they forfeit in creativity and initiative is gained by the
organization as a whole and contributes, presumably, to its greater
"efficiency." Bureaucratic organizations strive for maximum functional
rationality. - From Irving M. Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of
Sociological Theory (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968), pp.
311-312. |
| 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. An approach or orientation of studying social and cultural
phenomena. It holds that society is essentially a set of interrelated
parts, e.g., institutions, beliefs, values, customs, norms, etc., and that
each of these parts has a particular purpose, i.e., that each of these
parts functions in a particular way. It is held that no part, its
existence, or operation, can be understood in isolation from the whole.
Society is seen, from this position, as analogous to the human body or any
other living organism. Each of the "parts" of society are seen as
operating much like organs of the body. As in the body, it is held that if
one part of society changes it affects the other parts and how they
operate or function, and it also affects how the total system performs as
it may also affect the continued existence of the total society
(organism). Functionalism's critics have pointed to its tenuous assumption
of the necessary integration of all of the social systems parts. Critical
and radical sociology thus see functionalism as essentially conservative
in nature, both intellectually and
politically. |
TOP
|
G |
| Gemeinschaft
|
A German term coined by Tonnies that
denotes a sense of community, tradition, emphasis on family life, and
association for its own sake, such as friendship. |
| Gender
|
The feelings, attitudes, and
behaviours associated with being male or female. |
| Gender Roles
|
The tasks and activities that a
culture assigns to each sex. |
| Gender Stereotypes
|
Oversimplified but strongly held ideas
about the characteristics of males and females. |
| Gender Stratification
|
Unequal distribution of rewards
(socially valued resources, power, prestige, and personal freedom) between
men and women, reflecting their different positions in a social
hierarchy. |
| Generality
|
Culture pattern or trait that exists
in some but not all societies. |
| Generalized Belief
|
In Smelser's theory of collective
behavior, an irrational belief seized upon as a way of justifying behavior
and reducing uncertainty and feelings of anxiety. |
| Generalized Other
|
The organized attitude of social
groups. |
| Generalized Reciprocity
|
Principle that characterizes exchanges
between closely related individuals. As social distance increases,
reciprocity becomes balanced and finally negative. |
| Generational Kinship
Terminology |
Kinship terminology with only two
terms for the parental generation, one designating M, MZ, and FZ and the
other designating F, FB, and MB. |
| Gesellschaft
|
Tonnies' term, sometimes translated as
society, typified by an impersonal bureaucracy and contractual
arrangements rather than informal ones. |
| Gestalt Theory
|
A school in psychology that emphasizes
the organized character of human experience and behavior. Gestalt is a
German word that means form, pattern, or configuration. Gestalt psychology
thus emphasizes the study of wholes or whole patterns. According to the
theory, the functioning of the parts of a whole is determined by the
nature of the whole itself, and the behavior of wholes or whole systems is
such that they are inseparable in terms of their function or functions.
Gestalt theory attempts to organize human behavior in terms of larger
units of analysis, rather than small atomistic units. The larger units
(wholes) of Gestalt psychology are then related to their parts as well as
to other wholes. Gestalt psychology arose in opposition to associationism
and elementaristic analysis - two types of theory in which wholes are
analyzed in terms of their simplest parts. |
| Globalization
|
The accelerating interdependence of
nations in a world system linked economically and through mass media and
modern transportation systems. |
| Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
|
The total monetary value of all goods
and services produced within a nation’s economy during a one-year period,
a figure often used as an indicator of a nation’s financial well-being.
The GDP’s value as a diagnostic tool to measure the health of a country is
often critiqued because it fails to account for a host of relevant social
transactions as diverse as domestic work, volunteering, and criminal
activities. |
TOP
|
H |
| Habitus
|
Concept outlined by Marcel Mauss
connoting both living space and habitat that describes the way in which
particular social environments are internalized by individuals in the form
of dispositions toward particular bodily orientations and behaviours. The
habitus we occupy radically affects such basic activities as sleeping,
eating, sitting, walking, having sex, and giving birth, all of which
should be understood not as natural, but as a series of “body techniques”
that are learned in particular social contexts, and are therefore
culturally and historically specific. Pierre Bourdieu extended this
concept to talk about the relationship between habitus and social
class. |
| Hawthorne Effect
|
A distortion of research results
caused by the response of subjects to the special attention they receive
from researchers. |
| Hegemony
|
Developed by the Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s, hegemony refers to the ability of dominant
groups in society to exercise control over weaker groups not by means of
force or domination, but by gaining their consent, so that the unequal
distribution of power appears to be both legitimate and natural. In other
words, hegemony operates not by forcing people against their better
judgment to submit to more powerful interests, but rather by actively
seeking the spontaneous cooperation of subordinate classes to maintaining
social relationships that continue their subordination. Hegemony,
significantly, is never total, but operates in constant struggle with
newly emerging forms of oppositional consciousness. It works not by
crushing those forces, but by a constant process of negotiation. |
| 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. |
| Hidden Curriculum
|
In schools, knowledge, values,
attitudes, norms, and beliefs that people acquire because of the
educational process that is used to learn something else. |
| 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. |
| Holistic
|
Interested in the whole of the human
condition: past, present, and future; biology, society, language, and
culture. |
| Horizontal Integration
|
A synergistic venture wherein one
company acquires (and integrates with) another company that is making the
same kind of product or providing the same kind of service, in order to
increase the purchasing company’s presence in (and power over) a given
market. |
| Horticultural Society
|
A society in which subsistence needs
are met primarily through cultivation of small gardens without the use of
the plow. |
| Horticulture
|
Nonindustrial system of plant
cultivation in which plots lie fallow for varying lengths of time. |
| Human Rights
|
Doctrine that invokes a realm of
justice and morality beyond and superior to particular countries,
cultures, and religions. Human rights, usually seen as vested in
individuals, would include the right to speak freely, to hold religious
beliefs without persecution, and to not be enslaved, or imprisoned without
charge. |
| Human-Capital Theory
|
An economic theory that holds that the
skill level of the labour force is a prime determinant of economic
growth. |
| Hunter-Gatherers
|
a collective term for the members of
small-scale mobile or semi-sedentary societies, whose subsistence is
mainly focused on hunting game and gathering wild plants and fruits;
organizational structure is based on bands with strong kinship ties. |
| Hunting and Gathering
|
involves the systematic collection of
vegetable foods, hunting of game, and fishing. |
| Hypercorrection
|
The total alteration of all possible
variations of a word, including the actually correct ones, as a means of
overcompensating for a perceived deficiency in one's speech. For example,
while the speaker perceives that "Dis" is the "incorrect" version of
"This", that speaker may go too far and replace "d" with "th" anywhere
that "d" actually belongs, i.e., changing "reading" into "reathing". |
| Hypervitaminosis D
|
Condition caused by an excess of
vitamin D; calcium deposits build up on the body’s soft tissues and the
kidneys may fail; symptoms include gallstones and joint and circulation
problems; may affect unprotected light-skinned individuals in the
tropics. |
| Hypodescent
|
Rule that automatically places the
children of a union or mating between members of different socioeconomic
groups in the less-privileged group. |
| Hypothesis
|
a statement that stipulates a
relationship between a phenomenon for which the researcher seeks to
account and one or more other phenomena. |
TOP
|
I |
| Iconography
|
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. |
| Id
|
In Freudian theory, the instinctual
and undisciplined part of the human personality. |
| Ideal Self
|
Our image of ourselves as we believe
we ought to be. |
| Ideal Type
|
A construct that serves as a heuristic
device developed for methodological purposes in the analysis of social
phenomena. An ideal type is constructed from elements and characteristics
of the phenomena under investigation but it is not intended to correspond
to all of the characteristics of any one case. An ideal type is a sort of
composite picture that all the cases of a particular phenomenon will be
compared with. Max Weber developed this technique. Examples of ideal types
are: sacred society, secular society, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, sect,
church, and marginal man. |
| Identity
|
An individual’s unique personality or
self (i.e., “who we are inside”). The concept of individual identity is
complicated by the fact that, rather than inhabiting a single identity, we
all assume multiple identities that are defined by particular
circumstances and relationships. Marxist and psychoanalytic theories
further challenge the concept of identity, showing how it is constructed
by largely unconscious processes of interpellation. More recent theories
of performativity offer possibilities for challenging the rigidity of the
traditional identities on offer—identities that are founded in
essentialist notions of gender, race, and sexuality. |
| Ideology
|
At the most general level, ideology
refers to process by which the set of values and beliefs that bind
individuals together in a society become “naturalized.” The belief and
value systems of any given society are the outcome of history , that is,
of collective human activity that gives shape (in large and small ways) to
the characteristic features of a society. Ideology names those social and
political processes that directly and indirectly mask or hide this
historical process by making everyday life seem natural, inevitable and
unchangeable. The claim that capitalism is the only rational form of
economic organization is often ideological in this way, especially when
what this claim suggests is that history was inevitably moving towards a
world-wide capitalist system anyway: people did nothing to bring it about
and can do nothing to stop it. This is false, and ideology is often at
work in attempts to make false statements sound not only like the truth,
but like common sense. |
| Immanent Change
|
Sorokin's principle that cultures have
material and nonmaterial characteristics that cause societies to develop
in certain directions. |
| Imperialism
|
A policy of extending the rule of a
nation or empire over foreign nations or of taking and holding foreign
colonies. |
| Impression Management
|
A process by which people in social
situations manage the setting and their dress, words, and gestures to
correspond to the impressions they are trying to make or the image they
are trying to project. |
| Incest Taboo
|
the prohibition of sexual intimacy
between people defined as close relatives. |
| Independent Family Household
|
a single-family unit that resides by
itself, apart from relatives or adults of other generations. |
| Independent Invention
|
Development of the same cultural trait
or pattern in separate cultures as a result of comparable needs and
circumstances. |
| Independent Primary Jobs
|
In the primary labor market, jobs that
involve relatively high levels of creativity, autonomy, and power. |
| Indigenous Peoples
|
The original inhabitants of particular
territories; often descendants of tribespeople who live on as culturally
distinct colonized peoples, many of whom aspire to autonomy. |
| 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 (cf. deduction). |
| Industrial Revolution
|
The historical transformation (in
Europe, after 1750) of-"traditional" into "modern" societies through
industrialization of the economy. |
| Industrialization
|
The movement within a culture or
economic system toward an increased emphasis on large-scale/mechanized
industry rather than agricultural/small- scale commercial activity.
Although initially conceived as a primarily economic process in its
broadest sense of organization, capitalization, and mechanization,
industrialization has sweeping social and cultural implications. As well
as determining the manner in which things are produced (and, therefore,
what kinds of products are available), the process of industrialization
also effects the way labour and other resources are divided up within a
culture. |
| Informal Curriculum
|
Those things that are learned in
school, even if they are not written down as part of the formal
curriculum. |
| Informal Relationship
|
A relationship governed by flexible,
implicit norms. |
| Informant
|
A person who provides information
about his or her culture to the ethnographic fieldworker. |
| Instincts
|
Inborn patterns of behaviour in
animals, such as mating, catching food, and other examples of meeting
basic needs of survival and reproduction. |
| Institution
|
A set of roles graded in authority
that have been embodied in consistent patterns of actions that have been
legitimated and sanctioned by society or segments of that society; whose
purpose is to carry out certain activities or prescribed needs of that
society or segments of that society. - C. Wright Mills, The Sociological
Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 30. |
| Institutional Racism
|
Discriminatory racial practices built
into such prominent structures as the political, economic, and education
systems. Those accepted, established, evident, visible, and respected
forces, social arrangements, institutions, structures, policies,
precedents and systems of social relations that operate and are
manipulated in such a way as to allow, support, or acquiesce to acts of
individual racism and to deprive certain racially identified categories
within a society a chance to share, have equal access to, or have equal
opportunity to acquire those things, material and nonmaterial, that are
defined as desirable and necessary for rising in an hierarchical class
society while that society is dependent, in part, upon that group they
deprive for their labor and loyalty. Institutional racism is more subtle,
less visible, and less identifiable but no less destructive to human life
and human dignity than individual acts of racism. Institutional racism
deprives a racially identified group, usually defined as generally
inferior to the defining dominant group, equal access to an treatment in
education, medical care, law, politics, housing, etc. - Louis L. Knowles
and Kenneth Prewitt, editors, Institutional Racism in America (Englewood
Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969). |
| Instrumental Action
|
"[A]ction that is undertaken in order
to achieve a specific goal like finding a job, buying a house, or
borrowing money" (p. 204). Source: Beggs, John, Jeanne S. Hurlbert, and
Valerie A. Haines. 1996. “Situational Contingencies Surrounding the
Receipt of Informal Support.” Social Forces 75:201-22. |
| Instrumental Rationality
|
This is a complex framework that has a
simple idea at its core. In essence, the use of rationality, or reason, in
an instrumental fashion suggests the use of the most efficient means to
achieve the desired end. Analysis of instrumental rationality is usually
associated with the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), whose work
had an impact on the Frankfurt School and on the shape of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment in particular. For Weber, the rise of capitalism introduces
instrumental rationality into all spheres of life—not just in economics,
but in politics, culture and other parts of society as well. It might seem
as if it is good idea to achieve efficiency in all areas of life. However,
there are drawbacks to instrumental rationality, especially when it
becomes applied generally. The concept of efficiency isn’t a neutral one,
that is, it implies a certain set of values about the goals of human
activity and human life that may in fact contradict other values that
people hold dear. The Frankfurt School was critical of instrumental
rationality because it eliminated the critical use of reason. |
| Intellectual Property Rights
(IPR) |
Intellectual property rights,
consisting of each society's cultural base-its core beliefs and
principles. IPR is claimed as a group right-a cultural right, allowing
indigenous groups to control who may know and use their collective
knowledge and its applications. |
| Interactionist Perspective
|
A theoretical perspective that focuses
on the causes and consequences of social behavior, based on the importance
of assigning symbolic meaning to appearance, behavior, and
experience. |
| Internal Colonialism
|
An idea and reality in sociology and
society largely associated with the sociologist Richard Blauner. It refers
essentially to the experience and social position of certain minority
segments in society (in Blauner's work, blacks in American society) as
analogous to the traditional colonial situation. Furthermore, the dominant
(white) nation-state power extracts the material and human resources from
the weaker nation (usually third world) while exercising political and
economic control. The only and crucial difference, of course, is that with
the "internal colonial" situation both the expropriators and the
colonialized are within the same national political and economic system.
Along these lines, the position of native Americans, Chicanos, blacks,
Puerto Ricans, etc., in American society may be seen as a "colonial" one.
This view tends to see the racism within American society as an
essentially economic phenomenon - inherent in the structure of our dynamic
corporate capitalist economic system |
| International Culture
|
Cultural traditions that extend beyond
national boundaries. |
| Interpellation
|
A term coined by the French Marxist
Louis Althusser to describe the process by which an individual is
addressed, or “called on,” by ideology to assume a certain identity.
Critical to the success of interpellation is the degree to which an
individual recognizes and identifies with the roles s/he is assigned by
the dominant culture. |
| Iron Rule of Oligarchy
|
Michels' theory that all states
inevitably become oligarchies. |
| Iroquois
|
or Iroquois League, a confederacy of
six Native American tribes: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca,
and Tuscaroras. Tribal lands belonging to the "Six Nations" are found
mostly in what is now known as New York State. |
TOP
|
J |
| Joint Family Household
|
a complex family unit formed through
polygyny or polyandry or through the decision of married siblings to live
together m the absence of their parents. |
TOP
|
K |
| Kin
|
People bound together by ties of
ancestry, adoption, or marriage. |
| Kinesics
|
The study of communication through
body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions. |
| Kinship
|
Social relationships based on common
ancestry, adoption, or marriage. |
| Kinship Calculation
|
The system by which people in a
particular society reckon kin relationships. |
| Kula Ring
|
a system of ceremonial,
non-competitive, exchange practiced in Melanesia to establish and
reinforce alliances. Malinowski's study of this system was influential in
shaping the anthropological concept of
reciprocity. |
TOP
|
L |
| Labour Market Segmentation
|
The division of job markets into
distinct parts to which access is unequally distributed among
workers. |
| Labour Power
|
The potential to produce
goods--usually measured in terms of time--which workers sell to employers
in return for wages. |
| Language
|
Human beings' primary means of
communication; may be spoken or written; features productivity and
displacement and is culturally transmitted. |
| Latent Consequence
|
An unintended effect of a
characteristic of a social system on the maintenance or adaptation of that
system and its values. |
| Latent functions
|
The unrecognized and unintended
consequences of any social pattern. |
| Law
|
A legal code, including trial and
enforcement; characteristic of state-organized societies. |
| Legend
|
A story which purports to be based at
least in part on historical fact, but which is interpreted and retold in
an imaginative way by the storyteller. |
| Levelling Mechanisms
|
Customs and social actions that
operate to reduce differences in wealth and thus to bring standouts in
line with community norms. |
| Levirate
|
A social custom under which a man has
both the right to marry his dead brother's widow and the obligation to
provide for her. |
| Lexicon
|
Vocabulary; a dictionary containing
all the morphemes in a language and their meanings. |
| Liminality
|
The critically important marginal or
in-between phase of a rite of passage. |
| Lineage
|
Unilineal descent group based on
demonstrated descent. |
| Lineal Kinship Terminology
|
Parental generation kin terminology
with four terms: one for M, one for F, one for FB and MB, and one for MZ
and FZ. |
| Lineal Relative
|
Any of ego's ancestors or descendants
(e.g., parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren); on the direct line
of descent that leads to and from ego. |
| Lingua Franca
|
any language used as a common tongue
by people who do not speak one another's native language. |
| Longhouse
|
The long multi-family dwellings of the
Iroquois area. |
| Looking-Glass Self
|
A theory developed by Charles Horton
Cooley to explain how individuals develop a sense of self through
interaction with others. |
TOP
|
M |
| Macro-level orientation
|
A concern with broad patterns that
characterize society as a whole. |
| Magic
|
Use of supernatural techniques to
accomplish specific aims. |
| Mana
|
Sacred impersonal force in Melanesian
and Polynesian religions. |
| Manichean
|
a believer in religious or
philosophical dualism, from a religious dualism originating in Persia in
the third century A.D. and teaching the release of the spirit from matter
through strict self-denial. mano: a hand-held stone used for grinding
vegetable foods on a stone slab or "metate". |
| Manifest Consequence
|
An intended effect of a characteristic
of a social system on that system and its values. |
| Manifest functions
|
The recognized and intended
consequences of any social pattern for the operation of society as a
whole. |
| Market Economy
|
An economy based primarily upon
competition and exchange of goods and services rather than cooperation and
sharing. |
| 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. |
| Market Principle
|
Profit-oriented principle of exchange
that dominates in states, particularly industrial states. Goods and
services are bought and sold, and values are determined by supply and
demand. |
| Market Segmentation
|
Beginning in the latter half of the
twentieth century, a paradigm shift in the marketing world that involves
gearing cultural production toward increasingly narrow segments of the
public with the express goal of better catering to a consumer’s specific
tastes. |
| Marriage Rules
|
Norms that regulate whom people may
marry, when, and under what circumstances. |
| Marxism
|
Marxism is the philosophical and
sociological approach of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and their followers.
It is very much influenced by the dialectical method of Hegel, but rejects
Hegel's philosophic idealism and replaces it with dialectical materialism.
Marxism sees the economic factors as the base causal and conditioning
factors in both individuals and history. History is seen as basically a
series of class struggles, with classes being defined in terms of their
relation to the means of production. According to Marx, each period of
history has a dominant economic class and a developing rising economic
class. In time, a conflict breaks out between the dominant and rising
class, which results in the overthrow of the old ruling dominant class and
the establishment of the new rising class as the new dominant class. In
this manner, the capitalist class or bourgeoisie replaced the feudal
aristocracy or ruling class as the dominant class in the West. This
historical process does, however, end for Marx, and it is the industrial
working class that is given this special historical role of ending class
conflict once and for all and establishing a classless society. Marx
maintained that industrialized, capitalist societies were becoming
increasingly polarized into two classes: the dominant capitalist class
(the bourgeoisie) and the rising working-class (the proletariat), and that
the working-class would eventually overcome the ruling bourgeoisie to
establish the classless-socialist-communist society. |
| Marxist Anthropology
|
based principally on the writings of
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, this posits a materialist model of
societal change. Change within a society is seen as the result of
contradictions arising between the forces of production (technology) and
the relations of production (social organization). Such contradictions are
seen to emerge as a struggle between distinct social classes. Current
Marxist anthropology focuses on the transformation of social orders and
the relationships between conflict and cultural change. |
| Mass Culture
|
A form of culture produced for profit
by a vertically integrated factory system, for a large and diverse
audience. Mass culture, though in some ways more pervasive than ever, is
also breaking down as a result of economic processes of market
segmentation , cultural developments such as identity politics, and the
growing accessibility of technologies that allow “the masses” to produce
culture for themselves. |
| Mass Society
|
Ferdinand Tonnies' Gesellschaft. C.
Wright Mills, in both his Power Elite and White Collar, used the term mass
society or mass as a crucial concept in his description of the
"non-democratic" character and structure of American society. In Mills'
conception, American society is essentially twofold; an elite and a mass.
The power flow is one way; the ruling elite manipulates and defines the
existence of the politically and economically powerless mass, using as its
technology the modern mass media of communication. |
| Mass Society Theory
|
Komhauser's theory that collective
behavior is caused by a social condition in which people feel isolated
from one another and from their communities. |
| Material Culture
|
the buildings, tools, and other
artifacts that includes any material item that has had cultural meaning
ascribed to it, past and present. |
| Matriarchy
|
A society ruled by women; unknown to
ethnography. |
| Matriclan
|
a group that claims but cannot trace
their descent through the female line from a common female ancestor. |
| Matrifocal
|
Mother-centered; often refers to a
household with no resident husband-father. |
| Matrilineal Descent
|
Unilineal descent rule in which people
join the mother's group automatically at birth and stay members throughout
life. |
| Matrilocality
|
Customary residence with the wife's
relatives after marriage, so that children grow up in their mother's
community. |
| Means of Production
|
In Marxist theory, the ability to
produce; including the physical, technological, political, economic, and
social ability to do so. The means of production may be broken down into
the forces of production and the relations of production. In capitalism
the relations of production essentially refer to the institution of
private property and to the class relations between those who are
propertied and those who are not. The forces of production can be seen as
referring to both material and social elements. They include natural
resources (land, minerals, etc.) insofar as they are used as objects as
labor, physical equipment (tools, machines, technology, etc.), science and
engineering (the skills of people who invent or improve the physical
equipment), those who actually work with these skills and tools, and their
division of labor as it affects their productivity. - C. Wright Mills, The
Marxists (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1962), pp. 82-83. |
| Means of Production - or - Factors
of Production |
Land, labor, technology, and
capital-major productive resources. |
| Mechanical Solidarity
|
Emile Durkheim's notion of a
characteristic feature of social solidarity in simple, non-state
societies, where solidarity functions according to principles of
traditional authority, without many specialized roles, and on the basis of
tradition and custom. |
| Melanin
|
Substance manufactured in specialized
cells in the lower layers of the epidermis (outer skin layer); melanin
cells in dark skin produce more melanin than do those in light skin. |
| Meritocracy
|
A society in which most or all
statuses are achieved on the basis of merit (how well one performs a given
role). |
| Micro-level orientation
|
A concern with small-scale patterns of
social interaction in specific settings. |
| Minority
|
In cultural terms, any relatively
small and/or powerless group of people who differ from the majority, or
dominant, culture in ethnicity, religion, language, political persuasion,
and so on. Minority politics are linked to movements by groups to gain
certain political, economic, or social rights that they have been denied
because of their minority status. |
| Misogyny
|
Hatred of females. |
| Mode of Production
|
Way of organizing production-a set of
social relations through which labor is deployed to wrest energy from
nature by means of tools, skills, and knowledge. |
| Modernization
|
A concept describing a process through
which societies are believed to change from less to more developed forms
through the introduction of new technology and other social change. |
| Moiety
|
one of the two subdivisions of a
society with a dual organizational structure. |
| Monogamy
|
an exclusive union of one man and one
woman. |
| Monopoly
|
An economic situation in which a
single supplier controls the market for a particular product or service.
This situation puts the producer in a position of unchallenged dominance
from which it can inflate price to cover more than just necessary costs
(including a return on capital). Governments often legislate to restrict
the emergence of monopolies, since they are usually detrimental to the
consumer and the economy. |
| Monotheism
|
Worship of an eternal, omniscient,
omnipotent, and omnipresent supreme being. |
| Moral Economy Approach
|
Views peasants as being less concerned
with individual profit than with the security of knowing they will be
protected in adversity. |
| Morphemes
|
the smallest units of speech that
convey meaning. |
| Morphology
|
The study of form; used in linguistics
(the study of morphemes and word construction) and for form in general-for
example, biomorphology relates to physical form. |
| Multiculturalism
|
The view of cultural diversity in a
country as something good and desirable; a multicultural society
socializes individuals not only into the dominant (national) culture but
also into an ethnic culture. |
| Multinational Corporation
|
Any firm that extends itself outside
of national boundaries by operating branches in many different countries
simultaneously. |
| Myths
|
Stories that are told about the deeds
that supernatural beings played in the creation of human beings and the
universe itself. |
TOP
|
N |
| Nation
|
Once a synonym for "ethnic group,"
designating a single culture sharing a language, religion, history,
territory, ancestry, and kinship; now usually a synonym for state or
nation-state. |
| Nation-State
|
An autonomous political entity; a
country like the United States or Canada. |
| National Culture
|
Cultural experiences, beliefs, learned
behavior patterns, and values shared by citizens of the same nation. |
| Nationalism
|
As a form “imagined community”, the
nation is both example and instigator of the process by which identities
that are constructed or imagined come to assume the force of nature . One
useful way to approach the significance of the nation as a source of
modern identity is to think about the relationship between nations and
nationalism. Our usual, common-sense way of understanding the relationship
is to see the nation—a people defined by collective belonging to an
extensive community, usually defined in relation to a specific
territory—as primary, with nationalism as a frequent, though not
inevitable by-product. Recent theories of the development of nations
(Anderson, Gellner) suggest that the relationship might best be understood
as working the other way around: that is, nations are how the ideological
impulse of nationalism is legitimated and given concrete shape. |
| Nationalities
|
Ethnic groups that once had, or wish
to have or regain, autonomous political status (their own country). |
| Natural Selection
|
Originally formulated by Charles
Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace; the process by which nature selects the
forms most fit to survive and reproduce in a given environment, such as
the tropics. |
| Negative Reciprocity
|
an exchange between enemies or
strangers in which each side tries to get the better end of the
bargain. |
| Neolocality
|
Postmarital residence pattern in which
a couple establishes a new place of residence rather than living with or
near either set of parents. |
| New Racism
|
A theory of human nature that suggests
that it is natural for groups to form bounded communities. One group is
neither better nor worse than another, but feelings of antagonism will be
aroused if outsiders are admitted. |
| Nomadism, pastoral
|
Movement throughout the year by the
whole pastoral group (men, women, and children) with their animals; more
generally, such constant movement in pursuit of strategic resources. |
| Nonconformist Behaviour
|
Behavior that openly violates norms in
order to bring about social change. |
| Norms
|
The expectations or rules of behaviour
that emerge or derive from larger values. |
| Nuclear Family Household
|
an independent family unit formed by a
monogamous union. |
TOP
|
O |
| Office
|
Permanent political position. |
| Oligarchy
|
A state ruled by a privileged
elite. |
| Olympian Religions
|
In Wallace's typology, develop with
state organization; have full-time religious specialists-professional
priesthoods. |
| Open Class System
|
Stratification system that facilitates
social mobility, with individual achievement and personal merit
determining social rank. |
| Organic Solidarity
|
Emile Durkheim's view of social
solidarity pertaining to modern, urban, complex civilizations, state
societies, with many specialzed roles functioning interdependently on the
basis of contract and centralized authority, codified in laws. |
| Orientalism
|
Refers to the way in which “The
Orient” was and is constructed by the West as a means to claim authority
and exercise control over Eastern cultures. The Orient is not a fact, or a
specific geographical place; rather, it is the complex layers of knowledge
and mythology that have been constructed around Western ideas about the
non-West. For example, the way in which North American media characterize
the “Middle East” as a place of repressive government regimes and
fundamentalist religion glosses over the vast cultural differences between
different cultural groups of the region and contributes to the Western
assumption that domination of these “backward” nations is legitimate and
necessary. |
TOP
|
P |
| Paradigm
|
A framework of guiding assumptions,
theories, and methods that define a particular approach to scientific
problems. |
| Parallel Cousins
|
mother's sisters' children and
father's brothers' children. |
| Participant Observation
|
In ethnography, the technique of
learning a people's culture through direct participation in their everyday
life over an extended period of time. |
| Particularity
|
Distinctive or unique culture trait,
pattern, or integration. |
| Pastoralists
|
People who use a food-producing
strategy of adaptation based on care of herds of domesticated
animals. |
| Patriarchy
|
Political system ruled by men in which
women have inferior social and political status, including basic human
rights. |
| Patriclan
|
a group that claims but cannot brace
their descent through the male line from a common male ancestor. |
| Patrilineal
|
patrilocal complex-An interrelated
constellation of patrilineality, patrilocality, warfare, and male
supremacy. |
| Patrilineal Descent
|
Unilineal descent rule in which people
join the father's group automatically at birth and stay members throughout
life. |
| Patrilocality
|
Customary residence with the husband's
relatives after marriage, so that children grow up in their father's
community. |
| 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). |
| Peasant
|
Small-scale agriculturalist living in
a state with rent fund obligations. |
| Peer Group
|
People who share a level of social
standing, especially in terms of age. |
| Periphery
|
Weakest structural position in the
world system. |
| Personality
|
The relatively orderly and predictable
attitudes and patterns of behaviour associated with an individual. |
| Phenotype
|
An organism’s evident traits, its
"manifest biology"—anatomy and physiology. |
| Phoneme
|
Significant sound contrast in a
language that serves to distinguish meaning, as in minimal pairs. |
| Phonemics
|
The study of the sound contrasts
(phonemes) of a particular language. |
| Phonetics
|
The study of speech sounds in general;
what people actually say in various languages. |
| Phonology
|
The study of sounds used in
speech. |
| 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. |
| Plural Society
|
A society that combines ethnic
contrasts and economic interdependence of the ethnic groups. |
| Pluralism, Ethnic
|
The coexistence of diverse ethnic
groups in the same society. |
| Pluralism, Methodological
|
The doctrine that there is not one
(monism) or two (dualism) but many causes of why society and social
phenomena are the way they presently are. |
| Pluralist Theory
|
The theory that holds that power in
social systems is distributed among a wide variety of groups and
individuals. |
| Polyandry
|
marriage between one woman and two or
more men simultaneously. |
| Polygamy
|
plural marriage. |
| Polygyny
|
marriage between one man and two or
more women simultaneously. |
| Polytheism
|
Belief in several deities who control
aspects of nature. |
| Positivism
|
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. |
| Post-Industrial Society
|
A society in which the production of
goods is overshadowed by the provision of services, and in which relations
between people and machines are gradually replaced by relationships
between people. |
| Post-partum Sex Taboo
|
the prohibition of a woman from having
sexual intercourse for a specified period of time following the birth of a
child. |
| Postmodernism
|
Generally, postmodernism refers to a
phase in Western history that coincides with the information revolution
and new forms of economic, social and cultural life. Postmodernism names a
period—the current era—and points to the fundamental differences of this
era from even the recent past (i.e., modernism, ranging from roughly the
mid 19 th to the mid 20 th century). Postmodernism views the search for
truth as project whose real aim is achieving social power and control, and
is suspicious of any “grand narratives” or theories that seek to provide
the single explanation for how human beings act (such as Freudian
psychoanalysis) or how societies function (Marxism, for example).
Postmodernism also refers to styles and movements in arts and culture
which express this skeptical attitude, characterized by
self-consciousness, formal and stylistic borrowing, irony, pastiche,
parody, recycling, sampling, and a mixing of high and low culture. |
| Potlatch
|
Competitive feast among Indians on the
North Pacific Coast of North America. |
| Power
|
The ability to exercise one's will
over others-to do what one wants; the basis of political status. |
| Power Elite
|
Those who occupy the command posts of
power in our society, like corporation heads, political leaders, and
military chiefs. - C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (London: Oxford
University Press, 1956). |
| Pragmatics
|
The decisions made by speakers to
alter their speech--whether in terms of grammar, vocabulary, accent, tone
or pitch--to suit a particular audience or social context. |
| Prejudice
|
Devaluing (looking down on) a group
because of its assumed behavior, values, capabilities, attitudes, or other
attributes. |
| Prestige
|
Esteem, respect, or approval for acts,
deeds, or qualities considered exemplary. |
| Primary Deviance
|
Deviant acts committed without the
actor having been labeled. |
| Primary Group
|
A relatively small group in which
people are emotionally close and where interaction is intimate. |
| Primary Labour Market
|
The portion of the segmented labor
market that includes jobs that require stable work habits, involve skills
that are often learned on the job, are relatively high-paying, and have
job ladders. |
| Primary Socialization
|
The process by which children are
prepared for the various roles required by members of society. |
| Primordialist Thesis
|
The theory that ethnic attachments
reflect a basic tendency of people to seek out, and associate with, their
"own kind". |
| Productivity
|
A basic feature of language; the
ability to use the rules of one's language to create new expressions
comprehensible to other speakers. |
| Profane
|
the sphere of the ordinary and
routine; the everyday, natural world. |
| Professionalization
|
The social process through which an
occupation acquires the cultural and structural characteristics of a
profession. |
| Proxemics
|
the study of human perception and use
of space in communication and social relations. |
| Psychic Unity
|
a concept popular among some
nineteenth-century anthropologists that assumed that all people when
operating under similar circumstances will think and behave in similar
ways. |
| Purdah
|
the Muslim or Hindu practice of
keeping women hidden from men outside their own family; or, a curtain,
veil, or the like used for such a purpose. |
TOP
|
R |
| Race
|
A socially constructed label that has
been used to describe certain kinds of physical and genetic differences
between people. |
| Ranked Societies
|
societies in which there is unequal
access to prestige and status e.g. chiefdoms and states. |
| Rational Economic Decisions
|
the weighing of available alternatives
and calculation of which will provide the most benefit at the least
cost. |
| Reciprocity
|
One of the three principles of
exchange; governs exchange between social equals; major exchange mode in
band and tribal societies. |
| Redistribution
|
Major exchange mode of chiefdoms, many
archaic states, and some states with managed economies. |
| Reflexivity
|
the ability to stand back and assess
aspects of one’s own behavior, society, culture etc in relation to such
factors as their motivations, origins, meanings, etc. |
| Religion
|
Belief and ritual concerned with
supernatural beings, powers, and forces. |
| Rent Fund
|
the portion of the peasant budget
allocated to payment for the use of land and equipment. |
| Replacement Fund
|
the portion of the peasant budget
allocated to payment for the use of land and equipment. |
| Resocialization
|
A deliberate effort to change an
individual or group, leading to the acquisition of new values and
behaviour, particularly in prisons, military training camps, etc. |
| Revitalization Movements
|
Movements that occur in times of
change, in which religious leaders emerge and undertake to alter or
revitalize a society. |
| Rickets
|
Nutritional disease caused by a
shortage of vitamin D; interferes with the absorption of calcium and
causes softening and deformation of the bones. |
| Rite of Solidarity
|
any ceremony performed for the sake of
enhancing the level of social integration among a group of people. |
| Rites of Intensification
|
rituals intended either to bolster a
natural process necessary to survival or to reaffirm the society's
commitment to a particular set of values and beliefs. |
| Rites of Passage
|
Culturally defined activities
associated with the transition from one place or stage of life to
another. |
| Ritual
|
Behavior that is formal, stylized,
repetitive, and stereotyped, performed earnestly as a social act; rituals
are held at set times and places and have liturgical orders. |
| Role
|
The behaviour expected of someone
occupying a given status in a group or
society. |
TOP
|
S |
| Sacred
|
the sphere of extraordinary phenomena
associated with awesome supernatural forces. |
| Sanctions
|
Sanctions are rewards for appropriate
behaviour or punishment for inappropriate behaviour. Examples of positive
sanctions include praise, honours or medals for conformity to specific
norms. Negative sanctions range from mild forms of disapproval to
execution. |
| Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
|
Theory that different languages
produce different ways of thinking. |
| Science
|
A
systematic method for acquiring knowledge. Ultimately, science simply means
"knowledge".
Definitions on the Web:
a particular branch of scientific
knowledge; "the science of genetics"
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn
ability to produce solutions in some
problem domain; "the skill of a well-trained boxer"; "the sweet science of
pugilism"
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn
a method of learning about the
physical universe 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
www.coris.noaa.gov/glossary/glossary_l_z.html
The study of the natural world through
observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and
theoretical explanations.
www.iteawww.org/TAA/Glossary.htm
Science is a way of acquiring
knowledge. To do science, one must follow a specific universal methodology.
The central theme in this methodology is the testing of hypotheses and the
ability to make predictions. The overall goal of science is to better
understand nature and our Universe.
www.geog.ouc.bc.ca/physgeog/physgeoglos/s.html
Sites distributing information related
to scientific exploration. These include science exhibits, science museums,
science organizations, science laboratories, and academic institutions.
www.webbyawards.com/main/webby_awards/cat_defs.html
knowledge in general
etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/resources/dictionary.html
the process of gaining knowledge based
on making repeated observations about nature in controlled conditions
(experimentation) and attempting to explain what causes those observations
(theorizing) through constructing hypotheses that can be tested
experimentally. Science's only purpose is to gain knowledge. Sometimes that
knowledge may eventually lead to things mankind finds useful technology.
www.sasked.gov.sk.ca/docs/chemistry/mission2mars/contents/glossary/s.htm
The body of related courses concerned
with knowledge of the physical and biological world and with the processes
of discovering and validating this knowledge.
nces.ed.gov/pubsold/D95/defins3.html
Literally 'knowledge', science is the
synthesis of the systematic study of every aspect of our experience of
reality, especially objective reality, usually with the aim of reducing it
to a logically-consistent system of order (though modern science accepts
many paradoxes, if often with evident discomfort). The public image of
science's worldview is generally, though incorrectly, that of scientism; in
practice, the development of science depends extensively on the intuitive
mode as well as analysis.
www.tomgraves.com.au/index.php
The enterprise by which a particular
kind of ordered knowledge is obtained about natural phenomena by means of
controlled observation and theoretical interpretation
www.esb.utexas.edu/surge/Resources&Links/glossary.htm
Systematic and formulated knowledge of
a subject, obtained by scientific method that uses postulates to span the
gaps left by the limited human means of obtaining knowledge and then tests
the conclusions in every possible way.
chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/religion/bahai/sr/definit.html
Any domain of knowledge accumulated by
systematic study and organized by general principals.
www.fes-nj.com/connection-definitions.htm
— knowledge made up of an orderly
system of facts that have been learned from study, observation, and
experiments
nasaexplores.com/lessons/02-034/k-4_glossary.html
The arrangement of concepts in their
rational connection to exhibit them as an organic, progressive whole. See
Introduction, Lectures on the History of Philosophy 7.
www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/Hegel%20Glossary.htm
provides the store of knowledge of the
physical world.
www.ee.wits.ac.za/~ecsa/gen/g-04.html
A branch of knowledge or study dealing
with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the
operation of general laws.
www.wellnesschiro.com/glossary.htm
n a) knowledge covering general truths
or the operation of general laws esp. as obtained and tested through
scientific method b) such knowledge concerned with the physical world and
its phenomena
home.att.net/~tangents/data/rlgdef.htm
systematically acquired knowledge that
is verifiable.
oregonstate.edu/dept/anthropology/glossary2.htm
The method of inquiry that requires
the generation, testing, and acceptance or rejection of hypotheses.
highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072549238/student_view0/glossary.html
the state of knowing; systematic
observation and testing of natural phenomena in a search for general laws
and conclusive evidence.
www.eng.iastate.edu/explorer/topics/2001/lockheed/glossary.htm
is the body of knowledge obtained by
methods of observation. It is derived from Latin word scientia, which simply
means knowledge, and German word wisenschaft, which means systematic,
organized knowledge.
www.decidestr.com/definitions.htm
Hegel’s concept of -- science for
Hegel is an understanding based on the fullest possible context, fully
related with all the other parts of the whole revolution, Hegel’s conception
of -- for Hegel, it is a revolution primarily of spirit (Geist), i.e. a
complete qualitative change to a new way of understanding
staff.bcc.edu/philosophy/HEGELMARXGLOSSARY.htm
is a way of knowing about the physical
universe which requires measurements and controlled experiments.
www.vacadsci.org/JSR/definitions.htm
the study of the natural world
www.nde.state.nv.us/sca/science/NERDS/glossary.htm |
| Scientism
|
the belief that there is one and only
one method of science and that it alone confers legitimacy upon the
conduct of research. |
| Secondary Deviance
|
Deviant acts committed partly in
response to being labeled "deviant." |
| Secondary Labour Market
|
That segment of the labor market that
includes jobs that do not require stable work habits, are relatively
low-paying, have few chances for advancement, and have a high
turnover. |
| Sedentary Pastoralism
|
animal husbandry that does not involve
mobility. |
| Segmentary Lineage
|
a descent group in which minimal
lineages are encompassed as segments of minor lineages, minor lineages as
segments of major lineages, and so on. |
| Segmentary Lineage Organization
(SLO) |
Political organization based on
descent, usually patrilineal, with multiple descent segments that form at
different genealogical levels and function in different contexts. |
| Segmentary Societies
|
relatively small and autonomous
groups, usually of agriculturalists. who regulate their own affairs; in
some cases, they may join together with other comparable segmentary
societies to form a larger ethnic unit. |
| Self
|
One's awareness of ideas and attitudes
about one's own personal and social identity. |
| Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
|
The prediction of events that do in
fact come about, because of one's belief in the prediction and enactment
or lack of enactment on that belief, thus reinforcing the belief, i.e., if
a person or group predicts and deeply believes that certain events will
come about, that person or group will (sometimes unconsciously) modify
behaviors or engage in those behaviors that will create those situations
that will cause the predicted events to come about. Robert K. Merton
developed this concept out of his interpretation of W. I. Thomas'
"definition of the situation," i.e., "If men define things as real, they
are real in their consequences." An example of a self-fulfilling prophecy
would be a stock market crash - you would lose your money if you don't get
out as quickly as possible, so you sell and so do many others, and,
indeed, many people lose money because the values of the stocks
decrease. |
| Semantic Domains
|
groups of related categories of
meaning in a language. |
| Semantics
|
the study of the larger system of
meaning created by words. |
| Semiotics
|
the study of how signs and symbols
relate to the things they represent. As becomes evident in discussions
about culture, the meaning of a sign or symbol is not fixed; it varies
over time, in different contexts, and by the intent of the speaker/writer.
The relationship between a symbol or sign and what it represents can also
be contested -- different individuals or groups of individuals might have
different views on the content of a specific sign/signified relationship
(as is the case with the word "culture"). Someone interested in this
process of meaning-making -- a semiotician -- might study the process by
which contested meanings arise and are resolved. |
| Semiperiphery
|
Structural position in the world
system intermediate between core and periphery. |
| Serial Monogamy
|
an exclusive union followed by divorce
and remarriage, perhaps many times. |
| Sexism
|
Similar to the dynamics of racism.
Males are believed to be superior to females and when this belief is put
into action it leads to females being treated as objects, the last to be
hired, first to be fired, being paid less for equal work, etc. |
| Sexual Dimorphism
|
Marked differences in male and female
biology, besides the contrasts in breasts and genitals, and
temperament. |
| Sexual Division of Labour
|
the situation in which males and
females in a society perform different tasks. In hunting-gathering
societies males usually hunt while females usually gather wild vegetable
food. |
| Sexual Orientation
|
A person's habitual sexual attraction
to, and activities with: persons of the opposite sex, heterosexuality; the
same sex, homosexuality; or both sexes, bisexuality. |
| Sexual Stratification
|
the ranking of people in a society
according to sex. |
| Shaman
|
A part-time religious practitioner who
mediates between ordinary people and supernatural beings and forces. |
| Shamanistic Cult
|
that form of religion in which
part-time religious specialists called shamans intervene with the deities
on behalf of their clients. |
| Sharecropping
|
working land owned by others for a
share of the yield. |
| Shifting Cultivation
|
(swidden, slash and burn) a form of
plant cultivation in which seeds are planted in the fertile soil prepared
by cutting and burning the natural growth; relatively short periods of
cultivation on the land are followed by longer periods of fallow. |
| Slash-and-Burn Agriculture
|
a method of farming, also called
swidden agriculture, by which fields are cleared, trees and brush are
burned, and the soil, fertilized by the ash, is then planted. |
| Slavery
|
The most extreme, coercive, abusive,
and inhumane form of legalized inequality; people are treated as
property. |
| Social Cohesion
|
The degree to which participants in
social systems feel committed to the system and the well-being of other
participants. |
| Social Constructivism
|
One of two general ways (the other is
essentialist) in which meaning and identity formation is often understood.
Social constructivists believe that identity is not inherent within an
individual, group, or thing, but is instead largely a creation of
cultural, political, and historical forces. |
| Social dysfunctions
|
The undesirable consequences of any
social pattern for the operation of society. |
| Social Darwinism
|
The application of evolutionary
notions and the concept of survival of the fittest to the social
world. |
| Social functions
|
The consequences of any social pattern
for the operation of society as a whole. |
| Social Labeling Perspective
|
A perspective that holds that
societies often reinforce their boundaries by labeling people as well as
their acts as deviant. |
| Social Learning Theory
|
A theory of socialization that focuses
on learning through the imitation of models. |
| Social Race
|
A group assumed to have a biological
basis but actually perceived and defined in a social context, by a
particular culture rather than by scientific criteria. |
| Social structure
|
Any relatively stable pattern of
social behaviour. |
| Social Script
|
In the dramaturgical approach to
interaction, the role we perform in relation to a particular
audience. |
| Social Status
|
A position in a social relationship, a
characteristic that locates individuals in relation to other people and
sets of role expectations. |
| Social System
|
A term characteristic of functional
analysis (and specifically of Parsonian structural-functionalism). The
social system consists of both a social structure of interrelated
institutions, statuses, and roles and the functioning of that structure in
terms of social actions and human interactions. The social system thus is
said to include both social change (Comte's dynamics) - the processes and
patterns of action and interaction - and social stability (Comte's
statics) - stable social structural forms. Further, the social system
constitutes a unitary social whole reflecting a real value consensus - the
sharing of common values, social norms, and objectives. |
| Social-Conflict Theory
|
A way of seeing society as an arena of
inequality that generates conflict and change. |
| 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 society is a large social grouping
that shares the same geographical territory and is subject to the same
political authority and dominant cultural expectations. |
| Sociobiology
|
A perspective that views social
patterns among humans and other species as the result of genetics. |
| Sociolinguistics
|
Study of relationships between social
and linguistic variation; study of language (performance) in its social
context. |
| Sociological Imagination
|
The ability to see our private
experiences and personal difficulties as entwined with the structural
arrangements of our society and the historical times in which we
live. |
| Sororate
|
a social custom under which a widower
has the right to marry one of his deceased wife's sisters, and her kin are
obliged to provide him with a new wife. |
| Sovereignty
|
The possession of legal control and
governance over a specific geographic territory. Sovereignty once rested
in the body of the monarch, who possessed supreme power over his or her
kingdom. In the modern context, sovereignty has been located in
nation-states. Globalization has been understood by many scholars as
having complicated and undermined the sovereignty of nation-states. The
growth in the political power of international organizations (e.g., United
Nations, World Trade Organization) and the rise of non-governmental
organizations has redistributed nation-state sovereignty to a multiplicity
of sites and political levels (from local to global). |
| Specialized Pastoralism
|
the adaptive strategy of exclusive
reliance on animal husbandry. |
| Split Labour-Market Theory
|
The theory that racial and ethnic
conflict are rooted in differences in the price between people. |
| State
|
Complex sociopolitical system that
administers a territory and populace with substantial contrasts in
occupation, wealth, prestige, and power. An independent, centrally
organized political unit; a government. A form of social and political
organization with a formal, central government and a division of society
into classes. |
| State Capitalism
|
An economic system in which the state
owns some means of production but operates them according to capitalist
principles. |
| State or Nation-State
|
Complex sociopolitical system that
administers a territory and populace with substantial contrasts in
occupation, wealth, prestige, and power. An independent, centrally
organized political unit; a government. A form of social and political
organization with a formal, central government and a division of society
into classes. |
| Status
|
Any position that determines where
someone fits in society; may be ascribed or achieved. |
| Status Societies
|
Define by Henry Maine, a cultural
evolutionist, in terms of a society that is family-oriented, where
property is held in common, and where social control is maintained
primarily by sanctions. |
| Status-Attainment Models
|
Models of the determinants of
achievement in the labour force based on regression models that include
individual variables, such as social-class status, schooling,
intelligence, aspirations, and achievement. |
| Stereotypes
|
Exaggerated, oversimplified images of
the characteristics of social categories. |
| Stratification
|
Characteristic of a system with
socioeconomic strata, sharp social divisions based on unequal access to
wealth and power; see stratum. |
| Structural-Functionalism
|
Theory that sees society as a complex
system whose parts work together to promote stability. |
| Structuralism
|
An analytical approach characterized
largely by a shift in focus from interpreting a text in order to unveil
its hidden meaning to identifying and interrogating the ways in which
meaning is brought into being structurally. Structuralism is a diverse
approach encompassing numerous methodologies, connected by this concern
with the ways in which the structure of any given text is implicated in
the production of its meaning. Although it has been subject to intensive
critique (focusing, for example, on its inability to take account of
historical change), structuralism’s once-radical rejection of the role of
relationship and context in determining meaning has been enormously
influential in many disciplines. |
| Structuralism - French
|
the theoretical school founded by
Claude Levi-Strauss that finds the key to cultural diversity in cognitive
structures. |
| Style Shifts
|
Variations in speech in different
contexts. |
| Subcultures
|
Different cultural traditions
associated with subgroups in the same complex society. |
| Subordinate
|
The lower, or underprivileged, group
in a stratified system. |
| Subordinate Primary Jobs
|
In the primary labor market, jobs that
involve routine tasks and encourage workers to be obedient to
authority. |
| Substantivism
|
a school of economic anthropology that
seeks to understand economic processes as the maintenance of an entire
cultural order. |
| Superego
|
In Freudian theory, the conscience
containing all of the culturally constructed ideas of what is right and
what is wrong. |
| Superordinate
|
The upper, or privileged, group in a
stratified system. |
| Surplus Value
|
The value of goods and services that
is kept by employers as profit after paying workers whatever is needed to
buy their labor power and reproduce themselves. |
| Symbol
|
Something, verbal or nonverbal, that
arbitrarily and by convention stands for something else, with which it has
no necessary or natural connection. |
| Symbolic-Interactionism
|
Theory that sees society as the
product of the everyday interaction of individuals. |
| Symbols
|
A thing, image or sign that is mean to
stand in for the idea, belief or principle to which it refers. Any object,
image or sign to which people attach meanings and then use to communicate
with others. |
| Syncretisms
|
Cultural blends, or mixtures,
including religious blends, that emerge from acculturation, particularly
under colonialism, such as African, Native American, and Roman Catholic
saints and deities in Caribbean vodun, or "voodoo," cults; the exchange of
cultural features when cultures come into continuous firsthand contact.
taboo-Set apart as sacred and off-limits to ordinary people; prohibition
backed by supernatural sanctions. |
| Synergy
|
A strategy of synchronizing and
actively forging connections between directly related areas of
entertainment. For example, the merger of media giant Time Warner with
Internet giant AOL was intended to allow content developed for one
communication medium (e.g., television) to be re-used, recycled, and
reinforced in different media (e.g., film, Internet, etc.). |
| Syntax
|
The arrangement and order of words in
phrases and sentences. |
TOP
|
T |
| Taboo
|
Set apart as sacred and off-limits to
ordinary people; prohibition backed by supernatural sanctions. |
| Theoretical paradigm
|
A set of fundamental assumptions that
guides thinking and research. |
| Theory
|
A statement of how and why specific
facts are related. |
| Third World
|
Those less powerful, non-Western
nation-states that have experienced colonialization, are ex-colonized, or
have experienced modern capitalism as a form of imperialism, i.e., those
countries whose cultures have been disrupted by industrialization and
expropriation of their natural resources with little or no concern by the
capitalists about the disruption, oppression, and exploitation of the
people or just compensation for their labor or natural resources. The
third world includes those countries of Central and South America, Africa,
and Asia. The first world refers to Western capitalistic countries of
America and Western Europe. The second world referred to the Soviet Union
and its block of countries. |
| Total Institution
|
An organization such as a prison in
which all aspects of people's daily lives are controlled by
authorities. |
| Totem
|
a plant or animal whose name is
adopted by a clan and that holds a special significance for its members,
usually related to their mythical ancestry. |
| Totemism
|
A religion based on the belief that
sacred objects (totems) possess supernatural power. |
| Transhumance
|
One of two variants of pastoralism;
part of the population moves seasonally with the herds while the other
part remains in home villages. |
| Transnational Corporation
|
A firm that operates on a global scale
and works, to a greater or lesser extent, outside of national
jurisdictions. For example, former General Electric CEO Jack Welch’s
fantasy of operating the company from a permanently floating barge in
order to avoid all national trade regulations and laws would be an example
of a completely transnational company—it operates worldwide without
operating from within any specific country. |
| Tribe
|
Form of sociopolitical organization
usually based on horticulture or pastoralism. Socioeconomic stratification
and centralized rule are absent in tribes, and there is no means of
enforcing political decisions. |
TOP
|
U |
| Unilineal Descent
|
Matrilineal or patrilineal
descent. |
| Unilineal Evolution
|
a pattern of cultural progress through
a sequence of evolutionary stages; the basic premise of the early cultural
evolutionists. |
| Universal
|
Something that exists in every
culture. |
| Urbanization
|
The long-term but increasingly
intensifying shift of human populations from the country to the city. It
is a process that has contributed significantly to the reduction of open
spaces available for recreation as land was expropriated for the building
of industrial infrastructure. As fields disappeared with no new
playgrounds to replace them, it became harder to find places to hold
outdoor sports, festivals, and other forms of public gathering, which
shaped the development of popular culture in significant ways. |
| Use Value
|
The attribution of value to goods and
services based upon their usefulness to those who consume
them. |
TOP
|
V |
| Values
|
The standards by which people define
what is desirable or not, good or bad, ugly or beautiful; attitudes about
the way the world ought to be. |
| Vertical Integration
|
A synergistic venture wherein one
company acquires the means by which a particular product or service is
manufactured, distributed, and sold. Its aim is to increase a
corporation’s control over its own products by diminishing its reliance on
other companies. Vertical integration is considered by some to be
responsible for a reduction in the diversity of available cultural
products. |
| Vertical Mobility
|
Upward or downward change in a
person's social status. |
| Vertical Mosaic
|
A social structure where ethnic groups
occupy different, and unequal, positions within the stratification
system. |
| Victimless Crime
|
An offense in which no one involved is
considered a victim. |
| Village Head
|
A local leader in a tribal society who
has limited authority, leads by example and persuasion, and must be
generous. |
TOP
|
W |
| Wage Labour
|
A term used by Marx to describe the
fact that capitalism converts labor from the human activity of producing
culture into a commodity. The price of commodity labor is called wages. In
a capitalist system, people have only labor power to sell to get the
necessities of life. Wages are set by demand and supply but can be reduced
to below the level required for reproducing the labor force by cooperation
among capitalists and enforced competition between workers; by recruiting
from underdeveloped nations and by a large surplus population. It is
increased by unions, by internationalism and/ or by welfare
programs. |
| Wealth
|
All a person's material assets,
including income, land, and other types of property; the basis of economic
status. |
| Weber, Max
|
(1864-1920): Weber contributed much to
sociology; his critique/analysis of bureaucracy, his concern with forms of
stratification other than class, his work on power and authority all help
one understand the larger structures which defeat democracy and human
agency. He is best noted for his work on the sociology of religion in
which he made the connection between the Protestant ethic of hard work,
frugality, and stewardship of wealth [on behalf of God] with the Spirit of
Capitalism. In methodology, he is known for his use of 'ideal types' as
keys to understanding a society or an age--and for verstehen as a pathway
to knowledge; verstehen contrasts to empirical analysis and
inference. |
| White-collar Crime
|
Crimes that people are able to commit
because of the power and opportunities afforded by social
statuses--usually occupations--they occupy. |
| Witchcraft
|
use of religious ritual to control,
exploit, or injure unsuspecting, or at least uncooperating, other
persons. |
| Working Class
|
Or proletariat; those who must sell
their labor to survive; the antithesis of the bourgeoisie in Marx's class
analysis. |
TOP
|
Z |
| Zero-Sum Game |
A game in which the success of one
player requires the failure of another. |
| Zoomorphic |
"animal-like" |
Adapted from the following
sources:
1. Conrad Kottak. 2002. Cultural Anthropology. 9th ed. Mc-Graw-Hill.
2. Robert J. Brym, ed. 2003. New Society: Sociology for the 21st
Century. 3rd ed. Thomson-Nelson.
3. Richard T. Schaefer. Sociology: A Brief Introduction.
Online glossary.
4. Anthropology glossary and Anthropology dictionaries at
glossarist.com
5. Anthropology dictionary at
webref.org
6. Sociology dictionary at
webref.org
7. Dictionary
of Critical Sociology at Iowa State University
8. Anthropology
Biography Web, Minnesota State University at Mankato
9. Nelson -
Sociology Glossary
10. Nelson - Popular Culture -
A user's
Guide/Glossary |