Understanding Cultural Anthropology: Key Concepts and Definitions
Ethnocentrism
Refers to judging other cultures using own cultural standards.
Ego
Individual who is the central and starting point in kinship studies, that allows marking the origin of a specific genealogy and set the name of the remaining relatives.
Empathy
Understand the other person’s perspective.
Cultural Anthropology
“The learned set of traditions and lifestyles, socially acquired, of the members of a society, including their patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling and acting (their behavior).”
Infrastructure
Composed of activities from an external and behavioral point of view, by which society meets its minimum requirements for subsistence and regulates demographic growth. In this aspect it refers to family, groups of friends and in-law relationship.
Structure
It consists of activities from an external and behavioral point of view, through which society is organized into groups that distribute and regulate goods and labor. Here we are talking about companies, their employees and workers.
Superstructure
Composed of behavior devoted to artistic, recreational, intellectual and religious activities, such as attending worship practices, the temple or church and carry out in practice the behaviors promoted by religion. It includes all activities from the internal point of view of structure and infrastructure.
Nuclear Family
Consisting of father, mother and children, as a result of the union of the said couple, regardless of the quality and duration of the bond between them. Murdock said, the nuclear family has four vital functions to the functioning of society:
- Sexual relations (satisfies the sexual needs of its members)
- Reproduction (to ensure the protection of women during pregnancy and lactation)
- Education (allows the transmission and persistence of culture in families)
- Subsistence (through a division, by sex, of the activities needed for subsistence, it ensures the economic welfare of the family)
This family bond establishes several types of relationships:
- Monogamy: exclusive couple comprising one man and one woman
- Polygamy: Relationships are established with a variable number of spouses or partners. Polygamy is widely practiced in 90% of all cultures.
- Extended Family: includes, besides the father, mother and children, the parents and siblings of each of the parents, as well as the children of the latter. It is, in this sense, the sum of all nuclear families linked by blood ties.
- Exogamous Marriage: practice of marrying outside the individuals with which one is directly related (by blood) and it is the most widespread practice, probably due to the competitive advantages it offers by providing a way to extend both the size and the scope of extended families, and the benefits at a biological level, which produces more resistant individuals due to the mixture of genetic information of the spouses.
Kinship
“The sum of the links established by affinity (marriage) and filiation result in kinship, understood as the field of ideas constituted by the beliefs and expectations that family members share with each other. The research and documentation of these relationships among individuals of each family are conducted by genealogy; nowadays there is even software that allows us to create family relationships through the so-called kinship diagrams, more commonly known as family trees. Symbology includes a triangle to represent men, a circle for women, a dash that symbolizes the bond of marriage, a vertical line to indicate the offspring, a horizontal line that denotes a relationship of brotherhood, and finally, a circle with a small triangle inside that serves to highlight the ego, as we call the person on which we are trying to establish the genealogy.
Myth
These are stories that by recreating places and people of unproven existence fulfill the aim of recreating the origins of human cultures. (Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl).
Magic
It is based on the idea that there are hidden powers in nature that must be appeased through certain practices in order to get a benefit or cause misfortune; it is a constant that appears widespread in many societies described by anthropologists.
Religion
Tylor proposes the idea of God as the essence of this religious belief, and develops a concept of soul: that intangible and invisible being that coexists inside the human body. His doctrine of souls or animism is present in all societies. Religious subject proposes to distinguish between:
- Sacred: beliefs and rituals that create a relationship with the divine
- Profane: those ordinary events of everyday life.
Religious cults, which are grouped into 4 main types:
- Individualist: Applied by any individual only following socially established instructions.
- Shamanist: Specialized character who carries out their activity from time to time and who one resorts to at difficult times.
- Community: Are held by individuals grouped by age or family of origin, and carry out activities to ensure the common good.
- Ecclesiastical: Involve a full time commitment and professionalization of the activity. It is performed by the clergy, usually associated with the ruling class of society and, therefore, with economic and political interests included.