| agency | individual decision-making based on perception of context and the range of choices and possibilities
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| comparative approach | identification of fundamental similarities of cultural patterning as well as differences
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| cultural evolution | now largely discredited nineteenth century theory drawing on an interpretation of Social Darwinism, conceptualizing all cultures as representing stages through which all societies progress, with simple societies developing into increasingly more complex forms
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| cultural particularism | also referred to as cultural relativism, the perspective of Franz Boas and his followers that all cultures are equally distinctive and complex in different ways.
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| cultural relativism | the idea that each culture is unique and distinctive, but no one culture is superior; also that one's own culture should not be the basis on which to judge the behavior of other peoples
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| cultural rules | the information learned and internalized by human infants that govern human behavior within a given society
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| cultural universals | fundamental similarities shared by all cultures
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| culture | the central concept of anthropology, which consists of the things people make, their behavior, their beliefs and ideas; a set of ideas and meanings that people use, derived from the past and reshaped in the present
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| enculturation | the continuing process by which culture is learned and acquired by infants, and the development of similar mental schemes as the result of sharing reoccurring common experiences
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| ethnocentrism | the belief that one's own culture represents the best way to do things
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| functionalism | associated with British anthropologists at the beginning of the twentieth century, a vision of society that borrowed the organic analogy to theorize how cultural institutions interacted with each other to maintain the ongoing life processes of individuals and societies
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| historical anthropology | the contemporary anthropological approach that positions ethnographic data within a historical framework
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| postmodernism | a multifaceted reassessment of anthropology arguing that the discipline should stress humanism, cultural particularlism, local voice, and the literary components of ethnography
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| social organization | the way in which individuals perceive the structure and context of any situation and make decisions and choices from among alternative courses of behavior
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| social role | the behavior expected of individuals towards other people based on social status
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| social status | the positions in human society an individual occupies
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| social structure | the particular patterns of social relationships that characterize a society
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| society | the organization of social relationships within groups
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| structuralism | associated with French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and envisioning the elements of a culture as meaningless on their own but part of a larger structure from which their meaning can be understood
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| structure | pattern or form, distinguished from function, which is how the parts of a structure operate
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| symbolic anthropology | envisioning culture as a system of symbols, and the task of the anthropologist one of translating the layers of meaning into our concepts and language
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| universal human rights | a doctrine emphasizing the rights of the individual over the cultural norms of the community
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2003 McGraw-Hill Higher Education