| community | the unit of study for an anthropologist; the community usually has its own distinct name, the people within it recognize themselves as members and are usually bound, in the sense that its members concentrate their interactions within it and have an internal social structure
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| complex societies | heterogeneous and culturally diverse (usually) state-based societies marked by regional, class, occupational, religious, and/or ethnic differences. In complex societies no one community represents the totality of the society.
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| culture shock | the experience of recognizing that one's own culture is not "natural"; the feeling of uncertainty and anxiety an individual experiences when placed in a strange cultural setting
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| informant | individuals in a culture who are interviewed by the anthropologist about their culture
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| key informant | individuals in a culture who become intimate friends and mentors to the anthropologist; often individuals who straddle two different cultures
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| numaym | Kwakiut term for a group of relatives
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| participant observation | fieldwork technique in which anthropologists live with other people, learn their language, and come to understand their behavior and the ideas that are important to them. Participant observation involves an inherent contradiction: a participant operates inside a culture, while an observer is like a stranger, looking in from outside. Participation involves learning how to view things from the natives' points of view
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| potlatch | a large ceremonial gathering in which the host distributes large amounts of property to individuals of other groups
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| salvage anthropology | ethnographic descriptions collected in the early twentieth centuries by anthropologists whose aim was to record as much traditional culture as possible. For example, Franz Boas's descriptions of Kwakiutl potlatch
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| total social phenomenona | ritual with kinship, economic, religious, political, aesthetic, and peformative dimensions
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2003 McGraw-Hill Higher Education