Anthropology Topic 2

Stage of the development of anthropology that arises in the last third of the 19th century.

• Search for scientific laws of the functioning of societies, from divergent approaches

• Description of other cultures and reflection on the transformation of their practices

• Search for scientific laws of evolution of societies and their institutions

This theory argues that the societies shall pass through states of development.

• Historical Particularism

• Functionalism

• Evolutionism

Group of people who live according to certain forms of behavior, gathered to fulfill, through mutual cooperation, all or some of the purposes of life.

• State

• Otherness

• Society

Set of relationships that link two groups through marriage, and help maintain relationships and social solidarity in groups larger than the nuclear family.

• Affinity

• Plygyny

• Emphaty

Relationship with beings that suggest the notion of other as interpersonal phenomenon.

• Acculturation

• Otherness

• Enculturation

This school —represented by Levi-Strauss— uses an analogy to explain the origin of the differences and similarities among cultures.

• Historical particularism

• French structuralism

• Neoevolutionism

This theory says that cultural characteristics were diffused from one society to another by the voluntary or involuntary contact, it causes that several societies share language, ideology, ways of think, religion, economy, among other elements. That’s why we see a lot of similar characteristics in different societies.

• Functionalism

• Neoevolutionism

• Diffusionism

Political unit with an independent government and a centralized organization; it is composed of all the political and administrative institutions that control a defined territory

• Ethnocentrism

• State

• Society

Exchange of cultural features, a result of continuous direct contact between two groups.

• Syncretism.

• Acculturation

• Affinity

The existence of a cultural evolution determined by the amount of energy that could be captured and put into execution by person.

• Neoevolutionism

• French structuralism

• Functionalism