SOME BASIC CONCEPTS IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
modernism - progress advances through practical reasoning, experimentation, and innovations, instead of simply following established authority, conventions, and traditions without any questioning associated with the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution mainly from the 18th century onward in the West.
essentialism - the search for the ultimate essence of some phenomenon; that is, the definitive characteristics of something or its inherent quality, rather than its manifold meanings and/or historical and cultural contexts.
empiricism - the philosophical position that all knowledge derives from sensory experience; that is, from direct observation of physical phenomena and corresponding introspection instead of from prior reasoning alone (rationalism).
objectivism - the world's inherent qualities determine the observer's experience and can be accurately perceived.
positivism - only the methods of science can produce genuine knowledge that is valid and reliable.
scientism - may be a synonym for positivism, but instead may refer to the simplistic reductionism implicit in the position that science is the only route to knowledge.
materialism - the doctrine that matter, and only matter, exists. This contrasts with dualism which makes a basic distinction between mind and matter, and idealism which views reality as fundamentally mental or spiritual.
cultural materialism - the view that the nature of a society's culture is determined by its material conditions, especially environmental and economic factors.
structuralism - an approach to understanding culture asserting that external phenomena can be understood only in the context of the often unconscious structures which underlay them, and that these structures are universal sets of relations that govern social behavior and that derive meaning from binary oppositions or paired opposites (e.g., cold/hot, raw/cooked, and life/death).
critical theory - a neo-Marxist school of thought that challenges conventional beliefs and social arrangements including empiricism as an illusion of objectivity through neutrality that merely perpetuates the status quo.
subjectivism - an individual's own perspective brings more to experience than is inherent in the world and affects one's judgement of it.
relativism - no truths or values are absolute, instead they are related to personal, cultural, and historical perspectives.
cultural determinism or relativism asserts that an individual's or group's interpretation of the world is inescapably grounded in a particular sociocultural milieu.
postmodernism - critical eclectic position based on extreme relativity and skepticism which rejects any intrinsic meaning and reality for anything. It denies any metanarrative (final or grand narrative); that is, any attempt to comprehensively explain all of human endeavor in terms of a single theory, principle, or method. Instead, a variety of perspectives on anything exist, and none can be privileged over any others.
social constructionism - reality is not objective but constructed differently by different people, largely through social interactions, and according to biases and historical conditions.
deconstruction - an approach to criticism by closely scrutinizing any "text" by dissecting it into its component parts, deciphering the many meanings of each, exposing inconsistencies and contradictions, and thereby undoing the "constructions" of convention or ideology that impose meaning on something while demonstrating that there is no absolute truth, thus challenging established institutions and power structures.
idealism - the philosophical position that ideas rather than objects are the basis of reality, the opposite of realism and materialism. One extreme variant of idealism holds that all reality is a product of the mind.
poststructuralism - a variant of postmodernism which diverges from structuralism, mainly in denying that social systems, including language and literature, have any static, underlying structures which determine their meaning. It concentrates instead on the fragmented, multifaceted, and contradictory nature of things.
Sources
Barfield, Thomas, ed., 1997, The Dictionary of Anthropology, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Barnard, Alan, 2000, History and Theory in Anthropology, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Barnard, Alan, and Jonathan Spencer, eds., 1998, Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, New York, NY: Routledge.
Perry, Richard J., 2003, Five Key Concepts in Anthropological Thinking, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Rohman, Chris, 1999, A World of Ideas: A Dictionary of Important Theories, Concepts, Beliefs, and Thinkers, New York, NY: Ballantine Books.