| A | B |
|---|
| theory | a statement that allows us to both eplain and predict phenomena and enables us to represent reality as an abstract set of principles |
| hypothesis | an unproven proposition that can provide a basis for further investigation |
| evolutionism | Edward B. Tylor (England) and Lewis Henry Morgan (U.S.); all cultures pass through the same developmental stages in the same order |
| "science of culture" | human behavior was explained in terms of secular evolutionary processes rather than supernatural causes |
| diffusionism | all societies change as a result of cultural borrowing from one another |
| American historicism | Franz Boas; any culture is partially composed of traits diffused from other cultures |
| induction | collect a lot of data and then come up with a generalization |
| deduction | start out with a generalization and then look for facts that support it |
| functionalism | Bronislav Malinowski; cultures provide various means for satisfying both societal and individual needs |
| structural functionalism | A.R. Radcliffe-Brown; viewed functions in terms of how they contributed to the well-being of the society |
| notion of universal functions | every part of a culture has a function |
| principle of functional unity | a culture is an integrated whole composed of a number of interrelated parts; if parts of a culture are interconnected, then a change in one part is likely to result in changes in other parts |
| dysfunction | Robert Merton; cause a stress of imbalance in a cultural system |
| Margaret Mead | questioned whether the period of adolescence is universal in its experience or varies from one culture to another; gender roles; the importance of cultural rather than biological conditioning |
| neoevolutionalism | cultures evole in direct proportion to their capacity to harness energy (Culture=Energy X Technology);culture is shaped by environmental conditions and through culture, human populations continuously adapt to techno-environmental conditions |
| French structuralism | Claude Levi-Strauss; concentrates on identifying the mental structures that undergird social behavior; human cultures are shaped by certain preprogrammed codes of the human mind |
| ethnoscience | describes a culture by using the categories of the people under study rather than by imposing categories from the ethnographer's culture |
| cultural materialism | material conditions or modes of production determine human thoughts and behavior |
| postmodernism | called on anthropologists to switch from cultural generalization and laws to description, interpretation, and the search for meaning |
