Complementary Disciplines Flashcards

Anthropology is the study of the development of the human species and human cultures throughout the world. Significance: to describe the variety of ways of living, which they accomplish by focusing on different cultures of the world and how they differ. For example, in cultural anthropology, anthropologists study kinship rules, as different cultures have varying rules about what they consider a family to be.

Psychology is the study of people’s feelings, thoughts and personality development to understand the underlying triggers or causes of human behaviors.
Significance: understand how people act in particular situations, in experimental psychology, experiments are conducted on people to identify the normal range of human behaviors and their reasons for them. For example, if people are bystanders or actors (kitty genovese case)

Sociology is the study of analyzing the development and structure of human society and how it works.
Significance: understand how institutions affect human behavior. For example, we can understand better why crime is committed - because people's behavior is deviant from the societal norm.

Functionalism, Structuralism and Cultural Materialism.

Psychanalytic theory, Behaviorism, Learning Theory

Structural-functionalism, Neo-marxism, Symbolic-interactionism, Feminist theory, Inclusionism

Similarities- both sociology & psychology study human behavior. Both anthropologists and sociologists are interested in group behavior. Psychologists and sociologists ultimately seek to predict future behavior.
Differences- psychology studies human behavior of the individual and sociology studies group behavior and how institutions affect it. Anthropologists look for clues in the present to determine past behavior. Sociologists rely on research, whereas psychologists and anthropologists usually rely on observation.

Use the concepts status, heirarchy, role, values and norms and study the affect if people follow or not. Sociologists believe that we can only understand human behavior by undertaking systemic research and analysis of the structures of society and how these influence individual and group behavior. They examine trends in society. ***Overall, systematic & scientific investigation of the structures, relationships and interactions within society in order to explain their impact on members thoughts and actions.

Participant-observation is a technique used when anthropologists live with their subjects for a long time, participating as a group or community member and recording their observations. The significance of this is that the anthropologist believes he/she will be accepted into the group members allowing them to act normally as if the researcher wasnt there.

Intuition is our own emotions and logic.
Anthropologists study intuiton to help us see whether or not what we "know intuitively" is true, because often what the majority believes intuitively to be true, cannot be verified by evidence.

Kinship is a family relationship based on what a culture considers a family to be. Anthropologists study kinship because every culture has different rules about what they consider a family to be and that can give insight to things such as how authority & power are distributed and who they consider to be important enough to be considered family.

A patrillineal family is a family whose members organize the family through the father's line. For example, the father's last name is passed on or the king passes on his throne only to the males in the family.

Fictive kinship is a term used by anthropologists to describe the practice of acknowledging kin people who are not biologically related. For example, godparents are sometimes considered family even if they are not biologically related.

1.where people live (residence rules),
2. how generations are linked to eachother (descent rules)
3. how people pass on positions of authority (succession) and 4.how they pass on their physical posessions (inheritance rules)

Ethnography is the scientific study of human races and cultures. Anthropologists practice ethnographic through participant-observation, interviews, questionaires etc. and use the data to describe the nature of those who are studied.