Glossary

Cultural relativism: the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their own culture and not our own.

Deductive: reasoning from the general to the specific; the inverse of inductive reasoning. Deductive research is more common in the natural sciences than in anthropology. In a deductive approach, the researcher creates a hypothesis and then designs a study to prove or disprove the hypothesis. The results of deductive research can be generalizable to other settings.

Enculturation: the process of learning the characteristics and expectations of a culture or group. Ethnocentrism: the tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as the ruler by which to measure all other cultures.

Ethnography: the in-depth study of the everyday practices and lives of a people.

Hominin: Humans (Homo sapiens) and their close relatives and immediate ancestors.

Inductive: a type of reasoning that uses specific information to draw general conclusions. In an inductive approach, the researcher seeks to collect evidence without trying to definitively prove or disprove a hypothesis. The researcher usually first spends time in the field to become familiar with the people before identifying a hypothesis or research question. Inductive research usually is not generalizable to other settings.

Paleoanthropologist: biological anthropologists who study ancient human relatives. Participant-observation: a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged.