Glossary
Contested identity: a dispute within a group about the collective identity or identities of the group. 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.
Cultural determinism: the idea that behavioral differences are a result of cultural, not racial or genetic causes.
Culture: a set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all- encompassing, integrated whole that binds people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways.
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.
Diaspora: the scattering of a group of people who have left their original homeland and now live in various locations. Examples of people living in the diaspora are Salvadorian immigrants in the United States and Europe, Somalian refugees in various countries, and Jewish people living around the world.
Emic: a description of the studied culture from the perspective of a member of the culture or insider. Ethnocentrism: the tendency to view one’s own culture as most important and correct and as the stick by which to measure all other cultures.
Ethnography: the in-depth study of the everyday practices and lives of a people.
Etic: a description of the studied culture from the perspective of an observer or outsider.
Indigenous: people who have continually lived in a particular location for a long period of time (prior to the arrival of others) or who have historical ties to a location and who are culturally distinct from the dominant population surrounding them. Other terms used to refer to indigenous people are aboriginal, native, original, first nation, and first people. Some examples of indigenous people are Native Ameri- cans of North America, Australian Aborigines, and the Berber (or Amazigh) of North Africa.
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.
Key Informants: individuals who are more knowledgeable about their culture than others and who are particularly helpful to the anthropologist.
Kinship: blood ties, common ancestry, and social relationships that form families within human groups.
Land tenure: how property rights to land are allocated within societies, including how permissions are granted to access, use, control, and transfer land.
Noble savage: an inaccurate way of portraying indigenous groups or minority cultures as innocent, childlike, or uncorrupted by the negative characteristics of “civilization.”
Participant observation: a type of observation in which the anthropologist observes while participating in the same activities in which her informants are engaged.
Qualitative: anthropological research designed to gain an in-depth, contextualized understanding of human behavior.
Quantitative: anthropological research that uses statistical, mathematical, and/or numerical data to study human behavior.
Remittances: money that migrants laboring outside of the region or country send back to their home- towns and families. In Mexico, remittances make up a substantial share of the total income of some towns’ populations.
Thick description: a term coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures to describe a detailed description of the studied group that not only explains the behavior or cultural event in question but also the context in which it occurs and anthropological interpretations of it.
Undocumented: the preferred term for immigrants who live in a country without formal authorization from the state. Undocumented refers to the fact that these people lack the official documents that would legally permit them to reside in the country. Other terms such as illegal immigrant and illegal alien are often used to refer to this population. Anthropologists consider those terms to be discriminatory and dehumanizing. The word undocumented acknowledges the human dignity and cultural and political ties immigrants have developed in their country of residence despite their inability to establish formal residence permissions.
