| acculturation | The exchange of cultural features that results when groups come into continuous firsthand contact; the original cultural patterns of either or both groups may be altered, but the groups remain distinct.
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| achieved status | Social status that comes through talents, actions, efforts, activities, and accomplishments, rather than ascription.
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| adaptation | The process by which organisms cope with environmental stresses.
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| age set | Group uniting all men or women (usually men) born during a certain time span; this group controls property and often has political and military functions.
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| agency | The active role that individuals play in interpreting, using, making, and remaking culture.
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| agriculture | Nonindustrial system of plant cultivation characterized by continuous and intensive use of land and labor.
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| animism | Belief in souls or doubles.
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| anthropology | The study of the human species and its immediate ancestors.
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| anthropology and education | Anthropological research in classrooms, homes, and neighborhoods, viewing students as total cultural creatures whose enculturation and attitudes toward education belong to a larger context that includes family, peers, and society.
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| antimodernism | The rejection of the modern in favor of what is perceived as an earlier, purer, and better way of life; based on disillusionment with industrialization, globalization, and developments in science, technology, and consumption patterns.
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| applied anthropology | The application of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and methods to identify, assess, and solve contemporary social problems.
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| archaeological anthropology | The branch of anthropology that reconstructs, describes, and interprets human behavior and cultural patterns through material remains; best known for the study of prehistory. Also known as "archaeology."
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| ascribed status | Social status (e.g., race or gender) that people have little or no choice about occupying.
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| assimilation | The process of change that a minority group may experience when it moves to a country where another culture dominates; the minority is incorporated into the dominant culture to the point that it no longer exists as a separate cultural unit.
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| balanced reciprocity | See generalized reciprocity.
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| band | Basic unit of social organization among foragers. A band includes fewer than one hundred people; it often splits up seasonally.
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| big man | Figure often found among tribal horticulturalists and pastoralists. The big man occupies no office but creates his reputation through entrepreneurship and generosity to others. Neither his wealth nor his position passes to his heirs.
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| biocultural | Referring to the inclusion and combination (to solve a common problem) of both biological and cultural approaches—one of anthropology's hallmarks.
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| biological anthropology | The branch of anthropology that studies human biological diversity in time and space—for instance, hominid evolution, human genetics, human biological adaptation; also includes primatology (behavior and evolution of monkeys and apes). Also called physical anthropology.
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| Black English Vernacular (BEV) | A rule-governed dialect of American English with roots in southern English. BEV is spoken by African American youth and by many adults in their casual, intimate speech—sometimes called ebonics.
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| bourgeoisie | One of Karl Marx's opposed classes; owners of the means of production (factories, mines, large farms, and other sources of subsistence).
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| bridewealth | A customary gift before, at, or after marriage from the husband and his kin to the wife and her kin; see also progeny price.
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| call systems | Systems of communication among nonhuman primates, composed of a limited number of sounds that vary in intensity and duration. Tied to environmental stimuli.
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| capital | Wealth or resources invested in business, with the intent of producing a profit.
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| capitalist world economy | The single world system, which emerged in the 16th century, committed to production for sale, with the object of maximizing profits rather than supplying domestic needs.
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| cargo cults | Postcolonial, acculturative, religious movements common in Melanesia that attempt to explain European domination and wealth and to achieve similar success magically by mimicking European behavior.
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| caste system | Closed, hereditary system of stratification, often dictated by religion; hierarchical social status is ascribed at birth, so that people are locked into their parents' social position.
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| chiefdom | Form of sociopolitical organization intermediate between the tribe and the state; kin-based with differential access to resources and a permanent political structure.
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| clan | Unilineal descent group based on stipulated descent.
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| climate change | Global warming, plus changing sea levels, precipitation, storms, and ecosystem effects.
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| colonialism | The political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended time.
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| communal religions | In Wallace's typology, these religions have—in addition to shamanic cults—communal cults in which people organize community rituals such as harvest ceremonies and rites of passage.
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| communism | Spelled with a lowercase c, describes a social system in which property is owned by the community and in which people work of the common good.
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| Communism | Spelled with a capital C, a political movement and doctrine seeking to overthrow capitalism and to establish a form of communism such as that which prevailed in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1917 to 1991.
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| communitas | Intense community spirit, a feeling of great social solidarity, equality, and togetherness; characteristic of people experiencing liminality together.
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| complex societies | Nations; large and populous, with social stratification and central governments.
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| conflict resolution | The means by which disputes are socially regulated and settled; found in all societies, but the resolution methods tend to be more formal and effective in states than in nonstates.
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| core | Dominant structural position in the world system; consists of the strongest and most powerful states with advanced systems of production.
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| core values | Key, basic, or central values that integrate a culture and help distinguish it from others.
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| correlation | An association between two or more variables such that when one changes (varies), the other(s) also change(s) (covaries); for example, temperature and sweating.
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| cultural anthropology | The study of human society and culture; describes, analyzes, interprets, and explains social and cultural similarities and differences.
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| cultural colonialism | Within a nation or empire, domination by one ethnic group or nationality and its culture/ ideology over others—e.g., the dominance of Russian people, language, and culture in the former Soviet Union.
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| cultural consultant | Someone the ethnographer gets to know in the field, who teaches him or her about their society and culture, aka informant.
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| cultural imperialism | The rapid spread or advance of one culture at the expense of others, or its imposition on other cultures, which it modifies, replaces, or destroys—usually because of differential economic or political influence.
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| cultural relativism | The position that the values and standards of cultures differ and deserve respect. Anthropology is characterized by methodological rather than moral relativism: In order to understand another culture fully, anthropologists try to understand its members' beliefs and motivations. Methodological relativism does not preclude making moral judgments or taking action.
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| cultural resource management (CRM) | The branch of applied archaeology aimed at preserving sites threatened by dams, highways, and other projects.
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| cultural rights | Doctrine that certain rights are vested not in individuals but in identifiable groups, such as religious and ethnic minorities and indigenous societies.
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| cultural transmission | A basic feature of language; transmission through learning.
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| culture | Traditions and customs that govern behavior and beliefs; distinctly human; transmitted through learning.
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| curer | Specialized role acquired through a culturally appropriate process of selection, training, certification, and acquisition of a professional image; the curer is consulted by patients, who believe in his or her special powers, and receives some form of special consideration; a cultural universal.
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| daughter languages | Languages developing out of the same parent language; for example, French and Spanish are daughter languages of Latin.
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| descent | Rule assigning social identity on the basis of some aspect of one's ancestry.
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| descent group | A permanent social unit whose members claim common ancestry; fundamental to tribal society.
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| descriptive linguistics | The scientific study of a spoken language, including its phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax.
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| development anthropology | The branch of applied anthropology that focuses on social issues in, and the cultural dimension of, economic development.
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| diaspora | The offspring of an area who have spread to many lands.
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| differential access | Unequal access to resources; basic attribute of chiefdoms and states. Superordinates have favored access to such resources, while the access of subordinates is limited by superordinates.
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| diffusion | Borrowing between cultures either directly or through intermediaries.
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| diglossia | The existence of "high" (formal) and "low" (familial) dialects of a single language, such as German.
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| discrimination | Policies and practices that harm a group and its members.
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| disease | An etic or scientifically identified health threat caused by a bacterium, virus, fungus, parasite, or other pathogen.
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| displacement | A linguistic capacity that allows humans to talk about things and events that are not present.
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| domestic–public dichotomy | Contrast between women's role in the home and men's role in public life, with a corresponding social devaluation of women's work and worth.
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| dowry | A marital exchange in which the wife's group provides substantial gifts to the husband's family.
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| ecological anthropology | Study of cultural adaptations to environments.
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| economy | A population's system of production, distribution, and consumption of resources.
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| emic | The research strategy that focuses on native explanations and criteria of significance.
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| enculturation | The social process by which culture is learned and transmitted across the generations.
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| endogamy | Marriage between people of the same social group.
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| equity, increased | A reduction in absolute poverty and a fairer (more even) distribution of wealth.
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| essentialism | The process of viewing an identity as established, real, and frozen, so as to hide the historical processes and politics within which that identity developed.
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| ethnic group | Group distinguished by cultural similarities (shared among members of that group) and differences (between that group and others); ethnic group members share beliefs, values, habits, customs, and norms, and a common language, religion, history, geography, kinship, and/or race.
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| ethnicity | Identification with, and feeling part of, an ethnic group, and exclusion from certain other groups because of this affiliation.
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| ethnocentrism | The tendency to view one's own culture as best and to judge the behavior and beliefs of culturally different people by one's own standards.
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| ethnocide | Destruction by a dominant group of the culture of an ethnic group.
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| ethnoecology | A culture's set of environmental practices and perceptions.
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| ethnography | Field work in a particular culture.
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| ethnology | The theoretical, comparative study of society and culture; compares cultures in time and space.
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| etic | The research strategy that emphasizes the observer's rather than the natives' explanations, categories, and criteria of significance.
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| exogamy | Mating or marriage outside one's kin group; a cultural universal.
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| extended family household | Expanded household including three or more generations.
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| extradomestic | Outside the home; within or pertaining to the public domain.
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| family | A group of people (e.g., parents, children, siblings, grandparents, grandchildren, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, cousins, spouses, siblings-in-law, parents-in-law, children-in-law) who are considered to be related in some way, for example, by "blood" (common ancestry or descent) or marriage.
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| family of orientation | Nuclear family in which one is born and grows up.
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| family of procreation | Nuclear family established when one marries and has children.
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| fiscal | Pertaining to finances and taxation.
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| focal vocabulary | A set of words and distinctions that are particularly important to certain groups (those with particular foci of experience or activity), such as types of snow to Eskimos or skiers.
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| food production | Plant cultivation and animal domestication.
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| gender roles | The tasks and activities that a culture assigns to each sex.
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| gender stereotypes | Oversimplified but strongly held ideas about the characteristics of males and females.
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| gender stratification | Unequal distribution of rewards (socially valued resources, power, prestige, and personal freedom) between men and women, reflecting their different positions in a social hierarchy.
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| genealogical method | Procedures by which ethnographers discover and record connections of kinship, descent, and marriage, using diagrams and symbols.
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| general anthropology | The field of anthropology as a whole, consisting of cultural, archaeological, biological, and linguistic anthropology.
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| generality | Culture pattern or trait that exists in some but not all societies.
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| generalized reciprocity | Principle that characterizes exchanges between closely related individuals. As social distance increases, reciprocity becomes balanced and finally negative.
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| genitor | Biological father of a child.
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| genocide | Policies aimed at, and/or resulting in, the physical extinction (through mass murder) of a people perceived as a racial group, that is, as sharing defining physical, genetic, or other biological characteristics.
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| globalization | The accelerating interdependence of nations in a world system linked economically and through mass media and modern transportation systems.
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| greenhouse effect | Warming from trapped atmospheric gases.
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| head, village | See village head.
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| health care systems | Beliefs, customs, and specialists concerned with ensuring health and preventing and curing illness; a cultural universal.
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| hegemonic reading | The meaning of a text (including varied cultural products) as defined by its creators or other elites.
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| hegemony | As used by Antonio Gramsci, a stratified social order in which subordinates comply with domination by internalizing its values and accepting its "naturalness."
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| hidden transcript | As used by James Scott, the critique of power by the oppressed that goes on offstage—in private—where the power holders can't see it.
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| historical linguistics | Subdivision of linguistics that studies languages over time.
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| holistic | Interested in the whole of the human condition past, present, and future; biology, society, language, and culture.
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| hominid | A member of the taxonomic family that includes humans and the African apes and their immediate ancestors.
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| hominin | A member of the human lineage after its split from ancestral chimps; used to describe all the human species that ever have existed, including the extinct ones, but excluding chimps and gorillas.
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| horticulture | Nonindustrial system of plant cultivation in which plots lie fallow for varying lengths of time.
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| human rights | Doctrine that invokes a realm of justice and morality beyond and superior to particular countries, cultures, and religions. Human rights, usually seen as vested in individuals, would include the right to speak freely, to hold religious beliefs without persecution, and not to be enslaved.
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| hypodescent | A rule that automatically places the children of a union or mating between members of different socioeconomic groups in the less privileged group.
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| illness | An emic condition of poor health felt by individual.
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| imperialism | A policy of extending the rule of a nation or empire over foreign nations and of taking and holding foreign colonies.
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| incest | Sexual relations with a close relative.
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| independent invention | Development of the same culture trait or pattern in separate cultures as a result of comparable needs and circumstances.
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| indigenized | Modified to fit the local culture.
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| indigenous peoples | The original inhabitants of particular territories; often descendants of tribespeople who live on as culturally distinct colonized peoples, many of whom aspire to autonomy.
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| Industrial Revolution | The historical transformation (in Europe, after 1750) of "traditional" into "modern" societies through industrialization of the economy.
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| informed consent | An agreement sought by ethnographers from community members to take part in research.
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| intellectual property rights (IPR) | Each society's cultural base—its core beliefs and principles. IPR is claimed as a group right—a cultural right, allowing indigenous groups to control who may know and use their collective knowledge and its applications.
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| international culture | Cultural traditions that extend beyond national boundaries.
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| intervention philosophy | Guiding principle of colonialism, conquest, missionization, or development; an ideological justification for outsiders to guide native peoples in specific directions.
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| interview schedule | Ethnographic tool for structuring a formal interview. A prepared form (usually printed or mimeographed) that guides interviews with households or individuals being compared systematically. Contrasts with a questionnaire because the researcher has personal contact and records people's answers.
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| key cultural consultant | An expert on a particular aspect of local life who helps the ethnographer understand that aspect.
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| kinesics | The study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions.
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| law | A legal code, including trial and enforcement; characteristic of state-organized societies.
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| leveling mechanisms | Customs and social actions that operate to reduce differences in wealth and thus to bring standouts in line with community norms.
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| levirate | Custom by which a widow marries the brother of her deceased husband.
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| lexicon | Vocabulary; a dictionary containing all the morphemes in a language and their meaning.
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| life history | Of a cultural consultant; provides a personal cultural portrait of existence or change in a culture.
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| liminality | The critically important marginal or in-between phase of a rite of passage.
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| lineage | Unilineal descent group based on demonstrated descent.
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| linguistic anthropology | The branch of anthropology that studies linguistic variation in time and space, including interrelations between language and culture; includes historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.
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| longitudinal research | Long-term study of a community, society, culture, or other unit, usually based on repeated visits.
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| magic | Use of supernatural techniques to accomplish specific aims.
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| majority groups | Superordinate, dominant, or controlling groups in a social-political hierarchy.
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| mana | Sacred impersonal force in Melanesian and Polynesian religions.
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| market principle | Profit-oriented principle of exchange that dominates in states, particularly industrial states. Goods and services are bought and sold, and values are determined by supply and demand.
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| matrilineal descent | Unilineal descent rule in which people join the mother's group automatically at birth and stay members throughout life.
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| matrilocality | Customary residence with the wife's relatives after marriage, so that children grow up in their mother's community.
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| means (or factors) of production | Land, labor, technology, and capital—major productive resources.
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| medical anthropology | Unites biological and cultural anthropologists in the study of disease, health problems, health care systems, and theories about illness in different cultures and ethnic groups.
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| minority groups | Subordinate groups in a social–political hierarchy, with inferior power and less secure access to resources than majority groups have.
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| mode of production | Way of organizing production—a set of social relations through which labor is deployed to wrest energy from nature by means of tools, skills, and knowledge.
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| monotheism | Worship of an eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent supreme being.
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| morphology | The study of form; used in linguistics (the study of morphemes and word construction) and for form in general—for example, biomorphology relates to physical form.
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| multiculturalism | The view of cultural diversity in a country as something good and desirable; a multicultural society socializes individuals not only into the dominant (national) culture, but also into an ethnic culture.
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| nation | Once a synonym for "ethnic group," designating a single culture sharing a language, religion, history, territory, ancestry, and kinship; now usually a synonym for "state" or "nation-state."
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| national culture | Cultural experiences, beliefs, learned behavior patterns, and values shared by citizens of the same nation.
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| nationalities | Ethnic groups that once had, or wish to have or regain, autonomous political status (their own country).
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| nation-state | An autonomous political entity, a country like the United States or Canada.
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| natural selection | Originally formulated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace; the process by which nature selects the forms most fit to survive and reproduce in a given environment, such as the tropics.
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| negative reciprocity | See generalized reciprocity.
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| neoliberalism | Revival of Adam Smith's classic economic liberalism, the idea that governments should not regulate private enterprise and that free market forces should rule; a currently dominant intervention philosophy.
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| neolocality | Postmarital residence pattern in which a couple establishes a new place of residence rather than living with or near either set of parents.
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| nomadism, pastoral | Movement throughout the year by the whole pastoral group (men, women, and children) with their animals. More generally, such constant movement in pursuit of strategic resources.
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| office | Permanent political position.
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| Olympian religions | In Wallace's typology, develop with state organization; have fulltime religious specialists—professional priesthoods.
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| open-class system | Stratification system that facilitates social mobility, with individual achievement and personal merit determining social rank.
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| overinnovation | Characteristic of development projects that require major changes in people's daily lives, especially ones that interfere with customary subsistence pursuits.
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| pantribal sodality | A non-kin-based group that exists throughout a tribe, spanning several villages.
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| participant observation | A characteristic ethnographic technique; taking part in the events one is observing, describing, and analyzing.
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| particularity | Distinctive or unique culture trait, pattern, or integration.
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| pastoralists | People who use a food-producing strategy of adaptation based on care of herds of domesticated animals.
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| patriarchy | Political system ruled by men in which women have inferior social and political status, including basic human rights.
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| patrilineal descent | Unilineal descent rule in which people join the father's group automatically at birth and stay members throughout life.
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| patrilineal–patrilocal complex | An interrelated constellation of patrilineality, patrilocality, warfare, and male supremacy.
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| patrilocality | Customary residence with the husband's relatives after marriage, so that children grow up in their father's community.
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| peasant | Small-scale agriculturist living in a state, with rent fund obligations.
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| periphery | Weakest structural position in the world system.
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| phenotype | An organism's evident traits, its "manifest biology"—anatomy and physiology.
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| phoneme | Significant sound contrast in a language that serves to distinguish meaning, as in minimal pairs.
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| phonemics | The study of the sound contrasts (phonemes) of a particular language.
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| phonetics | The study of speech sounds in general; what people actually say in various languages.
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| phonology | The study of sounds used in speech.
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| physical anthropology | See biological anthropology.
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| plural marriage | Marriage of a man to two or more women (polygyny) or marriage of a woman to two or more men (polyandry)—at the same time; see also polygamy.
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| plural society | A society that combines ethnic contrasts, ecological specialization (i.e., use of different environmental resources by each ethnic group), and the economic interdependence of those groups.
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| polyandry | Variety of plural marriage in which a woman has more than one husband.
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| polygamy | Marriage with three or more spouses, at the same time; see also plural marriage.
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| polygyny | Variety of plural marriage in which a man has more than one wife.
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| polytheism | Belief in several deities who control aspects of nature.
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| postcolonial | Referring to interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized (mainly after 1800); more generally, "postcolonial" may be used to signify a position against imperialism and Eurocentrism.
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| postmodern | In its most general sense, describes the blurring and breakdown of established canons (rules, standards), categories, distinctions, and boundaries.
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| postmodernism | A style and movement in architecture that succeeded modernism. Compared with modernism, postmodernism is less geometric, less functional, less austere, more playful, and more willing to include elements from diverse times and cultures; post-modern now describes comparable developments in music, literature, and visual art.
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| postmodernity | Condition of a world in flux, with people on-the-move, in which established groups, boundaries, identities, contrasts, and standards are reaching out and breaking down.
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| potlatch | Competitive feast among Indians on the North Pacific Coast of North America.
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| power | The ability to exercise one's will over others—to do what one wants; the basis of political status.
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| prejudice | Devaluing (looking down on) a group because of its assumed behavior, values, capabilities, or attributes.
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| prestige | Esteem, respect, or approval for acts, deeds, or qualities considered exemplary.
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| productivity | The ability to use the rules of one's language to create new expressions comprehensible to other speakers; a basic feature of language.
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| progeny price | A gift from the husband and his kin to the wife and her kin before, at, or after marriage; legitimizes children born to the woman as members of the husband's descent group.
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| proletariat | See working class.
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| protolanguage | Language ancestral to several daughter languages.
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| public transcript | As used by James Scott, the open, public interactions between dominators and oppressed—the outer shell of power relations.
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| race | An ethnic group assumed to have a biological basis.
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| racial classification | The attempt to assign humans to discrete categories (purportedly) based on common ancestry.
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| racism | Discrimination against an ethnic group assumed to have a biological basis.
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| random sample | A sample in which all members of the population have an equal statistical chance of being included.
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| reciprocity | One of the three principles of exchange. Governs exchange between social equals; major exchange mode in band and tribal societies.
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| reciprocity continuum | Regarding exchanges, a range running from generalized reciprocity (closely related/deferred return) through balanced reciprocity to negative reciprocity (strangers/immediate return).
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| redistribution | Major exchange mode of chiefdoms, many archaic states, and some states with managed economies.
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| refugees | People who have been forced (involuntary refugees) or who have chosen (voluntary refugees) to flee a country, to escape persecution or war.
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| religion | Beliefs and rituals concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces.
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| revitalization movements | Movements that occur in times of change, in which religious leaders emerge and undertake to alter or revitalize a society.
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| rites of passage | Culturally defined activities associated with the transition from one place or stage of life to another.
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| ritual | Behavior that is formal, stylized, repetitive, and stereotyped, performed earnestly as a social act; rituals are held at set times and places and have liturgical orders.
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| sample | A smaller study group chosen to represent a larger population.
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| Sapir-Whorf hypothesis | Theory that different languages produce different ways of thinking.
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| science | A systematic field of study or body of knowledge that aims, through experiment, observation, and deduction, to produce reliable explanations of phenomena, with reference to the material and physical world.
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| scientific medicine | As distinguished from Western medicine, a health care system based on scientific knowledge and procedures, encompassing such fields as pathology, microbiology, biochemistry, surgery, diagnostic technology, and applications.
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| semantics | A language's meaning system.
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| semiperiphery | Structural position in the world system intermediate between core and periphery.
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| sexual dimorphism | Marked differences in male and female biology besides the contrasts in breasts and genitals.
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| sexual orientation | A person's habitual sexual attraction to, and activities with persons of the opposite sex (heterosexuality), the same sex (homosexuality), or both sexes (bisexuality).
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| shaman | A part-time religious practitioner who mediates between ordinary people and supernatural beings and forces.
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| slavery | The most extreme, coercive, abusive, and inhumane form of legalized inequality; people are treated as property.
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| social race | A group assumed to have a biological basis but actually perceived and defined in a social context—by a particular culture rather than by scientific criteria.
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| society | Organized life in groups; typical of humans and other animals.
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| sociolinguistics | Study of relationships between social and linguistic variation; study of language in its social context.
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| sociopolitical typology | Classification scheme based on the scale and complexity of social organization and the effectiveness of political regulation; includes band, tribe, chiefdom, and state.
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| sodality | See pantribal sodality.
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| sororate | Custom by which a widower marries the sister of the deceased wife.
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| state (nation-state) | Complex sociopolitical system that administers a territory and populace with substantial contrasts in occupation, wealth, prestige, and power. An independent, centrally organized political unit, a government.
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| status | Any position that determines where someone fits in society; may be ascribed or achieved.
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| stereotypes | Fixed ideas—often unfavorable—about what members of a group are like.
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| stratification | Characteristic of a system with socioeconomic strata.
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| style shifts | Variations in speech in different contexts.
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| subcultures | Different cultural symbol-based traditions associated with subgroups in the same complex society.
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| subgroups | Languages within a taxonomy of related languages that are most closely related.
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| subordinate | The lower, or underprivileged, group in a stratified system.
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| superordinate | The upper, or privileged, group in a stratified system.
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| survey research | Characteristic research procedure among social scientists other than anthropologists. Studies society through sampling, statistical analysis, and impersonal data collection.
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| symbol | Something, verbal or non-verbal, that arbitrarily and by convention stands for something else, with which it has no necessary or natural connection.
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| syntax | The arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences.
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| taboo | Prohibition backed by supernatural sanctions.
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| text | Something that is creatively "read," interpreted, and assigned meaning by each person who receives it; includes any media-borne image, such as Carnival.
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| transhumance | One of two variants of pastoralism; part of the population moves seasonally with the herds while the other part remains in home villages.
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| tribe | Form of sociopolitical organization usually based on horticulture or pastoralism. Socioeconomic stratification and centralized rule are absent in tribes, and there is no means of enforcing political decisions.
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| tropics | Geographic belt extending about 23 degrees north and south of the equator, between the Tropic of Cancer (north) and the Tropic of Capricorn (south).
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| typology, sociopolitical | See sociopolitical typology.
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| underdifferentiation | Planning fallacy of viewing less developed countries as an undifferentiated group; ignoring cultural diversity and adopting a uniform approach (often ethnocentric) for very different types of project beneficiaries.
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| unilineal descent | Matrilineal or patrilineal descent.
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| universal | Something that exists in every culture.
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| urban anthropology | The anthropological study of life in and around world cities, including urban social problems, differences between urban and other environments, and adaptation to city life.
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| variables | Attributes (e.g., sex, age, height, weight) that differ from one person or case to the next.
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| vertical mobility | Upward or downward change in a person's social status.
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| village head | Leadership position in a village (as among the Yanomami, where the head is always a man); has limited authority; leads by example and persuasion.
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| wealth | All a person's material assets, including income, land, and other types of property; the basis of economic status.
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| Westernization | The acculturative influence of Western expansion on other cultures.
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| working class (or proletariat) | Those who must sell their labor to survive; the antithesis of the bourgeoisie in Marx's class analysis.
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| world-system theory | Argument for the historic and contemporary social, political, and economic significance of an identifiable global system, based on wealth and power differentials, that extends beyond individual countries.
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