Cultural Anthropology: Concepts and Theory
What this domain tests
Cultural anthropology asks how people create meaning, organize society, and contest power. Items cover culture concepts, ethnocentrism and relativism, and theoretical schools - functionalism, structuralism, symbolic and interpretive anthropology, practice theory, and postcolonial critique.
Core rules and concepts
- Culture is learned, shared, symbolic, and contested - not fixed or biologically inherited.
- Enculturation transmits culture through socialization; worldview frames assumptions about reality.
- Ethnocentrism judges by one's own standards; cultural relativism brackets judgment to understand.
- Functionalism explains institutions by the needs they meet; structural-functionalism emphasizes social integration.
- Structuralism (Lévi-Strauss) seeks underlying binary oppositions.
- Interpretive anthropology (Geertz) reads culture as text and offers thick description - context-rich interpretation, not mere detail.
- Practice theory examines how agents reproduce or transform structures under constraint.
Worked example
A ritual exchange of yams is analyzed three ways. A functionalist asks how exchange creates obligations and alliances. An interpretive anthropologist asks what yams mean - prestige, ancestry, masculinity. A practice theorist asks how big-men use exchange to compete for influence while constrained by kinship rules. Reasoning: the theories are not simply true or false; they answer different questions. A strong answer names the question each theory addresses.
Traps that cost marks
Equating cultural relativism with moral relativism; calling culture shared while ignoring dissent; treating thick description as lots of detail; using one theory as universally superior; confusing structuralism with structural-functionalism.