Joan A. Malerba-Foran
Use first in unit presentation (Week 1: Day1)
The following definitions from:
Schwimmer, Brian. Cultural and Kin Terms: Department of Anthropology, University of
Manitoba. 28 June 2005. www.umanitoba. ca/anthropology/ tutor/kinmenu.html>
Clan: a large family group that includes many relatives (grandparents, uncles/aunts/parents, cousins)
Kin: people related to you through blood relations (biological descent)
Fictive kin: people NOT related to you by blood (biological descent) but they are those whom you define as “family” because of a history of close relationships (perhaps your best friend, adopted children, someone who lived with your family for a long time, etc.).
Kinship: principle of organizing individuals into social groups, roles, and categories based on parentage and marriage.
Nuclear family: a family consisting of two parents and their unmarried children. Types of families include extended, single-parent, blended, adoptive, step, foster, fictive, (gang?)
Use second in unit presentation (Week 1: Day 2)
The following definitions from:
Webster’s New World College Dictionary: The Dictionary for the 21st Century. Fourth
Edition. 1999.
Culture: the ideas, customs, skills, arts, etc. of a people or group that are transferred, communicated, or passed along, as in or to succeeding generations. Our focus will be on an oral culture
Folklore: all of the unwritten traditional beliefs, legends, sayings, customs, etc. of a culture.
Folk tale (or story): a story, usually of anonymous authorship and containing legendary elements, made and handed down orally among the common people
Legend: a story handed down for generations among a people and popularly believed to have a historical basis, although not verifiable
The following definition from:
Goody, Jack. “Oral Culture.” Folklore, Cultural Performances and Popular
Entertainment:
A Communications-centered Handbook
. Ed. Richard Bauman. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Oral culture: theverbal transmission of cultural values and social rules; thedeliberate act of teaching the young through stories that instruct and entertain.
The following definitions from:
Hibbitts, Bernard J. (1995). “Making Motions: The Embodiment of Law in Gesture.”
Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 6:51-81. U. of San Diego School of Law.
Gesture: Gestures are strongly contextual, unlike writing. Gestures perform many functions, but declined in importance with the onset of writing. Most important, gestures are visible and enhance community identity and individual status.
The following definition from:
Pearson, Michael Parker. (1984). “Mortuary practices, society, and ideology: an
ethnoarchaeological study.” Symbolic and Structural Archaeology. Ed. Ian Hodder.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 99-113.
Ritual: behavior showing stylized repetitions that express society’s fundamental social values. Ritual is characterized by fixity, being bound by rules, a kind of performance like a play, which has a prescribed routine of expression.
Use third in unit presentation (Week 1: Day 3)
Lanai: a veranda or open-sided living room of the kind found in Hawaii
Veranda: an open porch or portico, usually roofed, along the outside of a building
Porch: a covered entrance to a building, usually projecting from the wall and having a separate roof. Types of porches are front, back, sun, screened-in, three-season, sleeping
Stoop: a small porch or platform with steps
Use fourth in unit presentation (Week 1: Day 4-5)
The following definitions from:
Webster’s New World College Dictionary: The Dictionary for the 21st Century. Fourth
Edition. 1999.
Liminal: at the point where one perception or condition blends or crosses over into
another
Public: of, belonging to, or considering the people as a whole; of or by the community at large
Private: of, or belonging to, a particular person or group; not common or general
The following definitions from:
Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995.
Place: Described by Dolores Hayden as “one of the trickiest words in the English language,” she states that “An individual’s sense of place is both a biological response to the surrounding physical environment and a cultural creation…” (16). Further, “in the nineteenth century and earlier, place also carried a sense of the right of a person to own a piece of land, or to be part of a social world…People make attachments to places that are critical to their well-being or distress” (16).
Space: Lefebvre-after-Hayden “argues that every society in history has shaped a distinctive social space that meets its intertwined requirements for economic production and social reproduction” (19).
The following definition from:
Frost, Robert. “The Death of the Hired Man.”
Complete Poems of Robert Frost
. New
York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1949.
Home: Have your classes develop their own definition, but use Robert Frost’s “The
Death of the Hired Man” as a prompt: “’Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/they have to take you in’” (53).