Dictionary of Cross-Cultural/Inter-Cultural Terminology

Acculturation Difficulty - A problem stemming from an inability to appropriately adapt to a different culture or environment. The problem is not based on any coexisting mental disorder.

Achieved Status - Social status and prestige of an individual acquired as a result of individual accomplishments (cf. ascribed status).

Actor-Observer Effect - The tendency for actors to weigh any situation more heavily when explaining their behaviour, while observers weigh the actor's dispositions more heavily when explaining the same behaviour.

Adaptation - is a process of reconciliation and of coming to terms with a changed socio-cultural environment by making "adjustments" in one's cultural identity. It is also a stage of intercultural sensitivity, which may allow the person to function in a bicultural capacity. In this stage, a person is able to take the perspective of another culture and operate successfully within that culture. The person should know enough about his or her own culture and a second culture to allow a mental shift into the value scheme of the other culture, and an evaluation of behaviour based on its norms, rather than the norms of the individual's culture of origin. This is referred to as "cognitive adaptation." The more advanced form of adaptation is "behavioural adaptation," in which the person can produce behaviours appropriate to the norms of the second culture. Adaptation may also refer to patterns of behavior which enable a culture to cope with its surroundings.

Adaptation Level - Individual standards of comparison for evaluating properties of physical and social environment such as crowding and noise.

Advocacy View - of applied anthropology is the belief that as anthropologists have acquired expertise on human problems and social change, and because they study, understand, and respect cultural values, they should be responsible for making policies affecting people.

Aesthetics - Appreciation of the qualities discernible in superior works of art; the mind and emotions in relation to a sense of beauty.

Affinals - Relatives by marriage, whether of lineals (e.g., son's wife) or collaterals (e.g., sister's husband).

Affinal Kin - Persons related by marriage. Direct affinity is the relationship between the husband and his wife's relations by blood or between the wife and the husband's relations by blood. Collateral affinity is the relationship between the husband and the relations of his wife's relations.

Affirmative Action - "Affirmative action" refers to positive steps taken to increase the representation of minorities (racial, ethnic minorities and women in general) in areas of employment, education, and business from which they have been historically excluded.

Age Discrimination - is discrimination against a person or group on the basis of age. Age discrimination usually comes in one of two forms: discrimination against youth, and discrimination against the elderly.

Age set - Group uniting all men or women born during a certain historical time span.

Aggregate - Any collection of individuals who do not interact with one another.

Altruism - A voluntary form of behaviour motivated by a desire to improve another person's welfare rathe than the expectation of reward for oneself.

Ambient Environment - Changeable aspects of an individual's immediate surroundings, e.g., light, sounds, air quality, humidity, temperature etc.

Ambient Stressors - Factors in the environment that contribute to the experience of stress.

Ambilineal - Principle of descent that does not automatically exclude the children of either sons or daughters.

Anchor - A reference point for making judgements. In social judgement theory, anchor is the point corresponding to the centre of the latitude of acceptance.

Animism - is the belief that souls inhabit all or most objects. Animism attributes personalized souls to animals, vegetables, and minerals in a manner that the material object is also governed by the qualities which compose its particular soul. Animistic religions generally do not accept a sharp distinction between spirit and matter.

Anthropocentricity - The belief that humans are the most important elements in the universe and reality can be approached exclusively in terms of human values and experience.

Anthropology - The study of the human species and its immediate ancestors. Anthropology is the comparative study of past and contemporary cultures, focusing on the ways of life, and customs of all peoples of the world. Main sub-disciplines are physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, ethnology (which is also called social or cultural anthropology) and theoretical anthropology, and applied anthropology.

Anticonformity - Any behaviour, which is directly antithetical to or contradicts group norms. Also called counterconformity.

Apartheid - was a system of racial segregation used in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. Though first used in 1917 by Jan Smuts, the future Prime Minister of South Africa, apartheid was simply an extension of the segregationist policies of previous white governments in South Africa. The term originates in Afrikaans or Dutch, where it means "separateness". Races, classified by law into White, Black, Indian, and Coloured groups, were separated, each with their own homelands and institutions. This prevented non-white people from having a vote or influence on the governance. Education, medical care and other public services available to non-white people were vastly inferior and non-whites were not allowed to run businesses or professional practices in those areas designated as 'White South Africa'.

Applied Anthropology - The application of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and methods to identify, assess, and solve contemporary social problems.

Aquatic Ape Theory - This hypothesis or theory suggests that the ancestors of humans went through periods of living in aquatic settings and this was responsible for the development of many of the characteristics of Homo genus that are not seen in other primates. This hypothesis has been criticized as well as supported in mainstream paleoanthropology.

Arbitration - Third-party assistance to two or more groups for reaching an agreement, where the third party or arbitror has the power to force everyone to accept a particular solution.

Archaeological Anthropology (Prehistoric Archaeology) - The study of human behaviour and cultural patterns and processes through the material remains and artefacts of that culture.

Archaeomagnetic Dating - A method of dating artefacts from the past. Sometimes also called paleomagnetic dating. It is based on the fact that changes in the earth's magnetic field over time can be recorded as remnant magnetism in materials such as baked clay structure (ovens, kilns, and hearths used much earlier).

Archetype - the original pattern or model from which all things of the same kind are copied or on which they are based; a prototype. Also (in Jungian psychology) a collectively inherited unconscious idea, pattern of thought, image, etc., universally present in individual psyches.

Archival Research - Any study of data in records being studied, which were not collected specifically for the study itself.

Arranged Marriage - Any marriage in which the selection of a spouse is outside the control of the bride and groom. Usually parents or their representatives select brides or grooms by trying to match compatibility rather than relying on romantic attraction.

Arousal - A state of physiological or psychological excitation.

Arousal/Cost-reward Model - A model of helping, which predicts that people will help if they are aware of a need for help, experience physiological arousal, label that arousal as a response to the victim, and decide that cost and reward favour intervention on their part.

Ascribed Status - Social status which is the result of inheritance (cf. achieved status).

Assimilation - is a process of consistent integration whereby members of an ethno-cultural group, typically immigrants, or other minority groups, are "absorbed" into an established larger community. If a child assimilates into a new culture, he/she gives up his/her cultural values and beliefs and adopts the new cultural values in their place. Originates from a Piagetian (Swiss Developmental Psychologist JEAN PIAGET, 1896-1980) term describing a person's ability to comprehend and integrate new experiences.

Assimilation Effects - Shifts in judgements towards an anchor point in social judgement theory.

Assortative Mating - Nonrandom coupling of individuals based on resemblance of one or more characteristics.

Attachment Theory - A theory of the formation and characterization of relationships based on the progress and outcome of an individual's experiences as an infant in relation to the primary caregiver.

Attitude - Evaluation of people, objects, or issues about which an individual has some knowledge.

Attribution Theory - Attribution theory is a social psychology theory developed by Fritz Heider, Harold Kelley, Edward E. Jones, and Lee Ross. The theory is concerned with the ways in which people explain (or attribute) the behaviour of others or themselves (self-attribution) with something else. It explores how individuals "attribute" causes to events and how this cognitive perception affects their usefulness in an organization.

Augmentation Principle - In Kelley's attribution theory, the idea that the existence of difficulties in performing a behaviour results in a stronger conclusion that the actor is the cause of the event.

Autokinetic Effect - A stationary light, when viewed in an otherwise completely dark room, would appear to be moving.

Availability Heuristic - The tendency to be biased by events readily accessible in our memory.

Baak Gwai - A derogatory term meaning "White devil" or "white ghost" used by the Chinese in Mainland China and Hong Kong to refer to Caucasians.

Balance Theory - A theory of attitude change based on the principle of consistency among elements in a relationship. Psychologist Fritz Heider, proposer of this model suggested that unbalanced states create tension, so people try to reduce tension by changing some attitude.

Banana - Derogatory term for an East Asian person who is "yellow on the outside, white on the inside" used by other Asian Americans to indicate someone who has lost touch with their cultural identity and have over-assimilated in white, American culture.

Band - Basic unit of social organization among foragers. A band includes fewer than 100 people; it often splits up seasonally.

Bargaining - The process by which two or more parties attempt to settle what each shall give and take in their mutual transactions.

Behavioural Cue - A stimulus, either consciously or unconsciously perceived, that elicits or signals a type of behaviour. In other words it is a stimulus that provides information about what to do in a particular situation.

Behaviorism - A theoretical perspective, also called learning perspective, made famous by Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, B.F.Skinner, Edward Lee Throndike, in which behaviour is explained by external stimuli and learning processes.

Belief System - is the way in which a culture collectively constructs a model or framework for how it thinks about something. A religion is a particular kind of belief system. Other examples of general forms of belief systems are ideologies, paradigms and world-views also known by the German word Weltanschauung. In addition to governing almost all aspects of human activity, belief systems have a significant impact on what a culture deems worthy of passing down to following generations as its cultural heritage. This also influences how cultures view the cultural heritage of other cultures. Many people today recognize that there is no one correct belief system or way of thinking. This is known as relativism or conceptual relativism. This contrasts with objectivism and essentialism, both of which posit a reality that is independent of the way in which people conceptualize. A plurality of belief systems is a hallmark of postmodernism.

Belief in a Just World - The tendency of people to want to believe that the world is "just" so that when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it. Also called the just-world theory, just-world fallacy, just-world effect, or just-world hypothesis, Famous proponent is Melvin Lerner.

Biculturalism - The simultaneous identification with two cultures when an individual feels equally at home in both cultures and feels emotional attachment with both cultures. The term started appearing in the 1950s.

Biethnic - Of two ethnic groups: belonging or relating to two different ethnic groups. Usually used in reference to a person. For example: if a person's father is French and mother English, she is biethnic though not biracial. See also biracial.

Big Man - In anthropology the most influential man in a tribe of horticulturalists and pastoralists; a person with power in a community. The big man usually occupies no formal office and has no coercive authority but creates his reputation through skills, wisdom, entrepreneurship and generosity to others. His wealth or his position may not pass to his heirs.

Bilingual Education - teaching a second language by relying heavily on the native language of the speaker. The background theory claims that a strong sense of one's one culture and language is necessary to acquire another language and culture.

Bilateral Kinship Calculation - is a system in which kinship ties are calculated equally through both sexes: mother and father, sister and brother, daughter and son, and so on.

Biological Anthropology - is the study of human biological variation in time and space; includes evolution, genetics, growth and development, and primatology.

Biological Determinists - are those who argue that human behaviour and social organization are biologically determined and not learnt.

Biracial - Of two races. Usually used to refer to people whose parents come from two different races, e.g., father is Chinese and mother English.

Bottom-up Development - Economic and social changes brought about by activities of individuals and social groups in society rather than by the state and its agents.

Bourgeoisie - describes a social class of people who are in the upper or merchant class, whose status or power comes from employment, education, and wealth rather than from aristocratic origin. They are the owners of the means of production (factories, mines, large farms, and other sources of subsistence).

Bride Price - is the payment made by a man to the family from whom he takes a daughter in marriage.

Bush Doctrine - The Bush Doctrine describes various foreign policy principles of United States president George W. Bush. According to this doctrine, the United States had the right to aggressively protect itself from countries that harbor or give aid to terrorist groups, which was used to justify the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Further, it contains the controversial policy of preventive war, which held that the United States should depose foreign regimes that represented a potential or perceived threat to the security of the United States, even if that threat was not immediate; a policy of spreading democracy around the world, especially in the Middle East, as a strategy for combating terrorism; and a willingness to pursue U.S. military interests in a unilateral way even without the sanction of allies or international bodies.

Bystander Effect - The finding that a person is less likely to offer help when in the presence of witnesses than when alone. The bystander effect was first demonstrated in the laboratory by John Darley and Bibb Latane in 1968

Capital - Wealth or resources invested in business, with the intent of producing a profit for the owner of the capital.

Capitalist World Economy- The single world system, committed to production for sale, with the object of maximizing profits rather than supplying domestic needs. The term was launched by the US historical social scientist, Immanual Wallerstein.

Capitalism - Economic or socio-economic system in which production and distribution are designed to accumulate capital and create profit. A characteristic feature of the system is the separation of those who own the means of production and those who work for them. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first used the term Kapitalist in 1848. The first use of the word capitalism is by novelist William Thackeray in 1854.

Caste System - Hereditary system of stratification. Hierarchical social status is ascribed at birth and often dictated by religion or other social norms. Today, it is most commonly associated with the Indian caste system and the Varna in Hinduism.

Catharsis - is a Greek word meaning "purification" or "cleansing". Nowadays used to mean intense emotional release associated with talking about the underlying causes of a problem. In mystical traditions, catharsis is a process leading to the transcending of psychological, as well as spiritual, traumas and negativities. Used in modern psychotherapy, particularly Freudian psychoanalysis, to describe the act of expressing deep emotions often associated with events in the individual's past which have never before been adequately expressed.

Charlie - Non-derogatory slang term used by American troops during the Vietnam War as a shorthand term for Vietnamese guerrillas. Shortened from "Victor Charlie", the phonetic alphabet for Viet Cong, or VC. It was also a mildly derogatory term used by African Americans, in the 1960s and 1970s, for a white person (from James Baldwin's novel, Blues For Mr. Charlie).

Chiefdom - Kin-based form of sociopolitical organization between the tribe and the state. It comes with differential access to resources and a permanent political structure. The relations among villages as well as among individuals are unequal, with smaller villages under the authority of leaders in larger villages; it has a two-level settlement hierarchy.

Clan - Form of unilineal descent group based on stipulated descent. A clan is a group of people united by kinship and descent, which is defined by perceived descent from a common ancestor. As kinship based bonds can be merely symbolical in nature some clans share a "stipulated" common ancestor.

Clash of Civilizations - is a hotly debated theory publicized by Samuel P. Huntington with his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. He argues that the world has cultural fault lines similar to the physical ones that cause earthquakes and that people's cultural/religious identity will be the primary agent of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Bernard Lewis first used the term in an article in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly called "The Roots of Muslim Rage."

Collateral Household - is a type of expanded family household including siblings and their spouses and children.

Collectivism - Individualism/Collectivism is one of the Hofstede dimensions in intercultural communication studies. "Collectivism pertains to societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, which throughout people's lifetime continue to protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty." (Hofstede, G. (1991).

Colonialism - The political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended time.

Communism - A political theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Communism is characterized by the common ownership of the means of production contra private ownership in capitalism. The Soviet Union was the first communist state and lasted from 1917 to 1991.

Complex Societies - are usually nation states; large and populous, with social stratification and centralised forms of governments.

Consanguineal Kin - A blood relative. An individual related by common descent from the same individual. In most societies of the world, kinship can be traced both by common descent and through marriage, although a distinction is usually made between the two categories. The degree of consanguinity between any two people can be calculated as the percentage of genes they share through common descent.

Conspicuous Consumption - the excessive display of material items for the purpose of impressing others. People who make money very quickly or the noveau riche are often portrayed as doing this with unrefined taste. The term was first used by the American economist Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).

Contact Zone - The space in which transculturation takes place - where two different cultures meet and inform each other, often in highly asymmetrical ways.

Core Values - Basic, or central values that integrate a culture and help distinguish it from others.

Cosmology - Ideas and beliefs about the universe as an ordered system, its origin and the place of humans in the universe through which, people in that culture understand the makeup and the workings of all things.

Counterculture - is a sociological term used to describe a cultural or social group whose values and norms are at odds with those of the social mainstream. The term became popular during the youth rebellion and unrest in the USA and Western Europe in the 1960s as a reaction against the conservative social norms of the 1950s. The Russian term Counterculture has a different meaning and is used to define a cultural movement that promotes acting outside the usual conventions of Russian culture - using explicit language, graphical description of sex, violence and illicit activities. Counterculture in an Asian context as launched by Dr. Sebastian Kappen, an Indian Theologian very influential in the third world, means an approach for navigating between the two opposing cultural phenomena in modern Asian countries: (1) invasion by western capitalist culture and (2) the emergence of revivalist movements in reaction. Identification with the first requires losing own identity and with the second results in living in a world of obsolete myths and phantoms of the dead past. Thus discovering one's own cultural roots in a creative and yet critical fashion while being open to the positive facets of the other. (Adapted from http://www.wikipedia.org)

Cross Cousins - Children of a brother and a sister.

Cross Cultural - Interaction between individuals from different cultures. The term cross-cultural is generally used to describe comparative studies of cultures. Inter cultural is also used for the same meaning.

Cross Cultural Awareness - develops from cross-cultural knowledge as the learner understands and appreciates the deeper functioning of a culture. This may also be followed by changes in the learner's own behaviour and attitudes and a greater flexibility and openness becomes visible.

Cross-Cultural Communication - (also referred to as Intercultural Communication) is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds try to communicate. As a science, Cross-cultural communication tries to bring together such seemingly unrelated disciplines as communication, information theory, learning theories and cultural anthropology. The aim is to produce increased understanding and some guidelines, which would help people from different cultures to better, communicate with each other.

Cross-Cultural Communication Skills - refers to the ability to recognize cultural differences and similarities when dealing with someone from another culture and also the ability to recognize features of own behaviour, which are affected by culture.

Cross Cultural Competence - is the final stage of cross-cultural learning and signals the individual's ability to work effectively across cultures. Cross cultural competency necessitates more than knowledge, awareness and sensitivity because it requires the digestion, integration and transformation of all the skills and information acquired through them and applied to create cultural synergy within the workplace or elsewhere. This should be the aim of all those dealing with multicultural clients, customers or colleagues.

Cross Cultural Knowledge - refers to a surface level familiarization with cultural characteristics, values, beliefs and behaviours. It is vital to basic cross-cultural understanding and without it cross-cultural competence cannot develop.

Cross Cultural Sensitivity - refers to an individual's ability to read into situations, contexts and behaviours that are culturally rooted and consequently the individual is able to react to them suitably. A suitable response necessitates that the individual no longer carries his/her own culturally predetermined interpretations of the situation or behaviour (i.e. good/bad, right/wrong).

Cultivation Continuum - A term used in cultural anthropology. It is a continuum based on the comparative study of nonindustrial cultivating societies in which labor intensity increases and fallowing decreases.

Cultural Alienation - is the process of devaluing or abandoning one's own culture or cultural background in favour of another.

Cultural Anthropology - The study of contemporary and recent historical cultures among humans all over the world. The focus is on social organization, culture change, economic and political systems and religion. Cultural anthropologists argue that culture is "human nature," and that all people have a capacity to classify experiences, encode classifications symbolically and teach such abstractions to others. They believe that humans acquire culture through learning and people living in different places or different circumstances may develop different cultures because it is through culture that people can adapt to their environment in non-genetic ways. Cultural anthropology is also referred to as social or socio-cultural anthropology. Key theorists: Franz Boas, Emile Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, Marvin Harris, Claude Levi-Strauss, Karl Marx.

Cultural Boundaries - Cultural Boundaries can be defined as those invisible lines, which divide territories, cultures, traditions, practices, and worldviews. Typically they are not aligned with the physical boundaries of political entities such as nation states.

Cultural Construct - the idea that the characteristics people attribute to social categories such as gender, illness, death, status of women, and status of men is culturally defined.

Cultural Convergence - is an idea that increased communication among the peoples of the world via the Internet will lead to the differences among national cultures becoming smaller over time, eventually resulting in the formation of a single global culture. One outcome of this process is that unique national identities will disappear, replaced by a single transnational identity. Henry Jenkins, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA coined the term in 1998.

Cultural Cringe - refers to an internalized inferiority complex of an entire culture. This leads people of that culture to dismiss their own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries. In 1950 the Melbourne critic A.A.Philips coined the term Cultural cringe to show how Australians widely assumed that anything produced by local artists, dramatists, actors, musicians and writers was inferior to the works of the British and European counterparts. The term cultural cringe is very close to "cultural alienation" or the process of devaluing or abandoning one's own culture or cultural background in favour of another.

Cultural Determinists - are those who relate behaviour and social organization to cultural or environmental factors. The focus is on variation rather than on universals and stresses learning and the role of culture in human adaptation.

Cultural Diffusion - The spreading of a cultural trait (e.g., material object, idea, or behaviour pattern) from one society to another.

Cultural Diversity - Differences in race, ethnicity, language, nationality or religion. Cultural diversity refers to the variety or multiformity of human social structures, belief systems, and strategies for adapting to situations in different parts of the world.

Cultural Evolution - Theories that have developed since the mid-19th century, which attempt to explain processes and patterns of cultural change. Often such theories have presented such change as "progress," from "earlier" forms ("primitive", "less developed," "less advanced" etc.) to "later" forms ("more developed," "more advanced"). These schemes usually have reflected the ethnocentrism of the theorists, as they frequently put their own societies at the pinnacle of "progress."

Cultural Identity - is the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as her/his belonging to a group or culture affects her/his view of herself/himself. People who feel they belong to the same culture share a common set of norms.

Cultural Imperialism - is 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 due to economic or political reasons.

Cultural Materialism - Is a theoretical approach in Cultural Anthropology that explores and examines culture as a reflection or product of material conditions in a society. Cultural materialism is a variation on basic materialist approaches to understanding culture. The Anthropologist Marvin Harris is a famous representative.

Cultural Norms - are behaviour patterns that are typical of specific groups, which have distinct identities, based on culture, language, ethnicity or race separating them from other groups. Such behaviours are learned early in life from parents, teachers, peers and other human interaction. Norms are the unwritten rules that govern individual behaviour. Norms assume importance especially when broken or when an individual finds him/herself in a foreign environment dealing with an unfamiliar culture where the norms are different.

Cultural Relativism - The position that the values, beliefs and customs of cultures differ and deserve recognition and acceptance. This principle was established by the German anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) in the first few decades of the 20th century. Cultural relativism as a movement was in part a response to Western ethnocentrism. Between World War I and World War II, "Cultural relativism" was the central tool for American anthropologists in their refusal of Western claims to universality.

Cultural Resource Management (CRM) - is the branch of applied archaeology which aims to preserve archeological sites threatened by prospective dams, highways, and other projects.

Cultural Rights - is the idea that certain rights are vested not in individuals but in larger identifiable groups, such as religious and ethnic minorities and indigenous societies. Cultural rights include a group's ability to preserve its culture, to raise its children in the ways of its ancestors, to continue practising its language, and not to be deprived of its economic base by the nation-state or large political entity in which it is located.

Cultural Sensitivity - is a necessary component of cultural competence, meaning that we make an effort to be aware of the potential and actual cultural factors that affect our interactions with others.

Cultural Universal - General cultural traits and features found in all societies of the world. Some examples are organization of family life; roles of males, females, children and elders; division of labour; religious beliefs and practices; birth and death rituals; stories of creation and myths for explaining the unknown; "rights" and "wrongs" of behaviour etc.

Cultural Universalism - Cultural Universalism is the assertion that there exist values, which transcend cultural and national differences. Universalism claims that more "primitive" cultures will eventually evolve to have the same system of law and rights as Western cultures. Cultural relativists on the other hand hold an opposite viewpoint, that a traditional culture is unchangeable. In universalism, an individual is a social unit, possessing inalienable rights, and driven by the pursuit of self-interest. In the cultural relativist model, a community is the basic social unit where concepts such as individualism, freedom of choice, and equality are absent.

Culture - The shared values, norms, traditions, customs, arts, history, folklore and institutions of a group of people. "Integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behaviour that is both a result of and integral to the human capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations." The etymological root of the word is from the Latin 'colere' which means to cultivate, from which is derived 'cultus', that which is cultivated or fashioned. In comparison of words such as "Kultur" and "Zivilisation" in German, "culture" and civilisation" in English, and "culture" and "civilisation" in French the concepts reveal very different perspectives. The meaning of these concepts is however, converging across languages as a result of international contacts, cultural exchanges and other information processes.

Quotation from source http://www.britannica.com

Culture Shock - A state of distress and tension with possible physical symptoms after a person relocates to an unfamiliar cultural environment. This term was used by social scientists in the 1950s to describe, the difficulties of a person moving from the country to a big city but now the meaning has changed to mean relocating to a different culture or country. One of the first recorded use of the term was in 1954 by the anthropologist Dr. Kalervo Oberg who was born to Finnish parents in British Columbia, Canada. While giving a talk to the Women's Club of Rio de Janeiro, August 3, 1954, he identified four stages of culture shock-the honeymoon of being a newcomer and guest, the hostility and aggressiveness of coming to grips with different way of life, working through feelings of superiority and gaining ability to operate in the culture by learning the language and finally acceptance of another way of living and worldview. (Source: American Anthropologist June, 1974 Vol.76 (2): 357-359.

Daughter Languages - are languages developing out of the same parent language; for example, French and Spanish are daughter languages of Latin or Bengali and Hindi are daughter languages of Sanskrit.

Debriefing - Open discussion at the end of a study or experiment when the researcher reveals the complete procedure and background to the subject and explains the reasons for any possible deceptions that may have taken place and were necessary for the success.

Deindividuation - A state of relative anonimity in which a member of a group does not feel indentifiable or singled out.

Demand Characteristics - Explicit and implicit perceptual cues, which communicate what behaviour is expected in any particular situation.

Demarginalization - The process which facilitates a marginal or stigmatized space becoming 'normalized' so that its population is incorporated into the mainstream.

Denotation - The explicit meaning of a word or expression.

Dependant Variable - A measure of a particiapnt's responses in a research situation. In a scientifically controlled experiment, changes in the dependant variable are presumed to be caused by the independant variable.

Descent Group - is a permanent social unit whose members claim common ancestry. Usually this is fundamental to tribal society.

Development Anthropology - is the branch of applied anthropology that focuses on social issues and the cultural dimension of economic development. Development here refers to the social action by institutions, private business, state, independent volunteers, who are aiming to modify the economic, technical, political or/and social life of a given place, mostly in developing nations.

Diaspora - The term was originally used by the ancient Greeks to mean citizens of a large city who migrated to a conquered land with the purpose of colonization to assimilate the territory into the empire. Later the word was used to refer specifically to the populations of Jews exiled from Judea in 586 BC and from Jerusalem in 70 AD by the Romans. Now the term is used to refer to other population dispersals, voluntary and non-voluntary. The modern term evokes a sense of exile and homelessness.

Differential Access - refers to unequal access to resources, which is the basic attribute of different social structures from chiefdoms and states.

Diffuse - Diffuse/Specific is one of the value dimensions proposed by Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner (1997). It shows "how far we choose to get involved". In a very diffuse culture, a large part of the life is regarded as "private", where other persons without explicit consent have no access.

Diffusion - is the borrowing of cultural traits between societies, either directly or through intermediaries.

Diglossia - is the existence in a given society of two (often closely-related) languages, one of high prestige, which is generally used by the government and in formal texts, and one of low prestige, which is usually the spoken vernacular tongue. The high-prestige language tends to be the more formalised. For example in Pakistan, there is a diglossia between the extremely Persianised Urdu (used by the literary elite and the Government officials) and an Urdu that is very similar to Hindi spoken by common people.

Dimensions of Diversity - Dimensions of diversity in humans includes, but is not limited to: culture, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, geography, lifestyle, education, income, health, physical appearance, pigmentation, language, personality, beliefs, faith, dreams, interests, aspirations, skills, professions, perceptions, and experiences.

Discounting - In Kelley's attribution theory, the tendency to reduce the importance of any one cause when other, plausible causes are present.

Discrimination - Treatment or consideration based on class or category defined by prejudicial attitudes and beliefs rather than individual merit. The denial of equal treatment, civil liberties and opportunities to education, accommodation, health care, employment and access. In many countries discrimination by law consists of making unjust distinctions based on:

Religion, political affiliation, marital or family status
Age, sexual orientation, gender, race, colour, nationality
Physical, developmental or mental disability

State organized discriminations are universal only in mild forms e.g. non-citizens are excluded from health-care, unemployment support or study support. Extreme cases such as apartheid in South Africa, racial segregation in the USA and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany are not very common. Normative attempts by governments to reduce discrimination include equal opportunity laws, civil rights legislation and state policies of affirmative action.

Distinctiveness - In Kelley's attribution theory, the extent to which the actor's behaviour differs in relation to different targets.

Distributive Justice - A proposition of social exchange theory in which one's rewards should be in proportion to one's investments.

Diversity - The concept of diversity means understanding that each individual is unique, and recognizing individual differences along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or other ideologies. Primary dimensions are those that cannot be changed e.g., age, ethnicity, gender, physical abilities/qualities, race and sexual orientation. Secondary dimensions of diversity are those that can be changed, e.g., educational background, geographic location, income, marital status, parental status, religious beliefs, and work role/experiences. Diversity or diversity management includes, therefore, knowing how to relate to those qualities and conditions that are different from our own and outside the groups to which we belong.

Diversity Initiative - Sets of policy, definitions, action-plans and steps to map out, support and protect diversity in different dimensions such as age, gender ethnicity etc in any organization, society or area.

Door-in-the-face Effect - A technique for eliciting compliance by making a very large initial request, which the recipient is sure to turn down, followed by a smaller request.

Dowry - A marital exchange in which the wife's family provides substantial gifts of money, goods or property to the husband's family. The opposite direction, property given to the bride by the groom, is called dower.

Egalitarianism - Affirming, promoting, or characterized by belief in equal political, economic, social, and civil rights for all people. One of the seven fundamental value dimensions of Shalom Schwartz measuring how other people are recognized as moral equals.

Embeddedness - One of the seven fundamental value dimensions of Shalom Schwartz describing people as part of a collective.

Emic Perspective (Emic View) - A term used by ethnographers or cultural anthropologists to refer to the insider's or native's view of his or her world, it is an attempt at understanding a culture from "inside," from within its own frame of reference, from experiencing it as a participant (see also etic perspective).

Emotionalistic Disease Theories - Theories that assume that illness is caused by intense emotional experiences (e.g., the experience of Susto, which is a folk illness, specifically a "fright sickness" with strong psychological overtones among some Latin American populations). There are two other theories about the causes of illnesses - Personalistic disease theories blame illness on agents such as sorcerers, witches, ghosts, or ancestral spirits. Naturalistic disease theories explain illness in impersonal terms (e.g., Western biomedicine).

Enculturation - is the process whereby an established culture teaches an individual its accepted norms and values, by establishing a context of boundaries and correctness that dictates what is and is not permissible within that society's framework. Enculturation is learned through communication by way of speech, words, action and gestures. The six components of culture learnt are: technological, economic, political, interactive, ideological and world-view. It is also called socialization. (Conrad Phillip Kottack, Cultural Anthropology)

Endogamy - is the practice of marrying within one's own social group. Cultures who practice endogamy require marriage between specified social groups, classes, or ethnicities. Strictly endogamous communities like the Jews, the Parsees of India and the Yazidi of Iraq claim that endogamy helps minorities to survive over a long time in societies with other practices and beliefs. The opposite practice is exogamy.

Equity, Increased - is a reduction in absolute poverty and a fairer or more even distribution of wealth in a particular society or nation state.

Ethnic Competence - The capacity to function effectively in more than one culture, requiring the ability to appreciate and understand features of other ethnic groups and further to interact with people of ethnic groups other than one's own.

Ethnic Group - Group characterised by cultural similarities (shared among members of that group) and differences (between that group and others). Members of an ethnic group share beliefs, values, habits, customs, norms, a common language, religion, history, geography, kinship, and/or race.

Ethnic Slur - Is a term used to insult someone on the basis of ethnicity, race or nationality. Some derogatory examples are Flip (Western derogatory term used for Filipinos), Ginzo in US (for Italian Americans), Gweilo ("Foreign devil" or "white ghost", term used by the Chinese to refer to Westerners), Paki (UK for a South Asian) etc.

Ethnicity - Belonging to a common group with shared heritage, often linked by race, nationality and language.

Ethnocentrism - Belief in the superiority of one's own ethnic group. Seeing the world through the lenses of one's own people or culture so that own culture always looks best and becomes the pattern everyone else should fit into.

Ethnography - A research methodology associated with anthropology and sociology that systematically tries to describe the culture of a group of people by trying to understand the natives'/insiders' view of their own world (an emic view of the world).

Ethnology - Cross-cultural comparison or the comparative study of ethnographic data, of society and of culture

Ethnomusicology - is the comparative study of the musics of different places of the world and of music as a central aspect of culture and society.

Ethnosemantics - is the study of meaning attached to specific terms used by members of a group. Ethnosemantics concentrates on the meaning of categories of reality and folk taxonomies to the people who use them. (Source: Cultural Anthropology. A.R.N.Srivastava. Prentice-Hall)

Etic - is the research strategy used by ethnographers that emphasizes the observer's rather than the natives' explanations, categories, and criteria of significance. Etic is the phase in the study of a particular culture, after having experienced it and participated in it first-hand, of "stepping back" and evaluating the experience into explanatory terms in one's own culture (see emic perspective).

Exogamy - is the custom of marrying outside a specific group to which one belongs. Some experts hold that the custom of exogamy originated from a scarcity of women, which forced men to seek wives from other groups, e.g., marriage by capture. Another viewpoint ascribes the origin of exogamy to totemism, and claim that a religious respect for the blood of a totemic clan, led to exogamy. The opposite of exogamy is endogamy.

Expatriate - Someone who has left his or her home country to live and work in another country. When we go to another country to live, we become expatriates or expats for short.

Experimental Research - A research methodology used to establish cause-and-effect relationships between the independent and dependent variables by means of manipulation of variables, control and randomisation. A true experiment involves the random allocation of participants to experimental and control groups, manipulation of the independent variable, and the introduction of a control group for comparison purposes. Participants are assessed before and after the manipulation of the independent variable in order to assess its effect on the dependent variable (the outcome).

Extended Family - The relatives of an individual, both by blood and by marriage, other than its immediate family, such as aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins, who live in close proximity and often under one roof. Extended families are very common in collectivistic cultures. This is the opposite of the nuclear family.

Family of Orientation - Nuclear family in which one is born and grows up.

Family of Procreation - Nuclear family established when one marries and has children.

Fascism - A term used particularly to describe the nationalistic and totalitarian regimes of Benito Mussolini (Italy, 1922-45) and Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1933-45). Fascism is characterised by totalitarian attempts to impose state control over almost all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic. The fascist state also regulates and controls the means of production and takes all investment decisions. The word "fascism" comes from the fasces (rods bundled around an axe), which was the ancient Roman symbol of the authority of judges.

Faux Pas - (French word meaning false step) is a violation of accepted and unwritten, social norms. What is considered good manners in one culture can be considered a faux pas in another. For example, in Western societies it is usually considered a friendly gesture to bring a bottle of wine when invited to someone's house for dinner. French hosts may consider this insulting as it implies that the hosts are unable to serve their own good wine.

Feminist Anthropology- Approaches to the study of culture that emphasize the need to understand the gendered nature of human societies, and the gendered nature of social/cultural inquiry.

Feminity - Masculinity/Feminity is one of the Hofstede dimensions. Hofstede defines this dimension as follows: "femininity pertains to societies in which social agenda roles overlap (i.e., men and women are supposed be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life)." (Hofstede, 1991, p. 83)

Feudalism - Hierarchical social and political system common in Europe during the medieval period. The majority of the population were engaged in subsistence agriculture while simultaneously having an obligation to fulfil certain duties for the landholder. At the same time the landholder owed various obligations called fealty to his overlord.

First Nation - The indigenous population of Canada, excepting the Inuit or Métis people. The term came into common usage in the 1980s to refer mostly to Canada's aboriginal people, most of who live around Ontario and British Columbia.

Flip - Is a Western derogatory term used for Filipinos.

Folk - means 'Of the people', originally coined for European peasants. It refers to the art, music, and lore of ordinary people, as contrasted with the "high" art or "classic" art of the European elites.

Functional Explanation - The study of social institutions by behavioural scientists on the premise that social customs can be explained by considering their function or role in society. Term originally used by A.R.Radcliffe-Brown (1933).

Functionalism - In the social sciences, specifically sociology and sociocultural anthropology, functionalism (also called functional analysis) attempts to focus on the ways in which social institutions fill social needs, especially social stability. Functionalism treats society as a living organism or a complex machine, the parts of which can only be understood as they function in the whole. Aspects of a culture or society are studied in the context of how they function in the larger processes of society; they may also be considered in relation to the key "needs" they serve in a given society (e.g. needs for subsistence, social law and order, etc.)

Gender Discrimination - Gender discrimination is any action that allows or denies opportunities, privileges or rewards to a person on the basis of their gender alone. The term 'glass ceiling' describes the process by which women are barred from promotion by means of an invisible barrier. In the United States, the Glass Ceiling Commission has stated that women represent 1.1% of inside directors (those drawn from top management of the company) on the boards of Fortune 500 companies.

Gender Roles - The tasks and activities that a culture assigns to each sex.

Gender Stereotypes - are oversimplified but strongly held ideas about the characteristics, roles and behaviour models of males and females.

Gender Stratification - Unequal distribution of rewards (socially valued resources, power, prestige, and personal freedom) between men and women, depending on their different positions in a social hierarchy.

Genealogical Method - Procedures by which ethnographers discover and record connections of kinship, descent, and marriage in societies by using diagrams and symbols.

General Anthropology - The field of anthropology as a whole, consisting of cultural, archaeological, biological, and linguistic anthropology.

Generalized Reciprocity - is the principle that characterizes exchanges between closely related individuals. As social distance increases, reciprocity becomes balanced and finally negative.

Genetic Marker - Is a known DNA sequence of the human DNA. Genetic markers can be used to study the relationship between an inherited disease and its likely genetic cause.

Genitor - Biological father of a child.

Gentrification - The process by which middle- and upper class incomers displace established working-class communities. Gentrification may be small-scale and incremental (i.e. started by individuals) or be associated with major redevelopment and regeneration schemes by governments or public bodies e.g. Docklands and Notting Hill in London.

Ginzo - Is a US derogatory term to refer to Italian Americans.

Global Culture - One world culture. The earth's inhabitants will lose their individual cultural diversity and one culture will remain for all the people.

Globalization - A disputed term relating to transformation in the relationship between space, economy and society. The International Monetary Fund defines globalization as "the growing economic interdependence of countries worldwide through increasing volume and variety of cross-border transactions in goods and services, free international capital flows, and more rapid and widespread diffusion of technology". Meanwhile, The International Forum on Globalization defines it as "the present worldwide drive toward a globalized economic system dominated by supranational corporate trade and banking institutions that are not accountable to democratic processes or national governments."

Glocalization - The interaction between the particular character of places or regions and the more general processes of change represented by globalization. The term glocalization emphasizes that the globalization of a product is more likely to succeed when the product or service is adapted specifically to each locality or culture it is marketed in. Glocalization as a term first appeared in the late 1980s in articles by Japanese economists in the Harvard Business Review. First English usage is by the British sociologist Roland Robertson. The term combines the word globalization with localization. An example of glocalization in practice: for promotions in France, the restaurant chain recently chose to replace its familiar Ronald McDonald mascot with Asterix the Gaul, a popular French cartoon character.

Green Revolution - Agricultural development based on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, 20th-century cultivation techniques, and new crop varieties.

Gweilo - A derogatory term meaning "Foreign devil" or "white ghost" used by the Chinese in South of Mainland China and Hong Kong to refer to Westerners.

Harmony - One of the seven fundamental value dimensions of Shalom Schwartz measuring the fitting in harmoniously with the environment.

Health-Care Systems - Beliefs, customs, knowledge and specialists concerned with ensuring health and preventing and curing illness; a cultural universal.

Hegemony - Term derived from the work of the Italian writer and political theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), which refers to the ability of a dominant group to exert or maintain control through a combination of overt and subtle mechanisms.

Helping Behaviour - Prosocial behaviour that benefits others more than the person. Different from prosocial cooperation, in which mutual benefit is gained.

Heuristics - Rules of thumb or shortcuts for making judgements for which we have insufficient or unverified information.

Hidden Transcript - A term used by James Scott to describe the coded critique of power by the oppressed that goes on offstage and in private, where the power holders can't see it.

Hierarchy - One of the seven fundamental value dimensions of Shalom Schwartz measuring the unequal distribution of power in a culture.

High Context and Low Context Cultures - According to E.T. Hall (1981), all communication (verbal as well as nonverbal) is contextually bound. What we do or do not pay attention to is largely dictated by cultural contexting. In low-context cultures, the majority of the information is explicitly communicated in the verbal message. In high-context cultures the information is embedded in the context. High- and low-context cultures also differ in their definition of social and power hierarchies, relationships, work ethics, business practices, time management. Low-context cultures tend to emphasize the individual while high-context cultures places more importance on the collective.

Historical Linguistics - also called diachronic linguistics, is the study of how and why languages change.

Holistic - Emphasizing the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts. Interested in the whole of the human condition: past, present, and future; biology, society, language, and culture.

Homeworkers - People who do paid work from thier own homes.

Hypothesis - Tentative description of a relationship between variables or that such a relationship exists. In research some scientific method is used to test (in order to prove or disprove) a hypothesis.

Horticulture - The science or art of cultivating fruits, vegetables, flowers, or ornamental plants. In behavioural sciences, nonindustrial system of plant cultivation in which plots lie fallow for varying lengths of time.

Holocultural Analysis - A paradigm of research for testing hypotheses "by means of correlations found in a worldwide, comparative study whose units of study are entire societies or cultures, and whose sampling universe is either (a) all known cultures... or (b) all known primitive tribes" (Naroll, Michik, & Naroll, 1976).

Human Rights - Human rights refers to the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans irrespective of countries, cultures, politics, languages, skin colour and religions are entitled. Examples of human rights are the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the law, the right to participate in culture, the right to work, the right to hold religious beliefs without persecution, and to not be enslaved, or imprisoned without charge and the right to education.

Hybridity - Refers to groups as a mixture of local and non-local influences; their character and cultural attributes are a product of contact with the world beyond a local place. The term originates from agriculture and has for a long time been strongly related to pejorative concepts of racism and racial purity from western colonial history.

Hyperdescent - is the practice of determining the lineage of a child of mixed race ancestry by assigning the child the race of his more socially dominant parent (opposite of Hypodescent).

Hypodescent - A social rule that automatically places the children of a union or mating between members of different socioeconomic groups in the less-privileged group. In its most extreme form in the United States, hypodescent came to be known as the "one drop rule," meaning that if a person had one drop of black blood, he was considered black. The opposite of hypodescent is hyperdescent.

Imaginary Geographies - The ideas and representations that divide the world into spaces and areas with specific meanings and associations. These can exist on different scales e.g. the imaginaries that divide the world into a developed core and less developed peripheries or the imagined divide between the deprived inner city and the affluent suburbs. (Sibley)

Imperialism - A policy of extending the rule of a nation or empire over foreign nations or of taking and holding foreign colonies by forceful conquest.

Incest - Forbidden sexual relations with a close relative. The incest taboo is one of the most common of all taboos as almost all societies have some form of incest avoidance.

Independent Invention - Appearance of the same cultural trait or pattern in separate cultures as a result of comparable needs and circumstances.

Indigenized - Adapted or modified to fit the local culture.

Indigenous Peoples - Those peoples native to a particular territory that was later colonized, particularly by Europeans. Other terms for indigenous peoples include aborigines, native peoples, first peoples, Fourth World, first nations and autochthonous (this last term having a derivation from Greek, meaning "sprung from the earth"). The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues estimates range from 300 million to 350 million as of the start of the 21st century or just under 6% of the total world population. This includes at least 5000 distinct peoples in over 72 countries.

Individualism - Individualism/Collectivism is one of the Hofstede dimensions in intercultural communication studies. He defines this dimension as: "individualism pertains to societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after himself or herself and his or her immediate family." (Hofstede, 1991, p.51)

Industrial Revolution - The process of historical transformation (in Europe, after 1750) of-"traditional" into "modern" societies through industrialization of the economy by applying new discoveries in science, production methods and distribution of labour.

International Culture - Cultural traditions that extend beyond the boundaries of nation states.

Intervention Philosophy - Guiding principle of colonialism, conquest, missionization, or development; an ideological justification for outsiders to guide native peoples in specific directions. It was the ideological justification for foreign powers to guide native peoples in specific directions, usually of benefit to the intruders.

Integration - The bringing of people of different racial or ethnic groups into unrestricted and equal association, as in society or an organization; desegregation. An individual integrates when s/he becomes a part of the existing society.

Interpretive Approach in Cultural Anthropology - Regards culture as "texts," to be read and translated for their "thick" meaning. Clifford Geertz is an example of those who represents this approach.

IPR - Intellectual Property Rights is a legal concept that includes copyrights, trademarks, patents, and related rights, whereby the holder of one these abstract "properties" has certain exclusive rights to the creative work, commercial symbol, or invention which is covered by it. Intellectual property rights, consisting of each society's cultural core beliefs and principles is also claimed as a group right, a cultural right, allowing indigenous groups to control who may know and use their collective knowledge and its applications.

Islamophobia - Fear and dread of Islam, which has been increasing particularly since September 11th 2001. The Runnymede Trust in 1997 identified 'closed' and 'open' views of Islam. Closed views see Islam as static and unchanging, as primitive, sexist, aggressive, and threatening. Closed views of Islam see hostility towards Muslims as 'normal' and are used to justify discrimination because no common values with other religions are admitted. Central to closed views, or 'Islamophobia', and propagated by the Western media, is the assumption that all Muslims support all actions taken in the name of Islam. Terrorists are called 'Islamic Fundamentalists' although Muslims see them as breaking Islamic law and they suffer from being associated with terrorists and murderers. Open views see Islam as a diverse and progressive faith with internal differences, debates and developments. Recognising shared values with other faiths and cultures Islam is perceived to be equally worthy of respect. Criticisms by the West are considered and differences and disagreements do not diminish efforts to combat discrimination while care is taken that critical views of Islam are not unfair and inaccurate.

Ivory tower view - of applied anthropology; the belief that anthropologists should avoid practical matters and concentrate on research, publication, and teaching.

Jati - A local subcastes in Hindu India.

Jet Lag - A temporary disruption of bodily rhythms caused by high-speed travel across several time zones typically in a jet aircraft. Typical symptoms are fatigue, insomnia. The world has 24 time zones, one for each ho