Chapter 8: Gender

Sexual Dimorphism: Marked differences, such as in height and weight, in male and female
biology besides the contrasts in breasts and genitals.
Gender Roles: The tasks and activities that a culture assigns to each sex.
Gender Stereotypes: Oversimplified but strong held ideas about the characteristics of
males and females.
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.
Domestic-Public Dichotomy: Contrast between womens role in the home and mens role
in public life, with corresponding social devaluation of womens work and worth.
Matriarchy: A political system in which women lay a much more prominent role than men
do in social and political organization.
Patrilineal-Patrilocal Complex: An interrelated constellation of patrilineality, patrilocality,
warfare, and male supremacy.
Patriarchy: Political system ruled by men in which women have inferior social and political
status, including fewer basic human rights.
Intersex: Pertaining to a group of conditions reflecting a discrepancy between the external
and the internal genitals.
Transgender: A category of varied individuals whose gender identity contradicts their
biological sex at birth and the gender identity that society assigned to them in infancy.
Sexual Orientation: A persons habitual sexual attraction to, and sometimes activities
with, persons of the opposite sex (heterosexuality), or both sexes (bisexuality); also, the lack
of attraction (asexuality).

Chapter 9: Religion
Religion: Beliefs and rituals concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces.
Communitas: Intense community spirit, a feeling of great social solidarity, equality, and
togetherness; characteristic of people experiencing liminality together
Animism: Belief in souls or doubles.
Mana: Sacred personal force in Melanesian and Polynesian religions.
Taboo: Prohibition backed by supernatural sanctions.
Magic: Use of supernatural techniques to accomplish specific aims.
Ritual: Behavior is formal, stylized, repetitive, and stereotyped, performed earnestly as a
social act; rituals are held at set times and places and have liturgical orders.
Rites of Passage: Culturally defined activities associated with the transition from on place
or stage of life to another.
Liminality: The critically important marginal or in-between phase of a rite of passage.
Leveling Mechanisms: Customs and social actions that operate to reduce differences in
wealth and thus to bring standouts in line with community norms.
Revitalization Movements: Movements that occur I times of change, in which religious
leaders emerge ad undertake to alter or revitalize a society.

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.