Aboriginal languages
About 45 First Nations languages are spoken in Canada (the estimated number depends on the classification system). The languages with the greatest number of speakers (the numbers are approximations) ...
Alain Locke
(1886–1954).Philosopher, writer, and principal theorist of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Philadelphia, Alain LeRoy Locke graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1907. That year, he was the first ...
Alfred Louis Kroeber
(1876–1960) [Bi]American anthropologist and archaeologist who advocated the efficiency of seriation as a means of understanding artefact sequences. He formally defined the idea of the horizon style. ...
anthropology
In philosophical usage, a general theory of human nature, sometimes thought to be the necessary foundation of history and all social sciences. The philosophy of anthropology considers such issues as ...
Augusta Savage
(1892–1962).Sculptor. Largely because much of her work was lost or destroyed, she is more remembered today for her community activism during the Harlem Renaissance than for her art. During a ...
British Columbia
Canada's westernmost province is a mosaic of diverse landscapes noted for its spectacular scenery of snow-capped mountains, pocket deserts, coastal rainforest, and scenic rivers. While 46 First ...
Clyde Kluckhohn
(1905–60)An American anthropologist who taught at Harvard University and whose writings combined elements of anthropology and psychology. His main publication was Navajo Witchcraft (1944), in which ...
cognitive anthropology
Concerns itself with the search for patterns and variations in human cognition from one culture to another. It emerged as a distinct subfield in the 1950s with the development of ...
comparative method
A method of testing hypotheses about causal relationships, or establishing social types and classes, by looking at the similarities and differences between phenomena, societies or cultures. It could, ...
culture
The way of life of a people, including their attitudes, values, beliefs, arts, sciences, modes of perception, and habits of thought and activity. Cultural features of forms of life are learned but ...
diffusion
[Th]The spread of ideas, items of material culture, or cultural traits from one culture or society to another. Diffusion does not necessarily imply a movement of people, for ideas can move through ...
Edvard Alexander Westermarck
(1862–1939)Finnish anthropologist who wrote on the diversity of moral systems. Westermark espoused a kind of relativism, although without an account of what the truth of a moral statement actually ...
Edward Sapir
(1884–1939)German-born US linguist and anthropologist.Born in Lauenberg, Germany, Sapir went to the USA in 1889, at the age of five, and graduated from Columbia University, where he studied German ...
eugenics
The study of methods of improving the quality of human populations by the application of genetic principles. Positive eugenics would seek to do this by selective breeding programmes. Negative ...
four-fields approach
Refers to the division of anthropology into archaeological, sociocultural, biological/physical, and linguistic subfields, as envisioned by Franz Boas in the early twentieth century at Columbia ...
George Hunt
(1854–1933), ethnographic fieldworker.Born in Fort Rupert, British Columbia, Hunt was the son of Mary Ebbets, a Tongass Tlingit noblewoman, and Robert Hunt, a Hudson's Bay Company employee and later ...
historical particularism
The central component of Franz Boas's attack on nineteenth-century evolutionism and the comparative method (see evolution and evolutionism). Historical particularism is rooted in the notion that each ...
intelligence test
A standardized assessment procedure for the determination of intellectual ability. The score produced is usually expressed as an intelligence quotient. Most tests present a series of different kinds ...
James Alexander Teit
(1864–1922).Teit emigrated from the Shetland Islands to Canada in 1884. He spent most of his life at Spences Bridge, British Columbia, where from 1894 until his death he worked ...
