ABSTRACT
My favorite way to get people thinking about human societies across the globe and through history is to ask the deceptively simple question: “Are all people fundamentally the same or different?” Part of what I like about this discussionstarter is that I cannot answer it. For each argument for similarity, a counter can be made. For example, all societies have rules for who can reproduce with whom, but every society’s rules are different. Anthropologists use many frameworks to characterize cultures across the world. In countless cases, they use competing models to explain the same data. This is not unique to anthropologists-indeed economists, sociologists, biologists, psychologists, physicians, and many others disagree on the interpretation of a single set of facts. Because anthropologists, and by extension archaeologists, have no unified way to describe all social systems, in this chapter I will attempt to give a general overview of the common terms and basic concepts used in the field.
