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| The interface between a sociocultural system and its environment. |
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| In sociology, all human institutions, groups, and organizations. |
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| The symbolic universe—the shared meanings, ideas, beliefs, values, and ideologies that people associate with the physical and social world. |
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| The dynamic relationships between the different components of sociocultural systems. |
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| The application of ever-expanding technology and labor techniques to increase productivity. |
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| The technology and practices employed for expanding, limiting, and maintaining population size. Examples of variables included are demography, mating patterns, fertility, mortality, nurturance of infants, contraception, abortion, and infanticide. |
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| The technology and the practices employed for expanding or limiting basic subsistence production, especially the production of food and other forms of energy. Examples include the technology of subsistence, the relationships between technologies and the environment, and work patterns. |
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| Marvin Harris’s term that refers to the structural components of sociocultural systems that are organized around production, exchange, and consumption within and between large-scale political units (bands, villages, states, and empires). |
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| Marvin Harris’s term that refers to the structural components of sociocultural systems that are organized around basic production, exchange, and consumption within domestic settings (houses, camps, and other family and small community units). |
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| In sociocultural materialism, Max Weber’s typology of motivation for human behaviour. According to Weber there are four such motivations: value-oriented rational action (or wertrational), affective action (action motivated by emotions), traditional action (action motivated by what Weber calls the "eternal yesterday"), and goal-oriented rational action (or zweckrational). |
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| primacy of the infrastructure |
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| Marvin Harris’s idea that when trying to understand or explain a widespread social practice or belief, one must always begin with an examination of the relationship between infrastructure and the environment. |
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| Marx’s term for the social relations that people enter into through their participation in economic life. |
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| Marx's term for the technology, labour, and raw materials used to produce economic goods in a society. |
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| Material, structural, and cultural elements that make up the total system. |
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| The view that material conditions (usually economic and technological factors) play the central role in determining social stability and change. |
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| A societal condition in which virtually all social institutions (government, family, education) have adapted to the demands of the industrial economy. |
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