6,078 articles
Courtship in the Philippines
Courtship in the Philippines (ligaw or panliligaw) is the traditional Filipino process in which a man openly courts a woman, serves her family, and proves sincerity until she accepts. Distinguishing practices: harana serenading, pamamanhikan family visit, and slow family-mediated acceptance, now shifting to app-based dating.
Cousin
Cousin: a collateral relative descending from a parent's sibling. English uses one unsexed term (Eskimo/lineal system); Hawaiian, Iroquois, Crow, Omaha, and Sudanese systems distinguish cousin types differently; cousin marriage rules and laws vary.
Cousin marriage
Cousin marriage, or consanguineous marriage, is marriage between cousins, typically first cousins. Legal in most of the world, banned in many US states; raises autosomal recessive disorder risk roughly twofold.
Cousin marriage in the Middle East
Cousin (consanguineous) marriage in the Middle East: unions between second cousins or closer (F ≥ 0.0156), reaching 20–70% of marriages in Arab countries, driven by property retention, education, and rural residence.
Cousin marriage law in the United States
US state statutes restricting or banning first-cousin marriage, with the federal government silent: 22 permissive states, 6 conditional, and 22 bans since Kansas's first in 1858.
Covenant marriage
Covenant marriage is a legally distinct U.S. marriage form in Louisiana, Arizona, and Arkansas requiring premarital counseling and restricting divorce to fault-based grounds; take-up is under 5%.
Covert incest
Covert incest, or emotional incest, is a non-diagnostic term coined by Kenneth Adams in the 1980s for a parent using a child as a surrogate emotional partner, without physical sexual contact; related to parentification and enmeshment.
Coya
Coya, also spelled qoya (Quechua quya), was the title of the queen of the Inca Empire, the legitimate and principal wife of the emperor, the Sapa Inca.
Craig Cobb
Craig Cobb (born 1951) is an American white supremacist and neo-Nazi activist known for his failed 2012-2013 attempt to take over Leith, North Dakota, his 2014 terrorizing plea, and a DNA test showing 14% sub-Saharan African ancestry.
Creamy layer
Creamy layer: socially and economically advanced members of India's Other Backward Classes, excluded from OBC reservation under the 1992 Indra Sawhney judgment and the DoPT Office Memorandum of 8 September 1993; income limit now Rs 8 lakh per annum.
Creativity
Creativity is the ability to produce ideas that are both novel and useful. Distinguished by divergent and convergent thinking, TTCT and RAT measurement, default mode and executive control network interactions, and mixed findings on generative AI's impact on human ideation.
Credibility
Credibility, or source credibility, is perceived believability of an information source, defined by Hovland and Weiss (1951) through expertise and trustworthiness, later extended with attractiveness by Ohanian; it drives persuasion, health messaging, reviews, and misinformation research.
Cree
Cree, a group of Indigenous First Nations peoples in Canada (Eeyou Istchee in James Bay); speakers of Cree languages, the most commonly spoken First Nations languages in Canada; party to numbered treaties including Treaties 4, 5, and 6.
Cremation
Cremation is the burning of a dead body to bone fragments and ash, documented from c. 24000 BCE, revived industrially from 1873–1876, now 62.8% of US and 77.4% of Canadian dispositions in 2025, emitting about 210 kg CO2 eq per body.
Creole peoples
Creole peoples (Créoles) are groups to whom the term Creole refers: originally people of European or African descent born in the West Indies or Spanish or French America.
Crimean Karaites
Crimean Karaites: a Turkic-speaking Karaite Jewish community of Crimea, first recorded in 1278, legally separated from Rabbanite Jews under Russian rule (1795, 1863); Khazar-origin theory rejected by scholarship; small population today.
Crimean Tatars
Crimean Tatars (Qırımlı), a Turkic Muslim people indigenous to Crimea; khanate annexed by Russia 1783, deported by Stalin in 1944, returned after 1989, repressed under Russian occupation since 2014.
Criminal psychology
Criminal psychology, also called psychology of crime or psychology-law, studies the psychological factors behind criminal behavior. Branch of legal psychology overlapping forensic and correctional psychology; key risk factors and offender rehabilitation research.
Criollo people
Criollo people: American-born Spaniards in colonial Spanish America, also called creoles, distinct from peninsulars; legally equal but excluded from high office, they led the independence movements.
Crisis
A crisis is an unstable, dangerous event or period affecting an individual, a group, or society, often arriving abruptly with little warning; most crises are created by humans.
Critical ethnography
Critical ethnography is a qualitative research method combining ethnographic fieldwork with explicit analysis of power, domination, and inequality, aiming to free people from repression, used mainly in education, health research, and social work.
Critical race theory
Critical race theory (CRT) is a body of legal scholarship, developed in United States law schools in the late 1970s and early 1980s, examining how racism is embedded in legal institutions.
Critical theory
Critical theory is a family of theories aiming to critique and transform society; capitalized, it names the Frankfurt School tradition begun at Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research in the 1930s.
Critical thinking
Critical thinking, also called critical reasoning, is careful, goal-directed thinking about what to believe or do, evaluating evidence and arguments against standards of adequacy and accuracy.
Criticism of Facebook
Criticism of Facebook covers objections to Meta's platform: the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting of 87 million users, mixed mental-health evidence, moderation reversals including the January 2025 end of fact-checking, algorithmic news deprioritization, and EU Digital Services Act addictive-design charges.
Croatan
Croatan (Croatoan): Carolina Algonquian people of Hatteras Island, their principal town whose name was carved at the abandoned Roanoke colony in 1590, and the 1885–1953 designation of today's Lumbee Tribe.
Croats
Croats (Hrvati) are a South Slavic ethnic group and the majority nation of Croatia, where they made up 91.63% of the population in 2021, with large communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and abroad.
Cross burning
Cross burning: setting a cross on fire as intimidation, adopted by the Ku Klux Klan from 1915 (Stone Mountain, Leo Frank lynching); criminalized under federal and state statutes and shaped by Virginia v. Black (2003).
Cross-dressing
Cross-dressing: wearing clothing culturally associated with another gender; a form of gender expression, usually not tied to gender identity, sexual orientation, or erotic activity; distinct from drag performance.
Cross-race effect
Cross-race effect (own-race bias, other-race effect): better recognition of same-race than other-race faces. Robust, emerges by 3 months, influenced by childhood contact, a key factor in eyewitness misidentification.