Anthropology midterm fall 2018
Who taught Washoe (an ape) American Sign Language?
Allen and Beatrix Gardener
Koko and Washo were two primates who had learned
American Sign Language
The Origin of the Species was written by:
Charles Darwin
Which of the following is NOT a concept key to the human culture as discussed in the lecture?
Culture is isolated
According to the "Survival of the Fittest" video , what trait of the Rock Pocket Mouse was best adapted to survival on the lava flow?
Dark fur
Which of the following is NOT studied by anthropologists?
Dinosaur bones
*The nineteenth-century British anthropologist credited with the development of the concept of culture through an evolutionary perspective was
E. B. Tylor
The so-called cannibal forks of the Fijians were of great interest to collectors in England because
English collectors interpreted Fijians as savages and wanted examples of their savagery for the collections they displayed in their homes
*In science, a theory is only a guess. True or false
False
*The first real protection for the preservation of archaeological sites in the United States was put in place in 1966. True or false
False
Contemporary cultural anthropologists often rank societies along an evolutionary scale from "primitive" to "advanced." True or false
False
Cultural anthropology is one of the most quantitative of the social sciences. True or false
False
In order to study culture one must travel to distant, far-off places. True or false
False
In order to truly practice cultural relativism, one could never make a judgement on what is right and wrong. True or false
False
In science, a theory is an educated guess and is not well-accepted among the scientific community. True or false
False
Material culture consists only of the objects made in preindustrial societies. True or false
False
The aesthetic dimension of an object is universally shared. True or false
False
What was the fate of Kennewick Man?
He has been buried by members of the Columbia Basin Tribes
*This school of anthropological thought stresses the interrelationship among the natural conditions in the environment and society:
Neoevolutionism
In archaeology, this is a division of prehistory based on gross changes in subsistence patterns, climatic changes, housing and burial styles, etc.
Period
Reconnaissance work in archaeology is also known as:
Phase I
According to "Our Babies Ourselves", which of the following is NOT one of the "3 R's" of child rearing in Dutch society?
Respect
The idea that embraces dynamic cultural processes and the idea that the observer of cultural processes can never see culture completely objectively represent:
The idea that embraces dynamic cultural processes and the idea that the observer of cultural processes can never see culture completely objectively represent
According to "Our Babies Ourselves", in the United States, individualism is valued highly, so generally parents do not hold their babies as much as other cultures. True or false
True
Historical markers are generally something that conveys a limited range of meaning about an object, place, or event. True of false
True
Most people are unaware of the structure of a language until someone speaking it makes a mistake. True or false
True
The World Heritage Site program can only delist sites if the host country fails to protect it. True or False
True
In "Radio Lab: Why Isn't the Sky Blue", how did Guy Deutsher's daughter Alma initially describe the sky?
White
"Why Isn't the Sky Blue": What is the name of the British Prime Minister who was fascinated with the stories of Homer?
William Gladstone
A language of mixed origin that developed from a complex blending of two parent languages is called
a creole
A key principle of the holistic perspective developed by Franz Boas is
a goal of synthesizing the entire context of human experience
The Greek philosopher Aristotle proposed that all life was arranged in
a great chain of being
Talking about sports as a battlefield is an example of
a metaphor
Linguists refer to mixed languages with a simplified grammar that people rarely learn as a mother tongue as
a pidgin language
One of the methods that archaeologists can use to determine potentially useful areas to excavate involves the use of
aerial surveys, surface surveys, regional surveys, GIS surveys (answer was all of the above)
Which of the following is not one of the ways that objects change over time?
an object always becomes less valuable and less significant as it ages and deteriorates over long periods of time
The peppered moth is a classic example of how environmental factors
are part of the interaction between genotype and phenotype
*Cultural anthropologists do research by
building trusting relationships with people over a long period of time
One of the central ideas of Darwin's theory of evolution was the idea that
change in organisms was related to their adaptability to a particular environment
The communication systems of nonhuman species consist of a finite (limited) number of signals for finite specific meanings. Such systems are said to be:
closed
The process of learning culture from a very young age is called
enculturation
Which method would be best when doing a study on the genetic propensity for cancer in a given population?
genealogical method
Uniformitarianism is the idea that change occurs:
gradually and through the result of processes that are still observable today.
Alfred Russell Wallace is known for:
hitting upon the idea of natural selection at about the same time as Darwin
*Linguistic anthropologists traditionally study
how our language evolved, how our mouths form words, and how indigenous people classify their social worlds (answer was all of the above)
What process involves shifting from an agricultural economy to a factory-based one?
industrialization
*Why was the discovery of penicillin in 1928 useful in our understanding of evolution?
it demonstrated that bacteria could quickly develop the ability to resist antibiotics
*Anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Jane Richardson made a detailed study of skirt length over the 300 years prior to World War II. Which of the following characterizes their conclusions?
many aspects of women's dress styles changed during every period, although skirt length is generally shorter in recent decades than a century or more ago, skirt length is always changing, skirt length changed in regular cycles, getting shorter and then longer before becoming shorter again (answer was all of the above)
*In terms of the extended evolutionary synthesis, large-scale agriculture, which produces massive amounts of both food and pollution, can be understood as a form of
niche construction
If you wanted to understand very early, non-living human beings, you would likely engage in
paleoanthropology
When anthropologists study the way people use language in real settings rather than as a set of grammatical rules, they are focusing on
parole
Which type of interaction may include playing basketball, cooking, dining, or having coffee with informants?
participant observation
The structuralist approach to culture theorizes what?
people make sense of the world through binary oppositions (e.g., raw/cooked)
*Cultural anthropologists face an ethical responsibility in their work and so must disclose to informants
reasons for doing the research
In anthropology, holism refers to:
seeking to understand how all aspects of our species are related
A qualitative approach to studying social life in your university would emphasize all of the following except
the construction of statistical models to explain activities in the community
The idea that things have social lives refers to which of the following?
the fact that objects are deeply intertwined with people's lives
How, in general, does Marvin Harris (a materialist) explain the biblical dietary laws?
they resulted from some practical, usually economic considerations
The main idea behind the holistic perspective is to study culture
through systematic connections of different parts
The most enduring and ritualized aspects of culture are referred to as
traditions
