Humanities Final

Homi Bhabha argues that cultures are not monolithic or homogeneous, but rather hybrid. What does he mean by this?

All of these. There is no such thing as cultural "purity," but rather a process of borrowing that changes both dominating and dominated cultures. Culture is a performance, in which aspects of cultural meaning such as clothing or sports change when different cultures come into contact with one another. Although dominant cultures imagine themselves as superior, the process of imposing this "dominant" culture on other cultures results in a complex exchange that undermines this assumption.

What qualities did the new modern city that emerged in the 20th century emphasize?

Cleanliness, transportation, shopping, surveillance.

Kitsch is primarily defined by:

Commercialism

Europeans and European-Americans have always thought of themselves as belonging to the same "white" race.

False

The Atlantic Slave Trade sent the majority of African slaves to North America.

False

Karl Marx's belief that class conflict between workers and owners would inevitably lead to a synthesis in which conflict would end can best be described as:

Hegelian teleology

In Alex Haley's book Roots, in what important way does the author change St. Augustine's concept of autobiography?

Haley looks at trauma and loss, rather than the teleological model of arriving at a pre-established identity.

What did Emile Durkheim notice about modern urban life?

People experienced a sense of "anomie," or the loss of social norms that stabilized society. Suicide suddenly increased. People lost their sense of social belonging. Correct! All of these.

Herbert Spencer's philosophy of "social Darwinism" is based on what logical error?

People with the traits Herbert Spencer judged to be the best are also the most adapted to survive.

According to Thomas Hobbes, the social contract is:

The process by which the people relinquish some of their freedoms in exchange for civic order controlled by the government.

Unlike Plato, his teacher Socrates relied on the method of elenchus, which can best be described as:

The process of questioning assumptions that leads the conversation to a point of productive confusion, or aporia.

In what way(s) does Andrew Carnegie illustrate Max Weber's theory of the "Protestant work ethic"? Correct Answer

All of these. He emphasizes the well-being of the community as a whole rather than the luxury of his own family. He emphasizes hard work and thrift, and discusses work in the context of morality. He focuses on the concept of calculation when talking about the good of society.

The satirist Juvenal argued that people only really want panem et circenses (bread and circuses) because:

A Republican form of government will tend to distract its population in order to better control the demos. The demos isn't really interested in the responsibility of governing in a representative form of government like the Roman Republic. Given the choice between the responsibilities of civic duty and the pleasures of ease and entertainment, the people will generally choose entertainment. Correct Answer All of these.

What key change(s) did Frederick Taylor make to industry?

Both of these. He introduced rationalizing time-motion studies that made workers more efficient. He set the pace of work to the automation of the assembly line rather than human rhythms.

According to Benedict Anderson, what is the driving force behind the construction of national identity?

Communication technologies such as the printing press that allow us to create commonly shared stories.

The Great War (World War I) profoundly changed the idea of the heroic soldier by:

Correct Answer Both of these. Destabilizing the assumption that modern technology was a purely good phenomenon. Demonstrating for the first time that technology could destroy human bodies and "shock" human minds.

Linear perspective is a key development in Western art because:

Correct! All of these. It puts the viewing subject at the center of the visual experience by bending space around their perspective. It participates in the contradictory Platonic idea that representation should mask its artificiality because illusion is the opposite of philosophical truth. It makes claims to greater "realism" by creating the illusion of three-dimensional depth.

According to Antonio Gramsci, hegemony is the theory that:

Dominant cultural values are a self-producing system that establish and perpetuate norms of thinking and acting.

The term patriotism comes from the root word pater, or father. This is important because:

It demonstrates the ways in which different hierarchical binaries, such as patriarchy and nationalism, build on and reinforce one another.

Fraz Boas' concept of cultural relativism was an important theory at the beginning of the twentieth century because:

It emphasized the concept that cultural development is influenced by a number of complex factors, rather than a universal pattern that all cultures must follow. It refused to see cultures in a hierarchical binary. It rejected the teleological notion that some cultures are more "advanced" than others. Correct! All of these.

Jacques Derrida uses the Greek word pharmakon to emphasize what specific problem in language?

Language can have more than one meaning, making a singular Platonic interpretation impossible.

A nation is ALWAYS defined by which of the following qualities:

None of these: There is nothing that has always defined a nation.

Why does Plato suggest that the Philosopher King should use "noble lies" in order to manipulate his subjects?

Plato believes that the demos is incapable of understanding philosophical truth because they, like the slaves chained up the cave, are used to mistaking shadowy representations for reality.

For the Greeks, "barbarian" described:

Someone with inferior cultural values. A wartime enemy such as the Persians. A person who spoke a non-Greek language. Correct Answer All of these.

The root meaning of the noun "orient" is:

The "east," the place from which the sun rises.

What is the American anthropologist and author, Zora Neale Hurston's argument about hybridity?

The African-American communities she studied expressed the "will to adorn," which is the tendency to neither completely accept nor complete reject dominant culture, but rather change it in a rich process of cross-cultural exchange and influence.

What did Max Weber mean by the "iron cage"?

The bureaucratic tendency toward impersonal rationalization that dehumanized people.

Confirmation bias can be defined as:

The confirmation of a theory by ignoring contradictory evidence.

The example of the Valentine's Day rose illustrates the central problem in representation by reminding us that:

The cultural meaning of the rose is always constructed by ignoring some qualities, while exclusively focusing on others.

What does WEB Du Bois mean by the "color line"?

The material and psychological boundaries separating white and black culture

The term "melting pot" was coined by Israel Zangwill in his play by that same title in 1908. The term refers to:

The melting down of metal to purify it and rid it of impurities.

Why did Plato (representing Socrates) think democracy was doomed to fail?

The people would always be vulnerable to the manipulation of a demagogue who would manipulate them with rhetoric, rather than a philosopher king who would understand the Truth.

According to Angela Davis, Eduardo Mendieta, and other philosophers, racism is not just an action or thought by individuals; it is also part of social and economic institutions. Which of the following list names ALL of these institutions?

The plantation, Jim Crow, the ghetto, the prison

Rather than address the messiness of cultural identity, Hegel skipped over these irresolvable questions by proposing that we can know an ethnos by the fact that a group feels kinship. What is the key flaw in Hegel's argument?

This is circular reasoning, in which idea of national identity is assumed to be there if people feel that it is there.

According to Adorno, anything can become part of the culture industry if it is taken our context, mass produced, and sold as a mere commodity. Thus, in the culture industry Beethoven's sonatas can be used to sell beer, or Che Guevara's image can be used to sell t-shirts.

True

Aesthetics turns the Greek concept of perception into an abstract and universal philosophy of beauty used to establish the touchstones of our cultural canon.

True

The Louvre museum represents the concept of teleological cultural development by putting the "primitive" artifacts of non-European countries in the lower levels, and the "higher" European art in the upper floors.

True

The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, used the Platonic logic of associating outward appearance with inward essence in a hierarchical binary when he wrote: "Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination, they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous."

True

Lewis Mumford thought the invention of the clock in the 1600s was a major shift in our concept of time because we switched to a monastic concept of time, in which our personal experience of time established our daily routines and time was understood to be a relative experience.

false

Gayatri Spivak thinks there are no blocks to communication and cultural understanding bet

false

Henry Ford argued that workers were negatively affected by factory work because the repetitive labor of the assembly line meant the routinization of mindless action.

false

According to Max Weber, the emergence of Protestantism in Northern Europe changed capitalism forever by shifting the value system to a Calvinist emphasis on hard work and thrifty living.

true

American racial theories and Nazi eugenics programs were both based on the teleological assumption that evolution is a linear, coherent process that clearly distinguishes to "superior" from "inferior" peoples.

true

For Karl Marx, technology is the defining aspect of modern life because it changes our relationship to labor.

true

For the Greek philosopher Aristotle, the polis, or Greek city, was the place where politics happened, because it was necessary to develop strategies for mediating between people when they lived close to each other in cities, rather than spread apart in the country.

true

Karl Marx demonstrates that the capitalist mode of production is not universal, or timeless; instead, he maintains that it has changed over time and will continue to change.

true

Karl Marx thought capitalism necessitated worker alienation because workers can never fully own what they make.

true

Modernism was the first major movement to break with the cultural canon by incorporating artifacts that were previously considered inferior.

true

Paternalism, the argument that "inferior races" needed the help and guidance of "superior races" was used both on the slave plantations of the American South and in the colonized countries controlled by Europeans.

true

Social contract theory thought of politics in a vacuum, with an imaginary "primitive man" at the origin of civilization, and a series of Cartesian rational trade-offs along the way toward social government.

true