Cultural Anthropology Ch. 1&2

Ethnocentrism

Assuming your culture's way of doing things is the best.

Interpretive Approach to Culture

Emphasizes that culture is a shared system of meanings.

All humans are born with some culture.

False

Contemporary cultural anthropologists rank societies along an evolutionary scale from "primitive" to "advanced" to categorize human diversity.

False

Three broad theories of social structure dominate the social sciences.

Functionalism, conflict, and interactional

Because our values and beliefs include many elements of life such as clothes, food, and language means that culture is

Integrated

Culture

Is learned and shared

Qualitative Study

Research that involves interviews, observations, images, objects, and words.

Social Evolution

The idea that cultures pass through stages from primitive to complex.

Cultural Relativism

The moral and intellectual principle that one should withhold judgment about seemingly strange or exotic beliefs and practices.

Traditions

The most enduring and ritualized aspects of culture.

The primary ethical responsibility of anthropologists is to

The people or places they study

Natural Selection

The process by which inheritable traits are passed along to offspring because they are better suited to the environment.

Enculturation

The process of learning culture from a very young age.

Cultural Anthropology

The subfield of anthropology that studies human diversity, beliefs, and practices.

Biological Anthropology

The subfield of anthropology that studies human evolution, including human genetics and human nutrition.

Linguistic Anthropology

The subfield of anthropology that studies language.

Archeology

The subfield of anthropology that studies the material remains of past cultures.

A key principle of the holistic perspective developed by Franz Boas is

a goal of synthesizing the entire context of human experience

The idea that Ongee ancestors make tidal waves and earthquakes would be understood by an interpretive anthropologist as

a way of explaining how the world works

Which of the following is the most significant aspect of the salvage paradigm?

anthropologists need to collect information from societies before they die out

If you wanted to understand the norms of a society, you would be most likely to focus on

everyday interactions

Examples of social institutions are

kinship, marriage, and farming

During anthropological fieldwork, cultural anthropologists

learn the local language, record people's economic transactions, and study how environmental changes affect agriculture

If a functionalist were to explain why the teacher lectures from the front of the classroom to students organized in neatly arranged chairs, she or he would emphasize that

learning happens best when students are being talked at

"Owning" culture

means controlling symbols that give meaning

Norms are stable because

people learn them when they are young

Western colonial powers understood the different customs and cultures of the people they colonized as

proof of their primitive nature

Techniques that classify features of a phenomenon and count, measure, and construct statistical models are collecting and analyzing

quantitative data

Anthropologists overcome ethnocentrism by

seeing matters from the point of view of another culture

Even though anthropologists use parts of the scientific method, some don't see what they do as science because

the complexity of social behavior prevents any completely objective analysis of human culture

A cross-cultural perspective on eating insect larvae would reveal

the cultural constructions of insects as food