mini exam #1 cultural anthropology

true

"Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" is a parody (humorous exaggeration) of US culture in the 1950s.

false

According to Kaplan, although archivists as a profession struggled with the issue of objectivity throughout the 20th century, within anthropology there has been little concern with this topic.

false

According to Lundberg, Malinowski believed that ethnographers should keep themselves at a distance from their subjects so that they could maintain their scientific objectivity.

true

According to Miner, one of the central beliefs of the Nacirema is that the human body is disgusting and prone to disease and decay.

oralism, segregation

According to Waller, in the 1870s and 1880s, white schools for the deaf moved toward ___. In the American south, however, the phenomenon of ___ led to Black ASL remaining closer to the original form of ASL.

false

Alex the famous subject of one nonhuman language study, was a prairie dog.

false

Although Lundberg is aware that she could help the residents of Lamalera by sharing simple medical supplies, she withholds these so as not to interfere with village life.

false

Anthropologists are interested only in observing cultures from the objective, outsider perspective, because insiders are always mistaken about their own cultures.

false

Anthropologists consider data collected through direct observation to be more truthful and accurate than data collected through survey or interview.

false

Biological determinists would have been very much in favor of schools to "civilize" Native Americans, Africans, and other people they saw as inferior.

Langue, Parole

Early linguists like Sir William Jones were very invested not just in diachronic approaches (change over time), but also in the idea of ___, which refers to the "true" form of a language. This way of approaching language is called prescriptive linguistics, and it perceives language as something that should be protected from too much change. In contrast, a descriptive linguistics approach is interested in synchronic use of language (i.e. how members of a living group of speakers use that language in varied ways) and the validity and cultural information contained in ___ which is how people speak language and strategically deploy it.

Language is OPEN/PRODUCTIVE

Human languages have a large repertoire of symbols, and we can combine, invent, repurpose symbols to capture an infinite number of meanings. Nonhumans do not seem to combine utterances to describe new things. Humans combine the symbols they have at their disposal to ask about, describe, learn, and so on. My niece using "the daddy of your house" instead of "your husband" or "my uncle" is an example of this, as is Washoe, the chimpanzee who was taught sign language, signing "water bird" for "duck."

Language has the quality of DISPLACEMENT

Humans are not limited to stimulus/response communication. We fantasize, we communicate at will. We displace the act of communication from the thing we are communicating about.

Paralanguage, Kinesics

If one has access to the voice of an individual who is producing spoken language, they have access that individual's ___ (i.e., their vocal qualities and extralinguistic utterances); if one can see someone producing language, they also have access to that person's ___ or body language as well as their proxemics or use of space.

false

In "Got Culture?" Craig Stanford explains why the arguments for nonhuman culture are unconvincing and don't stand up to scrutiny.

false

In "How Code Switching Explains the World," Demby argues that only truly bilingual people code switch.

explicit, implicit

In "Queer Customs" Kluckhohn makes a distinction between ___ culture, which is what an outsider could readily observe, and and ___ culture, which is much more difficult to get at, because most people have never examined things like the thoughts and beliefs that influence their behavior.

replicability, Validity, accuracy

In assessing anthropological data, the term ___ relates to whether or not another researcher would come to the same conclusions if they repeated an experiment and whether our data tell us about the group we want to study, rather than telling us about our tools for data collection; the term ___ relates to whether research subjects "recognize" themselves in the story a researcher tells and find it meaningful (i.e., do the emic and etic stories overlap); issues of ___ relate to how well the data collected reflect some kind of objective reality.

Bronislaw Malinowski, Melville Herskovitz

In her comparison between archivists and anthropologists, Kaplan calls attention to the anthropologist ___, who argued that anthropologists needed to be explicit about their participant observation methodologies, and later, to anthropologist ___ who argued strongly that anthropologists needed to accept that their observations were inherently subjective and filtered through their own subjectivity.

speech, sign language, lexigrams

In terms of examining the capacity for language in non-human great apes, early on, cross-fostering studies attempted to teach apes ___, which is not anatomically possible for them. In the mid-twentieth century, experiments using ___ investigated whether the barrier to language production was simply anatomical, but these studies are inherently subject to the criticism that nonhuman subjects are merely mimicking, rather than producing language. At the end of the 20th century, experiments using ___ became the gold standard for nonhuman language studies, because they addressed this criticism.

false

In the Fongoli forest, Primatologist Jill Pruetz observed both adult male and adult female chimpanzees hunting with spears.

Franz Boas, Culture areas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Functionalism

In the early 20th century, the North American anthropologist ___ developed the idea of cultures as historically particular phenomena and further suggested that anthropologists ought to specialize in ___ and abandon earlier global approaches to culture. In the United Kingdom, the anthropologist ___ worked away from ethnocentrism and toward cultural relativism by using the concept of ___ —which is the idea that cultural beliefs, practices, and behaviors that may seem "shocking" to the outsider do work and/or solve problems for that group of people.

Unilineal evolution, Biological determinism, Hyperdiffusionism/diffusionism

In the late 19th century, an approach to culture/anthropology known as ___ assumed that all human groups moved through the exact same stages of cultural development (e.g., savage, barbarous, civilized), although not necessarily at the same pace. Contemporary with this approach was an approach known as ___, which assumed that culture was somehow contained within the physical body, so that individuals would develop a particular cultural pattern by nature, regardless of nurture. Also contemporary was the approach called ___ which assumed that only a very few cultures were "hotspots" of innovation and other cultures simply "borrowed" from these.

Ethnography, Ethnology

In the practice of sociocultural anthropology ___ refers to the intensive look at a single culture that examines that cultures uniqueness and emphasizes difference; however, anthropologists are also interested in ___ which places any given culture pattern against the backdrop of universal humanity and draws comparisons across cultures.

true

The symbolic/interpretive anthropologists rejected the idea that anthropology is (or should try to be) a science.

communication, language

The term ___ is very broad; it refers to any sending and receiving of messages. In contrast, the term ___ refers to a highly specialized form that may be unique to humans.

symbol, signal

The term ___ refers to an abstract, arbitrary way of representing a concept. These abstract representations differ from one group to the other (e.g., hand vs. mano); in contrast the term ___ refers to communication in a way where the meaning of the message is clear, unambiguous and easily understood across group lines (e.g., baring one's teeth as a threat).

Anthropomorphism, Anthropodenial

The term ___ refers to projecting human like characteristics on to nonhumans. Scientists typically consider this problematic. Franz deWaal, however, argues that the opposite phenomenon, which he calls ___ is equally problematic.

emic, etic

This is meant to elicit both the ___ perspective (insider) and employ a(n) ___ (outsider) perspective.

hypothosis, data

This means that we create knowledge by making observations, then formulating ___ and testing these by collecting ___

Social legacy

refers to the practices, beliefs, behaviors, etc., that we gain from the specific cultural and social groups around us. For example, different ways of carrying children (including who, how, when) vary, and they are a matter of social legacy.

I'd expect you to acknowledge Stanford's work on the issue of symbols, perhaps talk about learning (and likely explicit teaching). The idea of culture being social is also important. Just show me you're thinking.

where do you stand on the issue of nonhuman culture?

social science

anthropology is academically classified as a

true

Formal, structured interviews are an appropriate tools if a research wants to ensure comparability of the results from interviewee with those of another interviewee.

Language gaining meaning from STRUCTURE

Human languages convey complex, nuanced meanings because "utterances" are structured. I cannot blurt a string of symbols, ignoring the rules of word order in English, and make full meaning ("Cute dog so is my" is not meaningful in English—"My dog is so cute" is meaningful because it is appropriately structured). By changing structure, the same symbols can have multiple meanings: "Ralphie torments Beaker" and "Beaker torments Ralphie" have two different meanings.

false

Kluckhohn argued that it was critical for anthropologists and missionaries to work together to establish a universal set of morals in all human groups.

infrastructure, social structure, superstructure

Malinowski approached culture in terms of its "must-haves." In his framework, ___ refers to the way a group accesses resources and distributes them, its technology, the knowledge of the environment, and so on. ___ refers to individuals' statuses within the group, their sense of self versus other, and obligations based on status. ___ refers to overarching cognitive models of the way the world works and why the group does things in a particular way.

Jill Pruetz, spear

Mary Roach reports on the research of primatologist ___ who observed chimpanzees in Fongoli forest, where it was primarily females and juveniles who engaged in hunting using ___ they crafted.

Language being SYMBOL BASED

Meaning comes from a host of arbitrary signifiers attached to objects, concepts, and so on. These signifiers are abstract and not concretely or obviously related to the thing they signify. Thus, the symbol for a "thing" (e.g., "sunglasses" in English) is no better or worse for representing that thing any other language (e.g. "sonnebrille" for the same object in German).

false

Most 21st century linguists take a strongly prescriptivist approach to their discipline and argue for moving humans toward the correct form of language.

false

Much contemporary anthropological work is dedicated to establishing that biological races are real and fundamentally different.

false

Napoli argues that it is important to maintain only one correct way of speaking within a language.

linguistic anthropology, archeology, physical anthropology

Of the four fields that make up the discipline of anthropology, ___ studies living cultures through their primary symbolic systems; ___ studies (mostly) past cultures through their material culture; and ___ has four sub fields that approache human nature and human culture from a biological perspective.

Participant observation

Sociocultural anthropology involves fieldwork employing a(n) ___ framework.

false

Stanford argues that chimpanzee communication is not symbolic, because communicative gestures are the same across all communities.

holistic

The discipline is distinct from sister disciplines in the fact that anthropologists take a(n) ___ approach, meaning we are interested in the total system of culture and intersections between different aspects of it.

Design features

a term we associate with Charles Hockett's mid-20th century attempt to identify the features that all human communication systems share, that are NOT widely found in the communication systems of non-humans in the wild. langugage is symbol based, structure, open/productive, and a quality of displacement

Organic heredity

the abilities, bodily states, and unlearned responses that all humans share. Kluckhohn gives the example of the infant "grasp reflex," which is present, regardless of cultural or societal surroundings.

Ethnocentrism

the belief we all have instilled in us that our cultural way of doing things is the best (because it's natural, the most highly evolved, the most intuitive, the most rational, etc.—the "why" of the superiority is often interesting and conflicting when we start to question it. This is something a sociocultural anthropologist must try to avoid or at least move beyond, but also still has to recognize.

Cultural relativism

the position that holds that cultures are "successful" adaptations to the particular set of problems a group experiences, and there is no objective "better" or "worse," just different. Sociocultural anthropologists, to do their work effectively, have to try to embrace this position, at least to some extent.