Cultural Anthropology Questions
The thinker who developed evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century was
Charles Darwin
_____ variation means that change is gradual across groups and that traits shade and blend into each other.
Clinal
What is the main implication of Don Kulick's story about "coming out in the field" for other anthropologists who do not necessarily study in a gay community?
Developing rapport sometimes relies on sharing a lot in common with your subjects.
________ anthropology is the study of how different societies change, engage with, and preserve the natural world.
Environmental
______ are people who are expelled by the authorities of their home countries.
Exiles
One of the reasons intersex individuals interest anthropologists is how unusual and strange it is in a sexually dimorphic species.
Fa;se
Anthropologists do not consider unstructured, casual conversations data.
False
Anthropologists generally believe in one unified theory of culture
False
Anthropologists like E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Renato Rosaldo do not see cultural anthropology as a science.
False
Because of the widespread use of mass media today, sociolinguists have found increasing homogeneity in the use of language in the United States.
False
Countries will find it relatively easy to decide what language its citizens will speak
False
Cultural anthropology is one of the most quantitative of the social sciences.
False
Cultural models and personal cognitive models are the same thing.
False
Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg conducted fieldwork among homeless San Francisco heroin injectors for
11 years
The BaMbuti are a tribe
False
The scientific method is a research method in pursuit of ultimate truths.
False
The two-spirit people represent a third-gender role in India, translated as "neither man nor woman."
False
There are more undernourished people than obese and overweight people in the world.
False
There is a biological connection between the trait of skin tone and other "racial" traits, such as certain facial features and bodily shapes.
False
When people around the world have disputes, they are most concerned with winning and losing
False
When people consume the same clothes, food, and goods they eventually think and behave the same.
False
If you wanted to study patterns of kin relations in a community, which method would you use?
Genealogical method
What ethical dilemmas did Claire Sterk face in her research with prostitutes?
How to respond when her informants were abused or otherwise threatened.
One of Hortense Powdermaker's key insights about prejudice is that
It is based on flawed logic
Why do environmental anthropologists study formal nature protection?
It often generates social conflicts
Why is Karl Polanyi's distinction between formal and substantive economics important?
It recognizes that economies involve both how people think and the actual transactions they engage in.
_____ laws in the US South after the Civil War are a good illustration of explicit discrimination.
Jim Crow
_______ refers to the widespread assumptions that people make about the relative sophistication and status of particular dialects and languages.
Language ideology
_________ is the idea that people speaking different languages perceive the world differently.
Linguistic relativity
Why were American birth rates low from 1942 to 1946?
Most young married men were serving in the military
_____ are words or objects that stand for something else.
Signs
If you wanted to have consistent responses, what kind of interview would you use?
Survey interview
Which of the following was a negative result of the creation of cash economies in colonies?
The social cohesiveness of local communities was disturbed due to migration for work
Culture can be transmitted virtually through the Internet in addition to face-to-face interaction.
True
Culture is uniquely human.
True
Exchange is a human universal
True
Famines are often caused by not environmental factors but social factors like inequality.
True
Foragers tend work less to survive than agriculturalists or pastoralists.
True
Genetically speaking, humans are a remarkably homogeneous species: there is far greater variation within human groups than there is between them.
True
Globalization and localization are complementary dynamics.
True
In every society there is a gap between that society's ideal family and the real families that exist.
True
The dichotomy between males and females is not two distinct categories but a continuum of sexual possibilities in the human species.
True
The incest taboo, or the prohibition against marrying within the nuclear family, is a human universal.
True
The notion of "ritualized homosexuality" developed by Gilbert Herdt was problematic because Western notions of homosexuality do not easily apply cross-culturally.
True
The processes of capital accumulation and the expansion of European colonialism disrupted many societies
True
The prophet Mohammad had a Christian wife.
True
There is rarely any guessing involved in the development of theories because they are tested repeatedly
True
To follow political action one must be familiar with society's rules and codes about who gets to exercise power and under what conditions.
True
What do environmental anthropologists study?
All of the options
Why is the description of conflict as "ethnic violence" misleading? You Answered It suggests that violence is biological and certain "ethnic" groups are more violent than others. It ignores the peaceful interactions of groups over time. Correct Answer All of the options. It implies age-old conflicts that are not affected by historical or political events
All of the options
Koko and Washoe are two primates who learned
American Sign Language
_______ landscapes are important because they demonstrate that many landscapes that seem wild are actually the product of human shaping.
Artifactual
An anthropologist who studies unearned privilege would be most interested in which of the following? You Answered All of the options. A fieldwork situation like the one involving Tamie Tsuchiyama, in which she clearly got privileges other internees did not get because of her involvement with the government. Racial profiling of blacks by a security officer. Correct Answer A situation in which an upper-class man gets accepted at an Ivy League university because his father and grandfather went there.
A situation in which an upper-class man gets accepted by an Ivy League university because his father and grandfather went there.
The !Kung people of southern Africa are an example what kind of society?
Acephalous
To understand aggression in society, we have to understand which of the following factor(s)? The role of the state in promoting conflicts. The availability of weapons. All of the options Cultural attitudes toward violence.
All of the options
Which of the following are areas of social activity that globalization affects?
All of the options
Which of the following is a feature of language?
All of the options
Which of the following is an element of violence? All of the options The use of force to cause harm to someone or something. It is an efficient way to transform a social environment. A highly visible assertion of power.
All of the options
Which of the following methods allowed Fairhead and Leach to make their conclusions about landscape change in Guinea?
All of the options
________ is the economic system based on private ownership of the means of production, in which prices are set and goods distributed through a market.
Capitalism
A key feature of the theory of primordialism is that ethnic groups are created by powerful interest groups in a society.
False
Although Rambo was a popular American film, it has appealed to audiences in remote corners of the world, including small villages in New Guinea, whose residents unexpectedly give the same meaning to all the characters as American audiences do.
False
Environmental anthropologists accept the idea that all indigenous people are environmentalists.
False
Ethnobiologists are primarily interested in the conservation traditions of non-Western peoples.
False
Foodways rarely change because people are conservative.
False
For antidiscrimination activists and educators, it is usually enough to simply demonstrate the existence of prejudice and discrimination.
False
Genes often work in isolation.
False
In the economic view of class, each class is a fully achieved position, with no influence of family history
False
It has been proven that overpopulation will inevitably lead to global famine.
False
Languages change very slowly, taking generations or even centuries
False
Most anthropologists see the consumption of an object or commodity as an antisocial act.
False
People living in noncentralized political systems have generally welcomed their integration into centralized political systems because it provides greater security and prosperity for them.
False
Shamans usually act simultaneously as political leaders and healers in their communities.
False
Since the early nineteenth century, the traditional American family has consisted of a husband, a wife, a few children, and perhaps a pet
False
Which English philosophers were concerned with the problem of disorder and argued that chaos is avoidable by creating strong government?
Hobbes and Locke
When language speakers use slang or metaphor, they are engaging in which concept suggested by French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure?
Parole
_______ development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Sustainable
_____ is the pattern of word order used to form sentences and longer utterances in a language.
Syntax
Which of the following statements about the concept of race in the United States is true?
The American concept of race is inconsistent, categorizing by phenotype, culture, and nationality.
A commodity chain analysis applied to motorcars would be interested in all of the following except
The layout of the factory in which they are built
In a kinship system with matrilineal descent, who does a man inherit his rights to land and clan wealth from?
The mother's brother
A biocultural analysis of carpal tunnel syndrome would emphasize the complex intersection of environmental, biological, and social causes of it.
True
A correlation exists between female status and the importance placed on child rearing in a society
True
A critical reason for taking field notes is that there may be a long lag time between field work and writing and publishing about it.
True
A key feature of political anthropologist Maxwell Owusu's perspective on democracy in Ghana is that the state will work better if village chiefs play a role in decision-making.
True
According to Edward Sapir, language is the symbolic guide to culture.
True
All knowledge systems about nature, including science, are culturally based.
True
All societies have some sort of taboo against incest.
True
Although Russians do use money to buy things, they also rely on bartering when money is scarce.
True
Anthropologists agree that, in addition to prejudice and discrimination, unearned privilege upholds social inequality.
True
Anthropologists are deeply skeptical of grandiose claims about biological destiny and the belief that nature explains all of our behavior.
True
Anthropologists of the 1880s are referred to as "armchair anthropologists" because they never traveled abroad and they gathered data from other people's reports.
True
Anthropologists often take on the role of "student" treating their informants as their "teachers."
True
Anthropology is different from journalism because journalists' data are protected by law.
True
As children get older, cultural influences on behavior become much stronger; and as a result, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to isolate biological influences on what it means to be male or female.
True
Bourgois and Schonberg advocate a heroin prescription program for addicts who have failed methadone treatment
True
Buddhism is neither monotheistic nor polytheistic.
True
In many societies, some people live their lives as neither male nor female.
True
In some cultures people are not born as full persons but gain that as they fulfill social obligations.
True
In some hunter-gatherer groups relations are egalitarian and women can become leaders of a band.
True
Language can be used to exclude or marginalize some people.
True
Localization is the flip side of globalization.
True
Malinowski's analysis of the Kula cycle is important because it helps explain how Trobriand men get social status.
True
Many societies do not have a distinctive category of "art."
True
Most people are unaware of the structure of a language until someone speaking it makes a mistake.
True
Nuclear family units occur in and are important to nearly every society around the world.
True
One of the key functions of family is controlling and managing its members' wealth.
True
Poverty increases the risks of HIV infection
True
Professor Price will be annoyed with me if I use the term "Caucasian" to describe white people in my essays.
True
The processes of capital accumulation and the expansion of European colonialism disrupted many societies.
True
While there are poor and marginalized white groups, their status is based on class, not race.
True
A language of mixed origin that developed from a complex blending of two parent languages is called
a creole
.Fundamentalism is on the rise in Christian and Muslim groups. This can be attributed to __________.
a response to perceived social crises.
A society with no governmental head or hierarchical structure is an ______ society.
acephalous
A cultural constructionist who studies class would be interested in the cultural practices of an emerging middle class in a place like Nepal. the ways intelligence tests are designed in ways that demonstrate that poor people are less intelligent than rich people. all of the options. the new ways in which class identities are combined with racial and ethnic identities, such as the idea that WASP signifies white or Jew signifies middle class.
all of the options
A multisited ethnographer studying Mexican migrants in the United States would be most likely to conduct fieldwork by interviewing border officials. You Answered by traveling with migrants as they cross borders in the Southwest. in a government hearing on immigration policy. all of the options.
all of the options
Anthropologists today recognize that artists can reflect traditions specific to their societies challenge people's thinking reinforce cultural patterns all of the options
all of the options
The enhanced cognition of early modern humans allowed for
all of the options
When anthropologists go into the field they go with a set of questions they want to ask and have answered. all of the options. they often change the focus of their question to fit what they are seeing. they often go with the flow of everyday life, even if it seems off-topic at the time.
all of the options
During fieldwork cultural anthropologists learn the local language. study how environmental changes affect agriculture. record people's economic transactions. all of those listed.
all of those listed
A central technique involved in an informal, open-ended interview is to
allow questions to emerge in the course of the interview.
In northern Sudan, cultural ideology holds that uncircumcised women
are not respectable and will have difficulty finding a marriage partner.
Globalization is a process that includes all of the following EXCEPT __________.
benefits for most cultural minorities
The enhanced cognition of early modern humans allowed for
better defense against predators. all of the options. organizing social groups. increased sophistication in toolmaking.
Which technology led to what is referred to as the "sexual revolution" in the 1960s?
birth control pill
A quantitative approach to studying the archaeological past would be most interested in
building and testing hypotheses by collecting, classifying and measuring the remains of past cultures.
Animal call systems
can only communicate in response to real-world stimuli
All societies differentiate between male and female, but one way Americans are unique in how we do it is that we link gender to
colors
The linked elements that contribute to the manufacture of an object like a T-shirt is called a ________.
commodity chain
Early anthropologists used the ________ method to establish models of social evolution.
comparative
Following Professor Price's definition and explanation of cultural relativism, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban's (in Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights) initial refusal to directly oppose female circumcision (or genital cutting) was an example of
confusing cultural relativsim with moral relativsim
Most families function as groups of real people who work together toward common ends. Such family groups are referred to as a
corporate group
The major difference in different kinship systems is the way they classify or group together their ______.
cousins
The unilateral decision of one social group to take control of the symbols, objects, and practices of others is called cultural _________
cultural appropriation
The ________ school emphasized that processes of enculturation shape the characteristics of a person's individual makeup.
culture and personality
The mental illness or psychological malady that a particular group of people suffers is also known as a ________.
culture-bound syndrome
According to Mauss and Durkheim, a key feature of the concept of personhood in many cultures is
defined socially
An example of _______ reciprocity is the Sagali rite in the Trobriand Islands, in which women make and give away banana leaf bundles when somebody dies.
delayed
Franz Boas and his students were ________, emphasizing that cultural characteristics result from a spread of cultural attributes from one society to another.
diffusionists
Anthropologist George W. Stocking, Jr., suggested that researchers should try to look at objects in several _______, beyond just height, width, and depth, including time, power, wealth, and aesthetics.
dimensions
Bronislaw Malinowski developed the _______ method, which requires the researcher to live with people for years in order to develop the "native's point of view."
ethnographic
The idea that cultures pass through stages from primitive to complex is known as social _____
evolution
One reason many anthropologists are skeptical of _______ is that it compares humans with primates to prove that certain things, like male dominance, are natural.
evolutionary psychology
When social norms dictate that someone from a particular clan must marry outside of that clan, anthropologists say that the clan is
exogamous
A biological determinist
explain human behavior, cognition, and perception as a result of evolutionary processes.
Anthropologists call family groups that consist of larger groups of relatives beyond the nuclear family ______ families.
extended
In the face of disparities in access to food, anthropologists are increasingly studying the issue of ______.
food security
For the Bantu and Sudanic villagers living near the Ituri Forest, the forest is
full of frightening malevolent spirits unfit for habitation.
What are people who belong to conservative religious movements that advocate a return to traditional principles called?
fundamentalists
The _____ system refers to the ideas and social patterns a society uses to organize males, females, and those who do not fit either category.
gender/sex
Anthropologists commonly refer to the ideas and social patterns a society uses to organize males, females, and those who do not fit either category as
gender/sex systems
The application of genetic explanations for breast cancer is an example of _________.
geneticization
One of the main reasons localization interests anthropologists is that
global integration creates opportunity for local cultures to express themselves.
A society's separate legal and constitutional domain that is the source of law, order, and legitimate force is the _______.
government
Anthropologist Ashraf Ghani's successes as a finance minister and presidential candidate in Afghanistan can be attributed to what?
his attentiveness to local social norms and priorities.
A visual anthropology perspective is applicable to all of the following except
how people need to work in order to buy things
The "one drop rule" enlarged the slave population by
including the mixed-race of children of slaveholders in the enslaved population.
The practice of anthropologists explaining their research and being clear about the risks involved is called _______
informed consent
Ethnocentrism
is a common feature of culture.
Using the term "Caucasian" to describe white Americans
is incorrect and is a holdover from discredited racial classifications that perpetuates the perception that race is a valid construct
A key feature of environmental ______ movements is their attention to the linkages between social marginalization and environmental degradation.
justice
The ability to digest milk into adulthood is called _______.
lactase persistence
Culture is
learned and shared.
The recent rise of autonomy movements among Hawaiian separatists and Zapatistas in Mexico are examples of
localization
The anthropological study of _________ includes looking at the ideas and practices of manhood and how gender/sex identities are constructed.
masculinity
The practice in which a third party intervenes in a dispute to aid the parties in reaching an agreement is called _______
mediation
The practice in which a third party intervenes in a dispute to aid the parties in reaching an agreement is called _______.
mediation
Although all primates use some form of call system, some, such as chimps and ______, are known to be capable of more complex communication than a simple call system.
monkeys
The process by which inheritable traits are passed along to offspring because they are better suited to the environment is
natural selection
The flexibility of the brain is called
neural plasticity
Anthropologists began to understand the adaptability of the human brain by studying
nonhuman primates
After the US Civil War the biologizing of race became extreme and people were defined as black if they had a single African ancestor, which came to be known as the "_____ rule."
one drop
Claire Sterk's primary research methods were
participant observation and in-depth interviews
Which of the following would not be an explanation for divine madness (buduh) in Bali, Indonesia, by a biocultural anthropologist?
particular communities evolved to suffer from particular maladies.
Norms are stable because
people learn them when they are young
Saying race is ________ constructed is not enough because conceptions of race have real consequences.
socially
Power that transcends individuals, operating in settings and orchestrating settings in which social and individual actions take place, is
structural power
Most visitors to the 1935 exhibition of African art at New York's Museum of Modern Art were confronted for the first time by traditional African carvings of human and animal figures that were
stylized and symbolic representations of their subjects
The core of Anthony F. C. Wallace's understanding of religion was belief in
supernatural things
A relativistic perspective on the meanings of Coca-Cola in Tzotzil Maya communities in Chiapas, Mexico, would emphasize
that those meanings are only sensible within a culturally specific set of ideas about religion and spirituality.
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.
Which approach to religious beliefs and behaviors do the Welsch and Vivanco feel is most effective at explaining why people engage in religious behaviors, especially behaviors that do not directly benefit the individual, such as the actions of Jonathan Daniels, Tom Coleman, or suicide bombers in the Middle East?
the idea that religion is a system of social action
A key component of nutritional anthropology as defined by Audrey Richards was attention to
the interrelationship between biology, health, ecology, political-economic, and cultural concerns.
A biocultural perspective on gender variance would emphasize all of the following EXCEPT
the relative allocation of sex-specific hormones, such as testosterone and estrogen, that influence whether a person is male or female.
If anthropologist Roy Rappaport were studying organic farming practices in the rural United States, he would likely want to understand
the understandings farmers themselves have of the landscape, as well as the understandings scientists and other outsiders have of the same landscape.
The main idea behind the holistic perspective is to study culture
through systematic connections of different parts.
James Ferguson, who is an anthropologist of development, argues that development exist
to expand state power
A word that best describes participant observation is
unstructured
An anthropologist who promotes principles of agroecology would likely view horticulture as
useful to learn new principles about sustainable farming.
The comparative method
uses data from many different societies.
Claire Sterk built rapport with the prostitutes she studied by
all of the options
Anthropologists often disguise the identity of their
informants
The exchange of brass rods for the purchase of cattle or the payment of bride price is an example of the use of
limited-purpose money.
What is the family formed by a married couple and their children called?
nuclear family
The approach that compares ancient texts and documents to analyze long-term linguistic change is called _______.
philology
If you were conducting a symbolic analysis of TV programs and wanted to identify a key scenario such as the Horatio Alger myth, which of the following would you focus on?
plots that are repeated in many of the programs that American viewers interpret as commonplace social experiences.
When a woman marries more than one man she is practicing
polyandry
Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 film Triumph of the Will celebrated and glorified the Nazi regime with footage of actual rallies and conventions. Although every frame of this film was authentic and nothing in it was staged, many people describe it as a _______ film because of the way it manipulated the footage to glorify Hitler and the Nazis.
propaganda
Good illustrations of a _______ include a funeral, wedding, graduation, or initiation, in which an individual or group of individuals change social position.
rite of passage
The reproductive forms and functions of the body are referred to as our _____.
sex
The practice of referring to people by the names of their children (such as father of Peter or mother of Susan) is called _______.
teknonymy
A foodways perspective on human evolution would emphasize
that changes in human dietary physiology are intertwined with how people grow, share, and eat food.
An action theorist studying political power in the US Senate would be especially interested in
the normative rules of conduct that senators are supposed to follow.
One of the primary reasons indigenous leaders criticize the dominant model for administering protected environmental areas is
they assume nature must be uninhabited by people.
The Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania practice
transhumant pastoralism.
A key finding of anthropologist Matthew Gutmann's fieldwork on masculinity in Mexico is that
women challenge men's domination over them by arguing and issuing ultimatums.