Exam 2 (Final Exam) World Cultures

Anthropologists distinguish between kin terms and genealogical kin types. What is the difference?

Kin terms are the words used for different relatives in a particular language, but genealogical kin types refers to the actual genealogical relationship.

This chapter's "Focus on Globalization" section discusses the strides different countries have made to close the gender gap. Which region has done the least to correct gender-based inequality?

Middle East/North Africa

Adding together men's and women's subsistence activities and their domestic work, men tend to work more hours than women do.

False

All art is objectively beautiful.

False

Expressive culture refers to the components of a culture that are expressed publicly, as opposed to the private aspects of culture that are hidden from anthropologists.

False

Gender roles are the instinctual behaviors that are the exclusive domain of each sex.

False

The relative gender equality found in horticultural societies most likely characterizes the most natural state of gender differentiation.

False

Your family of procreation is the one into which you were born.

False

With unilineal descent, sex with cross cousins is proper, but sex with parallel cousins is considered incestuous. Why?

Parallel cousins are considered closer relatives than cross cousins.

Which of the following statements about individual artists in non-Western societies is true?

They are more likely to be part of the cultural mainstream than Western artists, because social approval and acceptance is more important in non-Western societies.

According to studies in the 1960s, why did young Etoro men and boys engage in homosexual relationships?

They believed it necessary for boys to ingest semen in order to mature in a healthy way.

Which of the following statements about polygynous marriages is true?

They frequently involve a hierarchical arrangement among the wives.

How do the rules of endogamy function in society?

They tend to maintain social distinctions between groups.

Which of the following statements about bifurcate merging kinship terminologies is NOT true?

They use the same term to describe MB and FB.

Cross-culturally, the subsistence contributions of men and women are roughly equal.

True

Cross-culturally, women's roles tend to be focused on activities associated with the home, while men are more active in the public domain.

True

Like race, kinship is a cultural construction, in that it exhibits considerable cultural diversity.

True

The specific roles assigned to each gender vary from culture to culture.

True

Although the nuclear family remains a cultural ideal for many Americans, nuclear families accounted for just 20 percent of American households in 2012. In fact, other domestic arrangements outnumber the traditional U.S. household five to one. All of the following are among the reasons for this trend EXCEPT that

contrary to expectations, the importance of kinship is growing in contemporary nations.

In an example of how definitions of art change through time and space, this chapter describes how French impressionism, currently widely esteemed as exceptional art, was initially

criticized for being too sketchy and spontaneous to be considered art.

What is the term for the marital exchange in which the bride's family or kin group provides substantial gifts when their daughter marries?

dowry

Appreciation for the arts must be learned, this being part of the process of

enculturation

What term refers to the culturally sanctioned practice of marrying someone within a group to which one belongs?

endogamy

Which of the following marital customs functions to maintain distinctions between groups?

endogamy

What is the term for the study of the music of the world and of music as an aspect of culture?

ethnomusicology

A cross-cultural study that systematically compared romantic love in many cultures found

evidence that romantic love may be a universal, although romantic love and marriage do not necessarily go together.

This chapter's discussion on recurrent gender patterns stresses that

exceptions to cross-cultural generalizations may involve societies or individuals.

________ is synonymous with the arts.

expressive culture

Folk art, music, and lore refer to the

expressive cultures of ordinary people.

Which term refers to the family in which a child is raised?

family of orientation

Which of the following is NOT among contemporary rites of passage?

fasting

Among horticulturalists with matrilineal descent and matrilocality,

female status tends to be high.

A "world-rejecting religion" is one that

focuses on a higher realm of reality

The tasks and activities that a culture assigns to each sex are known as

gender roles.

What is the term that anthropologists use to refer to the biological father of a child?

genitor

Anthropologist Edmund Leach (1955) observed that, depending on the society, several different kinds of rights are allocated by marriage. According to Leach, marriage can but doesn't always accomplish each of the following EXCEPT

give either or both spouses rights over the latent and manifest functions of the other.

What helped broaden the study of humanities from fine art and elite art to "folk" and non-Western arts, along with the creative expressions of popular culture?

growing acceptance of the anthropological definition of culture

More than half of all U.S. families living in poverty are

headed by women.

The domestic-public dichotomy refers to the separation of

home and the outside world.

The rise in female employment in the United States, especially in professional careers, when coupled with ________, has dramatically increased household incomes in the upper classes. This pattern has been one factor sharpening the contrast in household income between the richest and poorest populations of Americans.

homogamy

Marvin Harris's studies (1974, 1978) of how beliefs and rituals may function as part of a group's cultural adaptation to its environment are an illustration of

how religion can play a prominent role in cultural ecology.

A Nuer woman married to a woman can be the pater of a child she did not father. Native American berdaches, biological men who represent a third gender, sometimes assume the role of a wife when married to a man with whom they share the products of their labor. Cross-cultural examples such as these illustrate

how, if they were to be made legal, same-sex marriages could easily benefit from the same legal rights different-sex marriages already enjoy.

Among the Agta of the Philippines, women not only gather, they also

hunt, while carrying their babies with them.

In which type of society would you expect women's status to be highest?

hunters and gatherers

Divorce tends to be more common

in matrilineal than in patrilineal societies.

All cultures have taboos against ________, sexual relations with someone considered to be a close relative, although precisely what constitutes a close relative varies across cultures.

incest

Transgender is a social category that

includes people whose gender identity has no apparent biological roots.

Kinship terminology is a classification system, a taxonomy or typology. More generally, a taxonomic system

is based on how people perceive similarities and differences in the things being classified.

Because music is a cultural universal and musical abilities seem to run in families,

it has been suggested that the predisposition for music may have a genetic basis.

Understanding kinship systems is an important part of anthropology because

kinship ties are important to the people anthropologists study; they are a key component of people's everyday social relations.

What is the term for the marginal or in-between phase of a rite of passage?

liminality

A unilineal descent group whose members demonstrate their common descent from an apical ancestor is a(n)

lineage

Susan Montague and Robert Morais (1981) argue that Americans appreciate football because it presents a miniaturized and simplified version of modern organizations. These researchers

link football's values, particularly teamwork, to those associated with business.

What term refers to the manipulation of the supernatural to accomplish specific goals?

magic

Besides animism—and sometimes coexisting with it in the same society—there is a view of the supernatural as a domain of raw impersonal power, or force, that people can control under certain conditions. This conception of the supernatural is particularly prominent in Melanesia. Melanesians refer to this force as

mana

What term refers to one of two descent groups in a given population?

moiety

What postmarital residence rule is most often found in societies with lineal kinship terminologies?

neolocal

What is the name of the postmarital residence pattern in which the married couple is expected to establish their own home?

neolocality

All of the following are examples of a Western ethnocentric view of art in the non-Western world EXCEPT that

non-Western sculpture is not always art.

The incest taboo is almost culturally universal, but

not all cultures define incest the same way

What are the two basic social units of foraging societies?

nuclear family and band

What makes up ego's nuclear family of orientation?

parents and siblings

In a study assessing the effects of television on behavior, attitudes, and values, Kottak and a team of researchers found that

people's ideas about proper family size are influenced as they see, day after day, nuclear families smaller than the traditional ones in their town.

Transvestism, when members of one gender (usually male) dress as another (female), is

perhaps the most common way of forming genders alternative to male and female.

Antimodernism describes the rejection of the modern in favor of what is perceived to be an earlier, purer, better way of life. Fundamentalism describes antimodernist movements in various religions. Ironically,

religious fundamentalism is itself a modern phenomenon, based on a strong feeling among its adherents of alienation from the perceived secularism of the surrounding modern culture

What are both induction into the U.S. Marine Corps and the vision quest of certain North American Indian societies examples of?

rites of passage

In a bifurcate merging kinship terminology, what is merged?

same-sex siblings of each parent

When compared to other kinds of societies, all the following are true about foragers EXCEPT that

sexual promiscuity is most common and routinely punished.

Which of the following kinds of religion involves part-time religious specialists in foraging societies?

shamanistic religion

In South Sudan, a Nuer woman can marry a woman if her father has only daughters but no male heirs. This is done to maintain the patrilineage. The "wife" has sex with one or more men until she gets pregnant. The children born are then accepted as the offspring of both the female husband and the wife. What is important in this example is

social rather than biological paternity, again illustrating how kinship is socially constructed.

What is the name of the custom by which a widower marries the sister of his deceased wife?

sororate marriage

Anthropologists have an interest in sports because, as the media's illustrations of U.S. football suggest,

sports can symbolize certain key aspects of the culture in which they are highly popular.

Animism, polytheism, and monotheism are the

stages, according to Edward Tylor, through which religion evolved.

What kind of society most likely has buildings dedicated to the arts?

state

According to Victor Turner, all rites of passage have three phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation. Of these three, the liminal phase—which is the most interesting—is typically characterized by

symbolic reversals of ordinary behavior

In nonindustrial societies, artists

tend to be part-time.

Robert Bellah (1978) coined the term world-rejecting religion to describe most forms of Christianity, including Protestantism. More generally, world-rejecting religions

tend to reject the natural—the mundane, ordinary, material, secular—world and focus instead on a higher realm of reality

There is no simple or universally accepted explanation for the fact that nearly all cultures ban incest. However, the most accepted explanation for the incest taboo is

that following rules of exogamy is adaptively advantageous.

The Barí of Venezuela recognize multiple fathers, even though biologically there can be only one actual genitor. This example shows

that like race and gender, kinship is culturally constructed.

Which of the following is an example of a rule of endogamy?

the Nazi law forbidding Aryans from marrying anyone but other Aryans

Émile Durkheim, an early scholar of religion, stressed what he termed religious effervescence. Anthropologists too have stressed

the collective, shared, and enacted nature of religion, the emotions it generates, and the meanings it embodies.

With the term sex, anthropologists are referring to biological differences. In contrast, they define gender as

the cultural construction of whether one is female, male, or something else.

What is meant by the term feminization of poverty?

the increasing number of women among the poorest people

What does ego represent in a depiction of a kinship system?

the point of reference used to determine which kin terms go where

Anthropologists are interested in kinship calculation, which is

the system by which people in a society reckon their kin relationships.

Which of the following best defines polygyny?

the type of marriage in which there is more than one wife

Traditionally, in some areas of the former Yugoslavia, several nuclear families were embedded in an extended family household called a zadruga. Among the Nayar in southern India, it was typical for people to live in matrilineal extended family compounds called tarawads. Descriptions of these two culturally specific cases highlight how

there are many alternatives to the nuclear family.

Regarding sexual orientation, all of the following are true EXCEPT that

there is conclusive scientific evidence that sexual orientation is genetically determined.

Why do the Kalabari carve wooden sculptures of spirits?

to manipulate spiritual forces, illustrating that not all sculpture is art

Which of the following is NOT among the four sexual orientations found throughout the world?

transsexuality

Like bifurcate merging kinship terminology, generational kinship terminology

uses the same term for parents and their siblings, but lumping is more complete (there are only two terms for the parental generation).

A lineal kinship terminology

uses two terms to identify ego's parents' siblings: one term for both FZ and MZ and another term for both FB and MB.

Actors, musicians, and dancers

function as intermediaries who translate the works and ideas of other artists.

Religion and magic don't just explain things and help people accomplish goals—they also enter the realm of human feelings. In other words,

they serve emotional needs as well as cognitive (i.e., explanatory) ones.

Which of the following kin types is NOT ego's lineal relative?

B

Found in a cave in Slovenia, the oldest known musical instrument, the "Divje babe flute," dates back more than

43,000 years

All of the following are a form of polygamy EXCEPT

A man who marries, then divorces, then marries again, then divorces again, then marries again, each time to a different woman.

Which of the following groups see a sharp divide between themselves and other religions, as well as between a "sacred" view of life and the "secular" world?

Haredi Jews

What kind of evidence led scientists studying remains at South Africa's Blombos Cave to suggest that they had found proof of symbolic thought dated to more than 70,000 years ago?

Among the bone tools they found were some that were not just sharp but also symmetrical and polished, characteristics that do not add functional value to the tool.

What kind of religion is based on the idea that each human has a double that is active during sleep?

Animism

Which of the following is NOT discussed in this chapter as a way of defining art?

Art is in a cultural sphere separate from politics and religion.

Which of the following statements is true regarding the relationship between art and religion?

Art is produced for religious purposes as well as for its aesthetic value.

Polygyny, although formally outlawed, has survived in Turkey since the Ottoman period, when having several wives was viewed as a symbol of power, wealth, and sexual prowess. Unlike in the past, when the practice was customary and not illegal, polygyny can put contemporary women at risk. How?

Because their marriages have no official status, secondary wives who are abused or mistreated have no legal recourse.

Which of the following is true about rites of passage?

Beliefs and rituals can, ironically, both diminish and create anxiety and a sense of insecurity and danger.

Contemporary North American adults usually define their families as consisting of their husbands or wives and their children. In contrast, when middle-class Brazilians talk about their families, they mean their parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and on, down to their children. They rarely mention the spouse. Which of the following is among the reasons for this stark cultural contrast?

Brazilians live in a less mobile society and so stay in closer contact with their relatives, including members of their extended family, than do North Americans.

The techniques that anthropologists have used to analyze myth and folktales can be extended to two popular films in American culture, The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars. Which of the following would NOT be a part of such an analysis revealing the similarities between the two films?

Confirming Lévi-Strauss's analysis of myths around the world, these movies have many secondary cultural references that only cultured audiences are able to perceive and appreciate.

In a lineal system of kinship terminology, which of the following pairs would be referred to by the same term?

FB and MB

Evangelical Protestantism is experiencing rapid growth in all of the following regions EXCEPT

Europe

Of the following factors, which is historically correlated with the shrinking of the female factory workforce in the United States?

European immigration around 1900

Which of the following does NOT belong to ego's matrilineage?

FM

In Arembepe, Brazil, a degree of community solidarity was promoted by the myth that everyone was kin. However, social solidarity was actually much less developed in Arembepe than in societies with clans and lineages. Why?

Intense social solidarity demands that some people be excluded. By asserting they were all related—that is, by excluding no one—Arembepeiros were actually weakening kinship's potential strength in creating and maintaining group solidarity.

Why does exogamy, the practice of seeking a husband or wife outside one's own kin group, have adaptive value outside of biological concerns?

It creates new social ties and alliances, providing access to more resources and social networks.

Which of the following statements about polyandry is most likely true?

It is a cultural adaptation to mobility associated with male travel for trade, commerce, and warfare.

Which of the following statements about religion is NOT true?

It is a cultural construction, therefore not a reality

Based on research in the 1960s, which of the following statements about Etoro conceptions of heterosexual intercourse is NOT true?

It was permitted to take place only in the couple's residence.

What is the most common system of kinship classification used in the United States?

Lineal

In a bifurcate merging kinship system, which of the following would be referred to by the same term?

M and MZ

In a society with two exogamous lineages or moieties, who is the preferred cross-cousin bride for a male ego?

MBD (mother's brother's daughter)

Which of the following is ego's cross cousin?

MBS (mother's brother's son)

Among the Yanomami of Venezuela and Brazil, as in many societies with unilineal descent, which of the following is true?

Marriage between cross cousins is preferred; marriage between parallel cousins is considered incest.

Protestant values such as asceticism and entrepreneurship as a result of the belief that success on Earth could lead to salvation, and a fervent individualism due to the belief that only individuals could be saved, both lead in the right conditions to the rise of capitalism. Who made this argument?

Max Weber in his influential book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Which of the following kinds of religion involves full-time religious specialists?

Olympian religion

What is the term that anthropologists use to identify ego's socially recognized father?

Pater

Which of the following statements about religion is NOT true?

Religion serves only to maintain social solidarity; it does not create or maintain societal divisions.

Who the mentioned in the text as a founder of the anthropology of religion?

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor

What does it mean that kinship, like race, is culturally constructed?

Some genealogical kin are considered to be relatives whereas others are not, and the rules underlying such considerations vary across cultures.

In states, how is art typically defined?

State societies rely heavily on critics, judges, and experts to make these decisions.

Appreciating art involves an aesthetic appreciation of form as well as feeling.

True

Which of the following is NOT true of the role of the Internet in marriage in contemporary societies?

The Internet has largely supplanted traditional "offline" partner shopping, which has dramatically faded in significance.

Although the incest taboo is a cultural universal, cultures define incest differently. For example, in many cultures it is incestuous to marry parallel cousins but not cross cousins. What is the difference?

The children of two brothers or two sisters are parallel cousins. The children of a brother and a sister are cross cousins.

Which of the following statements is NOT true?

The feminization of poverty is unique to the United States.

Art and religion are similar, because both refer to aspects of culture that are of more than ordinary significance.

True

Which of the following statements about groups with the patrilineal-patrilocal complex is NOT true?

Their land and prestige are passed through the females.

Rituals serve the social function of creating temporary or permanent solidarity among people—forming a social community. We see this also in practices known as

Totemism

Intersex, a group of conditions involving discrepancy between external genitals and internal genitals, can have a variety of chromosomal causes that create a sex-gender difference. Which of the following chromosomal anomalies identifies a person with the chromosomes of a woman and female internal anatomy, but with male external genitals?

XX Intersex person

Which of the following is NOT a reason that the Indian sacred cow is adaptive, according to Harris's studies?

Zebu cattle are frequently slaughtered and their meat distributed on ceremonial occasions.

What is communitas?

a collective liminality

In his study of Navajo music, McAllester found that it reflected the overall culture in all of the following ways EXCEPT

a general Navajo liberalism extended to music.

If a patriarchy is a political system ruled by men, what would a matriarchy be—a political system ruled by women? Anthropologist Peggy Sanday, who investigated these questions among the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, found that

although matriarchies do exist, they are not mirror images of patriarchies because, at least for the Minangkabau, both men and women are seen as cooperative partners for the common good.

A recent cross-cultural study of 87 societies, all of which had incest taboos, investigated the rate at which such taboos were broken. The results of this study add to the evidence that

although tabooed, incest does happen.

What term refers to the kind of descent in which people choose the descent group that they join?

ambilineal

Why should the numbers from Kinsey's research be considered merely illustrative, rather than statistically accurate?

a reliance on nonrandom samples

Cargo cults, syncretic religions that mix Melanesian and Christian beliefs, are

a religious response to the expansion of the world capitalist economy, often with political and economic consequences

For the women of Planinica, a Muslim village in prewar Bosnia, singing signaled

a series of transitions between life stages.

Totemism, one form of cosmology, is

a system, in this case a religious one, for imagining and understanding the universe.

What is one of the most important activities in Pentecostal culture that has greatly aided its expansion?

active evangelization

To understand royal endogamy, it is useful to distinguish between the manifest and latent functions of customs and behavior. The manifest function of a custom refers to the reasons people in a society give for it. Its latent function is

an effect the custom has that the society's members don't mention or recognize.

In North America, the relatively high incidence of expanded family households in the lower class is

an important strategy the urban poor use to adapt to poverty.

Findings of finely shaped bones dating from more than 100,000 years ago in South Africa's Blombos Cave suggest that

anatomically modern humans had the ability, as early as 100,000 years ago, of symbolic thought.

Any media-borne image or message can be analyzed in terms of its nature, including its symbolism and its effects. It can also be analyzed as a text, which refers to

anything that can be read or processed, interpreted, and assigned meaning by anyone exposed to it.

Like ethnicity and language, religion also is

associated with social divisions within and between societies and nations.

________ magic is based on the belief that whatever is done to an object will affect a person who once had contact with it.

contagious

Bronislaw Malinowski found that the Trobriand Islanders used magic when sailing, a hazardous activity. He proposed that

because people can't control matters such as wind, weather, and the fish supply, they turn to magic.

In what kind of kinship calculation are kin ties traced equally through males and females?

bilateral

What kind of kinship is most common in the contemporary United States?

bilateral kinship

As we enter the 21st century, artistic expression

can be seen to be increasingly incorporating elements from many cultures into contemporary art and performance.

Art can often lead to an intense emotional release, also referred to as

catharsis

According to genealogical kin types used by anthropologists to study kinship relations, what kind of relative is ego's mother's brother?

collateral relative

A lobola, a substantial marital gift from the husband and his kin to the wife and her kin among the BaThonga of Mozambique, is

widespread in patrilineal societies.

Which of the following tend to be directed at socially marginal individuals as a method of social control?

witchcraft accusations

Which of the following groups is more accepting of mass media in Brazil?

women

Among societies exhibiting the patrilineal-patrilocal complex in highland Papua New Guinea,

women remain the primary producers of subsistence crops.