Peoples and Cultures Class UWF

How do anthropologists today evaluate Marshall Sahlins' statement that foragers are "the original affluent society?"

Anthropologists know that foragers' work and leisure time depends on the availability of resources, making this statement overly romantic.

What does the chapter author, García, say sparked his interest in cultural anthropology?

A lifetime of other people's questions and assumptions about his racial and ethnic background

How did the "Age of Enlightenment" plant seeds for many academic disciplines, including anthropology?

Ordinary people could learn the "truth" through observation and experience.

Which of the following is NOT a major subfield of anthropology in the United States?

Sociopolitical anthropology

Anthropologist Eric Wolf argued that human consciousness is determined by this basic human activity:

Work

In the study of religion, a cosmology may be defined as

an explanation for the origin or history of the world.

In her book, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family, Jean Briggs argues that

anger and strong negative emotions are not expressed among families that live together in small iglus amid harsh environmental conditions.

The most common form of descent pattern practiced in the United States is referred to as

bilateral.

One consequence of early anti-miscegenation laws during the period of slavery in the United States was that

children of slave women and a Euro-American father inherited their mother's racial and slave status, adding to the slave "property" of the father.

The communication of animals using sounds and visual cues (such as color changes, expressions, or body movements) is referred to as a

closed system

Salvage ethnography was an ethnographic approach that emphasized

collecting and documenting records of "authentic" and "traditional" cultures that were in danger of disappearing.

The political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended period of time is referred to as

colonialism

Relationships formed through blood connections are called __________, while those formed through marriage are called __________.

consanguineal, affinal

North American anthropologists stress the importance of holism, or

considering the entire context of a society, including its history.

Marvin Harris argues that religious beliefs developed in India to prohibit killing cows because

cows were more valuable alive than as meat, due to their role in farming and subsistence.

The principle that a culture must be understood on its own terms rather than compared to an outsider's standard is called

cultural relativism

The four-fields approach in the anthropology of the United States includes

culture, biology, language, and archaeology

The social-cultural process that creates kinship-based relationships of rights and obligations between members of a family is referred to as

descent.

A child born into a traditional Croatian family will use different terms to refer to their mother's brother and father's brother as a reflection of the

different roles that these uncles play in a child's life based on an earlier agricultural lifestyle.

A society in which few differences exist between members in terms of wealth, status, and power is referred to as a

egalitarian system.

Each of the four types of socio-cultural integration can be identified as

egalitarian, ranked, or stratified.

The ________ perspective focuses on how people perceive and categorize their own culture and experiences.

emic

Cultural explanations about the underlying causes of health problems are referred to in medical anthropology as

ethno-etiology.

The in-depth study of everyday practices and lives of a people is referred to as

ethnography

The comparative study of cultural ideas about wellness, illness, and healing is called

ethnomedicine.

The field of study that investigates the ways that natural processes have shaped the development of life on Earth, producing measurable changes in populations over time is called

evolutionary biology.

At Halloween each year, the author joins in giving out handfuls of candy to neighborhood children. This type of reciprocity can best be called

generalized reciprocity.

The intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa" is the definition of

globalization

Horace Miner's essay Body Rituals of the Nacirema (1956) was written as a satire to

have readers examine the way that early anthropological descriptions made other people seem exotic and strange.

All of the following are true about Sir James Frazer EXCEPT

he concluded that all religious systems were equally developed but had different manifestations

An approach to culture that emphasizes the interrelationships between all aspects is referred to as

holistic

A socially constructed racial classification system in which a person of mixed racial heritage is automatically categorized as a member of the less (or least) privileged group is called

hypodescent.

Sharing of food and other resources among members of foraging groups

is a survival strategy that reinforces social equality and helps the group get through times of scarcity.

The term for all forms of human body language is

kinesics

The word used to describe culturally-recognized ties between members of a family is

kinship.

A social contract between (most often) two individuals and potentially their families that specifies rights and obligations of their union and their offspring is how anthropologists understand

marriage.

The anthropological term for a trait that is inherited independently, and not bundled together with other traits, is

nonconcordant

The research technique in which an ethnographer records their own observations and thoughts, as well as what they do while engaging in daily community activities, is called

participant observation

Informal disputes in band societies may involve

ridicule and mediation.

A set of behaviors expected of an individual who occupies a particular status is called a/an

role.

The field of linguistics that focuses on the study of the meanings of words and other morphemes, as well as how the meanings of phrases derive from them is called

semantics

Any culturally-designated position a person occupies in a particular setting is called a/an

status.

The idea that a U.S. bride would wear a white dress to her wedding, but a Chinese bride would wear red, relies on the __________ meaning of colors in different cultures.

symbolic

Contemporary globalization is said to have begun, at least in terms of economics, as coinciding with

the end of WWII and Bretton Woods Conference, which led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

The social relations through which human labor is used to transform energy from nature using tools, skills, organization, and knowledge, is called

the mode of production

Matrilineal descent refers to the recognition of descent through

the mother's line only.

In subsistence studies, the term domestic economy refers to

the work associated with obtaining food for a family or household.

While most of the human population is lactose intolerant, some people can naturally digest milk and dairy products. This lactose persistence in some people is a result of

their ancestors' history of dairy farming.

Which of the following of Hockett's design features are unique to human language?

Displacement

In order to study the similarities and differences among living societies and cultural groups, what must cultural anthropologists do?

Immersive fieldwork.

Why does an early human burial with stone tools, shells, animal bones, and other objects suggest a belief in the supernatural?

It seems to show they were preparing their dead for what might be needed in an afterlife.

What was the major criticism of the early 20th century "three-race" theory that divided the world's peoples into the categories of Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid?

Many peoples of the world were omitted from the racial groups with no clear way of including them in one group or another.

Which of the following modes of production is characterized by subsistence food-getting, egalitarianism, and labor organized on the basis of kinship relations?

Domestic production

A society that is nomadic and small in size, lacks formal leadership, and generally forages for their living is likely a

band society.

The four levels of socio-cultural integration characterized by Elman Service are

band, tribe, chiefdom, and state.

Negative reinforcements include

fines.

The cultural norms and attitudes surrounding food and eating are known as

foodways

The four modes of subsistence recognized by anthropologists are

foraging, pastoralism, horticulture, agriculture.

The term "vernacular" is used to identify

non-standard or stigmatized forms of a language, also may be called a "dialect."

The three modes of exchange are

reciprocity, market exchange, and redistribution.

The process by which an inaccurate concept or idea is so heavily promoted and circulated by people that it becomes an unquestioned "truth" is called

reification.

Cross-culturally and historically, marriages based on free choice and romantic love are

relatively unusual and recent.

Nineteenth century anthropologists identified three stages of "cultural evolution," which were called (in this order of development):

savagery, barbarism, and civilization.

The title of the ethnography, Chopsticks Work Only In Pairs (1999), reflects the Lahu society's emphasis on

the importance of the male-female dyad or partnership in domestic life, work, and leadership.

Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois lived with Puerto Rican crack dealers in East Harlem in order to find out

why pockets of extreme poverty persist in the United States.

Early ethnographer E.E. Evans-Pritchard describes the one main explanation that the Azande of north-central Africa give for any misfortune. This explanation is

witchcraft.

Thomas Malthus' idea that connects population and resources argues that

without something to slow it down, a population will grow faster than the resources that the environment can provide

Anthropologists researching gender in the 1980s came to the conclusion that evaluating male dominance in any culture

. should be examined through the lens of different components of status and socio-economic and identity variables.

In the U.S., the idea of a "legitimate" or "illegitimate" child refers to whether

. the child was a result of a legally recognized relationship that entitled offspring to certain rights, including inheritance.

Several groups of people, including the Chukchi of Eastern Siberia and Inuit of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, have darker skin than other people living at similar latitudes. This is due to

. the high Vitamin D content of the diets of these groups.

Zoonotic diseases are diseases that

can be passed between humans and animals.

The term that anthropologists use to quantify the number of calories that can be extracted from a particular unit of land to support a human population is

carrying capacity

A mode of subsistence defined by its reliance on wild plant and animal food resources already available in the environment is called

foraging

Which of the following methods would an ethnographer use specifically to collect data on important relationships that form the foundation of the society?

genealogical method

Gifts that are given without agreeing upon the exact value of the gift, nor the time frame within which it should be returned, demonstrates

generalized reciprocity

People who are disconnected from the production of their food (that is, who do not know where their daily food comes from or how it was produced) are most likely to be in which kind of society?

Agricultural

Which of the following anthropological theorists believed that supernatural beliefs met the psychological needs of people, and were born out of the "tragedies of human life?"

Bronislaw Malinowski

Which mode of production has these three central features: private property is owned by a business class; workers sell their labor power to survive; and surpluses of wealth are produced?

Capitalist production

Which early natural scientist divided the human species into four "races": Americanus, Europaeus, Asiaticus, and Africanus?

Carolus Linnaeus

The first theoretical ideas connecting religion to a set of practices and social institutions that bring a community together are connected to the writings of

Emile Durkheim

When an ill person describes the origin of their suffering as coming from a fright or shock, they are using which type of ethno-etiology?

Emotionalistic

Why might humans be susceptible to obesity based on our ancient history as foraging peoples?

Food shortages among foragers would give a selective advantage to those individuals who could retain body fat.

Which of the following subsistence activities is an example of an immediate return system?

Foraging for plant foods in a forest

What was the eventual result of the debate within the American Anthropological Association (AAA) over Napoleon Chagnon's actions among the Yanomami?

He was found not guilty but not entirely guilt-free.

What is ethnocentrism?

It is the belief that one's own culture is superior to others.

Which of the following does NOT describe culture?

It is the genetic range of a society or subgroup.

At the turn of the 20th century, the landowning elite began to lose control in Latin America when

Latin American peasants migrated from the countryside into the cities and European immigrants arrived

During the 1920s, some scholars argued for a division of European races into

Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean.

In environments where the sun's rays are much less intense, what problem does the human body face, especially in terms of natural selection?

Not enough sunlight penetrates the skin to enable Vitamin D production

What type of food was discovered to make up the majority of the diet of human foragers (and, by extension, likely our ancient ancestors)?

Plant foods such as nuts, fruits, and roots

Which of the following subsistence activities is an example of a delayed return system?

Planting seeds

What major contributor(s) to human disease became problematic once agricultural communities became densely populated?

Problems disposing of waste and difficulty accessing clean water

Rarely, foraging groups may become sedentary instead of nomadic. This is possible when

abundant natural resources create a food surplus, allowing some members of society to pursue other occupations than foraging.

Which of the following anthropologists wrote about how culture shapes a region's personality traits in Patterns of Culture (1934)?

Ruth Benedict

Which theorist proposed that religious beliefs provide rules or restrictions that suppress humans' worst instincts?

Sigmund Freud

Suitable field sites for conducting ethnography include

any and all places where culture exists.

Which vitamin, important for healthy bone growth, does sunlight help produce?

Vitamin D

How can sickle cell anemia be seen as an adaptive characteristic for humans?

When a person inherits one copy of the sickle cell gene, it confers resistance against malaria.

Which subfield of anthropology aims to solve specific practical problems in collaboration with governmental, non-profit, and community organizations?

applied anthropology

Language universals are

a set of characteristics of all human languages that are the same or similar.

In Hawaiian kinship terminology, there are

a smaller number of kinship terms, grouping you (Ego), your brothers and sisters, and your cousins together under the term "child."

The ability to induce or cause the behavior of others to change due to a social or political position is called

authority.

The old stereotypes of primates as living in male-centered, male-dominated groups came from 1960's research on

baboon groups led by males, established by force, who provided internal and external defense of the "troop."

The Kula Ring of the Trobriand Islands, a ceremonial exchange of arm bands and necklaces, best illustrates

balanced reciprocity.

When something is given or traded with the expectation that something of equal value will be returned within a specified time period, it shows

balanced reciprocity.

The approach that considers health to be the absence of disease or dysfunction, and that disease can be identified as one of the following: a pathogen, malfunction of the body's processes, or a physiological disorder is the

biomedical approach.

Most often, ethnographers include in their writing

both etic and emic perspectives

Foragers have a broad-spectrum diet, that is, they

have a diet based on a wide range of food resources.

Practices intended to bring supernatural forces under one's personal control are referred to as

magic.

The discipline that investigates human health and health care systems in comparative perspective, considering a wide-range of bio-cultural dynamics that affect the well-being of human populations is referred to as

medical anthropology.

When anthropologists say, "race is not real," what they mean more accurately is that

race is not an accurate way to describe any biological differences in the human species, but ideas about race are real in social and cultural ways.

A sense of trust and a comfortable working relationship in which the informant and the ethnographer are at ease with each other is referred to as having

rapport

The means by which human society and culture is extended to include the nonhuman is an anthropological definition of

religion.

According to Durkheim, __________ objects or ideas are set apart from the ordinary, while __________ objects or ideas are ordinary and may be treated with disregard or contempt.

sacred, profane

The institution of slavery in the U.S. helped define race through a rule which stated that any trace of known non-European ("non-white") ancestry was used to automatically exclude a person from being classified as "white" (and therefore be born into slave status). This rule was called

the "one-drop" rule.

The idea that children will gradually lose the ability to acquire language naturally without effort is called

the Critical Age Range Hypothesis

Clifford Geertz' term, "thick description," refers to the ethnographer's focus on

the context and meanings of any cultural practice.

The fact that small-scale, semi-subsistence farmers - such as the indigenous coffee farmers of Central America and Mexico - own their own land, organize along a kin-based system, and also produce a commodity for the global market demonstrates that

their economic activity is uniquely adapted to the contemporary global economy by utilizing several modes of production simultaneously.

In the book Darkness in El Dorado (2000), Patrick Tierney published a book in which he aimed to expose the practices of two ethnographers who worked among the Yanomami of the Amazonian rainforest. He made all of the following claims against Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel EXCEPT

they introduced cigarettes, creating an epidemic of lung cancer.

Societies that are characterized by groups of people linked by age, gift exchanges, or marriage, a lack of central government, leadership roles that are open to everyone, and an egalitarian set of values are

tribes.

In calling religion "the opium of the people," Karl Marx meant that religion

was an ideology that dulls people into accepting their low economic and social status by promising acceptance into Heaven through obedience.

Which of the three modes of production is the most recent?

Capitalist production

How did the early theorist, Sir James Frazer, characterize the spiritual beliefs that he documented?

He dismissed them as "false" and "absurd".

What was the problem with Flaherty's "documentary" film, Nanook of the North?

He staged certain scenes and provided traditional props to recreate an imagined past for the Inuit.

Why doesn't class stratification develop in foraging societies?

There is no advantage to hoarding food or having too much personal property.

The fact that not only people of East Asian ancestry have an epicanthic eye fold, but also people from Central Asia, parts of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, some Native American groups, and the Khoi San of southern Africa, is an example of

a nonconcordant trait that is mistakenly associated with one "racial" group.

The minimal unit of sound that can make a difference in meaning, but that does not carry meaning itself (such as /b/ in "bit" or /p/ in "pit") is

a phoneme

Anything that serves to refer to something else, but has an arbitrary meaning, is best referred to as

a referent

In cultural anthropology, the term "belief" refers to

all mental aspects of culture.

The general idea of Chomsky's Universal Grammar is that

all normally developing human infants have an innate ability to acquire the language(s) used around them.

The set of ideas about the categories of gender, and the beliefs, behaviors, and meanings associated with each gender, is referred to as a

gender ideology.

A set of culturally invented expectations leading to a role that a person assumes, learns, and performs, describes

gender roles.

The feeling of ease in one's own body in familiar social settings (based on social class) can be described by the term

habitus

Obesity is considered to be a "disease of civilization," meaning

it did not exist in early human populations.

The perception that an individual has a valid right to leadership is called

legitimacy.

In anthropology, descent from a common ancestor is referred to as

lineage.

Gender ideologies in the 19th and mid-20th centuries were based on a form of biological determinism, in which

males and females were supposedly born fundamentally different reproductively and were "naturally" sexually attracted to each other, although women's sexual drive was not well-developed.

Malinowski is known to have done all of the following EXCEPT

marrying a native Trobriand Islands woman.

Some cultures recognize descent in a family lineage only on the father's side (or in the paternal line). This form of descent is referred to as

patrilineal.

After Latin American countries declared independence from Spain, what relationship functioned as the primary political mechanism?

patron/client

The idea of the "ethnoscape" focuses on __________ that flow(s) across borders.

people

People who identify as hijras from India are

people who identify with a third gender role in society, often assigned male at birth or intersex.

The study of the means of control in societies is the subject of

political anthropology.

A Japanese person of Buraku descent (Burakumin) can be distinguished from non-Buraku Japanese by

social stigma based on ancestry.

Individuals who seek to use magic for their own purposes are referred to generally by anthropologists as

sorcerers.

A subsistence system is

the set of practices used by members of a society to acquire food.

In many cases, a person's consumption patterns (otherwise known as "taste") are actually a reflection of

the social class in which they were raised

All of the following are true about matrilineages, EXCEPT

they are also matriarchal, that is, women have more power than men.

Which of the following is the best summary of the goals of economic anthropology?

. To examine how many forces affect the decisions of economic actors in production, exchange, and consumption, and the meaning of material and immaterial objects

Foraging societies are characterized by

. collective ownership of the primary means of production and lower rates of social domination.

The Nayar of southern India practiced an interesting form of matrilineal descent in which women lived with their mothers and siblings, even after marriage. This had the result that

. men and women could have more than one spouse, but the children always remained with their mothers.

During the height of the European colonial period, European nations ruled more than ________ of the world.

85%

What do the authors argue is "natural" (that is, not culturally determined) about the family?

A biological mother and a biological father

How can we best understand the use of the term "dialect?"

A dialect is a variation of a language, usually distributed across geographic regions, that is considered lower in social and political prestige to another "standard" variety.

What is armchair anthropology?

An approach that uses the stories and experiences of others to measure other cultures from one's own (superior) vantage point

Societies with tributary production generally share which of the following features?

Communities of kin own and work the land; tribute collected is used by the ruling class.

Which is the most common form of family structure cross-culturally?

Extended family

Which types of societies throughout time have had the strictest controls over marriage, in order to reproduce the existing social structure?

Stratified non-egalitarian societies

Based on evidence from anthropological studies, which of the following results is most likely to come from the introduction of modern goods into traditional communities?

The community incorporates new things into their pre-existing practices without completely trading old ideas for new ones.

According to Malinowski's functional approach to religion, which of the following acts would likely require supernatural rituals or ceremonies?

Taking a difficult exam for graduate school.

What do the chapter authors argue is the distinguishing feature of globalization?

The rapid speed of global interactions

Which of the following modes of production is based on farmers or herders producing for themselves and their families, but also giving a portion of their goods or labor to their leaders?

Tributary production

The approach in which disease is thought to be the result of natural forces such as cold, heat, wind, dampness, and above all, by an upset in the balance of the basic body elements is a(n)

naturalistic ethno-etiology.

A person's attempt to take advantage of another person economically is called

negative reciprocity

The multi-faceted political and economic philosophy that emphasizes privatization and unregulated markets is

neoliberalism

The ability to induce behavior of others in specified ways by means of coercion or use or threat of physical force is called

power.

Broca's area and Wernicke's area are two structures that

process language in the human brain.

Anthropologists focus on three phases of economic production, which are

production, exchange, and consumption

In Brazil, people who are interacting typically do so standing close to one another, often touching one another. This aspect of paralanguage is referred to as

proxemics