ANTH101
Approximately what percent of 177 states were ranked as "sustainable" by the 2009 Failed States Index?
7
What is levirate marriage?
A man marries his deceased brother's wife.
What is bridewealth?
A transfer of valuables between male heads of families to formalise a new marriage.
C. Wright Mills, Ferdinand Lundberg, and G. William Domhoff, researchers who have examined social class and the distribution of social power in contemporary America, conclude that:
A very small upper class enjoys a disproportionate share of the benefits of the American economy.
When the United Nations began its campaign to improve the human condition, development experts assumed that global poverty was caused by:
A vicious cycle of disease, ignorance, and poverty.
In comparison with mobile foragers in the game rich savanna regions of East Africa, pastoralism:
Are often defined by context in relation to other groups.
In relation to the emergence of the world system, how is sugar best characterised?
As providing nourishment and comfort to the working classes of England.
Like the Hawaiian and Mesopotamian kings, the Inca emperors expanded their social power by:
Asserting a symbolic connection between themselves, the fertility of nature, and the general well-being of society.
IHOPE project archaeologist Fekri Hassan takes a power and scale perspective on global sustainability problems and:
Attributes sustainability problems to the tendency of the managerial elite of complex societies to expand economic growth at the expense of most people.
The "great divide" between domestic-scale societies and chiefdoms was crossed when:
Autonomous villages surrendered political autonomy to a paramount chief.
What is the term for group of Aboriginal people who camp and forage together?
Band.
According to Goldman, Pacific Island societies were aristocracies based on:
Belief in the inherent superiority of a line of descent.
In African cattle societies with an ideology of patrilineal descent:
Both men and women hold diverse, overlapping rights over animals.
Nuer marriages are based on an agreement between the families of the bride and groom involving rights over:
Cattle and women.
Dramatic transformations in American eating patterns, increasing consumption of protein, fats, and total calories, can best be attributed to:
Decision-making, advertising, marketing, and political lobbying by the corporate directors of the food industry.
According to Bodley's scale and power theory, what were the first states and political centralisation probably created by?
Decisions made by a few individuals who were uniquely positioned to take advantage of historical circumstances to advance their self-interest.
Sustainable Development, as defined by the Brundtland Commission in 1987, refers to:
Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
The basic Aboriginal material inventory includes:
Digging stick, spear, and fire.
Bodley's power and scale perspective suggests that the most useful strategy for dealing with global problems might be to:
Distribute social power and decisionmaking as broadly as possible.
What cultural response to the crisis of capitalism of 1970 to 1980 was followed by global elites and led to the creation of the contemporary phase of globalization?
Distributing wealth and income up.
What was the transformation of the first chiefdoms into the first city-states in Mesopotamia by about 3500 BC based on?
Elite control of mass production and long-distance trade, conquest war, and unequal access to landed wealth.
Americans who believe in utopian capitalism assume that:
Everyone can rise to any economic level by intelligence, hard work, and creative energy.
Some authorities have argued that the most important functional advantage of state organisation in the Andean region was:
Food storage to average out environmentally determined production fluctuations.
What was perhaps the most critical factor limiting the ability of Pacific Islands to permanently support a human population?
Freshwater
After five decades of international development effort, the absolute number of impoverished people in the world:
Has increased.
The Inca ruler resembled the Hawaiian king in that both:
Headed royal lineages, were treated like gods, and wielded significant power.
What are the commercial world's primary scalerelated problems and perhaps the most important threats to sustainable cultural development?
Impoverishing concentrations of social power and the impossibility of perpetual growth in a finite world.
The age grade system operating in Australian society:
Is nurturing and guiding, while moving everyone up as they mature.
Marshall Sahlins argues that Americans eat steak rather than liver because:
It reinforces one's social rank.
In comparison with ideology and practice in the ancient imperial world, one of the most radical features of the U.S. Constitution as of 1791 was:
Its guarantee of individual freedom of religion, speech, and other civil rights.
As in Aboriginal Australia, the most important organizing principle of domestic life on Tikopia was:
Kinship.
In the 1980s researchers Franke and Chasin found that the poor in Kerala, India were experiencing objective improvements in nutrition, life-expectancy, and infant mortality rates, which they attributed to:
Land reform and wealth redistribution.
The market economy can be characterised as "disembodied" because it is based on a cultural assumption that:
Links social well-being to individual self-interest and economic growth.
Anthropologists who carefully examined gender roles in African pastoral societies concluded that:
Men and women play complementary, but not totally equitable, roles within the household.
The most important subsistence utilization of cattle by East African cattle peoples is probably for:
Milk.
In sharp contrast to the production/consumption situation in the tribal world, industrial production and the market economy means that in American culture
Needs are culturally increased above the level that can ever be satisfied.
The economic systems of both Mesopotamia and Inca Peru are best characterized as:
Non-market, non-monetary economies.
In comparison with the situation in domestic-scale societies, a striking feature of the production and distribution of goods in Dynastic Mesopotamia was:
Numerous full time craft specialists probably worked for rations under the direction of the temple-palace bureaucracy.
The feathered cloaks worn by the Hawaiian chiefs were:
Part of the political economy used to mark elite status and keep potential rivals loyal.
What did Nancy Scheper-Hughes attribute the chronic malnourishment and high infant mortality rates in northeast Brazilian squatter towns to?
Political-economy.
In contrast to earlier political scale cultures and ancient civilizations, what was the emerging commercial scale culture uniquely characterised by?
Population growth, reliance on non-renewable energy, non-sustainable consumption.
It seems likely that the redistribution system on Hawai'i:
Primarily benefited the elite, not the commoners
The archaeological and ethnographic record suggests that the Australian Aboriginal population:
Probably remained relatively stationary due to prolonged lactation, infanticide, and relatively high "natural" infant mortality.
Given the level of fish productivity in the coral reef ecosystem, it is likely that:
Protein was not a limiting factor for most Pacific Islands.
The Polynesian system of mana:
Provided supernatural support for chiefly status.
What cultural response might global citizens take to create a sustainable global society in responding to today's sustainability crisis?
Redistribute social power.
Aboriginal totemic estate groups:
Regulate marriage and rights to spiritual property and natural resources.
According to the World Values Survey, Norwegians, in comparison with Americans:
Report feeling higher levels of personal autonomy, and at the same time feel much more comfortable with their local communities than Americans.
Nuer Leopard-Skin Chiefs:
Served as mediators in dispute settlement.
What cultural features make the Basque region of Spain (including the Pais Vasco) an important example of a sustainable cultural system integrating industrial technology and commercialization?
Small-scale, worker-owned cooperatives.
What were among the most prominent features of the Andean cultural tradition?
State organisation, intensive agriculture, monumental architecture.
Medical anthropologist Paul Farmer attributes the conditions of extreme poverty to structural violence, referring to
Structural inequalities in the distribution of social power that allow more powerful people to violate the basic human rights of the less powerful.
In Australia the concept of an "original affluent society" is:
Supported by the relatively high amount of leisure time enjoyed by both men and women even in the desert interior.
In comparison with mobile foragers in the game rich savanna regions of East Africa, pastoralism:
Supports greater human population densities, but means more work and instability.
Advertising dominates the U.S. media, spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year to persuade us:
That consumption of certain brands brings happiness.
Chinese anthropologist Francis Hsu attributes the distinctive features of American culture to:
The American core value of individual self-reliance.
Perhaps the most important explanation for the remarkable resilience of East African pastoralism in the face of external political and economic influences is:
The age class system.
According to Max Weber, what does the "Protestant Ethic" provide ideological support for?
The belief that hard work and competitiveness can overcome inequality and promote capital accumulation.
According to Wallerstein, why did a truly global world system become possible under capitalism?
The capitalist system can function without a centralised political authority.
51. According to Bodley, what is the functionally most important underlying feature of civilization?
The centralisation of political power.
What does the Great Transition refer to?
The change in cultural beliefs and practices that produces a truly sustainable global system.
As economic growth proceeded and elites constructed the core institutions of capitalism in England between 1688-1812:
The number of poor households increased at a faster rate than either maintenance, or elite household.
Kinship is especially important in a domestic scale society because:
There are no other significant social statuses.
Why were irrigation systems especially important for the development of chiefdoms on Hawai'i?
They helped produce the surplus that supported the elites.
A small-scale chiefdom such as Tikopia can be distinguished by mode of production from a relatively large scale chiefdom or proto-state such as Hawaiʻi as follows:
Tikopia's mode of production is kin-ordered, Hawaiʻi's is tributary.
The extreme underdevelopment of Bangladesh by the 1980s can best be attributed to:
Unequal distribution of development costs and benefits.
In 2007 the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, based on many years of research by hundreds of scientists from throughout the world, reported finding:
Unmistakable evidence of global warming caused by human activities.
In comparing the economic systems of the imperial and commercial worlds, it is particularly striking that wealth was:
Used directly to produce more wealth only in the commercial world.
By the closing decades of the twentieth century, the United States had become a global superpower, best characterized as directed and controlled by:
Various, often shifting elites at the tops of multiple hierarchies with economic, political, ideological, and military power.
The curiously curved shell fishhook used by Pacific Islanders:
Was actually more effective than European style steel fishhooks.
What does the Anthropocene refer to?
When human activities became geologically visible, about 1800 AD.
Animism refers to:
a belief in spirits
Domestication refers to:
a gradual process that occurred in many different places
What makes the integrated model of culture a useful analytical framework for cultural anthropologists?
a) its categories cross-cut in illuminating ways the mental, behavioural and material aspects of culture that individual human beings experience b) it helps us understand how the different parts of societies and cultures work together to produce distinctive cultural worlds c) it is one of the ways in which we can take a holistic approach
71. The most striking feature of the American cosmology, in contrast to the cosmologies of domestic and imperial scale cultures, is that:
a) the economy is supreme, and all things are considered to be market-regulated commodities
The large scale mobilisation of labor in the service of the Andean state was based on which two important principles of interaction?
ayni reciprocity and mita rotation.
Society in the imperial world:
centrally organized with thousands or millions of people
What is the term for a group of Aboriginal people owning a common spiritual and territorial estate?
clan.
In Asháninka society (which uses an Iroquois kinship terminological system), a man would most likely marry someone he refers to as:
cross cousins
The concept of political economy Bodley uses:
focuses on political organisation and ideology, rather than on technology
1. According to Bodley, what is the most important cultural process?
humanization (the production, maintenance, and reproduction of human beings and culture)
Using the term "tribe" to refer to domestic- scale cultural groups above the village or band level:
indicates shared culture and language, with the absence of permanent centralised political leadership.
The development efforts of the major development agencies, at least through the 1980s, was primarily aimed at:
large-scale infrastructure development
Culture, as defined by most anthropologists, includes the following:
learned and shared symbolic information and behaviour
Village size in Amazonia is limited by the availability of protein (an important ecological factor) and cultural factors such as:
leisure and household autonomy being more important than large villages
What Marshall Sahlins calls "the industrial revelation" is the realisation that:
material progress increased human needs, leaving people perpetually unsatisfied
Amazonian subsistence production systems:
maximize leisure, household autonomy, and labor equality between men and women
Culture, as a way of knowing the world:
may not always give people an accurate image of the physical world
Asháninka household wealth is predominately in:
nature and people
A distinctive feature of the Asháninka kinship terminological system is that immediate kin are sorted into two groups:
parents/siblings and in-laws/spouses
Subsistence intensification:
people work harder to produce more food per unit of territory and to support higher densities and more permanent settlements
The process that produced political-scale culture and the imperial world is known as
politicization
Commercially organized socio-cultural systems:
potentially encompass the entire world
What is most important environmental factor limiting the distribution of organisms, including the foraging peoples of Australia?
rainfall.
What is perhaps the most critical limit on the size of villages in Amazonia?
society's refusal to grant political power to the headman
2. What does the term emic refer to?
the "insider" view of a culture
Matrilocality in Amazonia can be functionally associated with:
the importance of female task groups for such activities as manioc processing
What is Pareto optimality?
the point at which economic growth should stop because no one can get rich without making someone else poorer
The culture of the Ashaninka people is representative of the tribal world because:
they have only temporary leaders, but no permanent chiefs or government
Variations in skin, hair, and eye colour, body build, and the shape of the face that are the basis of popular racial stereotypes:
vary continuously between individuals and populations, and do not produce discrete "races"