Anthropology 203 Quizzes

The idea that a culture should be understood on its own terms, and that its potentially strange, puzzling, incoherent or morally troubling traits, customs, ideas, or practices may have a natural logic when viewed from within the culture is known as...

cultural relativism

The process of learning the accepted norms and behaviors in one's culture is called...

enculturation

Culture is... (select all that apply)

learned, shared, symbolic, adaptive, patterned, sets of ideas and behaviors

Margaret Mead... (select all that apply)

studied adolescence, puberty, and differences in Western and non-Western youth and their transition to adulthood, studied hunting and gathering subsistence practices and how Western culture influenced these, conducted fieldwork among Samoans and New Guineans, conducted fieldwork among Hawaiians and Australians, was a famous anthropologist, influenced popular American culture, found that non-American youth have a relatively relaxed transition into adulthood and relationship with sexuality, whereas American youth don't

Ethnocentrism is... (select all that apply)

where someone thinks "our ways are best, others' ways are wrong", the tendency to view the traits, ways, ideas, and values observed in other cultures as inferior and/or illogical

What are the four main subfields of anthropology? Select all that apply.

Biological (also called physical) anthropology, Archaeology, Cultural anthropology, Linguistic anthropology

Theories... (select all that apply)

CANNOT be proven, CAN be rejected (through falsification), are useful for developing hypotheses, are facts, do NOT guide anthropological investigations

Anthropologists use which terms and distinctions to discuss our view of a culture?

Emic and Etic. Emic is the insider's view of a culture. Etic is the outsider's view and is more objective and less personal.

Some of anthropology's defining characteristics are that it is... (select all that apply)

Holistic, Comparative, Relies on the concept of culture, Scientific

How do anthropologists mainly gather data? Choose one.

Live among the people they are studying

Anthropology is the study of humans in all places and all times

True

Ethnography can be both a research process and a written account of a culture

True

The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) and the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) are two widely used cross-cultural samples of ethnographic information.

True

Explain how culture can be adaptive and maladaptive. Give an example of each

Your Answer: Culture can be adaptive because the people that are better adapted to their surroundings through the process of natural selection have a better chance of surviving and become a more desirable person to mate with to continue the lineage of their traits. If a person lacks these traits for survival by not adapting to their environment their traits are considered maladaptive to the group and they might be ostracized from the group.

What are you looking forward to about the study of anthropology this semester? Is there anything that stands out about our class or the reading material so far?

Your Answer: I'm looking forward to learning more about cultures and how different cultures absorb information from other cultures. What about another culture makes it desirable to another culture? The first intriguing thing from the reading is the split of ideal culture and real culture. It kind of reminds me of what we're currently going through pandemic wise.