Cultural Anthropology

Koko and Washoe are two primates who learned

American Sign Language.

Multisited ethnography is an example of which method?

Comparative method

Although cultural differences produce different behaviors and practices, humans feel emotions in the same way worldwide.

False

An ecological footprint is a measurement of the population an area can support.

False

Anthropologists believe that the "native point of view" is better than their own

False

Anthropologists care about how objects are created but not really how they are destroyed.

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

Big men can transfer their power and status through inheritance when they die.

False

Contemporary ecological science supports the idea that human cultural behaviors are solely shaped by the environment.

False

Countries find it relatively easy to decide what language its citizens will speak.

False

Economists and economic anthropologists are not that different in the way they study how people get the things they need to survive.

False

Environmental anthropologists accept the idea that all indigenous people are environmentalists.

False

Field notes are usually written on the spot, not after the fact.

False

Foodways rarely change because people are conservative.

False

Genes often work in isolation.

False

Globalization is so exciting to anthropologists right now because they have never studied interconnectivity before.

False

In order to study culture one must travel to distant, far-off places.

False

It has been proven that overpopulation will inevitably lead to global famine.

False

Most anthropologists see the consumption of an object or commodity as an antisocial act.

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

If you wanted to study patterns of kin relations in a community, which method would you use?

Genealogical method

Which method would be best when doing a study on the genetic propensity for cancer in a given population?

Genealogical method

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.

Gorillas

What ethical dilemmas did Claire Sterk face in her research with prostitutes?

How to respond when her informants were abused or otherwise threatened.

The use of mock Spanish reinforces a common impression that Hispanic people are socially inferior. This is an example of the power of which of the following?

Language ideology

_________ is the idea that people speaking different languages perceive the world differently.

Linguistic relativity

Analyses that focus on the linkages between political-economic power, social inequality, and ecological destruction are typical of which approach?

Political ecology

Which of the following groups of people were instrumental in the development of categorizing humans into distinct races?

Scientists

Which government agency's activities might you focus on if you wanted to understand structural power?

The census office

A critical reason for taking field notes is that there may be a long lag time between fieldwork 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

A key marker of development anthropology's success is when local perspectives and voices are paid attention to in development projects.

True

According to Edward Sapir, language is the symbolic guide to culture.

True

Although Russians do use money to buy things, they also rely on bartering when money is scarce.

True

Although language is one of the most rule-bound aspects of human culture, it is also one of the least conscious.

True

Anthropologists agree that, in addition to prejudice and discrimination, unearned privilege upholds social inequality.

True

Gift exchanges are important because people everywhere invest symbolic meaning in the things they give, receive, and consume.

True

In nearly all societies with any degree of social stratification, more men are in leadership roles than women, not only in political roles but also in economic and social roles involving trade, exchange, kinship relations, ritual participation, and dispute resolution.

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

It is unusual for human adults to be able to digest milk.

True

Localization is the flip side of globalization.

True

Many non-Western societies have conservation traditions that are based on distinct principles of human-nature relationship.

True

One of the key functions of family is controlling and managing its members' wealth.

True

Patterns of social inequality and racial discrimination have important biological consequences for certain groups, such as African Americans.

True

Professor Price will be annoyed with me if I use the term "Caucasian" to describe white people in my essays.

True

Racialization has identified different markers of racial identity in Latin America than in the United States.

True

In an _______ society, food-sharing, kin relations, and consensus-building are all key aspects of politics.

acephalous

The idea that there are specific rules and codes surrounding the exercise of power is a key feature of ______ theory.

action

Which of the following theories is most concerned with understanding how people maintain political power in their daily activities and decision-making processes?

action theory

Development anthropologists often think of themselves as

advocates of poor and marginalized people.

Ethnocentrism

all of the above ( presents a major problem for anthropologists, means you think your culture is superior to others, is a common feature of culture)

World systems theory helped anthropologists

all of the options (better explain uneven development through time and space, better understand local social relations, better explain the historical emergence of development patterns through the world)

The limitation of culture and personality studies was that they assumed

all of the options (childhood enculturation determines adult personality, a culture has only one personality type, our own concept of "individual" was not problematized enough)

Which of the following is the most significant aspect of the salvage paradigm?

anthropologists need to collect information from societies before they die out

Sometimes the very landscapes that Westerners want to conserve without people on them are actually the result of indigenous involvement and manipulation. These are called ______ landscapes

artifactual

Advertisers have trained American consumers to focus on the newest and most exciting products through their

attempts to constantly frame their products as new and improved

Sex-assignment surgery performed on intersex people demonstrates clearly how cultural assumptions about sexual dichotomy shape ideas about the ______ basis of sex.

biological

Cultural anthropologists do research by

building trusting relationships with people over a long period of time

Animal call systems

can only communicate in response to real-world stimuli

Words that came from the same ancestral language and originated from the same word are called

cognate words.

Clans come in three types: matrilineal, patrilineal, and

cognatic

The linked elements that contribute to the manufacture of an object like a T-shirt is called a ________.

commodity chain

The Tahitians' desire for a superior cutting tool in the form of iron was a kind of obsession with an object, or what anthropologists call _______, that took the form of prostitution.

commodity fetishism

Which of the following best describes the methodology of multisited ethnography?

comparative

The major difference in different kinship systems is the way they classify or group together their ______.

cousins

The view that nature and environmental conditions shape the characteristics and lifeways of a group of people is known as environmental ________.

determinism

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

A major problem with the approach to race that defines race as reproductively isolated breeding populations is that

every breeding population qualifies as a race

If you wanted to understand the norms of a society, you would be most likely to focus on

everyday interactions

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

Anthropologists like E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Renato Rosaldo do not see cultural anthropology as a science.

false

Art historians and anthropologists have traditionally shared very little in their approaches to understanding cultural objects.

false

People rarely hold conflicting values.

false

The movement of genes through interbreeding or intermarriage among humans from distinct populations is

gene flow.

Barter, or the direct swapping of goods, is different from _______ in that a giver has no expectation of return.

generalized reciprocity

If a single female immigrant brings a trait to a small, sparsely populated island and within many generations it is present in 50% of the population, it would be an example of

genetic drift.

According to anthropologists, _______ is the contemporary widening of scale of cross-cultural interactions owing to the rapid movement of money, people, goods, images, and ideas.

globalization

Many arguments over ________ are about winners and losers, but anthropologists are just as interested in cultural nuances such as inequality, confrontation, domination, and resistance.

globalization

Anthropologist Kim Hopper believes

industrialized nations produce "surplus people"

Anthropologists often disguise the identity of their _______.

informants

Long-term damage to soil quality is typical of

intensification

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

For a society to have a separate occupational category of artist, it needs to have which of the following characteristics?

it must have a considerable degree of social stratification and lots of different kinds of occupational categories

A visual representation of family relationships is called a _____ chart.

kinship

Similar to clans, _______ tend be composed of people who are directly descended from known ancestors.

lineages

A voodoo doll is a good illustration of

magic that follows the law of similarity

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

You and your sibling are fighting over who gets to use the family car. When your parent intervenes and seeks a solution that is agreeable to both of you, it is an example of

mediation.

Intelligence is

not marked by a single fixed gene.

What is the family formed by a married couple and their children called?

nuclear family

Anthropologist Roy Rappaport's distinction between cognized and ______ models of ecology is important because it distinguishes between outsider and insider views of nature.

operational

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

The collection of goods in a community and the subsequent redivision of those goods among members of a society is called

redistribution

In Malaysia capitalist entrepreneurship is

respectful of Islamic and Malay obligations and values.

Mary Douglas compared food's structure in society with language and a formal dinner with a _______________.

sentence

Sexual preferences, desires, and practices are encompassed in the study of _________.

sexuality

Indiana University biologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey conducted a series of sexuality studies during the 1940s and found that

sexuality consists on a continuum.

Sex-assignment surgery is important because it

shows that "sex" is constructed upon cultural assumptions.

Claire Sterk gained initial entry to the community of prostitutes she wished to study

slowly and by not presenting herself as an expert.

Violence is

socially constructed

Dividing people along lines of moral purity and pollution, such as caste does, is an illustration of social ______.

stratification

Slash-and-burn agriculture, also called _______ agriculture, is the most effective farming technique in tropical areas when population densities are low.

swidden

Clifford Geertz proposed an interpretive approach to religion, arguing that religion was a system of ______.

symbols

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 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.

The idea that things have social lives refers to which of the following?

the fact that objects are deeply intertwined with people's lives

The application of a holistic perspective to understand changes in everyday practices, such as eating breakfast cereals, reveals

the interconnections between different domains of a society.

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

Which of these is known as the "Westermarck effect"?

the psychological revulsion against having sex with close relatives

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.

One of the main reasons agricultural intensification interests anthropologists is that

there are many strategies for achieving it.

A central feature of cultural convergence theories is that

they explain the apparent decline of cultural diversity.

European colonial regimes commonly instituted controls on native people's use of natural resources

to eliminate native competition against the European businesses exploiting raw materials in the colonies.

Nature and nurture are not opposed but intertwined.

true

One of the key functions of family is controlling and managing its members' wealth.

true

The incest taboo, or the prohibition against marrying within the nuclear family, is a human universal.

true

Women who practice polyandry tend to marry

two or more brothers.

A good example of disguised discrimination is

when shopkeepers or security guards follow black customers through stores.

From an anthropological perspective, which of the following is not a new issue that arises with in vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogacy, adoption, and frequent divorce and remarriage in American society?

who inherits the parent's land

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.

An anthropologist who studies unearned privilege would be most interested in which of the following?

A situation in which an upper-class man gets accepted at an Ivy League university because his father and grandfather went there.

To understand aggression in society, we have to understand which of the following factor(s)?

All of the options ( Cultural attitudes toward violence, the role of the state in promoting conflicts, the availability of weapons)

Why is the description of conflict as "ethnic violence" misleading?

All of the options (It implies age-old conflicts that are not affected by historical or political events, it suggests that violence is biological and certain "ethnic" groups are more violent than others, it ignores the peaceful interactions of groups over time)

Sustainable development for indigenous people involves which of the following elements?

All of the options. (It must address local people's ability to make a living, It must create sustainable alternatives to economic activities that deplete natural resources, It must involve them in natural resource management)

Cultural models and personal cognitive models are the same thing.

False

Most mammals use some form of call system to communicate with others of their species. Dogs and chimpanzees share an additional linguistic characteristic because they can communicate simple combinations of ideas about things they are not currently seeing.

False

Nearly all of the ancient societies in the Middle East and the Mediterranean were monotheistic.

False

One of the reasons intersex individuals interest anthropologists is how unusual and strange it is in a sexually dimorphic species.

False

People in the periphery responded passively to capitalist expansion.

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

People rarely hold conflicting values.

False

Sex is a simple product of nature and biology.

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

The Irish and a few other groups became white during the past century, but the phenomenon of groups becoming white appears to have stabilized.

False

When people consume the same clothes, food, and goods they eventually think and behave the same.

False

What does an ecological footprint measure?

Measures how fast we consume resources and generate waste compared to how fast nature can absorb our waste and generate new resources

______ and nurture are common shorthand terms for the biological and cultural or environmental influences on our behavior.

Nature

_______ assumes ethnicity is largely a natural phenomenon, based on biological, linguistic, and geographical ties to those with whom individuals have obvious similarities of appearance, geography, language, or socioeconomic context.

Primordialism

______ anthropology grew out of the culture and personality school, which focused on how patterns of childrearing and cultural ideologies shape individual experience.

Psychological

_____ is a concept that organizes people into groups based on specific physical traits that are thought to reflect fundamental and innate differences.

Race

______ is the repressive practices, structures, beliefs, and representations that uphold racial categories and social inequality.

Racism

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay found that if a language had only three color terms, they would always be black (dark), white (light), and ______.

Red

Which of the following reasons explains why a collaborative approach to conservation can be so challenging?

Scientists and conservationists are often skeptical of indigenous knowledge claims.

________, such as newspapers, are important in fieldwork because they can help provide a broader context for what the anthropologist hears and observes.

Secondary materials

A central assertion of the ________ hypothesis is that religious thinking is gradually giving way to secular thought without relying on references to any form of supernatural power.

Secularization

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

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

Big men can transfer their power and status through inheritance when they die.

True

Culture is uniquely human.

True

Diversity, defined anthropologically, refers to both multiplicity and variety, which is not the same thing as "difference."

True

For early anthropologists, religions of "primitive" people were based on a fundamental error in thinking.

True

Foragers tend work less to survive than agriculturalists or pastoralists.

True

Secular rituals that celebrate the state or nation, particular occupations, or other identities may achieve many of the same ends as religious rituals.

True

The dichotomy between males and females is not two distinct categories but a continuum of sexual possibilities in the human species.

True

The processes of capital accumulation and the expansion of European colonialism disrupted many societies.

True

Which of the following observations would be LEAST likely to come from an anthropologist who shares Simone de Beauvoir's notion of "second sex"?

Western models of male-female relations cannot be universalized.

Anthropologists think of bride price as being about compensation for rights in women—her labor, her support for family affairs, her looking after children, and rights of sexual access. What other social payment is structurally most DISSIMILAR to a bride price payment from this perspective?

a father's purchase of a new car for his daughter when she goes off to college

Matrilineal descent is typically difficult for Americans to grasp because it feels so unnatural to us. What explains this feeling that matrilineal descent is unnatural since as Americans we also recognize that we are descended from one mother and her parents?

all of the options (although women can now own property, be breadwinner and head of a household, and can earn more than a husband, an American "ideal" family is still perceived by some as centered on the father; we usually get our surnames from our father, giving our kinship system a patrilineal bias; our kinship system is bilateral, recognizing descent through both mother and father, so it seems strange to recognize only one of these lines)

Claire Sterk built rapport with the prostitutes she studied by

all of the options (truly wanting to learn from the women and acknowledging their expertise, listening to the women's stories, providing practical assistance)

The major goal of "development" is

all of the options. (expanding capitalist markets, importing health, alleviating poverty)

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 relativism with moral relativism

Anthropologists believe that a ______ approach, analyzing human societies' phenomena by comparing the phenomena with different societies, is necessary to appreciate the cultural basis of our beliefs and actions.

cross-cultural

The subfield of anthropology that studies human diversity, beliefs, and practice is called

cultural anthropology

The cooperative organization of work into specialized tasks and roles is the ________.

division of labor

When cultural anthropologists live in societies for one or more years observing social life, they are doing ______.

field work

Diversity defined anthropologically

focuses on multiplicity and variety.

If Jakob Grimm, who developed what has come to be known as Grimm's law, were analyzing the historical relationships among the so-called dialects of Chinese (such as Cantonese and Mandarin), what data would he be looking for in his linguistic fieldwork?

how the speakers of each dialect pronounce different words with similar meanings in the several dialects.

The ability to digest milk into adulthood is called _______.

lactase persistence

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.

"Mother nature" and "natural resources" are a good example of

metaphors of human-nature interaction.

How words fit together to make meaningful units is called

morphology

Anthropologists use ______ ethnography to juxtapose phenomena that were once thought worlds apart. You Answered national

multisited

Slight, unpredictable variation in the genetic code that occurs during reproduction is called

mutation.

One reason many environmental anthropologists are skeptical of _______ as a sole explanation for environmental degradation is that it doesn't recognize that different societies and people within each society consume differing amounts of resources.

overpopulation

The earliest anthropologist to compare religious and spiritual beliefs around the world was E. B. Tylor. For him the heart of religious beliefs was the belief in

spirits

James Ferguson, who is an anthropologist of development, argues that development exist

to expand state power.

Anthropologist Ralph Linton reported that Americans in the military during the First World War adopted a reverential attitude toward the rainbow emblem that represented their military units that resembled the ways tribal people revered their

totems

Nuclear family units occur in and are important to nearly every society around the world.

true