Cultural Anthropology Ch. 1&2
Ethnocentrism
Assuming your culture's way of doing things is the best.
Interpretive Approach to Culture
Emphasizes that culture is a shared system of meanings.
All humans are born with some culture.
False
Contemporary cultural anthropologists rank societies along an evolutionary scale from "primitive" to "advanced" to categorize human diversity.
False
Three broad theories of social structure dominate the social sciences.
Functionalism, conflict, and interactional
Because our values and beliefs include many elements of life such as clothes, food, and language means that culture is
Integrated
Culture
Is learned and shared
Qualitative Study
Research that involves interviews, observations, images, objects, and words.
Social Evolution
The idea that cultures pass through stages from primitive to complex.
Cultural Relativism
The moral and intellectual principle that one should withhold judgment about seemingly strange or exotic beliefs and practices.
Traditions
The most enduring and ritualized aspects of culture.
The primary ethical responsibility of anthropologists is to
The people or places they study
Natural Selection
The process by which inheritable traits are passed along to offspring because they are better suited to the environment.
Enculturation
The process of learning culture from a very young age.
Cultural Anthropology
The subfield of anthropology that studies human diversity, beliefs, and practices.
Biological Anthropology
The subfield of anthropology that studies human evolution, including human genetics and human nutrition.
Linguistic Anthropology
The subfield of anthropology that studies language.
Archeology
The subfield of anthropology that studies the material remains of past cultures.
A key principle of the holistic perspective developed by Franz Boas is
a goal of synthesizing the entire context of human experience
The idea that Ongee ancestors make tidal waves and earthquakes would be understood by an interpretive anthropologist as
a way of explaining how the world works
Which of the following is the most significant aspect of the salvage paradigm?
anthropologists need to collect information from societies before they die out
If you wanted to understand the norms of a society, you would be most likely to focus on
everyday interactions
Examples of social institutions are
kinship, marriage, and farming
During anthropological fieldwork, cultural anthropologists
learn the local language, record people's economic transactions, and study how environmental changes affect agriculture
If a functionalist were to explain why the teacher lectures from the front of the classroom to students organized in neatly arranged chairs, she or he would emphasize that
learning happens best when students are being talked at
"Owning" culture
means controlling symbols that give meaning
Norms are stable because
people learn them when they are young
Western colonial powers understood the different customs and cultures of the people they colonized as
proof of their primitive nature
Techniques that classify features of a phenomenon and count, measure, and construct statistical models are collecting and analyzing
quantitative data
Anthropologists overcome ethnocentrism by
seeing matters from the point of view of another culture
Even though anthropologists use parts of the scientific method, some don't see what they do as science because
the complexity of social behavior prevents any completely objective analysis of human culture
A cross-cultural perspective on eating insect larvae would reveal
the cultural constructions of insects as food