Cultural Anthropology Final Exam Ch. 1-5

When did anthropology emerge as an academic discipline?

1800's

When humans are born, their brain is what percentage of its eventual weight?

25%

A language of mixed origin that developed from a complex blending of two parent languages is called

A creole

Linguistics refer to mixed languages with a simplified grammar that people rarely learn as a mother tongue as

A pidgin language

Which project would be best suited to parachute ethnography?

A study of community response to a disaster

Research committed to making social change and improving the lives of marginalized people is

Action Anthropology

Edward Sapir, who had been a student of Franz Boas's, saw himself as both a cultural anthropologist and a professionally trained linguist. He urged cultural anthropologists to pay close attention to language during field research because

All of the above

The 19th century British anthropologist who is credited with the development of the concept of culture through an evolutionary perspective where the most evolved societies resembled the British societies in which he lived was

E.B. Taylor

Assuming your culture's way of doing things is the best is

Ethnocentrism

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

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

Everyday interactions

Activities that are biologically based, such as eating and sleeping, are universally the same for all humans

False

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

False

Cultural anthropology is one of the most quantitative of the social sciences.

False

Long-term immersion in a community is called ___________.

Fieldwork

This anthropologist rejected the idea that there are groups of people belonging to stable and unchanging races

Franz Boas

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

Gene Flow

The US government's prohibition of Native American children speaking their indigenous languages in Indian schools has contributed most profoundly to

Language Death

When language speakers use "proper grammar and diction" which carefully follow the rules, they are engaging in which concept suggested by French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure?

Langue

What prompted intellectuals to start systematically explaining the differences among people?

The industrial revolution

Holistic

The perspective that aims to identify and understand cultures in the entirety

enculturation

The process of learning culture from a very young age

Cultural models help us make sense of the world because

They provide a pattern for one's own behavior and interpreting others' actions

Anthropology is different from journalism because journalists' data are protected by law.

True

Elaborating symbols and summarizing symbols work in opposite ways.

True

Western psychological terms and treatments are globalizing, and now there is evidence of mental illnesses in places where they never existed before.

True

Ethnopsychology is largely concerned with

Understanding how other societies make sense of selves, persons, and emotions.

In evolutionary terms humans are distinct from other primates with respect to their ability to use language because

We can speak using a larynx

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

anthropologists need to collect information from societies before they die out

"Owning" culture means

controlling symbols that give meaning

The moral and intellectual principle that one should withhold judgment about seemingly strange or exotic beliefs and practices is

cultural relativism

How would a critical relativist explain Native American criticisms of cultural appropriation?

it is important to understand Native American claims from their point of view though it doesn't necessarily mean we should accept them as the only way to view the issue

Examples of social institutions are

kinship, marriage, farming (all of the above)

Norms are stable because

people learn them when they are young

Anthropologists overcome ethnocentrism by

seeing matters from the point of view of another culture

A relativistic perspective on the meanings of Coca-Cola in Tzotzil Maya communities in Chiapas, Mexico, would emphasize

that those meanings are only sensible within a culturally specific set of ideas about religion and spirituality

An evolutionary perspective would be most likely to explain colonialism as

the natural abilities of more civilized people to control less civilized people

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

this way of teaching organizes people to promote shared cultural goals

Increasingly, professional anthropologists are

All of the above (Women, indigenous people, minorities)

In which of the following locations would you find an anthropologist doing fieldwork?

All of the above (a mental institution, the amazon rain forest, a factory, an NYC neighborhood)

The human mind is

All of the above (an information processor, responsible for emotions and imagination, capable of creating cognitive models)

What is the type of information written in field notes?

All of the above (confidential information, personal feelings of the anthropologist, personal information about informants)

Which of the following is a feature of language?

All of the above (it is used to communicate, it is systematic, it consists of sounds organized into words according some sort of grammar)

During fieldwork cultural anthropologists

All of the above (record people's economic transactions, learn the local language, study how environmental changes affect agriculture)

A cross-cultural perspective on eating insect larvae would reveal

All of the above (the artificiality of taste, the cultural constructions of insects as food, that eating insects can be adoptive)

When anthropologist go into the field

All of the above (they often go with the flow of everyday life, even if it seems off-topic at the time, they go with a set of questions they want to ask and have answered, they often change the focus of their question to fit what they are seeing)

A social consequence of introducing coffee into the highlands of Papua New Guinea was that

All of the above (young men gained social status, coffee plantations took over all open land, people had more access to commodities)

Koko and Washo were two primates who had learned

American Sign Language

The subfield of anthropology that studies the material remains of past cultures, often focusing on the rise of cities, is called

Archeology

Anthropologists of the 1880s are referred to as "___________" because they never traveled abroad and they gathered data from other people's reports.

Armchair Anthropologists

A paradigm that emphasizes humans that are made up of complex biological, cultural, and psychological processes is

Biocultural

Cultural anthropologists do research by

Building trusting relationships with people over a long period of time

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

Cognate Words

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

Cultural Anthropology

Because the years of crucial human brain development coincide with the years of enculturation, we can refer to the human brain as a _______ brain.

Cultured

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

Genealogical Method

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

This evolutionary mechanism is only important when population sizes are small and possibly geographically isolated

Genetic Drift

The people anthropologists gather data from are called

Informants

Which term refers to the knowledge about other people that emerges from relationships?

Intersubjective

"Going native" refers to a process whereby the anthropologist

Loses the ability to be an engaged observer

Most people are unaware of the structure of a language until someone speaking it

Makes a mistake

The affects and feelings we experience as humans

May not have an exact equivalent in another culture

In linguistics, words that differ by only one single sound contrast, like in the case of "ban," man," and "pan," are called _________ _________.

Minimal Pairs

How words fit together to make meaningful units is called

Morphology

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

Mutation

Anthropologist Sherry Ortner distinguished three kinds of culturally powerful symbols that include all of the following except

Narrative Symbols

The flexibility of the brain is called

Neural Plasticity

Anthropologists begin to understand the adaptability of the human brain by studying

Nonhuman Primates

Intelligence is

Not marked by a single fixed gene

When anthropologists study the way people use language in real settings rather than as a set of grammatical rules, they are focusing on

Parole

This type of interaction may include playing basketball, cooking, dining, or having coffee with informants

Participant Observation

The set of characteristics of an individual is called a ______.

Phenotype

______ refers to the structure of speech sounds

Phonology

On the island of Java in Indonesia, nearly every sentence marks a person's ________ between speaker and listener.

Social Position

Ethnocentrism is

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)

Culture is

learned and shared

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