Cultural Anthropology Midterm

A society characterized by a permanent political office that belongs to the leader, a redistributive economy, social and political bonds made through marriages and secret societies is most likely a

chiefdom

The "three sisters" crops of the New World

corn (maize), beans, and squash

An anthropologist interested in fishing methods of the Trobriand Islanders would be conducting _______ anthropology, whereas one interested in the sharing of fish is conducting _______ anthropology.

ecological :: economic

The controversial diary of Malinowski, written while he was doing fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, was published after his death. Although we cannot ask him to explain, one of the lessons that we learned from the diary was that

even important ethnographers in the discipline's history may have been deeply prejudiced personally against their study participants

The Anthropological definition of "culture" includes the concept of "race"

false

According to Darrel Posey, a dominant feature of Kayapo ecology is the creation and maintenance of

forest islands

Small languages are disappearing at a rate of one every

2 weeks

Rapport

A sense of trust and a comfortable working relationship in which the informant and the ethnographer are at ease with each other

What is the correct relationship between a state and a nation?

A state is a coercive political institution; a nation is an ethnic population.

People who are disconnected from the production of their food (that is, who do not know where their daily food comes from or how it was produced) are most likely to be in which kind of society?

Agricultural

symbol

Anything that serves to refer to something else, but has an arbitrary meaning

An example of __________ is a medical doctor trained in cultural anthropology that is able to contextualize the historical, social, and political forces impacting their patients

Applied Anthropology

The only state-level societies in the ancient New World were

Aztec and Inca

In Ongka's Big Moka, where do the Australian dollars generally come from?

Coffee

The ________ perspective focuses on how people perceive and categorize their own culture and experiences

Emic

The four modes of subsistence recognized by anthropologists are

Foraging, pastoralism, horticulture, agriculture

The shift from Old English to Middle English occurred when

French conquerors from Normandy invaded England in 1066 AD

Examples of early historians that essentially conducted anthropology includes all the following

Herodotus Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta Zhang Qian

One reason that plant domestication occurred around the same time throughout the world (ca. 9500-7000 BP) is

Holocene climate was more stable and predictable than the previous Pleistocene epoch

Empirical Data

Information collected in controlled, systematic, and reproducible ways

Formal economics focuses on individual behavior whereas _______ economics focuses on group behavior.

Institutional

Reverse dominance occurs when

People reject any attempts of an individual to exercise power (such as throwing a feast for everyone)

Culture

a vast, accumulated knowledge passed down from generation to generation within a group of people

Rarely, foraging groups may become sedentary instead of nomadic. This is possible when

abundant natural resources create a food surplus, allowing some members of society to pursue other occupations than foraging

Critical age range hypothesis

The idea that children will gradually lose the ability to acquire language naturally without effort

cultural determinism

The idea that one's cultural upbringing and social environment, rather than one's biology, primarily determine behavior

Ethnocentrism

The idea that one's own group is better than any other

Why doesn't class stratification develop in foraging societies?

There is no advantage to hoarding food or having too much personal property

The type of exchange illustrated by the Kula of the Trobriand Islands is

balanced reciprocity

When something is given or traded with the expectation that something of equal value will be eventually returned within a specified general time period, it shows

balanced reciprocity

Most often, ethnographers include in their writing

both emic and etic perspectives

Rather than studying isolated facets of a society (it's history, language, demographics, economics, politics, religion, etc.) separately, anthropology's __________ approach incorporates them all as part of a complex whole

holistic

People whose gardens supply the majority of their food are called

horticulturalists

Collecting data before developing a hypothesis is known as a _______ approach; conversely, starting with a hypothesis and then testing it on a dataset is known as ________.

inductive : deduction

The Nuremberg Code is a document produced after WWII that is relevant to anthropology because

it provided a model code of ethics for how to treat human subjects ethically in medical or scientific research

An important point from the "story from the field" video in northern Pakistan was the importance of _____________.

knowing your own culture and biases

foraging

mode of subsistence defined by its reliance on wild plant and animal food

Three modes of exchange

reciprocity, market exchange, and redistribution

Nineteenth century anthropologists identified three stages of "cultural evolution," which were called (in this order of development)

savagery, barbarism, and civilization

cultural relativism

the idea that we should judge another culture's beliefs and behaviors from their own perspective, not ours

The social relations through which human labor is used to transform energy from nature using tools, skills, organization, and knowledge, is called

the mode of production

The theory of functionalism, as used by Malinowski, understood that cultural traditions developed as a result of

the need to regulate specific human needs, such as food, safety, reproduction, and livelihood

In a pastoralist society, wealth and status are measured by

the number of animals a person owns

political economy

the study of the use and control of resources as a mechanism for wielding power

The last scene of Ongka's Big Moka shows the final giant moka with numerous gifts, including

there is no final moka at the end of the film

One of the points implicit in Body Ritual of the Nacirema is that cultural relativism can help us find the familiar in the _______ and vice versa

unfamiliar

In Notes on a Balinese Cockfight, why was Geertz so surprised when the man they followed knew so much about them

up until that moment, they had been treated as "invisible" by everyone in the village

Emically-speaking, the highlight of the Kula trade is

useless armbands and necklaces

The common English phrases "I won the argument" and "I had a fight with my boyfriend last night" are examples of the conceptual metaphor in American culture that argument is

war

Thomas Malthus' idea that connects population and resources basically argues that

without something to slow it down, a population will grow faster than the resources that the environment can provide

An etic perspective would include

Analyzing a cultural practice by examining how they intersect with the global economy

Culture

"That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" is Tylor's definition of

The four main subfields of Anthropology include:

-Cultural Anthropology -Archeology -Linguistic Anthropology -Biological/Physical Anthropology

Tribal leaders like the Big Men of New Guinea can be described by all of the following

-he uses persuasion and diplomacy to achieve his political goals -his role is not hereditary -he acquires followers by doing favors that others cannot repay

Undertaking a period of fieldwork in cultural anthropology typically requires

-interacting on a daily basis with a group of people to learn about them -spending a few months to a few years living among the research participants -the anthropologist to go to where the people of the research study are

Suitable field sites for conducting ethnography include

-isolated, non-industrialized societies. -urban environments, such as a city in the U.S.. -multiple locations, especially when gaining a full understanding of an issue requires traveling to different locations

How many languages are spoken in the world today?

7000

armchair anthropology

An approach that uses the stories and experiences of others to measure other cultures from one's own (superior) vantage point

What causes language variation

Migration routes Topography Settlement patterns

What might be said about the stability of states?

States tend toward instability, evidenced by the fact that very few states in history have lasted up to 1,000 years

legitimacy

The perception that an individual has a valid right to leadership

participant observation

The research technique in which an ethnographer records their own observations and thoughts, as well as what they do while engaging in daily community activities

Means of production

The resources used to produce goods (land, farms, factories)

carrying capacity

The term that anthropologists use to quantify the number of calories that can be extracted from a particular unit of land to support a human population

Which of the following modes of production is based on farmers or herders producing for themselves and their families, but also giving a portion of their goods or labor to their leaders?

Tributary production

Bronislaw Malinowski

While Franz Boas is credited with introducing participant observation to Anthropology, _________ greatly expanded on the idea in their work on the Trobriand Islands

The general idea of Chomsky's Universal Grammar is that

all normally developing human infants have an innate ability to acquire the language(s) used around them

When children stop learning a language, the language eventually

dies

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity promotes the idea that

one's cultural environment and one's language are so interrelated that the way a person speaks may influence the way they see the world

Clifford Geertz' term, "thick description," refers to the ethnographer's focus on

the raw details (context, meanings) of ethnographic fieldwork