Anthropology Exam 1
The moral and intellectual principle that one should withhold judgment about seemingly strange or exotic beliefs and practices is known as
Cultural Relativism
One problem with the argument that chimpanzees and humans are similar because they share so much _____ in common is that humans also share a significant percentage of it with daffodils
DNA
Who was responsible for the theory of social evolution?
EB Tylor
Assuming your culture's way of doing things is the best is called
Ethnocentrism
The experience of feeling that the way your culture does things is the right way and any different way of doing things is wrong is called _________________.
Ethnocentrism
T/F Non-random mating among the Hutterite sect in Canada is a good example of how genetic drift works.
False
T/F The scientific method is a research method in pursuit of ultimate truths
False
A key principle of the holistic perspective developed by Franz Boas is
A goal of synthesizing the entire context of human experience.
Ethics, which are _______________________________, are important to anthropologists.
A moral imperative
The defining feature of historical particularism is
Individual societies develop particular cultural traits and undergo a unique process of change.
What process involves shifting from an agricultural economy to a factory-based one?
Industrialization
The practice of anthropologists explaining their research to participants and being clear about the risks involved is called
Informed Consent
A cross-cultural perspective on eating insect larvae would reveal
The artificiality of taste the cultural constructions of insects as food, that eating, insects can be adaptive.
T/F A key concern in the 1850s that shaped the discipline of anthropology was the emergence of a new scientific theory called "evolution."
True
T/F Diversity, defined anthropologically, refers to both multiplicity and variety, which is not the same thing as "difference."
True
T/F Most anthropologists believe in a single unified theory of culture
True
The application of the comparative method in his research in Papua New Guinea led coauthor Robert Welsch to focus on
(a) published and unpublished accounts of mask collectors who visited different villages(b) all of the answers are correct(c) interviews of village elders in different villages(d) museum collections
The most successful life form on earth is thought by many to be __________.
1 to 3 cells
When did anthropology emerge as an academic discipline
1800s
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
The example of dogs and wolves being able to breed even though they are different species underscores what important aspect of our approach to evolutionary theory?
Ambiguity is part of our own taxonomic system
A symbol is:
An object, idea, image, figure, or character that represents something else
Which of the following is the most significant aspect of the salvage paradigm?
Anthropologists need to collect information from societies before they die out.
The thinker who developed evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century was:
Charles Darwin
The historical practice of more powerful countries claiming possession of less powerful ones is called _____________________ and was a driving force in anthropology.
Colonialism
The subfield of anthropology that studies human diversity, beliefs, and practice is called:
Cultural Anthropology
______________________ refers to the adaptive changes that organisms make across generations.
Evolution
Gene flow is the movement of genetic material across different ecosystems.
False
T/F Activities that are biologically based, such as eating and sleeping, are universally the same for all humans.
False
T/F All humans are born with some culture.
False
T/F Contemporary cultural anthropologists often rank societies along an evolutionary scale from "primitive" to "advanced."
False
T/F Cultural appropriation involves relationships of power.
False
T/F Cultural relativism is important because it helps anthropologists understand and defend all the things that people in other cultures do.
False
T/F Culture is uniquely human.
False
T/F Humans and chimpanzees share 98% of their genes
False
T/F People rarely hold conflicting values.
False
The American anthropologist responsible for the concept of historical particularism was named
Franz Boas
The theory of culture that proposes that cultural practices, beliefs, and institutions fulfill the psychological and physical needs of society is called
Functionalism
Loss of genetic variation occurring when a small population creates a new, usually isolated, community is known as the _______________.
Gene flow
Michael Ames developed exhibits with native Canadian communities at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia because he believed in ______________.
Interpretive theory
The idea of biological evolution was first proposed by
Lamarck in the late 1700s
Linguistic anthropologists traditionally study
Language
2. The subfield of anthropology that studies language use is called
Linguistic Anthropology
How would a critical relativist explain Native American criticisms of cultural appropriation?
Native Americans claims from their point of view though it doesn't mean we should accept them as the only way to view the issue.
The process by which inheritable traits are passed along to offspring because they are better suited to the environment is
Natural Selection
The theorist most connected with post-structuralism is
Renato Rosaldo
An ethical approach to anthropological research would emphasize
Responsibilities toward the host country and the people being studied.
A relativistic perspective on the meanings of Coca-Cola in Tzotzil Maya communities in Chiapas, Mexico, would emphasize what?
That those meanings are only sensible within a culturally specific set of ideas about religion and spirtuality.
What prompted intellectuals to start systematically explaining the differences among people?
The Industrial Revolution
One of the useful results of a phylogeny is to show that
The ancestral history of a species or group of related species.
The primary ethical responsibility of anthropologists is to (who):
The people or species they study
The term diversity, when defined anthropologically, means?
The sheer variety of ways of being human around the world.
A key element of the scientific method, which both explains things and guides research, is
Theories
A change in DNA sequence leading to variation is known as mutation.
True
Genetic drift can occur because of an intentional change in health policies in a particular country.
True
Many evolutionary processes interact to affect the organism T/F
True
The physical characteristics of any organism that can be seen are known as the phenotype.
True
The core idea of Darwin's and Wallace's ideas—descent with modifications via natural selection—is intimately tied to what larger force?
Variation
The Greek philosopher Aristotle proposed that all life was arranged in
a great chain of being
A social consequence of introducing coffee into the highlands of Papua New Guinea was that
a)young men gained social status b) coffee plantations took over all open land c)people had more access to commodities
An evolutionary perspective on variations in physical traits reflects
adaptive changes
Comparing DNA sequences allows us to understand whether organisms are connected through common ___________.
ancestor
The peppered moth is a classic example of how environmental factors
are part of the interaction between genotype and phenotype
Examples of social institutions are
are patterns of beliefs and behavior centered on basic social needs.
A quantitative approach to studying the archaeological past would be most interested in
building and testing hypothesizes by collecting, classifying and measuring data.
When Kay Warren presented her anthropological research, a group of Maya intellectuals, activists, and political leaders:
challenged her right to study, as a foreigner
One of the central ideas of Darwin's theory of evolution was the idea that
change in organisms was related to their adaptability to a particular environment.
A taxonomic structure is one that
classifies species by a system
"Owning" culture (means)
controlling symbols that give meaning
Anthropologists believe that analyzing human cultural phenomena by comparing those phenomena across different societies, called the _____________ approach, is necessary to appreciate how "artificial" our beliefs and actions are.
cross culture
The unilateral decision of one social group to take control of the symbols, objects, and practices of others is called
cultural appropriation
Collective definitions of proper and improper behavior that "build" meanings through common experiences and negotiations are cultural __________________.
cultural construction
The ability of African cichlids, a popular pet fish, to develop highly similar body shapes despite coming from two different and geographically distant environments is an example of
developmental bias
The process of learning culture from a very young age is called
encultration
If you wanted to understand the norms of a society, you would most likely focus on
everyday interactions
When cultural anthropologists live in societies for one or more years observing social life, they are doing
fieldwork
The theory that posits that cultural practices and beliefs serve purposes for society is called
functionalism
Individuals migrating from one country to another can fundamentally alter genetic variation in all members of both populations because of _________
genetic drift
_____________ emerges when genetic variation within a group grows so large that its members begin exhibiting important genetic and physical differences.
genetic flow
The Human Terrain System, a program of the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, used anthropologists to ______________________________.
help soldiers understand village politics and translate information.
Because our values and beliefs include many elements of life such as clothes, food, and language means that culture is
integrated
An ______________ approach to culture, such as that promoted by Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and Mary Douglas, emphasizes that culture is a shared system of meanings.
interpretive
Many anthropologists are wary about traditions because, while they may feel antiquated to some people, they are often _____________.
invented
One of the more important ways that anthropology contributes to the development of evolutionary theory is that
it challenges the biological reductionism of much evolutionary theory
The success of simple life forms such as bacteria challenges one of the early ideas about evolution because
it demonstrates the oversimplification that comes from thinking humans are more highly evolved
Cultural determinism is unproductive for cultural analysis because
it explains all human action as the product of culture alone, it can justify atrocities, it denies the influence of factors like physical environment and biology on humans
Culture is (includes what characteristics?)
learned, shared based on symbols, integrated, dynamic
The comparative method is
look at similarities and differences across two or more cultures.
Plasticity can be understood as not being Lamarckian because
modification happens before genetic changes appear that change in place across generations
If you observed gradual changes in environmental temperature and, at the same time, observed that there were changes in the phenotype of a butterfly species over fifteen generations, which theory might best help explain what is going on?
natural selection
Speciation, when considered as an outcome consistent with Darwin's idea of descent with modification, supports the idea that
new life forms originate as a result of previously exiting ones
In terms of the extended evolutionary synthesis, large-scale agriculture, which produces massive amounts of both food and pollution, can be understood as a form of
niche construction
The influence of figures like Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Galileo Galilei on the intellectual history of evolution is that they showed the importance of
observing nature and using evidence to build knowledge
During fieldwork, cultural anthropologists
participant-observation
Norms are stable because
people learn them when they are young
Sickle-cell anemia, a blood cell mutation, takes a toll on those afflicted, but is an example of a mutation that may also be useful because it
provides resistance to malaria in the tropics
Research that involves interviews, observations, images, objects, and words is a _____ study.
qualitative
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
The idea that cultures pass through stages from primitive to complex is known as
social evolutionism
Gregor Mendel's findings about inheritance among pea plants stemmed from what key ability that he possessed?
the ability to observe closely
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
Ethnocentrism is:
the judgment of other groups by one's own standards and values
The practical use of anthropological knowledge to address real-world problems, sometimes called anthropology's "fifth field," is
Applied Anthropology
The subfield of anthropology that studies the material remains of past cultures, often focusing on the rise of cities, is called
Archaeology
Why was the discovery of penicillin in 1928 useful in our understanding of evolution?
Bacteria evolve quickly so we could study themm evolving.
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 people to promote shared cultural goals.
One of the important ways that genetic material is moved between different populations, such as through gene flow, is
through a choice of sexual partner
The main idea behind the holistic perspective is to study culture
through systematic connections of different parts
The most enduring and ritualized aspects of culture are referred to as
traditions
While the behaviors selected for by Belyaev and Trut in their work with foxes have some genetic basis, it remains true that
variations in behavior and morphology are expected because genes don't always shape such variability
An anthropologist studying the evolution of human‒bacteria interactions would be most interested in all of the following except
what ever one doesn't sound like a bacteria
The subfield of anthropology that studies human evolution, including human genetics and human nutrition, is called
Biological Anthropology
Who was responsible for the theory of functionalism?
Bronislaw Malinowski
The work of Russian geneticists over forty years, selecting for tameness among foxes, resulted in changes in animal ___________.
phentotype
An evolutionary perspective would be most likely to explain colonialism as
the natural abilities of more civilized people to control less civilized people.
The structuralist approach to culture theorizes what?
people make sense of the world through binary oppositions.
The idea that embraces dynamic cultural processes and the idea that the observer of cultural processes can never see culture completely objectively represent
post-structuralism
Western colonial powers understood the different customs and cultures of the people they colonized as
Proof of their primitive nature
T/F Qualitative methods often use the researchers themselves as the research instrument
True
T/F There is rarely any guessing involved in the development of theories because they are tested repeatedly.
True
Biological anthropologist Andrea Wiley's work with lactase persistence is important to public health because it draws attention to
policies should promote non-milk products that are also high in calcium, fat and protein
If you wanted to study genetic drift in Hutterite colonies such as those in which Michael Park studied gene flow, you would be interested in
population records that suggest a dramatic reduction in population
Domesticated and wild animals may differ in all the morphological traits listed below except
tameness
What U.S. food-policy ideas might emerge out of Andrea Wiley's research on lactase persistence?
policies should promote non-milk food products that are also high in calcium, protein and fat
The controversy between Native Americans and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) schools using mascots illustrates
the power of tradition
A key feature of the _____________ concept is that it refers to the taken-for-granted notions, rules, moralities, and behaviors within a social group that feel natural.
Culture
The nineteenth-century British anthropologist credited with the development of the concept of culture through an evolutionary perspective was
E. B Taylor
The method of data collection that involves prolonged and intensive observation of everyday life and is a hallmark of cultural anthropology is
Ethnographic Method
T/F Variation in genes acts as the sole source for biological change of traits in an organism.
False
The perspective that aims to identify and understand cultures in the entirety is called
Holistic
T/F Anthropologists have always approached a problem by specializing in one of the four subfields.
True
T/F Anthropologists like E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Renato Rosaldo do not see cultural anthropology as a science.
True
T/F Clyde Kluckhohn argued that both biological and cultural aspects of humanity must be seen as a continuum of small changes.
True
T/F Culture can be transmitted virtually through the Internet in addition to face-to-face interaction
True
T/F Culture consists of the collective processes that make the artificial seem natural.
True
T/F Historical archaeologists excavate sites where written historical documentation exists that provide an accurate description of the way the people actually lived.
True
"Survival of the fittest" is taken to mean competition for __________________.
mating
A _________ charts the evolutionary history of a particular taxonomic branch and yields information about its ancestry.
phylogenetic
The application of a holistic perspective to understand changes in everyday practices, such as eating breakfast cereals, reveals
the processes of cultural appropriation
