Anthropology Test 2

The process of learning culture from a very young age is called

enculturation

The effects of sedentism and population growth on populations can also be seen in the presence of

epidemic diseases

The study of how people classify things in the world is called

ethnoscience

All humans are born with some culture.

false

Forensic scientists can identify the race of an individual's skull with 100% accuracy

false

Languages change very slowly, taking generations or even centuries.

false

Most anthropologists believe in a single unified theory of culture.

false

Social complexity is always associated with social inequality and hierarchy

false

Which mode of subsistence includes the search for edible things?

foraging

Eating practices mark

gender age ethnic group

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

holistic

V. Gordon Childe understood the revolution brought by the rise of early agriculture involved all the following except

increasing brain size among the population that was at the heart of the revolution

Because our values and beliefs include many elements of life such as clothes, food, and language means that culture is

integrated

Which of the following is not true of economic anthropology?

it assumes that free market capitalism will take over the world

Anthropology's understanding of skin pigmentation emphasizes that

it is an adaptive response to ultraviolet light

Which of the following is a feature of language?

it is used to communicate it is systematic it consists of sounds organized into words according to some sort of grammar

A key reason anthropologists study people's pursuit of cool things is because

it's an important avenue through which people express and change their social relationships

Which of the following would be least likely given as an explanation by a cultural anthropologist for the absence of food security among the poor?

it's related to the ignorance of the poor to effectively feed themselves

Culture is

learned and shared

How words fit together to make meaningful units is called

morphology

In what ways were principles of natural selection involved in the increasing size of food grains like corn, wheat, and barley?

natural selection was not involved because the processes involved humans selecting the best seeds

One of the side effects of increased food production is the generation of a surplus, something that helped give rise to

new social roles for food producers, typically specialist roles

Gift exchange for Marcel Mauss is based primarily on

obligation

Which of the following analyses of Christmas shopping would least likely come from a follower of cultural economics?

people always make decisions about what to buy on the basis of getting the lowest price

Norms are stable because

people learn them when they are young

In analyzing the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society, Esther Boserup examined the relationship between

population growth and food production

Economies in which people seek high social rank, prestige, and power instead of money and material wealth are known as

prestige economies

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

redistribution

Archaeologists today generally agree that most social systems

routinely collapse and are then revived after some period of time

Anthropologists overcome ethnocentrism by

seeing matters from the point of view of another culture

A society having many different parts organized into a single social system is said to have

social complexity

Understanding biological variation means we must understand the role of

social relationships and cultural attitudes that affect health outcomes

A foodways perspective on human evolution would emphasize

that changes in human dietary physiology are intertwined with how people grow, share, and eat food

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

One of the reasons that the understanding of many early city-states is challenging is due to

the lack of written records

All biological approaches to race are problematic because

they rarely describe an actual individual or characterize whole groups of people the sampling is too specific and focuses only on visible traits one trait tends to be representative of other characteristics like intelligence and personal character

Early European archaeologists were interested in studying the ancient societies in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the rest of the Fertile Crescent because

they saw European legal codes and philosophies as originating in these ancient Middle Eastern states

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

we can speak using a larynx

One of the key findings of Annette Weiner's work in the Trobriand Islands contradicted Malinowski's earlier idea that

women did not participate in the exchange systems in the islands

Does race have biological consequences?

yes, because of racism

is the basis of human behavior is something that conventionally stands for something else includes numbers and the alphabet

A symbol

can only communicate in response to real-world stimuli

Animal Call Systems

Changing a wild plant or animal into something that can be controlled and used by humans

Domestication

presents a major problem for anthropologists means you think your culture is superior to others is a common feature of culture

Ethnocentrism

Despite the evidence of escalating warfare, excessive population growth, drought, and the failings of the ruling elite, the overwhelming evidence about the Mayan empire suggests that

Mayans were fully assimilated into the Spanish empire at the time of the conquest

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

a creole

One of the limitations of the archaeological analysis of complexity is that

an object by itself cannot determine dynamics of wealth, power, or status

The concept of animal husbandry refers to the practice of

breeding, care, and use of domestic animals by humans

Which of the following is NOT a reasonable account used to explain why humans started raising their own food by domesticating plants and animals?

by the end of the ice age, human brains were finally large enough and humans smart enough to learn that if they planted seeds they would grow

A substantivist would be most likely to explain the Kula cycle as

closely tied to important social institutions, such as kin networks, trading ties, and political structure

Which of the following is a contributing factor to the development of creoles, pidgins, and other hybrid forms of language?

colonialism globalization migration

The point of Mary Douglas' comparison of the proper sequence of an English meal (with dessert at the end), to the structure of a sentence, was to

demonstrate how food was a form of symbolic communication

Of the many reasons suggested for the abandonment of the Mayan city of Copán, one reason we can safely say was not part of the process was

drought

The concept that people have images, knowledge, and concepts of the physical landscape that affect how they will actually interact with it is called

a cultural landscape

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

a pidgin language

One of the criticisms of large-scale meat production is that it depersonalizes the product that the consumer buys. Were everyone who wished to consume meat required to hunt it down, kill it, clean and process it, this would likely result in

a reformulation of that food's meaning to the consumer

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

language death

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

If you studied speech patterns such as those analyzed in Robin Lakoff's study of gendered speech, you might find that "talking like a lady"

marginalizes women's voices in work contexts

The importance of teosinte, or maize, in archeology is that it

provides strong evidence that humans understood and cultivated plants

Which of the following is not an example of the ways humans vary biologically?

race

The themes of reciprocity and gift exchange are critical to anthropologists because

reciprocity is deeply embedded in social relations the exchange of gifts is the economy in many societies they are economically significant in market-based economies

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

the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built from the language habits of a particular social group language is a guide to "social reality" we understand the material world through the language we speak

According to anthropologists, economies are shaped by which factors?

the decisions people make social relationships culture and morality

What do environmental anthropologists study?

the impact of pollution on certain groups the effects of global economic changes on human-nature relationships the impact of sustainable development initiatives on certain groups

Variations in skin pigmentation can be traced to

the latitude where one's ancestors spent the most time

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

The most enduring and ritualized aspects of culture are referred to as

traditions

America's pattern of gender inequality is built into our linguistic practices.

true

Culture is uniquely human.

true

Genetically speaking, humans are a remarkably homogeneous species: there is far greater variation within human groups than there is between them

true

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

true