UVM Anthro Final

9. Which statement best reflects the central findings of Luis Vivanco's research on the intersections of sustainability and bike culture in Bogotá, Colombia?

"Attitudes toward bicycle use are complicated by social inequalities and unequal access to secure urban spaces."

Anthropological ethics

... Ethics:moral questions about right and wrong and standards of appropriate behavior. Ethical dilemmas: what their research does to its subjects, (responsibility) Philippe Bourgois - studies crack dealers in harlem → illegality = ethical issue for ethnographers. Anthropologists committed to doing no harm (protecting informants identities)

Caste:

...each of the hereditary classes of Hindu society, distinguished by relative degrees of ritual purity or pollution and of social status. Varna: ideal model of social classification, expressed in terms of purity and pollution (Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaisya, Sudra)

Dowry:

Brides family pays to grooms family to ensure her well-being, wont make claims on family's estate.

Globalization:

Defined as the contemporary widening scale of cross cultural interactions owing to the rapid movement of money, people, goods, images, and ideas within nations and across national boundaries.

4. In the Kula ring, there is often a long lag time between the receipt and reciprocation of a gift. Anthropologists call this phenomenon _______ ______.

Delayed Reciprocity

Cognatic Lineage:

Descent through both mother and father.

Mathiang Gok (Dinka)

Fetish magically imposed upon someone else.

Holism:

The effort to synthesize these distinct approaches and findings into a single comprehensive explanation

Cultural economics:

The idea that symbols and morals help shape a community's economy

Participant-observation:

Is a key element of anthropological fieldwork, it is a systematic research strategy that is, in some respects, a matter of hanging out.

Hijra (India):

Is a transgender indivudal who was assigned male at birth, but now doesn't identify as either gender.

Magic:

Is an explanatory system of causation that does not follow naturalistic explanations-such as bening struck by a weapon or infected by some virus- often working at a distance without direct physical contact.

Horticulture:

Is the cultivation of gardens or small fields to meet basic needs of a house-hold. Sometimes referred to as subsistence agriculture. Small scale trade but not investment.

Sociolinguistics:

Is the study of how sociocultural context and norms shape language use and the effects of language use on society.

Violence:

Is typically defined as the use of force to harm someone or something. It is highly visible and concrete assertion of power, and a very efficient way to transform a social environment.

Structural violence

It refers to a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs

Bridewealth:

To compensate another clan for losing a person, the grooms family gives valuables to the bride family in what has been called bride wealth, bride price payments, or simply bride price.

Kula (Trobriand Islands):

Kula Ring(exchange) is a ceremonial exchange system conducted in papua new guinea. Malinowski made the Kula Ring famous.

Big Man (Melanesia):

Leadership style based on reciprocity, assumes status by being able to persuade followers, not because he controls power or resources on his own. Cannot transfer status through inheritance when they die.

Fieldwork:

Long term immersion in a community

6. Tara Heffernan, who studied American patterns of childbirth, observes that home birth has been discredited and laws rewritten to define physician control over birthing. In other words, childbirth has been turned into a medical problem, a process anthropologists called

MEDICALIZATION____.

Endogamy:

Means that members of the clan must marry someone inside their own clan.

Materiality

People obsession with accumulation of material things. Processes through which people create, imagine and interact with objects.

Power:

Political Power: refers to how power is created and enacted to attain goals that are presumed to be for the good of a community, the common good. Structural Power: which is power that not only operates within settings but that also organizes and orchestrates the settings in which social and individual action take place.

Foraging:

Refers to searching for edible plant and animal foods without domesticating them.

Language ideology:

Refers to the ideologies people have about the superiority of one dialect or language and the inferiority of others.

Shaman:

Religious leaders who communicate the needs of the living with the spirit world.

Txiv neeb (Hmong)

Shaman in "Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down"

Witchcraft:

Social insurance scheme- catch tensions before they erupt. Doesn't blame the victim, emanates from person without their control

2. Culture-bound syndromes exist because the diagnosis of a mental illness reflects a society's disease categories and ideas about normality/abnormality, which are culturally-relative.

TRUE

2. Environmental anthropology demonstrates that many non-Western societies have conservation traditions based on distinct principles of human-nature relationship.

TRUE

2. Issues of ideology, identity, morality, and aesthetics are critical to understanding how and why people talk the way they do.

TRUE

3. Anthropologists still debate theories about the relationship between culture and globalization, yet most accept that human cultural diversity exists, not in spite of, but because of global interconnections.

TRUE

5. As a four-field discipline, Anthropology is focused on physical, behavioral, and cultural variability and change across human communities.

TRUE

4.________ theory has provided cultural anthropologists with tools to understand how and why global inequality exists.

World System

World Systems Theory:

World system theory rejects the idea that global interconnections are anything new, identifying the late fifteenth century as the beginning of a new capitalist world order that connected various parts of the world in new ways.

Law of similarity/law of contagion

a magical law that suggests that once two people or objects have been in contact a magical link persists between them unless or until a formal exorcism or other act of banishing breaks the non-material bond.

Culture-bound syndrome:

a mental illness unique to a culture. Ex: is Koro the condition unique to Chinese and Southeast Asian cultures in which an individual believes his external genitalia re shrinking and even disappearing.

Holism/holistic perspective:

a perspective that aims to identify and understand the whole - that is, the systematic connections between individual cultural beliefs and practices - rather than the individual parts.

5. In the Hmong world view, Lia's condition gave her the potential to eventually become a shaman, or in their language,

a txiv neeb.

Ethnocentrism:

assuming our way of doing things is correct, while simply dismissing other people's assumptions as wrong or ignorant

Worldview:

assumptions about the world and how it works

8. Fadiman's book describes many situations that demonstrate the social power and authority of biomedicine. Which of the following is not one of those examples?

b) A txiv neeb and a physician collaborating to decide on the course of Lia's treatment.

10. Is "native anthropology" really possible? According to Japanese-American anthropologist Takeyi Tsuda:

b) Perhaps, but even native anthropologists and the people they study in their community have meaningful differences between them.

20. Doing ethnographic fieldwork ethically involves:

b) a commitment to doing no harm c) being open and honest about the purposes of the research e) b and c

8. If you were going to conduct ethnographic fieldwork at Patrick Gymnasium on student exercise culture, your research would most likely involve .

b) experiential immersion, particularism, and inductive reasoning

8. According to Susan Crate, one of the primary interests of anthropologists studying the impacts of climate change is:

b) how people make sense of environmental changes related to climate change

16. A relativistic perspective on human-nature relations would:

b) question whether or not different cultures even conceive of nature in the same ways

19. Anthropologists explain actions like those happening in Jolo—handling serpents, drinking poison, and handling burning objects—as an illustration of:

b) the relationship between meaning and symbolic action

8. In the film "Shadows and Illuminations," Pak Kereta has a syringe of a black liquid shot up his nose. What kind of healing process is this?

c) clinical therapeutic process

9. In the film Shadows and Illuminations, Pak Kereta turns toward a number of distinct healing traditions and healers to diagnose and treat his situation. This is an illustration of:

c) medical pluralism

10. Rituals appear to work because they convey symbolic meanings of the world, employ magical thinking, and because they are:

c) social performances

Liminality

disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete

6. An interpretive approach to the study of culture or religion, such as that promoted by Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and Mary Douglas, focuses on:

e) a social group's shared symbolic meanings

7. Which of the following was not a key evolutionary change in the hominin past that contributed to the cultural capacity we now have as humans?

e) territorialism

9. "Religious" symbols differ from everyday, run-of-the-mill symbols. How?

e) they seem uniquely realistic and reflect ideas about a general order of existence

Polygamy:

plural marriage

Culture:

refers to these taken-for-granted notions, rules, moralities, and behaviors within a social group that feel natural and the way things should be.

Balanced Reciprocity:

when a person gives something expecting an equivalent gift back.

Negative Reciprocity:

which economist call barter, the attempt to get something for nothing.

Structural Power:

which is power that not only operates within settings but that also organizes and orchestrates the setting in which social and individual action take place.

Exogamy:

which means that members of the clan must marry someone from another clan, which has the effect of building political, Economic, and social ties with other clans.

Limited purpose money:

which refers to objects that can be exchanged only for certain things.

15. Which statement best describes the methodology of participant-observation?

"Its goal is to understand the meanings people ascribe to their existence by immersing the researcher in their everyday lives."

18. Which statement best describes how a World Systems Theorist would approach the arrival of Western-style malls in India?

"These malls are sure to benefit global corporations at the expense of the local economy and society"

Interpretive anthropology

(1970-present) Clifford Geertz Victor Turner, Mary Douglas. → Culture is a shared system of meaning. People make sense of their world through the use of symbols and symbolic activities like myth and ritual.

3 Reasons for medicalizing the non-medical:

- Financial - Medicalization enhances the social authority of physicians - Concerns Americans current preference for viewing social problems in scientific rather than moral or social terms

Jolo Serpent Handling (W. Virginia)

A community of people who participate in a religion know as serpent handling.

Moka (Papua New Guinea Highlands):

A highly ritualized system of exchange in Mount Hagen, concepts of "Big man" political system. Moka are reciprocal gifts of pigs through which social status is achieved.

Symbols:

A symbol being something that conventionally stands for something else, through which people make sense of the world

Problem-solving anthropologies (applied, practicing, activist)

Applied: refers to the application of the method and theory of anthropology to the analysis and solution of practical problems Activist: involves developing the research questions and project while working with informants, allowing them to participate in the production of knowledge which will contribute to understanding the issues they face and how to resolve them

Norms:

Are typical patterns of behavior, often viewed by participants as the rules of how things should be done.

4. Anthropologists have begun to challenge Cartesian dualism, which separates mind and body. The _____ perspective is helping us rethink older topics like human evolution, cognition, emotions, and sleep.

Biocultural

Descent lineages:

Basic units of kinship. Create corporate groups that control inheritance, maintain relations without central government, control land

Biocultural perspective:

Beings in which biological, physiological and cultural processes interact in complex ways. Divide between biology and culture meshed in human mind. Humans all have shared biological outer limits, where they differ is across cultures because of influence of external factors.

Cultural vs. Critical relativism:

Cultural: Relativism: The moral and intellectual principle that one should withhold judgment about seemingly strange or exotic beliefs and practices.

5. Anthropologists use the ____ concept to refer to the taken-for-granted notions, rules, moralities, and behaviors within a social group that feel natural to it members.

Culture

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:

Different languages have different grammars which create distinct conceptual worlds among their speakers

Environmental determinism:

Environmental conditions shape cultural characteristics. Nature is an independent variable , culture is dependent

1. Anthropologists believe that symbolic meaning is only created and conveyed through language; the social processes of everyday life have nothing to do with it.

FALSE

1. Anthropologists have found that there is no non-Western culture with as sophisticated an understanding of the natural world as Western science.

FALSE

1. Anthropologists who study sustainability issues tend to downplay the environmental and health risks of industrial agriculture and landscape change, and tend to focus instead on how economic growth is the necessary key to long-term sustainability.

FALSE

1. The latest findings of paleoanthropology suggest that the hominin capacity for culture appeared with the emergence of our species, Homo sapiens.

FALSE

2. According to Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban who studied Female Genital Mutilation in Sudan, cultural relativism is always incompatible with the idea of universal human rights. Therefore, anthropologists should never offer their expertise to international debates regarding human rights.

FALSE

3. Globally, the secular(Refers to the declining influence of religion) worldview and atheism have been on the rise for decades and are on the verge of stamping out religious and magical worldviews.

FALSE

3. The primary goal of economic anthropology is the creation of abstract models of economic practice to identify laws of human behavior.

FALSE

3. When medical anthropologists study cultural conflicts in healthcare like the ones Fadiman's book describes, their primary job is to explain which explanatory model of illness is the correct one.

FALSE

4. The ethnographic method is a form of quantitative research whose goal is to construct statistical models to explain what is observed.

FALSE

Cultural rules of alcohol use (D. Heath)

Fieldwork in Bolivia (1950's) → drinking is ritualized: invitations, toasts and shared drinks. Alcohol not reliable in its effects cross culturally. --Prohibition hardly ever works, unless couched in sacred rules --Where drinking is viewed as heroic, masculine, powerful = excessive use --Where drinking denied to young = youth drink too much, too fast --Drinking is social act --Values, norms influence effects of drinking, regardless of biochemistry, pharmacology --Rules of drinking associated with strong emotions, sanctions --Many cultures emphasize sociability, relaxation --It is rare for alcohol to be associated with any single specific problem --Ideas about what is normal shape what is abnormal (i.e., less intoxication in societies --where drunkenness considered shameful or disgusting)

Formal and informal mechanisms of social control

Formal: Government, SGA, RA's, Res Life. Informal: "law like" qualities to things that aren't laws, holding door for people, recycling/composting, dress code, rumor/gossip.

Delayed Reciprocity:

Giving a gift to someone, expecting some equivalent gift soon.

7. One of the things that distinguishes cultural anthropology from other social sciences is its _____perspective, which involves an effort to understand interrelationships between the domains of a society, such as religion, politics, and economics.

Holistic

Proxemics

How people use physical space and kinesics (body motion, posture, gestures) to communicate non-verbally.

Karoshi (Japan):

In Japanese culture people literally work themselves to death, and drop dead(A condition unique to Japanese life)

Muxes (Oaxaca):

In Zapotec culture of Oaxaca a Muxe is an assigned male at birth who dresses and behaves in ways otherwise associated with the female gender, they may be seen as a third gender. Muxes marry men or women.

General Purpose money:

Money that is used to buy almost anything (Bills, checks, cards)

Ritual:

Stylized performances involving symbols that are associated with social, political, and religious activities.

7. In one of Lia's healing ceremonies, sacrificial pigs are paid spirit money to negotiate with dab spirits who can help bring her lost soul back. This is a good example of a ________ therapeutic process.

Symbolic

Foodways:

The structured beliefs and behaviors surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of food.

Functionalism:

Theory that holds that cultural practices and beliefs serve purposes for society, such as explaining how the world works, organizing people into roles so they can get things done, and so on.

Structural-functionalism:

Theory which held that the different structues of a society functioned in an intergrated way to maintain social order and control.

5. A key concept at the heart of economic anthropology, _____, is not the same as price; it is a culturally-relative and symbolic assessment of worth.

Value

Value:

Values are symbolic expressions of intrinsically desirable principles or qualities

Pheme (Greeks):

Was the goddess of fame in Greek mythology, the people she favored were renowned while the people she didn't like were plagued by rumors.

Cross-cousin marriage:

When 2 people from the same clan marry each other for the benefits of marriage.

Intersubjectivity:

Which means that knowledge about other people emerges out of relationships individuals have with each other.

14. A biocultural anthropologist studying human cognition and the nervous system would assume all of the following except:

a) the separation of mind and body, as advocated by Cartesian dualism

Hybridization:

alternative theory, refers to open-ended and ongoing cultural intermingling and fusion.

Money:

an object or substance that serves as a payment for a good or service.

6. The theoretical perspective that views Ongka's desire to engage in gift exchange and hold a moka as a means for him to gain symbolic prestige and status in his community is called

cultural_ __economics__. [NOTE: some of you wrote "prestige economies." This is not correct because prestige economies is not a 'theoretical perspective' but an example of a type of economic system, as the textbook explains. Someone with a theoretical approach of cultural economics would be very interested in a prestige economy, of course, so if you wrote prestige economies, we gave .5 points)

10. Which of the following situations is most closely associated with the distinction medical anthropologists make between disease and illness?

d) Mike tells his primary care physician about a persistent pain in his chest, and after a few tests is sent home because none of the tests can confirm his account.

10. A contemporary environmental anthropologist would be most interested in conducting which kind of research project?

d) a study of conflict between nature conservation projects and indigenous communities concerned about their land rights and access to resources

11. All of the following are major contributions of cultural anthropology to knowledge except:

d) cultural diversity in the world is in decline

9. How would a "critical relativist" explain American Indian criticisms of cultural appropriation?

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

12. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis emphasizes which key anthropological concept?

d)relativism

Patrilineage:

descent through the fathers lineage

Matrilineage:

descent through the mothers lineage

7. People reshape their environments to fit their needs, and nature only sets the groundwork of possibilities for cultural expression; these are two of the strongest arguments against

environmental____ __determinism

Polygyny:

in which one man is married simultaneously to two or more women.

Polyandry:

in which woman has two or more husbands at one time

6. Three primary historical trends contributed to the creation of anthropology as a discipline, including colonialism,

industrialization, and evolutionary theory.

Rite of passage:

is a life cycle ritual that marks a person's transition from one social state to another.

Religion:

is a symbolic system that is socially enacted through rituals and other aspects of social life.

Scapularmancy (Siberia)

is the practice of divination by use of scapulae (shoulder blades). In the context of the oracle bones of ancient China, which chiefly utilized both scapulae and the plastrons of turtle

Medicalization:

process of viewing or treating as a medical concern conditions that we not previously understood as medical problems.

Gender/sex system:

refer to the ideas and social patterns a society uses to organize males, females, and those who do not fit either category.

Generalized Reciprocity:

refers to giving a gift without the expectation of a gift back

13. An anthropologist of globalization would study the soccer World Cup in terms of:

the role of the World Cup in the construction of transnational relationships and ideas about global culture

Kinship:

the social system that organizes people in families based on descent and marriage

Ethnography

the systematic study of people and cultures. It is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study. An ethnography is a means to represent graphically and in writing the culture of a group.

17. An environmental anthropologist studying the Siberian ritual of scapularmancy would emphasize how:

this custom might help people regulate hunting and resource use