Anthro Midterm 1

What is anthropology?

The exploration of human diversity in time and space

A holistic and comparative perspective ....

most characterizes anthropology among the disciplines that study humans

Human abilities to learn, to think symbolically, to use language, and to employ tools and other products in organizing our lives and adapting to our environments

rest on certain features of human biology that make culture, which is not itself biological, possible.

Which is not true about culture

Culture is passed on genetically to future generations.

What is the process by which children learn a particular cultural tradition?

Enculturation

This chapter's description of how humans cope with low oxygen pressure in high altitudes illustrates ...

human capacities for cultural and biological adaptation, the latter involving both genetic and physiological adaptations.

The presence of more efficient respiratory systems to extract oxygen from the air among human populations living at high elevations is an example of which form of adaptation?

Genetic adaptation

Over time, humans have become increasingly dependent on which of the following to cope with the range of environments they have occupied in time and space?

Cultural means of adaptation

Today's global economy and communications link all contemporary people, directly or indirectly, in the modern world system. People must now cope with forces generated by progressively larger systems�the region, nation, and world. For anthropologists study

According to Marcus and Fisher (1986), "The cultures of world peoples need to be constantly rediscovered as these people reinvent them in changing historical circumstances.

In general, Americans tend to maintain a greater physical distance from others they interact with on a day-to-day basis, especially when compared to Brazilians or Italians, who need less personal space. However, the story of American students' attitudes t

any nation usually contains diverse and even conflicting cultural values, and these cultural values are not static

What are the four subfields of anthropology?

Biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology

Anthropologists' early interest in Native Americans

is an important historical reason for the development of U.S. four-field anthropology.

How are the four subfields of U.S. anthropology unified?

Each subfield studies human variation through time and space.

What is one of the most fundamental key assumptions that anthropologists share?

A comparative, cross-cultural approach is essential to study the human condition.

Cultural anthropologists carry out their fieldwork

in all kinds of societies.

Which of the following perspectives emphasizes that cultural forces constantly mold human biology? The

biocultural perspective

Ethnography is

the fieldwork aspect of cultural anthropology.

Based on his observations that contact between neighboring tribes had existed since humanity's beginnings and covered enormous areas, Franz Boas argued

against treating cultures as isolated phenomena.

What component of cultural anthropology is comparative and focused on building upon our understanding of how cultural systems work?

Ethnology

Archaeologists studying sunken ships off the coast of Florida or analyzing the content of modern garbage are examples that

archaeologists study the culture of historical and even living peoples.

Linguistic anthropology

includes sociolinguistics, descriptive linguistics, and the study of the biological basis for speech.

Kottak defines anthropology as a science yet suggests that it is among the most humanistic of all academic fields. This is because

of its fundamental concern and respect for human diversity.

Bronislaw Malinowski, an early contributor to the cross-cultural study of human psychology, is famous for his fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders of the South Pacific. Although some of his specific findings have been questioned by more recent scholars

individual psychology is molded in a specific cultural context.

According to Kottak, anthropology may improve psychological studies of human behavior by contributing

a cross-cultural perspective on models of human psychology

The American Anthropological Association has formally acknowledged a public service role by recognizing that anthropology has two dimensions:

Academic anthropology and practicing, or applied, anthropology.

Applied anthropology

encompasses any use of the knowledge and/or techniques of its four subfields to identify, assess, and solve practical problems.

Which of the following statements about theories is not true?

Theories apply only to linguistic and biological phenomena.

In science, what is the relationship among explanations, associations, and theories?

An explanation must show how and why the thing to be understood is associated with or related to something else. Associations require covariation: when one thing (a variable) changes, the other one varies as well. Theories provide explanations for associa

The study "Television's Behavioral Effects in Brazil" illustrates all of the following except

how investigators must carefully choose between a qualitative or quantitative data model.

Culture

is acquired by humans as members of society through the process of enculturation.

Which of the following statements about enculturation is not true? Enculturation

is the exchange of cultural features that results when two or more groups come into consistent firsthand contact.

Anthropologists agree that cultural learning is uniquely elaborated among humans and that all humans have culture. They also accept a doctrine designated in the 19th century as the "psychic unity of man." What does this doctrine mean?

Although individuals differ in their emotional and intellectual capacities, all human populations have equivalent capacities for culture.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined culture as ideas based on cultural learning and symbols. For anthropologist Leslie White, culture originated when our ancestors acquired the ability to use symbols. What is a symbol? It is

something verbal or nonverbal, within a particular language or culture, that comes to stand for something else.

What is the term for a sign that has no necessary or natural connection to the thing for which it stands?

Symbol

What do anthropologists mean when they say culture is shared?

Culture is an attribute of individuals as members of groups.

People in the United States sometimes have trouble understanding the power of culture because of the value that American culture places on the idea of the individual. Yet in American culture

individualism is a distinctive shared value, a feature of culture

People have to eat, but culture teaches us what, when, and how to do so. This is an example of how

culture takes the natural biological urges we share with other animals and teaches us how to express them in particular ways.

Since the 1970s, many anthropologists have done research among the Ariaal, a nomadic community of northern Kenya. Just as anthropologists have studied many aspects of this community's culture, the Ariaal have formed opinions based on observation of their

slather white liquid on their very white skin to protect them from the sun, and often favor short pants that show off their legs and boots.

Culture can be adaptive or maladaptive. It is maladaptive when

cultural traits, patterns, and inventions threaten the group's continued survival and reproduction and thus its very existence.

The human capacity for culture has an evolutionary basis that extends back at least 2.5 million years. This date corresponds to

early toolmakers whose products survive in the archaeological record.

Why does this chapter on culture include a section that describes similarities and differences between humans and apes, our closest relatives?

To emphasize culture's evolutionary basis

Many human traits reflect the fact that our primate ancestors lived in trees. These traits include all of the following except

echolocation made possible by overlapping visual fields.

The incest taboo is a cultural universal, but

the definition of what constitutes incest varies widely across cultures

What are exogamy and the incest taboo examples of?

Cultural universals

Which of the following is a cultural generality?

The nuclear family

Which of the following least explains the existence of cultural generalities?

The arbitrariness of the sign

What are cultural particulars?

Traits unique to a given culture, not shared with others

All of the following are evidence of the tendency to view culture as a process except

analysis that attempts to establish boundaries between cultures.

What process is most responsible for the existence of international culture?

Cultural borrowing or diffusion, whether direct, indirect, or by force

Which statement about subcultures is not true? Subcultures

are mutually exclusive; individuals may not participate in more than one subculture.

Which of the following statements about culture is not true?

It is transmitted genetically.

The Makah, a tribe that lives near the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the Olympic Peninsula, see themselves as whalers and continue to identify themselves spiritually with whales. Their ongoing struggle to maintain their traditional way of life, w

contemporary indigenous groups have to grapple with multiple levels of culture, contestation, and political regulation.

The tendency to view one's own culture as superior and to use one's own standards and values in judging others is called

ethnocentrism.

In anthropology, cultural relativism is not a moral position but a methodological one. It states that

in order to understand another culture fully, we must try to understand how the people in that culture see things.

How are cultural rights different from human rights?

Cultural rights are vested in groups, not in individuals.

Human rights are seen as inalienable. This means that

nations cannot abridge or terminate them.

Although rap music originated in the United States, it is now popular all over the world. Which of the following mechanisms of cultural change is responsible for this?

Diffusion

What is the term for the kind of cultural change that results when two or more cultures have consistent firsthand contact?

Acculturation

Which of the following is an example of independent invention, the process by which people in different societies have innovated and changed in similar but independent ways? The invention of

agriculture

What term is synonymous with applied anthropologists?

Practicing anthropologists

All of the following illustrates the kinds of work that applied anthropologists do except

borrowing from fields such as history and sociology to broaden the scope of theoretical anthropology.

Why is ethnography one of the most valuable and distinctive tools of the applied anthropologist? It

provides a firsthand account of the day-to-day issues and challenges that the members of a given community face, as well as a sense of how those people think about and react to these issues.

Which of the following is a distinguishing characteristic of the work that applied anthropologists do? They

enter the affected communities and talk with people.

Which of the following illustrates some of the dangers of the old applied anthropology?

anthropologists aiding colonial expansion by providing ethnographic information to colonists

Who was studied at a distance during the 1940s in an attempt to predict the behavior of the political enemies of the United States?

the Germans and Japanese

What is the postwar baby boom of the late 1940s and 1950s responsible for? It

fueled the general expansion of the U.S. educational system, including academic anthropology.

As an aid to applied anthropology, anthropological theory

promotes a systemic perspective that aids the successful implementation of development projects.

All of the following are proper roles for applied anthropologists except

placing the cultural values of the local people above everybody else's cultural values.

This chapter's "Appreciating Anthropology" account describes how applied anthropologists can help communities preserve their culture in the face of threat or disaster, such as Hurricane Katrina. For example, after the hurricane, anthropologist Shannon Daw

the government should treat the votive artifacts of the cemetery not as debris but as the religious artifacts they are, making some effort to restore the damaged site, find the objects, and at least record where they came from.

What is the commonly stated goal for most development projects?

Increased equity

In a comparative study of 68 development projects, Kottak determined that

culturally compatible development projects were twice as successful as incompatible ones.

Which of the following is not a valid criticism of many economic development projects?

Project planners have no real interest in helping communities.

What term refers to the tendency to view less developed countries as more alike than they are?

Underdifferentiation

Development projects should aim to accomplish all of the following except

developing strategies with little input from the local communities.

Which of the following is a reason that the Madagascar project to increase rice production was successful?

Malagasy leaders were of the peasantry and were therefore prepared to follow the descent-group ethic of pooling resources for the good of the group as a whole.

The Malagasy development program described in this chapter illustrates the importance of

the local government's ability to improve the lives of its citizens, when committed to doing so.

In an example of applied anthropology's contribution to improving education, this chapter describes a study of Puerto Rican seventh graders in a Midwestern U.S. urban school (Hill-Burnett, 1978). What did anthropologists discover in this study?

The Puerto Rican students' education was being affected by their teachers' misconceptions.

Anthropology may aid in the progress of education by helping educators avoid all of the following except

tolerance of ethnic diversity

Robert Redfield's research recognized that a city is a social context that is very different from a tribal or peasant village. What did he study? Differences between

urban and rural communities

What did Robert Redfield argue about the relations between urban and rural communities?

Cities are centers from which cultural innovations are spread to rural and tribal areas.

Which of the following is not a feature of urban life?

Dispersed settlements

Which of the following best illustrates urban applied anthropologists' ability to help social groups deal with urban institutions?

Vigil's study of gang violence in the context of large-scale immigrant adaptation to U.S. cities

Which of the following is true about medical anthropology?

This growing field considers the biocultural context and implications of disease and illness.

What is a disease?

A scientifically identified health threat

What is an illness?

A health problem as it is experienced by the one affected

Shamans and other magico-religious specialists are effective curers with regard to what kind of disease theory?

Personalistic

What is microenculturation?

the process whereby particular roles are learned within a limited social system (for example, a business)

An ethnographic study of the workplace

provides a close observation of workers and managers in their natural setting.

This chapter's "Appreciating Diversity" account describes how McDonalds was able to succeed in the Brazilian market once it adapted to preexisting Brazilian cultural patterns. This example illustrates

how the axiom of applied anthropology that innovation succeeds best when it is culturally appropriate applies not just to development projects but also businesses, such as fast food.