Exam 11: Class and Inequality

Street vendors in Bolivia are very common but technically illegal. They often remain in poverty, despite working hard to sell their wares. What does anthropologist Daniel Goldstein suggest as a cause of their continued poverty?

When the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest perform a potlatch, there may be times when the excess gifts are actually destroyed rather than given away. Why is this done?

Which society is based on the sharing of resources to ensure group success and has relatively low hierarchy and violence?

Egalitarian societies depend on sharing which of the following in order to ensure group success?

According to Karl Marx, the bourgeoisie consisted of a capitalist class of individuals who owned what part of society?

What common result occurs when patterns of social stratification emerge?

In some societies, the social rank of each member is determined by who his or her parents are. What can we probably say about this society?

Countries such as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are among those that have offered increasingly generous social benefits to their populations. What is the most likely result of this kind of action by the state?

Which of the following consists of wages earned from work, plus dividends and interest on investments along with rents and royalties?

Stratification exists in every culture that anthropology has studied, but systems of stratification such as class are not considered intrinsic to human culture. These seemingly contradictory ideas might be resolved through archaeological evidence. What aspect of human social behavior lends itself to a nonstratified society, according to archaeological findings?

As India grows economically, we can observe a shift from a hierarchy of caste to a hierarchy of class. This is due to what change in the caste system itself?

Aside from access to financial resources, what most influences an individual's life chances?

Anthropologist Gregory Mantsios contends that the media play a significant role in hiding class stratification in the United States. What do his findings reveal about media focus?

According to the United Nations, what is the global distribution of wealth and income?

The caste system of India has been analyzed for a long time by anthropologists. It is also mythologized in cultures other than India as a system of oppression dating back thousands of years. This is not, as we have seen, the entire story. What is a caste system? Why does it exist in the first place? How did the colonial power of Britain affect the caste system? What is changing about the caste system today? Give examples from the text for the ways in which this system is changing and what it seems to be changing into.

What is true about systems of class and inequality?

Which of these usually results from the unequal distribution of a society's resources within a class system?

A chief in a ranked society performs an act of gift giving that shares accumulated wealth while also enhancing the chief's prestige. What do anthropologists call this process?

The increasing concentration of wealth into the hands of a smaller number of persons, in part due to globalization, is part of which accelerating process?

Studies of caste in India reveal what important fact about this particular social structure?