Exam 3: Method and Theory in Cultural Anthropology

The emic perspective focuses on local explanations of criteria and significance.

What advantages do you see in ethnographic research techniques? What are the advantages for survey techniques? Which one would you choose, and what would that choice depend on?

An anthropologist has just arrived at a new field site and feels overwhelmed with a creepy, profound feeling of alienation, of being without some of the most ordinary, trivial (and therefore basic) cues of his culture of origin. What term best describes what he is experiencing?

Reflecting today's world, in which people, images, and information move about as never before, fieldwork must be more flexible and on a larger scale. The result of such fieldwork is often an ethnography that

This chapter mentions the work of Wolf and Mintz, both students of Julian Steward, as illustrations of approaches that

The Human Terrain System seeks to embed anthropologists and other social scientists within military teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. Which of the following is NOT a reason that anthropologists and the AAA Executive Board object to the use of anthropologists in the military?

What is Project Minerva? What about the Human Terrain System? What concerns have these Pentagon programs raised among anthropologists? In your view, what role (if any) should academics play in national security?

Really good key cultural consultants will actually end up recording most of the data needed to write an ethnography.

In survey research, a sample should

What is the term for an expert on a particular aspect of native life?

What is the term used by John Durham Peters (1997) to describe how contemporary people simultaneously experience the local and the global?

Which of the following terms refers to the theoretical paradigm that holds that customs (social practices) function to preserve the social structure?

The research technique that uses diagrams and symbols to record kin connections is called

Given the realities of the contemporary world, anthropologists need to apply methods that protect their analyses from biases caused by external forces.

The characteristic field techniques of the ethnographer are participant observation, the genealogical method, and in-depth interviewing.

Ethnography is increasingly multi-timed and multi-sited, the result of a shift toward a recognition of the ongoing and inescapable flows of people, technology, images, and information that characterizes much of the world today.

Among the classic works of processual approaches to culture is Edmund Leach's Political Systems of Highland Burma. This study made a tremendously important point by taking a regional rather than a local perspective.

Much of the history of anthropology has been about the roles and relative prominence of culture and the individual.

Despite the variety of research techniques that the ethnographer may utilize in the field, in the best studies the hallmark of ethnography remains

What right do ethnographers have to represent a people or culture to which they don't belong? This question illustrates