Deck 17: Applying Anthropology 

Question 1

Which of the following was observed in the Bahia, Brazil, development project in which sailboat owners got loans to buy motors, as described in this chapter?

A) Ambitious young men increasingly sought wage labor.
B) Individual initiative was rewarded, and the fishing industry grew.
C) The fishing community became more egalitarian.
D) There was an increase in commercial sailboat ownership.
E) The price of power fishing vessels decreased.

Answer 1

Ambitious young men increasingly sought wage labor.

Question 2

One of the stated goals of public anthropology is to

A) restrict the publication of research papers to professional journals.
B) oppose policies that promote injustice.
C) promote anthropology as a career, especially to minorities.
D) refrain from discussion of social issues in the media.
E) encourage academic anthropologists to become applied anthropologists.

Answer 2

oppose policies that promote injustice.

Question 3

Which of the following does NOT illustrate the kinds of work that applied anthropologists do?

A) working for or with international development agencies, such as the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development
B) using the tools of medical anthropology to work as cultural interpreters in public health programs
C) borrowing from fields such as history and sociology to broaden the scope of theoretical anthropology
D) applying the tools of forensic anthropology to work with police, medical examiners, the courts, and international organizations to identify victims of crimes, accidents, wars, and terrorism
E) helping the Environmental Protection Agency address environmental problems

Answer 3

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

Question 4

The U.S. baby boom of the late 1940s and 1950s

A) fueled the general expansion of the U.S. educational system, including academic anthropology.
B) produced a new interest in ethnic diversity.
C) worked to shrink the world system.
D) brought anthropology into most high school curricula.
E) promoted renewed interest in applied anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s.

Question 5

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

A) anthropologists' work on the contrasts between urban and rural communities
B) anthropologists aiding colonial expansion by providing ethnographic information to colonists
C) anthropologists collaborating with nongovernmental organizations in the 1980s
D) anthropologists promoting the study of their field among university undergraduates
E) anthropologists practicing participant observation and taking photographs of ritualistic behavior

Question 6

Applied anthropology is

A) rarely possible, as anthropological studies are not practical in the "real world."
B) the term used for all anthropological research programs.
C) the use of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and methods to identify, assess, and solve contemporary problems.
D) not guided by anthropological theory.
E) the purely academic dimension of anthropology.

Question 7

What is the commonly stated goal for most development projects?

A) greater socioeconomic stratification
B) decreased local autonomy
C) ethnocide
D) increased equity
E) cultural assimilation

Question 8

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

A) cultural relativism
B) intervention philosophy
C) overinnovation
D) underdifferentiation
E) ethnobias

Question 9

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

A) high population density
B) social heterogeneity
C) geographic mobility
D) dispersed settlements
E) economic differentiation

Question 10

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

A) breaking down corporate descent groups, which are too independent and interfere with development.
B) the local government's ability to improve the lives of its citizens, when committed to doing so.
C) replacing subsistence farming with a viable cash crop.
D) replacing outdated traditional techniques of irrigation with more modern ones.
E) the top-down strategies developed by the UN.

Question 11

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

A) ethnic stereotyping.
B) indiscriminate assignment of nonnative English speakers to the same classrooms as children with "behavior problems."
C) sociolinguistic discrimination.
D) incorrect application of labels such as "learning impaired."
E) tolerance of ethnic diversity.

Question 12

Development projects should aim to accomplish all of the following EXCEPT

A) promoting change, but not overinnovation.
B) preserving local systems while working to make them better.
C) developing strategies with little input from the local communities.
D) drawing models of development from indigenous practices.
E) respecting local traditions.

Question 13

Development anthropology is the branch of applied anthropology that focuses on social issues in, and the cultural dimension of, which type of development?

A) ethical
B) theoretical
C) political
D) economic
E) scholastic

Question 14

People are usually willing to change just enough to maintain, or slightly improve on, what they already have. For this reason, development projects are most likely to succeed when they avoid the fallacy of

A) ethnobias.
B) overinnovation.
C) cultural relativism.
D) underdifferentiation.
E) intervention philosophy.

Question 15

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

A) They promote development.
B) They consult project managers.
C) They consult government officials and other experts.
D) They enter the affected communities and talk with people.
E) They gather government statistics.

Question 16

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?

A) The Puerto Rican students' education was being affected by their teachers' misconceptions.
B) The Puerto Rican subjects benefited from the English-as-a-foreign-language program.
C) The parents of Puerto Rican students did not value achievement.
D) Puerto Ricans do not benefit from bilingual education.
E) Puerto Rican students came from a background that placed less value on education than did that of White students.

Question 17

All of the following are proper roles for applied anthropologists EXCEPT

A) placing the cultural values of local people above all others' cultural values.
B) working with people to design culturally appropriate and socially sensitive change.
C) identifying the needs for change that local people perceive.
D) working as participant observers, taking part in the events they study in order to understand local thought and behavior.
E) protecting local people from harmful policies and projects that might threaten them.

Question 18

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

A) The project took into account the inevitability of native forms of social organization breaking down into nuclear family organization, impersonality, and alienation.
B) The elites and the lower class were of different origins and thus had no strong connections through kinship, descent, or marriage.
C) There is a clear fit between capitalist development schemes and corporate descent-group social organization.
D) The educated members of Malagasy society are those who have struggled to fend for themselves and therefore brought an innovative kind of independence to the project.
E) Malagasy leaders were of "the people" and were therefore prepared to follow the descent-group ethic of pooling resources for the good of the group as a whole.

Question 19

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

A) the Koreans and English
B) the Germans and Japanese
C) the Malagasy
D) the Brazilians and Indonesians
E) the Yanomami and Betsileo

Question 20

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

A) It is valuable insider's data that can be routinely sold to multinational corporations and state agencies without the consent of the people studied.
B) It produces a statistically unbiased summary of human responses to set stimuli.
C) It is among the most economical and time-efficient tools that exist in the social sciences.
D) 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 the people think about and react to such issues.
E) It can be produced without leaving the comfort of the anthropologist's office.

Question 21

During World War II, the U.S. government recruited anthropologists to study Japanese and German cultures. This chapter uses this example to illustrate the dangers of the old anthropology.

Question 22

What is a disease?

A) a consequence of a foraging lifestyle
B) a health problem as it is experienced by the one affected
C) a scientifically identified health threat
D) an unnatural state of health
E) an artificial product of biomedicine

Question 23

What is an illness?

A) a scientifically described health threat
B) a nonexistent ailment (only diseases are real)
C) a purely linguistic problem
D) an artificial product of biomedicine
E) a condition of poor health perceived by an individual

Question 24

Academic and applied anthropology have a symbiotic relationship, as theory aids practice and application fuels theory.

Question 25

Fortunately for applied anthropologists eager to do effective international work, all governments are by their nature genuinely and realistically committed to improving the lives of their citizens.

Question 26

Ethnography is one of applied anthropology's most valuable research tools, because it provides a firsthand account of the lives of ordinary people.

Question 27

Development anthropology is the branch of applied anthropology that focuses on social issues in, and the cultural dimension of, moral development.

Question 28

Which of the following statements about medical anthropology is true?

A) It is the field that proved that people from rural areas suffer only from illnesses and not diseases.
B) This field applies Western medicine to solving health problems around the world.
C) This growing field considers the biocultural context and implications of disease and illness.
D) Typically in cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, this field does market research on the use of health products around the world.
E) It applies non-Western health knowledge to a troubled industrialized medical system.

Question 29

Ethnographic study of the workplace

A) provides close observation of workers and managers in their natural setting.
B) is required of all organizations that want to become not-for-profit, according to the American Anthropological Association.
C) is routinely performed by employees of the U.S. federal government.
D) is not very useful, because all workplaces are becoming increasingly homogeneous, compared to 20 years ago.
E) provides evidence that economic factors are fundamental to understanding differential productivity.

Question 30

Sociolinguists and cultural anthropologists studying Puerto Rican communities in the Midwestern United States found that Puerto Rican parents valued education more than non-Hispanics did.

Question 31

Efforts to demonstrate the public policy relevance of anthropology are known as

A) development anthropology.
B) underdifferentiation.
C) ethnography.
D) public anthropology.
E) cultural resource management.

Question 32

During the 1950s and 1960s, most American anthropologists were college professors.

Question 33

The best strategy for change is to base the social design for innovation on locally based demand.

Question 34

The Bahia, Brazil, development project in which loans were given to fishing-boat owners is an example of how some development projects can actually widen wealth disparities instead of increasing equity.

Question 35

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

A) ritualistic
B) personalistic
C) scientific
D) exotic
E) naturalistic

Question 36

When nations become more tied to the world economy, indigenous forms of social organization inevitably break down into nuclear family organization, impersonality, and alienation.

Question 37

Urban anthropologists research topics such as immigration, ethnicity, poverty, and class.

Question 38

Which of the following best describes scientific medicine?

A) a health care system that relies on advances in technology
B) a tendency to overprescribe drugs and surgeries
C) the practice of medicine in particular Western nations
D) the availability of free or low-cost health care for all
E) the beliefs, customs, and specialists concerned with curing illness

Question 39

A commonly stated goal of recent development policy is to promote equity; that is, to reduce poverty and promote a more even distribution of wealth.

Question 40

Anthropology has three dimensions: academic, applied, and a mix of the two.

Question 41

Scientific medicine is not the same thing as Western medicine.

Question 42

A bachelor's degree in anthropology is of little value in the corporate world.

Question 43

Non-Western medicine does not maintain a sharp distinction between biological and psychological illnesses.

Question 44

Biomedicine, which aims to link an illness to scientifically demonstrated agents that bear no personal malice toward their victims, is an example of naturalistic medicine.

Question 45

Strictly speaking, medical anthropology is an applied field within anthropology.

Question 46

Health care systems refers only to the nationalized health care services that exist in core industrial nations.

Question 47

An illness is a scientifically identified health threat caused by a bacterium, virus, fungus, parasite, or other pathogen.

Question 48

Non-Western medicine recognizes that poor health has intertwined physical, emotional, and social causes.