Deck 15: Materiality: Constructing Social Relationships and Meanings With Things

Question 1

For anthropologists, materiality refers to

A) having the quality of being physical or material.
B) technologically simple objects.
C) only objects that are aesthetically pleasing.
D) American Indian objects.

Answer 1

A

Question 2

Museums were the ______ place where anthropologists studied objects and art.

A) First
B) Last
C) Most important
D) Least important

Answer 2

A

Question 3

Repatriation refers to:

A) the return of human remains and artifacts to the communities of descendants of the people to whom they originally belonged.
B) a prominent and early American Indian activist group.
C) programs that provide financial support to maintain sites of importance to humanity.
D) a practice in the Old World of preserving archaeological sites.

Answer 3

A

Question 4

UNESCO's World Heritage Sites program

A) assists with determining ownership of material culture.
B) provides financial support to maintain sites of importance to humanity.
C) was founded in 1968 by the American Indian Movement.
D) is of little importance to anthropologists.

Question 5

Which of the following groups is a prominent American Indian rights group founded in 1968?

A) NAGPRA
B) American Indian movement
C) World Heritage movement
D) Civil Rights movement

Question 6

On the north coast of Papua New Guinea, a religious cult leader name Barjani was remembered through which object?

A) His shoes
B) His hat
C) His staff
D) His cloak

Question 7

When objects begin to take on mystical powers and engender obsessive desire and worship it is called

A) magic.
B) an appreciation for aesthetics.
C) artistic sensibility.
D) commodity fetishism.

Question 8

Karl Marx discussed the changing nature of commodities in his book

A) Capital.
B) The German Ideology.
C) The Forest People.
D) The Encyclopedia of African Art

Question 9

Which term refers to the cultural perspectives and social processes that shape and are shaped by how goods and services are bought, sold, and used in contemporary capitalism?

A) Commodity fetishism
B) Alienation
C) Mass consumption
D) Art

Question 10

When people consume films cross-culturally, they

A) embed local concerns and interpretations into the storytelling.
B) usually cannot make sense of it on their own.
C) typically understand how the director wanted them to perceive the film.
D) are often offended by the stereotypes they see depicted on film.

Question 11

Alienation occurs when

A) a worker hand-crafts an object.
B) a worker makes only part of an object.
C) someone gives a gift.
D) someone destroys an object.

Question 12

A key way that objects are used to manipulate people comes through which of the following?

A) Commodity fetishism
B) Advertising
C) Stealing and various kinds of fraud
D) Austerity

Question 13

Advertisers have trained American consumers to focus on the newest and most exciting products through their

A) constant innovations and improvements.
B) attempts to constantly frame their products as new and improved.
C) removal and destruction of old stock to make way for new products.
D) disparaging remarks about celebrities.

Question 14

Repatriation is the act of returning human remains or cultural artifacts to the communities of descendants of the people to whom they originally belonged.

Question 15

Anthropologists have found that people imprint themselves and their pasts onto objects.

Question 16

The social life of things refers to the changing meanings and significance that objects take on over years, decades, and even centuries.

Question 17

The objects in a college student's dorm room have great personal meaning for the student but may mean something entirely different to everyone else in the dormitory.

Question 18

Thrones, staffs, shrines, and distinctive or ornamented objects are often used to display people's

A) beauty.
B) art.
C) power.
D) aesthetic criteria.

Question 19

Most African masks were

A) exact likenesses to the animal they were representing.
B) used as everyday objects.
C) symbolic.
D) well understood by European art historians.

Question 20

The earliest engagement anthropologists had with material culture happened where?

A) In the flea markets of Paris, where artists like Picasso bought African art objects that inspired many of their paintings
B) In the great palaces of Asia in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China
C) In the gift shops of the world's great art museums, which sold cheap examples of primitive art
D) In museums where objects from around the world were originally seen as evidence of how primitive or civilized different societies were

Question 21

For a society to have a separate occupational category of artist, it needs to have which of the following characteristics?

A) It must be creative and allow its youth to explore the world around them.
B) It must be small and isolated from contamination of ideas from outside.
C) It must have a considerable degree of social stratification and lots of different kinds of occupational categories.
D) Its people must be ethnocentric.

Question 22

To illustrate the dimensions that all objects possess, the textbook discusses a "shiny new bicycle." Why is this example useful to illustrate dimensionality?

A) Bicycles have been around for a while, but they are becoming an important commodity since Americans started producing them in factories again.
B) Actually, any object would do just as well, but most Americans are familiar with bicycles.
C) The latest iPhone would have been a better choice because it would emphasize the latest technology.
D) Bicycles are typically only available to the highest social classes in any society.

Question 23

Archaeologists find it easiest to study changing styles and fashions through which of the following classes of object?

A) Bones
B) Tools
C) Burials
D) Pottery

Question 24

People's fascination with having the newest Nike shoes or iPhone is an example of which of the following anthropological concepts?

A) Commodity fetishism
B) High aesthetic taste
C) A flair for style
D) Repatriation

Question 25

Which of the following is not one of the ways that objects change over time?

A) the form, shape, color, material, and use may change from generation to generation.
B) an object changes significance and meaning as its social and physical contexts change.
C) a single object changes significance and meaning as it changes hands.
D) an object always becomes less valuable and less significant as it ages and deteriorates over long periods of time.

Question 26

When workers make only part of an object rather than the whole product, they have less of a relationship with the fruits of their labor. Karl Marx suggested that this changed relationship with the objects they were producing created a feeling of

A) freedom.
B) joy over what they had made.
C) boredom with the process of production.
D) alienation.

Question 27

Most anthropologists see the consumption of an object or commodity as an antisocial act.

Question 28

Objects and visual images have many things in common because both can be used to construct meaning for people.

Question 29

If anthropologist Daniel Miller were studying the production of a commercial product like blue jeans, he would likely want to understand:

A) how blue jeans create images of social status and position within a community.
B) how blue jeans have become so commonplace that they no longer function to mark people's identity.
C) how blue jeans are no longer used as work pants as they originally were in the 1870s and 1880s.
D) how blue jeans became available in numerous colors.

Question 30

How does the example of Barjani's bowler hat illustrate that objects have "social lives"?

Question 31

If you wanted to study the influence and power of beer commercials on college students and other younger adults, who would you interview and why would you focus on this group of people?

Question 32

Consider any object belonging to your roommate or someone down the hall from your dorm room. Explain how this object has several dimensions and how these dimensions would help you understand your subject's outlook, goals, aspirations, and identity in the world.

Question 33

When Samsung and Apple ads run on TV and web pages they often present their own product as superior to the other. Most of the time we assume they are comparing their products for our benefit. But if viewed in another way, they are reinforcing a number of assumptions, perspectives, or interpretations that both companies share and that both firms want you as a consumer to accept without any thought. What might these shared assumptions, perspectives, and interpretations be; and how does each company convey this message?

Question 34

What difference has it made in the kinds of questions anthropologists ask about objects when the discipline stopped thinking of museum collections as being simply evidence of how simple societies interacted with their physical and social environment and began asking how did these particular objects come to be in the museum in the first place?

Question 35

What role do you think the anthropology of art, objects, and visual culture could play in how advertisers, manufacturers, and filmmakers design and present their products to the public?

Question 36

Why are objects and images powerful in shaping the way people think about themselves and their personal identities?