Deck 1: Culture

Question 1

Which one of the rituals or ceremonies below is not used to mark a passage to a new status or stage of life?

A) high school graduation ceremony
B) birthday party
C) wedding
D) rally preceding a basketball game
E) induction into the Marines

Answer 1

rally preceding a basketball game

Question 2

The coexistence of churches and religious beliefs in all societies where scientific knowledge is advanced suggests that Tylor was wrong in proposing that religion declines as science provides better answers.

Answer 2

True

Question 3

Contrast ritual behavior with ordinary behavior. Give examples of religious and secular rituals. What are the main differences between such kinds of ritual?

Answer 3

Answers will vary

Question 4

Is religion becoming more or less important in contemporary American society? Why? If you believe that religion is becoming less important, what is replacing it?

Question 5

What is a rite of passage? What three phases ordinarily constitute a rite of passage? Provide at least two different examples to illustrate your answer.

Question 6

Discuss two cases in which religion played an important role in social change.

Question 7

Discuss three ways religion may act as a form of social control. How do leaders mobilize communities and gain support for their policies? Consider the connections between religion and politics in states, both ancient and modern.

Question 8

Which of the following explanations of circumstances that shaped acceptance or rejection of the idea of women working outside the home is not true?

A) After 1900, as the rise of machine tools and mass production reduced the need for female labor, the notion that women were biologically unfit for factor work gained ground.
B) Wartime shortages of men promoted the idea that women could and should work outside the home.
C) Rising prices and a spreading culture of consumption spur female employment, since families find having multiple paychecks helpful.
D) The rapid business expansion that came after World War II increased the demand for workers that was satisfied by soldiers returning home after the war, resulting in women being sent back to work in the home.
E) Economic change paved the way for the contemporary women's movement, which helped expand work opportunities for women.

Question 9

Which of the following statements is not consistent with the discussion of the cultural shaping of sexual potential and orientation presented in the text?

A) Traditionally, young Sudanese Azande males had sex with older men; as young warriors they had sex with younger men; after marriage, they switched to having sex with women.
B) Because heterosexual coitus is practiced in all human societies, our biological primate heritage is . clearly more important than culture in shaping sexual orientation.
C) Cross-cultural studies show a wide variation in attitudes about homosexuality.
D) In the United States, attitudes about sex and sexual orientation have differed over time and with . socioeconomic status, region, and rural versus urban residence.
E) Among the Etoro, heterosexual sex was discouraged except for reproduction, whereas sex acts between men were viewed as essential.

Question 10

What have recent cross-cultural studies of gender roles demonstrated?

A) The gender roles of men and women are largely determined by their biological capabilities- relative strength, endurance, intelligence, etc.
B) Women are subservient to men in nearly all societies because their subsistence activities contribute much less to the total diet than do those of men.
C) The relative status of women is variable, depending on factors such as subsistence strategy, the importance of warfare, and the prevalence of a domestic-public dichotomy.
D) Foraging, horticultural, pastoral, and industrial societies all have similar attitudes regarding gender roles.
E) Changes in the gender roles of men and women are usually associated with social decay and anarchy.

Question 11

The feminization of poverty-the increasing representation of women and their children among America's poorest people-has occurred alongside gains that other American women have made in the economy.

Question 12

Compare two of the following in terms of gender roles and stratification: (a) foraging societies, (b) matrilineal-matrilocal societies, (c) patrilineal-patrilocal societies, (d) agricultural societies, and (e) industrial societies.

Question 13

What is the domestic-public dichotomy? In what kinds of societies is it more pronounced? Less pronounced (or even nonexistent)? How is it related to gender stratification?

Question 14

Are certain sexual preferences more natural than others? Use cross-cultural evidence to substantiate your argument.

Question 15

What is a matriarchy? Have anthropologists ever encountered one? If so, describe it; if not, describe the closest approximation. How does it compare to a patriarchy?

Question 16

What effects did the advent of food production have on the roles and status of women?

Question 17

What social, political, and economic conditions influence gender stratification and violence against women?

Question 18

How has industrialism affected gender roles and stratification? How and why is poverty becoming feminized?

Question 19

What particular aspect of life in industrial nations makes the nuclear family practical?

A) The emphasis on relations with kin outside the nuclear family serves to link the otherwise isolated nuclear family with kin that may be economically helpful.
B) Family isolation arising from geographic mobility and living where jobs are available means that most middle-class couples, much like foraging people, establish households and families of their own.
C) A strong form of individualism has arisen in middle class American culture that conflicts with life in larger family groups.
D) When some poor people escape the poverty often associated with industrial societies, they no longer feel obligated to provide financial aid to the circle of less fortunate relatives, breaking off relations with their family and starting their own household.
E) Neolocality is the traditional form of residence in most societies, established long before societies became industrial and persisting long after.

Question 20

What does each of these marriage practices-arranged marriage, lobola, sororate and levirate-best illustrate about marriage?

A) The central role played by romantic love in marriage and family life
B) The widespread focus across cultures on rules of endogamy
C) The importance of marriage as an alliance between groups
D) The need to establish a partnership for the benefit of the children
E) The social construction of kinship

Question 21

Which of the following would not be an example of a benefit of plural marriage from the point of view of certain parties involved?

A) A second wife may be of help to the first wife with regard to household chores.
B) A prominent man who travels throughout a region may value having wives in different provinces for their service as his local agents in provincial matters.
C) A man, such as the king of Buganda, who takes wives from different kin groups of his nation creates in-laws throughout his kingdom, giving all the groups a chance to provide the next ruler and thus a stake in the government.
D) Men have multiple wives as a way of cultivating marital alliances that serve these men's aims.
E) Having many husbands may be a way for a woman to seek prestige.

Question 22

A lobola gift to the bride's family makes children born to the woman become full members of her husband's descent group.

Question 23

Discuss ways in which kinship and descent help human populations adapt to their environments.

Question 24

Discuss the major similarities and differences between nuclear families, extended families, and descent groups (e.g., lineages and clans).

Question 25

Does the practice of lobola necessarily imply gender inequality? What is the function of lobola, what type of society does it typically occur in, and how does it affect marriage and divorce? How does a dowry differ?

Question 26

Compare endogamy and exogamy. How absolute is the distinction between the two? Use examples to illustrate your argument.

Question 27

Why does lobola stabilize marriages?

Question 28

In what ways has industrialism affected North American family organization?

Question 29

What are some of the general patterns found in the family organization of foragers?

Question 30

What are the six things that Leach argued marriage can accomplish?

Question 31

How does marriage function as a kind of group alliance? What role do lobola and dowries play in creating and maintaining marriage alliances?

Question 32

How does divorce vary cross-culturally? What factors affect the ease (or difficulty) and frequency of divorce?

Question 33

What has changed for foraging bands in contemporary times?

A) Foraging bands today have evolved new kinds of stone tools.
B) Modern foragers live in nation-states and are increasingly linked to the larger world.
C) Foragers today increasingly evade the domination of the governments whose territories they live on.
D) Although the large majority of foraging societies retain their traditional mobile hunting-gathering . lifestyle, a few have adopted sedentary ways.
E) All foraging bands today have adopted agriculture.

Question 34

Which of the following is not a characteristic of food production that distinguishes it from foraging?

A) Food production involves a gender division of labor.
B) Food production leads to larger, denser populations and more complex economies.
C) Food production leads to increasing demands for maintaining order.
D) Food production may lead ultimately to more complex political systems.
E) Agriculture or agriculture and industrialism may be the predominant economic types of a state.

Question 35

Which of the following would not be an example of a sodality that members or your family or of groups that span several families or communities might belong to?

A) a men's or women's club
B) a college sorority or fraternity
C) a group of people constituting a high school class
D) a clan of people who say that they descend from a common ancestor
E) a labor union

Question 36

Why does a big man accumulate wealth?

A) Big men are chiefs who are trying to make their achieved status more permanent by engaging in conspicuous symbolic displays of wealth.
B)The term big man refers to the liminal state that a Kapauku youth enters before marriage, during which he accumulates wealth in order to fund the wedding and pay the brideprice.
C) Big men typically are war leaders and as such they must maintain a supply of "grievance gifts" to compensate the families of warriors who die under their command.
D) To become a big man, an individual must wear a tonowi shell necklace, which is imported from the coast and is therefore quite expensive by Kapauku standards.
E) Big men do not keep the wealth they accumulate but rather redistribute it to create and maintain alliances with political supporters.

Question 37

What are the major implications of food production? How does reliance on food production affect the social, economic, and political organization of societies?

Question 38

In nonstate societies, relationships based on kinship, descent, and marriage are essential to sociopolitical organization. Discuss two ethnographic cases that illustrate this point.

Question 39

What are some of the ways in which social order is maintained in band and tribal societies?

Question 40

Contrast two of the following: (a) band leaders, (b) village heads, (c) big men, (d) chiefs. How do these political figures attain-and keep-their leadership positions? To what extent can they enforce their decisions? How permanent are their political roles?

Question 41

What factors are responsible for the variable development of political regulation and authority structures among pastoralists?

Question 42

To what extent can modern foragers serve as the basis for reconstructions of social, political, and economic organization among ancient hunter-gatherer bands? Justify your answer.

Question 43

How do anthropologists distinguish between a chiefdom and a state? Is this a useful distinction? Is it always easy to make such a distinction?

Question 44

What are the three dimensions of social stratification as defined by Weber? What is the basis of each dimension? How does stratification differ from status systems in nonstate societies?

Question 45

Which one of the following reasons for the conflict in Darfur, Sudan, is most clearly related to issues of making a living as discussed in Chapter 6?

A) The military government's attempt to change the country into an Islamic nation.
B) The attempt to force the Arabic language on people who do not speak that language.
C) The tensions between Arab people and the black African population, who define themselves as . religiously, linguistically, and culturally different.
D) Rivalry between agriculturalists and pastoralist groups due to drought-related land and water scarcity.
E) Pastoral peoples such as the Arabs do not easily tolerate black African people.
Gezon - Chapter 05 1

Question 46

Which of the following was not true of the Botswana government's relocation of the foraging Basarwa San from their ancestral territory?

A) The Botswana High Court ruled that the San had been wrongly evicted.
B) The High Court's verdict was hailed as a victory for indigenous peoples around the world.
C) The attorney general recognized the court order to allow the San to return to their ancestral lands but imposed conditions that made returning difficult.
D) According to critics, the relocation turned a society of free hunter-gatherers into communities dependent on food aid and government handouts.
E) The government left the main well open for San use, allowing the free use of water that is otherwise . a major obstacle to survival in the Kalahari Desert.

Question 47

Which of the following actions or situations that one might see in America most nearly resembles the competitive feasting called potlatch, which converts wealth into prestige?

A) Acts of rivalry between high school sports teams, such as wearing sweatshirts displaying words that tout one's own side.
B) The highly publicized donation of a large sum of money from members of an affluent group of Hollywood celebrities to a city or country with a run of bad luck that willingly accepts the gift.
C) A businessman's ownership of three luxury automobiles, which mostly stay in his garage.
D) The grant from an estate of a deceased wealthy family of the family's book collection to a public library.
E) A large birthday party where guests are allowed to indulge in a variety of rich foods.

Question 48

Discuss the major differences between industrial and nonindustrial modes of production.

Question 49

Anthropologists often say that nonindustrial economies are embedded in society. What is meant by this?

Question 50

How does economic specialization in industrial nations differ from specialization in nonindustrial societies?

Question 51

Do people in all societies maximize? What do they maximize? Do anthropologists believe that maximization is a cultural universal? What do you think? Explain your answer.

Question 52

Are reciprocity, redistribution, and the market principle mutually exclusive in any given society? Give examples, including contemporary North America in your answer.

Question 53

How is a rent fund different from a subsistence fund? Cite examples to illustrate your argument.

Question 54

Contrast generalized, balanced, and negative reciprocity. How does negative reciprocity differ from the market principle?

Question 55

Is the contrast between horticulture and agriculture one of degree or of kind? Cite ethnographic evidence to support your answer.

Question 56

What is an adaptive strategy? Identify the five adaptive strategies in Cohen's typology of societies. Discuss how Cohen links economy and social features.

Question 57

Of the 841 languages once spoken on the island of Papua New Guinea, many are now endangered and some have no living speakers. This is most consistent with which of the following?

A) Papua New Guinea has the largest diversity of spoken languages of any region in the world.
B) The number of languages spoken in the world is increasing rapidly.
C) Nothing can be done to preserve linguistic diversity.
D) All people should study English in order to facilitate cross-cultural communication.
E) The world's linguistic diversity has been cut in half over the past 500 years.

Question 58

What term did anthropologist Edward T. Hall coin to refer to the study of spatial relations between people?

A) Displacement
B) Proxemics
C) Kinesics
D) Semantics
E) Sociolinguistics

Question 59

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh reported that Kanzi, an 8-year-old bonobo, a great ape similar to a chimpanzee but genetically and behaviorally closer to humans, learned to use symbols to communicate with a grammatical complexity similar to that of

A) a 12-year-old gorilla.
B) a 20-year-old chimpanzee.
C) a 2-year-old child.
D) a 5-year-old child.
E) human beings around the time that speech first took hold roughly 150,000 years ago.

Question 60

What are the three key characteristics of human language? Discuss whether call systems and ASL-using nonhuman primates display these characteristics.

Question 61

What are the key structures of language? Why is it important to know and understand these features?

Question 62

How are socioeconomic, ethnic, and gender differences reflected in language? Give specific examples.

Question 63

What is BEV? How does it compare to SE?

Question 64

What do historical linguists study? How is historical linguistics relevant to anthropology?

Question 65

Because anthropologists who write reflexive ethnography have recognized that not even anthropologists can be completely objective, they have made a call to authors to:

A) write their ethnography like a novel that communicates information directly from the anthropologist to the reader.
B) stay in the field for longer times to seek to provide more objective information.
C) reflect on their own biases and perspectives.
D) keep the ethnography as inclusive and holistic as possible.
E) avoid questioning traditional methods of writing ethnography.

Question 66

Use of a signed form stating that a member of the community being studied consents to participate in the research follows from the ethical requirement that

A) ethnographers acquire consent in seeking the cooperation of scholars of the host country who have already studied the community being researched.
B) the researcher provide the American Anthropological Association with a consent document in case it needs to investigate allegations of the researcher's misconduct.
C) doing ethnography with some form of consent allows the researcher greater freedom in intruding on the relations that exist within the community.
D) the research not harm the people being studied.
E) the ethnographer never takes a stand on issues related to the community

Question 67

If a native informant told an ethnographer that his or her community practiced certain rituals in order to prevent illnesses caused by spirits or ancestors, the informant would be providing an etic explanation.

Question 68

What are the ethical obligations of anthropologists working in foreign countries?

Question 69

Describe the different styles of ethnography that have occurred through time.

Question 70

Discuss how the mass media and globalization affect anthropological research.

Question 71

What are the differences between questionnaires and interview schedules? What advantage might an ethnographer gain by using an interview schedule instead of a questionnaire?

Question 72

Explain participant observation, and contrast it with other research techniques.

Question 73

What is the genealogical method? Why is it important for anthropologists to gather genealogical data?

Question 74

What is the difference between emic and etic perspectives? Why might an anthropologist want to use both strategies when conducting ethnographic fieldwork?

Question 75

What kind of diffusion took place when white Americans took Native American children from their families and placed them in boarding schools where they were not allowed to speak their own language or wear local clothing and adornments?

A) Forced diffusion
B) Direct diffusion
C) Indirect diffusion
D) Enculturated diffusion
E) Bilateral diffusion

Question 76

Although whole populations have been discriminated against because other people viewed them as intellectually and culturally inferior, anthropologists recognize that all human populations have equivalent capacities for culture. This equivalence is known by which of these terms?

A) the psychic unity of humanity
B) enculturation
C) cultural relativity
D) cultural rights
E) a universal

Question 77

When variations on the American flag carry different messages, anthropologists speak of the phenomenon as agency.

Question 78

To what extent is tool use unique to humans? Illustrate your answer with examples from studies of nonhuman animals, including other primates.

Question 79

What do studies of wild chimpanzees indicate about the nature of chimpanzee hunting behavior? What are some of the possible implications of this behavior for our understanding of early hominin social organization?

Question 80

Describe the biological features that humans share with primates and how they provide a biological basis for cultural attributes. How is human culture similar to and different from aspects of primate life?