Question 1

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

Accepted Answer

A) True 
 B)False

Question 2

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?

Accepted Answer

The answer of What advantages do you see in ethnographic...

Question 3

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?

Accepted Answer

A)  culture shock 
B)  diachrony 
C)  synchrony 
D)  configurationalism 
E)  agency paralysis

Question 4

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

Accepted Answer

A)  challenges anthropologists concerned with salvaging isolated and untouched cultures around the world. 
B)  becomes less useful and valuable to understanding culture. 
C)  is increasingly multi-sited and multi-timed, integrating analyses of external organizations and forces to understand local phenomena. 
D)  is more traditional, given anthropologists' concerns of defending the field's roots. 
E)  requires that researchers stay in the same site for more than three years.

Question 5

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

Accepted Answer

A)  put human agency at the center of cultural analysis. 
B)  focus on the study of cultures as closed systems, untouched by regional and even global dynamics. 
C)  ignore the role of history in shaping culture as we know it. 
D)  consider the relevance of world-system theory and political economy to anthropology. 
E)  are just as deterministic as the old evolutionary models, but for different reasons.

Question 6

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?

Accepted Answer

A)  Anthropologists in war zones have an ethical dilemma where their responsibilities to their military units may conflict to their obligations to the local people they study. 
B)  It is difficult to give informed consent in an active war zone without feeling coerced, thereby compromising "voluntary informed consent" in the AAA Code of Ethics. 
C)  Anthropologists may not be able to identify themselves as anthropologists, distinct from military personnel. 
D)  Anthropologists, by the nature of their discipline, are not permitted to interact with any military personnel. 
E)  The Human Terrain System conflicts with the ethical responsibility of anthropologists to disclose who they are.

Question 7

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?

Accepted Answer

The answer of What is Project Minerva? What about the...

Question 8

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

Accepted Answer

A) True 
 B)False

Question 9

In survey research, a sample should

Accepted Answer

A)  include the entire population in question. 
B)  include anyone who will be interviewed by the ethnographer. 
C)  target only one social, cultural, or environmental factor that influences behavior. 
D)  be constituted so as to allow inferences about the larger population. 
E)  be invariant.

Question 10

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

Accepted Answer

A)  representative sample 
B)  etic informant 
C)  key cultural consultant 
D)  biased informant 
E)  example of the life-history approach

Question 11

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

Accepted Answer

A)  bifocality 
B)  dual ethnography 
C)  reflexivity 
D)  the ethnographic present 
E)  interpretive ethnography

Question 12

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

Accepted Answer

A)  the Manchester school 
B)  synchronic functionalism 
C)  configurationalism, as illustrated in the works of Benedict and Mead 
D)  Panglossian structuralism 
E)  structural functionalism, as illustrated in the work of Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard

Question 13

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

Accepted Answer

A)  kin-based interviewing. 
B)  genealogical participant observation. 
C)  interpretive anthropology. 
D)  DNA testing. 
E)  the genealogical method.

Question 14

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

Accepted Answer

A) True 
 B)False

Question 15

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

Accepted Answer

A) True 
 B)False

Question 16

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.

Accepted Answer

A) True 
 B)False

Question 17

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.

Accepted Answer

A) True 
 B)False

Question 18

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

Accepted Answer

A) True 
 B)False

Question 19

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

Accepted Answer

A)  collaborating with the community to construct a cohesive image of local culture. 
B)  entering the community and getting to know its people. 
C)  gathering large quantities of data on a limited budget. 
D)  defining the local culture in such a way as to highlight what makes the particular culture so unlike any other. 
E)  providing detailed descriptions of "the imponderabilia of native life and of typical behavior."

Question 20

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

Accepted Answer

A)  anthropology's crisis in representation-questions about the role of the ethnographer and the nature of ethnographic authority. 
B)  the threat that the World Wide Web poses to anthropologists who are less and less needed to write about and publish accounts of cultural diversity. 
C)  the fact that anthropologists are, after all, colonial agents of the industrialized West. 
D)  a lack of leadership in the American Anthropological Association. 
E)  the problem inherent in anthropology's overspecialization.

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