Fundamentalists are correct in seeing a rise in secularism in contemporary North
America.
Which of the following statements about irrigation is NOT true?
A. Irrigated fields typically increase in value through time.
B. Irrigation is one of the defining characteristics of foraging societies.
C. Irrigation usually enriches the soil.
D. The Betsileo of Madagascar used irrigation intensively.
E. Irrigation fields are labor intensive compared to swidden (burned over) fields.
Although the incest taboo is a cultural universal, cultures define incest differently. For
example, in many cultures it is incestuous to marry parallel cousins but not
cross-cousins. What is the difference?
A. The children of two brothers or two sisters are parallel cousins. The children of a
brother and a sister are cross-cousins.
B. Parallel cousins are socially recognized relatives, but cross-cousins are true
biological cousins.
C. The children of a brother and a sister are parallel cousins. The children of two
brothers or two sisters are cross-cousins.
D. Parallel cousins are true biological cousins, whereas cross-cousins are simply
socially recognized relatives.
E. There is no symbolic difference between the two, only a biological difference.
The status systems of chiefdoms and states are similar in that both are based on
differential access to resources. Nevertheless, a key distinction is that
A. status is much more important to leaders in chiefdoms than in states.
B. differential access in chiefdoms is still very much tied to kinship.
C. stratum endogamy exists in chiefdoms but not in state status systems.
D. in chiefdoms, women are always excluded from the competition for status, whereas
in states this gender difference does not exist.
E. the status system of chiefdoms can sometimes function in a completely egalitarian
manner when the populations are small enough.
What are induction into the U.S. Marine Corps and the vision quest of certain North
American Indian societies examples of?
A. binary opposition
B. a generalized exchange
C. a structural analysis of religion
D. rites of passage
E. genetic programming
Which of the following did NOTresult from Christopher Columbus’s voyages?
A. The rate of violence among Native Americans markedly increased.
B. Europeans extracted silver and gold from the land.
C. Europeans enslaved Native Americans.
D. Europeans offered statehood to Peru, Mexico, and Cuba.
E. Europeans colonized New World lands.
Which of the following is a cultural generality?
A. exogamy
B. the use of fire
C. the incest taboo
D. the use of symbols
E. the nuclear family
Polygamy, although formally outlawed, has survived in Turkey since the Ottoman
period, when having several wives was viewed as a symbol of power, wealth, and
sexual prowess. Unlike the past, when the practice was customary and not illegal,
polygamy can put contemporary women at risk. How?
A. Women in polygamous unions have less of a chance to marry several men
themselves.
B. Because their marriages have no official status, secondary wives who are abused or
mistreated have no legal recourse.
C. The increase in the number of wives a man takes on increases inter-wife feuds.
D. As cross-cultural studies have shown, violence against women is correlated with the
presence of polyandry in society.
E. Unlike in the past, polygamous unions are no longer unions based on romantic love.
When compared to other kinds of societies, all the following are true about foragers
EXCEPTthat
A. the public and private spheres are least separate.
B. hierarchy is least marked.
C. aggression and competition are most discouraged.
D. sexual promiscuity is most common and routinely punished.
E. the rights, activities, and spheres of influence of men and women overlap the most.
Over time, humans have become increasingly dependent on which of the following to
cope with the range of environments they have occupied in time and space?
A. cultural means of adaptation
B. biological means of adaptation, mostly thanks to advanced medical research
C. a holistic and comparative approach to problem solving
D. social institutions, such as the state that coordinates collective action
E. technological means of adaptation, such as the creation of virtual worlds that allow
us to escape from day-to-day reality
What is an age set?
A. a village council
B. a pantribal sodality that represents a certain level of achievement in the society,
much like the stages of an undergraduate’s progress through college
C. all men and women related by virtue of patrilineal descent from a human apical
ancestor
D. all men and women related by virtue of matrilineal descent from a nonhuman apical
ancestor
E. a group uniting all men or women born during a certain span of time
Applied anthropology is
A. the purely academic dimension of anthropology.
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. rarely possible, as anthropological studies are not practical in the “real world.”
E. is not guided by anthropological theory.
Protestant values such as asceticism and entrepreneurship as a result of the belief that
success on earth could lead to salvation, and a fervent individualism due to the belief
that only individuals could be saved lead, in the right conditions, to the rise of
capitalism. Who made this argument?
A. Claude Lvi-Strauss in his famous book The Savage Mind (1962, 1966)
B. Robert Bellah
C. Anthony F. C. Wallace in his attempt to show religion’s relevance in understanding
historical change
D. Sir Edward Burnett Tylor
E. Max Weber in his influential book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(1904, 1958)
Of the following factors, which is historically correlated with the lowering of women’s
status in the United States?
A. European immigration around 1900
B. World War II
C. voting rights for women
D. inflation
E. the women’s rights movement
According to Fredrik Barth’s theories about ethnic identity, ethnic boundaries most
stable when
A. ethnic groups share a common ancestor.
B. ethnic groups occupy different ecological niches.
C. ethnic groups share the same nation-state.
D. the members of the ethnic groups are highly educated, as with postcolonial states.
E. ethnic groups are culturally very similar and tend to pursue the same goals.
One aspect of linguistic history is language loss. When a language disappears,
A. less strain is put on the educational system, because it has less language diversity to
deal with.
B. this is confirmation to historical linguists that language is also a victim of
evolutionary forces.
C. so does pride in one’s heritage.
D. cultural diversity is reduced as well.
E. humanity is that much closer to global integration.
In survey research, what is sampling?
A. the collection of a study group from a larger population
B. the interviewing of a small number of key cultural consultants
C. a form of participant observation
D. the collection of life histories of every member in a community
E. a collection reflecting the emic perspective
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. Puerto Rican students came from a background that placed less value on education
than did that of white students.
B. The parents of Puerto Rican students did not value achievement.
C. The Puerto Rican subjects benefited from the English as a foreign language program.
D. Puerto Ricans do not benefit from bilingual education.
E. The Puerto Rican students’ education was being affected by their teachers’
misconceptions.
Found in a cave in Slovenia, the oldest known musical instrument, the “Divje babe
flute,” dates back more than
A. 130,000 years.
B. 5,000 years.
C. 5 million years, to roughly the time of the emergence of bipedalism.
D. 43,000 years.
E. 10,000 years, the same time as the emergence of agriculture.
What is the postwar baby boom of the late 1940s and 1950s responsible for?
A. It fueled the general expansion of the U.S. educational system, including academic
anthropology.
B. It promoted renewed interest in applied anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s.
C. It brought anthropology into most high school curricula.
D. It produced a new interest in ethnic diversity.
E. It worked to shrink the world system.
________ is the term for the physical destruction of ethnic groups by murder, warfare,
and introduced diseases.
A. Sociocide
B. Ethnocide
C. Biocide
D. Genocide
E. Patricide
Anthropologist Susan Kent notes a tendency to stereotype foragers, to treat them all as
alike. They used to be stereotyped as isolated, primitive survivors of the Stone Age.
Another, more recent, common stereotype of foragers sees them as
A. peaceful individuals in touch with their inner selves.
B. culturally deprived people forced by states, colonialism, or world events into
marginalized environments.
C. ideal humans with the perfect diet and rhythm of life.
D. not isolated at all but living in nation-states and an interlinked world.
E. primitive survivors not of the Stone Age but the Bronze Age.
Which of the following is NOT true about culture?
A. Culture is a key aspect of human adaptability and success.
B. Culture is passed on genetically to future generations.
C. Cultural forces consistently mold and shape human biology and behavior.
D. Culture guides the beliefs and behavior of the people exposed to it.
E. Culture is passed on from generation to generation.
A lineal kinship terminology
A. is generally found in societies with patrilineal descent rules.
B. uses two terms to identify ego’s parents’ siblings: one term for both FZ and MZ and
another term for both FB and MB.
C. is often found in association with the distinction between parallel and cross-cousins.
D. stresses relationships with collaterals.
E. uses the same term to refer to M and MZ.
Which of the following does NOT belong to ego’s matrilineage?
A. FM
B. B
C. ZS
D. MB
E. M
Which of the following marital customs functions to maintain distinctions between
groups?
A. progeny price
B. levirate
C. sororate
D. sororal polygyny
E. endogamy
What term refers to the manipulation of the supernatural to accomplish specific goals?
A. animism
B. magic
C. religion
D. a rite of passage
E. pantheism
The incest taboo is a cultural universal, but
A. not all cultures have one.
B. not all cultures define incest the same way.
C. not all cultures know about the consequences of incest.
D. some cultures have replaced it with the levirate.
E. some cultures practice gerontology anyway.
The work of which of the following anthropologists illustrated a renewed interest in
cultural change and even evolution (although of a very different sort than Tylor and
Morgan had in mind)?
A. Ruth Benedict
B. Max Gluckman
C. Victor Turner
D. Julian Steward
E. Margaret Mead
What is the name of the postmarital residence pattern in which the married couple is
expected to establish its own home?
A. neolocality
B. patrilocality
C. matrilocality
D. ambilocality
E. uxorilocality
In theory, a biological race is a geographically isolated subdivision of a species.
Humanity (Homo sapiens) lacks such races because
A. although humans exhibit biological differences, these are only skin deep.
B. human populations have experienced a type of controlled breeding that is distinct
from that experienced by dogs and roses.
C. human populations have not been isolated enough from one another to develop such
discrete groups.
D. they are politically incorrect.
E. humans are less genetically predictable than the animals and plants that are
susceptible to domestication.
Ethnographers typically combine emic and etic research strategies in their fieldwork.
This means they are interested in applying both
A. local- and scientist-oriented research approaches.
B. local and bifocal research approaches.
C. reflexive and salvage approaches.
D. personal and impersonal research approaches.
E. the genealogical and survey methods.
According to Weber, what are the three dimensions of social stratification?
A. the means of production, mode of production, and measure of production
B. status, exchange, and religion
C. gender, ethnicity, and race
D. wealth, power, and prestige
E. age, gender, and ethnicity