1. According to this chapter, why have Iran and the United States had such a difficult
time coming to mutually agreeable and beneficial foreign policy decisions?
a) There is a shared history of conflict that is too long and painful to overcome.
b) Iran is religious, whereas the United States has a formal separation between church
and state.
2. According to anthropologists, culture is
c) harmed by exposure to outside influences.
d) All of these are correct.
3. According to the chapter, which of the following is/are symbolic actions that
communicate our identity to others?
a) How close you stand next to someone you don’t know.
b) What clothes you wear.
4. What word is defined by the mobilization of cultural symbols to create, sustain, or
resist social inequities?
a) Environment
b) Colonialism
5. The process by which you learned to speak, what to eat, or what to wear is called
c) embodiment.
d) symbolic learning.
6. The diffusion of ideas, technologies, and practices occurs through what types of
contact?
a) Military conquest
b) Trade of goods with other nations or regions
7. Which of the following is NOT one of the three levels anthropologists use to describe
and analyze the way a given culture operates?
a) Cultural practices
d) Worldview
8. Which of the following is NOT a part of the text’s brief description of cultural
practices?
a) The “surface” of culture
b) The artifacts we produce and use
9. The book compares the culture logic behind the Trobrianders’ explanations for why
magic fails at certain times to which other explanation for failure that is internally
consistent with one culture’s logic?
d) A street magician in the United Kingdom explaining his card trick
10. Which of the following is the best description of “expressive culture” as the concept
was related in the book?
a) The way a culture gets analyzed: e.g., ethnographies, firsthand accounts
b) The way a culture passes on its learning and knowledge to the next generation
11. Which of the following is an example of a culture shock?
a) Finding out the food in another place is much more delicious than expected
d) Neither of these is correct.
12. Anthropology as a field of study can be said to be
a) evolutionary.
b) comparative.
13. What is particularly unique about anthropology, as compared to most other social
sciences?
a) Anthropology is primarily concerned the relations of people to their environments
b) Anthropology is not concerned with power relations in society
14. Cross-cultural comparison is necessary to
a) Help determine which cultural practices are rational and which are not.
d) Explain what causes societies to change over time.
15. Which of the following is considered the holistic way of studying human nature?
a) Studying a group’s religion in order to have a better idea of why people in the group
act the way they do
b) Studying the power structures in a society to understand why people in the group
follow certain rules and leaders
16. Long-term study by anthropologists in a host community, in which they enter as
deeply as possible into the everyday life of the community is called
a) Quasi-experimental research
b) Social work
17. An evolutionary account of a given culture, to an anthropologist, would attempt to
show that
a) the society has always been improving, going from primitive to modern.
b) the society has lost its distinctive character and should attempt to isolate itself from
cultural diffusion.
18. The best definition of “methodological relativism” is
a) the view that any behavior is acceptable in its own context.
d) the view that the best method for evaluating cultural behavior is to have it studied by
outside experts.
19. According to the authors, few anthropologists are _____ relativists.
a) Philosophical
d) Functional.
20. Which of the following insights can anthropology offer to the field of international
studies?
a) There are usually just about two points of view of things.
d) All of these are correct.