Sociolinguistics has demonstrated that men lack the linguistic capacity to distinguish
between slight changes in color.
Hypodescent in the United States automatically determines the race of a child whose
parents belong to different racial groups.
Although humans do employ tools much more than any other animal does, tool use also
turns up among several nonhuman species, including birds, beavers, sea otters, and
apes.
The traditional gender roles of the Betsileo of Madagascar illustrate the idea that
intensive cultivation does not necessarily entail sharper gender stratification.
According to Leslie White, culture is dependent upon the ability to create and use
symbols.
Most contemporary foragers live in remote areas, completely cut off from contact with
other modern, agricultural, and industrial communities.
With the rise of states, kinship’s role in society continued to grow and dominate daily
activities.
Shamans are full-time religious practitioners generally found in state-level societies.
Psychologists tend to study only people living in the non-Western world, so
anthropology has very little to offer this field.
Non-Western medicine treats illnesses symptomatically, seeking an immediate cure.
Dowries are most common in societies in which women occupy an elevated status
position.
The spread of environmentalism may expose radically different notions about the rights
and values of plants and animals versus humans. Fortunately, it is clear to everyone that
certain animal rights trump other rights.
Cultural forces are indigenized when native traditions are presented to and appreciated
by the former colonialists, who acknowledge these forces as indigenous or native.
Weber argued that without Catholic ethic and values, capitalism and industrialism
would have never spread beyond England.
Weber argued that the only true capitalists were Protestants, and people who believed in
any other faith could never fully mature as capitalists.
Culture helps us define the world in which we live, to express feelings and ideas, and to
guide our behavior and perceptions.
In order to intensify production, agriculturalists frequently build irrigation canals and
terraces.
In chiefdoms, chiefs occupy formal offices and administer or regulate a series of
villages.
Identities are not fixed; they are fluid and multiple. People seize on particular,
sometimes competing, self-labels and identities, depending on context.
In the United States, attitudes regarding the role of women in the workplace have varied
according to economic needs.
In the United States, the ratio of marriages to divorces doubled between 1960 and 1980,
and the divorce rate reached 55% in 2010.
In transhumant societies, the entire group moves with their animals throughout the year.
Ascribed statuses are based on an individual’s talents, abilities, and actions.
Although nuclear families are found in many societies around the world, this
phenomenon is not a cultural universal.
Independent invention occurs when two or more cultures independently come up with
similar solutions to a common problem.
Syntax refers to the rules that dictate the order of words in a language.
A fiscal system includes the judges, laws, and courts that resolve conflicts.
During World War II, the U.S. government recruited anthropologists to study Japanese
and German cultures. This chapter uses this example to illustrate the dangers of the old
anthropology.
Social controls refers to the fields of the social systembeliefs, practices, and institutions
that are most actively involved in the maintenance of norms and the regulation of
conflict.
With generalized reciprocity, the individuals participating in the exchange usually do
not know the other person prior to the exchange.
Music is one of the most social kinds of artistic expression.
Forces influencing production and consumption are no longer restricted by national
boundaries.
Social movements worldwide have adopted the term indigenous people as a
self-identifying and political label based on past oppression but are now legitimizing it
in the search for social, cultural, and political rights.
Horticulture refers to low-intensity farming that often uses slash-and-burn techniques to
clear land.
Phenotypic similarities and differences always have a genetic basis.
Age grades represent stages in one’s life with specific tasks, obligations, and duties for
the individuals in a given grade.
Unlike “indigenous peoples,” what term, which highlights the prominence that the
exclusion of strangers has assumed in day-to-day politics worldwide, has been claimed
by majority groups in Europe?
A. indigenous people
B. autochthon
C. mestizo
D. euroindio
E. freedom fighter
In 1989, a military government seized power in the Sudan. This resulted in which of the
following?
A. The Sudan now has no more tribal religions, because everyone has converted to
either Christianity or Islam.
B. The Sudan is now the largest country in Papua New Guinea.
C. The Sudanese government adopted a policy of cultural imperialism.
D. The Sudan has little ethnic or religious diversity.
E. The Sudanese government has institutionalized cargo cults.
What term refers to an organism’s evident traits, or its “manifest biology”?
A. manifest destiny
B. genotype
C. biological circumscription
D. phenotype
E. hereditary inequality
What term refers to the tendency to view less developed countries as more alike than
they are?
A. cultural relativism
B. ethnobias
C. overinnovation
D. underdifferentiation
E. intervention philosophy
Which of the following is true about rites of passage?
A. Beliefs and rituals can, ironically, both diminish and create anxiety and a sense of
insecurity and danger.
B. Despite their prevalence during the time that Victor Turner did his research, rites of
passage have disappeared with the advent of modern life.
C. Participants in rites of passage only are tricked into believing that there was a big
change in their lives.
D. Rites of passage only worsen the anxieties caused by other aspects of religion.
E. Rites of passage would be effective in diminishing anxiety and fear if they did not
involve the liminal phase.
Which of the following is NOT true of postmodernism?
A. It originally described a style and movement in architecture.
B. It rejects rules, geometric order, and austerity.
C. It has a clear and functional design or structure.
D. It draws on a diversity of styles from different times and places.
E. It extends value well beyond classic, elite, Western cultural forms.
Which of the following kinds of societies is most likely to have stratum endogamy
(marriage within one’s own group)?
A. band
B. state
C. chiefdom
D. society with segmentary lineage organization
E. tribe
Which of the following statements about purported attempts to assign humans to
discrete racial categories based on common ancestry is true?
A. They are applied to endogamous breeding populations.
B. They are based on genotypic rather than phenotypic characteristics.
C. They are based on global racial categories that vary little among societies.
D. They are a recent phenomenon brought on by globalization.
E. They are culturally arbitrary, even though most people assume them to be based in
biology.
Which of the following statements about subcultures is NOT true?
A. Subcultures exemplify “levels of culture.”
B. Subcultures have different learning experiences.
C. Subcultures have shared learning experiences.
D. Subcultures may originate in ethnicity, class, region, or religion.
E. Subcultures are mutually exclusive; individuals may not participate in more than one
subculture.
In the pre-Civil War southern United States, gatherings of five or more slaves were
forbidden unless a white person was present, because
A. resistance was most likely to be expressed openly when black slaves were provoked
by the presence of white persons.
B. resistance is most likely to be expressed openly when people are allowed to
assemble.
C. white persons were curious about the use of the story of Moses that was popular
among slaves at the time.
D. some whites were eager to join the black slaves in their plans, some successful, in
establishing free communities in isolated areas.
E. these whites were actually covert anthropologists eager to study social relations
during these politically difficult times.
Nation-states
A. are defined by their lack of ethnic identity.
B. are ethnically homogeneous.
C. are the same as tribes and ethnic groups.
D. are parts of other states.
E. sometimes encourage ethnic divisions for political and economic ends.
Appreciation for the arts must be learned, it being part of the process of
A. aesthetic tuning.
B. biological adaptation.
C. imitation.
D. cultural evolution.
E. enculturation.
Regarding sexual orientation, all of the following are true EXCEPT that
A. different types of sexual desires and experiences hold different meanings for
individuals and groups.
B. there is conclusive scientific evidence that sexual orientation is genetically
determined.
C. in a society, individuals will differ in the nature, range, and intensity of sexual
interests and urges.
D. culture always plays a role in molding individual sexual urges toward a collective
norm, and these norms vary from culture to culture.
E. flexibility in sexual expression seems to be an aspect of our primate heritage, since
both masturbation and same-sex sexual activity exist among chimpanzees and other
primates.
This chapter’s “Focus on Globalization” section discusses economic globalization.
Which of the following is an outcome of our 21st-century global economy?
A. Modern-day transnational finance has shifted economic control of local life to
outsiders.
B. Economic functions are now locally controlled.
C. Foreigners now finance only a small percentage of the U.S. national debt.
D. American companies are withdrawing from foreign markets.
E. With increasing globalization there is increased face-to-face contact in economic
transactions.
Although the nuclear family remains a cultural ideal for many Americans, nuclear
families accounted for just 22.5 percent of American households in 2007. In fact, other
domestic arrangements outnumber the traditional U.S. household more than four to one.
All of the following are among the reasons for these trends EXCEPT that
A. women are increasingly joining men in the workforce.
B. job demands compete with romantic attachments.
C. divorce rates have risen.
D. it is increasingly economically feasible for women to delay marriage and yet live
away from their family of orientation.
E. contrary to expectations, the importance of kinship is growing in contemporary
nations.
As we enter the 21st century, artistic expression
A. within industrialized states is increasingly becoming more isolated and independent.
B. finds itself intentionally avoiding the use of multiple expressive media in favor of
employing only one medium.
C. can be seen to be increasingly incorporating elements from many cultures into
contemporary art and performance.
D. is disappearing from our cultural repertoire.
E. has lost most of its effectiveness.
Which of the following statements about British colonialism is NOT true?
A. It lacked an intervention philosophy.
B. It can be divided into two stages.
C. It was legitimized by the racist notion of the “white man’s burden.”
D. It began to disintegrate after World War II.
E. It was partly driven by business interests.
Pentagon programs, including Project Minerva, draw on social science research to learn
about national security threats. Why do social scientists object to the military
determining which research projects are worth funding?
A. because the military budget is already overextended
B. because the military has higher ethical standards than anthropologists
C. because scholars favor a peer review system of choosing funded projects
D. because the military might surpass anthropologists in cultural knowledge
E. because government spending has no business overlapping with science
Yehudi Cohen’s adaptive strategies
A. suggest hypothetical correlationsthat is, a causal relation between two or more
variables, such as economic and cultural variables.
B. suggest multidirectional relationships between a society’s mean and its mode of
production.
C. suggest that economic systems are a better way of categorizing societies than relying
on cultural patterns.
D. suggest an association between the economies of societies and their social features.
E. have strong predictive powers when analyzed in computer models.
In the early 20th century, the anthropologist Franz Boas described changes in skull form
among the children of Europeans who had emigrated to North America. He found that
the reason for these changes could not be explained by genetics. His findings
underscore the fact that
A. phenotypic similarities and differences don”t necessarily have a genetic basis.
B. even though the environment influences the phenotype, genetics is a more powerful
determinant of racial differences.
C. diet affects which genes are turned off and which get turned on, resulting in a
particular phenotypic characteristic.
D. describing changes in skull form is the most accurate way to study the impact of
migration on traveling populations.
E. observing changes over one generation is not enough to make conclusions about
changes in the genotype and phenotype.
Which of the following is an example of a rule of endogamy?
A. a taboo on marrying members of the same totemic group
B. the Nazi law forbidding Aryans from marrying anyone but other Aryans
C. a taboo against marrying within the same village
D. a taboo on mating with members of one’s extended family
E. the incest taboo
Unlike in industrial societies, where economic alienation is common, in nonindustrial
societies,
A. alienation is pervasive.
B. alienation is suffered only among the poorer classes.
C. social relations are embedded in all relations except the economic ones.
D. the relations of production, distribution, and consumption are social relations with
economic aspects.
E. alienation is an ascribed status.
What is a mode of production?
A. a postindustrial adaptive strategy, such as commercial agriculture or international
mercantilism
B. the land, labor, technology, and capital of production
C. the way a society’s social relations are organized to produce the labor necessary for
generating the society’s subsistence and energy needs
D. whether a society is foraging, horticulturalist, or agriculturalist
E. the cultural aspect of any given economy, such as changing fashions in the textile
and clothing industry
What right do ethnographers have to represent a people or culture to which they don”t
belong? This question illustrates
A. anthropology’s crisis in representationquestions 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.
Westernization is a form of what kind of cultural change?
A. exodus
B. imperialism
C. acculturation
D. enculturation
E. migration
How do the rules of endogamy function in society?
A. They prove that the incest taboo is not the cultural universal it was once thought to
be.
B. They encourage the extension of affinal bonds to an ever-widening circle of people.
C. They tend to maintain social distinctions between groups.
D. They expand the gene pool.
E. They extend kin ties across classes.
Traditional racial classification assumed that biological characteristics such as skin
color were determined by heredity and remain stable over many generations. We now
know that
A. skin color is actually determined throughout child development.
B. skin color is determined by sun exposure and the amount of melanin in our diets.
C. a biological similarity such as skin color is also the result of natural selection
working among different populations that face similar environmental challenges.
D. skin color is determined by a single gene that is prone to mutations over many
generations.
E. a biological similarity such as skin color is always the result of both a common
ancestry and natural selection.
The human capacity for culture has an evolutionary basis that extends back at least 2.5
million years. This date corresponds to
A. the earliest production of cave art found in South Africa.
B. early toolmakers whose products survive in the archaeological record.
C. a genetic mutation that caused the increase in brain size and complexity.
D. the advent of anatomically modern primates.
E. evidence of hunting and the use of fire to cook tough meats.
Transgender is a social category that
A. includes people whose gender identity has no apparent biological roots.
B. always contrasts biologically with ordinary males and females.
C. consists of only intersex people.
D. is entirely biologically constructed.
E. has no validity within the social sciences.
Which of the following kin types is NOTego’s lineal relative?
A. M
B. B
C. MM
D. F
E. S