This chapter mentions the work of Wolf and Mintz, both students of Julian Steward, as
illustrations of approaches that
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.
This chapter’s “Appreciating Anthropology” section discusses research on the ancient
syntax of a “proto-human language,” thought to be ancestral to all contemporary
languages. This research suggests that
A. the proto-language sounded similar to modern-day English.
B. subject-verb-object ordering is very rare in languages spoken today.
C. word ordering within a language is uniform across the world.
D. word ordering has remained constant over time, not changing when languages
branch off from their mother tongues.
E. the proto-language sounded similar to the speech of Yoda in “Star Wars.”
What did Robert Redfield argue about the relations between urban and rural
communities?
A. Peasants are culturally isolated from cities.
B. Cities are centers from which cultural innovations are spread to rural and tribal areas.
C. Innovation tends to move from rural to urban areas.
D. There are so many connections between rural and urban areas that it is not useful to
distinguish between the two within one cultural context.
E. Urban centers have more in common with each other, even across national
boundaries, than they do with rural areas in the same country.
Which is the key assumption in Claude Lvi-Strauss’s structuralism?
A. All myths can be classified as either good or evil.
B. The human propensity to classify phenomena in certain ways is acquired through
enculturation.
C. There is a very specific role for human agency in culture, and the structure of
cultural patterns determines that role.
D. Cultural patterns determine the human propensity to classify things in certain ways.
E. Human minds have certain universal characteristics that originate in common
features of the Homo sapiens brain and lead people everywhere to think similarly
regardless of their society or cultural background.
Although locals may create a new religion, on a global scale religious change is more
commonly the result of
A. a local community’s rejection of their traditional beliefs.
B. the increased popularity of telenovelas.
C. the diffusion of attractive intervention philosophies.
D. missionaries and proselytizers representing the major world religions.
E. multinational corporations that collaborate with local religions to establish markets.
Which of the following was studied by Sapir and Whorf?
A. the interaction of thought on surface structure
B. the influence of language on thought
C. the influence of deep structure on surface structure
D. the influence of deep structure on semantic domains
E. the influence of culture on language
What is the term for an expert on a particular aspect of native life?
A. representative sample
B. etic informant
C. key cultural consultant
D. biased informant
E. example of the life-history approach
Recent cross-cultural studies of gender roles demonstrate that
A. the gender roles of men and women are largely determined by their biological
capabilitiesrelative strength, endurance, intelligence, and so on.
B. women are subservient in nearly all societies, because their subsistence activities
contribute much less to the total diet than do those of men.
C. foraging, horticultural, pastoral, and industrial societies all have similar attitudes
toward sex but different attitudes toward gender.
D. changes in the gender roles of men and women are usually associated with social
decay and anarchy.
E. the relative status of women is variable, depending on such factors as the type of
subsistence strategy employed, the importance of warfare, and the prevalence of a
domestic-public dichotomy.
There is no simple or universally accepted explanation for the fact that all cultures ban
incest. However, the most accepted explanation for the incest taboo is
A. genetically programmed instinctive horror.
B. a widespread and well-founded fear of biological degeneration.
C. following rules of exogamy is adaptively advantageous.
D. isolated social groups are better at survival.
E. a genetically determined attraction for those most different from us.
Contemporary North American adults usually define their families as consisting of their
husbands or wives and their children. In contrast, when middle-class Brazilians talk
about their families, they mean their parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and
on, down to their children. They rarely mention the spouse. Which of the following is
among the reasons for this stark cultural contrast?
A. Brazilians readily incorporate strangers into their social worlds.
B. North Americans value independence over their family.
C. North Americans have more choices about where they can live, and they have
chosen to live away from their relatives.
D. Brazilians live in a less mobile society and so stay in closer contact with their
relatives, including members of their extended family, than do North Americans.
E. Brazilians have purely economic relationships with their spouses.
Which of the following statements about peasants is NOT true?
A. They all live in state-organized societies.
B. They owe rent to landlords.
C. They practice small-scale agriculture without modern technology such as chemical
fertilizers and tractors.
D. They owe rent to the government.
E. They are not part of the world market.
What term refers to languages that have descended from the same ancestral language?
A. F2 languages
B. sibling languages
C. daughter languages
D. brother languages
E. protolanguages
Cultural anthropologists carry out their fieldwork in
A. factories.
B. the tropics.
C. the third world.
D. former colonies.
E. all kinds of societies.
The view that each element of culture, such as the culture trait or trait complex, has its
own distinctive history, and that social forms (such as totemism in different societies)
that might look similar are not comparable because of their different histories, is known
as
A. historical particularism.
B. cultural generalism.
C. the Boasian approach.
D. structural functionalism.
E. comparative functionalism.
Why is ethnography one of the most valuable and distinctive tools of the applied
anthropologist?
A. It is valuable insider’s data that can be routinely sold to multinational corporations
and state agencies without the consent of the people studied.
B. It provides a firsthand account of the day-to-day issues and challenges that the
members of a given community face, as well as a sense of how those people think about
and react to these issues.
C. It produces a statistically unbiased summary of human response to set stimuli.
D. It is among the most economical and time-efficient tools that exist in the social
sciences.
E. It can be produced without leaving the comfort of the anthropologist’s office.
Periphery nations
A. export to the core but not the semiperiphery.
B. lack industrialization.
C. are isolated from the world economy.
D. have economies that disproportionately benefit capitalists in the core.
E. have little incentive to interact with nations of the core.
________ magic is based on the belief that whatever is done to an object will affect a
person who once had contact with it.
A. Contagious
B. Imitative
C. Serial
D. Sequential
E. Simultaneous
A horticultural system of cultivation is characterized by
A. intensive use of land and human labor.
B. the use of irrigation and terracing.
C. developing almost exclusively in arid areas.
D. lack of proper knowledge about plant domestication.
E. periodic cycles of cultivation and fallowing.
Which of the following does NOT illustrate the kinds of work that applied
anthropologists do?
A. working for or with international development agencies, such as the World Bank and
the U.S. Agency for International Development
B. helping the Environmental Protection Agency address environmental problems
C. borrowing from fields such as history and sociology to broaden the scope of
theoretical anthropology
D. using the tools of medical anthropology to work as cultural interpreters in public
health programs
E. applying the tools of forensic anthropology to work with police, medical examiners,
the courts, and international organizations to identify victims of crimes, accidents, wars,
and terrorism
Linguistic anthropology
A. is a research strategy of biological anthropologists studying the emergence of
language among nonhuman primates.
B. relies heavily on the methods of phrenology.
C. includes sociolinguistics, descriptive linguistics, and the study of the biological basis
for speech.
D. includes cultural anthropology and paleoecology.
E. has securely dated the origin of hominid language.
Why does exogamy, the practice of seeking a husband or wife outside one’s own kin
group, have adaptive value outside of biological concerns?
A. It increases the likelihood that disadvantageous alleles will find phenotypic
expression and thus be eliminated from the population.
B. Exogamy creates new social ties and alliances, providing access to more resources
and social networks.
C. It impedes peaceful relations among social groups and therefore promotes population
expansion.
D. It was an important causal factor in the origin of social stratification.
E. Exogamy is not adaptive; it is just a culture construction.
The greenhouse effect is a natural phenomenon that keeps the earth’s surface warm.
Without greenhouse gaseswater vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide,
halocarbons, and ozonelife as we know it wouldn”t exist. The current problem is that
A. there are more cooling than warming radiative forcings.
B. the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases has reached its highest level in
400,000 years, and this rise has upset the balance of radiative forcings working to warm
and cool the earth.
C. scientists cannot agree on a general model of how the greenhouse effect went from
being a positive to a negative and a life-threatening force.
D. global warming actually benefits 90 percent of the world population, so it is difficult
to mobilize the will to address the anthropogenic causes of climate change.
E. it is difficult to distinguish between climate change and global warming.
Modern foragers are not Stone Age relics, living fossils, lost tribes, or noble savages.
Still, to the extent that foraging has been the basis of their subsistence, contemporary
and recent hunter-gatherers
A. are the closest we can come to studying true human nature.
B. illustrate links between a foraging economy and the emergence of social
stratification.
C. suggest that the most basic motive driving human survival is the need for power.
D. can illustrate links between a foraging economy and other aspects of society and
culture, such as their sociopolitical organization.
E. illustrate the social precursors to hegemony.
A key feature of language that helps explain anthropologists’ continued interest in
studying it is that it
A. enables us to compare human and nonhuman primate linguistic grammars.
B. tells us a lot about the present, although nothing about the past.
C. is always changing.
D. helps them distinguish between the more and less evolved human races.
E. rarely changes, so it provides a good window into linguistic uses of the past.
________ describes the process of viewing an identity as established, real, and frozen,
so as to hide the historical processes and politics within which that identity developed.
A. Essentialism
B. Marketing
C. Autochthony
D. Patrimony
E. Fluidity
Shamans and other magico-religious specialists are effective curers with regard to what
kind of disease theory?
A. exotic
B. ritualistic
C. naturalistic
D. personalistic
E. scientific
Which of the following best illustrates urban applied anthropologists’ ability to help
social groups deal with urban institutions?
A. “culture at a distance” studies among Japanese and Germans in an attempt to predict
the behavior of the enemies of the United States
B. Kottak’s comparative study of development projects from around the world
C. Vigil’s study of gang violence in the context of large-scale immigrant adaptation to
U.S. cities
D. anthropological analysis of the relation between Malagasy descent groups and the
state
E. analysis of differences between personalistic and naturalistic disease theories among
rural poor of the U.S.
What is a disease?
A. a health problem as it is experienced by the one affected
B. an artificial product of biomedicine
C. a consequence of a foraging lifestyle
D. an unnatural state of health
E. a scientifically identified health threat
This chapter’s “Focus on Globalization” discusses outsourcing jobs to countries outside
the United States. What is an outcome of this outsourcing?
A. decreased profits for U.S. corporations
B. an increase in union membership within the U.S.
C. corporations realizing the importance of workers’ rights
D. fewer jobs in the U.S., as they are replaced by machines and outsourced jobs
E. more incentives for illegal immigration
What component of cultural anthropology is comparative and focused on building upon
our understanding of how cultural systems work?
A. ethnography
B. data collection
C. ethnology
D. fieldwork
E. data entry
Which of the following is NOT mentioned in this chapter as a way of defining art?
A. Art is something that attracts your attention, catches your eye, and directs your
thoughts.
B. Art is the quality, production, expression, or realm of what is beautiful or of more
than ordinary significance.
C. Art is the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria.
D. Art expresses culture through which a person or persons can express themselves
creatively in the visual arts, literature, music, and theater arts.
E. Art is in a cultural sphere separate from politics and religion.