Ch9 Test Bank + Politics Cooperation, Conflict, And Power

Chapter 9: Politics: Cooperation, Conflict, and Power Relations

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 01

1) Laws

Feedback: Laws are sets of rules established by some formal authority.
Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. entail a third party who intervenes in a dispute to aid the parties in reaching an agreement.

*b. are sets of rules established by some formal authority.

c. are when parties themselves reach a decision jointly.

d. are the legal process by which an individual or council with socially recognized authority intervenes in a dispute and unilaterally makes a decision.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 02

2) The !Kung people of southern Africa are an example what kind of society?

Feedback: Acephalous society is a society without a governing head, generally with no hierarchical leader-ship.
Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

*a. Acephalous

b. Segmentary lineage

c. Lawless

d. Structural-functional

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 03

3) Which English philosophers were concerned with the problem of disorder and argued that chaos is avoidable by creating strong government?

Feedback: Hobbes and Locke believed that humans are naturally selfish, competitive, and warlike, leading to violence and a chaotic free-for-all as people pursue their own personal interests, a condition avoided only by the absolute rule of a monarch.
Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. Evans-Pritchard and Radcliffe-Brown

*b. Hobbes and Locke

c. Smith and Marx

d. Sahlins and Service

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 04

4) Lineage or clan ownership of land and livestock, with little sense of private property, characterizes the

Feedback: A tribe is a type of pastoralist or horticulturist society with populations usually numbering in the hundreds or thousands in which leadership is more stable than that of a band, but usually egalitarian, with social relations based on reciprocal exchange.
Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. band.

*b. tribe.

c. chiefdom.

d. state.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 05

5) A band is a

Feedback: A band is a small, nomadic, and self-sufficient group of anywhere from 25 to 150 individuals with face-to-face social relationships, usually egalitarian.
Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. centralized group of people who have a high population density and participate in intensive agriculture.

b. centralized group of people who have a medium population density and participate in extensive agriculture.

c. noncentralized group of people who have a low to medium population density and participate in pastoralism or horticulture.

*d. noncentralized group of people who have a low population density and participate in foraging.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 06

6) Independent states recognized by other states, and composed of people who share a single national identity, are referred to as

Feedback: A state is the most complex form of political organization, associated with societies that have intensive agriculture, high levels of social stratification, and centralized authority.
Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. governments.

b. tribes.

c. chiefdoms.

*d. nation-states.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 07

7) Which theory was used to explain how stateless societies maintained social order and equilibrium?

Feedback: During the early twentieth century, the global expansion of British colonialism coincided with and helped fuel the rise of British anthropology. Colonial authorities often turned to anthropologists to help them make sense of the foreign societies now under British control that did not have forms of government recognizable to the British. This situation presented British anthropologists with important opportunities to study the maintenance of order in societies without formal governments and political leaders. It also allowed these anthropologists to help formalize patterns of indirect rule in which local chiefs were incorporated into the new colonial administration. The theory they used to explain how these societies had maintained order was structural-functionalism, which held that the different structures of a society (religion, politics, kinship, etc.) function in an integrated way to maintain social order and equilibrium. In Africa, structural-functionalists identified numerous ways societies maintained order and social control without formal political institutions

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. Marxism

b. Interpretive anthropology

*c. Structural-functionalism

d. Neo-evolutionary

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 08

8) Which of the following social structures was identified as a way that African societies maintained order?

Feedback: Religious rituals can also function politically, integrating a community by bringing people together around common beliefs and activities. Rituals serve political ends by legitimating community authority, ensuring group cohesion, organizing against enemies, and resolving disputes. Beliefs in witchcraft or sorcery, which provoke fear in many societies, can also promote order. Throughout Africa, for example, people who do not behave according to community norms are identified and punished as witches, a practice that maintains the social norms. They might be banished from a village, harassed, or abused physically (Marwick 1952). Without for-mal courts, structural-functionalists insisted, such practices maintain social control and operate as a rudimentary criminal justice system.

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. Educational systems

b. Presidential authority

*c. Religious practices and beliefs

d. Parliamentary systems

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 09

9) Age-grades

Feedback: Age-grades are groupings of age-mates, who are initiated into adulthood together.

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. organize women in Maasai society.

b. organize food sharing among the !Kung.

*c. organize men into generational groups among the Maasai.

d. organize hunting parties among the Nuer.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 10

10) What form of lineage is flexible, noncentralized, and quickly created and dismantled?

Feedback: The Nuer are quite independent, tending their herds of cattle in small lineages of several dozen men descended from a single ancestor. These lineages see themselves as having arisen when larger lineage groups broke into smaller groups or segments. Yet, whenever a smaller lineage group faces an external threat, such as aggression from a distantly related lineage, it works together with other closely related lineages to confront the threat. The political unity of the Nuer was thus flexible and non-centralized, allowing them to create larger groups according to need and dismantle those larger groups quickly. Evans-Pritchard described this political system as “segmentary lineages.” In this classic quotation, he explains the logic of political organization.

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. Reciprocity

b. Age-grade

c. Centralized

*d. Segmentary

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 11

11) For anthropologists, political power refers to how

Feedback: Political power includes the processes by which people create, compete, and use power to attain goals that are presumed to be for the good of a community.
Page reference: What Is Political Power?

a. elected officials use power.

b. violence is used by the nation-state to subdue dissent.

c. politics operates informally.

*d. power is used to attain goals for the good of the community.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 12

12) Power that transcends individuals, operating in settings and orchestrating settings in which social and individual actions take place, is

Feedback: It became clear to political anthropologists by the 1980s and 1990s that certain power relationships transcend any individual. Political anthropologists began to refer to such power as structural power, which is power that not only operates within settings, but also organizes and orchestrates the settings in which social and individual action take place. “Structure” here means something very different from how the early structural-functionalists understood it. They were interested in social institutions (“structures,” as a noun), while this newer perspective focuses on the mix of social processes, relationships, and institutions that shape or “structure” (as a verb) social action.
Page reference: What Is Political Power?

a. authority.

*b. structural power.

c. domination.

d. violence.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 13

13) For a big man in a nonstate society, what is the most powerful and valuable tool?

Feedback: “Power” in this sense is typically considered to be the ability to make people think or act in certain ways, through physical coercion or through more symbolic means, such as persuasion.
Page reference: What Is Political Power?

a. Force

b. Formal authority

c. Corruption

*d. Persuasion

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 14

14) Which of the following is an element of violence?

Feedback: Even though we might all agree that violence involves some element of harm and an assertion of power over others, people nevertheless have differing opinions on what constitutes violence. Some of these opinions are individually held, but some are related to differences in how we as members of a particular culture define violence and give meaning to it. Culture shapes not only how people think about violence but also how, why, and when they use it as a form of power over others.
Page reference: Why Do Some Societies Seem More Violent Than Others?

*a. It is the use of force to cause harm to someone or something.

b. It is an invisible assertion of power.

c. It is an inefficient way to transform a social environment.

d. It is only found in centralized political systems.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 15

15) Violence is

Feedback: Even though we might all agree that violence involves some element of harm and an assertion of power over others, people nevertheless have differing opinions on what constitutes violence. Some of these opinions are individually held, but some are related to differences in how we as members of a particular culture define violence and give meaning to it. Culture shapes not only how people think about violence but also how, why, and when they use it as a form of power over others.
Page reference: Why Do Some Societies Seem More Violent Than Others?

a. static.

b. inherited.

*c. socially constructed.

d. absolute.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 16

16) Which branch of cultural anthropology looks at the way that people handle disputes?

Feedback: Legal anthropology, the branch of political anthropology interested in such matters, has identified a number of ways people manage disputes. Some strategies are in-formal, including avoidance, competition, ritual, and play. Others are formal, involving specialized institutions or specialists. The most common of these strategies include adjudication (going to court), negotiation (talking through problems), and mediation (a third party helps resolve the problem).
Page reference: How Do People Avoid Aggression, Brutality, and War?

a. Political anthropology

*b. Legal anthropology

c. Psychological anthropology

d. Applied anthropology

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 17

17) The legal process by which an individual or council with socially recognized authority intervenes in a dispute and unilaterally makes a decision is

Feedback: Adjudication is the legal process by which an individual or council with socially recognized authority intervenes in a dispute and unilaterally makes a decision.
Page reference: How Do People Avoid Aggression, Brutality, and War?

*a. adjudication.

b. mediation.

c. laws.

d. negotiation.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 18

18) Negotiation

Feedback: In a negotiation, the parties themselves reach a decision jointly.
Page reference: How Do People Avoid Aggression, Brutality, and War?

a. entails a third party who intervenes in a dispute to aid the parties in reaching an agreement.

b. is a set of rules established by some formal authority.

*c. is when parties themselves reach a decision jointly.

d. is the legal process by which an individual or council with socially recognized authority intervenes in a dispute and unilaterally makes a decision.

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 09 Question 19

19) To follow political action one must be familiar with society's rules and codes about who gets to exercise power and under what conditions.

Feedback: To follow political action, one must be familiar with a society’s specific rules and codes about who gets to exercise power and under what conditions. Anthropologist F. G. Bailey compared these codes to those of playing a game. In politics, as in a game, there are normative rules, fairly stable and explicit ethical norms by which players must abide, such as honesty, fair-ness, and so on. There are also pragmatic rules, which are the creative manipulations necessary to win the game itself. For example, in American politics, normative rules require political actors to be open, fair, and honest. But we know based on reading the political news in the newspaper that there are also the pragmatic rules of gaining and holding onto power, which often involve favoritism and even outright lying.

Page reference: What Is Political Power?

*a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 09 Question 20

20) Big men can transfer their power and status through inheritance when they die.

Feedback: To some extent, the exercise of political power differs between state and non-state societies. For example, in non-state societies such as tribal societies of South America and Melanesia, power tends to be temporary and episodic, emerging from personal charisma, not from elections or in-heritance from a powerful parent. The Amazon headman, for example, is “a first among equals.” He assumes his status as leader by being able to persuade followers, not because he controls power or resources on his own. Such leaders, who are sometimes called “Big Men,” cannot transfer their status and power through inheritance when they die.

Page reference: What Is Political Power?

a. True

*b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 09 Question 21

21) For anthropologists, power is largely located in the hands of state institutions and political offices.

Feedback: “Power” in this sense is typically considered to be the ability to make people think or act in certain ways, through physical coercion or through more symbolic means, such as persuasion.
Page reference: What Is Political Power?

a. True

*b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 09 Question 22

22) When people around the world have disputes, they are most concerned with winning and losing.

Feedback: Most North Americans assume that disputes are about winning and losing. We approach a lawsuit pretty much the same way we approach a sporting event, the point being to vanquish the other side. But for many peoples around the world, disputes are not “about” winning and losing. Neither are sporting events. In both cases, the object of a lawsuit or game is to repair a strained relationship.
Page reference: How Do People Avoid Aggression, Brutality, and War?

a. True

*b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 09 Question 23

23) In some hunter–gatherer groups relations are egalitarian and women can become leaders of a band.

Feedback: In some hunter-gatherer groups, such as the Batek of Malaysia, where relations between men and women are egalitarian, women can also become leaders of a band.

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

*a. True

b. False

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 24

24) Political acts include all of the following except

Feedback: To follow political action, one must be familiar with a society’s specific rules and codes about who gets to exercise power and under what conditions. Anthropologist F. G. Bailey compared these codes to those of playing a game. In politics, as in a game, there are normative rules, fairly stable and explicit ethical norms by which players must abide, such as honesty, fair-ness, and so on. There are also pragmatic rules, which are the creative manipulations necessary to win the game itself. For example, in American politics, normative rules require political actors to be open, fair, and honest. But we know based on reading the political news in the newspaper that there are also the pragmatic rules of gaining and holding onto power, which often involve favoritism and even outright lying.

Page reference: What Is Political Power?

a. running for election.

b. protesting against police brutality.

c. gossiping about a neighbor to shame them for not fulfilling their obligations.

*d. serving as treasurer during a game of Monopoly.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 25

25) The importance of structural functionalism is that it

Feedback: During the early twentieth century, the global expansion of British colonialism coincided with and helped fuel the rise of British anthropology. Colonial authorities often turned to anthropologists to help them make sense of the foreign societies now under British control that did not have forms of government recognizable to the British. This situation presented British anthropologists with important opportunities to study the maintenance of order in societies without formal governments and political leaders. It also allowed these anthropologists to help formalize patterns of indirect rule in which local chiefs were incorporated into the new colonial administration. The theory they used to explain how these societies had maintained order was structural-functionalism, which held that the different structures of a society (religion, politics, kinship, etc.) function in an integrated way to maintain social order and equilibrium. In Africa, structural-functionalists identified numerous ways societies maintained order and social control without formal political institutions

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. helped anthropologists understand the evolution of political systems.

b. showed that violence and chaos are universal aspects of human affairs.

*c. showed that non-Western societies have order without formal government.

d. demonstrated that symbols underlie all human processes.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 26

26) Which of the following theories is most concerned with understanding how people maintain political power in their daily activities and decision-making processes?

Feedback: Action theory is an approach in the anthropological study of politics that closely follows the daily activities and decision-making processes of individual political leaders emphasizing that politics is a dynamic and competitive field of social relations in which people are constantly managing their ability to exercise power over others.

Page reference: What Is Political Power?

*a. Action theory

b. Marxist theory

c. Structural-functionalist theory

d. World systems theory

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 27

27) Identification cards are an example of

Feedback: Contemporary nation-states increasingly exercise power over their citizens by creating and managing information about them using institutionalized surveillance. Techniques of surveillance range from the mundane (national identity cards and censuses, for example) to the more secretive and sinister—such as monitoring social media, wiretapping, and hacking computers. Surveillance secures and expands leaders’ power and authority, by identifying potential opposition or non-conformity threatening their authority.
Page reference: What Is Political Power?

a. structural power.

b. violence.

*c. surveillance.

d. politics.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 28

28) How do religious rituals function politically?

Feedback: Religious rituals can also function politically, integrating a community by bringing people together around common beliefs and activities. Rituals serve political ends by legitimating community authority, ensuring group cohesion, organizing against enemies, and resolving disputes. Beliefs in witchcraft or sorcery, which provoke fear in many societies, can also promote order. Throughout Africa, for example, people who do not behave according to community norms are identified and punished as witches, a practice that maintains the social norms. They might be banished from a village, harassed, or abused physically (Marwick 1952). Without for-mal courts, structural-functionalists insisted, such practices maintain social control and operate as a rudimentary criminal justice system.

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

*a. By legitimating community authority

b. By reducing fear

c. By fostering disputes

d. They do not function politically

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 29

29) The exercise of political power in state and nonstate societies is different in all of the following respects except

Feedback: It became clear to political anthropologists by the 1980s and 1990s that certain power relationships transcend any individual. Political anthropologists began to refer to such power as structural power, which is power that not only operates within settings, but also organizes and orchestrates the settings in which social and individual action take place. “Structure” here means something very different from how the early structural-functionalists understood it. They were interested in social institutions (“structures,” as a noun), while this newer perspective focuses on the mix of social processes, relationships, and institutions that shape or “structure” (as a verb) social action.
Page reference: What Is Political Power?

a. the ways in which power is gained.

b. the uses of violence and coercion toward political ends.

*c. the importance of personal connections.

d. the ways in which power is transmitted to others.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 30

30) The exercise of political power requires

Feedback: It became clear to political anthropologists by the 1980s and 1990s that certain power relationships transcend any individual. Political anthropologists began to refer to such power as structural power, which is power that not only operates within settings, but also organizes and orchestrates the settings in which social and individual action take place. “Structure” here means something very different from how the early structural-functionalists understood it. They were interested in social institutions (“structures,” as a noun), while this newer perspective focuses on the mix of social processes, relationships, and institutions that shape or “structure” (as a verb) social action.
Page reference: What Is Political Power?

a. force.

b. violence.

c. authority.

*d. legitimacy.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 31

31) Control over symbolic, material, and human resources are important dimensions of

Feedback: Political power includes the processes by which people create, compete, and use power to attain goals that are presumed to be for the good of a community.
Page reference: What Is Political Power?

a. age-grades.

b. adjudication.

c. mediation.

*d. political power.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 32

32) Why is the description of conflict as “ethnic violence” misleading?

Feedback: During the Bosnian civil war in the 1990s, foreign journalists tended to describe acts of violence by Serbs, Croats, and Muslims as “ethnic violence” based on centuries-old hatreds between these ethnic groups. But this explanation ignores long histories of coexistence, cultural interchange, and peaceful relations that anthropologists had observed in the region. A more complex understanding of the conflict sees violence as a byproduct of a struggle over political power among nationalist leaders after the fall of communist Yugoslavia. Seeking to consolidate their hold over political power and state institutions, nationalists on all sides used the media to broadcast daily doses of fear, hatred, and dehumanizing images of people from the other “ethnic” groups. They used targeted violence on people of other ethnic backgrounds. All of these factors created fear and a sense of powerlessness among ordinary people.
Page reference: Why Do Some Societies Seem More Violent Than Others?

*a. It implies age-old conflicts are not affected by historical or political events.

b. It assumes the peaceful interactions of groups over time.

c. It ignores that violence is biological and certain “ethnic” groups are more violent than others.

d. It is not misleading because it is the way that anthropologists describe violence.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 33

33) When people describe violence as meaningless they

Feedback: In the United States, we sometimes hear in the media about events like suicide bombings in Israeli and Iraqi markets and cafés; machete attacks on innocent people in Liberia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone in Africa; or plane hijackings by some militant group, which of course happened in this country on September 11, 2001. Commentators often call these shocking acts “meaningless” and “barbaric.” But such acts are never meaningless. They are meaningful—to both victims and perpetrators—although the different sides interpret the violence very differently.
Page reference: Why Do Some Societies Seem More Violent Than Others?

a. are correct.

*b. interpret violence as something without reason.

c. humanize the perpetrators.

d. fail to justify violence as a necessary part of society.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 34

34) In many societies people resolve disputes by restoring harmony, although people are not always satisfied with this resolution. Why?

Feedback: While some anthropologists welcome the rise of alternative dispute management, others question its implicit harmony ideology. She observes that many people involved in civil wars and other large-scale conflicts do not necessarily want harmony. They want justice, fairness, and the rule of law. This is a sentiment expressed by many Mozambicans, for example, whose civil war ended in a mediated settlement in 1992. Many Mozambicans believe the settlement, which brought with it the introduction of foreign aid institutions and Inter-national Monetary Fund stabilization policies, actually deepened their woes by generating more poverty and inequality than before the war.
Page reference: Why Do Some Societies Seem More Violent Than Others?

a. Because it's better to win a dispute

b. Because most people would rather avoid the issue altogether

c. Because adversarial relationships are more effective at getting to the bottom of the problem

*d. Because of a preference for justice, fairness, and the rule of law

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 35

35) Violence between ethnic groups is not inevitable, but the idea that it is persists. Which of the following is not a reason for its persistence?

Feedback: During the Bosnian civil war in the 1990s, foreign journalists tended to describe acts of violence by Serbs, Croats, and Muslims as “ethnic violence” based on centuries-old hatreds between these ethnic groups. But this explanation ignores long histories of coexistence, cultural interchange, and peaceful relations that anthropologists had observed in the region. A more complex understanding of the conflict sees violence as a byproduct of a struggle over political power among nationalist leaders after the fall of communist Yugoslavia. Seeking to consolidate their hold over political power and state institutions, nationalists on all sides used the media to broadcast daily doses of fear, hatred, and dehumanizing images of people from the other “ethnic” groups. They used targeted violence on people of other ethnic backgrounds. All of these factors created fear and a sense of powerlessness among ordinary people.
Page reference: Why Do Some Societies Seem More Violent Than Others?

a. It offers a tidy narrative that seems to explain the world.

b. Mass media repeat the idea regularly.

c. Ethnic leaders promote the idea to gain power.

*d. Ethnic groups actually do fight with each other all the time.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 36

36) The importance of a phenomenon like “revenge suicide” in Papua New Guinea is that it

Feedback: In many societies, women may be so disempowered politically and socially that their ability to take direct action lies only in the most dramatic action of all, taking one’s own life. For example, on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, some women commit “revenge suicide” in response to abuse or shame. Here young women are powerless figures. But a woman’s act of suicide shifts the burden of shame to her tormentor (often a husband), and it can even mobilize her male relatives and other community members to acknowledge the injustice, forcing them to seek accountability from the offending party. Although taking such actions may be difficult for many Westerners to comprehend, this situation suggests we must consider forms of political power that are available to those we do not conventionally understand to be “powerful.”

Page reference: What Is Political Power?

a. demonstrates why women are irrational.

b. demonstrates why men are controlling and mean toward women.

*c. demonstrates that the nonpowerful have ways of exercising political power.

d. demonstrates the difficulty of locating structural power.

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 09 Question 37

37) In some societies witchcraft accusations can work as an informal method of social control.

Feedback: Religious rituals can also function politically, integrating a community by bringing people together around common beliefs and activities. Rituals serve political ends by legitimating community authority, ensuring group cohesion, organizing against enemies, and resolving disputes. Beliefs in witchcraft or sorcery, which provoke fear in many societies, can also promote order. Throughout Africa, for example, people who do not behave according to community norms are identified and punished as witches, a practice that maintains the social norms. They might be banished from a village, harassed, or abused physically. Without for-mal courts, structural-functionalists insisted, such practices maintain social control and operate as a rudimentary criminal justice system.

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

*a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 09 Question 38

38) People living in noncentralized political systems have generally welcomed their integration into centralized political systems because it provides greater security and prosperity for them.

Feedback: Bands and tribes in this scheme were examples of non-centralized political systems, in which power and control over resources are dispersed among members of the society. Chiefdoms and states were examples of centralized political systems, in which certain individuals and institutions hold power and control over resources. Although Sahlins and Service acknowledged that different societies followed different individual evolutionary paths, the tendency was that with increasing population density came more intensive and centralized forms of political organization.

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. True

*b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 09 Question 39

39) A key feature of political anthropologist Maxwell Owusu's perspective on democracy in Ghana is that the state will work better if village chiefs play a role in decision-making.

Feedback: Leaders of nation-states also often co-opt local political actors and their power to serve their own or their nation-state’s ends. In post-independence Ghana, for example, where chiefs, headmen, and extended family lineages control village-level resources and political processes, centralized governments have co-opted traditional non-state leaders by rewarding some with high-level positions in the state bureaucracy. Such an appointment to a governmental position makes the leader responsible at the local level for enforcing national laws and mobilizing support for state-led development programs (Owusu 1996). For several decades, anthropologist Maxwell Owusu has researched how this kind of political power works in post-independence Ghana. He has advocated formally incorporating non-state political leaders into nation-state functions.

Page reference: What Is Political Power?

*a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 09 Question 40

40) The central idea of Evans-Pritchard's concept of segmentary lineages is that the Nuer people have organized themselves politically into stable lineages, or segments.

Feedback: Many early political anthropologists originally assumed African or Pacific societies were essentially untouched by contact with the West. But many of these “traditional” political systems were not “traditional” at all, as they had been put in place by the British colonial policy of “Indirect Rule,” which allowed local rulers to exercise administrative control over their people through whatever existing power structure was in place when the British arrived.

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. True

*b. False

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 41

41) A structural-functionalist would be most likely to analyze violence as

Feedback: During the early twentieth century, the global expansion of British colonialism coincided with and helped fuel the rise of British anthropology. Colonial authorities often turned to anthropologists to help them make sense of the foreign societies now under British control that did not have forms of government recognizable to the British. This situation presented British anthropologists with important opportunities to study the maintenance of order in societies without formal governments and political leaders. It also allowed these anthropologists to help formalize patterns of indirect rule in which local chiefs were incorporated into the new colonial administration. The theory they used to explain how these societies had maintained order was structural-functionalism, which held that the different structures of a society (religion, politics, kinship, etc.) function in an integrated way to maintain social order and equilibrium. In Africa, structural-functionalists identified numerous ways societies maintained order and social control without formal political institutions

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. a reflection of deep ethnic hatreds.

b. an innate condition of humanity.

c. the best way to create segmentary lineages.

*d. a means of creating and maintaining social order.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 42

42) The neo-evolutionary typology of political systems would classify the role of president of the city council in your hometown as

Feedback: In the 1940s and 1950s, as political anthropology was taking shape in the United States, Ameri-can anthropologists called “neo-evolutionists” sought to classify the world’s diverse political systems and explain how complex political systems, especially states, had evolved from simpler forms of social and political organization. Anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service suggested a typology of societies with different forms of political and economic organization. By considering who controls food and other resources in any given society, they defined four types of society: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. This typology was intended both to describe different kinds of society as well as to explain how more complex political forms had developed from simpler ones.

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. headman of a tribe.

b. a big man.

*c. a bureaucrat in a centralized state.

d. a chief.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 43

43) An action theorist studying political power in the US Senate would be especially interested in

Feedback: Action theory is an approach in the anthropological study of politics that closely follows the daily activities and decision-making processes of individual political leaders emphasizing that politics is a dynamic and competitive field of social relations in which people are constantly managing their ability to exercise power over others.

Page reference: What Is Political Power?

*a. the normative rules of conduct that senators are supposed to follow.

b. the way the field of social relations structures senators' interactions.

c. the ways female senators exercise power in a male-dominated institution.

d. the delegation of political power from one individual to another.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 44

44) You and your sibling are fighting over who gets to use the family car. When your parent intervenes and seeks a solution that is agreeable to both of you, it is an example of

Feedback: Mediation entails a third party who intervenes in a dispute to aid the parties in reaching an agreement.

Page reference: How Do People Avoid Aggression, Brutality, and War?

a. adjudication.

b. negotiation.

*c. mediation.

d. avoidance.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 45

45) Which of the following is NOT a research agenda that focuses on structural power?

Feedback: It became clear to political anthropologists by the 1980s and 1990s that certain power relation-ships transcend any individual. Political anthropologists began to refer to such power as structural power, which is power that not only operates within settings, but also organizes and orchestrates the settings in which social and individual action take place. “Structure” here means something very different from how the early structural-functionalists under-stood it. They were interested in social institutions (“structures,” as a noun), while this newer perspective focuses on the mix of social processes, relationships, and institutions that shape or “structure” (as a verb) social action.
Page reference: What Is Political Power?

a. An examination of the U.S. census office and how people shape their actions when asked census questions

*b. A study of children bullying each other on the playground in Brazil

c. A study about policies related to hygiene and family management and the result on reproductive practices among Italian families after World War I

d. An examination of laborers on banana plantations in Costa Rica, where workers have limited potential for wealth accumulation due to foreign ownership of plantations

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 09 Question 46

46) Which of the following explanations of political relationships among the !Kung would be least likely to come from a traditional political anthropologist?

Feedback: Until they were brought under the control of the Namibian and South African governments, Ju/’hoa did not even have a notion of a distinct political sphere. In Ju/’hoa groups, important band decisions have historically been made by group consensus. Life is organized around sharing food, and those who do not share are taunted and shamed mercilessly, or even pushed out of the band. The emphasis on sharing and egalitarianism has been a means of keeping people more or less in line without the need for government or laws (a set of rules established by some formal authority).

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

a. The !Kung make decisions as a group.

b. The !Kung use food-sharing as a way to equalize relationships.

*c. The !Kung have to navigate complex politics as ethnic minorities in states that don't want them.

d. The way politics works among the !Kung is the most basic form of human politics.

Type: Short Answer

Title: Chapter 09 Question 47

47) How might an advocate of structural power explain the use of a census by the US government?

Feedback: It became clear to political anthropologists by the 1980s and 1990s that certain power relation-ships transcend any individual. Political anthropologists began to refer to such power as structural power, which is power that not only operates within settings, but also organizes and orchestrates the settings in which social and individual action take place. “Structure” here means something very different from how the early structural-functionalists under-stood it. They were interested in social institutions (“structures,” as a noun), while this newer perspective focuses on the mix of social processes, relationships, and institutions that shape or “structure” (as a verb) social action.
Page reference: What Is Political Power?

Type: Short Answer

Title: Chapter 09 Question 48

48) Is action theory applicable to a study of a sports team? Explain your answer.

Feedback: Action theory is an approach in the anthropological study of politics that closely follows the daily activities and decision-making processes of individual political leaders emphasizing that politics is a dynamic and competitive field of social relations in which people are constantly managing their ability to exercise power over others.

Page reference: What Is Political Power?

Type: Short Answer

Title: Chapter 09 Question 49

49) What are the primary strengths of the gendered approach to political power? Give an example of a project in which you might use it.

Feedback: Political power operates in multidimensional ways: it is action-oriented, it is structural, and it is gendered. It also tends to operate in particular ways in non-state contexts as well as in modern nation-states.

Page reference: What Is Political Power?

Type: essay/short answer questions

Title: Chapter 09 Question 50

50) How would you use structural-functionalism in a study of how order in your university is maintained?

Feedback: During the early twentieth century, the global expansion of British colonialism coincided with and helped fuel the rise of British anthropology. Colonial authorities often turned to anthropologists to help them make sense of the foreign societies now under British control that did not have forms of government recognizable to the British. This situation presented British anthropologists with important opportunities to study the maintenance of order in societies without formal governments and political leaders. It also allowed these anthropologists to help formalize patterns of indirect rule in which local chiefs were incorporated into the new colonial administration. The theory they used to explain how these societies had maintained order was structural-functionalism, which held that the different structures of a society (religion, politics, kinship, etc.) function in an integrated way to maintain social order and equilibrium. In Africa, structural-functionalists identified numerous ways societies maintained order and social control without formal political institutions

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

Type: essay/short answer questions

Title: Chapter 09 Question 51

51) What role do you think perspectives drawn from political anthropology could play in governing a country?

Feedback: Legal anthropology, the branch of political anthropology interested in such matters, has identified a number of ways people manage disputes. Some strategies are in-formal, including avoidance, competition, ritual, and play.
Page reference: How Do People Avoid Aggression, Brutality, and War?

Type: essay/short answer questions

Title: Chapter 09 Question 52

52) Is there structural power in the United States? If not, why? If so, give an example and use the discussion of structural power from the book to make your case.

Feedback: It became clear to political anthropologists by the 1980s and 1990s that certain power relationships transcend any individual. Political anthropologists began to refer to such power as structural power, which is power that not only operates within settings, but also organizes and orchestrates the settings in which social and individual action take place. “Structure” here means something very different from how the early structural-functionalists understood it. They were interested in social institutions (“structures,” as a noun), while this newer perspective focuses on the mix of social processes, relationships, and institutions that shape or “structure” (as a verb) social action.
Page reference: What Is Political Power?

Type: essay/short answer questions

Title: Chapter 09 Question 53

53) How do societies that do not have central governments maintain order?

Feedback: Bands and tribes in this scheme were examples of non-centralized political systems, in which power and control over resources are dispersed among members of the society. Chiefdoms and states were examples of centralized political systems, in which certain individuals and institutions hold power and control over resources. Although Sahlins and Service acknowledged that different societies followed different individual evolutionary paths, the tendency was that with increasing population density came more intensive and centralized forms of political organization.

Page reference: Does Every Society Have a Government?

Type: essay/short answer questions

Title: Chapter 09 Question 54

54) How does political power work in both state and nonstate societies?

Feedback: Political power includes the processes by which people create, compete, and use power to attain goals that are presumed to be for the good of a community.
Page reference: What Is Political Power?

Type: essay/short answer questions

Title: Chapter 09 Question 55

55) How is violence culturally constructed?

Feedback: Anthropologists have long observed that violence and the threat of violence, far from implying chaos, can actually encourage social order. Contrary to stereotypes of violence as chaotic and antisocial, violent acts are ordered because they reflect culturally specific patterns, rules, and ethical codes. These patterns define when and why violence is acceptable, what forms of violence are appropriate, and who can engage in violent acts.

Page reference: Why Do Some Societies Seem More Violent Than Others?