Chapter 15 Materiality & Social Meaning Test Bank Docx

Chapter 15: Materiality: Constructing Social Relationships and Meanings with Things

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 01

1) For anthropologists, materiality refers to

Feedback: Materiality is having the quality of being physical or material.
Page reference: Why Is the Ownership of Artifacts from Other Cultures a Contentious Issue?

a. having the quality of being physical or material.

b. technologically simple objects.

c. only objects that are aesthetically pleasing.

d. American Indian objects.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 02

2) Museums were the ______ place where anthropologists studied objects and art.

Feedback: In the United States, the discipline of anthropology began in museums, arising amidst the scramble to put together collections of cultural, archaeological, linguistic, and biological data to document the human story. At first, most of the material culture displayed in American museums was from Native Americans in the Western states. From 1850, many of these objects were held in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
Page reference: Why Is the Ownership of Artifacts from Other Cultures a Contentious Issue?

a. First

b. Last

c. Most important

d. Least important

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 03

3) Repatriation refers to:

Feedback: Repatriation is the return of human remains or cultural artifacts to the communities of descend-ants of the people to whom they originally belonged.
Page reference: Why Is the Ownership of Artifacts from Other Cultures a Contentious Issue?

a. the return of human remains and artifacts to the communities of descendants of the people to whom they originally belonged.

b. a prominent and early American Indian activist group.

c. programs that provide financial support to maintain sites of importance to humanity.

d. a practice in the Old World of preserving archaeological sites.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 04

4) For anthropologists, the most important aspect of any object is

Feedback: The idea that inanimate things have social lives is based on the assumption that things have forms, uses, and trajectories that are intertwined in complex ways with people’s lives. Just as people pass through different socially recognized phases of life, objects have “careers” (in the sense of having a course or progression) with recognizable phases, from their creation, exchange, and uses, to their eventual discard. Along the way, it is possible to identify social relationships and cultural ideologies that influence each period in this career. Across cultures, these relation-ships and ideologies can vary drastically.

Page reference: Why Is the Ownership of Artifacts from Other Cultures a Contentious Issue?

a. its aesthetic quality.

b. the value of the object at an auction.

c. how it emerges from and exists within a set of human social relationships.

d. how the use of its raw materials affects the environment.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 05

5) UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites program

Feedback: Many countries have implemented legislation and programs of their own to recognize and protect historic sites, and most governments support UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites program, which provides financial support to maintain sites of importance to humanity. The majority of the 814 cultural heritage sites currently recognized by UNESCO’s program have played a key role in human history. Five of them are sites where early fossil hominids have been found in Africa, China, and Australia. Others are key archaeological sites, such as the pyramids of Giza and the temples and palaces of Ancient Thebes in Egypt, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Chichén Itzá in Mexico, Mesa Verde in Colorado, and the moai statues on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), all of which are typical of what we often think of as ancient historic and prehistoric sites. Many others are historic cities like Fez in Morocco.
Page reference: Why Is the Ownership of Artifacts from Other Cultures a Contentious Issue?

a. assists with determining ownership of material culture.

b. provides financial support to maintain sites of importance to humanity.

c. was founded in 1968 by the American Indian Movement.

d. is of little importance to anthropologists.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 06

6) Which of the following groups is a prominent American Indian rights group founded in 1968?

Feedback: During the 1970s, activists associated with the American Indian Movement (AIM), a prominent American Indian rights group founded in 1968, began to protest how national, state, and local officials treated Indian remains.
Page reference: Why Is the Ownership of Artifacts from Other Cultures a Contentious Issue?

a. NAGPRA

b. American Indian movement

c. World Heritage movement

d. Civil Rights movement

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 07

7) On the north coast of Papua New Guinea, a religious cult leader name Barjani was remembered through which object?

Feedback: An interesting illustration comes from the island of Walis along the north coast of Papua New Guinea, as witnessed by Robert Welsch, one of the authors of this textbook, in 1993. A century earlier, a religious cult leader named Barjani had foretold the coming of Europeans and was believed to be a prophet. After his death, his family’s clansmen had erected a shrine for him, where people in need of supernatural assistance could leave a small amount of money or tobacco to ensure Barjani’s assistance. When Welsch and his colleague, John Terrell, went to see the shrine, they were mostly interested in the building’s historically important architectural style. The real surprise came when they climbed the small ladder to peer into Barjani’s shrine. The interior of the small shrine held a single object in a place of honor on a simple but small platform of palm leaves: an old and well-worn bowler hat, much like the one Charlie Chaplin wore in some of his movies.

Page reference: How Should We Look at Objects Anthropologically?

a. His shoes

b. His hat

c. His staff

d. His cloak

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 08

8) The idea that things have social lives refers to which of the following?

Feedback: The idea that inanimate things have social lives is based on the assumption that things have forms, uses, and trajectories that are intertwined in complex ways with people’s lives. Just as people pass through different socially recognized phases of life, objects have “careers” (in the sense of having a course or progression) with recognizable phases, from their creation, exchange, and uses, to their eventual discard. Along the way, it is possible to identify social relationships and cultural ideologies that influence each period in this career. Across cultures, these relation-ships and ideologies can vary drastically.

Page reference: Why Is the Ownership of Artifacts from Other Cultures a Contentious Issue?

a. A belief in animism because objects are often linked to particular spirits

b. Most objects that anthropologists study are either relics or sacred objects

c. The fact that objects are deeply intertwined with people's lives

d. They are imbued with life via sacred ceremonies

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 09

9) When objects begin to take on mystical powers and engender obsessive desire and worship it is called

Feedback: Commodity fetish is the view of Karl Marx that commodities exercise a strange kind of power over people, controlling their attention and becoming objects of obsessive desire and worship.
Page reference: How Do Objects Help Shape and Express Our Goals and Aspirations?

a. magic.

b. an appreciation for aesthetics.

c. artistic sensibility.

d. commodity fetishism.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 10

10) Karl Marx discussed the changing nature of commodities in his book

Feedback: As described in Capital, in an industrial factory, a worker makes only part of an object, and he or she has no such relationship with either the fruits of his or her labor or with the buyer. The result, Marx asserted, was the creation of a widespread feeling of alienation, or antagonistic detachment, be-tween workers and the commodities they produce, as well as between these workers and the buyers of the goods. As this sense of alienation between people and goods expanded, objects were no longer valued as much for how useful they were, or for the human sweat, ingenuity, and social cooperation that went into them. What held people’s attention now were issues like wages, working conditions, and the trading values of the commodities.

Page reference: How Do Objects Help Shape and Express Our Goals and Aspirations?

a. Capital.

b. The German Ideology.

c. The Forest People.

d. The Encyclopedia of African Art

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 11

11) Which term refers to the cultural perspectives and social processes that shape and are shaped by how goods and services are bought, sold, and used in contemporary capitalism?

Feedback: Culture of mass consumption is the cultural perspectives and social processes that shape and are shaped by how goods and services are bought, sold, and used in contemporary capitalism.
Page reference: How Do Objects Help Shape and Express Our Goals and Aspirations?

a. Commodity fetishism

b. Alienation

c. Mass consumption

d. Art

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 12

12) When people consume films cross-culturally, they

a. embed local concerns and interpretations into the storytelling.

b. usually cannot make sense of it on their own.

c. typically understand how the director wanted them to perceive the film.

d. are often offended by the stereotypes they see depicted on film.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 13

13) Alienation occurs when

a. a worker hand-crafts an object.

b. a worker makes only part of an object.

c. someone gives a gift.

d. someone destroys an object.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 14

14) A key way that objects are used to manipulate people comes through which of the following?

a. Commodity fetishism

b. Advertising

c. Stealing and various kinds of fraud

d. Austerity

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 15

15) Advertisers have trained American consumers to focus on the newest and most exciting products through their

a. constant innovations and improvements.

b. attempts to constantly frame their products as new and improved.

c. removal and destruction of old stock to make way for new products.

d. disparaging remarks about celebrities.

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 15 Question 16

16) Repatriation is the act of returning human remains or cultural artifacts to the communities of descendants of the people to whom they originally belonged.

a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 15 Question 17

17) Anthropologists have found that people imprint themselves and their pasts onto objects.

a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 15 Question 18

18) The social life of things refers to the changing meanings and significance that objects take on over years, decades, and even centuries.

a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 15 Question 19

19) The stereotype that Tahitian women were sexually promiscuous emerged almost overnight after the arrival of Captain Samuel Wallis in 1767, when Tahitians recognized that the British had steel that the crew would exchange for sexual favors.

a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 15 Question 20

20) The objects in a college student's dorm room have great personal meaning for the student but may mean something entirely different to everyone else in the dormitory.

a. True

b. False

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 21

21) Thrones, staffs, shrines, and distinctive or ornamented objects are often used to display people's

a. beauty.

b. art.

c. power.

d. aesthetic criteria.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 22

22) Most African masks were

a. exact likenesses to the animal they were representing.

b. used as everyday objects.

c. symbolic.

d. well understood by European art historians.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 23

23) The earliest engagement anthropologists had with material culture happened where?

a. In the flea markets of Paris, where artists like Picasso bought African art objects that inspired many of their paintings

b. In the great palaces of Asia in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China

c. In the gift shops of the world's great art museums, which sold cheap examples of primitive art

d. In museums where objects from around the world were originally seen as evidence of how primitive or civilized different societies were

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 24

24) For a society to have a separate occupational category of artist, it needs to have which of the following characteristics?

a. It must be creative and allow its youth to explore the world around them.

b. It must be small and isolated from contamination of ideas from outside.

c. It must have a considerable degree of social stratification and lots of different kinds of occupational categories.

d. Its people must be ethnocentric.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 25

25) To illustrate the dimensions that all objects possess, the textbook discusses a “shiny new bicycle.” Why is this example useful to illustrate dimensionality?

a. Bicycles have been around for a while, but they are becoming an important commodity since Americans started producing them in factories again.

b. Actually, any object would do just as well, but most Americans are familiar with bicycles.

c. The latest iPhone would have been a better choice because it would emphasize the latest technology.

d. Bicycles are typically only available to the highest social classes in any society.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 26

26) Archaeologists find it easiest to study changing styles and fashions through which of the following classes of object?

a. Bones

b. Tools

c. Burials

d. Pottery

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 27

27) People's fascination with having the newest Nike shoes or iPhone is an example of which of the following anthropological concepts?

a. Commodity fetishism

b. High aesthetic taste

c. A flair for style

d. Repatriation

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 28

28) Which of the following is not one of the ways that objects change over time?

Feedback: All tangible property has a biography that is profoundly shaped by culture. Paying attention to the biography of a thing—its life course from its origins through its distribution, uses, and eventual discard—can uncover important social relationships and cultural dynamics.
Page reference: How and Why Do the Meanings of Things Change Over Time?

a. the form, shape, color, material, and use may change from generation to generation.

b. an object changes significance and meaning as its social and physical contexts change.

c. a single object changes significance and meaning as it changes hands.

d. an object always becomes less valuable and less significant as it ages and deteriorates over long periods of time.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 29

29) When workers make only part of an object rather than the whole product, they have less of a relationship with the fruits of their labor. Karl Marx suggested that this changed relationship with the objects they were producing created a feeling of

Feedback: Alienation is the antagonistic detachment between workers and the commodities they produce, as well as between these workers and the buyers of the goods.
Page reference: How Do Objects Help Shape and Express Our Goals and Aspirations?

a. freedom.

b. joy over what they had made.

c. boredom with the process of production.

d. alienation.

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 15 Question 30

30) Most anthropologists see the consumption of an object or commodity as an antisocial act.

Feedback: Consumption is the social act of using and assigning meaning to a good, service, or relationship.

Page reference: How Do Objects Help Shape and Express Our Goals and Aspirations?

a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 15 Question 31

31) Objects and visual images have many things in common because both can be used to construct meaning for people.

Feedback: Material culture includes the objects made and used in any society, which is of special interest to anthropologists. Traditionally, the term referred to technologically simple objects made in preindustrial societies, but “material culture” may refer to all of the objects or commodities of modern life as well, including all the latest electronic gadgets, smartphones, and tablets.
Page reference: Why Is the Ownership of Artifacts from Other Cultures a Contentious Issue?

a. True

b. False

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 32

32) Just before World War II anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Jane Richardson published one of the earliest analyses of a modern commodity, focusing in particular on women's skirts. If you were going to build on their study by examining basketball shorts and jerseys, which of the following would you collect data about?

Feedback: Just before World War II, anthropologists Jane Richardson and Alfred Kroeber (1940) published an analysis of skirt length in women’s dresses over the previous 300 years. Studying all sorts of pattern books, sketches, and photographs of women’s dresses, they documented how styles of dresses had changed over this period. They found that skirt length had risen and fallen in ways that most women were unaware of. In a more or less predictable way, hem length fluctuated from extremes of long to short over a 50-year period or cycle. Subsequent studies since 1940 have suggested that this cycle has now shortened to about 20 or 25 years.

Page reference: How And Why Do the Meanings of Things Change Over Time?

a. The size of men's basketball shoes and how these are related to the average height of American men

b. How the makers of basketball jerseys have focused on primary colors

c. The length of basketball shorts from one period to another

d. The association between jersey quality and success in shooting baskets

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 33

33) If anthropologist Daniel Miller were studying the production of a commercial product like blue jeans, he would likely want to understand:

Feedback: British anthropologist Daniel Miller (1987), who built on the other two volumes to construct an argument that things matter for understanding the social life of people because things are so important to all human beings in ways they are not for all other animals. In his 1987 volume Mate-rial Culture and Mass Consumption, Miller introduced the notion that anthropologists should not overlook the commodities of modern cultures, because they mean important things to ordinary people. Even though smartphones, blue jeans, and automobiles are made in distant, impersonal factories, they are meaningful to people because they are so much a part of daily life.

Page reference: How Do Objects Help Shape and Express Our Goals and Aspirations?

a. how blue jeans create images of social status and position within a community.

b. how blue jeans have become so commonplace that they no longer function to mark people's identity.

c. how blue jeans are no longer used as work pants as they originally were in the 1870s and 1880s.

d. how blue jeans became available in numerous colors.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 34

34) A century ago, studies of objects were largely studies of material culture and the technology available to people living in small-scale societies with simple technologies. The modern anthropological approach to objects has done which of the following?

Feedback: In the United States, the discipline of anthropology began in museums, arising amidst the scramble to put together collections of cultural, archaeological, linguistic, and biological data to document the human story. At first, most of the material culture displayed in American museums was from Native Americans in the Western states. From 1850, many of these objects were held in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
Page reference: Why Is the Ownership of Artifacts from Other Cultures a Contentious Issue?

a. Caused anthropologists to accept that museum collections are accurate representatives of the technologies of the time

b. Led anthropologists to recognize that objects do not change meaning over time

c. Pushed anthropologists to take a critical approach to the motives of the collectors of these early museum collections

d. Led to the removal of all objects in museums that are associated with indigenous peoples

Type: Short Answer

Title: Chapter 15 Question 35

35) How does the example of Barjani's bowler hat illustrate that objects have “social lives”?

Feedback: An interesting illustration comes from the island of Walis along the north coast of Papua New Guinea, as witnessed by Robert Welsch, one of the authors of this textbook, in 1993. A century earlier, a religious cult leader named Barjani had foretold the coming of Europeans and was believed to be a prophet. After his death, his family’s clansmen had erected a shrine for him, where people in need of supernatural assistance could leave a small amount of money or tobacco to ensure Barjani’s assistance. When Welsch and his colleague, John Terrell, went to see the shrine, they were mostly interested in the building’s historically important architectural style. The real surprise came when they climbed the small ladder to peer into Barjani’s shrine. The interior of the small shrine held a single object in a place of honor on a simple but small platform of palm leaves: an old and well-worn bowler hat, much like the one Charlie Chaplin wore in some of his movies.

Page reference: How Should We Look at Objects Anthropologically?

Type: Short Answer

Title: Chapter 15 Question 36

36) If you wanted to study the influence and power of beer commercials on college students and other younger adults, who would you interview and why would you focus on this group of people?

Feedback: If large corporations want to survive and expand, they have to persuade consumers to buy their products and not those of one of their competitors. To persuade you to buy their product, they bombard you with advertising that will encourage you to think that their product is necessary for a fulfilling life and that their brand is more likely to help you reach your goals than any other brand. Advertisers proudly announce that they are simply passing on useful information to consumers, but we know that they are really trying to convince us that we need their product. We think of this ad-making as part of the process of manipulating our world through a symbolic framing or reframing of their products.
Page reference: How Do Objects Help Shape and Express Our Goals and Aspirations?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 37

37) Consider any object belonging to your roommate or someone down the hall from your dorm room. Explain how this object has several dimensions and how these dimensions would help you understand your subject's outlook, goals, aspirations, and identity in the world.

Feedback: The late historian of anthropology George W. Stocking, Jr., edited an influential book called Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture (1985). Stocking’s introduction to this book explained that anthropology’s history began with the study of objects in museums decades before anthropologists even began conducting their own field research. Using these collections, they developed crude analyses of how civilized, barbaric, or primitive a society was from the kinds of objects they had or did not have. Later, when anthropologists started conducting fieldwork, they noticed firsthand the importance of objects in rituals, social exchanges, and political activities. Anthropologists began to look at objects to understand the meaning of rituals, the interconnections between people who exchanged particular objects, and the social stratification within a society that could be seen in the presence or absence of objects in a particular household or community.
Page reference: How Should We Look at Objects Anthropologically?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 38

38) When Samsung and Apple ads run on TV and web pages they often present their own product as superior to the other. Most of the time we assume they are comparing their products for our benefit. But if viewed in another way, they are reinforcing a number of assumptions, perspectives, or interpretations that both companies share and that both firms want you as a consumer to accept without any thought. What might these shared assumptions, perspectives, and interpretations be; and how does each company convey this message?

Feedback: If large corporations want to survive and expand, they have to persuade consumers to buy their products and not those of one of their competitors. To persuade you to buy their product, they bombard you with advertising that will encourage you to think that their product is necessary for a fulfilling life and that their brand is more likely to help you reach your goals than any other brand. Advertisers proudly announce that they are simply passing on useful information to consumers, but we know that they are really trying to convince us that we need their product. We think of this ad-making as part of the process of manipulating our world through a symbolic framing or reframing of their products.
Page reference: How Do Objects Help Shape and Express Our Goals and Aspirations?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 39

39) What difference has it made in the kinds of questions anthropologists ask about objects when the discipline stopped thinking of museum collections as being simply evidence of how simple societies interacted with their physical and social environment and began asking how did these particular objects come to be in the museum in the first place?

Feedback: In the United States, the discipline of anthropology began in museums, arising amidst the scramble to put together collections of cultural, archaeological, linguistic, and biological data to document the human story. At first, most of the material culture displayed in American museums was from Native Americans in the Western states. From 1850, many of these objects were held in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
Page reference: Why Is the Ownership of Artifacts from Other Cultures a Contentious Issue?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 40

40) What role do you think the anthropology of art, objects, and visual culture could play in how advertisers, manufacturers, and filmmakers design and present their products to the public?

Feedback: If large corporations want to survive and expand, they have to persuade consumers to buy their products and not those of one of their competitors. To persuade you to buy their product, they bombard you with advertising that will encourage you to think that their product is necessary for a fulfilling life and that their brand is more likely to help you reach your goals than any other brand. Advertisers proudly announce that they are simply passing on useful information to consumers, but we know that they are really trying to convince us that we need their product. We think of this ad-making as part of the process of manipulating our world through a symbolic framing or reframing of their products.
Page reference: How Do Objects Help Shape and Express Our Goals and Aspirations?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 15 Question 41

41) Why are objects and images powerful in shaping the way people think about themselves and their personal identities?

Feedback: Marx’s understanding of the culture of mass consumption is influential because it explains the changes in human relations that came with the rise of commodity production. But with his focus on commodity production, Marx paid little attention to the process of consumption and how people actually acquire, use, and make sense of what they consume. Rather than look at consumption as an antisocial act, many anthropologists who study it have concluded that it is a deeply social, not anti-social, act. Seeking out and possessing consumer goods is a key means through which people define and express who they are: their social status, economic means, gender identities, aesthetic sensibilities, individual qualities of taste and discernment, and identification with a certain social class or interest group.

Page reference: How Do Objects Help Shape and Express Our Goals and Aspirations?