Chapter 5 Globalization and Culture Exam Questions

Chapter 5: Globalization and Culture: Understanding Global Interconnections

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 01

1) Globalization is the

Feedback: Globalization is the widening scale of cross-cultural interactions caused by the rapid movement of money, people, goods, images, and ideas within nations and across national boundaries.
Page reference: Is the World Really Getting Smaller?

a. idea that cultural characteristics result from internal historical dynamism.

b. process of relationships being limited to those within nation-state boundaries.

c. field that studies the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism.

*d. widening scale of cross-cultural interactions caused by the rapid movement of money, people, goods, images, and ideas within nations and across national boundaries.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 02

2) Cultural differences are often caused by

Feedback: Mainstream anthropology was locally focused, based on research in face-to-face village settings. But as encounters among societies have seemed to intensify, anthropologists have realized that paying attention only to local settings gives an incomplete understanding of people’s lives. It also gives an incomplete understanding of the causes of cultural differences. As we will see, differences often emerge not in spite of, but because of, interconnections.

Page reference: Is the World Really Getting Smaller?

a. the isolation of communities.

*b. interconnections between societies.

c. innovations within a single society.

d. insulated incidences of rapid technological change.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 03

3) Rapid increases in the scale and amount of communication

Feedback: At the heart of globalization are rapid increases in the scale and amount of communication taking place. With smartphones, the Internet, and email accessible in most parts of the world, it is clear that the scale of contact has made a quantum leap forward over the past generation. Such rapid and much more frequent communication means that people in very remote places can be in con-tact with people almost anywhere on the globe. Never before has this capability been possible.

Page reference: Is the World Really Getting Smaller?

a. are relatively even throughout the world.

b. include narrow use of computers and cell phones.

*c. mean that people in remote places can be in contact with people all over the world.

d. level socioeconomic inequalities around the world.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 04

4) Financial globalization has allowed for

Feedback: In the modern era, financial globalization involving the reduction or elimination of tariffs to pro-mote trade across borders began in the 1870s. Although the two world wars disrupted those pro-cesses, the past 70 years have seen their reemergence. In recent decades, finance and the rapid movement of money across national boundaries have allowed corporations to move factories from one country to another. A generation ago, U.S. factories moved their operations to Mexico and China, but now many of these same factories have been shuttered and relocated to Honduras or Vietnam because of rising hourly labor costs in Mexico and China.

Page reference: Is the World Really Getting Smaller?

a. wealth to be evenly distributed throughout the world.

*b. corporations to move factories from one country to another.

c. the minimum wage to stay the same.

d. industries to stabilize in their traditional geographic areas.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 05

5) Eric Wolf encouraged anthropologists to consider what in their field studies?

Feedback: Wolf rejected the customary divisions we make between “West” and “non-West.” He insisted that people in the periphery also have helped shape the world system, because they have not responded passively to capitalist expansion. In fact, they have often resisted it. These are the common people usually ignored by the victorious elites when they wrote their histories. Wolf argued that we need to pay close attention to the peripheral people’s active role in world history.
Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

a. Language

b. Economics

*c. History

d. Sexuality

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 06

6) Push-pull factors

Feedback: Push-pull factors include the social, economic, and political factors that “push” people to migrate from their homes and that “pull” them to host countries.

Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

a. describe the factors that contribute the elevation of tides worldwide.

b. explain why colonists adventured to the new world.

c. provide the foundation for determining the difference between core and periphery nations.

*d. describe the factors that “push” people to migrate from their homes and that “pull” them to host countries.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 07

7) Development anthropologists often think of themselves as

Feedback: Development anthropology is the application of anthropological knowledge and research methods to the practical aspects of shaping and implementing development projects.
Page reference: Doesn’t Everyone Want to Be Developed?

a. critics of USAID and other development institutions.

*b. advocates of poor and marginalized people.

c. objective observers.

d. advocates for policy planners.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 08

8) James Ferguson, who is an anthropologist of development, argues that development exists

Feedback: Ferguson’s point is that people in rural Lesotho are not poor because they live in a remote area and lack capitalism; they are poor because their labor is exploited in South Africa. But by viewing poverty as a lack of technical improvements in the rural countryside, the project failed to address the socioeconomic inequalities and subordination that are the underlying causes of poverty in rural Lesotho. All of this misunderstanding led to one major unexpected consequence: the arrival of government development bureaucrats to put the development project’s technologies in place undermined the power of traditional village chiefs. Ferguson concluded that development exists, not to alleviate poverty, but to reinforce and expand bureaucratic state power at the expense of local communities.
Page reference: Doesn’t Everyone Want to Be Developed?

a. to alleviate poverty.

b. to improve working conditions for farmers.

*c. to expand state power.

d. to enhance access to new technologies such as cell phones.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 09

9) Some social networks are so spatially disbursed that migrants participate a community that spans multiple countries, referred to as a

Feedback: In some circumstances, social networks are so spatially extended that migrants participate in a transnational community. Roger Rouse documented this phenomenon while studying the effects of migration on the rural Mexican village of Aguililla. As a result of out-migration, Aguilillans were scattered across multiple outposts and settlements in urban Mexico and the United States. Nevertheless, community members still felt that they were members of a single social unit, and they maintained close social, kin, and economic ties through regular phone contact and movement of individuals between settlements, and by ensuring that important decisions were made collectively.

Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

a. Postcolonialism

b. Globalization

*c. Transnational community

d. Hybridization

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 10

10) Hybridization is about

Feedback: Hybridization is persistent cultural mixing that has no predetermined direction or end-point.
Page reference: If the World Is Not Becoming Homogenized, What Is Actually Happening?

a. maintaining distinct ethnic boundaries.

b. technological inequality.

c. defining a direction for change.

*d. cultural mixing.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 11

11) The process of promoting one culture over others, through formal policy or less formal means, is referred to as

Feedback: Cultural imperialism is the promotion of one culture over others, through formal policy or less formal means, like the spread of technology and material culture.
Page reference: If the World Is Not Becoming Homogenized, What Is Actually Happening?

a. Coca-Colonization.

b. cultural relativism.

c. localization.

*d. cultural imperialism.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 12

12) ________________ are people who leave their homes to work for a time in other regions or countries.

Feedback: Migrants are people who leave their homes to live or work for a time in other regions or countries.

Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

*a. Migrants

b. Immigrants

c. Refugees

d. Exiles

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 13

13) Today, anthropologists assert that

Feedback: Nowadays, nearly every anthropologist accepts that it is impossible to make sense of local cultural realities without some understanding of the broader political, economic, and social conditions that also shape people’s lives. The problem is that anthropologists have typically conducted their studies in a single field site (a village, community, tribe, or district), while the transnational or transregional connections may be very far away. So how can anthropologists simultaneously study a local phenomenon in a community and the national or international factors and forces shaping that community?

Page reference: How Can Anthropologists Study Global Interconnections?

*a. it is impossible to make sense of local cultural realities without understanding broader political, economic, and social conditions.

b. we can understand “villages” on their own terms without understanding broader forces such as economics.

c. the idea of community is no longer relevant because of globalization.

d. the ethnographic research method is no longer valid.

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 05 Question 14

14) The processes of capital accumulation and the expansion of European colonialism disrupted many societies.

Feedback: For several decades, world systems theory has provided the social sciences with an important theoretical lens for understanding global inequality. Developed by economic historians André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, world systems theory rejects the idea that global inter-connections are anything new, identifying the late fifteenth century as the beginning of a new capitalist world order that connected different parts of the world in new ways. During this historical period, according to world systems theory, the expansion of overseas European colonies was enabled by and rooted in the creation of a global capitalist market.
Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

*a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 05 Question 15

15) People in the periphery responded passively to capitalist expansion.

Feedback: Wolf rejected the customary divisions we make between “West” and “non-West.” He insisted that people in the periphery also have helped shape the world system, because they have not responded passively to capitalist expansion. In fact, they have often resisted it. These are the common people usually ignored by the victorious elites when they wrote their histories. Wolf argued that we need to pay close attention to the peripheral people’s active role in world history.
Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

a. True

*b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 05 Question 16

16) Localization is the creation and assertion of highly particular, place-based identities and communities.

Feedback: Localization is the creation and assertion of highly particular, place-based identities and communities.
Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

*a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 05 Question 17

17) Anthropologists are generally ignored by “development” experts at institutions like the World Bank.

Feedback: As a result of pressure from anthropologists and other social activists, governments and major development organizations like the World Bank began to commission social impact studies to understand the potential impacts of their projects, and to try to alleviate the negative effects on local populations. Today, many anthropologists work in development agencies, both internationally (such as in USAID) and domestically (in community development organizations). One indication of how successful anthropologists’ contributions to development have been is that the cur-rent director of the World Bank, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, is an anthropologist.
Page reference: Doesn’t Everyone Want to Be Developed?

a. True

*b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 05 Question 18

18) When people consume the same clothes, food, and goods they eventually think and behave the same.

Feedback: Mainstream anthropology was locally focused, based on research in face-to-face village settings. But as encounters among societies have seemed to intensify, anthropologists have realized that paying attention only to local settings gives an incomplete understanding of people’s lives. It also gives an incomplete understanding of the causes of cultural differences. As we will see, differences often emerge not in spite of, but because of, interconnections.

Page reference: Is the World Really Getting Smaller?

a. True

*b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 05 Question 19

19) A limitation of convergence theories is that they underestimate variability and plasticity as key features of human culture and evolutionary history.

Feedback: The interaction of culture with political, economic, and social processes is complex, and in many ways, the world’s material culture and associated technologies are becoming homogeneous. Anthropologists who study these processes pursue one form of cultural convergence theory or an-other.
Page reference: If the World Is Not Becoming Homogenized, What Is Actually Happening?

*a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 05 Question 20

20) Multi-sited ethnography is a strategy of following connections, associations, and putative relationships from place to place

Feedback: Multi-sited fieldwork has been productive for studying transnational phenomena like environmentalism and other social movements, the media, certain religious societies whose membership extends across the borders of many countries, and the spread of science and technology. As the object of anthropological research has expanded to include topics like these, more and more anthropologists are doing multi-sited research. Multi-sited research is not appropriate for every research topic, but it is now becoming a common anthropological research strategy.
Page reference: How Can Anthropologists Study Global Interconnections?

*a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 05 Question 21

21) Multi-sited fieldwork has been productive for studying transnational phenomena like environmentalism and other social movements, the media, certain religious societies whose membership extends across the borders of many countries, and the spread of science and technology.

Feedback: Multi-sited fieldwork has been productive for studying transnational phenomena like environmentalism and other social movements, the media, certain religious societies whose membership extends across the borders of many countries, and the spread of science and technology. As the object of anthropological research has expanded to include topics like these, more and more anthropologists are doing multi-sited research. Multi-sited research is not appropriate for every research topic, but it is now becoming a common anthropological research strategy.
Page reference: How Can Anthropologists Study Global Interconnections?

*a. True

b. False

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 22

22) World systems theory helped anthropologists

Feedback: World systems theory is the theory that capitalism has expanded on the basis of unequal exchange throughout the world, creating a global market and global division of labor, dividing the world be-tween a dominant “core” and a dependent “periphery.
Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

*a. better explain the historical emergence of development patterns throughout the world.

b. explain even development through time and space.

c. ignore local social relations.

d. remedy the past for the future.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 23

23) A key feature of financial globalization is

Feedback: In the modern era, financial globalization involving the reduction or elimination of tariffs to promote trade across borders began in the 1870s. Although the two world wars disrupted those processes, the past 70 years have seen their reemergence.
Page reference: Is the World Really Getting Smaller?

a. governments imposing new regulations on trade.

b. equalization of financial opportunities around the world.

c. greater coordination of multinational corporations.

*d. the reduction or elimination of tariffs to promote trade.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 24

24) Promoters of globalization highlight which of the following?

Feedback: In public debates, the most common way of framing globalization’s outcomes is in terms of winners and losers. Globalization’s promoters focus on winners, arguing that greater economic integration brings unprecedented prosperity to millions. They cite evidence that the more open a country is to foreign trade, the more rapidly its economy grows. Critics focus on losers, invoking images of refugee crises, sweatshops, and poverty.

Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

*a. The more open a country is to foreign trade, the better the economy will be

b. People need access to cell phones

c. It is an even process benefiting everyone equally

d. It is protective for environmental degradation

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 25

25) The recent rise of autonomy movements among Hawaiian separatists and Zapatistas in Mexico are examples of

Feedback: Localization is the creation and assertion of highly particular, place-based identities and communities.
Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

a. globalization.

b. immigration.

*c. localization.

d. migration.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 26

26) The most important goal of the Congolese sapeur is to

Feedback: For example, among the Bakongo in the Republic of the Congo, a former French colony in Central Africa, poor Bakongo youths in urban shanty towns of the capital city, Brazzaville, compete with each other to acquire famous French and Italian designer clothes. Calling themselves sapeurs (loosely translated as “dandies”), the most ambitious and resourceful go to Europe, where they acquire fancy clothes by whatever means they can.

Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

a. imitate European consumers.

b. steal and resell secondhand clothes.

*c. accumulate prestige.

d. acquire smartphones.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 27

27) One of the main reasons localization interests anthropologists is that

Feedback: Globalizing processes also promote a contrasting phenomenon anthropologists call localization—the creation and assertion of highly particular, often place-based, identities and communities. It is evidenced by the rise of autonomy movements among Hawaiian separatists and other indigenous groups throughout the world that seek self-determination; nationalist and ethnic movements like that of the Basques in Europe; and other movements engaged in rein-forcing local control; for example, by encouraging community-supported agriculture and the use of local currencies.

Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

a. anthropologists have always been locally focused.

*b. global integration creates opportunity for local cultures to express themselves.

c. it is easier to study local settings than global settings.

d. it is rapidly disappearing as a phenomenon.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 28

28) A central feature of cultural convergence theories is that

Feedback: The interaction of culture with political, economic, and social processes is complex, and in many ways, the world’s material culture and associated technologies are becoming homogeneous. Anthropologists who study these processes pursue one form of cultural convergence theory or an-other.
Page reference: If the World Is Not Becoming Homogenized, What Is Actually Happening?

a. they explain the rise of cultural conflict in the world.

*b. they explain the apparent decline of cultural diversity.

c. they articulate how and why cultures converge through mixture and hybridity.

d. they explain why development appeals to all people around the world.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 29

29) A key difference between anthropologists of development and development anthropologists is

Feedback: There are two distinct anthropological approaches to development: development anthropology and the anthropology of development. While development anthropologists involve themselves in the theoretical and practical aspects of shaping and implementing development projects, anthropologists of development tend to study the cultural conditions for proper development, or, alternatively, the negative impacts of development projects. Often the two overlap, but at times they are in direct conflict.

Page reference: Doesn’t Everyone Want to Be Developed?

a. the first are academics; the second work in applied fields.

b. the first are theoretical; the second are practical.

c. the first work in development agencies; the second criticize it.

*d. the first are analysts of development; the second seek ways to influence it from within.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 30

30) Which of the following best describes the methodology of multi-sited ethnography?

Feedback: Multi-sited fieldwork has been productive for studying transnational phenomena like environmentalism and other social movements, the media, certain religious societies whose membership extends across the borders of many countries, and the spread of science and technology. As the object of anthropological research has expanded to include topics like these, more and more anthropologists are doing multi-sited research. Multi-sited research is not appropriate for every research topic, but it is now becoming a common anthropological research strategy.
Page reference: How Can Anthropologists Study Global Interconnections?

a. Analytical

*b. Comparative

c. Genealogical

d. Local

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 31

31) Which of the following is not true about hybridization theories?

Feedback: Hybridization is persistent cultural mixing that has no predetermined direction or end-point.
Page reference: If the World Is Not Becoming Homogenized, What Is Actually Happening?

a. It has several aliases, among them “syncretism”.

*b. It explains why conflict is growing in the world.

c. It reimagines old racialist thinking that abhorred mixture.

d. It rejects the existence of cultural purities.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 32

32) A world systems theory is important for all of the following reasons except

Feedback: For several decades, world systems theory has provided the social sciences with an important theoretical lens for understanding global inequality. Developed by economic historians André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, world systems theory rejects the idea that global inter-connections are anything new, identifying the late fifteenth century as the beginning of a new capitalist world order that connected different parts of the world in new ways. During this historical period, according to world systems theory, the expansion of overseas European colonies was enabled by and rooted in the creation of a global capitalist market.
Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

a. it is useful for analyzing postcolonial conditions.

b. it highlights resistance at the periphery.

*c. it lends itself readily to ethnographic methodology.

d. it explains how and why global capitalism has disrupted so many societies.

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 05 Question 33

33) Globalization is so exciting to anthropologists right now because they have never studied interconnectivity before.

Feedback: In our fast-paced world with its new technologies, means of transport, and modes of communication, it is easy to assume that the kinds of human movement, trade, and cross-cultural interactions we today call “globalization” represent a totally new phenomenon for humanity. But the fact that these supposedly most “remote” and “isolated” peoples on earth were historically linked to and participated in a broader world should cause us to question those assumptions. In fact, anthropologists have understood for quite some time that a key element of the human story, past and present, is the importance of cross-cultural interactions and interconnections.
Page reference: How Can Anthropologists Study Global Interconnections?

a. True

*b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 05 Question 34

34) Cultural diversity persists in the world because cultures have been isolated from each other for so long but that diversity is bound to disappear as cultures intermingle more.

Feedback: Understandably, in the face of forced change, people want to conserve the traditions and relationships that give their lives meaning. This point is one of the keys to understanding culture in the context of global change. Culture helps people make sense of and respond to constant changes in the world, and it is itself dynamic. But culture also has stable and conservative elements, and different societies have different levels of tolerance for change, both of which mean that cultural change is not a uniform process for every society. This situation of uneven change partly explains why we see the persistence of cultural diversity around the world in spite of pre-dictions that it would disappear.

Page reference: Doesn’t Everyone Want to Be Developed?

a. True

*b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 05 Question 35

35) A key marker of development anthropology's success is when local perspectives and voices are paid attention to in development projects.

Feedback: Development anthropology is a branch of applied anthropology. It is a response to a simple fact: many development projects have failed because planners have not taken local culture into consideration. Planners often blame project failures on local people’s supposed ignorance or stubborn-ness. But it is often planners themselves who are ignorant of local issues or set in their ways. Projects are more likely to meet their goals when they are fine-tuned to local needs, capacities, perspectives, and interests.

Page reference: Doesn’t Everyone Want to Be Developed?

*a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 05 Question 36

36) Globalization and localization are complementary dynamics.

Feedback: Globalization is the widening scale of cross-cultural interactions caused by the rapid movement of money, people, goods, images, and ideas within nations and across national boundaries. Localization is the creation and assertion of highly particular, place-based identities and communities.

Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

*a. True

b. False

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 37

37) In a study on the Olympics a hybridization theorist would likely focus on

Feedback: Hybridization is persistent cultural mixing that has no predetermined direction or end-point.
Page reference: If the World Is Not Becoming Homogenized, What Is Actually Happening?

a. how national conflicts play out through athletic competitions.

*b. the unexpected social patterns that emerge from intermingling between athletes, fans, and officials.

c. the shared values of amateurism and internationalism.

d. how the principles of capitalist efficiency have reshaped the games.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 38

38) If a development anthropologist were to get involved in a project in your city that is revitalizing a poor neighborhood, she or he would probably emphasize the

Feedback: Development anthropology is the application of anthropological knowledge and research methods to the practical aspects of shaping and implementing development projects.
Page reference: Doesn’t Everyone Want to Be Developed?

a. overarching importance of improving the neighborhood's economy.

b. overarching importance of extending state power into the neighborhood to regularize social relations.

*c. overarching importance of listening to the priorities of the neighbors.

d. overarching importance of building lasting infrastructure and buildings.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 39

39) A believer in cultural imperialism would explain that people who watch American television in remote places like a Walpiri camp in the Australian outback are

Feedback: Because world systems theory focused on the rise of capitalism as a global system, this macro-level perspective did not readily lend itself to ethnographic research of smaller communities and non-global economics. But the theory helped anthropologists better explain the historical emergence and contemporary persistence of uneven development patterns around the world and has been of critical interest to scholars of postcolonialism, the field that studies the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism. It has also helped anthropologists understand the linkages between local social relations (families, kin networks, communities) and other levels of political-economic activity, like the regional, national, and transnational.

Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

a. learning important lessons about life in America.

b. experiencing a form of hybridization.

c. likely to resist everything they see and hear.

*d. being subjected to alien cultural influences.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 40

40) World systems theory would be most suited to which of the following research projects?

Feedback: For several decades, world systems theory has provided the social sciences with an important theoretical lens for understanding global inequality. Developed by economic historians André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, world systems theory rejects the idea that global inter-connections are anything new, identifying the late fifteenth century as the beginning of a new capitalist world order that connected different parts of the world in new ways. During this historical period, according to world systems theory, the expansion of overseas European colonies was enabled by and rooted in the creation of a global capitalist market.
Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

a. An ethnographic study of village-level political leaders

*b. A historical study of indigenous resistance to colonialism

c. A comparative study of the economic potential of different policy mechanisms to promote global trade

d. A program evaluation of a non-profit organization

Type: Short Answer

Title: Chapter 05 Question 41

41) What are the primary strengths of world systems theory? Give an example of a project in which you might employ it.

Feedback: For several decades, world systems theory has provided the social sciences with an important theoretical lens for understanding global inequality. Developed by economic historians André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, world systems theory rejects the idea that global inter-connections are anything new, identifying the late fifteenth century as the beginning of a new capitalist world order that connected different parts of the world in new ways. During this historical period, according to world systems theory, the expansion of overseas European colonies was enabled by and rooted in the creation of a global capitalist market.
Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

Type: Short Answer

Title: Chapter 05 Question 42

42) Do you think an ethnographer could employ a multi-sited approach in a project studying Walmart's cultural influence inside and outside the United States. If not, why not? If yes, what field sites would you study?

Feedback: Multi-sited fieldwork has been productive for studying transnational phenomena like environmentalism and other social movements, the media, certain religious societies whose membership extends across the borders of many countries, and the spread of science and technology. As the object of anthropological research has expanded to include topics like these, more and more anthropologists are doing multi-sited research. Multi-sited research is not appropriate for every research topic, but it is now becoming a common anthropological research strategy.
Page reference: How Can Anthropologists Study Global Interconnections?

Type: Short Answer

Title: Chapter 05 Question 43

43) Describe how you would apply the theory of McDonaldization to explain how airlines work in the United States.

Feedback: Another version of convergence theory envisions a worldwide convergence of consumer preferences and corporate practices, invoking the image of “McDonaldization.” Advocates of this version assert that the principles of the fast-food restaurant—efficiency (quick service at a low cost), calculability (quantity over quality), predictability, tight control over production, and using technology over human labor—characterize American society and, increasingly, the rest of the world.

Page reference: If the World Is Not Becoming Homogenized, What Is Actually Happening?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 44

44) For what kinds of research projects is multi-sited ethnography useful and not useful? In your answer give at least one example for each.

Feedback: Multi-sited fieldwork has been productive for studying transnational phenomena like environmentalism and other social movements, the media, certain religious societies whose membership extends across the borders of many countries, and the spread of science and technology. As the object of anthropological research has expanded to include topics like these, more and more anthropologists are doing multi-sited research. Multi-sited research is not appropriate for every research topic, but it is now becoming a common anthropological research strategy.
Page reference: How Can Anthropologists Study Global Interconnections?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 45

45) Is hybridization occurring in American life? If not, why? If so, give an example and use the discussion of hybridization from the book to make your case.

Feedback: Hybridization is persistent cultural mixing that has no predetermined direction or end-point.
Page reference: If the World Is Not Becoming Homogenized, What Is Actually Happening?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 46

46) Is the diffusionist perspective of Boas and his students useful in anthropology today?

Feedback: Franz Boas and his students Alfred Kroeber and Ralph Linton developed a theory of culture that emphasized the interconnectedness of societies. The Boasians thought of themselves as diffusionists, emphasizing that cultural characteristics result from either internal historical dynamism or a spread (diffusion) of cultural attributes from one society to another. Later, be-ginning in the 1950s, Marxist anthropologists like Eric Wolf argued against the isolation of societies, suggesting that non-Western societies could not be understood without reference to their place within a global capitalist system, which reaches across international boundaries with abandon. And yet, until the 1980s, such themes of interconnectedness rarely interested most cultural anthropologists.

Page reference: Is the World Really Getting Smaller?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 47

47) What elements of social life are affected by globalization?

Feedback: In our fast-paced world with its new technologies, means of transport, and modes of communication, it is easy to assume that the kinds of human movement, trade, and cross-cultural interactions we today call “globalization” represent a totally new phenomenon for humanity. But the fact that these supposedly most “remote” and “isolated” peoples on earth were historically linked to and participated in a broader world should cause us to question those assumptions. In fact, anthropologists have understood for quite some time that a key element of the human story, past and present, is the importance of cross-cultural interactions and interconnections.

Page reference: Is the world really getting smaller?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 48

48) Why is development an uneven process?

Feedback: Because world systems theory focused on the rise of capitalism as a global system, this macro-level perspective did not readily lend itself to ethnographic research of smaller communities and non-global economics. But the theory helped anthropologists better explain the historical emergence and contemporary persistence of uneven development patterns around the world and has been of critical interest to scholars of postcolonialism, the field that studies the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism. It has also helped anthropologists understand the linkages between local social relations (families, kin networks, communities) and other levels of political-economic activity, like the regional, national, and transnational.

Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 49

49) How and why do people participate in global processes and local communities simultaneously? Give some examples to illustrate your point.

Feedback: Whether Malay factory women, Congolese sapeurs, or for that matter, ourselves, people continue to define their identities locally. What is different today from previous generations, per-haps, is that people increasingly express their local identities through their interaction with trans-national processes, such as communications, migration, or consumerism, and with institutions, such as transnational businesses. In today’s world, people participate in global processes and local communities simultaneously. But they rarely participate in global processes on equal footing, be-cause of their subordinate place in the world system or in their own countries. Nevertheless, many anthropologists feel that to identify them in stark terms as either winners or losers of global integration greatly simplifies the complexity of their simultaneous involvement in globalization and localization processes.

Page reference: What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 05 Question 50

50) How do the findings and theories of anthropologists of globalization affect your understanding of culture?

Feedback: We aim to deepen your understanding of culture as a dynamic process by showing its importance for understanding contemporary global processes. For anthropologists, globalization is not simply a matter of cultural homogenization. It is a process that illustrates how people create and change their cultures because of their connections with others. Not everybody participates equally in these diverse kinds of global connections, which means we also have to consider power relationships and social inequality.

Page reference: Is the World Really Getting Smaller?