Exam Questions 3rd Edition Politics Ch.8

Chapter 8 Test Bank

Multiple Choice

1. The !Kung people of southern Africa are an example what kind of society?
2. Acephalous
3. Segmentary lineage
4. Lawless
5. Structural-functional
6. Which English philosophers were concerned with the problem of disorder and argued that chaos is avoidable by creating strong government?
7. Evans-Pritchard and Radcliffe-Brown
8. Hobbes and Locke
9. Smith and Marx
10. Sahlins and Service
11. Which theory was used to explain how stateless societies maintained social order and equilibrium?
12. Marxism
13. Interpretive anthropology
14. Structural-functionalism
15. Neo-evolutionary
16. Which of the following is not a way that societies maintain order outside of formal political institutions?
17. Age-grades
18. Sorcery and witchcraft
19. Kinship
20. Random division of labor
21. The Yanomami, who have headmen as leaders and have an egalitarian model of social stratification, are classified as having which type of political organization?
22. Governed
23. Tribe
24. Centralized
25. Chiefdom
26. For anthropologists, political power refers to how
27. elected officials use power.
28. violence is used by the nation-state to subdue dissent.
29. politics operates informally.
30. power is used to attain goals for the good of the community.
31. Power that transcends individuals, operating in settings and orchestrating settings in which social and individual actions take place, is
32. authority.
33. structural power.
34. domination.
35. violence.
36. For a big man in a nonstate society, what is the most powerful and valuable tool?
37. Force
38. Formal authority
39. Corruption
40. Persuasion
41. Which of the following is an element of violence?
42. It is the use of force to cause harm to someone or something.
43. It is an invisible assertion of power.
44. It is an inefficient way to transform a social environment.
45. It is only found in centralized political systems.
46. For anthropologists, power is
47. with the people.
48. about how people manage social relationships through force, influence, persuasion, and control over resources.
49. located only in state institutions and political offices.
50. the prerogative of politicians and rulers.
51. Legal anthropologists study
52. how people control the production of goods.
53. how people use violence.
54. social movements.
55. how people solve disputes.
56. Independent states recognized by other states, and composed of people who share a single national identity, are referred to as
57. governments.
58. tribes.
59. chiefdoms.
60. nation-states.
61. Anthropologists argue that violence is always
62. irrational.
63. the result of political breakdown.
64. socially constructed.
65. inherited.
66. What is not true of bands?
67. They are usually egalitarian.
68. They rely on face-to-face social relationships.
69. They are led by a hereditary leader.
70. They are self-sufficient.
71. Violence is
72. static.
73. inherited.
74. socially constructed.
75. absolute.
76. Which branch of cultural anthropology looks at the way that people handle disputes?
77. Political anthropology
78. Legal anthropology
79. Psychological anthropology
80. Applied anthropology
81. The legal process by which an individual or council with socially recognized authority intervenes in a dispute and unilaterally makes a decision is
82. adjudication.
83. mediation.
84. laws.
85. negotiation.
86. Political acts include all of the following except
87. running for election.
88. protesting against police brutality.
89. gossiping about a neighbor to shame them for not fulfilling their obligations.
90. serving as treasurer during a game of Monopoly.
91. The importance of structural functionalism is that it
92. helped anthropologists understand the evolution of political systems.
93. showed that violence and chaos are universal aspects of human affairs.
94. showed that non-Western societies have order without formal government.
95. demonstrated that symbols underlie all human processes.
96. Which of the following theories is most concerned with understanding how people maintain political power in their daily activities and decision-making processes?
97. Action theory
98. Marxist theory
99. Structural-functionalist theory
100. World systems theory
101. How do religious rituals function politically?
102. By legitimating community authority
103. By reducing fear
104. By fostering disputes
105. They do not function politically
106. Negotiation
107. entails a third party who intervenes in a dispute to aid the parties in reaching an agreement.
108. is a set of rules established by some formal authority.
109. is when parties themselves reach a decision jointly.
110. is the legal process by which an individual or council with socially recognized authority intervenes in a dispute and unilaterally makes a decision.
111. Lineage or clan ownership of land and livestock, with little sense of private property, characterizes the
112. band.
113. tribe.
114. chiefdom.
115. state.
116. If you were to study the ways families in the United States resolve disputes, which kind of anthropology would you be practicing?
117. Neo-evolutionary
118. Economic
119. Legal
120. Structural-functionalist
121. An anthropologist using action theory would be most likely to do what kind of fieldwork?
122. Following individual political leaders in their day-to-day lives
123. Undertaking a workplace analysis of city hall
124. Using archival data to draft more culturally relevant public policy positions for a congressional candidate
125. Working with grassroots organizations as they pursue immediate political changes
126. Which cultural group does not have a centralized political system?
127. The Kung! San
128. The former Asante empire
129. The British monarchy
130. The Bafokeng kingdom
131. The exercise of political power in state and nonstate societies is different in all of the following respects except
132. the ways in which power is gained.
133. the uses of violence and coercion toward political ends.
134. the importance of personal connections.
135. the ways in which power is transmitted to others.
136. The exercise of political power requires
137. force.
138. violence.
139. authority.
140. legitimacy.
141. Control over symbolic, material, and human resources are important dimensions of
142. age-grades.
143. adjudication.
144. mediation.
145. political power.
146. Why is the description of conflict as “ethnic violence” misleading?
147. It implies age-old conflicts are not affected by historical or political events.
148. It assumes the peaceful interactions of groups over time.
149. It ignores that violence is biological and certain “ethnic” groups are more violent than others.
150. It is not misleading because it is the way that anthropologists describe violence.
151. When people describe violence as meaningless they
152. are correct.
153. interpret violence as something without reason.
154. humanize the perpetrators.
155. fail to justify violence as a necessary part of society.
156. In many societies people resolve disputes by restoring harmony, although people are not always satisfied with this resolution. Why?
157. Because it’s better to win a dispute
158. Because most people would rather avoid the issue altogether
159. Because adversarial relationships are more effective at getting to the bottom of the problem
160. Because of a preference for justice, fairness, and the rule of law
161. 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?
162. It offers a tidy narrative that seems to explain the world.
163. Mass media repeat the idea regularly.
164. Ethnic leaders promote the idea to gain power.
165. Ethnic groups actually do fight with each other all the time.
166. The importance of a phenomenon like “revenge suicide” in Papua New Guinea is that it demonstrates
167. why women are irrational.
168. why men are controlling and mean toward women.
169. that the nonpowerful have ways of exercising political power.
170. the difficulty of locating structural power.
171. A structural functionalist would be most likely to analyze violence as
172. a reflection of deep ethnic hatreds.
173. an innate condition of humanity.
174. the best way to create segmentary lineages.
175. a means of creating and maintaining social order.
176. The neo-evolutionary typology of political systems would classify the role of president of the city council in your hometown as
177. headman of a tribe.
178. a big man.
179. a bureaucrat in a centralized state.
180. a chief.
181. An action theorist studying political power in the US Senate would be especially interested in the
182. normative rules of conduct that senators are supposed to follow.
183. way the field of social relations structures senators’ interactions.
184. ways female senators exercise power in a male-dominated institution.
185. delegation of political power from one individual to another.
186. 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
187. adjudication.
188. negotiation.
189. mediation.
190. avoidance.
191. Which of the following is not a research agenda that focuses on structural power?
192. An examination of the US census office and how people shape their actions when asked census questions.
193. A study of children bullying each other on the playground in Brazil.
194. A study about policies related to hygiene and family management and the result on reproductive practices among Italian families after World War I.
195. An examination of laborers on banana plantations in Costa Rica, where workers have limited potential for wealth accumulation due to foreign ownership of plantations.
196. Which of the following explanations of political relationships among the !Kung would be least likely to come from a political anthropologist?
197. The !Kung make decisions as a group.
198. The !Kung use food-sharing as a way to equalize relationships.
199. The !Kung have to navigate complex politics as ethnic minorities in states that don’t want them.
200. Politics among the !Kung serve to provide order to an otherwise chaotic and self-serving group.

True/False

1. To follow political action one must be familiar with society’s rules and codes about who gets to exercise power and under what conditions.
2. True
3. False
4. Big men can transfer their power and status through inheritance when they die.
5. True
6. False
7. For anthropologists, power is largely located in the hands of state institutions and political offices.
8. True
9. False
10. When people around the world have disputes, they are most concerned with winning and losing.
11. True
12. False
13. In some hunter–gatherer groups relations are egalitarian and women can become leaders of a band.
14. True
15. False
16. In some societies witchcraft accusations can work as an informal method of social control.
17. True
18. False
19. People living in noncentralized political systems have generally welcomed their integration into centralized political systems because it provides greater security and prosperity for them.
20. True
21. False
22. 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.
23. True
24. False
25. There are some acts of violence that cannot be understood through an anthropological framework.
26. True
27. False
28. Culture encompasses the relationships and processes of cooperation, conflict, and power that are fundamental aspects of human life.
    1. True
    2. False
29. A society’s separate legal and constitutional domain that is the source of law, order, and legitimate force is the government.
    1. True
    2. False
30. A society with no governmental head or hierarchical structure is an acephalous society.
    1. True
    2. False
31. The practice in which a third party intervenes in a dispute to aid the parties in reaching an agreement is called negotiation.
    1. True
    2. False
32. According to the neo-evolutionary typology of political organization, the type of leadership practiced in a tribe is charismatic headman with some authority.
    1. True
    2. False
33. The concept of functionalism is useful because it points to the ways in which power is not simply the exercise of will over others but diffused across a social field.
    1. True
    2. False

Short Answer

1. How might an advocate of structural power explain the use of a census by the US government?
2. Is action theory applicable to a study of a sports team? Explain your answer.
3. What are the primary strengths of the gendered approach to political power? Give an example of a project in which you might use it.
4. How would you use structural-functionalism in a study of how order in your university is maintained?
5. What role do you think perspectives drawn from political anthropology could play in governing a country?
6. 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.
7. How do societies that do not have central governments maintain order?
8. How does political power work in both state and nonstate societies?
9. How is violence culturally constructed?
10. When there is a conflict in a community or society, what are the political possibilities for dealing with it?

Short Answer Key

1. How might an advocate of structural power explain the use of a census by the US government?
   1. What Is Political Power?
   2. 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 (Wolf 2001:384). “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.
2. Is action theory applicable to a study of a sports team? Explain your answer.
   1. What Is Political Power?
   2. People everywhere gain and manage political power through a combination of decision-making, cooperation, opportunism, compromise, collusion, charm, gamesmanship, strategic alliance, factionalism, resistance, conflict, and other processes. A focus on these processes was central to action theory, an approach that emerged in the 1960s. Action theorists closely followed the daily activities and decision-making processes of individual political leaders like chiefs in ­African villages or headmen in Amazonian settlements. They argue that politics is a dynamic and competitive field of social relations in which people are constantly managing their ability to exercise power over others (Vincent 1978). In other words, it is not enough to be president of the United States; one has to act as the president.
3. What are the primary strengths of the gendered approach to political power? Give an example of a project in which you might use it.
   1. What Is Political Power?
   2. During the past forty years, feminist anthropologists have observed that while men tend to dominate formal political processes in most societies, relationships between men and women intersect with political power in complex ways. In a number of societies, women exercise formal leadership and political power. In other settings, women may have very little formal power, but they can mobilize to assert power in response to events.
   3. 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 (Figure 8.3). 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 own male relatives and other community members to acknowledge the injustice, forcing them to seek accountability from the offending party (Counts 1980). ­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.”
4. How would you use structural-functionalism in a study of how order in your university is maintained?
   1. Does Every Society Have a Government?
   2. During the early twentieth century, the global expansion of British colonialism 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. This situation presented British anthropologists with important opportunities to study the maintenance of order in societies without formal governments and political leaders. The theory they used was structural-functionalism, which held that the different structures of a society (religion, politics, kinship, etc.) functioned in an integrated way to maintain social order and control.
   3. In Africa, structural-functionalists identified numerous ways in which societies maintained order and social control without formal political institutions (Radcliffe-Brown 1952). For example, kinship could work, as it did among the Nuer pastoralists of Sudan, to organize men into lineages that normally live separately but would come together to meet external threats. The division of men from different families into associations like age-grades (groupings of age-mates who are initiated into adulthood together), such as among the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania, could work as a rudimentary political system (Kurtz 2001). ­Beliefs in witchcraft or sorcery can also promote order. Throughout Africa, for example, people who do not behave according to community norms are identified and punished as witches, which can maintain social conformity. Without formal courts, structural-functionalists insisted, such practices maintained social control and operated as a criminal justice system (Gledhill 2000).
5. What role do you think perspectives drawn from political anthropology could play in governing a country?
   1. Does Every Society Have a Government?
   2. In the 1940s and 1950s, as political anthropology was taking shape in the United States, American anthropologists called neo-evolutionists sought to classify the world’s diversity of 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 (1960) 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.
   3. Political anthropology’s early focus on political systems was valuable for describing the diverse ways in which humans create and maintain social order, with or without formal governments. But reality hardly ever corresponds to these simple theoretical models. A major problem with the bands–tribes–chiefdoms–states typology is that many cases blur the boundaries between types. For example, a society might have tribe-like qualities, as is the case with the Nuer, but because it has a population of 1.8 million people, it does not have the same kinds of social relations as a “tribe” of 500 people.
6. 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.
   1. What Is Political Power?
   2. 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 (Wolf 2001:384). “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.
7. How do societies that do not have central governments maintain order?
   1. Does Every Society Have a Government?
   2. This question might seem strange because the answer seems so obvious. Our society has government (a separate legal and constitutional domain that is the source of law, order, and legitimate force) from the federal level down to the most local. We may assume other societies must have something similar. Otherwise, wouldn’t they be in the throes of anarchy? Not necessarily. Consider the Ju/’hoansi (also known as !Kung San), a hunter-gatherer society in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa. Ju/’hoa have historically lived in egalitarian bands of fifteen to twenty people and are an acephalous society—that is, they have no governmental head or hierarchical structure. 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, and important band decisions were made by group consensus. Leadership was informal, life was organized around sharing food, and those who did not share were taunted and shamed mercilessly, or even pushed out of the band (Figure 8.1). The emphasis on sharing and egalitarianism kept people more or less in line without the need for government or laws, which are a set of rules established by some formal authority.
8. How does political power work in both state and nonstate societies?
   1. Does Every Society Have a Government?
   2. In the 1940s and 1950s, as political anthropology was taking shape in the United States, American anthropologists called neo-evolutionists sought to classify the world’s diversity of 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 (1960) 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.
   3. 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. Table 8.1 outlines how this classification incorporates politics, economy, size, and population density.
9. How is violence culturally constructed?
   1. What Is Violence?
   2. Violence is typically defined as the use of force to harm someone or something. It is a highly visible and concrete assertion of power, and a very efficient way to transform a social environment and communicate an ideological message (Riches 1986).
   3. Yet specifying what violence consists of is not always so straightforward, because violence is different things to different people (Eller 2006). The same person might acknowledge that shoving a person into a vat of boiling water is violent, yet may not view placing a lobster in that boiling water as violent. Another factor in assessing what is violent is intention: Did the perpetrator mean to do it (violent), or was it an accident (probably not violent)? And rationality: Did the perpetrator have control over his or her actions (violent), or was it a case of “losing one’s mind” (probably not violent, or at least justified)? And legitimacy: Was it a legitimate act, such as a boxer beating on another boxer (sports, not violence), or deviant, such as a man beating his wife (violent)? Even the nature of force: Was the force personal, as in one person punching another (violent), or structural, as in economic conditions depriving a child of food (open to debate)? And depending on whether you are a victim, perpetrator, or witness, you are likely to have a different perspective on whether or not an act is violent.
10. When there is a conflict in a community or society, what are the political possibilities for dealing with it?
    1. How Do People Avoid Aggression, Brutality, and War?
    2. Legal anthropology, the branch of political anthropology interested in such matters, has identified a number of ways people manage disputes (Nader and Todd 1978). Some strategies are informal, including avoidance, competition, ritual, and play. Others are formal, involving specialists or specialized institutions.