Why Is The Concept Of Culture Important? Test Bank Docx Ch.8 - Anthropology Human 5e | Test Bank Lavenda by Robert H. Lavenda. DOCX document preview.
Chapter 8: Why Is the Concept of Culture Important?
Test Bank
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 01]
1) Human condition is distinguished from the condition of other living species by
Feedback: Culture includes sets of learned behaviors and ideas that humans acquire as members of society. Humans use culture to adapt to and transform the world in which they live.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Define Culture?
a. culture.
b. learning.
c. nature.
d. openness.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 02]
2) Sets of leaned behavior and ideas that human beings acquire as members of society, together with the material artifacts and structures humans create and use, is an anthropological definition of
Feedback: Culture includes sets of learned behaviors and ideas that humans acquire as members of society. Humans use culture to adapt to and transform the world in which they live.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Define Culture?
a. symbols.
b. culture.
c. language.
d. cognition.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 03]
3) Those parts of culture that are absorbed in the course of daily practical learning are called
Feedback: Many things we learn, such as table manners and what is good to eat and where people are supposed to sleep, are never explicitly taught but rather are absorbed in the course of daily practical living. French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu called this kind of cultural learning habitus and it is heavily influenced by our interactions with material culture.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Define Culture?
a. cultural basics.
b. habitus.
c. symbolic.
d. unaware culture.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 04]
4) Something that stands for something else is a
Feedback: A symbol is something that stands for something else.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Define Culture?
a. symbol.
b. habitus.
c. cultural feature.
d. institution.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 05]
5) The process by which human beings, as material organisms, living together with other similar organisms, cope with the behavioral rules established by their respective societies is called
Feedback: Socialization is the process of learning to live as a member of a group.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Define Culture?
a. discipline.
b. enculturation.
c. socialization.
d. introspection.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 06]
6) The process by which human beings living with one another must learn to come to terms with the ways of thinking and feeling considered appropriate in their respective cultures
Feedback: Enculturation is the process by which human beings living with one another must learn to come to terms with the ways of thinking and feeling that are considered appropriate in their respective cultures.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Define Culture?
a. discipline.
b. enculturation.
c. socialization.
d. introspection.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 07]
7) Complex, variable, and enduring forms of cultural practice that organize social life are called
Feedback: Institutions are complex, variable, and enduring forms of cultural practice that organize social life.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Define Culture?
a. cultural universals.
b. social facts.
c. institutions.
d. symbols.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 08]
8) The exercise of at least some control over their lives by human beings is called
Feedback: Human agency is the exercise of at least some control over their lives by human beings.
Page reference: Culture, History, and Human Agency
a. free will.
b. habitus.
c. human agency.
d. historical.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 09]
9) The perspective on the human condition that assumes that mind and body, individuals and society, and individuals and the environment interpenetrate and even define one another is called
Feedback: Holism is the perspective on the human condition that assumes that mind and body, individuals and society, and individuals and the environment interpenetrate and even define one another.
Page reference: Culture, History, and Human Agency
a. dualism.
b. holism.
c. reductionism.
d. essentialism.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 10]
10) An approach that views human beings and environments as open systems that modify each other is called
Feedback: Coevolution the dialectical relationship between biological processes and symbolic cultural processes, in which each makes up an important part of the environment to which the other must adapt.
Page reference: Culture, History, and Human Agency
a. biological reductionism.
b. cultural determinism.
c. coevolutionary.
d. historical materialism.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 11]
11) The opinion that one’s own way of life is natural or correct and the only true way of being fully human is called
Feedback: Ethnocentrism is the opinion that one’s own way of life is natural or correct and, indeed, the only true way of being fully human.
Page reference: Why Do Cultural Differences Matter?
a. cultural relativism.
b. cultural determinism.
c. ethnocentrism.
d. egocentrism.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 12]
12) Understanding another culture sympathetically enough so that it appears to be a coherent and meaningful design for living is called
Feedback: Cultural relativism is the understanding another culture in its own terms sympathetically enough so that the culture appears to be a coherent and meaningful design for living.
Page reference: Why Do Cultural Differences Matter?
a. cultural interactionism.
b. cultural relativism.
c. holism.
d. cultural determinism.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 13]
13) Genocide is
Feedback: Genocide is the deliberate attempt to exterminate an entire group based on race, religion, national origin, or other cultural features.
Page reference: Why Do Cultural Differences Matter?
a. the attempt to exterminate an entire people.
b. denying that another culture has an independent identity.
c. the attempt to keep a group of people from living according to their own cultural patterns.
d. a symbolic act that denies the legitimacy of another group.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 14]
14) The idea that some cultures dominate others, and that domination by one culture leads inevitably to the destruction of subordinated cultures and their replacement by the culture of those in power, is called
Feedback: Cultural imperialism is the idea that some cultures dominate others and that domination by one culture leads inevitably to the destruction of subordinated cultures and their replacement by the culture of those in power.
Page reference: Does Culture Explain Everything?
a. cultural relativism.
b. colonialism.
c. cultural imperialism.
d. cultural hybridity.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 15]
15) Anthropological studies of social, political, and economic change provide considerable evidence that
Feedback: The anthropological perspective on the human condition is not easy to maintain. It forces us to question the commonsense assumptions with which we are most comfortable. It only increases the difficulty we encounter when faced with moral and political decisions. It does not allow us an easy retreat because once we are exposed to the kinds of experience that the anthropological undertaking makes possible, we are changed. We cannot easily pretend that these new experiences never happened to us.
Page reference: The Promise of the Anthropological Perspective
a. human beings are passive in the face of the new.
b. human beings actively and resiliently respond to life’s challenges.
c. indigenous peoples are everywhere doomed to extinction in the face of the expansion of the capitalist world system.
d. without the direction provided by theorists of social change from the “developed” world, ordinary citizens of “underdeveloped” lands cannot organize themselves in the face of diversity.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 16]
16) Culture…
Feedback: Thus, as Rick Potts puts it, “an evolutionary bridge exists between the human and animal realms of behavior. . . . Culture represents continuity” (1996, 197). Potts proposes that modern human symbolic culture and the social institutions that depend on it rest on other, more basic abilities that emerged at different times in our evolutionary past. Monkeys and apes possess many of these abilities to varying degrees, which is the reason they may be said to possess simple cultural traditions. Certainly our earliest hominin ancestors were no different.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Define Culture?
a. represents a sharp break between human beings and other animals.
b. demonstrates continuity between the human and animal realms of behavior.
c. is less important than genetics in shaping human behavior.
d. first appeared about 100,000 years ago.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 17]
17) Clifford Geertz observes that human beings raised in isolation would be
Feedback: Social scientists have long known that human beings who grow up isolated from meaningful social interactions with others do not behave in ways that appear recognizably human. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed long ago, such human beings would be neither failed apes nor “natural” people stripped of their veneer of culture; they would be “mental basket cases” (1973, 40). Social living and cultural sharing are necessary for individual human beings to develop what we recognize as a human nature.
Page reference: Culture, History, and Human Agency
a. failed apes.
b. fully human.
c. mental basket cases.
d. the real animal that is ordinarily hidden under the veneer of culture.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 18]
18) Cultural relativism
Feedback: Cultural relativism is the understanding another culture in its own terms sympathetically enough so that the culture appears to be a coherent and meaningful design for living.
Page reference: Why Do Cultural Differences Matter?
a. requires us to abandon the values our own culture has taught us.
b. makes it possible for us to prove the way a people’s culture makes them do things is wrong, whether they like it or not.
c. requires us to take many things into account before we form opinions about other cultural practices.
d. frees us from having to face choices between alternatives whose “rightness” and “wrongness” is less than clear-cut.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 19]
19) When anthropologist Janice Boddy carried out fieldwork in northern Sudan, what did she learn about genital cutting?
Feedback: One ethnographic study that aims to achieve these goals has been written by Janice Boddy, a cultural anthropologist who has carried out field research since 1976 in the Muslim village of Hofriyat in rural northern Sudan, where female genital surgery is traditionally performed in childhood. She writes that “nothing . . . had adequately prepared me for what I was to witness” when she first observed the operation; nevertheless, “as time passed in the village and understanding deepened I came to regard this form of female circumcision in a very different light” (Boddy 1997, 309). Circumcisions in Hofriyat were traditionally performed on both boys and girls, but the ritual had a different meaning for boys than it did for girls. Once circumcised, a boy takes a step toward manhood, but a girl will not become a woman until she marries. Female circumcision is required, however, to make a girl marriageable, making it possible for her “to use her one great gift, fertility” (Boddy 1997, 310).
Page reference: How Can Cultural Relativity Improve Our Understanding of Controversial Cultural Practices?
a. Only girls were subjected to genital cutting.
b. Female circumcision is required to make it possible for a girl to use her fertility.
c. Female circumcision is required for a girl to become a woman.
d. Females who underwent genital cutting in the village where they lived rarely suffered physically as a result of the procedure.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 20]
20) The anthropological definition of cultural relativism requires that we make an effort to _______ the practices of other cultures.
Feedback: Cultural relativism can be defined as “understanding another culture in its own terms sympathetically enough so that the culture appears to be a coherent and meaningful design for living” (Greenwood and Stini 1977, 182).
Page reference: How Can Cultural Relativity Improve Our Understanding of Controversial Cultural Practices?
a. approve
b. excuse
c. judge
d. understand
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 21]
21) When anthropologists distinguished between Culture and cultures, they were distinguishing between _______ and __________.
Feedback: For at least the past 50 years, many anthropologists have distinguished between Culture (with a capital C) and cultures (plural with a lowercase c). Culture has been used to describe an attribute of the human species as a whole—its members’ ability, in the absence of highly specific genetic programming, to create and to imitate patterned, symbolically mediated ideas and activities that promote the survival of our species. By contrast, the term cultures has been used to refer to particular, learned ways of life belonging to specific groups of human beings. Given this distinction, the human species as a whole can be said to have Culture as a defining attribute, but actual human beings would only have access to particular human cultures—either their own or other people’s.
Page reference: Does Culture Explain Everything?
a. different traditions of learned behavior / the ability to learn and create sets of behaviors and ideas
b. a defining attribute of human beings / ways of life of specific groups of people
c. the fine arts / local traditions of human beings
d. the genetic programming that sets humans apart from other animals / the ways in which that programming works in specific places
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 22]
22) Perhaps the most profound lesson we can learn from the Kiowa experience of Christianity is
Feedback: Missionaries did not insist that the Kiowa give up all traditional ways (Lassiter 2002, 53). Prominent individuals adopted Christianity, and Kiowa converts were trained to become missionaries and ministers, which proved attractive (Lassiter 2002, 57). Especially persuasive were women missionaries who “lived in the Kiowa camps, ate their food, and endured the privations of life on the plains with impressive strength” (Lassiter 2002, 59). Missionaries, in turn, actively sought to adapt Christian practices to traditional Kiowa ways. For example, “Missions were historically located in and around established camps and communities,” with the result that “churches were the natural extension of traditional Kiowa camps” and eventually took their place at the center of Kiowa life (Lassiter 2002, 61). It might be as accurate to say that the Kiowa “Kiowanized” Christianity, therefore, as it would be to say that missionaries “Christianized” the Kiowa.
Page reference: Cultural Change and Cultural Authenticity
a. the way in which Kiowa Christians have been able to transform what began as an exercise in cultural imperialism into a reaffirmation of traditional Kiowa values challenges the presumption that “authentic cultures” never change.
b. Christian missionaries and the U.S. Army effectively destroyed traditional Kiowa spirituality.
c. an indigenous society cannot remain authentic if its members abandon their traditional religious practices by converting to a different religion.
d. Kiowa conversion to Christianity hastened the demise of the Kiowa language.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 23]
23) According to the chapter, anthropology is guaranteed to
Feedback: There is no going back to ethnocentrism when the going gets rough, except in bad faith. So anthropology is guaranteed to complicate your life.
Page reference: The Promise of the Anthropological Perspective
a. decrease your quantitative reasoning skills.
b. complicate your life.
c. confuse your ability to work on a team.
d. make life easier.
Type: true-false
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 24]
24) The concept of habitus is heavily influenced by our interactions with material culture and gives shape and form to the idea that objects make people.
Feedback: Many things we learn, such as table manners and what is good to eat and where people are supposed to sleep, are never explicitly taught but rather are absorbed in the course of daily practical living. French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu called this kind of cultural learning habitus and it is heavily influenced by our interactions with material culture.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Define Culture?
a. True
b. False
Type: true-false
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 25]
25) Adam Kuper shows how the rulers in apartheid South Africa used the plural concept of culture to liberate themselves from control by the colonial government.
Feedback: It is the plural use of cultures with a lowercase c that has been challenged. The challenge may seem puzzling, however, because many anthropologists have viewed the plural use of the culture concept not only as analytically helpful but also as politically progressive. Their view reflects a struggle that developed in nineteenth-century Europe: Supporters of the supposedly progressive, universal civilization of the Enlightenment, inaugurated by the French Revolution and spread by Napoleonic conquest, were challenged by inhabitants of other European nations, who resisted both Napoleon and the Enlightenment in what has been called the Romantic Counter-Enlightenment. Romantic intellectuals in nations like Germany rejected what they considered the imposition of “artificial” Enlightenment civilization on the “natural” spiritual traditions of their own distinct national cultures (Kuper 1999; Crehan 2002).
Page reference: Does Culture Explain Everything?
a. True
b. False
Type: true-false
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 26]
26) The anthropological perspective can give you a broader understanding of human nature and the wider world, of society, culture, and history, and thus help you construct more realistic and authentic ways of coping with those complications.
Feedback: The anthropological perspective on the human condition is not easy to maintain. It forces us to question the commonsense assumptions with which we are most comfortable. It only increases the difficulty we encounter when faced with moral and political decisions. It does not allow us an easy retreat because once we are exposed to the kinds of experience that the anthropological undertaking makes possible, we are changed. We cannot easily pretend that these new experiences never happened to us.
Page reference: The Promise of the Anthropological Perspective
a. True
b. False
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 27]
27) According to Richard Potts, which of the following is NOT one of the elements that forms the foundation of culture?
Feedback: Potts proposes that modern human symbolic culture and the social institutions that depend on it rest on other, more basic abilities that emerged at different times in our evolutionary past.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Define Culture?
a. Memory
b. Transmission
c. Genetics
d. Selection
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 28]
28) To say that culture and the human brain coevolved is to say that
Feedback: Complex symbolic representation apparently was of great adaptive value for our ancestors. It created selective pressures that increased human symbolic capacities over time. Put another way, culture and the human brain coevolved, each furnishing key features of the environment to which the other needed to adapt (Odling-Smee 1994; Deacon 1997, 44).
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Define Culture?
a. each provided key features of the environment to which the other needed to adapt.
b. genetic changes in human beings are related to language.
c. biology is less important to modern human beings than it was in the ancient past.
d. human social organization is ancient.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 29]
29) Hoyt Alverson discovered that U.S. Peace Corps volunteers in Botswana had difficulty with their assignments in part because
Feedback: In the early 1970s, the Peace Corps office in Botswana was concerned by the number of volunteers who seemed to be “burned out,” failing in their assignments, leaving the assigned villages, and increasingly hostile to their Tswana hosts. The Peace Corps asked American anthropologist Hoyt Alverson, who was familiar with Tswana culture and society, for advice. Alverson (1977) discovered that one major problem the Peace Corps volunteers were having involved exactly this issue of similar actions having very different meanings. The volunteers complained that the Tswana would never leave them alone. Whenever they tried to get away and sit by themselves for a few minutes to have some private time, one or more Tswana would quickly join them. This made the Americans angry. From their perspective, everyone is entitled to a certain amount of privacy and time alone. To the Tswana, however, human life is social life; the only people who want to be alone are witches and the insane.
Page reference: Why Do Cultural Differences Matter?
a. people would always leave them alone.
b. actions that meant one thing to them meant something else to their Tswana hosts.
c. the Tswana were not interested in their projects.
d. they did not really care about the local people.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 30]
30) What did Boddy’s field research teach her about the meanings associated with infibulation in Hofriyat?
Feedback: Boddy discovered that the purity, cleanliness, and smoothness associated with the infibulated female body are also associated with other activities, concepts, and objects in everyday village customs.
Page reference: How Can Cultural Relativity Improve Our Understanding of Controversial Cultural Practices?
a. Men and women in Hofriyat have been unable to resist cultural pressure in favor of infibulation.
b. The meanings associated with female infibulation are reinforced by so many different aspects of everyday life that girls come to consider the operation a profoundly necessary and justifiable procedure.
c. A less radical form of the operation was promoted after 1969 but never gained acceptance among villagers.
d. It is a completely useless ritual.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 31]
31) To argue that “their culture made them do it” is to take the position of
Feedback: Many anthropologists have criticized use of the term cultures to refer to particular, learned ways of life belonging to specific groups of human beings. Critics argue that this way of talking about culture seems to endorse a kind of oppressive cultural determinism. Supporters, however, argue that in some cases this version of the culture concept can be used to defend vulnerable social groups against exploitation and oppression by outsiders.
Page reference: How Can Cultural Relativity Improve Our Understanding of Controversial Cultural Practices?
a. cultural determinism.
b. cultural relativism.
c. ethnocentrism.
d. environmental determinism.
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 32]
32) For some people, blue jeans, McDonalds hamburgers, hip hop, and Coca-Cola are seen destroying local practices. They call this process
Feedback: Cultural imperialism is the idea that some cultures dominate others and that domination by one culture leads inevitably to the destruction of subordinated cultures and their replacement by the culture of those in power.
Page reference: Does Culture Explain Everything?
a. the expansion of U. S. popular culture.
b. cultural imperialism.
c. market exchange.
d. hybridization.
Type: true-false
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 33]
33) African women who are trying to eliminate female genital cutting from their own societies are often not happy when American outsiders like Mary Daly and Alice Walker denounce the practice as a human rights abuse because outsiders’ condemnations of female genital cutting sound too much like the ethnocentric, reductionist critiques of “barbaric” African customs that Europeans once used to justify colonial conquest.
Feedback: Women anthropologists who come from African societies where female genital cutting is traditional point out that Western women who want to help are likely to be more effective if they pay closer attention to what the African women themselves have to say about the meaning of these customs: “Careful listening to women helps us to recognize them as political actors forging their own communities of resistance. It also helps us to learn how and when to provide strategic support that would be welcomed by women who are struggling to challenge such traditions within their own cultures” (Abusharaf 2000).
Page reference: How Can Cultural Relativity Improve Our Understanding of Controversial Cultural Practices?
a. True
b. False
Type: true-false
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 34]
34) Critics identify problems with several assumptions of the traditional plural concept of culture in anthropology because group members uncritically accept the differences between themselves and other groups.
Feedback: Doesn’t the fact that Kiowas are Christians today show that federal officials and missionaries succeeded in their policies of Western Christian cultural imperialism? Maybe not: “Taking the ‘Jesus Way’ is not necessarily the story of how one set of beliefs replace another one wholesale or of the incompatibility of Kiowa practices with Christian ones. Rather, it is a more complex encounter in which both sides make concessions” (Lassiter et al. 2002, 19).
Page reference: Cultural Change and Cultural Authenticity
a. True
b. False
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 35]
35) At the present time, anthropologists are seeing that the plural definition of culture is used by indigenous groups to define themselves and by other scholarly disciplines.
Feedback: The way in which Kiowa Christians have been able to transform what began as an exercise in cultural imperialism into a reaffirmation of traditional Kiowa values challenges the presumption that “authentic cultures” never change. Such an inflexible concept of culture can accommodate neither the agency of Kiowa Christians nor the validity of the “ongoing” and “continually unfolding” cultural traditions they produce.
Page reference: Cultural Change and Cultural Authenticity
a. True
b. False
Type: essay/short answer question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 36]
36) Identify an example of ethnocentrism from recent news and discuss the range of possible perspectives on the practice in question that might be held by members and outsiders of the society where it is found.
Feedback: Ethnocentrism is the opinion that one’s own way of life is natural or correct and, indeed, the only true way of being fully human.
Page reference: Why Do Cultural Differences Matter?
Type: essay/short answer question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 37]
37) Discuss how the Kiowa “kiowanized” Christianity using three examples discussed in the text.
Feedback: Missionaries did not insist that the Kiowa give up all traditional ways (Lassiter 2002, 53). Prominent individuals adopted Christianity, and Kiowa converts were trained to become missionaries and ministers, which proved attractive (Lassiter 2002, 57). Especially persuasive were women missionaries who “lived in the Kiowa camps, ate their food, and endured the privations of life on the plains with impressive strength” (Lassiter 2002, 59). Missionaries, in turn, actively sought to adapt Christian practices to traditional Kiowa ways. For example, “Missions were historically located in and around established camps and communities,” with the result that “churches were the natural extension of traditional Kiowa camps” and eventually took their place at the center of Kiowa life (Lassiter 2002, 61). It might be as accurate to say that the Kiowa “Kiowanized” Christianity, therefore, as it would be to say that missionaries “Christianized” the Kiowa.
Page reference: Cultural Change and Cultural Authenticity
Type: essay/short answer question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 38]
38) What did Daniel Miller mean when he said that the concept of habitus “gives shape and form to the idea that objects make people?” Illustrate your answer with examples.
Feedback: Many things we learn, such as table manners and what is good to eat and where people are supposed to sleep, are never explicitly taught but rather are absorbed in the course of daily practical living. French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu called this kind of cultural learning habitus and it is heavily influenced by our interactions with material culture. According to Daniel Miller (2010), Bourdieu’s theory “gives shape and form to the idea that objects make people. . . . We walk around the rice terraces or road systems, the housing and gardens that are effectively ancestral. These unconsciously direct our footsteps, and are the landscapes of our imagination, as well as the cultural environment to which we adapt” (53). The cultural practices shared within social groups always encompass the varied knowledge and skills of many different individuals.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Define Culture?
Type: essay/short answer question
Title: [Analysis and Synthesis: Chapter 08 Question 39]
39) The goal of cultural relativism is understanding. However, to understand does not mean to condone. Select a contemporary scenario (such as civil war, genocide) and how an anthropologist, from a relativistic point of view, would explain the cultural practice.
Feedback: Cultural relativism is the understanding another culture in its own terms sympathetically enough so that the culture appears to be a coherent and meaningful design for living.
Page reference: Why Do Cultural Differences Matter?
Type: essay/short answer question
Title: [Analysis and Synthesis: Chapter 08 Question 40]
40) Describe the difference between Culture and cultures. Discuss the different ways in which cultures can be used.
Feedback: For at least the past 50 years, many anthropologists have distinguished between Culture (with a capital C) and cultures (plural with a lowercase c). Culture has been used to describe an attribute of the human species as a whole—its members’ ability, in the absence of highly specific genetic programming, to create and to imitate patterned, symbolically mediated ideas and activities that promote the survival of our species. By contrast, the term cultures has been used to refer to particular, learned ways of life belonging to specific groups of human beings. Given this distinction, the human species as a whole can be said to have Culture as a defining attribute, but actual human beings would only have access to particular human cultures—either their own or other people’s.
Page reference: Does Culture Explain Everything?
Type: essay/short answer question
Title: [Analysis and Synthesis: Chapter 08 Question 41]
41) Discuss cultural imperialism, cultural hybridization, and cosmopolitanism. How do anthropologists define these concepts, how are they related, and why are they important in contemporary anthropological discussions of globalization?
Feedback: Cultural imperialism is the idea that some cultures dominate others and that domination by one culture leads inevitably to the destruction of subordinated cultures and their replacement by the culture of those in power.
Page reference: Does Culture Explain Everything?
Module 3 Test Bank
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 01]
1) The ethnographic research method that relies primarily on face-to-face contact with people as they go about their daily lives is called
Feedback: Participant observation is the method anthropologists use to gather information by living as closely as possible to the people whose culture they are studying while participating in their lives as much as possible.
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
a. controlled comparison
b. interviewing
c. scientific observation
d. participant observation
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 02]
2) An extended period of research during which a cultural anthropologist gathers firsthand data about life in a particular society is called
Feedback: Fieldwork is an extended period of close involvement with the people in whose language or way of life anthropologists are interested, during which anthropologists ordinarily collect most of their data.
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
a. fieldwork
b. graduate school
c. scientific observation
d. controlled comparison
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 03]
3) Thinking critically about the way one thinks, on one’s own experience is called
Feedback: Reflexivity is critically thinking about the way one thinks, reflecting on one’s own experience.
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
a. reflexivity
b. culture shock
c. positivism
d. relativism
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 04]
4) The feeling, akin to panic, that develops in people living in an unfamiliar society when they cannot understand what is happening around them is
Feedback: Culture shock is the feeling, akin to panic, that develops in people living in an unfamiliar society when they cannot understand what is happening around them.
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
a. culture shock
b. ethnocentrism
c. field hysteria
d. adaptation
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 05]
5) According to the text, different national traditions of anthropological research are
Feedback: Moreover, as our contact with the other is prolonged and as our efforts to communicate are rewarded by the construction of intersubjective understanding, we can always learn more. Human beings are open organisms, with a vast ability to learn new things. This is significant, because even if we can never know everything, it does not seem that our capacity for understanding ourselves and others is likely to be exhausted soon. This is not only because we are open to change but also because our culture and our wider environment can change, and all will continue to do so as long as human history continues. The ethnographic enterprise will never be finished, even if all nonindustrial ways of life disappear forever, all people move into cities, and everyone ends up speaking English. Such a superficial homogeneity would mask a vast heterogeneity beneath its bland surface. In any case, given the dynamics of human existence, nothing in human affairs can remain homogeneous for long.
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
a. helping to create a decolonized anthropology
b. driving the field apart
c. emphasizing national differences in anthropological research
d. taking anthropologists away from field research
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 06]
6) Ethnographic research that is not contained by social, ethnic, religious, or national boundaries is called
Feedback: Multisited fieldwork is ethnographic research on cultural processes that are not contained by social, ethical, or national boundaries, in which the ethnographer follows the process from site to site, often doing fieldwork at sites and with persons who traditionally were never subjected to ethnographic analysis.
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
a. ethnography
b. multidirectional fieldwork
c. multisited fieldwork
d. unconventional fieldwork
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 07]
7) In the text, Arjun Appadurai calls for collaborative approaches that would include anthropologists and
Feedback: Fieldwork involves differences of power and thereby places a heavy burden of responsibility on ethnographers. They are accountable not only to their informants but also to the discipline of anthropology, which has its own theoretical and practical concerns and ways of reasoning about ethnographic data. For these reasons, Arjun Appadurai has called for a “deparochialization of the research ethic” that would involve collaboration with colleagues outside the United States such as grassroots activists, who often lack the kinds of institutional resources and professional experience that scholars in the United States take for granted.
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
a. grassroots activists
b. local bureaucrats
c. national intellectuals
d. marketing researchers
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 08]
8) As related in the text, Daniel Bradburd and Anne Sheedy learned about the decision-making among the Komachi by
Feedback: Bradburd had gone to Iran to study the process of active decision making among nomadic herding people, and he was therefore quite interested in when people would move their camps and why they would do it. His first experience with moving was not what he had expected. After a month in one place, he started to hear talk about moving. Why? he asked. To be closer to the village and because the campsite was dirty. When? Soon. When is soon? When Tavakoli comes. This answer made no sense until further questioning revealed that Tavakoli was the son of the leader of the camp.
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
a. participating proactively in the Komachi decision-making process
b. asking people how they made decisions
c. drawing conclusions based on Komachi responses to their questions and interpretations
d. studying the astronomical constellations recognized by the Komachi
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 09]
9) According to David Hess, cited in the text, what is a fact?
Feedback: Anthropologist David Hess (1997) defines fact as a widely accepted observation, a taken-for-granted item of common knowledge (101–2).
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
a. A piece of reality
b. A taken-for-granted item of common knowledge
c. What is left when everything is explained
d. Whatever the anthropologist says it is, after careful research
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 10]
10) “Rich points,” Michael Agar’s expression discussed in the text, are
Feedback: Anthropologist Michael Agar uses the expression “rich points” for those unexpected moments when problems in cross-cultural understanding emerge. Rich points may be words or actions that signal the gaps between the local people’s out-of-awareness assumptions about how the world works and those of the anthropologist. For Agar, rich points are the raw material of ethnography, challenging researchers but also offering opportunities for insight. As he says, “it is this distance between two worlds of experience that is exactly the problem that ethnographic research is designed to locate and resolve” (Agar 1996, 31). Ethnographers work hard to situate rich points within the local cultural world, continually testing their interpretations in a variety of settings, with different people, to see if those interpretations are or are not confirmed.
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
a. cases with many different meanings
b. places where the anthropologist must pay more for information because it is so sensitive
c. moments when the anthropologist’s informants finally figure out the questions being asked
d. unexpected moments when problems in cross-cultural understanding emerge
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 11]
11) The dialectic of fieldwork refers to the
Feedback: In the dialectic of fieldwork, both anthropologist and informant are active agents. Each party tries to figure out what the other is saying. For example, the anthropologist asks about “ethnic groups” using a term in the informants’ language that seems close to “ethnic group” in meaning. Informants then try to interpret the anthropologist’s question in a way that makes sense. That is, each informant has to be reflexive, thinking about how people in his or her society think about the topic that they believe is addressed by the anthropologist’s question. This thinking about thinking is called reflexivity. Having formulated an answer, informants respond in terms they think the anthropologist will understand. Now it is the anthropologist’s turn to interpret this response, to decide if it makes sense and carries the kind of information he or she was looking for.
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
a. personal and financial connection between the anthropologist and the informants
b. anthropologist’s knowledge that he or she will return home while the informants must stay
c. mutual construction of cross-cultural knowledge about the informant’s culture by anthropologist and informant together
d. the language the anthropologist learns to use to communicate in the field
Type: multiple choice question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 12]
12) When Paul Rabinow found that Malik was hesitant to list his own possessions, he discovered
Feedback: Malik’s easy understanding of himself and his world had been disrupted, and he could not ignore the disruption. He would either have to change his self-image or find some way to assimilate this new information about himself into the old self-image. In the end, Malik managed to reaffirm his conclusion that he was not well off by arguing that wealth lay not in material possessions alone. Although he might be rich in material goods, his son’s health was bad, his own father was dead, he was responsible for his mother and unmarried brothers, and he had to be constantly vigilant to prevent his uncle from stealing his land (Rabinow 1977, 117–19).
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
a. that he could trust no one in Morocco
b. the shock of otherness
c. the correctness of his informants
d. the surprise of pseudofriendship
Type: essay/short answer question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 13]
13) Describe three kinds of preparations anthropologists undertake before going into the field. Why are these preparations important?
Feedback: Anthropologists sometimes gain field experience as undergraduates or early in their graduate studies by working on research projects or in field schools run by established anthropologists. Beginning anthropologists usually decide during graduate school where and on what topic they wish to do their research. These decisions are based on their interests, their readings, the courses they have taken, the interests of their professors, and current debates in cultural anthropology. Success depends on being able to obtain both permission to work in a particular place in the form of approvals from academic and governmental offices in the host country and the funds to support one’s research.
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
Type: essay/short answer question
Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 08 Question 14]
14) Compare and contrast the advantages and drawbacks of multisited field research as compared to singlesited field research.
Feedback: Multisited fieldwork is ethnographic research on cultural processes that are not contained by social, ethical, or national boundaries, in which the ethnographer follows the process from site to site, often doing fieldwork at sites and with persons who traditionally were never subjected to ethnographic analysis. Anthropologists sometimes gain field experience as undergraduates or early in their graduate studies by working on research projects or in field schools run by established anthropologists. An extended period of fieldwork is the final phase of formal anthropological training, but most anthropologists hope to incorporate additional periods of field research into their subsequent careers.
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
Type: essay/short answer question
Title: [Analysis and Synthesis: Chapter 08 Question 15]
15) Participant observation is the classic method of anthropological research. Many anthropologists would argue that no proper understanding of another culture can be attained without it. Explain why participant-observation is a valuable research methodology. What would be missed if anthropologists did not engage in it during fieldwork?
Feedback: Participant observation is the method anthropologists use to gather information by living as closely as possible to the people whose culture they are studying while participating in their lives as much as possible.
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods
Type: essay/short answer question
Title: [Analysis and Synthesis: Chapter 08 Question 16]
16) Rabinow writes, “There is no primitive, there are only other [people] leading other lives.” Describe what he means by this statement. What are the implications of such a view for the way anthropologists carry out their research?
Feedback: Good ethnography should allow readers to experience the informants’ full humanity. This privileged position, the extraordinary opportunity to experience “the other” as human beings while learning about their lives, is an experience that comes neither easily nor automatically. It must be cultivated, and it requires cooperation between and effort from one’s informants and oneself. We have made an important first step if we can come to recognize, as Paul Rabinow (1977) did, that “there is no primitive. There are other [people] living other lives” (151).
Page reference: On Ethnographic Methods