Ch. 8 Anthro Questions – Flashcards with Answers
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The human condition is distinguished from the condition of other living species by
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Culture
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Culture is
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Learned, shared, symbolic
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Those parts of culture that are absorbed in the course of daily practical learning are called
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habitus
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According to Rick Potts (as mentioned in the text), which of following is not one of the elements that form the foundation of culture? A) memory B) transmission C) Genetics D)Selection
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C) genetics
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According to Rick Potts, culture:
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demonstrates continuity between the human and animal realms of behavior
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To say that culture and the human brain evolved is to say that
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Each provided key features of the environment to which the other needed to adapt.
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Complex, variable, and enduring forms of cultural practice that organize social life are called...
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Institutions
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The exercise of at least some control over their lives by human beings is called
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human agency
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Clifford Geertz, as quoted in the text, observes that human beings raised in isolation would be...
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Mental basket cases
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An approach that views human beings and environments as open systems that modify each other is called
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coevolutionary
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Hoyt Alverson discovered that US Peace Corps volunteers in Botswana had difficultly with their assignment in part because
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Actions that meant one thing to them meant something else to their Tswana hosts
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Hoyt Alverson discovered that the Tswana people he talked to in Botswana and the US Peace Corps volunteers he interviewed differed with regard to
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The meaning of being alone
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Cultural relativism
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...
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Genocide is...
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The attempt to exterminate an entire people
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What is an example of ritual cutting associated with initiating girls and boys into adulthood?
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Clitoridectomy, Infibulation, and Circumcision
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African women who are trying to eliminate FGM from their own societies are often not happy when Americans outsiders like Mary Daly and Alice Walker denounce the practice as a human rights abuse. Why?
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1) When outsiders publicly condem traditional rituals like clitoridectomy and infibulation, they may do more harm than good. 2) 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. 3) Western women who want to help eliminate FGM are likely to be more effective if they pay close attention to what African women who are directly affected by the practice have to say about its meaning in their lives.
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When immigrants and refugees from Africa bring traditions of FGM to places like the US and European union, what has been the consequences?
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1) Growing awareness has led to public condemnation of the practice. 2) Laws have been passed that criminalize FGM in 15 African states and 10 industrialized nations including the US. 3) Immigrant or refugee mothers in the US who seek to have their daughters ritually cut have been stigmatized in the media as "mutilators" or "child abusers"
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When anthropologist Janice Boddy carried our fieldwork in northern Sudan, what did she learn about genital cutting?
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Female circumcision is required to make it possible for a girl to use her fertility.
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Janice Boddy learned that to infibulate a female boy in Hofriyat meant
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1) to renew and protect its fertility after giving birth 2) to make it clean and smooth and pure 3) To de-emphasize a women's sexuality and turn women into "mothers of men"
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Which of the following objects in the village of Hofriyat were associated with the infibulated female body? A) Waterbirds B) Ostrich eggshells C)Gourds D) all of the above
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D) all of the above
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In Hoyfriyat, the ability of an object to reain moisture is likened to its ability to retain fertility, likening a woman's infibulated body to
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A dried egg-shaped gourd with seeds that rattle inside it.
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What did Boddy's field research teach her about the meanings associated with infibulation in Hofriyat?
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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.
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Which of the following is not an assumption of cultural determinism regarding human nature and human society? A) Cultures have clear boundaries. B) Every culture offers people one way to interpret their experience. C) Every set of cultural practices contains fundamental contradictions. D) Human beings are passively molded by culture.
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c
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To argue that "their culture made them do it" is to take the position of
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Cultural determinism
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The anthropological definition of cultural relativism requires that we make and effort to ------ the practices of other cultures.
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understand
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When anthropologists distinguished between Culture and cultures there were distinguishing between ...... and ....
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a defining attribute of human beings/ ways of life of specific groups of people
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The text quotes Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who claims that as the social sciences were becoming established at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, anthropology was assigned the "savage slot". What does he mean by that?
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Anthropologists became the experts on the societies that were being colonized by European countries and the US.
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Adam Kuper (quoted in text) shows how the rulers in apartheid South Africa used the plural concept of culture to
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control indigenous African populations
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According to anthropologist Eric Luke Lassiter, does the fact that Kiowas are Christians today show that federal officials and missionaries succeeded in their policies of Western cultural imperialism?
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he said, "maybe not"
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According to anthopologist Eric Luke Lassiter, which of the following statements accurately describes how the Kiowa people dealt with Christianity?
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1) The Kiowa people "Kiowanized" Christianity 2) Kiowa Christian hymns, sung in the Kiowa language, are as much Kiowa (if not more) than they are Christian 3) Some Kiowa Christians insist that Christianity is not the same as "the white man's way"
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Perhaps the most profound lesson we can learn from the Kiowa experience of Christianity is
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That the way in which Kiowa Christians have been able to transform what began as an exercise in cultural imperialism into a reaffirmation of tradition Kiowa values challenges the presumption that "authentic cultures" never change.
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Critics identify problems with several assumptions of the traditional plural concept of culture in anthropology. Which of the followings is not one of those problems? A) Group members uncritically accept the differences between themselves and other groups. B) Group members end up having to live according to "their" culture and cant change it. C) Group members who challenge traditional ways of doing things are accused of being "traitors" to their group D) All of the above are problems that are identified.
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A) group members uncritically accept the differences between themselves and other groups.
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At the present time, anthropologists are seeing that the plural definition of culture
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all of the above