Exam 1 Study Questions
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Winter 2010
What does it mean that anthropology is ‘holistic’? (Culture Counts)
What are the four main subfields of anthropology? (Lecture and Culture Counts)
Give examples of how culture can change human biology in individuals. (Lecture)
What is the underlying method and foundation of cultural anthropological fieldwork and what is its
value to better understanding culture? (What do the authors of Culture Counts say in Ch. 2 about
anthropology’s role in bringing the concept of ‘culture’ to other disciplines and to the general
population?)
5. What is an ethnography? (See Culture Counts)
6. What is ethnology? (Culture Counts)
7. Be prepared to discuss Franz Boas and his role in the early years of American Anthropology and his
greatest contributions to the discipline. (Lecture and Culture Counts)
8. What is culture, and what are the elements of culture that we talked about the first week of class
and that are described in Culture Counts?
9. What do anthropologists mean when they say that culture is moral?
10. What do anthropologists mean when they say that culture is ‘arbitrary’ and ‘symbolic’?
11. What do anthropologists mean when they say that culture is limit setting?
12. What does embarrassment indicate in a social/cultural situation?
13. What is enculturation?
14. How would most anthropologists define ‘race,’ according to your text book and the film Race: the
Power of an Illusion? Why?
15. Why is ‘race’ a cultural construction which cannot be mapped onto biology?
16. Explain some of the social/political reasons Europeans and EuroAmericans historically defined and
constructed race in the ways that they did?
17. What are some of the conditions that Peggy McIntosh lists that African American co-workers, friends
and acquaintances cannot count on that most white persons take for granted? Why does McIntosh
conclude that disapproving of the situation is not enough to change it?
18. What is ethnocentrism? What are some extremes of ethnocentrism? (Lecture and text book)
19. What is relativism and its importance in anthropology? What are some extremes of relativism?
20. Explain the fieldwork methodology participant observation. What information can you gain from
participant observation that would likely be difficult to gather with other methods such as surveys,
experiments, and structured interviews? What are other anthropological techniques? (Lecture and
text book)
21. Was Claire Sterk’s approach to studying prostitution in Tricking and Tripping a more etic or emic
approach? Why? What did she learn?
22. What are ethical considerations for the ethnographer? (Culture Counts and Lecture)
23. What did Richard Borshay Lee learn about himself and his own ethnocentrisms through his fieldwork
experiences with the !Kung San in the article Eating Christmas in the Kalahari?
24. How does etic differ from emic? (Lecture and Culture Counts)
25. Be prepared to define ‘behavioral setting.’ What is an example of a behavioral setting and the
expected behaviors in that setting? What do behavioral settings tell us about enculturation? (Lecture)
26. How are habit and memory linked to places, culturally and biologically? (Lecture)
27. According to anthropologist Deborah Pellow, how was privacy understood in Shanghai, China in the
1980s and 1990s compared with ‘mainstream’ U.S.A? Why? (Lecture)
28. What is a liminal space? What is a liminal experience? How do liminal places and experiences create
a sense of vulnerability in individuals that could result in possible worldview or ideological changes?
Example? (Lecture)
29. Explain how the architectural design ‘panopticon’ has become a part of our spatial, as well as our
social and cultural experiences, according to Michel Foucault? (Lecture)
30. What is a contact culture? Give some examples. (Film Personal Space)
1.
2.
3.
4.
31. What is a non-contact culture? Give some examples. (Film Personal Space)
32. When did the U.S. educational system become focused so intensely on time as a measure of
intelligence and success, according to anthropologist Kathryn Leavitt Anderson? Why and how?
(Lecture)
33. What is an event time culture? Give some examples.(Lecture)
34. What is a clock time culture? Give some examples. (Lecture)
35. Applying seven or eight subcategories of the definition of culture (that we talked about in class the
first week), discuss the ways that people in industrialized cultures understand and use time. (Lecture)
36. How did the industrial revolution ‘speed up time,’ according to human geographer turned
anthropologist David Harvey? What is time-space compression? (Lecture)
37. What might the article Slumber’s Unexplored Landscape and sleep expectations in the U.S.
compared with other cultures tell us about clock time and culture’s influence on biology?
38. Why did Harvey and others conclude that we have become a throwaway society as a part of timespace compression? What is the economic importance of temporariness and high levels of
consumption in industrialized society? (Lecture)
39. What might a comparison between time, work, and fishing priorities in the predominantly
EuroAmerican fishing village Petersburg, Alaska and the predominant Tlingit village Kake, Alaska tell
us about how time perspectives influence our relationship with the environment? (Lecture)
40. How is learning language biological? (Lecture, film The Mind’s Big Bang, and Culture Counts)
41. How is learning language cultural? What is the central connection between language and culture?
42. According to Stephen Pinker and others featured in the film The Mind’s Big Bang, why do we seem
biologically more intelligent than people who lived 35,000 to 60,000 years ago? Are we innately
smarter, according to biological anthropologists featured in the film who study genetics, fossils, skull
shapes and fossilized brain impressions?
43. What relationship exists between cave art, carvings, tool making and bead making several thousand
years ago and the use of language? What does evidence about symbolic life tell us about The
Mind’s Big Bang?
44. What does the video about Kanzi the bonobo and his sister tell us about non-human animal abilities
to imitate, learn, and share language?
45. Why do many humans think they are too ‘special’ to be connected with other animals biologically,
intellectually and prehistorically? Some indigenous people say that many humans have learned to
have little respect for non-human animals and so have a fear of being connected in any way with
something they themselves don’t respect. Is that a possible reason?
46. How are language and cultural rules intertwined? Be prepared to discuss the main points of the
article To Give Up On Words as an example.
47. According to Basso, how do uses of silence in the Apache world differ from uses of silence in
‘mainstream’ U.S. culture?
48. Explain the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis. (Lecture and Culture Contact)
49. What is ‘Theory of Mind’?
50. What does Dr. Temple Grandin and psychologist Oliver Sachs say about autism, culture, and theory
of mind? (Culture Contact)