Society and Culture
Textbook Exam Questions
Course Introduction
This course explores the complex relationship between society and culture, examining how cultural values, beliefs, norms, and practices shape social structures and individual behavior. Through an interdisciplinary approach, students analyze the ways in which culture influences identity, socialization, inequality, and change in various societies around the world. Key topics include the role of language, religion, traditions, media, and globalization in the construction of social reality. The course encourages critical thinking through case studies, discussions, and practical examples, enabling students to better understand and navigate cultural diversity in a globalized world.
Recommended Textbook
Essentials of Cultural Anthropology 2nd Edition by Kenneth J. Guest
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Chapter 1: Anthropology in a Global Age
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Q1) When companies move their production facilities around the world to take advantage of cheaper labor and lower taxes, what do anthropologists call this?
A) ethnology
B) increasing migration
C) time-space compression
D) flexible accumulation
Answer: D
Q2) Dr. Ken Guest's research compares a community in New York's Chinatown with another community in Fuzhou, China. The two communities are linked by migration. What best describes his research?
A) ethnology
B) multi-sited ethnography
C) historic archeology
D) physical anthropology
Answer: B
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Chapter 2: Culture
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Q1) Margaret Mead's fieldwork in Samoa was controversial in part because she examined sexual freedom, and considered sexual behavior to be a matter of
A) stratification
B) enculturation
C) unilineal culture evolution
D) structural functionalism
Answer: B
Q2) Culture is more than a set of ideas or patterns of behavior shared by a group of people. It also includes general mechanisms created by people to promote and maintain their core values. The recent changes in same-sex marriage laws in the United States reflects the influence of which of these types of mechanisms?
A) religious preferences
B) powerful institutions
C) a justice system
D) coercive powers
Answer: B
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Chapter 3: Fieldwork and Ethnography
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Q1) What aspect of life do anthropologists tend find particularly useful when decoding radically different cultures?
A) relationships
B) ethnocentrism
C) patterns
D) language
Answer: C
Q2) Increased migration has led anthropologists to conduct different types of ethnographic research, collecting data in two or more locations. What type of ethnography is this?
A) reflexive
B) extensive
C) public
D) multi-sited
Answer: D
Q3) Define zeros and explain their significance for ethnographers.
Answer: Zeros are the elements of a story or picture that are not told or seen; they are key details omitted from the conversation. This omission offers insight into which topics are too sensitive to discuss publicly.
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Page 5
Chapter 4: Language
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Q1) The Hopi language has verb tenses that differ from those of English. Benjamin Whorf's linguistic research among the Hopi people suggested that this meant they have what?
A) a worldview where past and present represent lived reality and the future is hypothetical
B) an ability to retain their cultural traditions by only having one dialect
C) a worldview that keeps past, present, and future as entirely separate concepts
D) the same conceptual idea of time as everyone else, with different ways of describing it
Q2) What types of evidence have anthropologists drawn on to approximate when humans first began to use language? Using examples, analyze how genetic and archaeological information has been used to determine when the human capacity for speech evolved. How did language enhance the ability of humans to survive and adapt to inhospitable environments?
Q3) What do linguists call small units of sound that carry meaning on their own?
A) phonemes
B) syntax
C) morphemes
D) paralanguage
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Chapter 5: Race and Racism
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Q1) A person may inherit a genetic pattern for above-average height, but may only reach average height due to poor nutrition. What is this an expression of?
A) genotype
B) phenotype
C) cline
D) poverty
Q2) The process of categorizing, differentiating, and attributing a particular racial character to a person or group of people, is referred to as what?
A) discrimination
B) hypodescent
C) segregation
D) racialization
Q3) Compare and contrast how races have been constructed in two different cultures discussed in the text. What similarities are there, and how are they different? What does this tell us about the concept of race in general?
Q4) Explain how European colonial expansion gave rise to race and racism.
Q5) Explain how the idea of "white" or "whiteness" changed over time in the United States.
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Chapter 6: Ethnicity and Nationalism
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Q1) Since ethnicity is not biologically fixed, self-identification with a particular ethnic group can shift. What is this process called?
A) situational negotiation of identity
B) citizenship
C) ethnic boundary marker
D) assimilation
Q2) In a brief essay, compare and contrast how the Bafokeng have formed corporations to achieve specific goals. Use specific examples from the class to illustrate your answer.
Q3) Despite their often obvious ethnic, socioeconomic, occupational, and religious differences, and the fact that most will never meet each other, the majority of people in the United States see themselves as members of a large community called "America." What concept does this demonstrate?
A) ethnic making
B) nation building
C) imagined community
D) diaspora
Q4) Identify three things that are used as ethnic boundary markers, and explain in what cultures they are used and how.
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Chapter 7: Gender
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Q1) What do we call the process through which a sense of gender becomes normative and seems natural to us?
A) performance of gender
B) gender stratification
C) cultural construction of gender
D) gender hierarchy
Q2) The unequal distribution of power, prestige and responsibility between men and women in the U.S. military, even as policies change to attempt to be more inclusive, are a prime example of what?
A) gender stereotypes
B) gender roles
C) gender stratification
D) politics of gender
Q3) Define the concept of intersex, and explain how physicians' attitudes toward children born intersex have changed in recent decades in parallel with changes in attitudes toward sexuality.
Q4) Describe why anthropologists have shifted their focus from looking at gender roles to gender performance. What is the difference between the two? What role do gender ideologies and gender stereotypes play in gender performance?
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Chapter 8: Sexuality
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Q1) In Kano, Nigeria, Rudolf Gaudio found that men who have sex with other men use a special "code word" to describe themselves. What is that word?
A) mati
B) 'yan daudu
C) masu harka
D) machista
Q2) 'Yan daudu challenge the dominant norms of what aspect of northern Nigerian culture?
A) sexual
B) domestic
C) colonial
D) marital
Q3) Where does the dual categorization of sexuality as either homosexual or heterosexual come from?
A) the early Christian church
B) Western cultural history
C) near eastern theology
D) ancient Greece
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Chapter 9: Kinship, Family, and Marriage
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Q1) The statement issued in 2004 by the American Anthropological Association noted that a "vast array of family types" all contributed to "stable and humane societies." Why did the organization issue this statement?
A) to support heterosexual marriage
B) to support same-sex marriage
C) to expand research into the nature of families
D) to increase economic support for families in poverty
Q2) Anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard conducted ethnographic research with Nuer people of southern Sudan in the 1930s and argued that this group of people constituted a patrilineal descent group. What does it mean to be a patrilineal descent group and how does this differ from a matrilineal descent group? How were cattle used to reflect the patrilineal nature of Nuer descent? Provide at least two examples.
Q3) In a matrilineal descent group, continued membership in the same family group is passed down through which member?
A) father
B) mother
C) uncle
D) aunt
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Chapter 10: Class and Inequality
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Q1) Leith Mullings argues that class cannot be studied in isolation but rather must be considered together with race and gender as interlocking systems of what?
A) class
B) status
C) power
D) prestige
Q2) The culture of poverty theory suggests that poverty is the result of an individual's dysfunctional behaviors, attitudes, and values. Anthropologists have strongly challenged this idea, arguing that poverty is a structural problem. What do they say this results from?
A) It results from uneven access to a college education.
B) It results from partisan political infighting.
C) It results from poor decisions around urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s.
D) It results from dysfunctional aspects of the entire economic system.
Q3) According to Karl Marx, the capitalist class increase their wealth through:
A) intense competition.
B) extracting surplus labor value from the workers.
C) selling labor to the bourgeoisie.
D) meritocracy.
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Chapter 11: The Global Economy
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Q1) In its critique of modernization, modern world systems analysis argues that the source of raw materials today is ________ nations, the same as it was during the height of colonial expansion.
A) core
B) developed
C) periphery
D) impoverished
Q2) Agriculture is an intensive farming strategy involving permanent cultivation of the land. What is an important characteristic of this process?
A) Agriculture rarely produces a surplus that can be sold.
B) Agriculture uses labor and technology such as irrigation systems and plows.
C) Agriculture is an environmentally low-impact practice.
D) Agriculture uses a slash-and-burn method to clear land.
Q3) What is agricultural production? Where and when was it first seen in the archaeological record? What technologies does this subsistence strategy use? Name three social, political, and demographic features of agricultural societies that are not found in horticultural, pastoral, or foraging lifestyles.
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Chapter 12: Politics and Power
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Q1) Explain what hegemony is and give an example that illustrates your explanation.
Q2) A mufti is:
A) a spacious room in a mosque.
B) an Islamic legal scholar and interpreter of Islamic Law.
C) a court system based on Sharia law.
D) a judge in Egyptian personal status court.
Q3) In Bangladesh, over 1,000 youth marched over 100 miles to protest the construction of coal-fired plants. What does this demonstrate?
A) people taking political action to resist climate change
B) electoral politics in action
C) the persistence of egalitarianism
D) the reign of hierarchy
Q4) Compare and contrast the concepts of the band, the tribe, and the chiefdom. What are the advantages of each?
Q5) Discuss the role egalitarianism has played in hunter-gatherer bands and, quite possibly, human evolution.
Q6) Give an example of an alternative legal structure. Explain how it was used to circumvent state power
Q7) Describe the effects militarization has on a society. Provide two examples.
Page 14
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Chapter 13: Religion
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Q1) Which of the factors listed is helping to rejuvenate Catholicism in the United States?
A) increased immigration from Catholic countries bringing new membership, worship styles, and social needs
B) immigration of wealthy individuals from otherwise impoverished Catholic countries bringing an infusion of funds to local churches
C) high rates of conversion to Catholicism from Islam, creating a hybrid worship style to the Church
D) high rates of lapsed middle-class Catholics returning to the Church, bringing a return to traditional Catholic values
Q2) Which of the following is considered a type of magic that involves performances that imitate the desired result?
A) imitative magic
B) ritual magic
C) contagious magic
D) continuous magic
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Chapter 14: Health, Illness, and the Body
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Q1) Travelling to Tijuana to buy high blood pressure medicine, making a pilgrimage to visit a saint's shrine for healing, and going to the rainforest to participate in a ritual guided by a Shaman are all examples of:
A) medical migration.
B) biomedicine.
C) the movement of germs and disease.
D) the globalization of biomedicine.
Q2) Discuss how "traditional" Chinese medicine has "gone global"? How and when did Chinese medical practices become more widespread in North America, Europe, and other parts of the world?
Q3) How do anthropologists define biomedicine?
A) the intersection of multiple cultural approaches to healing
B) a practice that seeks to apply the principles of the natural sciences
C) the documentation and description of the local use of natural substances in healing remedies and practices
D) the comparative study of local systems of health and healing
Q4) What are two underlying beliefs that shape the traditional Chinese Medicine approach to health care? Give two examples of treatments that it uses. What do these types of treatment attempt to achieve?
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Chapter 15: Art and Media
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Q1) In Christopher Steiner's ethnography of art in Abidjan, Côte D'Ivoire, who are the primary consumers of locally produced art?
A) Arab businessmen
B) African farmers
C) Western businessmen
D) Western tourists
Q2) How does the author refer to the aesthetic experience?
A) as a universal perception of what art is
B) the perceptions of art based on logic
C) scientific studies of how art is perceived
D) the perception of art through one's senses
Q3) Why is Morrinho important to anthropologists?
A) It exposes the intersections of class, poverty, power, and kinship through a miniature city.
B) It reveals the fascination Brazilians have for models.
C) It displays the ways that foreign powers have infiltrated Brazil's art world.
D) It acts as a channel for the local population to expose corruption.
Q4) Consider the global trade of West African "wood" and "mud" artwork. Are these objects "authentic"?
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