Human Cultures Past and Present Exam Bank
Course Introduction
This course offers an in-depth exploration of human societies from prehistoric times to the contemporary era, examining the diverse ways people have adapted to their environments, organized their communities, constructed belief systems, and expressed their identities. Drawing from anthropology, archaeology, history, and related disciplines, students will analyze key cultural developments across the globe, including social structures, economic systems, language, religion, art, and technology. Through comparative case studies, the course encourages critical thinking about the forces shaping cultural change and continuity, emphasizing both the uniqueness and interconnectedness of human cultures past and present.
Recommended Textbook
Cultural Anthropology Appreciating Cultural Diversity 15th Edition by Conrad Kottak
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963 Verified Questions
963 Flashcards
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Chapter 1: What Is Anthropology
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53 Verified Questions
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Sample Questions
Q1) Over time, humans have become increasingly dependent on which of the following to cope with the range of environments they have occupied in time and space?
A) cultural means of adaptation
B) biological means of adaptation, mostly thanks to advanced medical research
C) a holistic and comparative approach to problem solving
D) social institutions, such as the state that coordinates collective action
E) technological means of adaptation, such as the creation of virtual worlds that allow us to escape from day-to-day reality
Answer: A
Q2) Anthropologists agree that a comparative, cross-cultural approach is unnecessary as long as researchers are diligent in their work.
A)True
B)False
Answer: False
Q3) Anthropologists study only non-Western cultures.
A)True
B)False
Answer: False
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Chapter 2: Culture
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Sample Questions
Q1) Culture
A) is the exclusive domain of the elite.
B) is acquired by humans as members of society through the process of enculturation.
C) is being destroyed by electronic media.
D) developed among nonhuman primates around 10,000 years ago.
E) is more developed in industrial nations than among hunters and gatherers.
Answer: B
Q2) Culture is transmitted by both formal and informal instruction, but not by observation.
A)True
B)False
Answer: False
Q3) The idea of universal and inalienable human rights that are superior to the laws and ethics of any culture can conflict with some of the ideas central to cultural relativism.
A)True
B)False
Answer: True
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Page 4
Chapter 3: Method and Theory in Cultural Anthropology
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Q1) Which of the following research methods is a distinctive strategy within anthropology?
A) its practice of cross-cultural comparison
B) the biological perspective
C) ethnography
D) the evolutionary perspective
E) working with skilled respondents
Answer: C
Q2) As investigators who illustrated the functionalist approach in anthropology, both Malinowski's and Radcliffe-Brown's ethnographic research focused on
A) myth and ritual and the ways that these aspects of culture created social cohesion.
B) the evolutionary history of present-day cultural patterns.
C) the role of cultural traits and practices in contemporary society.
D) the symbolic value that cultural traits and practices held with members of contemporary society.
E) the role of cultural traits and practices aimed at conflict resolution.
Answer: C
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Chapter 4: Applying Anthropology
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Q1) In a comparative study of 68 development projects, Kottak determined that
A) overinnovation was the most productive development model.
B) culturally compatible development projects were twice as successful as incompatible ones.
C) the Soviet socialist bloc model was the most successful.
D) the capitalist bloc model was the most financially successful.
E) the underdifferentiated model led to the most equity.
Q2) Who was studied at a distance during the 1940s in an attempt to predict the behavior of the political enemies of the United States?
A) the Koreans and English
B) the Yanomami and Betsileo
C) the Malagasy
D) the Germans and Japanese
E) the Brazilians and Indonesians
Q3) Anthropology has three dimensions: academic, applied, and a mix of the two.
A)True
B)False
Q4) Discuss ethical dilemmas and possible solutions with respect to the kinds of applied anthropology discussed in this chapter.
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Chapter 5: Language and Communication
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Sample Questions
Q1) Which of the following statements about chimpanzee call systems is NOT true?
A) They consist of a limited number of sounds.
B) Like language, they include displacement and cultural transmission.
C) They consist of sounds that vary in intensity and duration.
D) Calls cannot be combined when multiple stimuli are present.
E) They are stimuli dependent.
Q2) Diglossia refers to linguistic groups, like those in Papua New Guinea and Australia, that distinguish between only two colors: black and white or dark and light.
A)True
B)False
Q3) According to some estimates, the world's linguistic diversity has been cut in half in the past 500 years, and half of the remaining languages are predicted to disappear during this century. Why does this matter? Isn't this just a natural result of globalization, something we should actually celebrate, because it makes communication among diverse groups much easier?
Q4) Linguistic productivity refers to the fixed linguistic structures that prevent the creation of new expressions.
A)True
B)False
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Chapter 6: Ethnicity and Race
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Q1) Migration and rapid population growth are fueling multiculturalism in countries like the United States and Canada.
A)True
B)False
Q2) The role of natural selection in producing variation in human skin color illustrates the explanatory approach to explaining human biological diversity.
A)True
B)False
Q3) Which of the following statements about purported attempts to assign humans to discrete racial categories based on common ancestry is true?
A) They are applied to endogamous breeding populations.
B) They are based on genotypic rather than phenotypic characteristics.
C) They are based on global racial categories that vary little among societies.
D) They are a recent phenomenon brought on by globalization.
E) They are culturally arbitrary, even though most people assume them to be based in biology.
Q4) What is an "imagined community"? Social roles such as ethnicity and nationality are important to this concept-explain how.
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Chapter 7: Making a Living
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Q1) Which of the following is a characteristic of most foraging societies?
A) social stratification
B) sedentism
C) egalitarianism
D) irrigation
E) large populations
Q2) Which of the following statements about potlatching is NOT true?
A) Potlatching is an example of competitive feasting.
B) Potlatching was misinterpreted as a classical case of economically wasteful behavior.
C) Potlatching is a form of exchange that has long-term adaptive value.
D) Potlatching is a case that proves that the profit-maximizing motive is a human universal.
E) Potlatching is well documented among Native American communities of the North Pacific Coast of North America.
Q3) With balanced reciprocity, the giver expects something in return equal to what was given.
A)True
B)False
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Chapter 8: Political Systems
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Q1) Since bands lack formalized law, they have no way of settling disputes.
A)True
B)False
Q2) Tribal societies, which are typically organized by village life or membership in descent groups, tend to be egalitarian. However, egalitarianism diminishes
A) as tribal leaders gain too much power and start to put it to use to buy favors.
B) as village size and population density increase.
C) as the village head's family grows.
D) the closer one is to the big man's wife.
E) as the overall population ages.
Q3) The Qashqai and Basseri peoples are examples of nomadic foragers who live in modern-day Iran.
A)True
B)False
Q4) What are the major results and implications of food production? How does reliance on food production affect the social, economic, and political organization of societies that practice it?
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Chapter 9: Gender
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Q1) Of the following factors, which is historically correlated with the lowering of women's status in the United States?
A) European immigration around 1900
B) World War II
C) voting rights for women
D) inflation
E) the women's rights movement
Q2) More than half of all U.S. families living in poverty are
A) patrifocal.
B) blended.
C) headed by men.
D) headed by women.
E) dichotomized.
Q3) Which of the following statements about groups with the patrilineal-patrilocal complex is NOT true?
A) They are often characterized by the view that the women are polluting.
B) Their land and prestige are passed through the females.
C) They have strongly developed private-public dichotomies.
D) They have their prestige goods under male control.
E) They often practice polygyny and have patterns of intervillage raiding.
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Chapter 10: Families, Kinship, and Descent
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Q1) What postmarital residence rule is most often found in societies with lineal kinship terminologies?
A) ambilocal
B) neolocal
C) patrilocal
D) matrilocal
E) bilocal
Q2) Like bifurcate merging kinship terminology, generational kinship terminology
A) is common in North America.
B) makes sense only from the perspective of ego.
C) illustrates the complicated ways in which adults confuse their children about the realities of biology.
D) uses the same term for parents and their siblings, but lumping is more complete (there are only two terms for the parental generation).
E) uses the same term for parents and grandparents, so there is less lumping than in the bifurcate merging kinship system.
Q3) Discuss ways in which kinship and descent help human populations adapt to their environments.
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Chapter 11: Marriage
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Q1) The biological degeneration explanation for the incest taboo has won over supporters because of universal concerns about biology.
A)True
B)False
Q2) In South Sudan, a Nuer woman can marry a woman if her father has only daughters but no male heirs. This is done to maintain the patrilineage. The "wife" has sex with one or more men until she gets pregnant. The children born are then accepted as the offspring of both the female husband and the wife. What is important in this example is
A) the fact that only same-sex marriages are recognized in patrilineal societies.
B) social rather than biological paternity, again illustrating how kinship is socially constructed.
C) how biology overrides culture regardless of human intentions.
D) how often marriage is simply about property.
E) that it illustrates how romantic love is both universal and complicated.
Q3) What are some of the differences between endogamy and exogamy, and how absolute is the distinction implied by these terms? Use examples to illustrate your argument.
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Chapter 12: Religion
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Q1) By participating in a ritual, participants signal that they accept the common social and ethical order prescribed by their religion.
A)True
B)False
Q2) What are the similarities and differences between shamanistic and communal religions? How do these compare with Olympian religions and monotheism? What kinds of general evolutionary trends are discernible in religious worship?
Q3) Cargo cults, syncretic religions that mix Melanesian and Christian beliefs, are
A) culturally defined activities associated with the transition from one place or stage of life to another.
B) a religious response to the expansion of the world capitalist economy, often with political and economic consequences.
C) cultural acts that mock the widespread but erroneous belief of European cultural supremacy.
D) just like religious fundamentalism in that they are ancient cultural phenomena enjoying a rebirth in current world affairs.
E) antimodernist movements that reject anything Western.
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Chapter 13: Arts, Media, and Sports
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Q1) Expressive culture refers to the components of a culture that are expressed publicly, as opposed to the private aspects of culture that are hidden from anthropologists.
A)True
B)False
Q2) Art and religion are similar, because both refer to aspects of culture that are of more than ordinary significance.
A)True
B)False
Q3) Some researchers have proposed that early humans with a biological penchant for music may have been able to live more effectively in social groups, thus conferring an adaptive advantage to this penchant.
A)True
B)False
Q4) In general, folk art is much less symbolic than the artistic expression of full-time artists.
A)True
B)False
Q5) Where is art found? Is art found in the same contexts in all kinds of societies?
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Chapter 14: The World System and Colonialism
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Q1) Which of the following statements about British colonialism is NOT true?
A) It lacked an intervention philosophy.
B) It can be divided into two stages.
C) It was legitimized by the racist notion of the "white man's burden."
D) It began to disintegrate after World War II.
E) It was partly driven by business interests.
Q2) Who are indigenous peoples?
A) people who live in autonomous, independent nation-states
B) peasants who are of the same ethnicity as the ruling elite
C) descendants of tribespeople who live on as culturally distinct, colonized peoples, many of whom aspire to autonomy
D) any population living in a nation-state on the periphery of the world system
E) people who have emigrated to a new country
Q3) The United States originally started out as a peripheral nation, but by 1900 it had asserted itself as a member of the industrialized core.
A)True
B)False
Q4) How did the views of Marx and Weber on stratification differ? Relate their views to the modern global stratification system.
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Chapter 15: Anthropologys Role in a Globalizing World
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Q1) TV programming that is culturally alien tends to outperform native programming when the alien programming comes from the United States, Great Britain, and France.
A)True
B)False
Q2) When people are asked to give up the basis of their livelihood, they usually comply, especially if they are paid money.
A)True
B)False
Q3) In Spanish-speaking Latin America, social scientists and politicians favor which term over indio (Indian), the colonial term that the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors used to refer to the native inhabitants of the Americas?
A) indÃgena (indigenous person)
B) civilian
C) citizen
D) cultural patrimony
E) autochthon
Q4) What is the difference between postmodernity and postmodernism? How has postmodernity affected the units of anthropological study?
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