Exam 6: Anthropological Explanations

The research strategy that focuses on technology, environment, and economic factors as key determinants in sociocultural evolution while dividing the sociocultural system into "infrastructure," "structure," and "superstructure" is called __________.

The existence of a "joking relationship" (one in which interactions are typified by friendly teasing) between a man and his brothers-in-law would be explained by anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown as __________.

The body of anthropological theory concerned with the spread of technology, religion, economic systems, art forms, and other expressions of culture is known as __________.

The cultural ecological perspective of cultural evolution focuses on how specific sociocultural systems adapt to environmental conditions.

Which of the following theoretical orientations interprets cultures much like literary texts?

Bronislaw Malinowski's psychological functionalism focused on how society functions to serve the interests or needs of the individual.

In order for diffusionism to work as envisioned by the British and German schools, adherents had to maintain that __________.

The term "functionalism" in anthropology refers to the notion that __________.

The view that society consists of institutions that serve vital purposes for its people is known as __________.

Edward B.Tylor and other eighteenth-century thinkers asserted that "primitives" around the world would eventually evolve through the stages of barbarism to become civilized like Europeans, but that these "primitives" would need some help from the civilized world to reach this ultimate, ideal stage. This perception that Western society is the center of the civilized world and that non-Western societies are inherently inferior is called __________.

Explain how postmodernism has affected anthropological explanation. What is the postmodern critique of ethnography? Describe some of the changes to ethnographic research and writing that would be recommended by postmodernist anthropologists.

Anthropologist Franz Boas was a powerful advocate for unilineal diffusion.

Discuss the principal differences between nineteenth-century models for unilineal evolution and twentieth-century neoevolutionary theories. Who were the principal proponents of each?

G. Elliot Smith and William J. Perry, major figures associated with the school of British diffusionism in the early twentieth century, proposed that

The principal theoretical objective of modern anthropology is __________.

Franz Boas called for an end to "armchair anthropology," insisting that scholars must do rigorous, scientifically based fieldwork to collect basic ethnographic data.

Postmodernist anthropologists stress that ethnographers should present themselves as objective researchers.

Karl Marx's approach to understanding society drew on the work of __________.

Karl Marx suggested that all of the major societal and cultural transformations (that is, cultural evolution) seen since the Industrial Revolution are the result of warfare between communist and capitalist nations vying for power and control over land.

Lewis Henry Morgan believed in a hierarchical evolution of society from "savagery" to "civilization," but, unlike Edward B. Tylor, Morgan emphasized the evolution of the family and kinship terms.