Exam 6: Anthropological Explanations

Postmodernist anthropologists emphasize which of the following?

Symbolic anthropologists argue that culture can be reduced to genetically inherited linguistic traits that determine the way people classify and view the natural environment.

According to Bronislaw Malinowski, magic __________.

The British and German schools of cultural diffusion are considered to be obsolete as a means of understanding societal development because of their ethnocentric perspectives.

The neoevolutionists' perspective differed from the nineteenth-century evolutionists' ideas in a number of ways. The neoevolutionists __________.

The idea that societal and cultural change (or evolution) occurs when societies borrow cultural traits from one another is known as the "Cultural Spread Theory."

Compare and contrast the perspectives of the cultural materialists and Marxists. Are these theoretical views similar in any manner, or are they mutually exclusive and contradictory in nature? Explain.

Functionalism is weak in which of the following areas?

One of Franz Boas's principal criticisms of nineteenth-century anthropologists was that __________.

Nineteenth-century theories of "unilineal evolution" proposed which of the following?

According to Franz Boas, in order to conduct a historical particularist study of a society, one must adopt the notion of __________, or the belief that each society should be understood in terms of its own cultural practices and values.

According to Leslie White's theory of the evolution of sociocultural systems, the most highly evolved culture would be one __________.

The opposite of cultural relativism is __________.

Unilineal evolution is the view that all societies evolve in a single direction called "progress" toward complexity and civilization.

Feminist anthropologists agree that monogamy is preferred by women because of its sociobiological advantages.

Cultural relativism is the notion that each society should be viewed in terms of its own unique cultural practices and values.

According to general evolutionists such as Leslie White, since the degree of societal development is measured by the amount of energy harnessed by the sociocultural system, the greater the energy, the more highly evolved the system.

Much of the ethnographic record has been compiled by men.

Define psychological and structural functionalism. Do you think that these approaches are compatible with cultural ecology and cultural materialism? Why or why not?

As anthropology emerged from the intellectual atmosphere of the Enlightenment, early anthropologists were interested in explaining the similarities and differences among the diverse cultures of the world. Edward B.Tylor attempted to answer the question of why societies were at different or similar levels of evolution and development through the explanation of __________.