Exam 6: Anthropological Explanations

In the 19th century, E. B. Tylor suggested that all societies progressed through three evolutionary stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization.

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

What are some of the criticisms that have been leveled at the cultural ecological approach? Do you think these criticisms are valid? If so, how would you modify the cultural ecological perspective to take into account the criticism?

What are some of the weaknesses in the theory that there was only one "hearth" for the development of civilization?

L. H. Morgan was primarily interested in the evolution of:

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. E. B. Tylor attempted to answer the question of why societies were at different or similar levels of evolution and development by the explanation of:

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.

E. 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 these "primitives" would need assistance from the civilized world to reach this ultimate, ideal stage. This perception that Western society is the center of the civilized world and non-Western societies are inherently inferior is called:

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

Grafton Eliot Smith and William Perry, major figures associated with the school of British diffusionism in the early 20th century, proposed that:

Edward B. Tylor, who published a major book entitled Primitive Culture in 1871, is recognized as the first:

Nineteenth century theories of "unilineal evolution" proposed that:

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.

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 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:

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

The study of culture through interpretation of the meaning of values, beliefs, and symbols of a society is a theoretical orientation called anthropology.

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

How would a cultural materialist explain why Muslims don't eat pork?

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