Anthropology
Three important methods and tools in social and cultural anthropology
What are ethnographic research, fieldnotes, and participant observation?
The answer to the question "Do Muslim women really need saving?""
What is "no."
Any observable thing (including a sound, word, object, gesture, placement…) that carries a meaning or meanings
What is a sign?
The most common kinship system in the U.S.
What is bilineal?
The author of the essay "Betwixt and Between."
Who is Victor Turner?
The four fields of anthropology
What are cultural or social anthropology; physical or biological anthropology; archaeology; linguistic anthropology?
The organization that authored anthropology's "Code of Ethics" in the U.S.
What is the American Anthropological Association?
Language does not simply mirror or reflect reality, but also shapes it.
What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
Some topics covered in "new kinship studies"
What are adoption, technological changes, queer family-making?
Some features of the liminal stage in rites of passage.
What are: same clothing/no clothing, obedience, symbolic death, equality, "breaking down to build back up?"
Four characteristics of social or cultural anthropology
What are ethnographic, holistic, comparative, critical?
A distinction drawn by Renato Rosaldo, between a modest doctrine that allows you to make ethical judgements, as long as you engage people whose behavior you disagree with, and a much broader "anything goes" philosophy
What is cultural vs. ethical relativism?
The process by which a given sign changes meaning because of time, place, proximity to other signs, or other factors.
What is resignification?
An example is "compadrazgo"
What is "fictive" kinship?
The two aspects of a ritual object.
What are sensory and ideological?
Four big ideas that anthropology can help us understand
What are:
People are very different all over the world and in different times and situations… and they are also basically the same.
Believing that your specific way of doing things is the natural/good/moral/right/only way to do them, is a human universal.
Humans create the worlds they live in, and then they are also created by them.
People’s most fundamental and important beliefs about the world show up in the tiniest everyday behaviors—often when they are not aware of it.
An article that we have read that uses comparison in explicit or implicit ways.
What are (here almost any article we have read will count, but examples are): articles by Miner, Lee, Gibbs, Basso...?
According to Keith Basso, the conditions under which Western Apache may choose to remain silent.
What are conditions of ambiguity? (I will also accept the 6 reasons he discusses, but make sure you know this term)
The kinship system described in Goldstein's "When Brothers Share a Wife."
What is "fraternal polyandry?"
Three features of a ritual.
What are (any among these): organized action, historical continuity, set sequence, ritual objects, seen as not instrumental, objects and actions stand for something beyond themselves?
The central concept in social or cultural anthropology and its definition in this course
What is "culture," which is defined as an approach to studying collective groups of humans, focusing on systems of meaning and action that are: patterned; learned; shared; and also contested?
Two rituals compared by Mark Auslander in is article "How Families Work"
What are the mugeniso ritual in West Africa and U.S. December holiday rituals?
The two domains of language analyzed by Janet McIntosh in "Crybabies and Snowflakes."
What are the language of the U.S. right and the language used in basic training in the military?
Type of cousins that used to be preferred as marriage partners in South India.
What are "cross-cousins?" (mother's brother's or father's sisters)
Features of Red Solo cups, according to D'Costa.
What are convenience, casualness, and "equalizing?"