Ch.1

Question 0

For anthropologists, being ________ means trying to fit together all that is known about human beings.

Answer 0

holistic

Question 1

____________ can be formally defined as the study of human nature, human society, and the human past.

Answer 1

Anthropology, from the Greek word anthropos (human beings) and logia (the study of). The study of human beings.

Question 2

Anthropology is a ___________ discipline: Anthropologists must consider similarities and differences in as wide a range of human societies as possible before generalizing about what it means to be human.

Answer 2

comparative

Question 3

Because anthropology is interested in human beings in all places and at all times, anthropologists are curious about how we got to be what we are today. For this reason, anthropology is ____________.

Answer 3

evolutionary

Question 4

__________ ____________ is the subfield of anthropology that looks at human beings as biological organisms.

Answer 4

Biological anthropology

Question 5

Those who study the closest living relatives of human beings- the nonhuman primates (chimpanzees and gorillas, for example)- are called ______________.

Answer 5

primatologists

Question 6

Those who specialize in the study of the fossilized bones and teeth of our earliest ancestors are called ____________________.

Answer 6

paleoanthropologists

Question 7

________ _______________ use their knowledge of human anatomy to aid law- enforcement and human rights investigators by assisting in the identification of skeletal material found at crime or accident sites or at sites associated with possible human rights violations.

Answer 7

Forensic anthropologists

Question 8

Overlapping biological anthropology and cultural anthropology is the vibrant and relatively new field of _______ ____________.

Answer 8

medical anthropology

Question 9

________ _______________ investigate how variation in the beliefs and behaviors of members of different human groups is shaped by culture.

Answer 9

Cultural anthropologists

Question 10

_______ can be described as sets of learned behaviors and ideas that human beings acquire as members of society.

Answer 10

Culture

Question 11

Traditionally, cultural anthropology is rooted in _________, an anthropologist’s personal, long-term experience with a specific group of people and their way of life.

Answer 11

fieldwork

Question 12

People who share information about their way of life with anthropologists traditionally have been called __________.

Answer 12

informants

Question 13

Fieldworkers gain insight into another way of life by taking part as fully as they can in a group’s social activities as well as by observing those activities as outsiders. This research method, known as ___________-___________, is central to cultural anthropology.

Answer 13

participant-observation

Question 14

A book written about a single culture or way of life is often called a _________.

Answer 14

monograph, from the Greek mono (single) and graph (write).

Question 15

An ethnographic monograph is more commonly referred to as an ___________.

Answer 15

ethnography (from the Greek “ethnos” meaning “people.”)

Question 16

_________ is the comparative study of two or more ways of life.

Answer 16

Ethnology

Question 17

A third major subfield of anthropology, called _______________ ___________ or __________ ____________, is the branch of anthropology concerned with the study of human languages.

Answer 17

anthropological linguistics or linguistic anthropology

Question 18

For many people, the most striking cultural feature of human beings is ________, the system of arbitrary vocal symbols we use to encode our experience of the world and of one another.

Answer 18

language

Question 19

___________, the fourth traditional subfield of North American anthropology, can be defined as a cultural anthropology of the human past, involving the analysis of the material remains of earlier human societies.

Answer 19

Archaeology

Question 20

Through archaeology, anthropologists discover much about human history, particularly __________, the long stretch of time before the development of writing.

Answer 20

prehistory

Question 21

Name 4 of the traditional subfields of anthropology

Answer 21

• Biological anthropology
• Cultural anthropology
• Linguistic anthropology
• Archaeology

Question 22

In recent decades, increasing numbers of anthropologists have been using the methods and findings from every subfield of anthropology to address problems in the contemporary world, in what is called _______ ____________.

Answer 22

applied anthropology

Question 23

Activities whose aim is to improve people’s capacities to maintain their health, produce their food, and otherwise adapt to the challenges of life in the contemporary world are sometimes called ___________ ____________.

Answer 23

development anthropology

Question 24

The truth about the world is accessible through the five senses. A rational mind can derive truths from material evidence. _________ _________: undistorted, and thus universally valid, knowledge about the world.

Answer 24

objective knowledge

Question 25

Anthropologists felt free to apply scientific methods in any area of anthropological interest, from stone tools to religion, confident that the combined results of these efforts would produce a genuine “Science of Man” (as it was then called). This set of ideas and practices is known as __________.

Answer 25

positivism

Question 26

Today, many critical observers of the natural and social sciences connect these ideas to a complex Western cultural ideology called _________.

Answer 26

modernism

Question 27

Fieldwork had to become a _________ activity in which anthropologists carefully scrutinized both their own contribution to fieldwork interactions and the responses these interactions elicited from informants.

Answer 27

reflexive

Question 28

Many ethnographers have also chosen to engage in __________ _________ in which the goal is to follow people, or objects, or cultural processes that are not contained by social, national, ethnic, or religious boundaries.

Answer 28

multisited fieldwork