Deck 6: How Do We Make Meaning

Question 1

Play is

A) Consciously adopted.
B) Pleasurable.
C) Transformative.
D) All of the above.

Answer 1

D

Question 2

According to the text, play displays which of the following concepts in linguistics and cognition?

A) Vocal-auditory channel.
B) Rapid fading.
C) Openness.
D) Prescription.

Answer 2

C

Question 3

Some scholars have proposed that play is connected with

A) Developing cognitive and motor skills involving the brain.
B) Exercise.
C) Learning.
D) All of the above.

Answer 3

D

Question 4

Robert Fagen proposes that play in animals communicates the message

A) "All's well."
B) "Back off."
C) "Let's cooperate."
D) All of the above.

Question 5

Andrew Miracle points out that for Bolivian Aymara people in crowded situations, joking

A) Enables friends and relatives to separate themselves from outsiders.
B) Makes a socially unpleasant situation more tolerable.
C) Leads to fights, especially when personal.
D) Is common, but laughter never accompanies it; people laugh when they retell the jokes at home.

Question 6

Metacommunication refers to

A) Communication systems in advanced societies.
B) Communication about communication.
C) Ordinary communication studied out of context.
D) Such e-mail practices as the sideways smiley faces [for example, :-)].

Question 7

Marking the play frame can be done by

A) A dog showing its play face.
B) A referee's whistle.
C) The phrase "just joking."
D) All of the above.

Question 8

Because play offers different ways of thinking about everyday life, it is said to be

A) Dangerous.
B) Fun.
C) Reflexive.
D) Relativistic.

Question 9

In an example discussed in the text, Elizabeth Chin claims that when African American girls in New Haven, Connecticut, give their white dolls hairstyles like their own, they are

A) Fooling themselves about race.
B) Reconfiguring the boundaries of race.
C) Demonstrating that race is less important in the United States than some scholars have claimed.
D) Making an unconscious political statement about their own powerlessness.

Question 10

Which of the following observations about play is FALSE?

A) Play is a source of creativity.
B) Play is always good.
C) Play is practice for the real world.
D) Play can be a source for changing ordinary life.

Question 11

Where humor critical of rulers is censored, such humor

A) Disappears.
B) Is directed into other channels, frequently about animals or magic.
C) Becomes a form of political resistance.
D) Is taken over by the ruling elite and used for its own purposes.

Question 12

Which of the following statements about sport is true?

A) In the world of institutionalized sport, play is the work of the players.
B) Play is only one component of sport.
C) Even if a sport has become institutionalized, the spectators are still playing.
D) All of the above are true.

Question 13

What regularly happens when a sport is introduced into a social group that had never known it before?

A) Nothing; the rules of the sport are fixed and cannot be changed without destroying the sport.
B) Nothing; if the people are willing to play the sport, they will play by the rules.
C) The sport is redefined and adjusted to fit the norms and values of the host culture.
D) The sport is redefined and adjusted, but only in those elements external to the basics.

Question 14

Which of the following observations describes professional soccer in Brazil?

A) Soccer is central to life in Brazil but virtually unknown anywhere else in the world.
B) Soccer represents group coordination, division of labor, minute specialization, mechanization, and controlled violence.
C) For many Brazilians, the experience of supporting a soccer team may be their only experience of a loyalty beyond the local community.
D) Support for local professional soccer teams in cities like Rio de Janeiro cut across boundaries of race, income, class, and neighborhood.

Question 15

The full institutionalization of sport seems to have taken place in

A) Bands.
B) Chiefdoms.
C) Agricultural societies.
D) Modern nation-states.

Question 16

According to the anthropologist Christian Bromberger, French and Italian soccer fans are fascinated by the game because

A) The course of a match resembles the uncertain fate of people in the contemporary world.
B) At the end, they have a clear-cut demonstration of who the winners and losers are.
C) Winning depends on brute force rather than strategy or luck.
D) Of the predictability of players' choices.

Question 17

The leading sports activity in Cuba is

A) Soccer.
B) Squash.
C) Baseball.
D) Track and field.

Question 18

Fidel Castro is a big fan of baseball. According to the anthropologist Thomas Carter, this is related to

A) The hypocrisy of Cuban communists.
B) The association of baseball with anticolonial politics prior to Cuban independence.
C) Castro's attempts to rebuild social and economic ties to the United States following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
D) The fact that Castro spent his youth in the United States.

Question 19

According to Thomas Carter, arguing about baseball in Cuba is a way of

A) Embodying and displaying the values of a Cuban male.
B) Discussing politics using a nonpolitical idiom.
C) Bringing men and women together.
D) Bridging the divide between rural and urban Cubans.

Question 20

The one important exception to the global mass culture of sport is that

A) It is always associated with food.
B) It regularly separates women from men.
C) It regularly separates blacks from whites.
D) None of the above.

Question 21

Which of the following play a role in our aesthetic response to a work of art?

A) Its ability to affect us emotionally.
B) Its form must be a convincing evaluation of the content.
C) Its form must be technically perfect in its realization.
D) All of the above play a role.

Question 22

Play with form producing some aesthetically successful transformation-representation is a definition of

A) Games.
B) Art.
C) Sport.
D) Ritual.

Question 23

A Javanese artist makes a puppet of the great mythic hero Arjuna out of water buffalo hide for use in the shadow puppet plays called wajang. This is an example of what the text calls

A) Transformation-representation.
B) Aesthetic creation.
C) Functional design representation.
D) Formal evaluation.

Question 24

Which of the following statements accurately reflect(s) the relationship between play and art?

A) Art is a kind of play.
B) Art is play subject to limitations of form and content.
C) Art is taken more seriously than pure play, so that challenges to its rules are more threatening.
D) All of the above are true.

Question 25

Artists in non-Western societies

A) Are divorced from everyday life.
B) Produce work that is more interesting to Western collectors than it is to the people in their own societies.
C) Are similar to Western artists in that they are concerned with art for art's sake.
D) Work with symbols that are of central importance to their societies.

Question 26

In Western societies, art is affected by

A) Artists' images of themselves.
B) Market factors.
C) The art establishment.
D) All of the above.

Question 27

"Art by intention" includes

A) Objects that are found and exhibited.
B) Objects that have been made for religious purposes.
C) Objects that are made to be art.
D) Objects that carry meaning for the people who make them or use them.

Question 28

According to Shelly Errington as cited in the text, "art by appropriation" includes

A) Objects that museums decided were art.
B) African masks.
C) Ancestor figures from New Guinea.
D) All of the above.

Question 29

Which of the following characteristics of objects does NOT fit Shelly Errington's view of the Western definition of art as it affects art by appropriation?

A) Durable.
B) Portable.
C) Representational.
D) Useful.

Question 30

In today's global art market,

A) People who make primitive or tribal art are no longer tribal.
B) Most producers of ethnic arts sell their work to wealthy Western collectors.
C) Producers of ethnic arts have become well-known artists.
D) The increased demand for ethnic and tribal arts provides a new and successful economic strategy for tribal peoples.

Question 31

In discussing authenticity in music, Michelle Bigenho distinguishes among three different forms of authenticity. Which of the following is NOT one of them?

A) Cultural-historical authenticity.
B) Experiential authenticity.
C) Genuine authenticity.
D) Unique authenticity.

Question 32

When Michelle Bigenho tried to assist villagers in copyrighting a cassette of their music, she and the villagers discovered that

A) Bolivian law did not recognize collective ownership of a creative work.
B) If the villagers did not take individual ownership of the music, it could only be classified as folklore and therefore belonged to the state.
C) To copyright the work would take additional time and a significant amount of additional money.
D) Both a and b

Question 33

According to the anthropologist Ian Condry, in Japan

A) Hip-hop is the least successful style of music and dance imported from the United States.
B) Japanese hip-hop artists and fans have adapted hip-hop so that it is Japanese.
C) Japanese youth like the fashion made popular by hip-hop artists, but reject the music itself.
D) Young women are more interested in hip-hop than are young men.

Question 34

According to Ian Condry,

A) Japanese rappers and fans are mostly dropouts from the Japanese educational system and live apart from their families.
B) Most Japanese rappers and fans only speak Japanese, live at home with their parents, and are products of the Japanese education system.
C) Japanese hip-hop in Tokyo is pursued in a network of all-night clubs.
D) Both b and c

Question 35

According to Condry, for Japanese youth, partaking in the hip-hop scene is a way to

A) Learn English.
B) Find a social space in which Japanese cultural practices are not observed.
C) Express the idea that individuals should speak out for themselves.
D) Both a and b

Question 36

Susan Vogel suggests that for the Baule, the trickster figure of Ambomon represents

A) The certainty of the threat of disorder and death.
B) The importance of poking fun at people of high position.
C) The importance of balance for the Baule, whether in dance or in sculpture.
D) The certainty of the division of the world into male and female.

Question 37

According to Susan Vogel, the Gbagba dance teaches which of the following lessons about the Baule world?

A) Humans, with skill and supernatural aid, can dominate the most powerful wild animals.
B) Human accomplishment and beauty can be represented and highlighted.
C) Gender is complex and its boundaries are blurred.
D) All of the above are true.

Question 38

Jane Cowan observes that in northern Greece, dance

A) Plays a role in the social construction of gender.
B) Is the art form most appreciated by working-class people.
C) Provides a safe way for women to enjoy themselves without the pressure to conform.
D) Is an art form for single women.

Question 39

When Lila Abu-Lughod asked poor women in Cairo what they liked about a television serial designed to teach them about how to be modern Egyptian citizens, she discovered that the women

A) Emphasized the political and social messages the creators intended to transmit.
B) Accepted the moral stances presented in the program only when they resonated with their own worlds.
C) Never watched TV and therefore had no opinion at all about the program.
D) Preferred Dallas to Hilmiyya Nights, the program she was asking about.

Question 40

Which of the following statements reflects the way anthropologists understand myth?

A) Myths are flawed attempts at science or history.
B) Myths may justify past action, explain action in the present, or generate future action.
C) Myths are tools for overcoming logical contradictions that cannot otherwise be overcome.
D) Both b and c are true.

Question 41

Stories whose truth seems self-evident because they integrate personal experiences with a wider set of assumptions about the way the world works are called

A) Folktales.
B) Metaphors.
C) Myths.
D) Narrative.

Question 42

When myths and related beliefs that are taken to be self-evident truths are highly codified and deviation from the code is considered a serious matter, we may call this

A) Liminality.
B) Orthodoxy.
C) Orthopraxy.
D) Ritual.

Question 43

The anthropologist who argued that myths serve as "charters" or "justifications" for present-day social arrangements was

A) E. E. Evans-Pritchard.
B) Claude Lévi-Strauss.
C) Bronislaw Malinowski.
D) Victor Turner.

Question 44

The Blue people control access to power among the Grugenach people. In the old days, before time began, the Red people had arrived first on the Island, before the Blue people, but they had married their father's sister's daughters and had so forfeited their rights to power. The Blue people, true to the ways of the ancestors, always married their father's brother's daughters and so displaced the Red people. This case demonstrates myth being used as

A) A social charter.
B) History.
C) A structural methodology.
D) Flawed history.

Question 45

The anthropologist who argued that myths are tools for overcoming logical contradictions that cannot otherwise be overcome was

A) E. E. Evans-Pritchard.
B) Claude Lévi-Strauss.
C) Bronislaw Malinowski.
D) Victor Turner.

Question 46

Which of the following does NOT reflect the anthropological understanding of ritual?

A) Rituals are exclusively religious in nature.
B) Rituals are repetitive social practices composed of a sequence of symbolic activities.
C) Through ritual performance, the ideas of a culture take on a concrete form.
D) Ritual shapes action as well as thought.

Question 47

Which of the following is learned at a child's birthday party in the United States?

A) That exchanging material objects is important in defining significant social relations.
B) How to symbolize friendship and sociability.
C) How to share with other people.
D) All of the above.

Question 48

In ritual, what is the connection between the ritual performance and the ritual text?

A) The text determines the performance.
B) The text and the performance shape each other.
C) In the long run, the performance is more significant than the text.
D) The text and the performance are both fixed.

Question 49

What are the three stages of rites of passage?

A) Separation, transition, reaggregation.
B) Effacement, transition, delivery.
C) Liberty, equality, fraternity.
D) Communitas, liminality, marginality.

Question 50

An intense comradeship in which the social distinctions among participants in a ritual disappear or become irrelevant is called

A) Liminality.
B) Communitas.
C) Transition.
D) Reaggregation.

Question 51

Liminal, from the Latin word limen, means

A) Sprite.
B) Containing.
C) Transporting.
D) Threshold.

Question 52

Play communicates about _____; ritual communicates about _____.

A) Body; mind.
B) What should be; what is.
C) What can be; what ought to be.
D) What is; what will be.

Question 53

When nearly every act of everyday life is ritualized and other forms of behavior are strongly proscribed, the term used is

A) Liminality.
B) Orthodoxy.
C) Orthopraxy.
D) Ritual.

Question 54

The demon exorcism of the Sinhalese Buddhists studied by Bruce Kapferer had which of the following features?

A) It lasted all night.
B) Its purpose was to purify a household prior to the wedding of one of its members.
C) It was performed only for members of the ruling class.
D) All of the above are true.

Question 55

In the Sinhalese Buddhist demon exorcism ritual,

A) The beginning comedy puts the audience at ease and is then followed by a serious dramatic performance.
B) The beginning action is the incorporation of audience and patient into the serious and threatening reality in which the gods dominate.
C) When the comedy begins, the demons are turned into figures of ridicule, allowing the gods to reappear and assert their dominance.
D) The success of the ritual depends on the ability of patient and audience to remain completely serious from beginning to end.

Question 56

Metacommunication places cognitive boundaries, or frames, around certain behaviors and says that they are "play" or that they are "ordinary life." Discuss, using examples.

Question 57

Discuss the significance of taking play seriously. What effect does this have on our understanding of human culture? In your answer, be sure to define play and discuss its connections with other aspects of the human experience.

Question 58

How can it be that without play there is no awareness of alternatives?

Question 59

"Play is only one component of sport." Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Defend your choice with examples.

Question 60

"Play is not always good." What does this statement mean? Illustrate your answer with examples.

Question 61

In the text, it is suggested that the worldview of soccer might be uncomfortable to sports fans in the United States. Why? Do you agree? Why or why not?

Question 62

Sports in the United States (and elsewhere) have become big business and big politics. Does this represent a corruption of originally untainted activities that we could eliminate if we had the will, or is it a virtually inevitable outcome of life in a modern nation-state? Discuss, illustrating your answer with examples.

Question 63

What is meant by the suggestion that play is a form of art? In what ways does art differ from pure play?

Question 64

Is art a universal language? Why or why not?

Question 65

Describe what is meant by transformation-representation. How does this concept help anthropologists discuss art from a cross-cultural perspective?

Question 66

Using two or three examples, discuss the ways in which art reflects and affects culture.

Question 67

Discuss the difference between art by intention and art by appropriation.

Question 68

Right now, ethnopop, world music, ethnic music, and indigenous music are popular among some people in the United States and Europe. Is this music "authentic?" Why or why not? In your answer, please refer to Michelle Bigenho's discussion of authenticity in the text.

Question 69

Discuss the two ways of understanding myth considered in the text. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each position? Are they mutually contradictory?

Question 70

What are the stages of rites of passage? Define each one and give concrete examples.

Question 71

People in a liminal state tend to develop communitas. Why is this so?

Question 72

What are the connections among play, art, myth, and ritual? Give examples.