Deck 8: Political Systems

Question 1

Foraging economies are usually associated with which type of sociopolitical organization?

A) band
B) tribal
C) state
D) chiefdom
E) primate

Answer 1

band

Question 2

What is an age set?

A) a village council
B) a pantribal sodality that represents a certain level of achievement in the society, much like the stages of an undergraduate's progress through college
C) all men and women related by virtue of patrilineal descent from a human apical ancestor
D) all men and women related by virtue of matrilineal descent from a nonhuman apical ancestor
E) a group uniting all men or women born during a certain span of time

Answer 2

a group uniting all men or women born during a certain span of time

Question 3

Modern foragers are not Stone Age relics, living fossils, lost tribes, or noble savages. Still, to the extent that foraging has been the basis of their subsistence, contemporary and recent hunter-gatherers

A) are the closest we can come to studying true human nature.
B) illustrate links between a foraging economy and the emergence of social stratification.
C) suggest that the most basic motive driving human survival is the need for power.
D) can illustrate links between a foraging economy and other aspects of society and culture, such as their sociopolitical organization.
E) illustrate the social precursors to hegemony.

Answer 3

can illustrate links between a foraging economy and other aspects of society and culture, such as their sociopolitical organization.

Question 4

As a stark reminder that no society truly is isolated, this chapter's "Appreciating Diversity" segment describes how various levels of political regulation-local, regional, national, and international-now determine how contemporary people such as the Venezuelan Yanomami live their lives. All of the following are examples of this, EXCEPT that

A) in 2005, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez expelled foreign missionaries working among the Yanomami, accusing them of espionage.
B) both the Yanomami and government workers such as nurses and doctors depend on the military to provide transportation in and out of the rain forest.
C) Yanomami leaders argue that since the expulsion of the missionaries in 2005 they have been neglected by the Venezuelan government.
D) In 2005, the Venezuelan government created the Yanomami Health Plan, with an aim to train some Yanomami to be health workers in their villages while sending doctors into the jungle to provide health care to remote communities.
E) Yanomami leaders have been expelled by their own communities because of accusations of sorcery.

Question 5

As illustrated by a comparison between the Basseri and Qashqai, two Iranian nomadic tribes, illustrates how as regulatory problems increase,

A) pastoralists are less likely to interact with other populations in the same space and time.
B) rules regarding crime and punishment become more severe.
C) political hierarchies become more complex.
D) age sets begin to disintegrate.
E) silence becomes the best strategy to avoid conflict.

Question 6

The Inuit song battle is

A) sometimes the occasion for a "treacherous feast."
B) a widespread feature of tribal society.
C) a ritualized means of designating hunting lands.
D) a means of resolving disputes so as to forestall open conflict.
E) used to initiate colonial strategies.

Question 7

Which of the following statements about political leaders in foraging bands is true?

A) They maintain power by keeping up strong ties with the commoner class.
B) They have inherited special access to strategic resources.
C) They maintain control by conquering foreign territories.
D) They have no means of forcing people to follow their decisions.
E) They are the most dominant males in the largest, most powerful descent group.

Question 8

Anthropologist Susan Kent notes a tendency to stereotype foragers, to treat them all as alike. They used to be stereotyped as isolated, primitive survivors of the Stone Age. Another, more recent, common stereotype of foragers sees them as

A) peaceful individuals in touch with their inner selves.
B) culturally deprived people forced by states, colonialism, or world events into marginalized environments.
C) ideal humans with the perfect diet and rhythm of life.
D) not isolated at all but living in nation-states and an interlinked world.
E) primitive survivors not of the Stone Age but the Bronze Age.

Question 9

How does a big man increase his status?

A) Big men are village heads who are trying to turn their achieved status into something more permanent; the standard way of doing this is through conspicuous symbolic displays of wealth.
B) The term big man refers to the liminal state a Kapauku youth enters before marriage; he accumulates wealth as a way of funding the wedding and paying the bride price.
C) Big men are typically war leaders and as such must have a standing supply of "grievance gifts" to compensate the families of warriors who die under their command.
D) The primary means of becoming a big man is the wearing of a tonowi shell necklace, which is imported from the coast and is therefore quite expensive by Kapauku standards.
E) Big men do not keep the wealth they accumulate; instead, they redistribute it to create and maintain alliances with political supporters.

Question 10

The status systems of chiefdoms and states are similar in that both are based on differential access to resources. Nevertheless, a key distinction is that

A) status is much more important to leaders in chiefdoms than in states.
B) differential access in chiefdoms is still very much tied to kinship.
C) stratum endogamy exists in chiefdoms but not in state status systems.
D) in chiefdoms, women are always excluded from the competition for status, whereas in states this gender difference does not exist.
E) the status system of chiefdoms can sometimes function in a completely egalitarian manner when the populations are small enough.

Question 11

Which of the following was NOT used by the traditional Inuit to handle disputes?

A) blood feuds
B) song contests
C) killing of the offender
D) courts of law
E) kin ties

Question 12

In the context of tribal societies, what is a "big man"?

A) someone who holds a permanent political office
B) a hereditary ruler
C) a person who creates his reputation through entrepreneurship and generosity to others
D) a leader who avoids excessive displays of generosity
E) a leader who has tremendous power because he is regarded as divine

Question 13

Tribal societies, which are typically organized by village life or membership in descent groups, tend to be egalitarian. However, egalitarianism diminishes

A) as tribal leaders gain too much power and start to put it to use to buy favors.
B) as village size and population density increase.
C) as the village head's family grows.
D) the closer one is to the big man's wife.
E) as the overall population ages.

Question 14

As an example of how virtually no one is immune from larger political and economic forces, the Yanomami tribal society of Brazil has suffered recent changes as a result of

A) being overrun by the more expansion-minded Nilotic peoples.
B) modern-minded big men amassing so much wealth that people have begun to regard them as chiefs.
C) village raiding among tribal groups.
D) the involvement of NGOs in their internal political affairs.
E) encroachment by gold miners and cattle ranchers.

Question 15

Why is it important to remember that the chiefdom and the state, like many categories used by social scientists, are ideal types?

A) They distinguish political and sociopolitical analyses among social scientists.
B) They are useless in sociopolitical analysis.
C) They represent social goals that politicians should strive to achieve.
D) They are labels that make social contrasts seem sharper than they really are.
E) They ensure that the field of anthropology remains more scientific.

Question 16

A big man's position depends on all of the following EXCEPT

A) hard work.
B) inherited inequality.
C) generosity.
D) personal charisma.
E) creation of wealth superior to that of others.

Question 17

Despite the analytical usefulness of learning about anthropologist Elman Service's typology of political organization into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states, it is important to remember that

A) Bronislaw Malinowski first came up with this typology.
B) it applies to only the reality of societies in the so-called Third World.
C) none of these political entities, or polities, can be studied as a self-contained form of political organization, because all exist within nation-states.
D) it has no practical value in ethnographic research, only in theoretical anthropology.
E) people all over the world vocally reject being classified under such a typology and typically express their anger through hidden transcripts.

Question 18

Noting that chiefdoms created the megalithic cultures of Europe, such as the one that built Stonehenge, Kottak reminds us that

A) chiefdoms that failed to become states did not have enough stone.
B) chiefdoms and states can fall as well as rise.
C) all chiefdoms end up becoming states.
D) all powerful chiefdoms required elaborate stonework to be recognized by competing groups.
E) chiefdoms have been among the rarest forms of social organization throughout human history.

Question 19

In which of the following forms of political organization is it most likely that the most important leaders will acquire their positions based upon personal background or ability, rather than heredity?

A) tribal societies
B) feudal states
C) imagined communities
D) chiefdoms
E) agrarian, preindustrial states

Question 20

Kottak prefers the term sociopolitical organization to Morton Fried's term political organization in discussing the regulation or management of interrelations among groups and their representatives, because

A) the term sociopolitical is more politically correct.
B) anthropologists and political scientists have an interest in political systems and organization, but they cannot agree on the same terminology.
C) sociopolitical is the term that the founders of anthropology used to refer to the regulation or management of interrelations among groups and their representatives.
D) the term political refers only to contemporary Western states.
E) Fried's definition is much less applicable to nonstates, in which it is often difficult to detect any public policy.

Question 21

In bands, the leader occupies an official office with coercive control over the members of the community.

Question 22

In the pre-Civil War southern United States, gatherings of five or more slaves were forbidden unless a white person was present, because

A) resistance was most likely to be expressed openly when black slaves were provoked by the presence of white persons.
B) resistance is most likely to be expressed openly when people are allowed to assemble.
C) white persons were curious about the use of the story of Moses that was popular among slaves at the time.
D) some whites were eager to join the black slaves in their plans, some successful, in establishing free communities in isolated areas.
E) these whites were actually covert anthropologists eager to study social relations during these politically difficult times.

Question 23

Which of the following kinds of societies is most likely to have stratum endogamy (marriage within one's own group)?

A) band
B) state
C) chiefdom
D) society with segmentary lineage organization
E) tribe

Question 24

Since bands lack formalized law, they have no way of settling disputes.

Question 25

In tribal societies, the village head leads by example and through persuasion; he lacks the ability to force people to do things.

Question 26

What is hegemony?

A) overt sociopolitical strategies used to control people
B) social controls that induce guilt and shame in the population
C) the critique of power by the oppressed that goes on offstage, in private, where the power holders can't see it
D) a stratified social order in which subordinates comply with domination by internalizing their rulers' values and accepting the "naturalness" of domination
E) open, public interactions between dominators and the oppressed-the outer shell of power relations

Question 27

According to Max Weber, prestige is the basis of

A) economic status.
B) political status.
C) social status.
D) power.
E) political capital.

Question 28

Which of the following is NOT typical of state-level societies?

A) a purely foraging-based subsistence strategy
B) class stratification
C) boundary maintenance systems
D) intensive, managed agriculture
E) a specialized decision-making system

Question 29

In the anthropological study of political systems, social control maintains social norms (cultural standards) and regulates conflict. Which of the following is NOT a form of social control?

A) hegemony
B) shame
C) making subordinates believe they will eventually gain power
D) exogamy
E) gossip

Question 30

According to Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault,

A) it is easier and more effective to dominate people in their minds than to try to control their bodies.
B) if state institutions such as prisons and schools are able to control people's bodies, their minds will follow.
C) anthropologists have no business studying the process of how the dominant ideology becomes internalized, since this is the job of psychologists and political scientists.
D) overt violence is critical for a state to succeed in dominating its population.
E) anatomically modern humans have a ways to go in the process of evolution, since they are so easily tricked into believing that forms of state control are both natural and good.

Question 31

The anthropological approach to the study of political systems and organization is global and comparative and includes nonstates as well as the states and nation-states usually studied by political scientists.

Question 32

Most band and tribal societies in the world today are completely cut off from the rest of the world.

Question 33

The sociopolitical organization of foragers tends to be bands.

Question 34

Which of the following is the most important factor in determining an individual's power and prestige in a state?

A) personality
B) ancestry
C) speaking ability
D) anthropomorphism
E) physical size

Question 35

The presence and acceptance of which of the following is one of the key distinguishing features of a state?

A) gender differences in terms of access to resources
B) generosity, even at the fiscal level
C) rapport between the elites and commoners
D) stratification
E) the authority of charismatic leaders

Question 36

How do chiefdoms differ from states?

A) Chiefdoms are based on differential access.
B) Chiefdoms lack socioeconomic stratification and stratum endogamy.
C) Chiefdoms lack ascribed statuses.
D) Chiefdoms have permanent political regulation.
E) Chiefdoms have full-time religious specialists.

Question 37

Which of the following statements about nonstate societies is true?

A) Warfare is conducted by professional armies.
B) Political institutions are maintained totally separate from economic institutions.
C) Social control is maintained mostly through physical coercion.
D) Economic, political, and religious activities are often embedded in one another.
E) All political power is based on religion.

Question 38

In an ethnographic field study of political systems in northern Mozambique, Nicholas Kottak found that avoiding shame can be an effective control against breaking social norms. This example of how shame can be a powerful social sanction

A) is unique among ethnographic cases illustrating the variety of sociopolitical systems that exist in the world today.
B) is often a key component of the formal processes of social control.
C) is evidence that shame is a cultural universal.
D) is an indication that women tend to suffer from the consequences of shame more than men do.
E) joins the work of many other anthropologists that cite the importance of informal processes of social control, including gossip and stigma.

Question 39

The influential sociologist Max Weber defined which three related dimensions of social stratification?

A) wealth, power, and prestige
B) cultural capital, power, and population control
C) superordinate, ordinate, and subordinate
D) judiciary, enforcement, and fiscal
E) selfishness, greed, and ignorance

Question 40

The key difference between a village head and a big man is that the big man has supporters in many villages, whereas the supporters of the village head are restricted to his respective village.

Question 41

Population control in states refers to the police and military.

Question 42

Modern hunter-gatherers should not be seen as representative of Stone Age peoples, all of whom were also foragers. Why?

Question 43

Social controls refers to the fields of the social system-beliefs, practices, and institutions- that are most actively involved in the maintenance of norms and the regulation of conflict.

Question 44

The Qashqai and Basseri peoples are examples of nomadic foragers who live in modern-day Iran.

Question 45

According to Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, it is easier and more effective to dominate people in their minds than to try to control their bodies.

Question 46

A fiscal system includes the judges, laws, and courts that resolve conflicts.

Question 47

How does Morton Fried define political organization? Why does Kottak prefer to use the term sociopolitical organization in discussing the regulation or management of interrelations among groups and their representatives?

Question 48

The efficacy of social control depends on how clearly people envision the sanctions that an antisocial act might trigger.

Question 49

With the rise of states, kinship's role in society continued to grow and dominate daily activities.

Question 50

In chiefdoms, chiefs occupy formal offices and administer or regulate a series of villages.

Question 51

Pantribal sodalities function to integrate the community by providing a series of important nonkin relationships.

Question 52

The elites of archaic states restricted access to sumptuary goods.

Question 53

In chiefdoms, individuals are ranked according to seniority, but everyone is believed to have descended from a common set of ancestors.

Question 54

States are complex systems of sociopolitical organization that aim to control and administer everything from conflict resolution to fiscal systems to population movements.

Question 55

Status in chiefdoms and states is based primarily upon differential access to resources.

Question 56

Age grades represent stages in one's life with specific tasks, obligations, and duties for the individuals in a given grade.

Question 57

What are the major results and implications of food production? How does reliance on food production affect the social, economic, and political organization of societies that practice it?

Question 58

Anthropologists claim that in nonstate societies the political structure is embedded in relationships based on kinship, descent, and marriage. What does this mean? Use two ethnographic cases to illustrate this claim.

Question 59

In the Igbo women's war, women used song, dance, noise, and "in-your-face" behavior to attempt to subvert formal authority, but women did not gain any greater influence.

Question 60

Stratum endogamy is restricted to chiefdoms, wherein chiefs occupied a formal elite stratum in society.

Question 61

This chapter's description of the Makua of Mozambique illustrates the combination of newer and more traditional characteristics of the Makua's formal political system. Give three examples of how the formal and traditional systems mix. Would the duality of the Makua system have been revealed had the analysis of this community focused only on the formal aspects of social control?

Question 62

What factors are responsible for the variable development of political regulation and authority structures among pastoralists?

Question 63

Contrast the Inuit and Yanomami with respect to their reasons for disputes, the effectiveness of their means of resolving disputes, and how they enforce decisions about resolving disputes.

Question 64

How does one distinguish between a chiefdom and a state? Is this a useful distinction? Is it always easy to make such a distinction?

Question 65

This chapter describes various ways in which dominant members of society exert control over a population by resorting to indirect or even covert means. What are some examples of this? What concepts have some come up with to understand the social dynamics that arise from these situations? Can you think of some contemporary examples of the use of these means of control?

Question 66

What are the differences between shame and guilt? Why is it important for anthropologists interested in understanding sociopolitical organization to pay attention to people's concerns with shame or guilt in the communities they study?

Question 67

Contrast two of the following as political regulators:

A) sodalities based on age and gender;
B) village headmen;
C) village councils;
D) big men; and
E) pantribal sodalities.

Question 68

This chapter's "Focus on Globalization" section discusses the role of new forms of media in political manipulation. Give some examples of how new media has been used by governments for political reasons, and how new media has been used by the public to encourage political dissent.

Question 69

Discuss ways in which order is maintained in societies that lack chiefs and rulers.