Deck 15: Politics: Power and Social Control

Question 1

The term politics can mean many things, but from the wider anthropological perspective, it is understood as talking about the relationships and processes of all of the following except

A) social control
B) Power
C) Media
D) cooperation

Answer 1

C

Question 2

The !Kung people of southern Africa are an example what kind of society?

A) Acephalous
B) segmentary lineage
C) Lawless
D) structural-functional

Answer 2

A

Question 3

Which English philosophers were concerned with the problem of disorder and argued that chaos is avoidable by creating strong government?

A) Evans-Pritchard and Radcliffe-Brown
B) Hobbes and Locke
C) Smith and Marx
D) Sahlins and Service

Answer 3

B

Question 4

Which theory was used to explain how stateless societies maintained social order and equilibrium?

A) Marxism
B) interpretive anthropology
C) structural-functionalism
D) neo-evolutionary

Question 5

For anthropologists, political power refers to

A) how elected officials use power
B) how violence is used by the nation-state to subdue dissent
C) how politics operates informally
D) how power is used to attain goals for the good of the community

Question 6

Power that transcends individuals, operating in settings and orchestrating settings in which social and individual actions take place, is referred to as

A) Authority
B) structural power
C) Domination
D) violence

Question 7

For a big man in a non-state society, what is the most powerful and valuable tool?

A) Force
B) formal authority
C) Corruption
D) persuasion

Question 8

Anthropologists and other social scientists refer to ways in which social, economic, and political processescategorize and transform a population into racial meanings as

A) Eugenics
B) Racialization
C) social inequality
D) institutional coercion

Question 9

Which of the following is an element of violence?

A) the use of force to cause harm to someone or something
B) a highly visible assertion of power
C) it is an efficient way to transform a social environment
D) all of the above

Question 10

Violence is

A) Static
B) Inherited
C) socially constructed
D) absolute

Question 11

Which branch of cultural anthropology looks at the way that people handle disputes?

A) political anthropology
B) legal anthropology
C) psychological anthropology
D) applied anthropology

Question 12

The legal process by which an individual or council with socially recognized authority intervenes in a dispute and unilaterally decides is

A) Adjudication
B) Mediation
C) Laws
D) negotiation

Question 13

The emphasis in early __________ systems ignores the idea that such structures only provide individuals with roles.

Question 14

The exercise of political power requires __________.

Question 15

The idea that there are specific rules and codes surrounding the exercise of power is a key feature of __________ theory.

Question 16

According to the __________ typology of political organization, the type of leadership practiced in a tribe is a charismatic headman with some authority.

Question 17

In early public records, the word "Christian" commonly appeared next to the names of Europeans but was later replaced by __________.

Question 18

The practice in which a third party intervenes in a dispute to aid the parties in reaching an agreement is called __________.

Question 19

Age-gradesare a rudimentary political system that brings order to a society.

Question 20

People living in non-centralized political systems have generally welcomed their integration into centralized political systems because it provides greater security and prosperity for them.

Question 21

To follow political action one must be familiar with society's rules and codes about who gets to exercise power and under what conditions.

Question 22

For anthropologists, power is largely located in the hands of state institutions and political offices.

Question 23

When people around the world have disputes, they are most concerned with winning and losing.

Question 24

Which of the following is a political act?

A) running for election
B) protesting against police brutality
C) gossiping about a neighbor to shame them for not fulfilling their obligations
D) all of the above

Question 25

The importance of structural functionalism is that it

A) helped anthropologists understand the evolution of political systems
B) showed that violence and chaos are universal aspects of human affairs
C) showed that non-Western societies have order without formal government
D) none of the above

Question 26

According to neo-evolutionary theory, non-centralized political systems include

A) tribes and chiefdoms
B) chiefdoms and bands
C) bands and tribes
D) chiefdoms and states

Question 27

Which of the following is not a political act?

A) running for election
B) protesting against police brutality
C) gossiping about a neighbor to shame them for not fulfilling their obligations
D) posting what you had for dinner on Facebook

Question 28

Which of the following theories is primarily concerned with understanding how individual people maintain political power in their daily activities and decision-making processes?

A) action theory
B) Marxist theory
C) structural-functionalist theory
D) world systems theory

Question 29

The importance of a phenomenon like "revenge suicide" in Papua New Guinea is that it demonstrates

A) why women are irrational
B) why men are controlling and mean toward women
C) that the non-powerful have ways of exercising political power
D) the difficulty of locating structural power

Question 30

Membership in a nation-state is not necessarily voluntary, a phenomenon that can be understood through an examination of

A) Religion
B) Colonialism
C) trade agreements
D) corruption

Question 31

The exercise of political power in state and non-state societies is different in all of the following respects except

A) the ways in which power is gained
B) the uses of violence and coercion toward political ends
C) the importance of personal connections
D) the ways in which power is transmitted to others

Question 32

Hortense Powdermaker examined race and racial inequality long before it was fashionable to do so, and the text cites several examples of how an individual can draw conclusions based on singular experiences in their life. Powdermaker's term for this process is called

A) Racialization
B) false generalization
C) Prejudice
D) discrimination

Question 33

Why is the description of conflict as "ethnic violence" misleading?

A) it implies age-old conflicts that are not affected by historical or political events
B) it ignores the peaceful interactions of groups over time
C) it suggests that violence is biological and certain "ethnic" groups are more violent than others
D) all of the above

Question 34

Violence between ethnic groups is not inevitable, but the idea that it is persists. Which of the following is not a reason for its persistence?

A) it offers a tidy narrative that seems to explain the world
B) mass media repeat the idea regularly
C) ethnic leaders promote the idea to gain power
D) ethnic groups actually do fight with each other all the time

Question 35

In many societies people resolve disputes by restoring harmony, although people are not always satisfied with this resolution. Why?

A) because it's better to win a dispute
B) because most people would rather avoid the issue altogether
C) because adversarial relationships are more effective at getting to the bottom of the problem
D) because of a preference for justice, fairness, and the rule of law

Question 36

The state is a type of __________ political system.

Question 37

A society's separate legal and constitutional domain that is the source of law, order, and legitimate force is called __________.

Question 38

The concept of __________ is useful because it points to the ways in which power is not simply the exercise of will over others but diffused across a social field.

Question 39

__________ as a form of dispute management can involve hearings presided over by respected people in a community.

Question 40

Structural power is found in the combined actions of institutions, science, and knowledge producers.

Question 41

A nation can be made up of people that simply imagine that they share a common culture or identity.

Question 42

Corruption is only a serious problem in non-Western societies.

Question 43

A key feature of political anthropologist Maxwell Owusu's perspective on democracy in Ghana is that the state will work better if village chiefs play a role in decision-making.

Question 44

The neo-evolutionary typology of political systems would classify the role of president of the city council in your hometown as

A) headman of a tribe
B) a big man
C) a bureaucrat in a centralized state
D) a chief

Question 45

A structural-functionalist would be most likely to analyze violence as

A) a reflection of deep ethnic hatreds
B) an innate condition of humanity
C) the best way to create segmentary lineages
D) a means of creating and maintaining social order

Question 46

Which government agency might you study if you wanted to understand structural power?

A) the census office
B) the president's office
C) the treasury
D) the congress

Question 47

The work of anthropologist Paul Richards demonstrates that violence can be something that is

A) a rational way of achieving a goal or strategy
B) epidemic among the Sierra Leone people
C) innate to all humans
D) something that can be avoided when outsiders mediate disputes

Question 48

An action theorist studying political power in the U.S. Senate would be especially interested in

A) the normative rules of conduct that senators are supposed to follow
B) the way the field of social relations structures senators' interactions
C) the ways female senators exercise power in a male-dominated institution
D) the delegation of political power from one individual to another

Question 49

You and your sibling are fighting over who gets to use the family car. When your parent intervenes and seeks a solution that is agreeable to both of you, it is an example of

A) Adjudication
B) Negotiation
C) Mediation
D) avoidance

Question 50

How can the act of suicide by a woman on New Britain islandbe considered a form of political action?

Question 51

From the perspective of political anthropology, does Locke's concept of the social contract apply inmodern nation-states?

Question 52

What are the primary strengths of the gendered approach to political power? Give an example of a project in which you might use it

Question 53

Is there structural power in the United States? If not, why? If so, give an example and use the discussion of structural power from the book to make your case.

Question 54

In the U.S. election race of 2016, one of the party candidates made a practice of habitually using stereotypical names and derogatory terms to describe non-U.S. populations such as Mexicans, Muslims, women, and other groups. How might such actions and statements contribute to and reinforce pre-existing prejudices among U.S. voters and non-voters?

Question 55

What are some of the ways you might apply political anthropology when examining the problem of campus violence, specifically sexual assault, and how it is resolved in a university or college setting?

Question 56

Explain how and why anthropologists consider violence to be culturally constructed.

Question 57

When you receive advertisements on social media, that advertiser has paid millions of dollars to the social media provider to reach you based on extensive tracking of your previous activities online. Why is this kind of activity not perceived or experienced as a form of social control or coercion, or as a form of institutional surveillance of a state's citizenry? Would you see this as a form of monitoring or "wiretapping"? Why or why not?

Question 58

One of the often-heard complaints about the political system in the United States is that "nothing gets done."How might you approach the study of this question from the perspective of a political anthropologist?

Question 59

It is often said that political corruption is something that happens in other countries or is worse than in one's own. How do you explain this notion as a political anthropologist?