SOA 130: FINAL EXAM
DUE no later than midnight on Thursday December 15th
Instructions:
· Please use this document to fill in your answers.
· Save the document as “Last Name_Final_Exam”
· Please read all instructions and questions carefully. Points will be taken off for not following directions and for not answering the questions completely.
PART I: Defining Terms (2 points each/10 points total)
All answers for this section should be 1-2 sentences long, single-spaced.
Please Note: You cannot use direct quotes for this section. It must be in your own words. Answers copied directly from the lectures, readings, or wikipedia will not be credited.
1) What is ethnography?
2) What is ethnocentrism?
3) What is cultural relativism?
4) What is the difference between emic and etic?
5) What is material culture?
PART II: Short Answer (5 points each/30 points total)
CHOOSE 6 OUT OF THE 10 TO ANSWER.
Answers for this section should be 3-5 sentences long, single-spaced.
Please Note: You cannot use direct quotes for this section. It must be in your own words. Answers copied directly from the lectures, readings, or wikipedia will not be credited.
1) What does Sir Ian Hodder mean when he says that, in archaeology, “interpretation begins at the trowel”? (Hint: think about the competing understandings of women’s role in the prehistoric past discussed in “New Women of the Ice Age article).
2) How has the study of bones (paleopathology) at Dr. Dickson’s Mounds challenged assumptions that agricultural production was good for people’s health?
3) What does Mary Douglas mean when she says that dirt (or trash) is “matter out of place”? In answering this question, think about symbolic boundaries that we create in society (Hall also discusses this).
4) What is the difference between marked and unmarked in binary pairs like male/female or black/white or heterosexual/homosexual? Are they equal?
5) J.L. Austen says that a performative utterance doesn’t just state or describe something; it actually does something. What does he mean by this? In your answer, use the example of saying “I do” in a wedding ceremony.
6) According to Scott Kiesling, what does the use of “dude” generally index about (a) the speaker’s social identity (i.e. age, race, gender, sexual orientation) and (b) the relationship between the speaker and addressee?
7) In the week on language ideologies, we discussed the practice of incorporation. Using Jane Hill’s article, define linguistic incorporation and give an example of this practice. What social groups usually practice incorporation (i.e. dominant or marginal groups)?
8) What does Clifford Geertz mean when he says that the Balinese are “showing themselves to themselves” through the performance of the cockfight?
9) In “The Five Sexes,” Anne Fausto-Sterling argues that in defiance of nature, “Western culture is deeply committed to the idea that there are only two sexes” (1993: 20). How does this “unnatural” belief that there is only male and female and nothing in between get naturalized in (a) language, and (b) medicine, specifically surgically assigning a sex to intersexual bodies?
10) What is stereotyping? Briefly, how does it produce a group as “Other”?
PART III: Long Essays (30 points each/60 points total)
All answers for this section should be 3-4 pages long, double-spaced.
Please note: In this section, you must engage directly with the readings by referring to them in your writing and, when necessary, using direct quotations (but do not overuse them!). In doing this, you must use proper citations in the text. So, if you are quoting something or taking an idea from a reading, use parenthetical quotations like the following: “blah blah blah” (Farmer 1998: 2). If you are using a quote of longer than 2 lines, you must indent it and single-space it (this is also called a “block quote”). Points will be taken off for improper citation. Not citing a source correctly is plagiarism.
1) Over the course of the semester, we have learned that race and gender are not a reflection of natural biological difference, but are instead socially constructed. Using at least four readings from the semester (2 on gender, 2 on race), explain how race and gender are socially produced as natural reflections of identity and difference through everyday social practices such as dress and speech, as well as in larger social institutions such as language, education, law, political policy, science, medicine, and popular representations (you don’t have to address all of these larger forces that naturalize categories of race and gender, but do account for at least two).
**Select from the following readings to answer this question:
GENDER: (Pick 2)
Don Kulick (“No” and “The Gender of Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes), Nikki Sullivan (“Performance, Performativity, Parody, Politics”), Daniel Miller (“Why Clothing Is Not Superficial”), Anne Fausto-Sterling (“The Five Sexes”), Scott Kiesling (“Dude”)
RACE: (Pick 2)
AAA Statement on Race, Jane Hill (“Language, Race, and White Public Space”), Mary Bucholtz (“The Whiteness of Nerds”), Stuart Hall (“The Spectacle of the Other”), and Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg (Righteous Dopefiend)
*You can also use films that we have viewed in your answer, but they do not count toward the 4 readings that you must use.
2) In the ethnographies, Righteous Dopefiend and Infections and Inequalities, the authors examine how larger social forces shape the biological realities of individual lives. In doing this, they argue that we cannot account for biological events such as disease, death, or addiction through purely physiological explanations or attribute them solely to individual moral failings. Instead, we must think about them as biological manifestations of social and economic inequalities. Both anthropologists use the term “structural violence” to make the argument that the social, political, and economic organization of society “wreaks havoc on vulnerable categories of people” (Bourgois and Schonberg 2009: 16). Using these two texts, explain the ways that larger social forces constrain the choices and options available to vulnerable populations and impact their health. In doing this, discuss (a) poverty, (b) race, and (c) gender.
