Midterm Exam — Instructions

Overview

This is the scored midterm for Cultural Anthropology. It checks the first half of the course, Weeks 1 to 7. That means how anthropologists look at human life, what they mean by culture, and how fieldwork is done and written up. It also means how language carries a way of life, how people get their food and move goods, and how groups decide who decides.

The midterm has 25 questions, and every question counts the same. Twenty-three of them ask you to pick one option, one asks you to judge whether a statement is true or false, and one asks you to pick every option that fits. Every scene, field note, or set of figures a question uses is written out in words inside the question, so nothing depends on reading a chart or a diagram. A few questions ask for one short step of arithmetic on the illustrative model table from Week 5, and scratch paper is enough for each one.

Every question practices a skill you have already used in the weekly quizzes, lecture tutorials, and Ethnography Workshops. Most questions describe a short, illustrative scene, invented for the question and attributed to no real person or place, and ask you to name the concept at work. Nothing on the midterm comes from outside Weeks 1 to 7.

Coverage and scope

The midterm covers Weeks 1 to 7, which is Objectives 1 to 5 as taught in those weeks. Here is what the drawn form holds, objective by objective, with the weeks its questions come from:

• The anthropological way of looking and the culture concept (Objective 1, 5 questions): 1 from Week 1, 2 from Week 2, 1 from Week 3, and 1 from Week 5. Review the perspective as the course built it: holism, comparison, and fieldwork; the four subfields; the history from the armchair to long-term fieldwork; the culture concept and its characteristics; norms, values, and symbols; enculturation and acculturation; and ethnocentrism, cultural relativism as a method, and moral relativism. These ideas come back inside the fieldwork and subsistence weeks too.
• Ethnographic methods (Objective 2, 5 questions): 4 from Week 3 and 1 from Week 6. Review the whole of Week 3: two-column field notes, participant observation as a method, interviews and key consultants, the genealogical method, emic and etic, thick description and its source, reflexivity, ethnography and ethnology, and the course's fieldwork ethics. From Week 6, review how an observer builds a coded tally of exchanges and works its percentages.
• Language as a cultural system (Objective 3, 4 questions): all from Week 4. Review the week's full scope: language and communication, the design features Hockett named, dialect and register, code-switching, the strong and weak forms of linguistic relativity, nonverbal communication and proxemics, and language change and endangerment.
• Making a living (Objective 4, 7 questions): all from Week 5. Review the subsistence strategies as a model, the illustrative model table and the ratios you can work from it, the links between subsistence, settlement, and mobility, and the shift to food production. Some of these questions ask for one short division on the table.
• Political organization and social control (Objective 5, 4 questions): all from Week 7. Review power, authority, and legitimacy; Service's band, tribe, chiefdom, and state as a model; Fried's egalitarian, rank, and stratified types; social control and law; and the three routes for settling a dispute.

By week, the 25 questions come out like this:

Week 5 carries the most questions, 8, so the subsistence strategies, the model table, and the shift to food production deserve the most review time. Week 3 comes next with 5, then Weeks 4 and 7 with 4 each. Week 2 has 2, and Weeks 1 and 6 have 1 each. By objective, making a living carries 7 questions, the largest share, and the culture concept and ethnographic methods come next with 5 each.

By difficulty, 9 questions are easy and 16 are medium, and none is rated hard. The medium ones usually ask you to apply a concept to a fresh scene or to correct a common wrong turn.

Week 8's lenses, from unilineal evolutionism to present-day practice, are not on the midterm. They are still worth a look, because they help you see the first seven weeks as a whole.

These notes map the skills the midterm checks. The questions themselves are drawn from the course's question bank and are not listed here.

Instructions

• Attempts: one. The midterm is a single scored attempt.
• Time limit: there is no time limit. Take the time you need, as long as you submit before the exam closes.
• Window: the midterm opens in the Week 8 module and closes at the due time your instructor sets. Start early enough to finish comfortably inside that window.
• Navigation: the questions appear one at a time, and once you move on you cannot go back to an earlier question. Settle each one before you move to the next.
• Materials: every figure a question uses is printed in the question, and scratch paper is enough for each short calculation. Write each step on its own line, as you did in the tutorials. Unless your instructor announces otherwise, the midterm is closed-note.
• After you submit: Canvas shows your result. The keyed choices stay hidden so the midterm stays fair for every student.

Academic integrity

The midterm is an individual, scored assessment, and it is closed to AI. Do not use a chatbot or any other AI tool, do not get help from another person, and do not share or post the questions during or after your attempt. These rules come from the course syllabus. The midterm confirms that you personally can define the course's distinctions, read a fieldwork scene with the right concept, and work the course's model table.

The honest way to prepare is open to you. The study guide, the practice exam, and the exam-prep tutorial rehearse the same skills with fresh variants, and nothing on them appears on the midterm word for word.

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