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Week 8 · Midterm study guide

Midterm Exam — Study Guide

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

Coverage — what the midterm covers

The midterm is cumulative over Weeks 1 to 7, which is Objectives 1 to 5 as taught in those weeks. It opens in the Week 8 module and closes at the due time your instructor sets. There is no time limit, and you get one attempt. The questions appear one at a time, and you cannot go back once you move on.

Format: 25 questions, and every question counts the same. Twenty-three ask you to pick one option, one asks you to judge a statement as 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 the question, and no question needs a chart or a diagram. A few questions ask for one short step of arithmetic on the Week 5 model table, and scratch paper is enough.

What is in scope, with the number of midterm questions on each course objective:

Midterm coverage by course objective: the weeks its questions come from, its main skills, and its number of questions out of 25
Course objective Weeks its questions come from Main skills Questions
The anthropological perspective and the culture concept 1, 2, 3, and 5 The subfields; the turn to long-term fieldwork; culture's five characteristics; culture and society; ethnocentrism and the two relativisms 5
Ethnographic methods 3 and 6 Participant observation; two-column field notes; emic and etic; thick description and its source; ethnography and ethnology; fieldwork ethics; building and reading a coded tally 5
Language as a cultural system 4 Language and communication; the five design features; dialect, register, and code-switching; the two forms of linguistic relativity; proxemics and gesture; endangerment and counts said in words 4
Making a living 5 The five subsistence strategies as a model; domestication in several regions; density, mobility, and surplus; the model table's ratios; the "original affluent society" debate 7
Political organization and social control 7 Power, authority, and legitimacy; band, tribe, chiefdom, and state as a model; egalitarian, rank, and stratified societies; social control and law; negotiation, mediation, and adjudication 4

Making a living carries the most questions, 7, and Week 5 also supplies one culture-concept question, so Week 5 holds 8 of the 25. Put the most review time there. Week 3 comes next with 5 questions, then Weeks 4 and 7 with 4 each. Week 2 has 2, and Weeks 1 and 6 have 1 each. By difficulty, 9 questions are easy, 16 are medium, and none is rated hard. Week 6 has only one question, yet every exchange you code starts from the three reciprocities, so keep them sharp. Week 8's lenses are not tested on their own, and they still make a good map for review.

Topic-by-topic review

Each topic gives the key idea in plain words, the course's own definitions, the course example, and the mistakes students make most often with their cures. Each week also names the one distinction it asks for, the way Week 8's review is organized. The deeper review for every topic is that week's chapter, lecture page, slide deck, and readings.

Week 1 — Anthropology and the anthropological perspective

  • The distinction: the four subfields, and anthropology against paleontology.
  • Key idea: anthropology studies people everywhere and in every period, including the society you live in now.
  • Definitions: anthropology is the study of humans across place and time: how people live, speak, organize themselves, and make meaning, and how human bodies and ways of life have varied and changed. The four subfields are cultural, linguistic, archaeological, and biological. Cultural anthropology studies ways of life in the present, mainly through long-term fieldwork. Linguistic anthropology studies language in social life. Archaeology studies past human ways of life through the material remains people left behind. Biological anthropology studies human evolution and human biological variation. Applied anthropology, the use of anthropology's methods to address practical problems, runs across all four.
  • The anthropological perspective is three habits used together. Holism looks at how the parts of a way of life fit together. Comparison sets a practice beside the same kind of practice elsewhere, so what seems natural shows up as one arrangement among several. Fieldwork is long-term research among the people being studied, taking part in and recording their daily life.
  • The history in two sentences: many nineteenth-century scholars compared customs from reports by travelers, missionaries, and colonial officials without living among the people described, later called the "armchair" approach. In the early twentieth century the discipline turned to long-term fieldwork, associated with Boas in the United States and with Malinowski's fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands in the 1910s.
  • Course example: the running fieldwork site, an illustrative, unnamed weekly neighborhood farmers' market of 24 stalls, open one morning a week from 8:00 a.m. to noon, so 12 − 8 = 4 hours. The four subfields ask four questions of one place. How do vendors act, and what does it mean to them? Which words do they use? What would the crates and stall posts show someone long after the market closed? How do diets built from stalls like these connect to human variation? Set beside a supermarket checkout, which has posted hours but no opening bell, the market's routine is one arrangement among several.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) "anthropologists dig up dinosaurs." Cure: dinosaurs belong to paleontology. (2) archaeology read as fossil-hunting. Cure: it studies past human ways of life through what people left. (3) anthropology read as the study of far-off peoples only. Cure: it studies every society, including your own. (4) fieldwork read as a short visit. Cure: it is long-term, and the course returns to its market every week for the same reason.

Week 2 — The culture concept

  • The distinctions: culture vs. society; enculturation vs. acculturation; ethnocentrism vs. cultural relativism vs. moral relativism.
  • Key idea: culture is the whole learned way of life of a group, not the arts alone.
  • Tylor's definition comes from Tylor (1871), Primitive Culture. The title is the period's wording, and "man" in the definition is the period's usage for all people. The definition names 6 items, and only 1 is art, so 6 − 1 = 5 of the named items are not the arts. It reads: "Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."
  • Five characteristics: culture is learned (not inherited biologically), shared but never uniform (people inside a culture disagree), symbolic (meaning attached by convention), integrated (a change in one part ripples through others), and changing.
  • Definitions: culture is the whole learned, shared way of life of a group; society is the group of people who live that way of life together and interact. Enculturation is the way a person learns their own culture growing up, mostly without noticing it. Acculturation is the cultural change that follows sustained contact between groups. A norm is a shared expectation for how people should behave. A value is a shared idea about what is good or important, which norms often protect. A symbol stands for something by convention, with no natural link to its meaning.
  • Judging and describing: ethnocentrism is judging another culture by the standards of your own, and everyone starts there by default. Cultural relativism is a method: describe and understand a practice in the terms of the culture it belongs to before judging it. Moral relativism is a different idea, the philosophical claim that no moral judgment holds across cultures. The American Anthropological Association takes public positions on race and on research ethics, so relativism as a method does not mean "anything goes". Benedict (1934), Patterns of Culture, was an early, influential statement of the relativist approach.
  • The familiar made strange: Miner (1956), "Body Ritual among the Nacirema", American Anthropologist, describes familiar habits as if they were foreign. "Nacirema" is "American" spelled backward, and the Nacirema are not a real people. The article appeared 1956 − 1871 = 85 years after Tylor's definition.
  • Course example: at the running site, the market manager rings a hand bell at 8:00 a.m. The bell is a symbol of "selling may begin", and the shared expectation that no one sells before it is a norm. On an illustrative visit, vendors unloaded crates from 7:40 a.m. with two shoppers already waiting, 60 − 40 = 20 minutes of waiting. A fair start for every stall is one possible value behind the norm, a reading to test with the vendors. Two vendors disagreed about bagging a regular's order before the bell, which shows that culture is shared, not uniform.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) culture read as the arts or "high culture". Cure: Tylor's list names art once among six. (2) culture read as inherited. Cure: it is learned. (3) culture read as uniform. Cure: every culture holds many voices. (4) culture read as unchanging. Cure: every culture changes. (5) relativism read as "anything goes". Cure: it is a method for understanding first, and the discipline still takes positions. (6) ethnocentrism read as something only other people have. Cure: everyone starts there. (7) the Nacirema read as a real people. Cure: the name is spelled backward on purpose.

Week 3 — Fieldwork and ethnographic methods

  • The distinctions: observation vs. interpretation; emic vs. etic; ethnography vs. ethnology.
  • Key idea: you learn a way of life by joining in over a long time and keeping a careful record that separates what you saw from what you think it means.
  • Participant observation is long-term fieldwork in which the researcher lives among the people being studied, takes part in their daily life, and records what they see, rather than watching from a distance. It was set out in Malinowski (1922), Argonauts of the Western Pacific, from his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands in the 1910s.
  • Field notes keep what was observed in one column and what it might mean in a separate column. Each entry opens with the visit, the time, and the setting, and it names people by role, never by name. Jottings made on site are written up as full notes the same day.
  • Talking methods: an open-ended interview lets the person answer in their own words; a structured interview asks everyone the same set questions in the same order. A key consultant is a person with deep knowledge who works closely with the researcher. The genealogical method, collecting a community's kin ties person by person, comes from Rivers (1910), "The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry", The Sociological Review.
  • Two points of view: emic describes the insider's own categories and meanings, in their words; etic describes an outside analyst's categories, chosen so cases can be compared. Pike (1954) coined the terms from "phonemic" and "phonetic". Neither view is right or wrong; good fieldwork holds both.
  • Thick description is describing an action together with the layers of meaning that make it what it is, so a reader can tell a wink from a twitch. Geertz (1973) used it in the opening essay of The Interpretation of Cultures, and he took the term from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Reflexivity is noticing and reporting how your own position shapes what you see and record.
  • Ethnography is the detailed study of one community, and the written account of it. Ethnology is the comparison of many cultures to find patterns and differences.
  • Ethics: the American Anthropological Association's Principles of Professional Responsibility (2012) set out 7 principles, beginning with "Do No Harm" and including "Obtain Informed Consent and Necessary Permissions". Informed consent is an ongoing agreement that a person can withdraw, not a one-time signature. The course's four rules: observe only in public, non-private settings; record roles, never names; take no photographs or recordings of people; and interview only a consenting adult about a non-sensitive everyday practice.
  • Course example: Visit 1 ran from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m., 2 hours or 2 × 60 = 120 minutes, and produced 10 field-note entries, one about every 120 ÷ 10 = 12 minutes. In entry 4, a vendor greets a shopper with "The usual?" and bags two pounds of apples before the shopper asks; the interpretation column says the shopper may be one of the vendor's "regulars". The vendors' "regulars" is the emic term. An observer's repeat buyers is the etic counterpart: people seen buying at the same stall on at least 3 of 4 weekly visits. That is 3 ÷ 4 = 0.75, or 75 percent of the visits.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) participant observation read as watching from a distance. Cure: you take part. (2) ethnography read as a short visit or a survey. Cure: it is long, close study of one community. (3) field notes read as the place for conclusions. Cure: the interpretation column says "may". (4) emic read as right and etic as wrong. Cure: they answer different questions. (5) consent read as a one-time signature. Cure: it is ongoing and can be withdrawn. (6) naming a person in private notes read as harmless. Cure: roles only, always.

Week 4 — Language and communication

  • The distinctions: language vs. communication; the strong vs. the weak form of linguistic relativity; dialect vs. register.
  • Key idea: many animals communicate, but human language is a learned, symbolic system that can say new things and talk about things that are not here.
  • Definitions: communication is any passing of information from one living thing to another. Language is one kind of communication: a symbolic system of learned words and rules. Hockett (1960), "The Origin of Speech", Scientific American, named design features that set it apart, and the course teaches five. Arbitrariness: no natural link between a word and its meaning. Displacement: talking about things not here and not now. Productivity: making and understanding sentences never heard before. Traditional transmission, often called cultural transmission: learned from other speakers, not inherited. Duality of patterning: sounds that mean nothing alone combine into meaningful words.
  • Variety inside a language: a dialect is a regional or social variety of a language, and every dialect follows its own rules, so a nonstandard dialect is not broken or lazy language. A register is the style a speaker shifts into for a setting. Code-switching is moving between two languages, or two varieties of one, within a single conversation.
  • Linguistic relativity, associated with Sapir and Whorf (named in words), holds that the language you speak shapes thought. Its strong form, that language determines thought, is not supported. Its weak form, that language influences habits of attention, sorting, and memory, has limited support. The question is a debate over the size of the effect.
  • Without words: nonverbal communication covers gesture, facial expression, posture, and the use of space, and its meanings are learned and differ across cultures. Proxemics is the cultural use of personal space, named by Hall (1966), The Hidden Dimension.
  • Change and endangerment: about seven thousand languages are spoken in the world now; counts differ by source, so the figure is said in words and never treated as exact. Language endangerment is the situation of a language whose speakers are few or are shifting to another language. Language revitalization is a community's work to bring its language back into everyday use. A language that changes is not decaying.
  • Course example: the illustrative interview has 5 questions and 5 answers, and 4 answers carry an emic term, so 4 ÷ 5 = 0.8, or 80 percent. The first term, "regulars", means buyers a vendor knows by sight and greets by their usual order. The second, "seconds", means bruised or misshapen produce sold at a lower price. The third, "the swap", is a vendor-to-vendor trade of goods of matched value, with no money. The fourth, "the bell", is the manager's 8:00 a.m. signal that selling may begin. Seconds sell at 2 dollars a pound, half the display price, so display tomatoes cost 2 × 2 = 4 dollars and a pound of seconds saves 4 − 2 = 2 dollars. Nothing in the sound of "seconds" means bruised, which is arbitrariness. The vendor's "Twenty years of crates" is displacement. "The usual?" with a regular against a full explanation for a first-time buyer is a change of register.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) linguistic relativity read as language determining thought. Cure: that is the strong form, and it is not supported. (2) a nonstandard dialect read as broken. Cure: every dialect is rule-governed. (3) language and communication used as synonyms. Cure: language is one learned, symbolic kind of communication. (4) gestures read as universal. Cure: their meanings are learned.

Week 5 — Making a living: subsistence strategies

This week carries 8 of the 25 questions: 7 on making a living and 1 on the culture concept.

  • The distinction: a model vs. a ladder.
  • Key idea: groups get their food in different ways, and those ways shape how many people live together, how often they move, and what they can store.
  • Subsistence strategies are the ways a group gets its food, taught as a classroom model of five. Foraging is hunting, gathering, and fishing without domesticated plants or animals. Horticulture is gardening with hand tools, with fields often left to rest and recover. Pastoralism is making a living mainly by herding domesticated animals, often moving with the seasons. Intensive agriculture uses plows, irrigation, draft animals or machines, and permanent fields worked year after year. In industrial and postindustrial economies, most people buy their food and work for wages, increasingly in services and information. Real communities mix strategies.
  • The shift to food production: domestication is people shaping wild plants and animals, over many generations, into kinds that depend on human care. It began independently in several world regions after the end of the last ice age, and the course keys no date.
  • Settlement and surplus: population density is the number of people living on each square kilometre. Settlement mobility is how often a community moves its homes. A surplus is food produced beyond what the producers need right away, which can be stored, traded, or used to feed people who do not produce food. Permanent fields let a town stay put, store food, and grow large; foraging and herding favor small groups that move.
  • The model table (Dataset D) is illustrative, with engineered whole numbers, and describes no real people:
The illustrative subsistence model table (Dataset D): people per square kilometre, settlement moves per decade, and typical local-group size for four model communities
Model community People per square kilometre Settlement moves per decade Typical local-group size
Foraging 1 60 30
Pastoral 4 40 60
Horticultural 20 2 150
Intensive agricultural 200 0 3,000
  • Reading the table in words: the horticultural density is 20 ÷ 1 = 20 times the foraging density, and the intensive agricultural density is 200 ÷ 20 = 10 times the horticultural. A decade is 10 years, so the foraging group moves 60 ÷ 10 = 6 times a year. The horticultural village moves about once every 10 ÷ 2 = 5 years as its fields need rest, and the intensive town does not move. The honesty note: real communities mix strategies, and real foraging densities are often well under 1 person per square kilometre.
  • The documented case and the debate: in the 1960s, Ju/'hoansi foragers in the Kalahari region (an older outsiders' label, "!Kung", is given once here) were the subject of studies of work, food sharing, and mobility. In the "original affluent society" debate, Sahlins (1972), Stone Age Economics, collected the argument that many foragers met their needs with fewer hours of food-getting work than farmers. Later critics counted food processing, tool-making, and household work, and they found the hours longer. The debate is about how much time and which tasks count as work, and the course keys no verdict.
  • The culture-concept link: a ranking word slipped into a description of how a people gets its food is ethnocentrism. Cultural relativism as a method describes the strategy in its own terms first.
  • Course example: the market's family-run stall sells from the family's own farm, with permanent fields, which is intensive agriculture. Its buyers mostly live by wages and buy their food, the industrial and postindustrial pattern. Two strategies mix in one place, not two rungs on a ladder.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) a "simpler" society read as an earlier stage of your own. Cure: the model compares; it does not rank. (2) foragers read as always hungry or always idle. Cure: the debate is about hours and tasks, not a stereotype. (3) food production read as one invention in one place. Cure: it began independently in several regions. (4) the model read as a ladder each society climbs. Cure: real communities mix strategies, and none is a step toward another.

Week 6 — Exchange and economic systems

  • The distinctions: generalized vs. balanced vs. negative reciprocity; reciprocity vs. redistribution vs. market exchange.
  • Key idea: goods move between people in more than one way, and how closely people keep count says a lot about how close they are.
  • The forms of exchange are a model named in words from Polanyi's The Great Transformation. Reciprocity is exchange between social equals. Redistribution is goods collected by a central person or office and given out again. Market exchange is buying and selling at prices set by supply and demand. Real economies mix all three.
  • Three reciprocities, from Sahlins (1965), differ by how closely the giver keeps track. Generalized reciprocity is giving with no count kept, usual among close kin and close friends. Balanced reciprocity expects a return of about equal value within a known time. Negative reciprocity tries to get more than it gives, including hard haggling with strangers. The closer the tie, the less the count.
  • The exchange set (Dataset C) keys twelve illustrative transactions: 3 generalized, 3 balanced, 2 negative, 2 redistribution, and 2 market, and 3 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 12. Three borderline cases, birthday gifts among friends, a restaurant tip, and a wedding gift registry, are discussed and never keyed.
  • The kula: in the 1910s, Trobriand Islanders and their neighbors carried shell necklaces (soulava, Kilivila) clockwise and shell armbands (mwali, Kilivila) counterclockwise around a ring of islands. Each valuable was held for a time and passed on for prestige and lasting partnerships rather than profit, as Malinowski (1922) recorded.
  • The gift: Mauss's essay on the gift, Essai sur le don, first published in French in the 1920s, argues that a gift carries three obligations: to give, to receive, and to give back. A gift is never free of obligation.
  • The potlatch is a feast of the Kwakwaka'wakw (the older outsiders' label, "Kwakiutl", is given once here) and other Northwest Coast peoples, at which hosts give away goods to validate names, rank, and rights before invited witnesses. Canada banned the potlatch under the Indian Act from the mid-1880s, and the ban was dropped in 1951. After a potlatch in 1921, people were arrested and ceremonial objects were seized. These are documented facts, not a debate.
  • Money and consumption: general-purpose money can be used for nearly any exchange; special-purpose money is valid for some exchanges only. Consumption, what people buy, use, and display, is also a way of showing identity.
  • The coded tally is a count of observed exchanges with each one sorted into one type, and borderline cases set aside and discussed rather than forced into a type. The running site's tally from one two-hour visit:
The running site's coded tally of 50 exchanges from one illustrative two-hour visit, with each type's count and percent of the 50
Exchange type Count Percent of 50
Market exchange (purchases at posted prices) 33 66 percent
Generalized reciprocity (coffee shared, change and bags lent, no count kept) 8 16 percent
Balanced reciprocity (vendor-to-vendor swaps of matched value) 5 10 percent
Redistribution (unsold goods pooled in the "Pantry" crate) 4 8 percent
Negative reciprocity 0 0 percent
Total coded 50 100 percent
  • Reading the tally: 33 ÷ 50 × 100 = 66 percent, and 8 ÷ 50 × 100 = 16 percent. The gap between those two shares is 66 − 16 = 50 percentage points, not "50 percent", because it is a difference between two percentages. Three borderline exchanges were set aside, discussed, and never counted.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) a gift read as free of obligation. Cure: give, receive, and give back. (2) reciprocity read as always equal. Cure: only balanced reciprocity keeps an even count. (3) market exchange read as universal or natural. Cure: it is one form among three. (4) the kula read as trade for profit. Cure: it built prestige and partnerships. (5) the potlatch read as waste. Cure: it validated names, rank, and rights. (6) the potlatch ban read as a debated policy. Cure: it was a documented law.

Week 7 — Political organization, power, and inequality

  • The distinction: power vs. authority, joined by legitimacy.
  • Key idea: people follow some leaders because they accept their right to lead, and others only because they cannot refuse.
  • Definitions: power is the ability to make others act, even against their will. Authority is power that people accept as rightful. Legitimacy is that acceptance, and it is what turns power into authority. Authority can rest on respect, with no title at all.
  • Service's model, associated with Service (1962), Primitive Social Organization (a title quoted as published in the period's wording), sorts political organization into four types. A band is small and mobile, with leaders who guide by influence. A tribe links villages through kin groups or associations, with leaders who cannot force others. A chiefdom has a hereditary office over several communities, often with redistribution through the chief. A state has a central government with the power to tax, make law, and enforce it. It is a tool for comparison, never a ladder of progress, and real communities mix features.
  • Fried's scheme, from Fried (1967), The Evolution of Political Society, sorts societies by access to prestige and resources. An egalitarian society has as many positions of prestige as people able to fill them. A rank society has fewer positions of prestige than people able to fill them. A stratified society gives people unequal access to basic resources, such as land.
  • Social control is the ways a group keeps its members within its rules: informal means such as gossip, ridicule, shunning, and the threat of supernatural sanction, and law, formal rules a recognized authority makes and enforces.
  • Dispute resolution has three routes. In negotiation, the parties settle it themselves. In mediation, a third party helps the two sides reach their own agreement but does not decide. In adjudication, a third party hears the sides and decides. Early twentieth-century accounts describe Inuit (the older outsiders' label, "Eskimo", is given once here) communities in parts of the Arctic settling some disputes through public song contests judged by the audience, one documented form among many.
  • Course example: at the running site, the market manager assigns stall locations, collects a weekly stall fee, and rings the bell, and the vendors' association votes on the rules. The vendors accept the manager's assignments as rightful, so the manager holds authority, and the association's vote supplies the legitimacy. "You sell before the bell, people talk": gossip, not a fine, keeps the rule. The manager acts in 2 of the 10 field-note entries, and 2 ÷ 10 × 100 = 20 percent. The "Pantry" crate carried 4 of the 50 coded exchanges, 4 ÷ 50 × 100 = 8 percent, which is redistribution run by the person with the authority to collect and give out.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) a chiefdom read as a small state. Cure: a chiefdom rests on an inherited office over several communities, while a state rests on a central government with the power to tax, make law, and enforce it. (2) a state read as more advanced than a band. Cure: the types compare; they do not rank. (3) power and authority used as synonyms. Cure: ask whether people accept it as rightful. (4) egalitarian read as "everyone is the same". Cure: it means equal access to prestige and resources for people of the same age and gender. (5) law read as the only form of social control. Cure: gossip, ridicule, and shunning do much of the work.

Week 8's new idea (not tested on its own)

Week 8 adds one piece of history: how anthropology's own ideas about culture changed, each school used as a lens on Weeks 1 to 7. Unilineal evolutionism, the nineteenth-century idea in Tylor and in Morgan (1877), Ancient Society, held that every society passes through the same series of stages; the discipline rejected it as a ranking of societies, not a finding of biology. Historical particularism, a label later given to Boas's approach, holds that each culture is the product of its own history. Functionalism, associated with Malinowski, explains a practice by the needs it meets, and Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism explains it by how it keeps a social structure going. Interpretive anthropology, associated with Geertz, reads culture as a web of meanings, as in thick description. Present-day practice is reflexive, collaborative, applied, and public, often working with communities as partners. Read the kula through each lens: as a "stage" (the rejected reading), as a product of the islands' own history, as meeting needs for alliance and prestige, and as a web of meanings about fame and partnership.

Representative practice

These are fresh variants, not the midterm's questions. Work each worked example yourself first, then compare your steps. Every scene below is illustrative, invented for this guide, and attributed to no real person, people, or place. The only real communities and sources are the ones the course pinned, and every number comes from the course's own illustrative datasets, computed and checked in advance.

Worked example — four research projects, four subfields, and one trap (Week 1)

Here is an illustrative list of five summer research projects. Sort each one.

  1. A team sifts the trash pits behind a closed railway workers' boarding house to learn what the workers ate. Archaeology: past human ways of life through what people left behind.
  2. A researcher records how members of a long-running chess club teach openings and tease each other across the board. Linguistic anthropology: language in social life.
  3. A researcher compares how children's growth differs between families living high in the mountains and families living near the sea. Biological anthropology: human biological variation.
  4. A researcher joins the holiday gatherings of families in a new apartment complex over many months to learn how they decide whose turn it is to host. Cultural anthropology: a way of life in the present, studied through long-term fieldwork.
  5. A team chips a dinosaur skeleton out of a cliff. Not anthropology at all: dinosaurs belong to paleontology.

Then one more: an anthropologist works with a tenants' association to design a welcome guide that new residents will actually read. That is applied anthropology, putting the discipline's methods to work on a practical problem, and it runs across all four subfields.

Tally: 4 projects inside the four subfields + 1 outside anthropology = 5 projects.

Why it matters: each subfield answers its own question about people. If no people, past or present, are being studied, the project is not anthropology.

Worked example — three reactions at a tailgate party (Week 2)

Three illustrative visitors from abroad watch fans grill and share food in a stadium parking lot before a football game.

  1. "These fans are wasteful and loud; people back home know how to behave." Ethnocentrism: judging the practice by the visitor's own culture's standards.
  2. "Before I judge, I will ask what the grills, the team colors, and the shared food mean to the fans." Cultural relativism as a method: describing the practice in its own terms first.
  3. "No one anywhere can ever call any practice wrong." Moral relativism: the philosophical claim that no moral judgment holds across cultures. It is a different idea from the method, and the discipline's own public positions show the method does not mean "anything goes".

Now read the same lot with the culture concept. The fans are the society, the people who share the day. Their learned routine of grilling, sharing, and cheering is part of their culture. The team colors are a symbol, and the expectation that neighbors share food across their cars is a norm. Two fans who argue about leaving before the final whistle show that the culture is shared but not uniform.

Why it matters: the three reactions sound alike at first, so ask what each one does. The first judges, the second describes before judging, and the third denies that judging is ever possible.

Worked example — two columns at a laundromat (Week 3)

An illustrative student watches a neighborhood laundromat, a business open to the public, one evening.

Two illustrative field-note entries from a laundromat, with what was observed kept apart from what it might mean
Entry Observed Possible interpretation
1, early evening, front row of washers A customer in work boots folds a stranger's finished load while the stranger is outside. The stranger returns and nods. Customers who come at the same hour may help each other unasked.
2, early evening, back corner Two customers call the washer that rocks during its spin "the dancer" and steer newcomers away from it. "The dancer" may be the regulars' own name for an unreliable machine.
  • The column check: a draft note reading "the customers here are friendly neighbors" belongs in the interpretation column. It is a reading, and one evening cannot settle it.
  • Emic and etic: "the dancer" is the emic term, the insiders' own word. An observer's "the washer that moves across the floor during its spin cycle" is the etic counterpart, a description anyone could use to compare laundromats. Neither one is wrong.
  • Roles, not names: "a customer in work boots" is a role. If the student overhears a first name, it stays out of the notes.
  • The four rules: the laundromat is public, the notes use roles, the student takes no photos, and any interview waits for a consenting adult's clear yes about a non-sensitive routine, such as how they pick a machine.

Why it matters: the observed column is what anyone standing there would have seen. Everything you think it means goes next door, marked with "may".

Worked example — one community or many, and a thin or thick note (Week 3)

  1. After long months of fieldwork at one dockworkers' union hall, an illustrative researcher writes a detailed book about that hall alone. Ethnography: the detailed study of one community, and the written account of it.
  2. A second researcher reads accounts that other fieldworkers wrote about dockworkers in many port cities and compares how each divides up its shifts. Ethnology: the comparison of many cultures.

Now the note. At an illustrative choir rehearsal, the director taps the music stand twice.

  • Thin: "The director tapped the stand twice."
  • Thick: "The director tapped the stand twice, which the singers knew meant 'start again from the last breath mark'. The new tenor kept singing, because no one had told him the signal yet."

Why it matters: the thin note records a movement; the thick note records what the movement means to the people in the room, which is what lets a reader tell one gesture from another.

Worked example — what the rowing club's talk shows (Week 4)

At an illustrative rowing club, a newcomer listens for one morning.

  1. On the dock, the coach describes next season's race on a lake none of them has rowed. Displacement: talking about things not here and not now.
  2. The newcomer understands "Row the long loop past the bridge, then turn at the second buoy", a sentence no one has said to her before. Productivity: understanding a sentence never heard before.
  3. The call "weigh enough" means stop rowing, and nothing in its sound says stop. Arbitrariness: no natural link between the words and their meaning.
  4. A rower's young child picks up every call by listening at practices for a season. Traditional transmission: learned from other speakers, not inherited.

Then three ways speech shifts:

  • The coach speaks in full, careful sentences at the club's fundraising dinner and in quick shorthand on the dock. That is a change of register, one speaker shifting style for a setting.
  • Two rowers move between English and the language their grandparents spoke, in the middle of one conversation. That is code-switching.
  • A rower from another region uses a grammar for questions that others in the club do not. That is a dialect feature, and it follows its own rules.

Last, the big question. A classmate says rowers who lack a word for one phase of the stroke cannot see that phase. That is the strong form of linguistic relativity, and it is not supported. A coach who says that learning the word helps rowers notice the phase sooner is describing the weak form, which has limited support.

Why it matters: the design features are what language has and other communication lacks, while register, dialect, and code-switching are variety inside human speech.

Worked example — five ways to get food, and one mix (Week 5)

Sort five illustrative setups into the course's five strategies.

  1. A small band gathers wild nuts and roots, hunts small game, and fishes a river, with no fields and no herds. Foraging.
  2. A camp of related families keeps sheep and goats for milk, wool, and trade, and packs up its tents to follow the grass from season to season. Pastoralism.
  3. A village clears small gardens with digging sticks and hoes, plants them for a few seasons, then lets each one rest while it clears another. Horticulture.
  4. A valley town floods its rice paddies from canals, plows them behind draft animals, and plants the same fields every year. Intensive agriculture.
  5. A warehouse worker buys groceries every week with wages and grows none of them. Industrial and postindustrial economy.

The mix: suppose the valley town's teenagers also gather wild mushrooms from the hills each autumn. Then one town uses two strategies, which is what real communities do. The model sorts strategies, not whole peoples.

Why it matters: each strategy has a tell. No domesticated plants or animals means foraging, herds mean pastoralism, hand tools and rested ground mean horticulture, plows and permanent fields mean intensive agriculture, and wages for food mean the industrial pattern.

Worked example — new readings of the model table (Week 5)

Use the illustrative model table from the review above. Work each step before you read it.

  1. Group size. How many times larger is the intensive town's typical local group than the foraging group? 3,000 ÷ 30 = 100. The intensive town's local group is 100 times the size of the foraging group's.
  2. Two farming groups. How many times larger is the intensive town's group than the horticultural village's? 3,000 ÷ 150 = 20. It is 20 times the size.
  3. Two mobile groups. How many times larger is the pastoral group than the foraging group? 60 ÷ 30 = 2. It is twice the size.
  4. Density, end to end. How many times the foraging density is the intensive agricultural density? 200 ÷ 1 = 200.
  5. Reading it in one sentence: as a strategy keeps people in one place on permanent fields, density and group size climb and moves fall to zero.
  6. The honesty note: the numbers are engineered for teaching. Real foraging densities are often well under 1 person per square kilometre, and real communities mix strategies.

Why it matters: every ratio is one value divided by another, and the result means "how many times as many". Say which two rows you divided before you say the number.

Worked example — model, not ladder (Week 5)

Three illustrative sentences from a draft paper, each with its fix:

  1. "Foraging bands are where farming towns started, an earlier stage of us." Fix: the strategies are a model for comparison, not steps every society climbs, and no culture is an earlier version of another. Real communities mix strategies.
  2. "The 1960s studies proved that foragers barely worked." Fix: this is a live debate. Sahlins's collected argument was that many foragers met their needs with fewer hours of food-getting work than farmers. Later critics counted food processing, tool-making, and household work and found the hours longer. The course keys no verdict.
  3. "A town with permanent fields is more developed than a herding camp." Fix: "more developed" is a ranking. Describe each strategy in its own terms: permanent fields support dense, settled towns, and herding supports smaller groups that move with the grazing.

Why it matters: the model, the debate, and relativism as a method all ask the same habit of you: describe and compare, never rank.

Worked example — keying five transactions and reading the tally (Week 6)

Key each illustrative transaction.

  1. In one household, whoever gets home first cooks for everyone, and no one tracks who has cooked more. Generalized reciprocity: no count kept, a close tie.
  2. Families in a babysitting co-op trade hours of childcare, tracked with paper tokens, so each family gives about as many hours as it gets. Balanced reciprocity: an expected return of about equal value. The tokens are special-purpose money, valid for babysitting and nothing else.
  3. An online seller hides that a used laptop's battery no longer holds a charge and talks a stranger into paying the price of a new one. Negative reciprocity: trying to get more than you give.
  4. A housing co-op collects the same fee from every unit and pays one crew to clear snow for everyone. Redistribution: collected at a center and given out again.
  5. A rider buys a monthly bus pass at its posted price. Market exchange.

Now read the running site's tally in two new ways:

  • All reciprocity together: 8 + 5 + 0 = 13 exchanges, and 13 ÷ 50 × 100 = 26 percent of the coded exchanges.
  • Market against redistribution: 66 percent against 8 percent is a gap of 66 − 8 = 58 percentage points.
  • Check the shares: 66 + 16 + 10 + 8 + 0 = 100 percent.

Why it matters: the three reciprocities differ by how closely people keep count, and redistribution and market exchange differ by where the goods go: through a center, or between a buyer and a seller at a price.

Worked example — who follows whom, and why (Week 7)

At an illustrative community theater, the company elects a stage manager each season. When she calls "places", the actors go. One lead actor refuses to rehearse until the cast moves the set his way, and they give in to keep the night going.

  • The stage manager holds authority: power the actors accept as rightful. The company's election supplies the legitimacy.
  • The lead actor uses power without authority: he makes others act, but nobody accepts it as his right.

Next, sort four illustrative cases with Service's model.

  1. About thirty people move between seasonal camps, and a respected elder guides decisions by advice alone. Band.
  2. Several villages are linked by clans, and their leaders can persuade but cannot force anyone. Tribe.
  3. An office passed down within one family line oversees several fishing villages and gathers part of each catch to share out at a yearly gathering. Chiefdom.
  4. A central government collects taxes, writes laws, and runs courts that enforce them. State.

Then three cases with Fried's scheme.

  1. On a volunteer trail crew, anyone skilled enough can lead a work party, and everyone uses the same shared tools. Egalitarian.
  2. A choir has one soloist's seat and many singers able to fill it, yet every member has the same access to the rehearsal hall and the music. Rank.
  3. In a farming town, a few families own all the farmland and everyone else rents land from them. Stratified.

Last, a dispute. Two coworkers who share a carpool argue about splitting the cost of gas. If they settle it over coffee, that is negotiation. If a third coworker helps them reach their own agreement, that is mediation. If the company's carpool coordinator hears both and decides, that is adjudication.

Why it matters: every one of these asks the same question underneath. Who decides, and do the others accept that person's right to decide?

Self-check questions

Try each one, then read the check and the one-line why.

  1. To learn how selling after dark is organized, an illustrative student studies late-night food trucks in one city and an open-air night market in another. Which habit of the anthropological perspective is that? Check: comparison. Why: it sets one practice beside the same kind of practice elsewhere.
  2. A child in an illustrative household learns, without anyone explaining it, to wait for everyone to sit before eating. Is that enculturation or acculturation? Check: enculturation. Why: it is learning your own culture growing up, mostly without noticing.
  3. Two longtime members of an illustrative bird-watching club disagree about whether a beginner may call out a sighting first. Name the characteristic of culture at work. Check: shared but never uniform. Why: people inside one culture still disagree.
  4. An illustrative student writes "the lifeguard is bored" in the observed column of field notes from a public pool. What is wrong? Check: it is an interpretation. Why: the observed column records what was seen, such as "the lifeguard looks at a phone and yawns".
  5. An illustrative student wants to take phone pictures of the laundromat's customers so the field notes can be matched to faces afterward. Which course rule does the plan break? Check: no photographs or recordings of people. Why: the notes record roles, and nothing identifies a particular person.
  6. A toddler at an illustrative playground says, "I runned all the way to the swings." Which design feature does the new sentence show? Check: productivity. Why: the child built a sentence no one taught her, using the rules she has learned.
  7. A nod of the head means "yes" to one illustrative traveler and something else to another. What does that show about nonverbal communication? Check: its meanings are learned. Why: gestures differ across cultures, so none is universal.
  8. Using the model table, how many times the horticultural density is the intensive agricultural density? Check: 10 times. Why: 200 ÷ 20 = 10, so ten times as many people live on each square kilometre.
  9. An illustrative neighbor borrows a ladder and returns it a week later with a jar of homemade jam. Which kind of reciprocity is that? Check: balanced reciprocity. Why: a return of about equal value came back within a known time.
  10. A classmate calls the potlatch "a waste of goods". What does the course say instead? Check: hosts gave away goods to validate names, rank, and rights before invited witnesses. Why: reading a practice in its own terms shows what it does for the people who hold it.
  11. At an illustrative choir, the other singers tease one member who keeps arriving late, until that member starts coming on time. Which kind of social control is that? Check: ridicule, an informal means. Why: no rule-maker or set penalty is involved, yet the group keeps its rule.
  12. Who set out the genealogical method, collecting a community's kin ties person by person, and in which year? Check: Rivers, in 1910. Why: the course pins his article "The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry" in The Sociological Review.

Check yourself — choose one. Write two or three sentences to a friend.

  • (a) Explain why the "original affluent society" question is still a debate, giving each side's strongest case.
  • (b) Explain why calling a band "less advanced" than a state misuses Service's model.

Either one rehearses an explain-why skill the midterm checks.

Watch before the exam

These eight videos come from the course's vetted Week 8 pool, and every one has captions. Use them to review and to connect weeks, not to learn anything new.

Study plan

A short countdown. Count back from the day you plan to sit the midterm.

  • Two weeks out: as you finish Week 6, start a one-page list of the course's swapped pairs. Begin with culture and society, enculturation and acculturation, ethnocentrism and relativism, emic and etic, and observation and interpretation. Then list ethnography and ethnology, language and communication, and the strong and weak forms. Add the three reciprocities, then power and authority when Week 7 arrives.
  • One week out: as you finish Week 7, reread the Week 5 topic review and redo its two model-table worked examples. Week 5 holds 8 of the midterm's 25 questions.
  • At the start of Week 8: take the practice exam once, cold and closed-note. Note which objectives cost you the most, and remember that it leans less on Weeks 3, 4, 5, and 7 than the midterm does.
  • Three or four days before you sit it: reread the topic reviews for your two weakest objectives, and redo the matching worked examples from scratch without looking.
  • Two days before: run the paired exam-prep tutorial (the copy-and-paste chatbot tutor, or its no-AI route) for active recall. Tell it which areas the practice exam exposed. Never paste anything that identifies a real person you observed into a chatbot; your notes use roles, so there is nothing of that kind to share.
  • The day before: retake the practice exam, explain every miss out loud, and work the self-check questions above. Saying your one-line cures aloud helps, whether to a friend or alone in a quiet room.
  • Right before: skim the "predictable mistakes → cures" lines for all seven weeks. Then stop studying, and take a few slow breaths.

This guide is for review. The exam-prep tutorial and the practice exam are where you rehearse. Pulling ideas back out of memory, not rereading, is what makes them stick.

Exam format

Every one of the 25 questions counts the same, and the midterm checks your own understanding without AI. The questions come one at a time, and there is no going back, so settle each one before you move on.

Test-taking strategies for this material:

  • Name the pair before you choose. Most questions turn on two neighboring ideas, such as emic and etic, or power and authority. Say which pair is in play first.
  • Ask the one-line test. Insider's word or analyst's word? Seen or interpreted? One community or many? Learned or inherited? Does anyone keep count? Do people accept it as rightful?
  • Treat "illustrative" as a cue. The scene was invented for the question and attributed to no one, so judge it by the course's definitions, not by what you guess happened next.
  • Watch for a ranking word. If an option calls a way of life earlier, simpler, or less advanced, it has slipped from comparing into ranking.
  • For a ratio, name the two rows first. Write which value you are dividing by which on scratch paper, then say the result in words, such as "ten times as many people on each square kilometre".
  • For a "pick every option that fits" question, judge each statement on its own, as if it were a true-or-false question.

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