Final Exam — Instructions
Overview
This is the scored final exam for Cultural Anthropology. It is cumulative: its questions reach all nine course objectives, from the anthropologist's way of looking in Week 1 to globalization and the course synthesis in Week 15. It is given in Week 16, the finals week, which has no new material.
The final has 40 questions, and every question counts the same. Thirty-five of them ask you to pick one option, and five ask you to judge whether a statement is true or false. Thirteen questions are on the easier side, 24 are of medium difficulty, and 3 are harder. Every scene, kinship diagram, field note, form, or set of figures a question uses is written out in words inside the question, so nothing depends on reading a chart or a drawing. A few questions ask for one short step of arithmetic, such as turning a count into a percent or stating a gap in percentage points, 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. Others ask what a pinned anthropologist argued or found, in the course's own words.
Coverage and scope
The questions were drawn from the course's question bank, and every one of the nine objectives appears at least once. Every question comes from the material of Weeks 9 to 15. None is drawn directly from the material of Weeks 1 to 8, yet six questions check an objective first taught in those weeks, applied inside a later week's material. Here is what this form actually contains, first by week and then by objective.
| Week | Topic | Questions | Objectives checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9 | Kinship and descent | 7 | Objective 6 (6), Objective 2 (1) |
| 10 | Marriage, family, and households | 7 | Objective 6 (6), Objective 4 (1) |
| 11 | Sex, gender, and sexuality | 6 | Objective 7 (5), Objective 1 (1) |
| 12 | Race, ethnicity, and human variation | 6 | Objective 7 (5), Objective 5 (1) |
| 13 | Religion, ritual, and worldview | 6 | Objective 8 (4), Objective 3 (2) |
| 14 | Health, illness, and healing | 5 | Objective 8 (5) |
| 15 | Globalization, colonialism, and applied anthropology | 3 | Objective 9 (3) |
| Objective | What the questions ask you to do | Weeks that teach it | Questions |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Use holism, comparison, and the culture concept, including relativism used as a method | 1 and 2, carried into 11 | 1 |
| 2 | Use the fieldwork methods, including the genealogical method | 3, carried into 9 | 1 |
| 3 | Read language and nonverbal communication as cultural systems | 4, carried into 13 | 2 |
| 4 | Compare ways of making a living and exchanging, including the obligations a gift creates | 5 and 6, carried into 10 | 1 |
| 5 | Tell power from authority and use the political models as models | 7, carried into 12 | 1 |
| 6 | Read kinship, descent, marriage, residence, and households | 9 and 10 | 12 |
| 7 | Explain how sex, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity are culturally organized | 11 and 12 | 10 |
| 8 | Interpret ritual, religion, illness, and healing | 13 and 14 | 9 |
| 9 | Analyze colonialism, globalization, migration, and heritage | 15 | 3 |
Each question checks exactly one objective, so the objective column adds to 40, the same as the week column.
Read the two tables together. Weeks 9 and 10 carry the most questions, 7 each, so kinship, descent, marriage, residence, and households deserve the most review time. Weeks 11, 12, and 13 have 6 each, Week 14 has 5, and Week 15 has 3. By objective, kinship and marriage (Objective 6) is the heaviest, with 12 questions. Sex, gender, race, and ethnicity (Objective 7) follows with 10, and ritual, religion, and healing (Objective 8) with 9.
Here are the skills the drawn form asks for, week by week:
- Week 9: read kin-type strings outward from ego, and sort relatives by birth or by marriage. Tell the two kinds of descent group apart, and keep descent through women apart from rule by women. Sort cousins and use the terminology types, and say how Rivers collected kin ties.
- Week 10: define marriage as the course does, and tell marrying out from marrying in. Name a marriage exchange by its direction, and apply the residence rules to the kinship set and to a short count of couples. Read a marriage exchange with the gift's obligations.
- Week 11: treat the foraging model as a model, and say which partner moves under a residence rule. State Mead's argument and the course's account of Two-Spirit. Read a division of labor as a share, and describe a documented case on its own terms first.
- Week 12: explain why human variation is continuous and what skin color tracks. State Boas's finding, and handle the two within-group figures as the course does. Tell ethnicity from race, and name rightful power.
- Week 13: use Tylor's minimum definition of religion, and name and order van Gennep's phases. Tell a rite of passage from a religious rite, and read a ritual's silent signals and insider terms with the tools of Week 4.
- Week 14: keep disease apart from illness and credit the distinction. Read a person's account of what made them sick, and describe a group's shared way of naming distress without diagnosing anyone. Credit structural violence to its coiner, and name the use of two healing systems at once.
- Week 15: name colonialism, read a route of goods with Wallerstein's idea of core and periphery, and state a change in a share in percentage points.
The early objectives still count. Six questions check Objectives 1 to 5, and every one of them sits inside a later week's material. The genealogical method from Week 3 comes back in Week 9's kinship diagrams. The gift's obligations from Week 6 come back in Week 10's marriage exchanges, and relativism as a method from Week 2 comes back in Week 11's gender diversity. Authority from Week 7 comes back in Week 12, and Week 4's nonverbal communication and insider terms come back in Week 13's rituals. Week 8's history of anthropology's ideas is not scored on its own, though it lays the whole course out as a set of lenses.
These notes map the skills the final checks. The questions themselves are drawn from the course's question bank and are not listed here.
Instructions
- Attempts: one. The final 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 final opens in Week 16 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, diagram, and scene a question uses is written out 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 final is closed-note.
- After you submit: Canvas shows your result. The keyed choices stay hidden so the final stays fair for every student.
Academic integrity
The final 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 final confirms that you personally can define the course's distinctions, read a kinship diagram, classify an exchange, and name a ritual phase.
The honest way to prepare is open to you. The study guide, the practice final, and the exam-prep tutorial rehearse the same skills with fresh variants, and nothing on them appears on the final word for word.
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