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Week 16 · Final study guide

Final Exam — Study Guide

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

Coverage — what the final covers

The final is cumulative over Weeks 1–15, and it checks all nine course objectives. It opens in Week 16, the finals week, 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: 40 questions, and every question counts the same. Thirty-five ask you to pick one option, and five ask you to judge a statement as true or false. Every scene, kinship diagram, field note, form, or set of figures a question uses is written out in the question, and no question needs a chart or a drawing. A few questions ask for one short step of arithmetic, such as a share as a percent or a gap in percentage points, and scratch paper is enough.

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

Final coverage by course objective: the weeks that teach it, its main skills, and its number of questions out of 40
Course objective Weeks that teach it Main skills Questions
The anthropological perspective and the culture concept 1 and 2, carried into 11 Holism and comparison; culture and society; ethnocentrism, relativism as a method, and moral relativism 1
Ethnographic methods 3, carried into 9 Two-column notes; emic and etic; the genealogical method; consent and the four fieldwork rules 1
Language as a cultural system 4, carried into 13 Language and communication; nonverbal communication; the insider's own terms 2
Making a living and exchange 5 and 6, carried into 10 The forms of exchange; the three reciprocities; the gift's three obligations 1
Political organization and social control 7, carried into 12 Power, authority, and legitimacy; Service's and Fried's models as models 1
Kinship, descent, marriage, and households 9 and 10 Kin-type strings and diagrams; descent groups; terminology types; marriage exchanges; residence rules; household forms 12
Sex, gender, race, and ethnicity 11 and 12 Sex, gender, and sexuality; the division of labor as a model; documented gender diversity; continuous variation; race and ethnicity; census categories 10
Religion, ritual, and healing 13 and 14 Rites of passage, liminality, and communitas; magic and witchcraft; disease and illness; explanatory models; structural violence 9
Globalization, colonialism, and heritage 15 Colonialism; the world-system; migration and remittances; heritage and repatriation; the synthesis 3

Where the weight sits. Every one of the 40 questions comes from the material of Weeks 9–15. Weeks 9 and 10 carry the most, 7 each, so put the most review time on kinship, descent, marriage, and residence. Weeks 11, 12, and 13 come next with 6 each, then Week 14 with 5 and Week 15 with 3. By difficulty, 13 questions are easy, 24 are medium, and 3 are hard.

The first half of the course still matters. Six questions check Objectives 1 to 5, and every one of them sits inside a later week's material. The genealogical method returns in the kinship week, the gift's obligations return in marriage exchanges, and relativism as a method returns in the gender week. Authority returns in the race week, and nonverbal communication and insider terms return in the ritual week. So Weeks 1–8 get a short callback section below, and Weeks 9–15 get the full review.

Topic-by-topic review

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

Weeks 1–8 in brief — the foundations the later weeks build on

  • The perspective (Week 1): holism is the habit of looking at how the parts of a way of life fit together. Comparison sets a practice beside the same kind of practice in other societies, so what seems natural shows up as one arrangement among several. Fieldwork is long-term research among the people being studied. Applied anthropology uses the discipline's methods on practical problems and runs across all four subfields.
  • The culture concept (Week 2): culture is the whole learned, shared way of life of a group, and society is the people who share it. Enculturation is learning your own culture growing up; acculturation is the change that follows sustained contact between groups. Ethnocentrism judges another culture by your own standards. Cultural relativism is a method: describe a practice in its own terms before judging it. Moral relativism, the claim that no moral judgment holds across cultures, is a different idea.
  • Fieldwork (Week 3): two-column field notes keep what was observed apart from what it might mean, and they name people by role, never by name. Emic terms are the insider's own words; etic terms are the analyst's, chosen for comparison, and neither is wrong. The genealogical method, collecting a community's kin ties person by person, comes from Rivers (1910). Reflexivity is noticing how your own position shapes what you record. Informed consent is ongoing and can be withdrawn.
  • Language (Week 4): communication is any passing of information between living things, and language is one learned, symbolic kind of it. Nonverbal communication covers gesture, facial expression, posture, and the use of space, and its meanings are learned and differ across cultures. An insider's term is written in quotation marks with an English gloss.
  • Making a living and exchange (Weeks 5 and 6): the subsistence strategies are a model of five, never a ladder, and real communities mix them. Reciprocity is exchange between social equals; redistribution collects goods at a center and gives them out again; market exchange is buying and selling at prices set by supply and demand. Sahlins split reciprocity into generalized (no count kept), balanced (an even return within a known time), and negative (trying to get more than you give). Mauss's essay on the gift names three obligations: to give, to receive, and to give back.
  • Governing (Week 7): power is the ability to make others act, even against their will. Authority is power that people accept as rightful, and legitimacy is that acceptance. Service's band, tribe, chiefdom, and state and Fried's egalitarian, rank, and stratified societies are models for comparison. In a stratified society, people have unequal access to basic resources such as land.
  • The lenses (Week 8): unilineal evolutionism, the nineteenth-century ranking of societies into stages, was rejected by the discipline. Historical particularism, functionalism, and interpretive anthropology stayed on as lenses, and present-day practice is reflexive, collaborative, applied, and public.
  • The running site's numbers you will still meet: the illustrative market has 24 stalls, 10 pinned field notes from Visit 1, and a coded tally of 50 exchanges. Market exchange was 33 of them, so 33 ÷ 50 × 100 = 66 percent.

Week 9 — Kinship and descent

  • The distinctions: consanguineal vs. affinal kin; patrilineal vs. matrilineal vs. bilateral; lineage vs. clan; parallel vs. cross cousins; matrilineal vs. matriarchal.
  • Key idea: every society decides which family ties count, what they are called, and what rights and duties they carry.
  • Definitions: kinship is the ties a society recognizes as family, built from birth, marriage, and other bonds, so it is cultural as well as biological. Consanguineal kin are related by birth; affinal kin are related by marriage. A kinship diagram uses a triangle for a man, a circle for a woman, and an equals sign for marriage. A vertical line shows descent, and a horizontal line joins siblings. It is centred on a marked ego, and it is always described in words as well.
  • Kin-type notation writes F, M, B, Z, S, D, H, and W and reads outward from ego. MB is "mother's brother", and FZD is "father's sister's daughter".
  • Descent is a rule that places a person in a group through a parent. Under patrilineal descent, sons and daughters belong to their father's group, and only sons pass membership on. Under matrilineal descent, daughters and sons belong to their mother's group, and only daughters pass it on. Bilateral kinship traces relatives equally through both parents and forms no descent groups.
  • Descent groups: a lineage can trace each step back to a known common ancestor. A clan claims a common ancestor, often legendary, without every step known.
  • Documented cases: the Haudenosaunee (the older outsiders' label, "Iroquois", is given once here) are a documented matrilineal case. Clan membership passed through women, and clan mothers held recognized roles, including in choosing chiefs. In the 1910s, Trobriand Islanders traced descent matrilineally, and a man's heir was his sister's son, as Malinowski described.
  • Kinship terminology is the set of words a language uses for relatives. Parallel cousins are the children of a parent's same-sex sibling, and cross cousins are the children of a parent's opposite-sex sibling. Under lineal terminology, ego uses separate words for siblings and for cousins. Under generational terminology, ego calls everyone in their own generation brother or sister. Under bifurcate merging terminology, ego calls parallel cousins brother or sister and cross cousins by a different term. The types are named descriptively, and they name terminology types, not any present-day people's practices. Morgan compared kin terms across many societies in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, a work whose date the course says in words.
  • Fictive kin are treated as relatives without ties of birth or marriage, such as a godparent. Chosen kin choose to be family to one another. Both carry real duties.
  • Course example: the illustrative kinship set (Dataset B) has 4 grandparents, 10 people in the parents' generation, and 7 in ego's generation, so 4 + 10 + 7 = 21 positions. If the society were patrilineal, ego's patrilineage would hold 8 people. If it were matrilineal, ego's matrilineage would also hold 8. Ego, B, and Z appear in both, so the two lists together name 8 + 8 − 3 = 13 people, and 21 − 13 = 8 positions fall in neither. The four cousins split 2 parallel and 2 cross, so parallel cousins are 2 ÷ 4 × 100 = 50 percent of them.
  • The running site: the family-run stall, drawn with roles and no names, has 2 + 4 + 2 = 8 roles across 3 generations, with 3 married couples and 2 in-laws, who are affinal kin to the founding grower.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) kinship read as only biology. Cure: every society decides which ties count. (2) matrilineal read as matriarchal. Cure: descent through women is not rule by women, and in many matrilineal societies men of the group, such as a mother's brother, held authority over its affairs. (3) patrilineal descent read as shutting daughters out. Cure: daughters belong; they do not pass membership on. (4) lineage and clan used as synonyms. Cure: a lineage knows every step. (5) a cousin term read as the same everywhere. Cure: the terminology type decides who is called brother or sister.

Week 10 — Marriage, family, and households

  • The distinctions: exogamy vs. endogamy; bridewealth vs. bride service vs. dowry; polygyny vs. polyandry; descent vs. residence.
  • Key idea: a marriage joins two families as well as two people, and a society's rules decide who may marry, what passes between the families, and where the couple lives.
  • Definitions: marriage is a socially recognized union that creates rights and obligations between the partners and between their families, and how a society defines it differs across societies and over time. Exogamy is a rule to marry outside one's own group, such as one's lineage or clan. Endogamy is a rule or preference to marry within one's own group, such as one's community or faith. Always ask "outside which group?" or "within which group?"
  • Marriage exchanges are the goods or work that pass between two families when a marriage is made, and they bind the families with obligations. Bridewealth is goods passed from the groom's kin to the bride's kin, recognizing the transfer of rights to her labor and to her children's membership; it is not the purchase of a wife. Bride service is work the groom does for the bride's family for a time. Dowry is goods passed from the bride's family when she marries, often to the couple or to the groom's family.
  • How many spouses: monogamy is marriage to one spouse at a time. Polygamy is marriage to more than one spouse at a time, and it covers both polygyny (one husband, several wives) and polyandry (one wife, several husbands). The course describes the forms and never ranks them.
  • Residence rules say where a newly married couple lives. Patrilocal: near the husband's father's kin. Matrilocal: near the wife's mother's kin. Avunculocal: near the husband's mother's brother. Neolocal: a new home apart from both. Bilocal: near either side. Descent is who you are related to, and residence is where you live.
  • Households: a household is the people who live together and share daily life, whether or not they are kin. The forms are nuclear (a couple and their children), extended (adding relatives beyond a couple and their children), single-parent, multigenerational (three or more generations under one roof), and blended (a couple with children from either partner's earlier relationships). They change with the economy, migration, and the life course.
  • Course example: the parents' generation of the kinship set holds 10 positions, so 10 ÷ 2 = 5 married couples, with 4 in-married spouses (FBW, FZH, MBW, and MZH). At the family-run stall, the son and his wife moved onto the family farm after they married, patrilocal in the model's terms, and the daughter and her husband live in town, which is neolocal. That is 1 + 1 = 2 couples in the second generation, so the patrilocal share is 1 ÷ 2 × 100 = 50 percent.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) bridewealth read as buying a wife. Cure: it recognizes a transfer of rights and binds two families. (2) bridewealth and dowry read as the same. Cure: they flow in opposite directions. (3) polygamy read as polygyny only. Cure: it covers polyandry too. (4) the nuclear family read as universal or original. Cure: it is one form among several. (5) descent and residence used as synonyms. Cure: related to vs. lives near.

Week 11 — Sex, gender, and sexuality

  • The distinctions: sex vs. gender vs. sexuality; a model vs. a description of every society; matrilineal vs. matriarchal, called back.
  • Key idea: a culture organizes roles and identities around a biological starting point, and what counts as men's work or women's work differs across societies and changes over time.
  • Definitions: sex is biological traits, such as chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy. Gender is the roles, behaviors, and identities a culture organizes around sex. Sexuality is patterns of attraction and the cultural rules around them. Gender roles are the tasks, behaviors, and expectations a culture assigns by gender; they are learned, differ across societies, and change over time. The gendered division of labor is the way a society assigns tasks by gender.
  • The man-the-hunter model holds that big-game hunting was done mainly by men and gathering mainly by women. It is a model with many documented exceptions, not a description of every foraging society.
  • The debate over how often women hunted, with no verdict: one side holds that many recorded foraging societies did divide labor this way, so the model sums up a real, widely recorded pattern. The other side points to the documented exceptions and to reflexivity: an observer's own position, including gender, shapes what they record, so older accounts may have missed women's hunting.
  • Documented gender diversity, each case in its own terms: Two-Spirit is an English umbrella term adopted by Indigenous people at a gathering near Winnipeg in the summer of 1990. It describes a range of gender and sexual identities within their own nations' traditions, and it is not an ancient word from one Indigenous language. Hijra (Hindi and Urdu) communities in South Asia and fa'afafine (Samoan) in Samoa are two more documented cases. Relativism as a method describes each case in its own terms before any judgment, and the course argues no policy question about gender.
  • Mead and her critics, with no verdict: Mead (1935) wrote Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, a title quoted as published in the period's wording. She argued that temperament linked to sex differs across societies, so much of it is learned. Later critics argued that her contrasts among the three societies were drawn too sharply, flattening the variety inside each one.
  • Course example: at the family-run stall, the working roles run 1 + 3 + 2 = 6 across three generations, and 8 − 2 = 6 of the stall family's 8 roles do stall work. By gender, 4 women and 2 men hold them, so 4 − 2 = 2 more women than men. The second generation holds 3 of the 6, and 3 ÷ 6 × 100 = 50 percent. The son and the granddaughter both restock, so 1 + 1 = 2 people share one task across the gender line.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) sex and gender used as synonyms. Cure: biology vs. the roles a culture builds on it. (2) gender roles read as the same everywhere. Cure: they differ and change. (3) the man-the-hunter model read as describing every foraging society. Cure: it is a model with many exceptions. (4) Two-Spirit read as an ancient word. Cure: it is a 1990 English umbrella term chosen by Indigenous people.

Week 12 — Race, ethnicity, and human variation

  • The distinctions: race vs. ethnicity; continuous variation vs. separate boxes; "socially made" vs. "has no effects".
  • Key idea: human variation is real and continuous, while the boxes a society sorts people into are made by that society and have real effects.
  • Definitions: human variation is the biological differences among people, such as skin color and body form. It is continuous: a trait such as skin color changes gradually across geography rather than falling into separate boxes. Skin color varies mainly with ancestral exposure to ultraviolet light and does not predict other traits.
  • Within groups: most variation lies within groups rather than between them. Lewontin (1972), "The Apportionment of Human Diversity", Evolutionary Biology, gave a figure of about 85 percent within populations. The American Anthropological Association's Statement on Race (1998) gives about 94 percent within so-called racial groups. The figures come from different analyses, so each is stated with its attribution and neither is keyed.
  • A classic study: Boas (1912), "Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants", American Anthropologist, found that children born in the United States to immigrant parents differed in head form from their parents. That was evidence that traits once treated as fixed racial markers respond to environment. Later reanalyses of his data are mentioned in words, and no figure from them is keyed.
  • Race is a social classification of people into groups that a society makes. The categories differ across places and times, and the inequality built around them has real effects. Ethnicity is a shared identity based on ancestry, language, religion, or customs, and ethnic identity is how people claim and display it. A nation is a people who see themselves as sharing a history and an identity. Nationalism is the idea and feeling that a nation should govern itself, and a nation-state is a state whose government claims to stand for one nation.
  • Census categories are the issuing body's own categories (Dataset G, real). The Census Bureau states that its race categories reflect a social definition of race, not a biological, anthropological, or genetic one, and that people may report more than one race. In 2024 the Office of Management and Budget revised its standard to one combined race-and-ethnicity question with 7 minimum categories, adding Middle Eastern or North African, and it describes them as socio-political constructs.
  • Course example: Middle Eastern or North African is the 1 newly added category, so 7 − 1 = 6 were not newly added in 2024. On an illustrative "check all that apply" tally, 8 people return the form: 6 check 1 box and 2 check 2 boxes. That is 6 × 1 + 2 × 2 = 10 checked boxes, 10 − 8 = 2 more checks than people, and 2 ÷ 8 × 100 = 25 percent who checked more than one box. The two within-group figures are 94 − 85 = 9 percentage points apart, yet both pass 50 percent, so both say most variation lies within groups.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) race read as natural biological groups. Cure: the categories are made by societies. (2) skin color read as predicting other traits. Cure: it tracks ultraviolet exposure. (3) ethnicity read as race. Cure: shared identity vs. a classification. (4) "race is a social construct" read as "race has no real effects". Cure: the inequality built on it is real. (5) the within-groups percentage read as one settled number. Cure: two analyses, two figures, one idea.

Week 13 — Religion, ritual, and worldview

  • The distinctions: religion vs. magic; a rite of passage vs. a calendrical ritual; separation vs. transition vs. incorporation.
  • Key idea: ritual moves people, marks time, and makes sense of misfortune, and none of that is meaningless repetition.
  • Definitions: Tylor's (1871) minimum definition of religion is belief in spiritual beings, which he called animism. Geertz's (1966) "Religion as a Cultural System" describes religion as a system of symbols that shapes people's moods and motivations and their sense of the order of existence. A worldview is a people's broad sense of how the world is ordered and what it means. A myth is a sacred story that explains how things came to be. A ritual is a patterned, repeated sequence of acts that carries meaning for the people who perform it.
  • Rites of passage: a rite of passage moves a person from one social status to another, and it need not be religious. Van Gennep (1909), Les rites de passage (English translation 1960), named its three phases: separation (set apart from the old status), transition (left the old status, not yet in the new one), and incorporation (welcomed back in a new status).
  • Turner's two ideas: liminality is the in-between state of the transition phase, from Turner (1967), "Betwixt and Between", an essay first presented in 1964. Communitas is the intense bond among people who share that state, from Turner (1969), The Ritual Process.
  • A calendrical ritual is performed at a regular point in time and marks the passing of time for a group rather than moving one person to a new status.
  • Magic and uncertainty: magic is ritual action used to try to bring about a result directly. Malinowski observed that, in the 1910s, Trobriand Islanders used magic for dangerous open-sea fishing but not for safe lagoon fishing, and argued that magic is used where outcomes are uncertain.
  • Witchcraft as explanation: Evans-Pritchard (1937), Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, from fieldwork in the late 1920s, describes how Azande accepted that termites weakened a granary's supports yet asked why it fell when particular people sat beneath it. Witchcraft answered the "why them, why now".
  • Specialists and movements: a shaman is a part-time specialist who contacts the spirit world for others, a priest is a full-time official of an organized religion, and a diviner seeks hidden knowledge through set procedures. A revitalization movement, from Wallace (1956), "Revitalization Movements", American Anthropologist, is a deliberate, organized effort to build a more satisfying culture in a time of stress; the Ghost Dance movement of 1889 to 1890 is a commonly taught example.
  • Course example: the illustrative rites-of-passage set (Dataset E) has 6 rites with 3 phases each, so 6 × 3 = 18 pinned phase entries. Each rite has 1 transition phase, so 6 entries are liminal and 18 − 6 = 12 are separation or incorporation. At the running site, Visit 1 began at 7:30 a.m. and the bell rang at 8:00 a.m., 30 minutes in. Two field notes come before the bell, 1 records it, and 7 come after, so 2 + 1 + 7 = 10. Van Gennep's English translation came 1960 − 1909 = 51 years after his book.
  • Reading the bell: the hush, the ring with the call "Bell's rung!", and the first sale make a three-part sequence. It marks the same line in time on each market day and moves no person to a new status, so it is a small calendrical ritual, not a rite of passage. The hush is nonverbal communication, and "the bell" is the vendors' own emic term.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) magic and religion read as the same. Cure: magic tries to bring about a result directly. (2) a rite of passage read as always religious. Cure: a graduation names no spiritual being. (3) ritual read as meaningless repetition. Cure: ask what it means to the people who perform it. (4) witchcraft belief read as ignorance of natural causes. Cure: the Azande knew about termites.

Week 14 — Health, illness, and healing

  • The distinctions: disease vs. illness; ethnomedicine vs. biomedicine as two healing systems; structural violence vs. physical violence by a person.
  • Key idea: being sick is a matter of the body and a matter of meaning, and social arrangements shape who gets sick.
  • Definitions: disease is a biological malfunction of the body as a biomedical practitioner defines it. Illness is the person's and community's experience and meaning of being unwell. Kleinman (1980), Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture, set the two apart.
  • Explanatory model: a person's account of an illness, covering what caused it, why it started when it did, what it does to the body, how serious it is, and what treatment it needs. The questions are asked openly, never as a checklist with one right reply. The person's own words are an emic account, and "explanatory model" is the analyst's etic term.
  • Healing systems: biomedicine is the system taught in medical schools and practiced in clinics and hospitals, one healing system among many. Ethnomedicine is a culture's own system of health and healing. Medical pluralism is using more than one system at once.
  • Cultural concepts of distress are ways of experiencing and talking about suffering that are shared within a cultural group. Anthropologists describe them in words and do not use them to diagnose anyone.
  • Structural violence is harm done by social arrangements, rather than by a person's blow, that put some people in the way of illness and injury. Galtung (1969), "Violence, Peace, and Peace Research", Journal of Peace Research, coined the term, and Farmer (2004), "An Anthropology of Structural Violence", Current Anthropology, brought it into anthropology. The social distribution of illness is the uneven way illness falls across a society, taught in words with no figure keyed.
  • Course example: in the illustrative interview excerpt (Dataset F), the vendor has sold at the market for 20 years. The first 4 replies carry the emic terms, and the 5th carries the back strain, so 4 + 1 = 5 replies. Questions and replies together make 5 + 5 = 10 lines. The vendor's wife blames the cold mornings and the doctor blames the lifting: 2 explanatory models of 1 condition. The excerpt touches only the cause question, so 5 − 1 = 4 questions stay open. Galtung's coinage came 2004 − 1969 = 35 years before Farmer's article.
  • The running site: the market office keeps a first-aid kit, and one vendor brings ginger tea for anyone with a cold, so 1 market of 24 stalls holds 2 kinds of care at once, which is medical pluralism.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) disease and illness used as synonyms. Cure: the body's malfunction vs. the experience of being unwell. (2) ethnomedicine read as superstition set against biomedicine. Cure: biomedicine is one healing system among many. (3) structural violence read as one person hurting another. Cure: the harm comes from social arrangements. (4) structural violence credited to Farmer as its coiner. Cure: Galtung coined it; Farmer brought it into anthropology.

Week 15 — Globalization, colonialism, and applied anthropology, and the synthesis

  • The distinctions: globalization vs. homogenization; colonialism as documented history vs. a debate; repatriation as law vs. goodwill; applied vs. "real" anthropology.
  • Key idea: every small place is tied to the rest of the world, and much of that tie has a colonial history.
  • Definitions: globalization is the intensifying flow of goods, people, money, and ideas across the world; it has a long history, much of it colonial, and it does not make every culture the same. Colonialism is one society's rule over another and the use of its land, labor, and resources, and its legacies continue in the present. After 1492, crops, animals, and diseases moved between the Americas and the rest of the world, changing diets, economies, and populations on every continent.
  • The world-system is Wallerstein's model, named in words, of a world economy in which core regions draw on peripheral regions through unequal exchange. It is a classroom tool, not a verdict on any real place. Wolf's Europe and the People Without History argued that the peoples anthropologists studied were never outside history. Mintz's Sweetness and Power traced how sugar linked plantation labor to European diets. Both works are named in words.
  • Migration: migration is the movement of people to live in another place, including across borders. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs counted about 304 million international migrants in 2024, 3.7 percent of the world's population. Transnational ties are the family, economic, and cultural links migrants keep across borders. Remittances are money migrants send to family and communities at home. The World Bank's remittance estimate for 2024 is taught in words and never tested.
  • Heritage and repatriation: cultural heritage is the practices, places, objects, and knowledge a community recognizes as its own and hands on. UNESCO's Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was adopted in 2003. Repatriation is the return of human remains and cultural objects to the communities they came from. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, signed in 1990, requires federal agencies and federally funded institutions to return Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. For covered institutions in the United States, repatriation is the law.
  • A documented colonial law: Canada banned the potlatch under the Indian Act until 1951. After a potlatch in 1921, authorities charged 45 participants and seized about 750 ceremonial objects. After decades of negotiation, the objects began returning to two community cultural centres, opened in 1979 and 1980. These are documented facts, not a debate.
  • Applied and public anthropology: applied anthropology uses the discipline's methods on practical problems, and public anthropology brings anthropological work to wide audiences and public debates. Homogenization is the idea that global flows make every culture the same; anthropologists find instead that global goods and media are taken up and remade locally.
  • Course example: the potlatch ban ended in 1951 and UNESCO's convention was adopted in 2003, so 2003 − 1951 = 52 years separate them. The first cultural centre to receive returned objects opened 1979 − 1921 = 58 years after the seizure. On the market's tally, reciprocity of all kinds was 8 + 5 + 0 = 13 exchanges, so 13 ÷ 50 × 100 = 26 percent, and redistribution was 4 ÷ 50 × 100 = 8 percent. Two vendors send money to relatives in another country every month, and none of the 50 coded exchanges records it.
  • The synthesis: the course closes by reading one site through 10 lenses. They are the field notes, the emic terms, the subsistence base, the coded tally, and the governance. Then come the family stall's diagram and households, its division of labor, the opening bell as ritual, the two kinds of care, and the vendors' transfers across a border. Holism, the habit from Week 1, is the move that sets all ten side by side.
  • Predictable mistakes → cures: (1) globalization read as making every culture the same. Cure: global flows are remade locally. (2) colonialism read as a debate about whether harm occurred. Cure: the harm is documented history. (3) repatriation read as optional goodwill. Cure: for covered institutions in the United States, it is the law. (4) applied anthropology read as separate from "real" anthropology. Cure: it runs across all four subfields.

Representative practice

These are fresh variants, not the final'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 datasets, computed and checked in advance.

Worked example — a reunion seating chart, read as kinship (Week 9)

At an illustrative family reunion, ego is a woman seated with her mother's sister's daughter, her mother's brother's son, her husband, and her father's sister's husband.

  1. Read the strings. Her mother's sister's daughter is MZD, and her mother's brother's son is MBS. Her husband is H, and her father's sister's husband is FZH.
  2. Birth or marriage? MZD and MBS are consanguineal kin, related by birth. H and FZH are affinal kin, related by marriage.
  3. Parallel or cross? MZD is a child of ego's mother's same-sex sibling, so she is a parallel cousin. MBS is a child of her mother's opposite-sex sibling, so he is a cross cousin.
  4. What would ego call them? Under lineal terminology, both are "cousin". Under generational terminology, both are brother or sister. Under bifurcate merging terminology, MZD is "sister", and MBS gets the separate cross-cousin term.
  5. Which descent group? If this family were matrilineal, ego and MZD would share one, since their mothers are sisters and both pass membership on. MBS would not share it. His father, ego's mother's brother, is in ego's group but does not pass membership on, so MBS joins his own mother's group.

Why it matters: every kinship question is the same two moves. Read the string outward from ego, then apply the one rule the question names.

Worked example — counting the kinship set (Week 9)

Use the illustrative kinship set (Dataset B). Work each step before you read it.

  1. Positions: 4 grandparents + 10 in the parents' generation + 7 in ego's generation = 21.
  2. Either lineage: the patrilineage and the matrilineage hold 8 people each, and ego, B, and Z are in both, so 8 + 8 − 3 = 13 people appear in at least one list.
  3. Neither lineage: 21 − 13 = 8 positions, the in-married spouses among them, belong to neither of ego's lineages.
  4. Cousins: 2 parallel + 2 cross = 4 cousins, and 2 ÷ 4 × 100 = 50 percent are parallel.

Why it matters: the 8 positions outside both lineages show that one descent rule always leaves some relatives in another group. Say which list you counted before you give the figure.

Worked example — three marriages, three exchanges, and where each couple lives (Week 10)

Sort each illustrative case.

  1. Before a wedding, the groom spends two harvest seasons working on the bride's father's orchard. Bride service: work the groom does for the bride's family.
  2. The groom's uncles bring a herd of goats to the bride's family, and the bride's children will belong to the groom's lineage. Bridewealth: goods from the groom's kin to the bride's kin, recognizing a transfer of rights, never the purchase of a wife.
  3. The bride's parents send furniture and household goods with her to the couple's new apartment. Dowry: goods passed from the bride's family, here to the couple.

Then residence. A couple who move in near the wife's mother's relatives are matrilocal. A couple who rent a place of their own across town are neolocal. A couple who move in near the husband's mother's brother are avunculocal.

Then the group rule. A clan that requires its members to marry outside the clan follows exogamy. A faith community that expects its members to marry within it follows endogamy.

Last, a household. A grandmother, her adult son, and his two children share one apartment and its costs. Three generations live under one roof, so it is a multigenerational household.

Why it matters: every marriage question asks who gives what to whom, or where the couple lives, or which group the rule is relative to. Answer that one question first.

Worked example — one stall, read by gender and by generation (Week 11)

Use the family-run stall from the course example above.

  1. Working roles: 1 in the first generation + 3 in the second + 2 in the third = 6.
  2. By gender: 4 women and 2 men, so 4 − 2 = 2 more women than men.
  3. By generation: the second generation holds 3 of the 6, and 3 ÷ 6 × 100 = 50 percent.
  4. Across the line: the son and the granddaughter both restock, so 1 + 1 = 2 people share one task across gender and across two generations.

Then sort three illustrative statements.

  • "Her chart lists two X chromosomes." This is about sex.
  • "On this crew, whoever is youngest makes the coffee, whatever their gender." This is a division of labor by age, not by gender.
  • "In my grandparents' town, only men sang at funerals, and now everyone does." These are gender roles that changed over time.

Why it matters: a division of labor is a cultural arrangement. The stall divides work by generation as much as by gender, and the sorting shows that biology alone does not set who does what.

Worked example — two figures, one idea, and a form with boxes (Week 12)

  1. Lewontin's figure (1972, stated with attribution, never keyed): about 85 percent within populations, so 100 − 85 = 15 percent lies outside them.
  2. The Statement on Race figure (1998, stated with attribution, never keyed): about 94 percent within so-called racial groups, so 100 − 94 = 6 percent lies outside them.
  3. Side by side: 94 − 85 = 9 percentage points apart, because they come from different analyses. Both pass 50 percent, so both say most variation lies within groups.
  4. The form: on the illustrative tally, 6 × 1 + 2 × 2 = 10 checked boxes for 8 people, so a count of boxes runs 10 − 8 = 2 higher than a count of people.

Then sort two illustrative statements.

  • "The office that writes the form decides which boxes it shows." This is about race as a classification a society makes.
  • "My cousins and I keep our grandparents' holiday recipes and call ourselves by our family's home region." This is ethnic identity, how people claim and display a shared heritage.

Why it matters: the idea is settled while the number is not one number. A census box is a category with real effects, not a natural group.

Worked example — two rites, one routine (Week 13)

Read two rites from the illustrative set (Dataset E).

Two illustrative rites from the course's rites-of-passage set, each with its three phases
Rite Separation Transition (liminal) Incorporation
A graduation Graduates leave family seats, put on caps and gowns, and line up apart The procession and ceremony, waiting to be called: no longer students, not yet graduates Name read, diploma handed over, tassel turned; welcomed back by family as graduates
A recruit's basic training Recruits leave home, hand in civilian clothes, and get the same haircut Basic training, where recruits are equal, stripped of former status, and bonded The graduation parade; the recruit returns as a soldier with a rank
  • Liminality: in both middle phases, people have left the old status and not yet entered the new one.
  • Communitas: the recruits' bond in basic training is the intense bond of people who share the liminal state.
  • Not religious: neither rite names a spiritual being, and both are still rites of passage.

Now an illustrative pregame routine. Before every home game, a volleyball team forms a circle, goes silent, and then shouts together. It happens at the same point before each game and moves no one to a new status, so it reads as a calendrical ritual. If a player says the circle keeps a losing streak away, that reading treats it as magic, used where an outcome is uncertain.

Why it matters: first ask whether anyone changes status. If someone does, find the three phases. If no one does, ask what the routine marks or tries to bring about.

Worked example — a sprained ankle, read five ways (Week 14)

An illustrative hotel housekeeper sprains an ankle on a broken curb while walking from the last bus stop after a late shift. In an open-ended interview, the housekeeper says the curb has been broken for months and nobody repairs that street. The clinic note names a ligament strain.

  1. Disease: the ligament strain, as a biomedical practitioner defines it.
  2. Illness: the missed shifts, the worry about getting home, and what the injury means to the housekeeper.
  3. Explanatory model: the housekeeper's account of the cause is one of the five open questions. The interviewer can still ask, openly, about timing, what it does to the body, how serious it is, and what treatment it needs.
  4. Medical pluralism: if the housekeeper wraps the ankle with a family remedy and also follows the clinic's advice, that is more than one healing system at once.
  5. Structural violence: the question is which social arrangements put this worker on a broken street at that hour. The course asks the question and keys no cause.

Why it matters: each tool answers a different question. Disease and illness ask what is wrong and what it means. The explanatory model asks what the person thinks, and structural violence asks what arrangements put people in harm's way.

Worked example — a coffee route and a tally gap (Week 15)

  1. The route: an illustrative cup of coffee was grown on a farm in one region, shipped across an ocean, roasted in another country, and poured at a counter near you. In the world-system model, the growing region sits in the periphery and the roasting and selling region in the core, linked by unequal exchange. The model is a tool, not a verdict on any real place.
  2. Not reciprocity: unequal exchange is not reciprocity between equals, the Week 6 idea, because one side steadily gains more than it gives.
  3. Two kinds of gap. On the market's tally, market exchange was 66 percent and all reciprocity 26 percent. The gap is 66 − 26 = 40 percentage points, not "40 percent", because it is a difference between two percentages.
  4. Remittances: the two vendors' monthly transfers to relatives in another country are remittances, part of their transnational ties. They happen outside the coded visit, so the tally shows only the local part of the vendors' exchanges.
  5. Homogenization tested: at an illustrative wedding, the band plays a global pop hit on local instruments in a local rhythm. The global song was taken up and remade locally, which is what anthropologists find instead of homogenization.

Why it matters: the last week asks you to hold the small place and the world system in one reading, and to say every figure in words.

Worked example — early tools inside late weeks (Weeks 3, 4, 6, and 7)

  1. Reflexivity in the gender week: an older account of a foraging society records no women hunting. Reflexivity asks how the observer's own position, including gender, shaped what was recorded. That is why the debate keeps both sides at full strength.
  2. Emic and etic in the healing week: an illustrative office worker calls a pounding headache "the deadline drum". That is the emic term. "Explanatory model" and "illness" are the analyst's etic terms.
  3. Redistribution in the heritage week: an illustrative community center collects a small fee from every member family and pays for heritage-language classes open to every child. Goods collected at a center and given out again are redistribution.
  4. Stratification in the race week: in a stratified society, people have unequal access to basic resources. A census category made by a government office can shape who gets which resources, which is why "socially made" never means "without effects".

Why it matters: the final checks the early objectives inside the later weeks. Name the early tool, then say what it shows in the new setting.

Self-check questions

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

  1. An illustrative student lists her mother's sister's son. Write the kin-type string, and say whether he is a parallel or a cross cousin. Check: MZS, a parallel cousin. Why: he is a child of ego's mother's same-sex sibling.
  2. Under generational terminology, what would ego call a cross cousin? Check: brother or sister. Why: generational terminology calls everyone in ego's own generation brother or sister.
  3. Which phrase is wrong: "lineage members can name every step back to the ancestor" or "clan members can name every step back to the ancestor"? Check: the second. Why: a clan claims a common ancestor without every step known.
  4. An illustrative couple lives near the husband's mother's brother after their wedding. Name the residence rule. Check: avunculocal. Why: the couple lives near the husband's mother's brother.
  5. A classmate writes that polygamy means "one husband with several wives". What is missing? Check: polyandry. Why: polygamy covers both polygyny and polyandry.
  6. Is a team's rule that "whoever arrives first sets up the nets" a gendered division of labor? Check: no. Why: it assigns the task by arrival, not by gender.
  7. On the market's tally, market exchange was 66 percent and redistribution 8 percent. How far apart are they? Check: 66 − 8 = 58 percentage points. Why: a gap between two percentages is stated in percentage points, not percent.
  8. In the recruit's basic training, which phase is the training itself? Check: transition. Why: recruits have left civilian life and are not yet soldiers with a rank.
  9. Which is the clearer case of magic in Malinowski's account: open-sea fishing or lagoon fishing? Check: open-sea fishing. Why: magic was used where the outcome was uncertain and dangerous.
  10. A health worker writes down a sick person's own words for a pain. Is that emic or etic? Check: emic. Why: it records the insider's own words and meanings.
  11. A classmate says that the potlatch ban "might not have been harmful, depending on your view". What does the course say? Check: the ban and the 1921 seizures are documented facts. Why: colonialism's harms are stated plainly, not staged as a debate.
  12. Which global flow does the course say is remade locally rather than making cultures the same? Check: global goods and media. Why: globalization is not homogenization.

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

  • (a) Explain why the debate over how often women hunted in foraging societies is still a debate, giving each side's strongest case.
  • (b) Explain why calling bridewealth "buying a wife" misreads what the exchange does.

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

Watch before the exam

These ten videos come from the course's vetted Week 16 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 final.

  • Two weeks out: as you finish Week 14, start a one-page list of the second half's swapped pairs. Begin with consanguineal and affinal, matrilineal and matriarchal, lineage and clan, and descent and residence. Then add bridewealth and dowry, sex and gender, race and ethnicity, and magic and religion. Add disease and illness, then globalization and homogenization when Week 15 arrives.
  • One week out: as you finish Week 15, reread the Week 9 and Week 10 topic reviews and redo their worked examples. Those two weeks hold 14 of the final's 40 questions.
  • At the start of Week 16: take the practice exam once, cold and closed-note. Note which objectives cost you the most, and remember that it leans far more on Weeks 1–7 than the final 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. Then skim the Weeks 1–8 callback section once, so the early tools are fresh when they appear inside a later week.
  • Right before: skim the "predictable mistakes → cures" lines for Weeks 9 to 15. 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 40 questions counts the same, and the final 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 descent and residence, or disease and illness. Say which pair is in play first.
  • Read kin-type strings from ego outward. Write the string, say it in words, then apply the one rule the question names.
  • Ask the one-line test. Related to, or lives near? Who gives to whom? Biology, or the role a culture builds on it? A shared identity, or a classification? Does anyone change status? The body's malfunction, or the experience of being unwell?
  • 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 or a missing decade. An option may call a way of life earlier, simpler, or less advanced, or describe a people with no fieldwork decade. Then it has slipped away from the course's way of describing.
  • For a percent, name the two counts first. Write which count you are dividing by which on scratch paper. For a change between two percentages, subtract and say "percentage points".
  • For a true-or-false statement, test every part. One wrong word, such as "only" or "always", makes the whole statement false.

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