All Things Anthropology Trivia Quiz

Answer: Franz Boas

Franz Boas was born in Minden, Germany in 1858 and died in New York in 1942. He was a prolific teacher and researcher and a mentor to famous anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Edward Sapir. In his work "The Mind of Primitive Man", he gave culture a new meaning. The importance of field work and his development of "Cultural Relativism" are two of his most important accomplishments.

Answer: Claude Lévi-Strauss

This French cultural anthropologist is the founder of "Structuralism", which applies structural linguistics to the field of anthropology and therefore working interdisciplinarily. He was born in Brussels in 1908 and died in Paris in 2009.

Answer: Ruth Benedict

Ruth Benedict was born in New York in 1887. She studied anthropology under Franz Boas, and one of her closest friends was Margaret Mead. She was a proponent of Cultural Relativism and an ardent advocate of field work. She wrote "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" during her work for the Office of War Information so it would help officials to plan a postwar policy in working with Japan.

She also wrote poetry under the pseudonym Anne Singleton. Ruth Benedict died in 1948.

Answer: The Death of Captain James Cook

The academic debate between Obeyesekere and Sahlins was about the death of James Cook, in 1779, and the reason why he was murdered by Hawaiian locals.

Sahlins stated that the murder was part of a ritual ceremony in which Cook represented the Hawaiian god Lono, so when he came to the island the first time he was revered, but when he returned he was murdered, because the return of Lono meant a cosmological crisis which could only be resolved by a ritual murder. Obeyesekere, a more postmodern thinker, stated that Sahlin's theory was another European myth and that the locals killed Cook because he had kidnapped one of their chiefs and had exploited the locals during his previous stay, so they killed him as means of protection.

It was a heated debate and they defended their theories with articles and books. Obeyeseker wrote "The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Myth-making in the Pacific" and Sahlins responded with his book "How Natives Think: About Captain Cook, For Example".

Answer: Coming of Age in Samoa

"Coming of Age in Samoa" was published in 1928 after extensive field work in Samoa and New Guinea. After observations and interviews of the local Samoan culture, especially the adolescents, she comes to the conclusion that culture plays an important role, even more so than biology, on the individual and on the society as a whole.

The work also had an impact on the sexual revolution in the 1960s, because the Samoan girls told Mead they could have sex with every men they chose, even before marriage, which was an eye-opening idea in 1928.

Answer: Laetoli Footprints Trail

The Laetoli Footprints in Tanzania were discovered by Mary Leakey in 1979. They were made by the Australopithecus Afarensis, and the trail consists of 70 footprints and is 27 meters long. The footprints are preserved thanks to a volcanic eruption in the region which cemented the prints into volcanic ash. The Laetoli Footprints give us a lot of information about the way in which early humanoids walked. It shows us that the early humans were bipedal and had feet more resembling human-like feet than ape-like feet.

Answer: Bronislaw Malinowski

Malinowski was born in Krakow, Poland in 1884 and moved around a lot during his life. He was a strong believer in field work and total immersion in the studied cultures. His work changed the field of anthropology because there came a shift from the armchair anthropologist to a participant observation. "Argonauts of the Western Pacific" was written after several years of studying the indigenous people on the Trobriand Islands, close to New-Guinea.

Answer: Marshall Sahlins

Marshall Sahlins was born in 1930 in Chicago, Illinois. His work "Stone Age Economics" puts an emphasis on the influence culture has on economics. He studied the economics of the hunter-gathering societies in his influential article "The Original Affluent Society". The teach-in is a form of nonviolent protest and became popular during the anti-Vietnam War protests.

Answer: Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss was born in 1872 and died in Paris in 1950. His works, especially on gift giving and the forms of exchange, are still influential in the field of anthropology. He was the nephew of the famous French sociologist Emile Durkheim. He was a great proponent of social ethnology, in which social structures and cultures are compared with each other.

His most influential work is "The Gift", in which he explored the practice of gift giving and receiving in all its aspects.

Answer: Clifford Geertz

Clifford Geertz was a proponent of symbolic and interpretative anthropology. He studied cultures by examining the symbols those society uses. A famous quote he made was: "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun". This quote is from his most famous work, "The Interpretation of Cultures". Also in this work he explained his theory of deep play, and exemplified it with his research and field work he did surrounding the common practice of cockfighting in the Balinese.