50 Fun Facts About Cultural Anthropology

Which US president's mother, Ann Dunham, was an anthropologist who studied village blacksmiths in Indonesia?

Barack Obama's mother wrote her dissertation on peasant blacksmithing, which a fellow anthropologist called a classic study of a 1,200-year-old industry.

Which author of the Earthsea novels was the daughter of California anthropologist Alfred Kroeber?

Ursula K. Le Guin kept the family name as her middle initial: the K stands for Kroeber. Her mother Theodora wrote Ishi in Two Worlds, about the last of the Yahi people.

Which object falls from a plane into a San community of the Kalahari in the comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy?

A Coca-Cola bottle is taken for a gift from the gods, but it causes so many quarrels that Xi walks to the edge of the world to throw it away.

Which classical star trained at Juilliard but took a Harvard degree in anthropology rather than music?

Yo-Yo Ma graduated in 1976 and later formed the Silk Road Ensemble, bringing together musicians from countries once linked by the old trade route.

Which British sport, brought by a missionary in 1903, did Trobriand Islanders remake with chanting and huge teams?

Cricket in the Trobriand Islands can have 40 or 50 players a side, and by custom the home team always wins.

Which stinging insects are woven into the gloves that Sateré-Mawé boys in Brazil wear during a warrior initiation?

Bullet ants have an extremely painful sting, and about 80 are woven into the gloves with stingers facing inward. A boy goes through the ordeal 20 times to complete the rite.

Which figures of Haitian folklore did ethnobotanist Wade Davis investigate in The Serpent and the Rainbow?

Zombies were made, Davis claimed, by dosing living people with poisons. Critics faulted his science, and the book inspired a 1988 horror film of the same name.

Which future US vice president's son Michael vanished in 1961 while collecting Asmat wood carvings in New Guinea?

Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York when the search began. No remains or proof of his son's death have ever been found.

Which Shakespeare tragedy did Laura Bohannan retell to Tiv villagers in Nigeria, only to have the plot corrected?

Hamlet came back to her as a different story, and her listeners were left puzzled that Westerners could not understand their own literature.

Which British royal studied archaeology and anthropology at Trinity College, Cambridge, before switching to history?

Charles III went on to become the first British heir apparent to earn a university degree, graduating from Cambridge in 1970.

Which future African president studied under Malinowski in London and wrote an ethnography of his own Kikuyu people?

Jomo Kenyatta turned his class essays into Facing Mount Kenya, which sold only 517 copies. A quarter of a century later he was leading the country it described.

Which country's president from 2014 to 2021, Ashraf Ghani, was a cultural anthropologist with a doctorate from Columbia?

Afghanistan's Ashraf Ghani taught anthropology at Johns Hopkins before entering politics; his government was overthrown by the Taliban in 2021.

In which Pacific nation do men of Pentecost Island dive from wooden towers with vines tied to their ankles?

Vanuatu's land divers inspired bungee jumping, and in 1995 the islanders said they would seek royalties from bungee operators for a tradition they saw as stolen.

Roughly how many stable relationships can one person keep up, by the famous number of anthropologist Robin Dunbar?

150 is the figure Dunbar proposed after comparing brain size with social group size in primates; his original calculation came out at 148.

Which North American religious community allows teenagers a freer spell called rumspringa before adult baptism?

Amish rumspringa normally begins at 16 and takes its name from the Pennsylvania German for running around.

Which island in the Bay of Bengal shelters a people in voluntary isolation behind a legal exclusion zone?

North Sentinel Island's residents have shot arrows at boats and even at low-flying helicopters, and the ban on approaching also shields them from diseases they have no immunity to.

Which spider trickster of Akan folklore crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Africans and lives on in Caribbean tales?

Anansi simply means spider in the Akan language, and Ghanaians call the whole storytelling tradition anansesem, or spider tales.

Which Native American movement led by the Paiute prophet Wovoka did anthropologist James Mooney study at first hand?

The Ghost Dance promised to reunite the living with the spirits of the dead and to end westward expansion. Mooney interviewed Wovoka himself.

Which Arctic people did Robert Flaherty film for Nanook of the North, a silent landmark of documentary cinema?

Inuit families of the 1920s already used rifles, but Flaherty encouraged his star to hunt as his ancestors had, an early case of staging in documentary film.

Which American entertainment hub did Hortense Powdermaker study like a village society in a 1950 ethnography?

Hollywood, the Dream Factory treated the film business as a society to be studied, much like the Melanesian village of Lesu where she had done fieldwork.

Which anthropologist's Patterns of Culture compared the Zuni, the Dobu and the Kwakiutl as distinct personalities?

Ruth Benedict borrowed the labels Apollonian and Dionysian from Nietzsche, though she had first-hand experience of only one of the three peoples, the Zuni.

Which anthropologist explained kosher food laws in Purity and Danger, then decades later called that reading a mistake?

Mary Douglas saw the forbidden animals as creatures that fit no tidy category, and her 1966 book on purity and pollution became a key text of social anthropology.

Which birds are fed poison in the benge oracle of the Azande, with survival or death giving the answer?

Chickens settle the question by living or dying, and only men may consult this most powerful of Azande oracles. E. E. Evans-Pritchard's study made the practice famous.

Which champion of cultural materialism became well known for a practical explanation of India's sacred cattle?

Marvin Harris named the approach in his 1968 history of anthropological theory, then went on to trace food customs around the world to their material roots.

Which phrase did Clifford Geertz borrow from philosopher Gilbert Ryle for ethnography that sets behaviour in context?

Thick description adds the context that a thin account of surface behaviour leaves out, and Geertz made it the name of his method in The Interpretation of Cultures.

Which approach did Claude Lévi-Strauss build on the linguistics of Saussure, reading cultures through binary opposites?

Structuralism holds that people think in pairs such as high and low or life and death, and that every culture can be understood in terms of these opposites.

Which commodity's history did Sidney Mintz write after fieldwork among plantation workers in Puerto Rico?

Sugar is the subject of Sweetness and Power, counted among the most influential books in both cultural anthropology and food studies.

Which anthropologist behind Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs took a leading role in the Occupy movement?

David Graeber did his own fieldwork in Madagascar, and Yale's decision not to renew his contract in 2005 caused a controversy.

Which UCLA anthropology student wrote The Teachings of Don Juan, about a Yaqui teacher now widely seen as invented?

Carlos Castaneda even earned his doctorate from UCLA, and the books became bestsellers that helped shape the New Age movement.

Which medical anthropologist and physician co-founded Partners In Health and is the hero of Mountains Beyond Mountains?

Paul Farmer kept returning to his work in Cange, Haiti, throughout medical school, while also earning a Harvard doctorate in medical anthropology.

Which railroad lawyer founded the comparative study of kinship with his 1871 work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity?

Lewis Henry Morgan carried out the first worldwide survey of kinship terms, and his work on social structure later influenced Marx and Engels.

Which marriage rule, typical of caste systems, keeps weddings inside a person's own social or religious group?

Endogamy helps a minority stay a distinct community for generations, while its opposite, exogamy, sends people outside the group to marry.

Which marriage custom, set out in the biblical book of Deuteronomy, has a man marry his dead brother's widow?

Levirate comes from the Latin levir, a husband's brother, and has nothing to do with Leviticus or the Levites.

Which form of plural marriage is most common in a belt of West and Central Africa led by Burkina Faso and Mali?

Polygyny joins the Greek words for many and for woman or wife, and it is more widespread in Africa than on any other continent.

Which animals are the chief gift in the moka exchanges around Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea?

Pigs given in moka must be outdone in return, since status comes from giving larger gifts than one has received.

Which Melanesian type of leader, common in Papua New Guinea, earns influence by persuasion rather than inheritance?

A big man holds no formal authority; he gives his followers protection and economic help, then uses their support to raise his own status.

Which subsistence strategy includes transhumance, the routine movement of herds between summer and winter grazing?

Pastoralism ranges from daily moves in search of fresh forage to full nomadism, in which whole families travel with their animals.

Which farming method, known to anthropologists as swidden, clears forest plots that then need years to recover?

Slash-and-burn leaves a nutrient-rich layer of ash that feeds the crops, but a plot can take from five to more than twenty years to recover.

Which peoples did Marshall Sahlins call the original affluent society, arguing that modest wants gave ample leisure?

Hunter-gatherers, Sahlins argued at the 1966 Man the Hunter symposium, could live affluently by desiring little and meeting those needs with ease.

Which residence pattern, the norm in most Western countries, has newlyweds set up a household apart from both families?

Neolocal residence is the basis of household life in most developed nations, and it is also found among some nomadic communities.

From which Native American language did English borrow 'totem', the word for a clan's emblem animal or spirit?

Ojibwe doodem refers to the clans of the Anishinaabe peoples, which are named mainly after animals.

From which language did English take 'amok', a furious frenzy long described as a culture-bound syndrome?

Malay amuk meant rushing in a frenzy; psychiatry's diagnostic manual has since dropped the whole category of culture-bound syndromes.

Which Polynesian word for a sacred, impersonal force later gave fantasy games the name for their magic points?

Mana entered fantasy through a 1969 Larry Niven short story, where it was the magical fuel needed to cast spells.

Which third-gender community, long seen dancing at weddings and births, did India's Supreme Court recognise in 2014?

Hijra are an officially recognised third gender across the subcontinent: Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh have made the same legal move.

Which word did anthropologist Edward T. Hall coin in 1963 for the study of how people use personal space?

Proxemics treats the use of space as an elaboration of culture, an idea Hall set out in his book The Hidden Dimension.

Which term names the learning of one's own culture, as opposed to acculturation, the learning of a different one?

Enculturation is shaped by parents, other adults and peers, whether or not they set out to teach anything.

Which English thinker coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' and stretched evolution to cover human societies?

Herbert Spencer coined the phrase in 1864 after reading Darwin, and his name became almost a synonym for Social Darwinism.

Which piece of furniture labels scholars like James Frazer, who wrote about distant peoples without doing fieldwork?

Armchair fits Frazer, who travelled little beyond Italy and Greece; his protégé Malinowski is remembered for taking anthropology off the verandah.

Which fatal disease spread among the Fore of Papua New Guinea through the funeral custom of eating dead relatives?

Kuru means trembling in the Fore language, and it was already declining by the mid-1960s because the funeral feasts had been banned.

Which Pacific islands' teenagers were at the centre of Derek Freeman's attack on Margaret Mead's most famous book?

Samoa had been Freeman's home as a young teacher, and his attack set off a controversy fiercer and more public than anthropology had ever seen.