Cultural Anthropology
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50 free Cultural Anthropology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cultural anthropology studies how people everywhere organise their lives: whom they marry, what they owe their relatives, how they feed themselves, and what they hold sacred. Its method is simple to state and hard to do: go, stay a long time, and pay attention. This quiz covers the ground of an introductory course. Expect the ethnographies and thinkers every student meets, the vocabulary of kinship, marriage, exchange and subsistence, rites of initiation, and arguments that shook the field. It also follows the subject out of the classroom, to a film set, a concert hall, a royal household and a presidential family. It suits students revising before an exam, quiz hosts building a social science round, and anyone curious about why customs that look strange from outside make sense from within. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which US president's mother, Ann Dunham, was an anthropologist who studied village blacksmiths in Indonesia?
Barack Obama
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.
Q 02Which author of the Earthsea novels was the daughter of California anthropologist Alfred Kroeber?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Q 03Which object falls from a plane into a San community of the Kalahari in the comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy?
A Coca-Cola bottle
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.
Q 04Which classical star trained at Juilliard but took a Harvard degree in anthropology rather than music?
Yo-Yo Ma
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.
Q 05Which British sport, brought by a missionary in 1903, did Trobriand Islanders remake with chanting and huge teams?
Cricket
Cricket in the Trobriand Islands can have 40 or 50 players a side, and by custom the home team always wins.
Q 06Which stinging insects are woven into the gloves that Sateré-Mawé boys in Brazil wear during a warrior initiation?
Bullet ants
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.
Q 07Which figures of Haitian folklore did ethnobotanist Wade Davis investigate in The Serpent and the Rainbow?
Zombies
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.
Q 08Which future US vice president's son Michael vanished in 1961 while collecting Asmat wood carvings in New Guinea?
Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York when the search began. No remains or proof of his son's death have ever been found.
Q 09Which Shakespeare tragedy did Laura Bohannan retell to Tiv villagers in Nigeria, only to have the plot corrected?
Hamlet
Hamlet came back to her as a different story, and her listeners were left puzzled that Westerners could not understand their own literature.
Q 10Which British royal studied archaeology and anthropology at Trinity College, Cambridge, before switching to history?
Charles III
Charles III went on to become the first British heir apparent to earn a university degree, graduating from Cambridge in 1970.
Q 11Which future African president studied under Malinowski in London and wrote an ethnography of his own Kikuyu people?
Jomo Kenyatta
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.
Q 12Which country's president from 2014 to 2021, Ashraf Ghani, was a cultural anthropologist with a doctorate from Columbia?
Afghanistan
Afghanistan's Ashraf Ghani taught anthropology at Johns Hopkins before entering politics; his government was overthrown by the Taliban in 2021.
Q 13In which Pacific nation do men of Pentecost Island dive from wooden towers with vines tied to their ankles?
Vanuatu
Q 21Which anthropologist's Patterns of Culture compared the Zuni, the Dobu and the Kwakiutl as distinct personalities?
Ruth Benedict
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.
Q 22Which anthropologist explained kosher food laws in Purity and Danger, then decades later called that reading a mistake?
Mary Douglas
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.
Q 23Which birds are fed poison in the benge oracle of the Azande, with survival or death giving the answer?
Chickens
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.
Q 14Roughly how many stable relationships can one person keep up, by the famous number of anthropologist Robin Dunbar?
150
150 is the figure Dunbar proposed after comparing brain size with social group size in primates; his original calculation came out at 148.
Q 15Which North American religious community allows teenagers a freer spell called rumspringa before adult baptism?
Amish
Amish rumspringa normally begins at 16 and takes its name from the Pennsylvania German for running around.
Q 16Which island in the Bay of Bengal shelters a people in voluntary isolation behind a legal exclusion zone?
North Sentinel
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.
Q 17Which spider trickster of Akan folklore crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Africans and lives on in Caribbean tales?
Anansi
Anansi simply means spider in the Akan language, and Ghanaians call the whole storytelling tradition anansesem, or spider tales.
Q 18Which Native American movement led by the Paiute prophet Wovoka did anthropologist James Mooney study at first hand?
Ghost Dance
The Ghost Dance promised to reunite the living with the spirits of the dead and to end westward expansion. Mooney interviewed Wovoka himself.
Q 19Which Arctic people did Robert Flaherty film for Nanook of the North, a silent landmark of documentary cinema?
Inuit
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.
Q 20Which American entertainment hub did Hortense Powdermaker study like a village society in a 1950 ethnography?
Hollywood
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.
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.
Q 24Which champion of cultural materialism became well known for a practical explanation of India's sacred cattle?
Marvin Harris
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.
Q 25Which phrase did Clifford Geertz borrow from philosopher Gilbert Ryle for ethnography that sets behaviour in context?
Thick description
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.
Q 26Which approach did Claude Lévi-Strauss build on the linguistics of Saussure, reading cultures through binary opposites?
Structuralism
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.
Q 27Which commodity's history did Sidney Mintz write after fieldwork among plantation workers in Puerto Rico?
Sugar
Sugar is the subject of Sweetness and Power, counted among the most influential books in both cultural anthropology and food studies.
Q 28Which anthropologist behind Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs took a leading role in the Occupy movement?
David Graeber
David Graeber did his own fieldwork in Madagascar, and Yale's decision not to renew his contract in 2005 caused a controversy.
Q 29Which UCLA anthropology student wrote The Teachings of Don Juan, about a Yaqui teacher now widely seen as invented?
Carlos Castaneda
Carlos Castaneda even earned his doctorate from UCLA, and the books became bestsellers that helped shape the New Age movement.
Q 30Which medical anthropologist and physician co-founded Partners In Health and is the hero of Mountains Beyond Mountains?
Paul Farmer
Paul Farmer kept returning to his work in Cange, Haiti, throughout medical school, while also earning a Harvard doctorate in medical anthropology.