IB Social and Cultural Anthropology practice questions.

Writing about his Trobriand fieldwork of the 1910s, Malinowski noted that elaborate magical rites accompanied fishing expeditions into the open sea beyond the reef, while fishing inside the sheltered lagoon was carried out with almost none. He took the contrast as evidence that

• magic survived only among those Trobrianders who had not yet learned reliable fishing techniques
• the lagoon was held to be a place where spirits were unwilling to intervene on behalf of the living
• magic and technical skill were rival explanations, and technical skill was steadily displacing magic
• magic clustered where technique alone could not secure the outcome

Answer: magic clustered where technique alone could not secure the outcome

The argument is about the distribution of magic, not about ignorance: the lagoon was predictable, the open sea was not, and the rites were concentrated where the risk lay. Reading magic as failed technology inverts Malinowski's point, since the same men fished expertly in both places.

Evans-Pritchard reported that his Nuer hosts in the southern Sudan in the 1930s placed past events by reference to the movement of herds between camps and to the succession of age-sets, rather than by counting years from a fixed point. He took this to show that

• the people he worked with had no way of measuring an interval longer than a single season
• time was reckoned through social and ecological relations rather than on an abstract scale
• recollection of the past was unreliable, since no written record of events was kept
• seasonal movement had made a shared calendar unnecessary for settling debts

Answer: time was reckoned through social and ecological relations rather than on an abstract scale

He distinguished ecological time, marked by the seasons and the herds, from structural time, marked by distance between groups in the lineage system; both are ways of classifying duration and neither is a defective calendar.

For three visits to a school kitchen a student is answered in short, polite sentences, and the cooks stop talking among themselves whenever she comes in. On the fourth visit she arrives early and helps carry the crates in from the yard; the same cooks then begin explaining, unprompted, why the trays are laid out as they are. What does the change most directly show?

• That covert observation yields fuller material than research announced to those present ever can.
• That the trust which makes candid talk possible is built through what the fieldworker does there.
• That a fieldworker who joins in the work of a setting has stopped observing and begun to belong to it.
• That the first three visits produced nothing usable and should be left out of the observation report.

Answer: That the trust which makes candid talk possible is built through what the fieldworker does there.

Rapport is an achievement of the fieldwork rather than a condition of it: it is won by taking part and it can be lost again. Geertz's much-cited instance is the police raid on a Balinese cockfight in April 1958, some ten days after he and his wife arrived, when running alongside their hosts did what ten days of polite presence had not.

Evans-Pritchard recorded that when a Nuer man was killed by a member of a nearby lineage in the southern Sudan of the 1930s, kin on both sides were drawn in along lines of descent, and that a settlement in cattle was eventually mediated by the leopard-skin priest. A structural-functionalist reading explains the feud as

• a relation of opposition and alliance through which the balance between lineage segments is restored
• a means by which individual men meet their own needs for security and standing
• an expression of unconscious contrasts, such as the wild and the domestic, that order Nuer thinking about persons
• a direct consequence of the colonial administration's demand that cattle be counted and grazing rights registered

Answer: a relation of opposition and alliance through which the balance between lineage segments is restored

Structural functionalism explains an institution by what it contributes to the continuation of the social structure, so feud appears as a regulated relation between segments rather than as a breakdown of order. Deriving it instead from the needs of the individuals taking part would be Malinowski's kind of functionalism, not Radcliffe-Brown's.

In Paper 1 the first question is worth four marks and asks candidates to describe a named concept and apply it to the passage. A candidate writes a full and accurate description of the concept but never mentions the passage. The most likely outcome is that the answer

• receives the description marks and loses the marks for application
• receives full marks, since an accurate description demonstrates the required knowledge
• receives nothing, because this question can only be answered out of the passage itself
• is credited under question 2 instead, as it treats a concept without using the stimulus

Answer: receives the description marks and loses the marks for application

Four-mark questions of this kind carry roughly two marks for the concept and two for its accurate use on the material in front of the candidate. Half the marks are lost by the commonest habit of all, writing the definition and stopping.