The language of anthropology: anthropological terms and inquiry-specific concepts practice questions.

In a garment factory the pace of work is set by the machines and the length of the shift by the employer. The sewers slow the line by taking every allotted break in full and by teaching new workers to do the same. An anthropologist would describe their conduct as an illustration of

• structure operating without agency, since the terms of employment had already settled what would happen on the shop floor
• agency exercised within constraints that the workers did not set and cannot easily escape
• agency understood as conduct owing nothing to social or economic circumstance whatever
• a role without a status, because the sewers occupy no recognised position in the enterprise that employs them

Answer: agency exercised within constraints that the workers did not set and cannot easily escape

Agency is the capacity to act and to give action meaning; it does not require freedom from constraint, which is why it is analysed alongside structure rather than against it. Reading agency as unconstrained choice empties the term of its analytical use.

In a city that has drawn labour migrants from several regions, people give their region of origin when applying for a room through a home-district association, and describe themselves simply as townspeople when dealing with the municipal office. For anthropologists the pattern shows that ethnicity is best understood as

• an inherited biological difference that becomes visible only once people have moved away from their region of origin
• an attachment that people give up once they have settled in a city
• another name for social class, since both are settled by employment
• a boundary claimed in relation to others, invoked on some occasions and set aside on others

Answer: a boundary claimed in relation to others, invoked on some occasions and set aside on others

Ethnicity is relational and situational: what matters is the boundary that is maintained and the occasions on which it is invoked, not a fixed cultural content carried about by each group. Treating it as inherited biology confuses it with the discredited idea of race as a natural division.

A museum gallery of the 1930s displayed masks from three continents together in one room labelled 'timeless traditions', while the rooms given to Europe were arranged by century and by named artist. An anthropologist analysing the display would treat it as an example of

• a self constructed by contrast with an other that is placed outside history and outside individual authorship
• cultural relativism applied to objects that had been collected during fieldwork in three different continents
• the comparative method, which sets cases beside one another in order to establish what varies between them
• an emic account, since the labels reproduce the terms in which the makers of the masks classified their own work

Answer: a self constructed by contrast with an other that is placed outside history and outside individual authorship

Self and other name a relation rather than two groups: the categories used for 'them' are what allow 'us' to appear historical, individual and ordinary. The display is evidence about the classifiers, not about the people who made the masks.

An ethnographer is told that a newborn is 'not yet with us' and receives no name until a rite held some weeks after birth, and hears an elderly man who has become forgetful spoken of as having 'gone ahead' although he is alive and cared for. The concept these usages illustrate is

• status, understood as the position an individual holds in a household
• identity, understood as the account a person gives of themselves
• personhood, which is conferred socially and may be qualified or withdrawn in the course of a life
• agency, understood as the capacity of an individual to act upon the circumstances in which they find themselves

Answer: personhood, which is conferred socially and may be qualified or withdrawn in the course of a life

Personhood is conferred and can be qualified or withdrawn, so it does not map onto the biological individual or onto the span between birth and death. It is distinct from identity, which concerns how a recognised person is categorised and categorises themselves.

A report on a mining region explains a community's reluctance to accept resettlement by referring to 'their traditional attachment to the land, which is part of who they are as a people'. No differences of opinion within the community are recorded and no history of previous removals is given. The anthropological term for the fault in this account is

• reflexivity, since the writer has failed to describe the effect of their own presence on the community
• essentialism, since a single fixed inner character is attributed to everyone in the community
• holism, since the writer has related the refusal to the wider arrangements of the region
• relativism, since the writer has declined to judge the community by any standard external to it

Answer: essentialism, since a single fixed inner character is attributed to everyone in the community

The account attributes conduct to an unchanging collective essence, which removes the disagreement, the history and the calculation that would explain it. Note that the same sentence could be rewritten anthropologically by asking who in the community holds which position and what previous removals taught them.

Many recent ethnographies use the word 'interlocutor' where an older monograph would have written 'informant'. The change of word is generally understood to mark

• a claim that the people concerned are now paid for their time, as research assistants would be
• a preference for shorter fieldwork, since interlocutors are consulted rather than lived among
• the fact that the older term is no longer understood by readers outside the discipline
• a reframing of the relationship as conversation between parties rather than the supply of information to an enquirer

Answer: a reframing of the relationship as conversation between parties rather than the supply of information to an enquirer

The older term carries the sense of someone reporting on their own community to an outside authority, a usage the colonial and policing associations of the word made hard to shake. The newer one asserts that the analysis was produced in exchange, which is a claim that the ethnography then has to make good.