ANT 153/353
Exam 2 Study Guide
Course materials you are responsible for: readings, lectures, films, discussions

  1. What is the belief that the body is inhabited by two spirits?
  2. What is the belief that impersonal forces or energies pervade everything?
  3. What are the principal characteristics of ritual in African religions?
  4. What distinguishes African religions from Christianity and Islam?
  5. What is the hierarchy of the supernatural in African indigenous religions?
  6. What is the name of the Maasai supreme being?
  7. What is the Maasai benevolent god?
  8. What is the Maasai malevolent god?
  9. What is the name of the Mande supreme being?
  10. What is the name of the Mande male deity?
  11. What is the name of the Mande female deity?
  12. What is the Mande name of the energy that pervades everything?
  13. How is it different from the Mande deities?
  14. What are the elements of ritual in indigenous African religions?
  15. What are the stages of the life cycle in African belief systems?
  16. Which one is obligatory in order to reach ancestorhood?
  17. What are the stages of a rite of passage?
  18. What are the principal foreign religions practiced in Africa?
  19. What is the Maasai’s principal adaptive strategy (how they get their food)?
  20. What is the role of genital cutting among the Maasai?
  21. What do Maasai men own? What do Maasai women own?
  22. Why are Maasai boys and girls completely shaved before they undergo initiation?
  23. What marks a Maasai’s progression through the stages of life?
  24. What is the female life stage that occurs at the same age period as warrior hood among the Maasai?
  25. What are age grades?
  26. From the film Two Ways of Justice: What is the Maasai way of punishing crime?
  27. From the film Two Ways of Justice: What is the official Kenyan government’s way of punishing crime?
  28. From the text: what were the state level societies in the Western Sudan and the Southern Savanna?
  29. What commerce did the Portuguese conduct at the castle of Elmina (present-day Ghana)?
  30. Who were the first Europeans to establish trading centers along the African coast?
  31. Where in Africa was slavery practiced prior to European contact?
  32. What parts of the world outside of Africa used African slaves prior to the trade to the New World?
  33. To what part of the New World were most of the slaves taken during the entire period of the Atlantic Slave Trade?
  34. What parts of Africa served as the major points of embarkation for the slave trade to the New World?
  35. Who sold slaves to the Europeans?
  36. What were the principal differences between slavery in Africa and slavery in the new world?
  37. Why is Swahili an unlikely candidate for an ancestral language of today’s African Americans?
  38. Name the African states that developed because of their participation in the slave trade.
  39. How many people left Africa for the New World as slaves between 1650-1900?
  40. How many people left Africa for the Middle East as slaves between 1500-1900?
  41. When was slavery abolished in the U.S.?
  42. What was the latest country in the world to officially criminalize slavery? In what year?
  43. What were the effects of the slave trade on the development of African commerce?
  44. From the Hodgson article about Koko, what cultural changes had she witnessed in her lifetime?
  45. What is a syncretic religion?
  46. Islam came to Africa in what century?
  47. What were Islamic influences on African cultures?
  48. What are the characteristics of African independent churches?
  49. What is the gerontocratic principle?
  50. What are Maasai concepts of rights in persons?
  51. What body modifications are part of the Maasai genderization process?
  52. What are cultural reasons for M/FGC in Africa?
  53. How does Maasai male circumcision differ from Western male circumcision?
  54. In what ways do Maasai children give “informed consent” for genital cutting?
  55. What benefits accrue to Maasai men and women for undergoing genital cutting?