Department of Anthropology
Junior Qualifying Exam

Instructions
This examination is open-book, open-notes. Do not discuss the exam questions or your work on them with anyone else. Your hardcopy exam is due in ______ office by 10 am on Monday, April 7. Your pseudonym should appear at the top of every page of your exam.

Answer the following three questions. Your answer to each question should be no longer than two pages in length, in standard format. Standard format is double-spaced text in any 12 point font with 1.25" side margins and 1" top and bottom margins. Any essay that does not meet these length and formatting requirements or is not carefully proofread will not be read by the examiners. Please make your essays concise, clear, and substantive. Whenever possible, tack closely back and forth between empirical facts and abstract categories. There is no time-limit on your work on particular essays. Include a list of references cited at the end of your exam. This bibliography and your in-text citations (AUTHOR YEAR: PAGE) must be in the style of American Ethnologist journal articles.

1) Mazzarella's article is about a mass-media and mass-consumption phenomenon. What special theoretical or model-building categories, and special methodological or fieldwork practices, does Mazzarella employ to arrive at an anthropological approach to this phenomenon? Answering this question, identify specific continuities and differences between the categories and methods of Mazzarella, on the one hand, and the categories and methods of any other anthropologist's analysis of a non-mass-mediated, non-mass-consumption phenomenon, on the other hand. Finally, if you were going to do fieldwork on Mazzarella�s object of study, what would you do that he has not done, and why would you do it?

2) On page 45, Mazzarella characterizes himself as "exploring the possibility of understanding the production of advertising as a kind of cultural production." Drawing on Mazzarella's ethnographic analysis of the "brand" EMW and the marketing of the product RightAway for empirical and methodological exemplification, explain what Mazzarella means by "cultural production" and to what other model(s) of "culture" he contrasts this category. Does Mazzarella's notion of "cultural production" differ foundationally from the notion of "culture" as articulated by any Boasian anthropologist or any anthropologist of broadly "structuralist," "symbolic" of "interpretive" anthropological affiliation? In your answer, explicitly define "culture," and explicitly exemplify both "culture" and "cultural production" using empirical materials from Mazzarella's account of Bombay advertising.

3) Present an anthropological analysis of a print (magazine, newspaper, etc.) advertisement of your choosing. Append and 8.5" x 11" photocopy of the ad to your exam. In your analysis, cite and make interpretive use of ideas or categories from Mazzarella and four other anthropological readings (or readings from sociocultural theory generally). If you cite mostly readings that you have encountered in course syllabi, then make sure they are readings from at least three different courses.