Fall Quarter Mid-term Exam Questions
Perception - 2003-2004
The exam will consist of brief pieces of writing about three questions on our work in biology so far and one longer essay on a question that we will choose from the following list. Over the next few days you should get together several times with other students and prepare for the exam by discussing the possible questions below and the ideas we've covered in biology as thoroughly and carefully as you can.
The exam starts Thursday at 1 and ends at 3, in our regular seminar rooms. We'll hand out the actual questions then. Please bring a supply of lined paper (bluebooks are fine if you want to use them, but any lined paper will do.) Please bring a couple of ballpoint pens - not pencils Ð cross out anything you want to change, and write after it or above it. (Please write on every other line.) Don't bring notes or handouts or the books - just your thoughts and something to write them down on. (Please note that "compare" means talk about similarities, and "contrast" means talk about differences.)
Question 1.
In film, the artist/director can communicate through other means than spoken language, which tells us things through true or false statements. He or she can also communicate with us through our perceptions. What we hear and see plays a central role in communicating the meaning of films. Pick one theme that's shared by at least three of our films so far (like nature, or language, or education, or innocence, or power). Choose at least half a dozen examples of images and/or sounds (not talk) from the films - images and/or sounds that you think play a central role in communicating their meanings. Discuss these images and/or sounds as carefully as you can to show how they contribute to what each film suggests or implies or reveals about each director's views of the theme you've picked out. (To phrase the point another way, you should end up using at least two examples each from at least three films.)
Question 2.
Someone who studies perception recently remarked: "Paradoxically enough, at every level of human biology from cellular mechanisms to evolutionary adaptation, restricting and shutting down our perceptual processes is as vital to the organism's functioning as intensifying and sustaining them is." Discuss this claim, supporting and or criticizing it by drawing on our work so far for illustrations and evidence to support your position.
Question 3.
In various ways, many of the films and texts we've studied so far (including Burr's, Herzog's, Dillard's, Classen and her co-authors', Truffaut's and Piaget's) are concerned with the relations between language and our immediate perceptual experience of the world. Pick four out of these six and compare and contrast their accounts of that relationship.
Question 4.
Discuss the similarities and differences in the ways Dillard, Stoddard, Herzog and Descartes use animals to reflect on the experience and meaning of being human.
Question 5.
In his preface to An Anthropologist on Mars, Sacks says that in his cases "...there is neither 'loss' nor 'preservation' of identity ..., but, rather, its adaptation, even its transmutation, given a radically altered brain and 'reality' .... these then are tales of metamorphosis." (pp. xviii - xix) Compare and contrast Sacks' approach to and conclusions about this theme with those of Truffaut, Suskind, and Herzog.
Question 6.
In various ways, many of the films and texts we've studied so far (including Sacks's, Stoddard's, Tanner and Berger's, Suskind's, and Doillon's) are concerned with compensatory adaptation. Pick four out of these six and compare and contrast their accounts of that process, its costs and its value.