Q7

[laura.bach]

Explaining this to help myself better understand, please feel free to comment with corrections.

The breakdown of the two views in this passage is:

Weiner: By using video cameras, indigenous cultures are necessarily Westernized.
"[Weiner] believes video technologies inevitably purvey a Western ontology" (Lines 20-21) AKA Video camera ---> Westernized

Ginsburg: Not necessarily. It's possible to use video cameras and not be Westernized. In fact, indigenous cultures may even resist Westernization because of video cameras.
"Ginsburg maintains that non-Western indigenous peoples can use Western media without adopting the conventions of Western culture. In fact... that video affords societies...an invaluable opportunity to strengthen native... traditions threatened by Western exposure" (Lines 37 - 43)

With that understanding in mind, on to the question...
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In using the phrase "technological determinism" (line 35), the author refers to the idea that:

"Boilerplate technological determinism" is about as feisty as I've seen an LSAT get in terms of one viewpoint disagreeing with another. Here, Ginsburg is really not into Weiner's aforementioned viewpoint and is calling his viewpoint wrong and cliche. The idea she's referencing is Weiner's main point summarized above.

(A) - This is the answer I picked originally because "predestined" caught my eye. But Weiner thinks technology will influence a culture in a predetermined way, not that technology is exchanged in a predetermined way.
(B) - Technologies influence indigenous individuals (and their culture), not field anthropologists (and their views).
(C) - There is no support for this answer. A greater dependence may seem rational based on what we know of the world, but there's no support in the passage that "in general" there is a "greater" dependence. We only have evidence of one type of technology being introduced and used. We have no idea if this is a general trend. Even if the passage did allude to this, Weiner's argument doesn't have to do with technology and indigenous people in general, he's just railing against video cameras. The answer is unsupported and/or too broad.
(D) - This is the opposite of Weiner's argument. He thinks all indigenous people will react the same way to cameras -- by becoming Western! He doesn't think that their ethical values will be able to influence how the camera impacts their culture.
(E) - I didn't like this answer originally because of the word "fundamental". I felt like it should read "inevitable" or, even better, "predestined" (shout out to A), but this is the closest to paraphrasing Weiner's argument without being incorrect (another shout out to A): the technology a culture uses fundamentally shapes that culture. In other words: video cameras will fundamentally reshape indigenous cultures (to be more Western). This is the idea to which Ginsburg is referring.

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

Nice work laura.bach!