Influenced by Western individualism and they studied European women

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION
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• HIGHLIGHTS

• the phrase European women of the Renaissance is placed in different spots in each option. We should start looking for modifier problems: a descriptive noun phrase is too far from the noun it modifies

• past participles and present participles can describe the same thing.

• "Peculiar" does not mean strange in this sentence. It means particular or distinctive.

• The meaning of the sentence is fairly simple but may be hard to see: Influenced by two things, anthropologists define X as Y.

THE PROMPT



Major ideas
• Someone has been influenced by Western individualism and has also been studying (or is now studying) European women of the Renaissance
• the someone is "the anthropologist"
• the anthropologist defines a distinctive or particular kind of personhood as an innately bound unit.
-- innately bound unit? I understand the noun only vaguely. As long as these words don't change and I understand the function of the noun (it describes or refines "personhood"), though, my vague understanding of content is okay.

Some scholars define personhood in a distinctive way (as an innately bounded unit).

THE OPTIONS


• noun/pronoun disagreement: plural they should refer to plural anthropologists, not "the anthropologist"
-- even if we changed the noun to plural "anthropologists," we would still have error because "they" is a problem.

• they in the introductory modifier ruins the parallelism signaled by the word AND.

eakabuah , I liked "I was silently rooting for" this option.

The word and joins similar parts of speech.
"Influenced by Western individualism" is an adjective (and participial) phrase. It describes a noun: what sort of person is she? The sort who has been influenced by Western individualism.

-- they studied European women of the Renaissance is not a participle (verbED) and not an adjective, but rather a full sentence.
-- It has a subject, a verb, and an object.
-- Full sentences (also called independent clauses) must be paired with other full sentences.
-- Things joined by "AND" must be equals ... must be the same parts of speech.
-- an adjective describes just one part of a full sentence: a noun.
-- a full sentence, by contrast, expresses a whole thought and contains at least a subject (noun) and a verb.

-- So those two items cannot be joined by "and." Doing so ruins parallelism. They are not the same parts of speech. They are not equals.

-- if by "noun clause" you mean something that I am missing (as in substantive clause), let me know

• to maintain a parallelism that is easier to see, we could use two verbED phrases, this way: Influenced by Western individualism and educated about European women of the Renaissance, anthropologists ...
Eliminate A


• studying European women of the Renaissance is a misplaced modifier. It's just sort of "tacked" onto the end of the sentence.
-- It should modify anthropologists
-- It is in the form comma + ___ING and as such, most likely modifies the whole preceding clause.
-- Cause and effect are reversed and illogical: Studying European women of the Renaissance partially caused anthropologists to define a certain form of personhood in a certain way. The phrase should precede anthropologists.
-- defined to be is not idiomatic. Defined as is correct.



• Influenced by Western individualism could modify an anthropological concept such as personhood.
-- Careful: an ideology could influence scholarly categorization of an abstract construct.
True, that meaning is not the intended meaning.
But an ideology can influence a psychological construct.
That meaning is not possible in this case because we have "defined . . . by the anthropologist."
The anthropologist is the noun who is influenced by Western individualism. Fatal modifier error.

• Once again, studying European women of the Renaissance is tacked onto the end of the sentence and is not a meaningful modifier.
The logical relationships between the modifier, its target, and the sentence as a whole are unclear.

• "the" anthropologist is not standard. The word "the" indicates that we know about the noun in question. Either we have read about it already or we know that the noun is meant to be representative, such as "the killer whale." The standard rendition is anthropologists. "The" is not necessarily wrong, but in this sentence it is weird.

• comma + ING modifiers typically modify the preceding clause. Not always. Sometimes they modify the immediately preceding noun. See this official question, here.
-- comma + ING does not necessarily have to describe the result of the previous clause, either. See this official question, here.
• This comma + ING issue is not settled.
-- Ask this question about comma + ING modifiers: do they make sense with the clause that precedes them? Are they logically related in some way?
-- AND yes, on the GMAT, most of the time comma + ___ING modifies the previous clause and presents the result of the clause
Eliminate C


• Bingo. This sentence makes perfect sense. Two adjectives, influenced and studying, describe the noun anthropologists.

• Meaning? Anthropologists who have been influenced for decades by Western individualism and who are now studying European women of the Renaissance define personhood in a certain way.

The highlighted parts are the relative clauses that have been reduced in this sentence.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't worry about it.

mykrasovski , you wrote


ArtVandaley , you wrote:


On what basis do both of you make these assertions?
(And mykrasovski , I'm about to change your example. You've created a straw man, not an analog.)
I see no evidence.
I see no official questions. No allusion to or explanation of grammar you've been taught.

You are both wrong.

MGMAT, Sentence Correction Guide, 6th edition: "Though not common on the GMAT , you can also pair present and past participles." p.88

Or have a look at this question Spoiler. That question is official. I've just given away the answer.
In the official question, the thing that is modified by both past and present participles takes a verb in present tense.

Parallelism is grounded in logic. If logic requires different participles, grammar adapts.

This sentence, for example, is correct and not different from the one at issue:
Influenced by a long history of white supremacy and soaking up hateful rhetoric from an irresponsible leader, at least one-third of U.S. citizens define "American" as "white."
Perhaps more familiar concepts will make the logical parallelism easier to grasp.

We do not know whether or when that definition by that group will change. For now, the description is accurate and likely to hold true for some time.

mykrasovski , you wrote:

I agree. The meaning is weird. But you completely disconnected the main clause from the intro.
Your example is thus not analogous to the sentence in this question.

Let's try your example this way:
Scared by a big dog and crying on the way home, the boy does not yet know that he will be okay.
Even this amended example is not truly on point. We are talking about ideas.

There are many schools of anthropology.
Anthropologists, probably from the same school of thought, [present tense] define personhood in a certain way.

For a really long time, these anthropologists have been steeped in an ideology that causes them to think in certain ways about personhood.
They are now studying and/or have been studying European women of the Renaissance.
Something about that group of women is instructive.
This group of anthropologists [present tense] defines personhood in a certain way—just as at least 1/3 of U.S. citizens define "American" as "white." The only difference is that the anthropologists are not hateful, xenophobic, and ruthless.

The descriptors in option D make sense because they come from reduced relative clauses, which I highlighted in the "Meaning" bullet point.
You can search my posts for my explanations of reduced relative clauses.

Life does not happen all at the same time.
Correct: Fatigued by the abrasiveness of a couple of people and lacking reserves to fight the fatigue, she considers shutting down the project she runs.

[/quote]
• "defined to be" is unidiomatic.
• The sentence is written in passive voice. Between 15 and 40 percent of correct OAs are in passive voice.
-- In this case, the idiom error disqualifies an answer that seems attractive.
• Idiom aside, rhetorically, D is better. D conveys details about Big Abstract Ideas, not about the work of one person.
Eliminate E

The answer is D.

Notes

I have erased more paragraphs than I have written.
Discretion is often the better part of valor.
It's almost dawn where I am.

These next words do not apply to most of you.

My threads are partly about creating a community.
I do not tolerate toxic.
There's enough waste.

Don't ever mistake kindness for weakness.

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COMMENTS

gotoeurope and Same Good Kid (great usernames, both), welcome to SC Butler.

Most of these answers are good. More importantly, most are a very nice display of people who help to make a community of learning.
thinkvision , eakabuah , exc4libur , J2S2019 , TheNightKing , gvij2017 , zhanbo , and Ashokshiva I am tagging you to give you notice.

Kudos to all correct answers that explain.