Chapter 3

Culture

What is culture?

• Beliefs, values, behavior and material objects

Nonmaterial culture

• The intangible creations of human society• refers to the nonphysical ideas that people

have about their culture, including beliefs, values, rules, norms, morals, language, organizations, and institutions.

Material Culture

• The tangible products of a society• These include homes, neighborhoods, cities,

schools, churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, offices, factories and plants, tools, means of production, goods and products, stores, and so forth.

What is meant by the author that no way of life is natural to humanity?

• Only humans depend on culture rather than instincts to ensure survival

Briefly recount the evolutionary background of human beings

• 4.5 million years old• 250,000 years ago Homo sapiens• Birth of civilization 12,000 years ago• Cultural diversity

Differentiate between these terms

• Culture refers to a shared way of life• Nation is a political entity that is a territory

with a designated borders such as the United States

• Society is the organized interaction of people in a nation or within some other boundry

Symbols

• Anything that carries a particular meaning recognized by people who share culture

• A word, a whistle, a wall of graffiti, a flashing red light, a raised fist.

Language

• A system of symbols that allows people to communicate with one another

• Cultural transmission the process by which one generation passes culture to the next

• Saphir-Whorf thesis states that people perceive the world through the cultural lens of language

Values and Beliefs

• Values are culturally defined standards by which people judge desirability, goodness, and beauty

• Beliefs are specific statements that people hold to be true

• Equal opportunity woman could be president

Norms

• Rules and expectations by which a society guides the behavior of its members

• Proscriptive should not do avoid casual sex• Prescriptive what we should do teach safe sex• Mores norms that are widely observed and

have great moral significance adult and children• Folkways norms for routine or casual interaction

greetings and dress

Social Control

• Attempts by society to regulate people’s thoughts and behaviors

Values of U.S. Culture

• A. Equal opportunity• B. Achievement and Success• C. Material Comfort• D. Activity and Work• E. Practicality and efficiency• F. Progress• G. Science• H. Democracy and free enterprise• I. Freedom• J. Racism and group superiority

Values in Conflict

Counterculture

• Cultural patterns that strongly oppose those widely accepted within society

Counterculture

• Countercultures, such as the infamous hippie counterculture movement of the 1960s, are formed and exist to oppose the dominant culture. Members of a counterculture come together around their desire to reject movements within the larger, dominant culture. While members have this opposition in common, they may not share religious or political affiliations, similar socioeconomic situations, or values.

Subculture

• Cultural patterns that distinguish some segment of society’s population

• They involve not only difference but also hierarchy

Subculture

• Subcultures are distinctive segments of the larger culture of a region or society that are marked by shared interests in music or cultural phenomena, membership in a specific ethnic or religious group, or shared socioeconomic status. While some subcultures exist in contradistinction to the society's dominant culture, others exist harmoniously within it. For example, Jews and Tea Party members are both examples of subcultures in the U.S. While the Jewish subculture is based around shared religious values, the Tea Party movement was primarily founded around a dissatisfaction with the political status quo.

Multiculturalism

• An educational program recognizing the cultural diversity of the United States and promoting the equality of all cultural traditions

Cultural Lag

• The fact that cultural elements change at different rates, which may disrupt a cultural system

Ethnocentrism

• The practice of judging another culture by the standards of one’s own culture

Cultural Relativism

• The practice of judging a culture by its own standards

Three reasons for global culture

• Global Economy-the flow of goods• Global communication-the flow of information• Global migration-the flow of people

Structural Functionalism

• Depicts culture as a complex strategy for meeting human needs

• Cultural Universals are traits that are found in every known human culture

• Critical Evaluation• A. The strength of the structural functional analysis is

showing how culture operates to meet human needs• B. The weakness of this paradigm is that it ignores

cultural diversity and downplays the importance of change

Social Conflict

• Rooted in the philosophical doctrine of materialism and suggests that many cultural traits function to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others

• Critical Evaluation• A. Recognizes that many elements of a culture

maintain inequality and promote the dominance of one group over others

• B. It understates the ways that cultural patterns integrate members of society

Sociobiology

• A theoretical paradigm that explores ways in which human biology affects how we create culture. Sociobiology has its roots in the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin

• Critical Evaluation• A. May promote racism and sexism• B. Research support for this paradigm is

limited

Culture as constraint

• Humans cannot live without culture, but the capacity for culture does have some drawbacks

Culture as freedom

• Culture forces us to choose as we make and remake a world for ourselves