Culture and Conditioning

Language/Gender/Class/Race

Key Concepts

• Identity Formation- A sense of self that an individual develops through socialization and where he/she develops a sense of difference from family and friends and takes a place in society.

• Identities are also formed through cultures and subcultures.

• Fragmented and fluid Identities• They/Why politics• Sources of identity- Nationality/ethnicity/ sexual

orientation/ gender/ class

• Identity construction therefore a process based on contradictions and dispositions.

• Modernity and Social Change• New social movements• Identity politics• Feminism • Globalization

Language

• Means and medium for the generation of the significance of meaning

• Meaning in central to explication of culture• To investigate culture one has to deconstruct

meaning and see how meaning is produced symbolically in an language as a signifying system

• Signifier and the signified are related to each other in some form or the other

• Criss crossing discourses through which objects and practices acquire significance

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