2.1 Culture and Cultural Change (D2L Reading) Flashcards
Society
A group of people who live in a certain place and who share culture, or otherwise sharing mechanisms for establishing webs of significance
Culture
1) A shared system of values and practices about how to live in society
2) The set of beliefs, values, and practices that help people establish their places and carry out their roles in webs of significance, or society
Socially constructed
1) The idea that most things we do with biological purposes, such as kissing or eating, are governed by rules, which are produced by culture
2) The idea that nothing is innate or natural and that all social truths are the result of humans acting towards ideas produced by culture
The tension between what two categories of schools of thought can help us understand culture?
1) Nature is responsible for how we act
2) Culture, by defining the rules of conduct, is responsible for the social world
What are three groups of elements of culture?
1) Material elements
2) Immaterial elements
3) Cultural universals
Material elements
Tangible aspects of culture
i.e. technology and natural resources
Immaterial elements
Intangible aspects of culture
i.e. ideas, language, rules about social behaviour
Cultural universals
Those elements shared by all cultures, such as beliefs and practices about birth, death, shelter and food
Cultural diversity
A way to explain how different cultures meet people’s material and immaterial needs in different ways
Why is culture a central concern to major theoretical positions?
Because of its implications for finding consensus and conflict
Consensus
General agreement within a population
What are five major theoretical positions is culture a central concern for?
1) Marxism
2) Functionalism
3) Symbolic interaction
4) Post-modernism
5) Queer studies
Stigmatized
Discriminated against based on a negatively perceived personal attribute
What evidence is there that humans have the power to deliberately change culture and thus change the world?
Emergence of subcultures
Subcultures
1) Smaller groups of people who do things differently than do most people in the dominant culture in which they live
i. e. hippies, fetishists and some religious sects
2) Groups of people who establish their own webs of significance and social practices that set them apart from the larger society in which they live
What important implication did the Web and globalization have on culture?
(Hint: There is a traditional sense that culture is specific to people in a certain place at a certain time in history)
Culture is no longer restricted to specific geographical locations
In other words, culture is both a local and trans-local force
Defiant publics
Those people united by their political activism into cultures of dissent
Does the interaction of people of different societies through defiant publics in important debates about social justice and the environment produce a more just state of affairs?
It is uncertain whether this will produce a more just state of affairs
How has culture traditionally been understood?
Culture has been understood as something that ties people to particular places
Webs of significance
A term for a way of looking at culture. These are our social and other ties with people who share a similar understanding of the world and who, therefore, do things similarly enough that together we form a culture.
Semiotic
A perspective on how language is constructed to establish powerful meanings
Biologically determined
The idea that our social acts are determined by biological needs such as reproduction
Tinguian of Austronesia
A group of tribal people who do not kiss for any reason
Eugenics
A moral position that advocated sterilization and murder of persons or entire “races” deemed genetically defective
Feminism
A theoretical paradigm, as well as a social movement, that focuses on causes and consequences of inequality between men and women, especially patriarchy and sexism
Queer theory
A number of approaches oriented toward social justice by abandoning traditional theories about normal identities in favour of inclusive and fluid categories of sexual, psychological, social and other experience
Patriarchal
A term used to describe cultures where males are granted privilege
Mechanical and organic solidarity
Durkheim’s terms for understanding how social integration occurs in simple and complex social groups
Cultural evolution
The idea that cultures evolve to meet the biological requirements of human societies, a notion sometimes linked to social Darwinism
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
A theory that helps us to understand how gender values permeate the structure of language
Values
Central beliefs that underlie the way people perceive justice or injustice in social situations. For example, freedom and autonomy are key values in North America.
Norms
Values that tend to be repeatedly expressed or practised such that they seem normal
Work ethic
A Western value that places the need to work and reach economic solvency above other needs and values
Ideal culture
The way a culture presents itself in its mores and norms or prescriptions for social action. It rarely achieves this status.
Real culture
The way culture actually happens, despite what ideal culture would imply
Mores
The legalized forms of norms
Mass media
The technologies, practices and institutions through which information and entertainment are produced and disseminated on a mass scale
Discourses
Powerful stories usually supported by dominant institutions and powerful people to force a vision of the world onto others
Narrative inevitability
The idea that discourses impact social action by making people expect certain outcomes from certain situations
Rites of passage
A term coined by Arnold Van Gennep in his 1908 study of culture and folklore to describe rituals performed when a person enters a more advanced status in a cultural group, such as graduating from college or getting married
Neo-liberalism
A form of liberal-democratic politics where the state decreasingly serves its social function and increasingly leans toward economic initiatives
Base/superstructure
In Marxist theory, the base is the relations of production such as workers and owners, and the superstructure includes culture, institutions and power structures that depend on that base
Liminal
The transitional moments that people go through during rites of passage
Base/superstructure
In Marxist theory, the base is the relations of production such as workers and owners, and the superstructure includes culture, institutions and power structures that depend on that base
Conflict theory
A theoretical paradigm linked to the work of Marx and Weber that emphasizes conflict and change as the regular and permanent features of society, because society is made up of various groups that wield varying amounts of power. Conflict theorists often stress the importance of status, economic inequality, and political power.
Mode of production
A Marxist term for how the economy works (eg agriculture vs industry)
Ideology
A powerful system of knowledge supported by dominant institutions that rationalizes different perceptions about social justice and order
Immanent transcendence
The misguided belief held by the Frankfurt School that society contained the potential and destiny to transcend capitalist exploitation
Immanent transcendence
The misguided belief held by the Frankfurt School that society contained the potential and destiny to transcend capitalist exploitation
Culture of dissent
A term used by Drache (2008) to explain how a global sense of disenfranchisement and political activism is uniting people into transnational, often Web-supported, cultures of activism
