2.1 Culture and Cultural Change (D2L Reading)

Question 1

Society

Answer 1

A group of people who live in a certain place and who share culture, or otherwise sharing mechanisms for establishing webs of significance

Question 2

Culture

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Socially constructed

Answer 3

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

Question 4

The tension between what two categories of schools of thought can help us understand culture?

Answer 4

1) Nature is responsible for how we act

2) Culture, by defining the rules of conduct, is responsible for the social world

Question 5

What are three groups of elements of culture?

Answer 5

1) Material elements
2) Immaterial elements
3) Cultural universals

Question 6

Material elements

Answer 6

Tangible aspects of culture

i.e. technology and natural resources

Question 7

Immaterial elements

Answer 7

Intangible aspects of culture

i.e. ideas, language, rules about social behaviour

Question 8

Cultural universals

Answer 8

Those elements shared by all cultures, such as beliefs and practices about birth, death, shelter and food

Question 9

Cultural diversity

Answer 9

A way to explain how different cultures meet people’s material and immaterial needs in different ways

Question 10

Why is culture a central concern to major theoretical positions?

Answer 10

Because of its implications for finding consensus and conflict

Question 11

Consensus

Answer 11

General agreement within a population

Question 12

What are five major theoretical positions is culture a central concern for?

Answer 12

1) Marxism
2) Functionalism
3) Symbolic interaction
4) Post-modernism
5) Queer studies

Question 13

Stigmatized

Answer 13

Discriminated against based on a negatively perceived personal attribute

Question 14

What evidence is there that humans have the power to deliberately change culture and thus change the world?

Answer 14

Emergence of subcultures

Question 15

Subcultures

Answer 15

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

Question 16

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)

Answer 16

Culture is no longer restricted to specific geographical locations

In other words, culture is both a local and trans-local force

Question 17

Defiant publics

Answer 17

Those people united by their political activism into cultures of dissent

Question 18

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?

Answer 18

It is uncertain whether this will produce a more just state of affairs

Question 19

How has culture traditionally been understood?

Answer 19

Culture has been understood as something that ties people to particular places

Question 20

Webs of significance

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

Semiotic

Answer 21

A perspective on how language is constructed to establish powerful meanings

Question 22

Biologically determined

Answer 22

The idea that our social acts are determined by biological needs such as reproduction

Question 23

Tinguian of Austronesia

Answer 23

A group of tribal people who do not kiss for any reason

Question 24

Eugenics

Answer 24

A moral position that advocated sterilization and murder of persons or entire “races” deemed genetically defective

Question 25

Feminism

Answer 25

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

Question 26

Queer theory

Answer 26

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

Question 27

Patriarchal

Answer 27

A term used to describe cultures where males are granted privilege

Question 28

Mechanical and organic solidarity

Answer 28

Durkheim’s terms for understanding how social integration occurs in simple and complex social groups

Question 29

Cultural evolution

Answer 29

The idea that cultures evolve to meet the biological requirements of human societies, a notion sometimes linked to social Darwinism

Question 30

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Answer 30

A theory that helps us to understand how gender values permeate the structure of language

Question 31

Values

Answer 31

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.

Question 32

Norms

Answer 32

Values that tend to be repeatedly expressed or practised such that they seem normal

Question 33

Work ethic

Answer 33

A Western value that places the need to work and reach economic solvency above other needs and values

Question 34

Ideal culture

Answer 34

The way a culture presents itself in its mores and norms or prescriptions for social action. It rarely achieves this status.

Question 35

Real culture

Answer 35

The way culture actually happens, despite what ideal culture would imply

Question 36

Mores

Answer 36

The legalized forms of norms

Question 37

Mass media

Answer 37

The technologies, practices and institutions through which information and entertainment are produced and disseminated on a mass scale

Question 38

Discourses

Answer 38

Powerful stories usually supported by dominant institutions and powerful people to force a vision of the world onto others

Question 39

Narrative inevitability

Answer 39

The idea that discourses impact social action by making people expect certain outcomes from certain situations

Question 40

Rites of passage

Answer 40

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

Question 41

Neo-liberalism

Answer 41

A form of liberal-democratic politics where the state decreasingly serves its social function and increasingly leans toward economic initiatives

Question 42

Base/superstructure

Answer 42

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

Question 43

Liminal

Answer 43

The transitional moments that people go through during rites of passage

Question 44

Base/superstructure

Answer 44

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

Question 45

Conflict theory

Answer 45

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.

Question 46

Mode of production

Answer 46

A Marxist term for how the economy works (eg agriculture vs industry)

Question 47

Ideology

Answer 47

A powerful system of knowledge supported by dominant institutions that rationalizes different perceptions about social justice and order

Question 48

Immanent transcendence

Answer 48

The misguided belief held by the Frankfurt School that society contained the potential and destiny to transcend capitalist exploitation

Question 49

Immanent transcendence

Answer 49

The misguided belief held by the Frankfurt School that society contained the potential and destiny to transcend capitalist exploitation

Question 50

Culture of dissent

Answer 50

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