Chapter 3 Flashcards
Culture
System of behaviours, beliefs, knowledges, practices, values, concrete materials, including buildings, tools and sacred items
Dominant Culture
Culture that, through its political and economic power, is able to impose its values, language, and ways of behaving and interpreting behaviour
Dominants
People who are closely linked with the cultural mainstream
Canadian dominants
White, English-speaking, heterosexual, male uni graduate of euro background b/w ages 30-55, in good health, who own homes in middle-class neighbourhoods of cities in Ontario of Quebec
Minority cultures
Those that fall outside of the cultural mainstream
Two subcategories that fall under minority cultures
Countercultures
Subcultures
Counterculture
Are minority cultures that feel the power of the dominant culture and exist is opposition to it
Hippies, bikers
Subcultures
Minority culture that differ in some way to dominant but don’t directly oppose it
Groups organized around occupations or hobbies
High culture
Culture of elite, a distinct minority. Associated with the arts
Cultural capital
High culture requires cultural capital which is the set of skills and knowledge needed to acquire the sophisticated tastes that mark someones as a person of a high culture
Popular Culture
Culture of the majority, especially those who do not have power (working class, less educated, woman, racialized minorities)
Mass culture
Refers to people who have little to no agency in the culture they consume (big company dictate what ppl buy, watch, value or believe )
Crucial distinction between popular culture and mass culture
Differ in terms of agency
Agency
Ability of the people to be creative or productive with materials given to them by a dominant culture
Simulacra
Stereotypical cultural images produce and reproduced like material goods or commodities by the media and sometimes by scholars
Inuit represented through igloos, kayaks etc
Hyper real
Decipherment
Looking in a text for the definitive interpretation for the purpose the culture industry has in mind for creating the text
Reading
Process in which people treat what is provided by the culture industry as a resource, a text to be interpreted as they see fit, in ways not necessarily intended by the creators of the text,
Norms
Standards of society
Sanctions
Rewards or punishments in response to a particular behaviour
Positive sanctions
Rewards for doing the right thing
Negative sanction
Reactions designed to tell offenders they have violated a norm
Folkways
Norms that govern day-to-day matters. Norms we should not violate and they are weakly sanctions
Mores
Are more serious than folkways. Often formalized norms we must not violate and violations are met with serious sanctions. More complicated and may be contested
Taboos
Norms deeply ingrained in our social consciousness that the mere though or mention of it is enough to arouse disgust or revulsion
Incest, child porn
Symbols
Cultural items that hold significance for a culture or subculture
Material
Non-material
Change over time
Values
Standard used by a culture to describe abstract qualities such
Ideal culture
What people believe
Actual culture
What really exists
Ethnocentrism
Someone holds up one culture- usually their own- as being the standard by which all cultures are to be judged
Eurocentrism
Involves addressing others from a broadly defined European position to address others and assuming the audience is or would like to be part of the position
Cultural globalization
Intensification and expansion of cultural flows across the globe
Cultural Relativism
An approach to studying and understanding an aspect of another culture within its proper social, historical, and environmental context
Cultural relativism vs presentism
CR- ability to judge figures of the past within their own time and not by today’s standards
P- inability to judge figures of the past within their own time, instead use today’s standards
Sociolinguistics
Study of language as a part of culture
Dialect
Language that differs from others in terms of pronoun citation, vocabulary and grammar
Sapir-whorf hypothesis
Describes the relationship between language and culture
Linguistic determinism
The way we view and understand the world is shaped by the language we speak
