Chapter 3 Flashcards
(32 cards)
Culture
A system of beliefs, behaviours, knowledges, practices, values and concrete materials.
Dominant Culture
The culture that is able to impose its values, language and ways of behaving on a given society.
Dominants
People who are closely linked with the cultural mainstream.
Minority Culture
Cultures that fall outside the cultural mainstream.
Countercultures
Minority cultures that feel the power of the dominant culture and exist in opposition to it.
Subcultures
Minority cultures that differ in some way from the dominant culture but don’t directly oppose it.
High Culture
The culture of the elite, a distinct minority.
Usually associated with the arts.
Cultural Capital
A set of knowledge and skills needed to acquire the sophisticated tastes that mark someone as a person of high culture.
Popular Culture
The culture of the majority, especially those who do not have power.
Mass culture
People who have little or no agency in the culture they consume.
Created by those in power for the masses.
Simulacra
A feature of mass culture, stereotypical cultural images produced and reproduced like cultural goods or commodities by the media and scholars.
Hyperreal manifestations of culture, likely to be more real than what actually exists.
Decipherment
Looking in a text for the definitive interpretation, the purpose.
Reading
The 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 way not necessarily intended by the creators of the text.
Norms
The rules or standards of behaviour that are expected of a group, society, or culture.
Sanctions
Rewards and punishment in response to a particular behaviour.
Positive Sanctions
Rewards for doing the right thing.
Negative Sanctions
Reactions designed to tell offenders they have violated a norm.
Folkways
Norms that govern day to day matters, etiquette. Norms we should not violate and are weakly sanctioned.
Mores
Formalized norms we must not violate and violations are met with serious sanctions.
Taboos
Norms that are so deeply ingrained in our social consciousness that the mere thought or mention of it is enough to arouse disgust or revulsion.
Symbols
Cultural items that hold significance for a culture or subculture.
Values
The standards used by a culture to describe abstract quality such as goodness, beauty, and justice to assess the behaviour of others.
Ideal Culture
What people believe in
Actual Culture
What really exists
