Chapter 3

Question 1

What is culture?

Answer 1

-System of behaviours, beliefs, knowledges, practices, values, concrete materials including buildings, tools, and sacred items
-Dynamic and change over time
-Elements, such as authenticity, are contestation points when agreeing upon who/what belongs to and represents a culture

Question 2

What is dominant culture?

Answer 2

-A culture that is able to impose its values, language and ways of behaving and interpreting behaviour in a given society through political and economic power
-Dominants are people who are closely linked with cultural mainstream

Question 3

What is minority culture and its two subcategories?

Answer 3

-Those that fall outside the cultural mainstream
1. Countercultures: Minority cultures that feel the power of the dominant culture and exist in opposition to it (I.e. clothing styles, sexual norms)
2. Subcultures: Minority cultures that differ in some way from the dominant culture but don’t directly oppose it (I.e. groups organized around ethnicities, occupations or hobbies)

Question 4

What is high culture?

Answer 4

-Culture of the elites, a distinct minority
-Often associated with the arts (E.g., theatre opera, ballet, and classical music)

Question 5

What is cultural capital?

Answer 5

-A set of skills and knowledge needed to acquire the sophisticated tastes that mark someone as a person of high culture
-Coined by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu

Question 5

What is social capital?

Answer 5

-Consists of the economic resources garnered from human interaction
-Inlude tangible and non-tangible assets such as information, innovative ideas, financial support and social networks of connection

Question 6

What is popular culture and how does it differ from mass culture?

Answer 6

-Culture of the majority, especially those who do not have power
-Differs from mass culture due to agency (ability to be creative or productive with materials given to them by dominant culture)

Question 7

What is mass culture?

Answer 7

-Refers to groups who have little or no agency in the culture they consume (big companies dictate what people watch, buy, value or believe), created by those in power for the masses

Question 8

Define simulacra

Answer 8

-Feature of mass culture
-Stereotypical cultural images produced and reproduced like material goods or commodities by the media and sometimes scholars (Jean Baudrillard)
-Hyperreal, likely to be considered more real than what actually exists

Question 9

What are cultural norms?

Answer 9

-Rules or standards of behaviour that are expected of a group, society, or culture
-Change over time and differ from culture to culture
-Expressed through various means

Question 10

What are sanctions? Positive and negative

Answer 10

-Rewards and punishment in response to a particular behaviour
-Positive: rewards for “doing the right thing or a good thing” (e.g., smiles, high fives or bonus)
-Negative: Reactions designed to tell offenders they have violated a norm (e.g., a glare, eye roll, parking ticket, library fine)

Question 11

What are the three norms distinguished by William Graham Sumner?

Answer 11

1. Folkways: norms that govern day-to-day matters. Should not be violated but are weakly sanctioned (no double-dipping chips, take hat off at dinner/church)
2. Mores: more serious than folkways, often formalize norms we must not violate and are met with serious sanctions. Complicated and may be disputed (stealing, lying, bullying)
3. Taboos: Norms that are so deeply ingrained in our social consciousness that the mere thought or mention is disgusting/revolting (incest, child porn)

Question 12

What are cultural symbols?

Answer 12

-Cultural items that hold signifigance for culture or subculture
-Can be tangible (material) such as flags, wedding rings, etc.
-Can be intangible (non-material) such as songs or events, rituals and ceremonies

Question 13

What are values?

Answer 13

-Standards used by a culture to describe abstract qualities such as goodness, beauty, and justice to assess the behaviour of others
-Value and behaviour are not always congruent (Ideal culture vs actual culture)

Question 14

What is ethnocentrism?

Answer 14

-Occurs when someone holds up one culture as being the standard by which all cultures are to be judged
-Often the product of a lack of knowledge or ignorance
-Played a role in the colonizing efforts of powerful nations imposing their beliefs on Indigenous populations of lands they “discovered”

Question 15

What is eurocentrism?

Answer 15

-Involves addressing others from a broadly defined European position and assuming the audience is or would like to be part of that position
-E.g., textbooks in the West tend to honour advances made by people with European background while downplaying or ignoring important non-European developments

Question 16

Manfred Steger

What is cultural globalization?

Answer 16

-Intensification and expansion of cultural flows across the globe
-Concerned with the one-way flow from the West or ‘Americanization’ of the world

Question 17

What is cultural relativism?

Answer 17

-Approach to studying and understanding an aspect of another culture within its proper social, historical and environmental context
-Cannot use our own cultural standards to assess and judge the cultural practices of others

Question 18

How does presentism differ from cultural relativism?

Answer 18

-Judges historical figures by today’s standards, not in the past within their own time

Question 19

What are dialects?

Answer 19

-variety of language that differs from others in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar
-often evaluated according to whether they represent proper or improper, casual or informal, even funny or serious versions of a language

Question 20

What is sociolinguistics?

Answer 20

-study of language as part of culture in relation to “race,” ethnicity, age, gender and region
-language is key to the communication and transmission of culture

Question 21

What is the difference between dialect vs. accents?

Answer 21

-dialect refers to a variation of language someone speaks as their mother tongue, whereas an accent relates to a persons pronunciation quirks while speaking a second language

Question 22

What is linguistic determinism?

Answer 22

-theory that the way an individual understands the world is shaped by the language they speak
-indicates that certain features within a culture “determine” the language that its members learn, and influence the underlying concepts expressed through that language (concerns are it might suggest and justify that certain cultures are capable of more complex thought than others)

Question 23

What is linguistic relativity?

Answer 23

-view that language and culture have a unique relationship in each society
-emphasizes culture, or environment and upbringing, over nature, or innate capability

Question 24

Who identified the contrast between popular and mass culture?

Answer 24

-Michel de Certeau
-Identified dechiperment and reading

Question 25

What are the two contrasting components that identify the distinction between popular and mass culture?

Answer 25

-Decipherment: looking in a text for definitive interpretation, for the purpose the culture industry had in mind creating the text without the opportunity to challenge or reject it (mass culture)
-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 neccessarily intended by the creators of text (popular culture)