Chapter 3: Cultures Flashcards
What is Culture?
A systems of behaviour and beliefs, knowledge, practises, values and concrete materials including buildings, tools, and sacred items.
Define Social Structure
The way society is organized into different parts.
4 Elements of Social structure.
- Roles
- Statues
- Social Groups
- Social Institutions
What is Authenticity of Culture?
Carries the idea of being true to a particular time, place, or context.
Culture often becomes _____ over the question of authenticity.
Contested
What does contested mean?
Describes a practise whose moral goodness or badness, normalcy or deviance is disputed by some members of society.
Elements of Traditional Social Institutions?
- Family
- Economy
- Religion
- Education
- Politics
What is a social institution?
An establishment which endures patterns of social relationship.
Elements of Contemporary social institutions?
- Mass media
- Sport
- Media
- Medicine
- Science and Technology
Elements of Culture?
- Norms
- Beliefs
- Value
- Symbols
What is the relationship between culture and social structure?
Society.
When can authenticity become a problem?
When a colonial society studies a colonized culture and claims to know the secret of its authenticity. (Ex. Disney movie- Aladdin)
Theoretical Perspective on Culture: Structural Functionalism
Integrates people into groups.
Theoretical Perspective on Culture: Conflict Theory
- Serves interests of powerful groups.
- Society based on tension and conflict over scarce resources
Theoretical Perspective on Culture: Symbolic Interactions
-Creates group identity from diverse cultural meanings.
Dominant Culture
Through its political and economic power, is able to impose its values, language, and ways of behaving and interpreting behaviour on a given society.
(Ex. Straight, white, males between the ages of 30-55 with a European background)
Minority Culture
Those that fall outside of the cultural mainstream.
Subcultures
A type of minority culture that is different from the dominant culture but is not directly opposed to it.
Countercultures
A minority culture that feel the power of the dominant culture and exists in opposition to it.
High Culture
- The Culture of the Elite.
- Distinct Minority
- Associated with the Arts
Who coined the term Cultural Capital?
Pierre Bourdieu
What is Cultural Capital?
Knowledge and skills needed to acquire the sophisticated tastes that marks someone as a person of high culture.
Popular Culture
culture for the majority, particularly for those who do not have power. It’s based on popular taste and is created by people who will consume it. (Ex. Youtube)
Mass Culture
A culture for the majority that is produced by big companies and powerful governments. (Ex. Disney)
Agency
Capacity of individuals to act freely. (ex. free-will, and individual choice)
Structure
Social forces determine or limit a person in their decisions. (i.e. socially-shaped tendency to act a certain way)
Agency vs Structure debate: What would Popular culture argue?
Popular Culture would argue that you’re able to use or resist that information or entertainment to your own means and ends.
Agency vs Structure debate: What would Mass Culture argue?
Mass Culture would argue that a “power bloc” exists and exerts powerful influence over us.
Simulacra
stereotypical cultural images produces and reproduced like material goods by the media. (Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte)
Simulacra is associated with what type of Culture?
Mass Culture
Which french sociologists coined the term simulacra?
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard described Simulacra as a “hyper-Reality”. What does this mean?
become more real than what actually exists.
What is the sociological reason for its [simulacra] importance?
It’s a critical concept for examining capitalism and consumerism.
Decipherment
involves looking in a text for the definitive interpretation. (The purpose the culture industry had in mind in creating the text)
Decipherment is associated with what type of culture?
Mass Culture
Reading
The process in which people treat what culture industries provide and resources. A text to be interpreted as they see fit, not always in ways the creators intended.
“Reading” is associated with what type of culture.
Popular Culture
What are social norms?
Rules and standards of behaviour that are expected of a group/
How are social norms enforced?
Through sanctions
What are sanctions?
Rewards or punishments given in response to a particular behaviour.
What do sanctions protect society from?
Chaos and disorder.
Who distinguished 3 types of social norms?
William Graham Sumner
What are the 3 types of social norms?
- Folkways
- Mores
- Taboos
What are folkways?
A type of social norms that described things we SHOULD NOT do. (Etiquette) (Distinguishes between what’s right and rude)
What are Mores?
A type of social norm that MUST NOT be violated. They are enshrined in the criminal codes and laws.
What are Taboos?
Norms that are deeply ingrained that the thought or mention of it revolts or disgusts people. FORBIDDEN (ex. cannibalism, necrophilia, pornography…)
What are Symbols?
Cultural items that hold significance for cultures of subcultures.
Ethnocentrism
Holding one culture as being the standard by which all are to be judged.
Eurocentrism
Taking a broadly defined European position to address others, and assume that the audience shares the same position.
What term did William Graham Sumner coin?
Ethnocentrism
Cultural Globalization
The intensification and expansion of cultural flows across the globe.
What is the concern with cultural globalization?
There will be a one-way flow of culture coming from the west (Americanization)
Who defined cultural globalization?
Manfred Steger
Cultural Relativism
An approach to studying and understanding an aspect of another culture within its proper social, historical, and environmental context.
When does cultural relativism become a problem?
When studying historical practises and views that were once widespread but are now considered abhorrent and offensive.
What’s the difference between cultural relativism and presentism?
Presentism is when you CANNOT judge figures of the past in their own time; but with cultural relativism you CAN.
What is sociolinguistics?
The study of language as part of a culture.
What does linguistic determinism suggest?
the way we view and understand the world is based on the language we speak.
