Chapter 5

Question 1

Q: What is perception?

Answer 1

A: The act of becoming aware of the world what we have termed the five traditional senses: Taste, touch, sight, hearing, and smell. To this could be added the sensing of movement, balance, gravity, temperature, and pain.

Question 2

Q: What is cultural synaesthesia?

Answer 2

A: A culturally shared response to sense other than the one being stimulated (e.g. hearing a sound and seeing a colour).

Question 3

Q: What are schemas?

Answer 3

A: Patterned, repetitive experiences that are shared and easily understood by members of a particular culture.

Question 4

Q: What are prototypes?

Answer 4

A: Examples of a typical instance, element, relation, or experience within a culture.

Question 5

Q: What is visuality?

Answer 5

A: The ways that individuals from different societies learn to interpret what they see and to construct mental pictures using the visual practices that their own cultural systems favors.

Question 6

Q: What is cognition?

Answer 6

A: (1) the mental process by which human beings gain knowledge, and (2) the “nexus of relations between the mind at work and the world in which it works.”

Question 7

Q: What are taxonomies?

Answer 7

A: Hierarchical systems that sort groups of things that share at least one quality (e.g., dogs) into subgroups that share a greater number of qualities (e.g., poodles, collies, boxers).

Question 8

Q: What are the elementary cognitive processes?

Answer 8

A: Mental tasks common to all humans without cognitive impairment.

Question 9

Q: What are functional cognitive systems?

Answer 9

A: Culturally linked sets of cognitive processes that guide perception, conception, reason, and emotion.

Question 10

Q: What is a cognitive style?

Answer 10

A: Recurring patterns of cognitive activity that characterize an individual’s perpetual and intellectual activities.

Question 11

Q: What is a global style?

Answer 11

A: A field-dependent way of viewing the world that first sees it as a bundle of relationships and only later sees the smaller pieces involved in these relationships.

Question 12

Q: What is an articulated style?

Answer 12

A: A field-independent way of viewing the world that breaks it up into small pieces, which can then be organized into larger chunks.

Question 13

Q: What is thinking?

Answer 13

A: The active cognitive process of “going beyond the information given”

Question 14

Q: What is syllogism?

Answer 14

A: A series of three statements in which the final statement (the conclusion) must follow logically from the first two statements (the premises).

Question 15

Q: What is syllogistic reasoning?

Answer 15

A: A form of reasoning based on the syllogism.

Question 16

Q: What is a reasoning style?

Answer 16

A: Culture and context-dependent ways in which we appraise, come to understand, and think about a cognitive task.

Question 17

Q: What is emotion?

Answer 17

A: The product of entanglements connecting bodily arousal and cognitive interpretation.

Question 18

Q: What is motivation?

Answer 18

A: The inner impulse to set (or accept) and accomplish goals.

Question 19

Q: What is socialization?

Answer 19

A: The process by which human beings learn to become members of a group, both by interacting appropriately with others and by coping with the behavioral rules established by the group.

Question 20

Q: What is enculturation?

Answer 20

A: The process by which human beings living with one another must learn to come to terms with the ways of thinking and feeling that are considered appropriate in their respective cultures.

Question 21

Q: What is self?

Answer 21

A: The result of the process of socialization and enculturation for an individual.

Question 22

Q: What is the zone of proximal development (ZDP)?

Answer 22

A: The difference between what individuals can achieve on their own and what they can achieve under the guidance of more experienced individuals.

Question 23

Q: What is personality?

Answer 23

A: The relative integration of an individual’s perceptions, motives, cognitions, and behavior within a sociocultural matrix.

Question 24

Q: What is subjectivity?

Answer 24

A: An individual’s awareness of his or her own agency and position as a subject.

Question 25

Q: What is agency?

Answer 25

A: An individual’s ability to make choices and to effect change through her or his actions.

Question 26

Q: What is a subject position?

Answer 26

A: An individual’s unique position in the world, which is shaped by social variables, such as class, gender, and socioeconomic status.

Question 27

Q: What are norms?

Answer 27

A: Rules (usually unwritten) for behaviors assumed to be typical within a specific social or cultural group.

Question 28

Q: What are values?

Answer 28

A: Specific culturally defined principles of behavior

Question 29

Q: What is cultural persona?

Answer 29

A: The presentation of self in compliance with specific cultural models (patterns) of values and meanings.

Question 30

Q: What is Sex?

Answer 30

A: The conventional biological distinction between male and female based on morphological sex (observable sex characteristics), gonadal sex (ovaries in females; testes in males), and chromosomal sex (XX or XY chromosomes).

Question 31

Q: What are gender roles?

Answer 31

A: Sets of behaviors that are commonly perceived as masculine or feminine within a specific culture.

Question 32

Q: What is gender?

Answer 32

A: The culturally constructed beliefs and behaviors considered appropriate for each sex.

Question 33

Q: What is sexuality?

Answer 33

A: An individual’s sense of his or her own sexual desires, orientation, and preferences.

Question 34

Q: What is heteronormativity?

Answer 34

A: An ideology that promotes heterosexuality as the social ideal, supported by the cultural definition of “appropriate” behavior based on culturally defined categories of “male” and “female”, “masculine” and “feminine.”

Question 35

Q: What are naturalizing discourses?

Answer 35

A: The deliberate representation of particular identities (e.g., caste, class, race, ethnicity, and nationality) as if they were a result of biology or nature rather than history or culture, making them appear eternal and unchanging.

Question 36

Q: What is homosexuality?

Answer 36

A: The heteronormative opposite of heterosexuality; that is sexual relations between two men or two women (i.e., same sex sexuality).

Question 37

Q: What does gay mean?

Answer 37

A: An affirmative and empowering self-designation for individuals medically classified as homosexual, which became widespread over the course of the twentieth century.

Question 38

Q: What is a lesbian?

Answer 38

A: A term used around the turn of the twentieth century to describe female same-sex sexuality; based on the name of the Greek island of Lesbos, the home of female poet Sappho, who was reputed to love women rather than men.

Question 39

Q: What is bisexuality?

Answer 39

A: Sexual attraction to both males and females.

Question 40

Q: What is transgender?

Answer 40

A: A term proposed in the 1960’s by medical researchers to classify individuals who in one way or another, seemed dissatisfied with sex and gender assignments they had received at birth.

Question 41

Q: What is a queer?

Answer 41

A: A self-identification claimed by some persons whose gender identities or sexual practices fall outside the range defined by “the heterosexual-homosexual continuum.”