Chapter 5- Textbook Flashcards
What is culture?
A complex collection of values, beliefs, behaviours, and material objects shared by a group and passed on from one generation to the next.
What are the three reasons why no one can really determine when culture began?
1) Very little material evidence, the things cultures make, survives over a long period of time
2) Much of culture is non material (e.g., a belief system) and, therefore, cannot be preserved for future generations to study.
3) Many of the developments that enabled our ancestors to become cultural (e.g., increasing brain size, bipedalism, dietary changes, emergence of language, use of technology, etc.) were all interconnected and integral for the emergence culture.
What are hominid ancestors?
Our human ancestors.
What are the 6 points of evidence of the evolution of human culture that may help determine when in fact human culture may have begun?
1) Social life: hominid ancestors lived in groups as far back as 4.4 million years ago
2) Parental care: early hominids had smaller brains sizes, as brain size increased birthing needed to occur at a n earlier stage as a large head would not fit through a female’s birth canal resulting in greater parental care. This change probably occurred with Homo erectus around 1.9 million years ago
2) Pair-bonding: the attachment of a male to a female is believed to have occurred between 2.4 and 1.9 million years ago
4) Subsistence: acquiring and distributing food took place over a number of periods. Tools used for hunting date as far back as 2.6 million years, evidence of organized hunts dates back 500 000 years and evidence of fishing dates back 100 000 years, and farming dates back 10 000 years.
5) Environmental adaption: use of caves dates back 800 000 years, use of fire dates back 450 000 years, and sewing of hides for clothing dates back 30 000 years.
6) Thought, language, art, and religion: oldest known piece of at dates back 250 000 years, pigments of black and red have been found in caves dating back 400 000 years, cave paintings dating back over 30 000 years, evidence of Neanderthals performing funerals over 100 000 years ago
What are Homo sapiens?
Modern human beings
How long ago does evidence of modern humans date back?
only 200 000 years
Where did Homo sapience emerge out of? When did they begin to move through Asia?
Africa and began to move through Asia between 80 000 and 60 000 years ago
Where can the earliest civilizations be traced back to and how long ago?
Jericho, West Bank, around 11 000 years ago.
What are the 5 defining features of culture?
1) Culture is learned: no one is born with culture; as we grow up we are constantly immersed in the cultural traditions of your parents, siblings, and peers. Your culture modifies and influences your perceptions, values, and perspectives.
2) Culture is shared: people interact and share experiences and meanings; shared collective symbols help to create and maintain group solidarity and cohesion.
3) Culture is transmitted: traditions and beliefs being passed from generation to generation to survive is an important requirement for any culture
4) Culture is cumulative: members of each generation find and modify their cultural beliefs to meet their changing needs
5) Culture is human: animals are considered to be social. but not cultural; culture is the product of human interaction
What two major segments can culture be divided into?
material culture and nonmaterial culture
What is material culture?
The tangible artifacts and physical objects found in a given culture. Encompasses the physical output of human labour and expression and helps us to adapt to and prosper ind verse and often challenging physical environments. It is everything we build and create.
What is nonmaterial culture?
The intangible and abstract components of a society, including value and norms that are passed on from generation to generation.
What are values?
Beliefs about ideal goals and behaviours that serve as standards for social life. They are the standards by which people define what is desirable or undesirable, good or bad, beautiful or ugly; they are the attitudes about the way the world ought to be. They define right and wrong or specify cultural preferences and are general guidelines on what a society deems to be important.
What are norms?
Culturally defined rules that outline appropriate behaviours. They help people know how to act in given social situations and provide general guidelines on how we should act, and because we learn them from an early age, they offer some comfort that we will know how to act in situations we have never faced before.
What are the two types norms?
folkways and mores
What are folkways?
Informal norms that suggest customary ways of behaving. Do not inspire strong moral condemnation.
What are mores?
Norms that carry a strong sense of social importance and necessity. They inspire strong moral condemnation. Some actions are considered to be such a violation of social mores that they are absolutely forbidden and considered taboo and are dealt with harshly. .
What is taboo?
A prohibition on a actions deemed immoral or disgusting.
What is the distinction between folkways and mores?
Is not necessarily the act itself but, rather, the social reaction that the act inspires.
What is a law?
A type of norm that is formally defined and enacted in legislation.
What is a sanction?
A penalty for norm violation or a reared for norm adherence. It is anything that rewards appropriate behaviours or penalizes inappropriate ones.
What is ethnocentrism?
The tendency to view one’s own culture as superior to all others. Being a member of a particular culture instills a sense of group loyalty and pride that is important when unity is necessary. Ethnocentrism is inconsistent with the sociological perspective because it restricts one’s ability to appreciate cultural diversity.
What is cultural relativism?
Appreciation that all cultures have their own mores, norms, and customs and should be evaluated and understood on their own terms, rather than according to one’s won cultural standards. It is an ethical position that assumes that no one should judge other people’s customs and traditions before truly trying to understand them.
What is the alternative to ethnocentrism?
cultural relativism
What do some critics of the philosophy of cultural relativism argue?
That by adopting the position, people give up the ability to determine if an action is right or wrong, moral or immoral. Critics argue that some things are wrong regardless of cultural context. One some level, universal human rights are contradicted by narrowly conceived ideas of cultural relativism.
What is culture shock?
The feeling of disorientation, alienation, depression, and loneliness experienced when entering a culture very different from one’s own that subsides only once a person becomes acclimated to the new culture.
What is Berg’s four-stage model to understand a person’s progression through feelings of culture shock?
1) Honeymoon: a feeling of admiration and awe regarding the newest culture, and cordial interactions with locals.
2) Crisis: differences in values, signs, and symbols begin to inspire feelings of confusion and disorientation that lead to feelings of inadequacy, frustration, anger, and despair.
3) Recovery: crisis is gradually resolved with a growing understanding of the host culture and recognition that its values are consistent with its view of the world.
4) Adjustment: an increasing ability to function effectively and enjoy the host culture despite occasional feelings of anxiety or stress.
What do all human beings communicate through?
symbols
What is a symbol?
Something that stands for or represents something else.
What is language?
A shared symbol system of rules and meanings that governs the production and interpretation of speech.
What must symbols have in order to be understand the thoughts or emotions that they are trying to convey?
established meanings
What, in essence, distinguishes one culture from another?
Agreed-upon meanings shared by a group of people
What is one of the main principle son symbolic interactionism when its comes to society (and culture)? What does this principle suggest/
Society (and culture) is socially constructed. This principle suggests that every time we interact, we interpret the interaction according to the subjective meanings each of us brings to it.
What do most researchers consider to be the key identifier of cultural boundaries?
Language
What happens when a language is lost?
The culture to which is belonged loses one of its most important survival mechanisms?
When does a language die out?
When dominant language groups are adopted by young people whose parents speak a traditional language.
According to K. David Harrison, approximately how many languages exist in the world? How many of these are in danger of extinction within the next 100 years?
- 7000
- half of these
According to Harrison, more than___of the world’s languages are spoken by only 0.2 percent of the world’s population?
-35 00
What happens when a language dies?
A little bit of culture dies with it.
What are the three reasons why we should be concerned about losing languages?
1) As a human collective, each time we lost a language we lose knowledge, because each language serves as a vast source of information about the past and about how we have a adapted to our environments
2) When a language dies, so do its related cultural myths, folk songs, legends, poetry, and belief systems. This is called “cultural amnesia” and lessens our ability to live peacefully with diverse populations because our understanding of cultural diversity decreases.
3) The demise of the world’s languages hinders our exploration of the mysteries of the human mind. Without the ability to convey ideas, we cannot hope to see the world from another’s perspective.
