Chapter 8: Culture

Question 1

Culture

Answer 1

Includes multiple lovers of traditions, values, and beliefs, as well as social, biological, and natural acts.

Includes both behavior and the material outcomes of that behavior (artifact or the things we construct from the material world around us- such as houses, clothing, cars, nuclear weapons, jets, and the like).

Question 2

Cultural relativism

Answer 2

Differences in culture reflect different frameworks of meaning and understanding and thus result in different lifestyles and ways of living.

Question 3

Biological determinism

Answer 3

The attempt to differentiate social behavior on the basis of biological genetic endowment.

Question 4

Postmodernism (culture)

Answer 4

Describes contemporary culture. Suggests that global electronic communications are the foundation of postmodern culture, exposing people in advanced capital societies to media images that allow them to splice together cultural elements from different places and times.

Question 5

Ideology

Answer 5

The dominant ideas about the way things are and should work.

Question 6

Ethnocentrism

Answer 6

Elevation of own ethnic group and its social and cultural processes over others.

Question 7

Cultural symbols

Answer 7

Something verbal or nonverbal that comes to stand for something else.

Question 8

Worldview and ethos

Answer 8

Worldview: an idea of reality.

Ethos: tone and character and quality of people’s life, it’s moral and aesthetic style and mood.

Question 9

Cultural innovation

Answer 9

The process of culture adapting, modifying, and changing through interactions over time.

Question 10

Cultural conflict

Answer 10

Conflict over meaning of cultural symbols. One things means one to one person and something different to another.

Question 11

Culture of povert

Answer 11

Originally used to bring attention to the way of life developed by poor people to adapt to the difficult circumstances of their lives.

Question 12

Practice orientations

Answer 12

Seeks to explain how, through culture, human beings construct meaning, intentionality, and public behavior.

Seeks to explain how human beings produce systematic cultural change or adapt to and maintain the culture.

Question 13

Cultural Hegemony

Answer 13

Dominance of a particular way of seeing the world.

Question 14

Traditions

Answer 14

Cultural beliefs and practices taken for granted that seem inevitable parts of life.

Question 15

Customs, or cultural practices

Answer 15

Come into being and persist as solutions to problems of living.

Question 16

Assimilation (cultural change)

Answer 16

Process in which the cultural uniqueness of the minority’s is abandoned and its members try to blend invisibly into the continent culture.

Question 17

Accommodation (cultural change)

Answer 17

More common than assimilation in multicultural, multiethnic society in the US. Accommodation is the process of partial or selective cultural change.

Question 18

Acculturation (cultural change)

Answer 18

Mutual sharing of culture.

Question 19

Biocultural socialization (cultural change)

Answer 19

Involves nonmajority group or or member mastering both dominant culture and their own.

Question 20

Race (culture)

Answer 20

System of social identity.

Question 21

Racism

Answer 21

Thinking and acting as if phenotypes (aka genes) and these other capacities are related and imply inferiority or superiority.

Question 22

Ethnic identity

Answer 22

How ethnic groups define themselves and maintain meaning for living individually and as a group.

Question 23

Socioeconomic status

Answer 23

Social class is a way of ascribing status, prestige, and power. It is based on education, income, and occupation.