Chapter 9

Question 1

What is culture?

Answer 1

Culture is often described as a set of shared meanings, practices, and beliefs that constitute a way of life for a specific group of people coexisting in a particular place and time.

Question 2

What is mindset?

Answer 2

People of a particular culture typically share a mindset and look at the world in similar ways.

Question 3

What is society?

Answer 3

Is a structured and organized system for grouping people. It has more intention behind how it is set up, whereas culture tends to emerge on its own with no overarching plan.

Question 4

What is sub-cultures?

Answer 4

How beliefs align with the overall beliefs of a larger culture.

Question 5

What is countercultures?

Answer 5

How beliefs contrast with overall beliefs of a larger culture.

Question 6

What is community?

Answer 6

Smaller groups of individuals with shared identities and worldviews and emphasizes the importance of interpersonal relationships.

Question 7

What is communism?

Answer 7

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of liberation of the proletariat.

Question 8

What is an esoteric perspective?

Answer 8

Understanding a community from the inside

Question 9

What is an exoteric perspective?

Answer 9

Views from the outside of the community, from those observing without being members themselves

Question 10

What is a network?

Answer 10

Networks are described as a web

Question 11

What is an online community?

Answer 11

Many online formats where people can gather and communicate.

Question 12

What is a fandom?

Answer 12

The broad term for the subculture of communities that form between audiences and media texts. Existed before the internet

Question 13

What is Victor Turner’s “communitas”? How is it different from community?

Answer 13

Turner used communitas over community to distinguish the modality of social relationship from an area of common living. Communitas is different from community because physical closeness isn’t enough to bring people together meaningfully. One also needs to consider the order and structure associated with society. Communitas is less structed than community. There are less rules and everyone is considered equal.

Question 14

What is Ferdinand Tonnies’s dichotomy of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft? How is it related to Turner’s communitas?

Answer 14

Geminschaft roughly translates to community and depends on can interactions. These interactions are social and can develop into relationships. Gesellschaft is connected to society and therefore more impersonal. In gesellschaft, interactions between people are more structured and don’t necessarily develop into relationships. The implication of equality doesn’t exist within society or within gesellschaft.

Question 15

Who coined the term “folklore”?

Answer 15

William J. Thoms in 1846

Question 16

Who were the folk? What was the purpose of studying them in the nineteenth century?

Answer 16

The folk according to Dundes were the uncivilized element in a civilized society. The folk were the peasants who may have existed nearby a civilized society, one that was more modern and resembles society as we think of it today.

Question 17

What is Edward Burnett Tylor’s “survivals”?

Answer 17

Traditions that existed from an earlier developmental stage.

Question 18

Who is William Wells Newell? What did he do? Who were the people he studied?

Answer 18

William Wells Newell was a scholar who put a spin on the old approach in resistance to the grand theory of evolutionary biology. He subscribed to some of the tenets of evolutionary theory but, he took a less heavy-handed approach. He was not looking to study the folk in order to understand civilization. Rather, he was more concerned that cultures of some groups, such as native Americans would soon vanish making it imperative to collect their traditions before it happened.

Question 19

What is Alan Dundes’ view of “folk”?

Answer 19

Folklorist Alan Dundes suggested that in order for the term folk to exist it must do so in opposition to another group of people. Folk were of a lower class than the elite and therefore through lack of funds and lack of availability could not afford to learn to read and write. His view changed and he decided that folk can mean any group of people whatsoever share at least one common factor, no matter what that linking factor may be.

Question 20

What is collective identity? Individual identity?

Answer 20

Collective identity is an identity that one shares with others of a similar culture or group shaping their sense of self. Individual identity: People who belong to the same group or community are not all the exact same, standing apart from one another.

Question 21

Who is Dick Hebdige? What is his study of subculture?

Answer 21

One of the most influential studies of subcultures is Dick Hebdige’s sub-culture: The Meaning of Style. In his research he looked at the rise of British postwar punk culture as derived from several other movements happening before it. Of particular interest to Hebdige was the actual style involved, not just the musical style, but the whole lifestyle, including clothing, body modification, and other sensibilities.

Question 22

What is the difference between subcultures and counterculture? Which one is biker culture? Why?

Answer 22

Subcultures are not aggressively in opposition to the dominant culture. Countercultures actively goes against those of dominant culture. Biker culture is a subculture. They are highly structured criminal organization.

Question 23

What are John Fiske’s three levels of fan production?

Answer 23

John Fiske’s three levels of fan production are semiotic, enuciative and textual. Semiotic production is mostly interior and applies broadly to the ways in which people make meaning and understand cultural texts. The point of the enuciative production is to visibly and vocally communicate your appreciation for a particular celebrity, sport team, or media text. Textual production involves the actual creation of modified or new textual forms.