Culture Flashcards
What is an example of culture as problem solving?
Superstitions; doing or wearing something in stressful situations to relieve tension
How does culture give concrete experience meaning?
Concrete physical sensations by themselves are meaningless, once your cultural experience conditions you to interpret them in a certain way, this perspective becomes your reality
What are high and popular culture?
Popular culture is consumed by many people of all social classes (e.g.: movies, pop music). High culture tends to be restricted to upper classes (e.g.: opera, ballet); that’s because appreciating some aspects of high culture require education or training that takes considerable time and money to achieve
What is the difference between dominant culture and subordinate culture?
Dominant culture helps rich and powerful categories of people exercise control over others; subordinate culture contests dominant culture to varying degrees
E.g.: idea that anyone can become rich if they work hard and make the right choices X skepticism over that notion
How can language be a cultural tool?
- giving meaning to sentences that would otherwise mean nothing (concrete to meaningful)
- in regards to dominant culture, can be a tool in socializing with the “right sort of people” that will build networks relevant to your socioeconomic situation; if you weren’t socialized with the right accent/vocabulary can be harder
What are symbols and what is their function?
Symbols are concrete objects or abstract terms that represent something else (i.e. alianca); their definitions can solve real-life problems. In a culture, shared symbols are needed
How does culture drive people’s actions?
Individuals respond to the meaning of events, which are defined by their culture to them
What are the 3 cultural survival kit tools?
- Abstraction: ability to create general concepts that organize sensory experience in meaningful ways which provide the foundation for beliefs (statements about what members of a community define as real; culturally constructions of reality and truth do not necessarily coincide with scientifically established facts)
- Cooperation: capacity to create a complex a complex social life by establishing generally accepted ways of doing things and ideas about what is right and wrong; by analyzing how people cooperate and produce norms and values, we can learn much about what distinguishes one culture from another
- Production: two main forms, A) Material culture - tangible (making and using tools and technology), B) Non-material culture - intangible (symbols, norms, values); results in social organization
What is social organization?
“orderly arrangement of social interaction”; culture as a blueprint for living with others and understanding, interpreting and putting it to use is the key to community survival
What are the types of norms?
- Folkways - social preferences
- Mores - social requirements that most people believe to be essential to group survival in society
- Taboos - strongest norms, causes revulsion if broken
- Laws - norms that are codified and enforced by the state (often taboos turn into laws)
What is ethnocentrism and why does it happen?
It’s the tendency for people to judge other cultures exclusively by the standards of their own culture, which seems so sensible and natural to them, since they’ve grown used to it to the point where it becomes invisible in their eyes
Who analyzed the practices of cow worship in rural India, what theoretical tradition did this analysis follow and did it illustrate the idea of culture as the cause of certain patterns of relations or the effect of them?
Harris; functionalism; culture as an effect of certain patterns of social relations
How does multiculturalism increase our ability to choose how culture influences us?
We are exposed to a sumptuous buffet of cultural options in everything from the food we eat to the people we marry, culture is diversifying
+ “because of globalization, people are at liberty to combine elements of culture from a wide range of historical periods and geographical settings rather than accepting the culture they were born into”
What is the rights revolution? Cite a positive and negative outcome of it.
The process by which socially excluded groups struggled to win equal rights under the law and in practice beginning in the second half of the 20th century after WWII and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
Led to a widening and deepening of democracy, but the extent to which current citizens should be responsible for compensation and restitution of past injustices is a source of controversy and conflict.
What is postmodernism?
Characterized by an eclectic mix of cultural elements, the erosion of authority, and the decline of consensus around core values; arose from cultural fragmentation and reconfiguration over the last few decades
