Culture Flashcards
Everything we make and consume-including our ideas, attitudes, traditions, and practices-beyond that bare necessity
Culture
Physical goods, often placed in an an economic system
Material culture
Beliefs, values, language
Symbolic culture
How a set of images and words can represent a particular culture
Collective representations
Cultural goods made for and enjoyed by elite groups
High culture
Heavily produced and commercialized goods made for and consumed by a large audience
Popular culture
Moral beliefs
Values
Rules and expectations by which a group guides the behavior of its members
Norms
Adopting a set of informal rules and manners that are appropriate in a specific setting
Code switching
Set of beliefs, values, and attitudes that we learn to use in different situations
Cultural toolkit
The mass production of cultural goods requires a vast system of people and organizations
Cultural industries
The acquisition of smaller corporations by larger ones
Corporate consolidation
The practice of corporations like Target and Toyota supporting cultural institutions (e.g., the National History Museum of African American History and Culture) in order to improve their reputations and imply they value racial diversity
Diversity capital
Investing in cultural institutions focused on Indigenous peoples in order to appear supportive of Indigenous groups
Branding indigeneity
Gaining prestige by exhibiting valuable cultural goods, which implies to others that you are wealthy
Conspicuous consumption
A group that holds values and engages in activities that separate members from the wider society
Subculture
Non-economic resources (knowledge, skills, behaviors) that are useful in a particular sphere of social life
Cultural capital
Contexts where a kind of cultural capital is exchanged, like a profession, a community, or a class of people
Fields
Our learned dispositions, a set of tendencies organizing how we see the world and act within it
Habitus
The social designation of honor
Status
A collection of people who share similar characteristics that a community has given a certain level of prestige-a greater or lesser value when compared to other groups
Status group
The ways people separate each other into groups (through traditions, styles, tastes, classifications)
Symbolic boundaries
People who differentiate themselves by knowing a lot about many different cultural fields
Cultural omnivores
When intercultural communication and the exchange of ideas and values reaches such an international scale, integrating political and economic systems
Globalization
Increased efficiency, predictability, and control
Rationalization
Imposition of the dominant group’s material and symbolic goods
Cultural imperialism
When members of a dominant culture adopt the cultural goods (e.g., ideas, symbols, skills, expressions, intellectual property) of other groups for profit
Cultural appropriation
The practice of raising awareness around issues of McDonaldization, corporate consolidation, and cultural imperialism through informal and often illegal guerilla (independent and unauthorized) marketing campaigns
Culture jamming
The international production, distribution, and marketing system of corporations, laborers, and consumers
Global commodity chain
Ritzer’s term for the increased rationalization and globalization of culture
McDonaldization
