Culture

Question 1

• Culture

Answer 1

• Culture is way of life shared by group of individuals – the knowledge, beliefs and values that bind a society together. Very diverse, can include artwork, language, and literature.
o Ways of of thinking, behaving, and feeling connected to a shared knowledge of a society and allow members of the society to gain meaning from object and ideas around them.
• Culture = rules that guide way people live
Culture is learned, reshaped from generation to generation. Culture makes a society run. Rules and input that allow society to run. Way of life of people.

o Need human ideas from culture to allow a society to work.
 Analogy: need apps to allow a phone be useful
o Culture and society need to both exist to function
 Each social unit has a unique way of life due to differences in culture
o Culture provides guidelines for actions and interactions within a society.

• Culture is the customs, knowledge, and behaviours that are learned and socially transmitted. Includes ideas, values and objects meaningful to a group of people.
——–&raquo_space;Culture is typically learned through observation, interactions, and the biological component (shaped through evolution)

Question 2

• Society

Answer 2

• Society is the way people organize themselves – bunch of people who live together in a specific geographic area, and interact more with each other than outsiders. Share a common culture over time.
society = structure that provides organization for people.
o Society includes institutions, ex. family, education, politics, which all meet basic human needs. Society provides structure. Groups of people.

 Each social unit has a unique way of life due to differences in culture

Question 3

• 4 main points of culture

Answer 3

o 1. People share culture in society: All people share culture with others in their society, provides rules and expectations for carrying out daily rituals and interactions.
o 2. Culture is adaptive – it evolves over time and adaptive.
 Normal in hunter/gathers (cooperativity encouraged) different than today’s information/technology age (individualism/competition).
o 3. Culture builds on itself – creation of culture is ongoing and cumulative, and societies build on existing cultures to adapt to new challenges and opportunities.
 Normal values are shaped by your culture. Ex. Putting a baby in a crib is strange in other parts of the world. Culture differs around the world.
o 4. Culture is transmitted – from one generation to the next. We teach a way of life to the next generation. Humans are only mammals with culture to adapt to environments (to survive on equator and artic)

Question 4

• High culture

Answer 4

• High culture refers to patterns of experiences and attitudes that exist in the highest class segments of a society. This tends to be associated with wealth and formality.

Question 5

• Normative culture

Answer 5

• Normative culture refers to values and behaviors that are in line with larger societal norms (like avoidance of crime).

Question 6

• Popular culture

Answer 6

• Popular culture refers to patterns of experiences and attitudes that exist within mainstream normative society - like attending a game or watching a parade.

Question 7

• A subculture

Answer 7

• A subculture is culture (ideas) of a meso-level (medium) subcommunity (small community) that distinguishes itself from the larger dominant culture of larger society/community.
o Subculture smaller than a nation but unlike a microculture, it is large enough to support people throughout their entire lifespan.
 Subcultures affect your life on a longer period than a microculture
o Meso-level = population size falls between micro and macro levels. They are medium sized groups such as communities, organizations, cities, states, clans, and tribes.
o It is a subcommunity = smaller community in larger one.
 Subcultures are unique to the larger society but still share some of the culture of the dominant society.

• Subcultures include ethnic groups like Mexicans or orthodox Jews, or groups like the elite upper class. Subculture can cause tension with dominant group-which have the power to determine the cultural expectations of society.

Question 8

• A microculture

Answer 8

• A microculture can’t support people throughout their lifespan, refers to groups/organizations only affecting limited period of one’s life. Ex. Girl scouts, college sororities, boarding school.

Question 9

Counterculture

Answer 9

• When laws of dominant society is violated (conflict with larger culture becomes serious), a counterculture results. Counterculture: group with expectations and values that strongly disagree with the main values from the larger society. It refers to a subculture that rejects some of the larger culture’s norms and values, and usually develop their own set of norms to live by.

o Ex. Mormons believe in polygamy. Polygamy = more than one spouse (broader definition), polygyny = more than one wife, polyandry – woman has multiple husbands

Question 10

• Culture lag

Answer 10

• Culture lag is the fact culture takes time to catch up with technological innovations, resulting in social problems. Common in societies because material culture changes rapidly, while non-material culture tends to resists change.

Question 11

o Material culture

Answer 11

o Material culture refers to physical and technological aspects of our daily lives, like food and houses, and phones

Question 12

non-material

Answer 12

non-material culture (symbolic culture) doesn’t include physical objects, like ideas/beliefs/values, which tend to resist change.

Question 13

• Culture Shock

Answer 13

• Culture Shock – feelings of disorientation, uncertainty, or even fear when they encounter unfamiliar culture practices. Ex. Moving countries, move social environments, or travels to another type of life (urban to rural).

o In foreign places, weather, language, landscape, food, values and customers, way business conducted differently, stores open/close at different times, food can be completely different. Everything you are used to is no longer in place.
o As a result of culture shock may feel sad, lonely, homesick, confused, etc, and have questioned your decision to move to this new place.

Question 14

• Diffusion

Answer 14

• Diffusion is the spread of an invention or discovery or ideas from one place to another. Spread of ideas such as Capitalism, democracy and religious beliefs have brought change in human relationships around the world.
o Spread of music, phone technology, computer hardware/software have made a difference in how people connect with others across the globe.
• Involves expansion of ideas across the globe
• Can occur in many ways.
o Exploration, military conquest, missionary work, mass media, tourism, internet.

• Diffusion between cultures has occurred throughout history but today it can happen faster because of social media/internet.

Question 15

• Culture Assimilation:

Answer 15

Cultural assimilation is interpenetration and fusion of ethnic minorities into the dominant culture.

Question 16

• Mass media

Answer 16

• Mass media = dissemination of information, and how information is transmitted within a culture. Includes print media (books, music, newspaper and magazines) and digital media (TV, media, radio, and the internet). How it’s consumed changes across cultures in each group. (Ex. Older people might get their info via TV and newspaper while younger people can get it via the internet).

Question 17

functionalist perspective of mass media

Answer 17

According to the functionalist perspective,

1. its main role is to provide entertainment. Occupy our leisure time.
2. Also says it can act as an agent of socialization (ex. Collective experience of watching Olympics on TV, and community building – entire internet communities) and
3. act as an enforcer of social norms.
4. o Also functions as a promoter of consumer culture. (marketing, commercials)

Question 18

• The conflict perspective of mass media

Answer 18

• The conflict perspective focuses on how the media portrays and reflects and exacerbate divisions that exist in society, ex. Race/ethnicity/gender/social class.
o Uses term gatekeeping to describe the process by which a small number of people and corporations control what information is presented on the media, and describes information (things that appear in newspaper, stories made into movies, what TV shows are turned into pilot) and how the information moves through a series of gates before they reach the public. In some countries this is decided by the government, in others decided by large media corporations.
o Gatekeeping has more effect on some media than others, ex. Lots of control on big-budget movies, but little overhead control on what’s posted online.
o Also describes how mass media reflects the dominant ideology. Giving time, space or privileging certain political, economic, and social interests at the same time limiting other views. People who make the choice of what media is produced– the gatekeepers are predominantly white, male, and wealthy.
o Portrayal of racial minority groups/LGBT groups, working class people, women (minorities in general), etc can be underrepresented or stereotyped – unrealistic generalizations of certain groups of people.
 There have been some attempts to fix underrepresentation/stereotyping
 But these attempts have sometimes wrongly resulted in tokenism instead of diversity. [One minority character is added to a movie as a stand in for the entire group]

tokenism - symbolic effort by companies to appear to include minority groups from society

Question 19

• Feminist Theories

Answer 19

• Feminist Theories is similar to conflict theory, in that mass media stereotypes/misrepresents society towards the dominant ideology. Specifically, message about men and women are represented in the media. Depictions of men and women often stereotyped, emphasizing traditional sex roles/gender roles.
o men are considered normal and women are considered the “other”. Ex. (“pens” and “pens for her” or “razors” and “razors for women”).
o Women are depicted as victims, men as aggressors
o Women are depicted as shallow or being obsessed with looks. Makes it more likely they will be sexualized/objectified.

Question 20

• Interactionist perspective

Answer 20

• Interactionist perspective looks at mass media on microlevel to see how it shapes day to day behavior. How mass media blurs line between solidary and group activities – ex. watching a movie (can be watching with other people but because of societal norms/theater rules you can’t talk about it with those who you are watching with). Looks at how we connect with others using media changes over time (email/text message instead of phone, or online dating increase).

Question 21

• Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (evolution can shape culture)

Answer 21

• Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution – both physical traits and behaviours can be selected for if they contribute to success of the species.

Physical traits can be selected for: Animals best suited for their environment have best likelihood to survive in that environment and passing on their genes.

Behaviors can be selected for: if they contribute to fitness of a species. How do we know which behavior is selected for? Well because there are cultural universals which exist throughout the world for certain things/behaviors which might have been selected for as human species evolved.

Question 22

 Cultural Universals

Answer 22

 Cultural Universals – Ex. all cultures have ways of dealing with illness/medicine/healing Or wedding/funeral ceremonies. Language (ability to communicate within a group).

cultural universals which exist throughout the world for certain things/behaviors which might have been selected for as human species evolved.

Question 23

Culture shapes evolution

Answer 23

o Ex. Hunter-gatherer society vs. farming society, people moved less, and populations grew. Because of this people were more exposed to outbreaks of disease. Since only those that survived were the ones not killed by diseases, our culture/these communities helped shape our immune systems.
o Or lactose intolerance, first year of life most humans get nutrition from milk, but genes to digest this milk are switched after children are weaned. But Northern Europeans which reared cattle, don’t have this effect – their lactase gene doesn’t turn off. So those able to digest milk more likely to survive. More surviving digesting-milk people so more digesting-milk (lactose tolerant) offspring. They can drink milk/eat dairy products because of ancestors culture directing evolution.

Question 24

• Cultural Transmission:

Answer 24

• Cultural Transmission: cultural transmission addresses how culture is learned. Culture is passed along from generation to generation through various childrearing practices, including when parents expose children to music.