CULTURE (chapter 2, chapter 16.4)

Question 1

Define culture.

Answer 1

Culture is the ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together form a people’s way of life. Culture includes what we think, how we act, and what we own. Culture is both our link to the past and our guide to the future.

Question 2

Define nonmaterial culture.

Answer 2

The ideas created by members of a society, ideas that range from art to Zen.

Question 3

Define material culture.

Answer 3

The physical things created by members of a society, everything from armchairs to zippers.

Question 4

Culture shapes …

Answer 4

Not only what we do but also what we think and how we feel - elements of what we commonly, but wrongly, describe as “human nature.”

Question 5

Given the extent of cultural differences in the world and people’s tendency to view their own way of life as “natural,” it is no wonder that travelers often find themselves feeling uneasy as they enter an unfamiliar culture.

Answer 5

This uneasiness is culture shock, personal disorientation when experiencing an unfamiliar way of life.

Question 6

Culture shock (1).

Answer 6

We experience culture shock. When we enter an unfamiliar culture and are not able to “read” meaning in our new surroundings.

Question 7

Culture shock (2).

Answer 7

We create culture shock for others when we act in ways they do not understand.

Question 8

Culture shock (2).

Answer 8

We create culture shock for others when we act in ways they do not understand.

Question 9

Culture is a product of evolution.

Answer 9

As the human brain evolved, culture replaced biological instincts as our species’ primary strategy for survival.

Question 10

Culture refers to a …

Answer 10

Shared way of life.

Question 11

Define nation.

Answer 11

A political entity, a territory with designated borders.

Question 12

Define society.

Answer 12

Society is the organized interaction of people who typically live in a nation or some other specific territory.

Question 13

Applicaiton to Canada.

Answer 13

Canada, then, is both a nation and a society. But many nations, including Canada, are multicultural; that is, their people follow various ways of life that blend (and sometimes clash).

Question 14

How many cultures are there in Canada?

Answer 14

The best way to identify the number of cultures is to count all the different languages. The Canada 2016 Census lists more than 200 nonofficial mother tongues spoken in this county, most of which were brought by immigrants from nations around the world. The census also recorded over 70 Indigenous languages, with the most popular being Cree, Inuktitut, and Ojibway.

Question 15

Globally …

Answer 15

Experts document more than 7,000 languages, suggesting the existence of as many distinct cultures. Yet the number of languages spoken around the world is declining, so that about 4,000 of the world’s languages now are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people. Experts expect that the coming decades may see the disappearance of hundred of these languages, and perhaps half the world’s languages may even disappear before the end of this century.

Question 16

As you might expect, when a language is becoming extinct, the last people to speak it are the …

Answer 16

Oldest members of a society.

Question 17

What accounts for the worldwide decline in the number of spoken languages?

Answer 17

The main reason is globalization itself, including high-technology communication, increasing international migration, and the expanding worldwide economy.

Question 18

Although cultures vary greatly, they all have common elements, including …

Answer 18

Symbols, language, values, and norms.

Question 19

Define symbol.

Answer 19

Anything that carriers a particular meaning recognized by people who share a culture.

Question 20

We can see the human capacity to create and manipulate symbols reflected in the very different meanings associated with the simple act of winking an eye, …

Answer 20

Which can convey interest, understanding, or insult.

Question 21

Societies create new symbols all the time.

Answer 21

“Cyber-symbols,” such as emoticons, for example, have developed along with our increasing use of computers for communication.

Question 22

Define language.

Answer 22

It is the key to the world of culture. It is a system of symbols that allows people to communicate with one another.

Question 23

Language not only allows communication but is also the key to cultural transmission, …

Answer 23

The process by which one generation passes culture to the next. Just as our bodies contain the genes of our ancestors, our culture contains countless symbols of those who came before us. Language is the key that unlocks centuries of accumulated wisdom.

Question 24

Does language shape reality?

Answer 24

Does someone who speaks Cree, the language spoken by Indigenous people who originated from the James Bay area of Canada, experience the world differently from other Canadians who think in, say, English or French? Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf claimed that the answer is yes, since each language has its own distinctive symbols that serve as the building blocks of reality. Further, they noted that each language has words or expressions not found in any other symbolic system. Finally, all languages fuse symbols with distinctive emotions so that, as multilingual people know, a single idea may “feel” different when spoken in Hindi rather than in Persian or Dutch.

Question 25

Formally, the Sapir-Whorf thesis holds that people see and understand the world through the cultural lens of language.

Answer 25

In the decades since Sapir and Whorf published their work, however, scholars have taken issue with this proposition. One criticism is that if human languages were radically different enough to create distinct realities, translation of various texts and speeches would not be possible. Current thinking is that although we do fashion reality out of our symbols, evidence supports the claim that language does not determine reality in the way Sapir and Whorf claimed. For example, we know that children understand the idea of “family” long before they learn that word; similarly, adults can imagine new ideas or things before devising a name for them.

Question 26

Define values.

Answer 26

Culturally defined standards that people use to decide what is desirable, good, and beautiful and that serve as broad guidelines for social living. People who share a culture use values to make choices about how to live.

Question 27

Values are broad principles that support beliefs. Define beliefs.

Answer 27

Specific thoughts or ideas that people hold to be true.

Question 28

In other words …

Answer 28

Values are abstract standards of goodness, and beliefs are particular matters that people consider true or false. For example, surveys show that 73% of Canadian adults say that they value gender equality and 65% believe that “things would work better” if there were more women in government. Yet, in reality, the proportion of women in the House of Commons was only 26% in 2015, though this number has been increasing ever so slowly in the last decade.

Question 29

Key values of Canadian culture:

Answer 29

1. Democracy and human rights.
2. Health care and the social safety net.
3. Support for the environment.
4. Importance of gender and racial equality.
5. Value of immigration.
6. Support for diversity.
7. Free market and property rights.

Question 30

Values: often in harmony, sometimes in conflict.

Answer 30

In many ways, cultural values go together. For instance, we value immigration and diversity because we see these traits as Canada’s defining characteristics that lead to achievement and success and result in greater material comfort. Sometimes, however, one key cultural value contradicts another. Take the third and last items on the list, for example: People in Canada believe in protecting the environment, yet they also value an economic system that promises endless growth - often at the expense of the environment. Value conflict causes strain and often leads to awkward balancing acts in our beliefs. In such cases, people may simply try to live with the contradictions.

Question 31

Norms.

Answer 31

Middle-class Canadians are reluctant to reveal to others the size of their paycheque, while people in China tend to share such “personal” information eagerly. Both patterns illustrate the operation of norms, rules, and expectations by which a society guides the behavior of its members. In everyday life, people respond to each other with sanctions, rewards, or punishments that encourage conformity to cultural norms.

Question 32

William Graham Sumner, an early U.S. sociologist, recognized that some norms are more important to our lives than others. Sumner coined the term mores to refer to …

Answer 32

Norms that are widely observed and have great moral significance. Certain mores include taboos, such as our society’s insistence that adults not engage in extramarital affairs.

Question 33

People pay less attention to folkways, norms for routine or casual interaction.

Answer 33

Examples include ideas about appropriate greetings and proper dresses. In short, mores distinguish between right and wrong, and folkways draw a line between right and rude. A man who does not wear a tie to a formal dinner party may raise eyebrows for violating folkways or “etiquette.” If, however, he were to arrive at the dinner party wearing only a tie, he would violate cultural mores and invite a more serious response.

Question 34

Finally, other kinds of norms are laws, systems of rules recognized and enforced by governing institutions.

Answer 34

In complex societies, laws are associated with formal legal systems, such as the Criminal Code of Canada. Because they are codified, laws are the most well-defined norms. Laws, however, can also exist in stateless Indigenous cultures, which without writing anything down maintain laws on the basis of custom and tradition.

Question 35

Social control.

Answer 35

Folkways, mores, and laws are the basic rules of everyday life. Although we sometimes resist pressure to conform, we can see that norms make our dealings with others more orderly and predictable. Observing or breaking the rules of social life prompts a response from others in the form of either reward or punishment. Sanctions - whether an approving smile or a raised eyebrow - operate as a system of social control, which means attempts by society to regulate people’s thoughts and behavior. As we learn cultural norms, we gain the capacity to evaluate our own behavior. Doing wrong (say, downloading a term paper from the internet) can cause both shame (the painful sense that others disapprove of our actions) and guilt (a negative judgment we make of ourselves). Of all living things, only cultural creatures can experience shame and guilt. This is probably what Mark Twain had in mind when he remarked that people “are the only animals that blush - or need to.”

Question 36

Ideal and real culture.

Answer 36

Values and norms do not describe actual behavior so much as they suggest how we should behave. We must remember that ideal culture always differs from real culture, which is what actually occurs in everyday life. For example, 38% of Canadians admit to texting in their cars while waiting at a red light, even though nearly 70% believe that doing so is unacceptable. But a culture’s moral standards are important even if they are sometimes broken, calling to mind the old saying, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Question 37

In addition to symbolic elements such as values and norms, every culture includes a wide range of physical human creations called artifacts.

Answer 37

The Chinese eat with chopsticks rather than knives and forks, the Japanese place mats rather than rugs on the floor, and many men and women in Indian prefer following robes to the close-fitting clothing common in Canada. The material culture of people can seem as strange to outsiders as their language, values, and norms.

Question 38

A society’s artifacts partly reflect underlying cultural values.

Answer 38

The warlike Yanomamö carefully craft their weapons and prize the poison tips on their arrows. By contrast, our society’s emphasis on individualism and independence helps explain our high regard for the automobile: We own more than 33.7 million motor vehicles - more than one for every licensed driver.

Question 39

Technology and culture.

Answer 39

In addition to expressing values, material culture also reflects a society’s level of technology, knowledge that people use to make a way of life in their surroundings. The more complex a society’s technology, the easier it is for members of that society to shape the world for themselves.

Gerhard Lenski argued that a society’s level of technology is crucial in determining what cultural ideas and artifacts emerge or are even possible. He pointed to the importance of socio-cultural evolution - the historical changes in culture brought about by new technology - which unfolds in terms of four major levels of development: hunting and gathering, horticulture and pastoralism, agriculture, and industry.

Question 40

Hunting and gathering.

Answer 40

The oldest and most basic way of living is hunting and gathering, the use of simple tools to hunt animals and gather vegetation for food.

Everyone helps search for food, with the very young and the very old doing what they can. Women usually gather vegetation - the primary food source for these people - while men do most of the hunting. Because the tasks they perform are of equal value, the two sexes are regarded as having about the same social importance.

Hunters and gatherers do not have formal leaders. They may look to one person as a shaman, or priest, but holding such a position does not excuse the person from the daily work of finding food.

Question 41

Horticulture and pastoralism.

Answer 41

Horticulture, the use of hand tools to raise crops, appeared around 10,000 years ago.

Pastoralism, the domestication of animals.

In a horticultural society, a material surplus means that not everyone has to produce food; some people are free to make crafts, become traders, or serve as full-time priests. Compared with hunters and gatherers, pastoral and horticultural societies are more unequal, with some families operating as a ruling elite and men increasing their power at the expense of women.

Because hunters and gatherers have little control over nature, they generally believe that the world is inhabited by spirits. As they gain the power to raise plants and animals, however, people come to believe in one God as the creator of the world. The pastoral roots of Judaism and Christianity are evident in the term “pastor” and the common view of God as a “shepherd” who stands watch over all.

Question 42

Agriculture.

Answer 42

Around 5,000 years ago, technological advances led to agriculture, large-scale cultivation using plows harnessed to animals or more powerful energy sources. Agrarian technology first appeared in the Middle East and gradually spread throughout the world. The invention of the animal-drawn plow, the wheel, writing, numbers, and new metals changed societies so much that historians called this era the “dawn of civilization.”

With large food surpluses that can be transported by animal-powered wagons, populations grow into the millions. As members of agrarian societies become more and more specialized in their work, credit, and later on money, is used as a form of common exchange, replacing the previous barter system. Although the development of agrarian technology expands human choices and fuels urban growth, it also makes social life more individualistic and impersonal.

Agriculture also brings about a dramatic increase in social inequality. Most people live as serfs or slaves, but a few elites are freed from labor to cultivate a “refined” way of life based on the study of philosophy, art, and literature. At all levels, men gain pronounced power over women.

Question 43

Industry.

Answer 43

Industrialization occurred as societies replaced the muscles of animals and humans with new forms of power. Formally, industry is the production of goods using advanced sources of energy to drive large machinery. The introduction of steam power, starting in England in about 1775, greatly boosted productivity and transformed culture in the process.

Agrarian people work in or near their homes, but most people in industrial societies work in large factories under the supervision of strangers. In this way, industrialization pushes aside the traditional cultural values that guided family-centered agrarian life for centuries.

Industry also made the world seem smaller. In the 19th century, railroads and steamships carried people across land and sea faster and farther than ever before. In the 20th century, this process continued with the invention of the automobile, the airplane, radio, television, and computers.

Industrial technology also raises living standards and extends the human life span. Schooling becomes the rule because industrial jobs demand more and more skills. In addition, industrial society reduce economic inequality and steadily extend political rights.

It is easy to see industrial societies as “more advanced” than those relying on simpler technology. After all, industry raises living standards and stretches life expectancy to the seventies and beyond - about twice that of the Yanomamö. But as industry intensifies individualism and expands personal freedom, it weakens human community. Industry also has led people to abuse the natural environment, threatening us all. And although advanced technology gives us labor-saving machines and miraculous forms of medical treatment, it also contributes to unhealthy levels of stress and has created weapons capable of destroying in a flash everything that our species has achieved.

Question 44

Post-industrial information technology.

Answer 44

Post-industrialism refers to the production of information using computer technology. Production in industrial societies centers on factories that make things, but post-industrial production centers on computers and other electronic devices that create, process, store, and apply ideas and information.

Question 45

We live in a culturally diverse society.

Answer 45

This diversity is due to Canada’s history of immigration.

Diversity reflects regional differences, and also differences in social class that set off high culture from popular culture.

Question 46

Define high culture.

Answer 46

Cultural patterns that distinguish a society’s elite.

Question 47

Define popular culture.

Answer 47

Cultural patterns that are widespread among a society’s population.

Question 48

Common sense may suggest that high culture is superior to popular culture, but sociologists are uneasy with such judgments for two reasons.

Answer 48

1. Neither elites nor ordinary people share all of the same tastes and interests; people within both categories differ in many ways.
2. Dow we praise high culture because it is inherently better than popular culture or simply because its supporters have more money, power, and prestige?

For example, there is no difference at all between a violin and a fiddle; however, we name the instrument a violin when it is used to produce classical music typically enjoyed by a person of higher position and we call it a fiddle when the musician plays country, folk, or bluegrass tunes appreciated by people with lower social standing.

Question 49

Define subculture.

Answer 49

Cultural patterns that set apart some segment of a society’s population. Hip-hop fans and jocks are two examples of youth subcultures in Canada.

Question 50

Define multiculturalism.

Answer 50

A perspective recognizing the cultural diversity of Canada and promoting equal standing for all cultural traditions.

Developed in reaction to the “melting pot” idea, which was thought to result in minorities losing their identity as they adopted mainstream cultural patterns.

Question 51

Counterculture.

Answer 51

Cultural diversity also includes outright rejection of conventional ideas or behavior. Counterculture refers to cultural patterns that strongly oppose those widely accepted within a society.

Question 52

Cultural lag.

Answer 52

Some elements of culture change faster than others. William Ogburn (1964) observed that technology moves quickly, generating new elements of material culture (things) faster than nonmaterial culture (ideas) can keep up with them. Ogburn called this inconsistency cultural lag, the fact that some cultural elements change more quickly than others, disrupting a cultural system. For example, in a world in which it is possible for a woman to give birth to a child using another woman’s egg, which has been fertilized in a laboratory with the sperm of a total stranger, how are we to apply traditional ideas about motherhood and fatherhood?

Question 53

Causes of cultural change.

Answer 53

1. Invention (e.g. the telephone and computer).
2. Discovery (e.g. the recognition that women are capable of political leadership).
3. Diffusion (e.g. the growing popularity of various ethnic foods and musical styles).

Question 54

Ethnocentrism.

Answer 54

Given that a particular culture is the basis for each person’s reality, it is no wonder that people everywhere exhibit ethnocentrism, the practice of judging another culture by the standards of one’s own culture. Some degree of ethnocentrism is necessary for people to be emotionally attached to their way of life. But ethnocentrism also generates misunderstanding and sometimes even leads to conflict. Take the annual dog meat festival in Yulin, China, which has seen international opposition to its summer solstice celebration. A petition against the festival, which was started in Elliot Lake, Ontario, reached over 4.7 million signatures. As residents of Yulin, however, point out, how is the eating of dog meat any different than the Western practice of eating the flesh of cows, chickens, or pigs? Is it not a measure of ethnocentrism to object to crispy skin dog meat but not rare cow steak.

Question 55

A global culture? Societies now have more contact with one another than ever before, thanks to the flow of goods, information, and people:

Answer 55

1. Global economy: The flow of goods. International trade has never been greater. The global economy has spread many of the same consumer goods - from cars and TV shows to music and fashions - throughout the world.
2. Global communications: The flow of information. The internet and satellite-assisted communications enable people to experience the sights and sounds of events taking place thousands of miles away, often as they happen. Cell phone communication instantly links people all around the world, just as new technology enables text messages written in one language to be delivered in another. In addition, although less than 1/3 of internet users speak English as their first language, most of the world’s Web pages are written in English. This fact helps explain why English is rapidly emerging as the preferred second language around the world.
3. Global migration: The flow of people. Knowing about the rest of the world motivates people to move to where they imagine will be better. In addition, today’s transportation technology, especially air travel, makes relocating easier than ever before. As a result, in most countries, significant numbers of people were born elsewhere, including 21.9% of Canada’s population.

Question 56

Structural-functional theory.

Answer 56

What is the level of analysis?
Macro-level.

What is culture?
Culture is a system of behavior by which members of societies cooperate to meet their needs.

What is the foundation of culture?
Cultural patterns are rooted in a society’s core values and beliefs.

What core questions does the approach ask?
How does a cultural pattern help society operate?
What cultural patterns are found in all societies?

Question 57

Social conflict and feminist theories.

Answer 57

What is the level of analysis?
Macro-level.

What is culture?
Culture is a system that benefits some people and disadvantages others.

What is the foundation of culture?
Marx claimed that cultural patterns are rooted in a society’s system of economic production.

Feminist theory says cultural conflict is rooted in gender.

What core questions does the approach ask?
How does a cultural pattern benefit some people and harm others?

How does a cultural pattern support social inequality?

Question 58

Culture as constraint.

Answer 58

As symbolic creatures, humans cannot live without culture. But the capacity for culture does have some drawbacks. We may be the only animals to name ourselves, but living in a symbolic world means that were are also the only creatures who experience alienation. In addition, culture is largely a matter of habit, which limits our choices and drives us to repeat troubling patterns, such as racial prejudice and sex discrimination, in each new generation.

Our society’s emphasis on competitive achievement urges us toward excellence, yet this same pattern also isolates us from one another. Material things comfort us in some ways but divert us from the security and satisfaction that come from close relationships and spiritual strength.

Question 59

Culture as freedom.

Answer 59

For better or worse, human beings are cultural creatures, just as ants and elephants are prisoners of their biology. But there is a crucial difference. Biological instincts create a ready-made world; culture forces us to make choices as we make and remake a world for ourselves. No better evidence of this freedom exists than the cultural diversity of our own society and the even greater human diversity found around the world.