Unit 3: Chapter 4 Vocab

Question 1

Culture

Answer 1

The sum total knowledge, attitudes, and habitual behavior patterns shared and transmitted by the members of a society. This is anthropologist Ralph Linton’s definition; hundreds of others exist

Question 2

Folk Culture

Answer 2

Cultural traits such as dress modes, dwellings, traditions, and institutions of usually small, traditional communities

Question 3

Popular Culture

Answer 3

Cultural traits such as dress, diet, and music that identify and are part of today’s changeable, urban-based, media-influenced western societies

Question 4

Local Culture

Answer 4

Group of people in a particular place who see themselves as a collective or a community, who share experiences, customs, and traits, and who work to preserve those traits and customs in order to claim uniqueness and to distinguish themselves from others

Question 5

Material Culture

Answer 5

The art, housing, clothing, sports, dances, foods, and other similar items constructed or created by a group of people

Question 6

Nonmaterial Culture

Answer 6

The beliefs, practices, aesthics, and values of a group of people

Question 7

Hierarchical Diffusion

Answer 7

A form of diffusion in which an idea or innovation spreads by passing first among the most connected places or peoples. An urban hierarchy is usually involved, encouraging the leap-frogging of innovations over wide areas, with geographic distance a less important influence

Question 8

Hearth

Answer 8

The area where an idea or cultural trait originates

Question 9

Assimilation

Answer 9

The process through which people lose originally differentiating traits, such as dress, speech particularities, or mannerisms, when they come into contact with another society or culture. often used to describe immigrant adaptation to new places of residence

Question 10

Custom

Answer 10

Practice routinely followed by a group of people

Question 11

Culture Appropriation

Answer 11

The process by which cultures adopt customs and knowledge from other cultures and use them for their own benefit

Question 12

Neolocalism

Answer 12

The seeking out of the regional culture and reinvigoration of it in response to the uncertainty of the modern world

Question 13

Commodification

Answer 13

The process through which something is given monetary value. Occurs when a good or idea that previously was not regarded as an object to be bought back and sold is turned into something that has particular price and then can be traded in a market economy

Question 14

Authenticity

Answer 14

In the context of local cultures or customs, the accuracy with which is a single stereotypical or typecast image or experience conveys an otherwise dynamic and complex local culture or its customs

Question 15

Distance Decay

Answer 15

The effects of distance on interaction, generally the greater the distance the less interaction

Question 16

Time-space Compression

Answer 16

A term associated with the work of David Harvey that refers to the social and psychological effects of living in a world in which time-space convergence has rapidly reached a high level of intensity

Question 17

Reterritorialization

Answer 17

With respect to popular culture, when people within a place start to produce an aspect of popular culture themselves, doing so in the context of their local culture and making it their own

Question 18

Cultural Landscape

Answer 18

The visible imprint of human activity and culture on the landscape. The layers of buildings, forms, and artifacts sequentially imprinted on the landscape by the activities of various human occupants

Question 19

Placelessness

Answer 19

Defined by geographer Edward Relph as the loss of uniqueness of place in the cultural landscape so that one place looks like the next

Question 20

Global-local Continuum

Answer 20

The notion that what happens at the global scale has a direct effect on what happens at the local scale, and vice versa. This idea posits that the world is comprised of an interconnected series of relationships that extend across space

Question 21

Glocalization

Answer 21

The process by which people in a local place mediate and alter regional, national, and global processes

Question 22

Ethnic Neighborhood

Answer 22

Neighborhood, typically situated in a larger metropolitan city and constructed by or comprised of a local culture, in which a local culture can practice its customs