Unit 4: Culture: Vocabulary

Question 1

Folk culture

Answer 1

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

Question 2

Popular (pop) culture

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Cultural appropriation

Answer 3

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

Question 4

Material culture

Answer 4

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

Question 5

Nonmaterial culture

Answer 5

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

Question 6

Placelessness

Answer 6

(Edward Relph) The loss of uniqueness of place in the cultural landscape so that one place looks like the next

Question 7

Survey systems

Answer 7

Systems that are used to collect data

Question 8

Culture

Answer 8

The sum total of the knowledge, attitudes, and habitual behavior patterns shared and transmitted by the members of a society

Question 9

Acculturation

Answer 9

The exchange of cultural features that results when groups come into continuous first-hand contact

Question 10

Adaptation

Answer 10

Adjusting to a translation based on the cultural environment of the target language

Question 11

Assimilation

Answer 11

The process by 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 (certain aspects of their culture are discontinued because their new environment is not conducive to them).

Question 12

Cultural convergence

Answer 12

Contact and interaction of one culture and another

Question 13

Cultural divergence

Answer 13

The separation of cultures through lessening contact between them; the restriction of a culture from outside influences

Question 14

Cultural complex

Answer 14

A related set of cultural traits, such as prevailing dress codes and cooking and eating utensils

Question 15

Cultural realm

Answer 15

The entire region that displays the characteristics of a culture

Question 16

Culture regions

Answer 16

A portion of Earth’s service occupied by a population sharing recognizable and distinctive cultural traits

Question 17

Diffusion

Answer 17

The spatial spreading or dissemination of a culture element (such as technological innovation) or some other phenomenon (e.g. a disease outbreak). Dissemination can occur through expansion (continuous growth), contagious diffusion (one by one), hierarchical diffusion (begins between persons in power), or stimulus diffusion (introduction of a cultural trait from another place)

Question 18

Expansion (diffusion)

Answer 18

The spread of an innovation or an idea through the population in an area in such a way that the number of those influenced grows continuously larger, resulting in an expanding area of dissemination.

Question 19

Relocation (diffusion)

Answer 19

Sequential diffusion process in which the items being diffused are transmitted by their carrier agents as they evacuate the old areas and relocate to new ones. The most common form of this involves the spreading of innovation by a migrating population

Question 20

Global-local continuum

Answer 20

The notion that what happens at a global scale has a direct effect on what happens at the local scale, and vice versa

Question 21

Innovation adoption

Answer 21

The diffusion of new ideas/the study of how, why, and at what rate new technology spreads throughout a culture