culture

culture

why is culture essential to our survival, what is common to all cultures, and how they vary?

what is culture?

a culture is a design for living, or more precisely, that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, moral, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by the human being as a member of society

society & culture compared

society consists of people interacting with one another in a patterned, predictable way

culture consists of:– abstract ideas that influence people (nonmaterial

culture)– tangible, human made objects that reflect those

ideas (material culture)

nonmaterial culture

cognitive component: knowledge and beliefs

normative component: norms and values

symbolic component: signs and language

cognitive

culture help us to develop certain knowledge and beliefs about what goes on around us

knowledge is a collection of ideas and facts about our physical and social worlds, which are relatively objective, reliable, or verifiable

beliefs are ideas that are more subjective, unreliable or unverifiable

normative

each culture has its own idea not only about what is important in the world but also how people should act

values are socially shared ideas about what is good, desirable or important

these shared ideas are usually the basis of a society’s norms, rules that specify how people should behave

norms

folkways – norms that are rather trivial, relatively weak, only expecting us to behave properly in our everyday lives

mores – insist that we behave morally, and violations of such norms will be severely punished

why do values have power over our behavior?

our parents, teachers, and other socializing agents teach us our society’s values so that we will feel it is right and natural to obey its norms

values contain an element of moral persuasion

values carry implied sanctions against people who reject them

symbolic

a symbol is a language, gesture, sound or anything that stands for some other thing.

symbols enable us to create, communicate and share, and transmit to the next generation the other components of culture

it is through symbols that we get immersed in culture and in the process become fully human

symbols : its characteristics

arbitrary: a word may mean whatever a group of humans have agreed it is supposed to mean

open system: we can blend and combine symbols to express whatever ideas come into our heads; we can create new messages, and the potential number of messages that we can send is infinite

nonverbal communication

kinesics: body language; the use of body movement as means of communication

proxemics: the use of space as a means of communication – unless someone violates what we consider our personal space

the power of language: sapir-whorf hypothesis

human beings live at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium expression for their society

language predisposes us to the see the world in a certain way

evolution & culture

according to the theory of natural selection, the biological characteristics of every species change over the generations and evolutionary change takes place in either of the following situations:– physical environment changes– a species move to a new environment– competition among species

evolution & culture

humans today are the product of a tremendously long process of evolution – and that caused us to lose nearly all our instincts – biologically fixed traits that enable the carrier to perform complex tasks

the loss of instincts has made us more dependent on each other, but the development of culture has also loosened our bondage to the natural environment

cultural universals

cultural universals – point of similarities in all cultures, i.e., need for clothing, complex communication, social order and esthetic and spiritual experiences are basic necessities of human social life

ethnocentrism

ethnocentrism: an attitude that our own culture is superior to other people’s, i.e. we think that the way we live is right and that other people’s way of life are wrong, uncivilized, or unnatural

ethnocentrism: is so powerful, it is bound to make us extremely biased against other cultures and to distort our observation of what they are really like

cultural relativism

It involves judging a culture on its own terms, i.e. since the terms of the culture – the participants’ perceptions, feelings, or viewpoints – are either completely or largely known to outsiders, social scientists usually try to become insiders so as to understand the native’s point of view

ecological perspective

attributes cultural variations to differences in the natural environment

humans must adapt to their environment to survive and they adapt through their cultures

functional perspective

explains cultural practice by referring to its function for the society as a whole

key terms

belief: an idea that is relatively subjective, unreliable, or unverifiable counterculture: a subculture whose norms and values sharply

contradict those the larger society but which is basically not illegal or criminal

cultural relativism: evaluating other cultures in their own terms, with the result of not passing judgment on them

cultural universal: a practice that is found in all cultures as a means for meeting the same human need

deviant subculture: a subculture whose values are in conflict with those of the dominant culture and which tends to be illegal or criminal

ethnocentrism: the attitude that one’s own culture is superior to that of others

folkways: weak norms that specify expectations about proper behavior

key terms

instincts: fixed traits that are inherited and enable the carrier to perform complex tasks

kinesics: use of body movements as a means of communication knowledge: a collection of relatively objective ideas and facts about

physical and social world laws: norms that are specified formally in writing, and backed by the

power of the state material culture: all the physical objects produced by humans as

members of society mores: strong norms that specify normal behavior and constitute

demands, not just expectations natural selection: process in which organisms that are well-adapted

to their environment have more offspring that the less well-adapted, thereby producing evolution

key terms

nonmaterial culture: norms, values, and all the other intangible component of culture

norm: a social rule that directs people to behave in a certain way proxemics: perception and use of space as a means of

communication sanction: formal or informal rewards for conformity to norms, or

punishments for violation of norms subculture: a culture within a larger culture symbol: a thing that stands for some other thing value: a socially shared idea that something is good, desirable or

important variable subculture: a subculture that is different from but

acceptable to the dominant culture