Sociology test TWO

Culture:

broadly is everything we make and consume

Symbols

material or immaterial objects that groups affix meaning to (often deployed through rituals)

Rituals

routinized and highly important group activities

Material Culture vs. Symbolic Culture

Material: physical goods, often placed in the economic system

symbolic: beliefs, values, language 

Collective representation

Can represent a particular culture, the purpose or function, is to create social order and cohesion 

• College colors, fashion trends

High vs. popular culture

High culture: cultural good made for and enjoyed by elite groups 

• Oil paintings, opera, ballet, fancy cuisine 

Popular culture: heavily produced and commercialized goods made for and consumed by a large audience

Code switching

adopting a set of informal rules and manners that are appropriate in a specific setting 

• Using slang and different clothes to act one way on the streets and another in the classroom 

cultural tool kit

sets of beliefs, values, and attitudes that we learn to use in different situations

Cultural industries

the mass production of cultural goods requires a vast system of people and organization

corporate consolidation

the acquisition of smaller corporations by larger ones

• 6 companies own over 90% of US media 

diversity capital

the practice of corporations like Target and Toyota supporting cultural institutions in order to improve their reputations and imply they value racial diversity 

branding indigenity

investing in cultural institutions focused on Indigenous peoples in order to appear supportive of Indigenous groups 

conspicuous consumption

gaining prestige by exhibiting valuable cultural goods, which implies to others that you are wealthy 

subculture

a group that holds values and engages in activities that separate members from wide society 

• Goth culture 

cultural capital

non-economic resources (knowledge, skills, behaviors) that are useful in a particular sphere of social life 

• Can be institutional, (degree from a university), embody cultural capital (your manner, style, ways of acting), or objectified culture, (your clothes, material objects) 

Fields

contact where a kind of cultural capital is exchanged, like a profession, a community, or a class of people

habitus

Our learned dispositions, a set of trends organizing how we see the world and act within it 

• With little thought, we follow traffic laws when crossing the street 

Status group

A collection of people who share similar characteristics that a community has given a certain level of prestige 

symbolic boundaries

the ways people separate each other into groups (through traditions, styles, tastes, classification)

boundary work

creating and maintaining these distinctions - from defining a friendship group to classifying people as part of the working class - and limiting membership and access to resources 

cultural omnivores

people who differentiate themselves by knowing a lot about many different cultural fields 

• Cowboy carter Beyonce 

Globalization

when values reach such an international scale, integrating political and economic systems 

Rationalization

increased efficiency, predictability, and control

Mcdonalidization

the border trend towards driving out local cultures and replacing them with standardized products 

• This can happen to entire places like NYC

cultural imperialism

the imposition of dominant groups' material and symbolic goods

Cultural Appropriation

when members of a dominant culture adopt the cultural goods (ideal, symbols, skills, expressions, intellectual property) of other groups for profit 

Cultural Jamming

the practice of raising awareness around issues of McDonalization, corporate consolidation, and cultural imperialism 

Global Commodity Chain

the international production distribution and marketing system of corporations, laborers, and consumers 

Sex vs. gender

• Sex: the different biological and physiological characteristics of males and females such as reproductive organs, chromosomes, and hormones 

• Gender: refers to the socially constructed characteristics of women and men, such as norms, roles and relationships among and better groups of women and men 

nature vs. nurture

• Nature: biological influence

• Nurture: social influence 

Gender Norms

social definitions of behaviors assigned to particular sex categories 

The social construction of gender

how meanings of gender are created through social interaction and social norms 

• Teaching, learning, performing

we do gender

perform actions that produce gender 

• Interactions with others, what we believe is appropriate for gender 

• Men were encouraged to “man up”, and  women were encouraged to cross their legs when wearing a dress 

gender binary

the classification system that allows for only separate gender categories 

Androgynous style

incorporating both feminine and masculine characteristics 

• David Bowie

Bathroom Bills

ban trans people from using school or public bathrooms consistent with their gender identity 

Gender affirming care

refers to therapies or treatments, ranging from counseling to medical interventions such as hormone treatments aimed at supporting and affirming an individual's gender identity when it conflicts with the one they were assigned at birth

Intersectionality

how different types of special relations are linked together in complex ways, creating very different experiences for different groups of people.

• Gender, race, class, sexuality, geography, etc. Intersect and interact 

Ethnoculture

cultural influences on the ethnic groups to which we belong 

Gender equality

individuals or groups treated and perceived differently based on their gender 

Eugenics and Buck vs. Bell

Eugenics movement: believes that humanity could be improved by encouraging better people to have more children while decreasing births among the unfit

• Buck vs. Bell: the Supreme Court even held that states had the right to sterilize individuals thought unfit to have children

Glass ceiling

both obvious and invisible barriers to advancement that are faced by women and minorities at work. 

• Restaurant industry, fewer women in computer science 

The motherhood penalty vs. the fatherhood bonus

• The motherhood penalty: the systematic disadvantages in wages, benefits, and other career factors that are associated with motherhood.

• The fatherhood bonus: Fathers’ paychecks sometimes even increase from being a parent.

Aquatintance rape

rape of sexual assualt that occurs between people who already know each other

victim blaming

when survivors are viewed as responsible fort their own assaults

Proxy violence

harming or threatening to harm someone else, like a child, other loved one, or even a pet, if the victim tries to leave

reproductive coercion

forcing parenthood on an unwilling partner through means ranging from vio-lence to contraceptive sabotage (tampering with birth control to make it less effective) 

financial abuse

preventing the vic-tim from working or restricting their access to money they’ve earned

Conservatorship

may be granted by a court when an individual is deemed unable to make their own decisions due to an issue like mental illness or dementia

Androcentric

focusing on the experience of men

Colonialism

one country politically and economically controls the people and resources of another geographical area

The jezebel caricature vs. brute caricature

• The jezebel caricature: portrayed Black wom-en as highly sexual and “lusty

• Brute caricature: portrayed Black men as savage sexual predators

social control

the way we enforce normative behaviors through social interaction, values and worldviews, and laws.

medicalized

a process in which society understands or defines a problem in medical terms.

• Example: erectile disfunction 

Phallocentrism

a worldwide that centers masculinity in both sexual acts and society more broadly 

Abstinence only vs. comprehensive sex education

• abstinence-only sex education: students are taught that absti-nence is expected of them

• Comprehensive sex education: generally “stresses the importance of waiting to have sex” while offering information about how contra-ception works, so students can avoid unwanted pregnancies and sex-ually-transmitted infections

Race

a system that humans created to classify and stratify groups of people based mostly on skin tone and other phenotypic characteristics 

• It is a social construct: a concept that humans invested in and gave meaning to  understand or justify some dimensions of the social world (skin tone as a measure of inequality) 

ethnicity

refers to common culture, religion, history, or ancestry shared by a group of people

• People of different racial groups can belong to the same ethnic group 

Eugenics

the idea that we can actively improve the genetic profile of humans, led to forced sterilization of groups of people labeled as unfit to reproduce

Phenotype

The set of our visible features or characters 

• Like skin color, hair, and eye 

Types of Bias: Implicit, explicitly, and internalized

• Implicit bias: the subconscious positive or negative association in our minds between seemingly unrelated things such as racial groups and positive or negative attribute 

• Explicitly bias: bias that we are openly and consciously aware of 

  • Opening favoring or disfavoring racial groups

• Internalized bias: when a person belonging to a marginalized racial group associates their own group with negative evaluations 

Stereotypes vs. prejudice

• Stereotypes: widely-shared perceptions about the personal characteristics, tendencies, or abilities of members of a particular group, like intelligence, personality, physical features, preferences, aggressiveness of criminality 

  • Example: Irish are rowdy drunks, Asians are studious and good at math 

• Prejudices:  preconceived beliefs, attitudes and opinions about members of a group 

  • Group threat theory:  argues that prejudices grow stronger if we begin to think of another group id we begin to think of another group as an economic-political or cultural threat

Ultimate attribution error

a tendency to perceive undesirable characteristics or behaviors exhibited by members of another group as an innate or inherent part of their personality or essence 

cognitive dissonance

a psychological state in which our preexisting ideas do not match what we see with our own eyes

contact theory

helps explain how interactions with members of other groups affect prejudice 

racial discrimination - negative vs. postive

• Negative racial discrimination: unfavorable and unjust treatment of a person based on their racial group membership 

• Positive discrimination: efforts used to rectify historical and contemporary forms of negative discrimination 

institutional racism

the ways that core institutions, like the law, education, and labor market, are embedded with racial biases and practiced that represent racial inequality

jim crow

a period in American history between the end of Reconstruction (following the Civil War) and the end of the Civil Rights Movement, where various laws were put into place to enforce racial segregation

civil rights movement

 a large-scale, black-led, social movement in the 1950s-60s centered around protest, civil disobedience, and legal battles that laid the groundwork for major advances in voting and civil rights

affirmative action

policies to programs that sought to redress past discrimination through active measures to ensure equal opportunity now

reparations

recognition of compensation (typically financial) for past harm against specific people or groups of people 

immigration selectivity

the process whereby people who immigrate to the US from certain countries have a unique demographic profile compared to the people who stayed behind in their home countries

life expectancy

a statistical measure of how long people can expect to live on average

• The gap between white and black people has been shrinking over time