Self and Society: Culture, Place, Socialization, and Genetic Determinism

Comprehensive practice flashcards defining core vocabulary, scholarly perspectives, and theoretical models across culture, place and memory, socialization of selfhood, and genetic determinism.

Culture (Matthew Arnold, 1867)

Culture defined as aesthetics or special intellectual or artistic endeavors or products, commonly described as "high culture."

Culture (Edward Tylor, 1870)

That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society; arrayed along an evolutionary continuum from "savagery" through "barbarism" to "civilization."

Culture (Franz Boas, Early 1900s)

A scientific conceptualization of culture that emphasizes the uniqueness of the varied cultures of peoples or societies, asserting that there is no high or low culture and no savage or civilized peoples.

Culture (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952)

Explicit and implicit patterns of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts.

Three Levels of Uniqueness in Human Mental Programming (Hofstede, 1994)

A triangular model defining human mental programming across three tiers: Human Nature (universal and inherited at the base), Culture (learned and specific to a group or category in the middle), and Personality (inherited, learned, and specific to the individual at the top).

Three Levels of Culture (Schein, 1984)

A framework identifying three layers of cultural depth: visible artifacts and creations, values held with a greater level of awareness, and taken-for-granted, invisible basic underlying assumptions.

Ethnicity

A social group affiliation referring to peoples who share language, historical origins, religion, identification with a common nation-state, or cultural system, defined by Eitzen and Zinn (1991) as "the condition of being culturally rather than physically distinctive."

Socially Ascribed Status

A social position or identity assigned to an individual based on characteristics such as ethnicity or birth, as opposed to an achieved social status earned through effort or mobility.

Sense of Place

An experiential orientation rooted in the body and senses, acquired through both knowledge of a location and its sensory feel comprising experiences, sights, sounds, smells, and rhythms.

Place Formation

The psychological and phenomenological process by which physical space is transformed into place: $\text{Space} + \text{Experience} + \text{Memory} + \text{Meaning} + \text{Attachment} \rightarrow \text{Place}$.

Collective Memory

Shared, socially constructed understandings of places, streets, buildings, historical events, and community narratives that contextualize personal life histories.

Memory-Self Discontinuity

The principle that the current self who remembers is not identical to the past self being remembered.

Displacement in Place

The condition where individuals remain physically in the same geographic location while environmental, demographic, or social transformations around them alter and fracture their sense of belonging.

Home (bell hooks)

An existential reality that exists both as a physical locale and as a set of practices entangled with the materiality of place, emerging from physical space while functioning as a construct of the imagination.

Socialization

The interactive project through which children are named, categorized, addressed, praised, corrected, and taught societal norms long before they can articulate who they are.

Relational Emergence of the Self

The sociological principle that the self is neither purely located inside the individual nor solely imposed by external institutions, but emerges through an ongoing interaction between self and others.

Engendering

The pervasive developmental and social project starting at birth that funnels, socializes, and categorizes an individual into the socially established gender binary.

Social Lens

An internalized perspective by which an individual learns to imagine how others perceive them, anticipate social reactions, and evaluate their own behavior and identity.

Affirmative Response to Gender Non-Conformity

A caregiving approach characterized by a willingness to accompany a child on their self-directed gender journey, remaining attuned to the child's cues, and validating their authentic gender expression.

Biological Influence

The empirical scientific principle that genes and physiological processes contribute to human growth, health, and development without acting as absolute determinants.

Genetic Determinism

The reductionist worldview asserting that genes are the decisive explanation for complex human characteristics, behaviors, and social inequality, captured by the slogan "Biology is destiny."

Eugenics (C.B. Davenport, 1910)

A movement originally named by Francis Galton ("truly or purely born") and defined by C.B. Davenport as "the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding" through controlling Mendelian inheritance.

Dual Objectives of the American Eugenics Movement

The twofold program of the movement: (1) a scientific research agenda to track inheritance patterns of social traits, and (2) a social action program to educate the public and enact restrictive social legislation.

The Eugenics Tree

A historical allegorical illustration portraying eugenics as "the self direction of human evolution," which draws foundational materials from roots like genetics, anthropology, geography, and sociology to form a harmonious whole.

Polygenic Inheritance

The biological reality that complex human behavioral and cognitive traits, such as intelligence, are influenced by many interacting genes rather than determined by single Mendelian traits.

Epigenetics

The field of biological study demonstrating that environmental factors, such as diet and stress, alter gene expression without mutating the underlying DNA sequence.