Chapter 2: Culture and Construction

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms and concepts related to culture, social construction, socialization, and sociological research from Chapter 2.

Social construct

An influential and shared interpretation of reality that will vary across time and space.

Social construction

The process by which we layer objects with ideas, fold concepts into one another, and build connections between them.

Signifiers

Things that stand for other things.

Categories

Subsets of things that we believe are sufficiently similar to one another to be considered the same.

Binaries

Categories we see as opposites or otherwise in opposition.

Associations

Ideas that have nothing special in common except for the fact that they are connected by a third idea.

Sequences

Ideas arranged into a specific chronological order.

Hierarchies

Ideas placed into ranked relationships.

Symbolic structure

A constellation of social constructs connected and opposed to one another in overlapping networks of meaning.

Culture

A wide-ranging word that encompasses most of the things about people that vary from place to place.

Cultural objects

Items given symbolic meaning or natural resources extracted and molded to serve cultural purposes.

Cultural cognitions

Shared ideas and values.

Cultural practices

Habits, routines, and rituals that people frequently perform.

Cultural bodies

Culturally influenced shapes and sizes, capacities, and physiological processes.

Social learning

The transmission of knowledge and practices from one individual to another via observation, instruction, or reward and punishment.

Dual inheritance theory

The idea that our genetic evolution influences our cultural evolution and vice versa.

Socialization

Learning how to be in social worlds by acquiring the norms, beliefs, values, and practices of different groups in societies through communication from others.

Subcultures

Subgroups within societies that have distinct cultural ideas, objects, practices, and bodies.

Cultural beliefs

Ideas about what is true and false.

Cultural values

Notions as to what is right and wrong.

Cultural norms

Shared expectations for behavior within a setting or in society.

Interpersonal socialization

Active efforts by others to help us become culturally competent members of our cultures.

Self-socialization

Active efforts to ensure we are culturally competent members of our cultures.

Social ties

The connections between us and other people.

Social networks

Webs of ties that link us to each other and, through other people's ties, to people to whom we are not directly linked.

Social media

Social networks mediated by the internet.

Homophily

Our tendency to connect with others who are similar to us.

Social network analysis

A research method that involves the mapping of social ties and exchanges between them.

Media socialization

The process of learning how to be culturally competent through our exposure to media.

Mass media

Mediated communication intended to reach not just one or a handful of people but many.

Embodied

Physically present and detectable in the body itself.

Cultured physiques

Bodies formed by what we do to and with them.

Biosocial research methods

Tools of sociological inquiry that investigate relationships between sociological variables and biological ones.

Culture-as-value thesis

The idea that we are socialized into culturally specific moralities that guide our feelings about right and wrong.

Culture-as-rationale thesis

The idea that we are socialized to know a set of culturally specific arguments with which we can justify why we feel something is right or wrong.

Ethnocentrism

The practice of assuming that one's own culture is superior to the cultures of others.

Cultural relativism

The practice of noting the differences between cultures without passing judgment.