Culture, Race & Ethnicity Flashcards

Culture, Race & Ethnicity

A. Culture

1. What is Culture?

• Definition (E.B. Tylor): Culture is the complex whole including knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities acquired by man as a member of society.

1.1 Culture Is Learned

• Enculturation: The process of learning cultural rules and logic begins at birth.
• Learning forms can be explicit or implicit.

1.2 Culture Uses Symbols

• Symbols can be verbal, non-verbal, or written and provide cultural stability.
• Symbols make the intangible tangible.
• Interpretive Theory of Culture (Clifford Geertz, 1973): Anthropologists analyze symbols to understand meanings in daily life.

1.3 Cultures Are Dynamic

• Cultures are not static; they comprise interrelated social, economic, and belief structures.
• Power relations and inequality are important in cultural analysis.
• Cross-cultural perspectives show the flexibility and plasticity of the human species.

1.4 Culture Is Integrated with Daily Experience

• Values and beliefs are shaped by integrated elements of life experience.
• What is considered “normal” is constructed by society's rules.

1.5 Culture Shapes Everybody’s Life

• Everyone has culture, whether they realize it or not.
• Cultures are more noticeable when they differ from the familiar.
• In the United States, minorities and immigrants are often viewed as “people with culture”.

1.6 Culture Is Shared

• For a thought or action to be cultural, it must be shared.
• People collectively build meanings through common experience and negotiation in social groups.
• Constructions derive from past collective experiences and responses to common goals and problems.

Cultural Understanding Involves Overcoming Ethnocentrism

• Cultural Relativism: Interpreting another culture using their values and beliefs rather than one's own.
• Critical Relativism: This does not equate to moral or ethical relativism and isn't cultural determinism.

Definition of Culture

• Collective processes through which people in social groups construct and naturalize certain meanings and actions as normal or necessary.
• Culture is emergent and unstable, responding to innovation, creativity, and struggles over meaning.

Anthropological Perspective

• Consider individuals and influences responsible for enculturation.
• Differentiate between explicit and implicit teachings.

2. If Culture Is Always Changing, Why Does It Feel So Stable?

• Societies function smoothly when cultural processes feel natural and stable.
• Stabilization occurs via:
  • Symbols
  • Values
  • Norms
  • Traditions

Symbols

• Symbols are arbitrary.
• Symbols remain stable, are easily remembered, and preserve conventional meanings.

Values

• Conserve a society’s dominant ideas about morality and social issues.
• Change more slowly than other aspects of culture.

Norms

• Remain stable because they are learned early and society encourages conformity.
• Often unnoticed until violated.

Traditions

• Assumed to be timeless.
• Challenging traditions is difficult due to the notion that things have always been a certain way.

3. How do Social Institutions Express Culture?

• Culture is expressed and reinforced by social institutions.
• Social institutions are organized sets of social relationships linking individuals in a structured way.
• Examples include:
  • Economic activities
  • Patterns of kinship and marriage
  • Political forms
  • Religious institutions

Functionalism

• Associated with Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown.
• Cultural practices and beliefs perform functions for societies.
• Social institutions function together to keep society functioning smoothly and minimize social change.

Holism

• Methodological tool showing interrelationships among different domains of a society.

4. Can Anybody Own Culture?

• Nobody can own the collective processes that make what's artificial seem natural.
• Conflicts arise over claims to exclusive rights to use symbols that give culture power and meaning.

B. Race, Ethnicity, and Class

5. Is Race Biological?

*Categories used in stratified societies are constructed and dynamic.

• The medication BiDil was developed for and tested on African Americans only.
• The drug would likely be equally effective for anyone because human hearts do not come in distinct “types” that correlate with skin color.

Naturalization

• Since the eighteenth century, scientists have tried to divide human variability into races.
• Racial typologies often share a fundamental flaw: there are no diagnostic genes or genetic traits that belong to only one “racial” group and no others.

Race as Adaptation?

• An adaptational approach to race links physical traits with the environment.
• There is a general correlation between latitude and skin pigmentation.
• The strength of the adaptational approach is that it identifies actual biological patterning.
• The weakness is that skin pigmentation varies along a continuum, so lines designating races are arbitrary.

Race Is Biologically Meaningless (but Real!)

• Race has biological and cultural consequences.
• Discrepancies in disease rates and life span between racial groupings can be attributed to racism and discrimination.

6. How Is Race Culturally Constructed?

• Cultural processes make the artificial seem natural.
• This is true of race.
• Ideas about race are learned.
• A primary cause is racialization.
• Rafael Trujillo promoted a policy of “whitening” of the population in the Dominican Republic.

When (and Why) Did “Race” Become So Important?

• In early European colonies, Africans were not initially viewed as racially inferior.
• Class rebellion spurred by poor workers led to dividing people along color lines as a means of control.

Races Are Not Discrete

• Races can and do mix.
• Any male and female can mate and produce viable offspring.

Race in Latin America

• Racial categories are constructed differently in different cultural contexts.
• Latin America had a greater number of races due to less restriction of sexual contact between different groups.

Saying “Race Is Culturally Constructed” Is Not Enough

• Racial groupings come with discrimination, exploitation, stigma, and negative biological outcomes.
• “Race” is not a stand−alone concept.
• It goes hand in hand with prejudicial attitudes and a repressive social order.

7. How Are Other Social Classifications Naturalized?

• Ethnicity, class, and caste may be naturalized like race to justify social hierarchies.
• “Race” and “ethnicity” are sometimes used interchangeably, but have different meanings.

Ethnicity

• Having common descent.
• Members emphasize familial metaphors and shared “blood,’ establishing group identity.

Class

• Economic hierarchy in capitalist society.
• Hierarchical distinctions are usually based on wealth, occupation, and social standing.
• The socioeconomic “accident of birth” has profound consequences.
• Americans once equated lower socioeconomic status with biological inferiority.

Caste

• Moral purity and pollution.
• Westerners use the Portuguese term “caste” to refer to the Indian system, divided into varna and jati.
• Varna is the hierarchy of Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras.

Caste Change

• Many Indians promote the decline of the caste hierarchy via democracy and affirmative action programs.
• Legislation against discrimination and the end of everyday discrimination are different things.

8. Are Prejudice and Discrimination Inevitable?

• Most forms of prejudice are acquired as part of enculturation.
• Learned behavioral patterns can be unlearned.

Explicit and Disguised Discrimination

• Explicit discrimination is easily identified and accepted.
• Disguised discrimination may live on beyond the official end of its explicit source.
• Anthropology has a strong history of standing up against discrimination.

Unearned Privilege

• The most disguised aspect of discrimination.
• Light skin pigmentation in the United States grants unearned privilege.
• Fighting discrimination requires recognition and efforts of both those who are discriminated against and those who aren’t.