PA 3 Vocab - Culture

Culture - shared values, beliefs, norms and rules, language, symbols, arts and artifacts, and the people's collective identities and memories

Material culture - tangible items

Nonmaterial culture - ideas, attitudes, and beliefs; intangible

Cultural universals - patterns or traits that are globally common to all societies

Ethnocentrism - believing your group's culture is the correct measuring standard/better than all others

Cultural imperialism - the deliberate imposition of one's own cultural values on another culture

Culture shock - the disorientation and frustration people experience when they find themselves in a new culture

Cultural relativism - practice of assessing a culture by its own standards rather than viewing it through the lens of one's own culture

Xenocentrism - the belief that another culture is superior to one's own

Xenophobia - an irrational fear or hatred of different cultures

Value - ideals or principles and standards members of a culture hold in high regard

Belief - the tenets or convictions people hold to be true

Ideal culture - the standards society would like to embrace and live up to

Real culture - the actual behaviors and practices that people in a society exhibit

Social control - ways to encourage conformity to cultural norms or rules

Sanctions - penalty or reward concerning a social norm

Norms - rules of conduct through which societies are structured

Mores (mor-ays) - norms that embody the moral views and principles of a group

Folkways - norms without any moral underpinnings; appropriate behavior in day-to-day practices

Language - a system that uses symbols with which people communicate and through which culture is transmitted

Symbols - create a language used for communication

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - linguistic relativity, language shapes thought and thus behavior, we experience the world through out language

High culture - the pattern of cultural experiences and attitudes that exist in the highest or elite class segments of society

Low culture - the pattern of cultural experiences and attitudes that exist in the lowest class segments of society

Pop culture - the pattern of cultural experiences and attitudes that exist in mainstream society

subculture - a smaller cultural group within a larger culture

counterculture - a cultural group that actively defies larger society by developing their own set of rules and norms to live by (e.g. cults)

innovation - new item is discovered or invented

diffusion - material culture enters and integrates in a culture

globalization - the promotion and increase of interactions between different regions and populations around the globe

culture lag - the time that passes between the introduction of a new item of material culture and its acceptance