Culture, Race & Ethnicity Flashcards

Culture, Race & Ethnicity

A. Culture

1. What is Culture?

• According to E. B. Tylor, culture is “the complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities acquired by man as a member of society.”

1.1 Culture Is Learned

• Enculturation is the process of learning the cultural rules and logic of a society, beginning at birth.
• Forms and types of learning may be explicit or implicit.

1.2 Culture Uses Symbols

• Symbols (verbal, non-verbal, or written) often provide cultural stability.
• Symbols are used to make something intangible tangible.
• The recognition and analysis of symbols lead to an “interpretive theory of culture” (Clifford Geertz, 1973), where anthropologists understand the meanings behind symbols in daily life.

1.3 Cultures Are Dynamic

• Cultures are not static.
• They comprise an interrelated set of social, economic, and belief structures.
• Anthropologists focus on power relations and inequality in cultural processes.
• A cross-cultural perspective shows 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 societal rules.

1.5 Culture Shapes Everybody’s Life

• Everyone has culture.
• Cultures are more noticeable when they differ from what we are familiar with.
• In the United States, minorities, immigrants, and others differing from white middle-class norms 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 participate in social groups and collectively “build” meanings through common experience and negotiation.
• A “construction” derives from past collective experiences and common responses to goals and problems.

Cultural Understanding Involves Overcoming Ethnocentrism

• Anthropologists practice cultural relativism, interpreting another culture using their goals, values, and beliefs rather than our own.
• Critical Relativism: Anthropologists do not necessarily accept and defend all practices (not equivalent to moral or ethical relativism).

What Is Culture?

• Culture involves the collective processes through which people in social groups construct and naturalize certain meanings and actions as normal and necessary.
• Culture is not a coherent system of symbolic beliefs that people “have” or “carry.”
• Culture is emergent and unstable, responding to innovation, creativity, and struggles over meaning.

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 and can differ in meaning to different populations.
  • Symbols can change, but they remain particularly stable, are easily remembered, and preserve a culture’s conventional meanings.

Values

• Values tend to conserve a society’s dominant ideas about morality and social issues.
• They typically change more slowly than other aspects of culture.

Norms

• Norms remain stable because people learn them early and society encourages conformity.
• They usually go unnoticed until violated.

Traditions

• Traditions are usually assumed to be timeless.
• The notion that things have always been a certain way makes challenging traditions difficult.

3. How Do Social Institutions Express Culture?

• Culture feels stable because it is expressed and reinforced by social institutions, which are organized sets of social relationships linking individuals in a structured way. These include:
  • Economic activities
  • Patterns of kinship and marriage
  • Political forms
  • Religious institutions

Functionalism

• Cultural practices and beliefs perform functions for societies, explaining how the world works and organizing people into roles.
• Social institutions function together to keep society functioning smoothly and minimize social change.

Holism

• Functionalism has left the legacy of the holistic perspective.
• This tool helps show interrelationships among different domains of a society.

4. Can Anybody Own Culture?

• Nobody can own “the collective processes that make the artificial seem natural.”
• Conflicts arise over claims to the exclusive right to use symbols that give culture power and meaning.

B. Race, Ethnicity, and Class

5. Is Race Biological?

• Categories and strategies used in stratified societies to uphold social order are constructed and dynamic.
• The medication BiDil was developed for and tested only on African Americans and approved by the FDA in 2005.
• The drug would likely be equally effective for anyone because human hearts do not come in distinct “types” correlating with skin color.

Naturalization

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

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, and any lines designating “races” are arbitrary.

Race Is Biologically Meaningless (but Real!)

• Race has biological and cultural consequences.
• Discrepancies in rates of disease and life span 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.
• Between the 1920s and 1950s, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo promoted an official policy of “blanquismo” or “whitening” of the population.

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

• In the earliest days of European colonies in North America, Africans were not viewed as racially inferior.
• In 1676, a class rebellion spurred by poor workers and indentured servants led leaders to divide people along color lines to control people and prevent future rebellions.

Races Are Not Discrete

• “Races” can and do mix.
• Any male and female from anywhere on the planet can mate and produce viable offspring.

Race in Latin America

• Racial categories are constructed differently in different cultural contexts.
• Latin America was colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese, who lived among Africans and Native Americans without restrictions on sexual contact.
• Historically, there have been a greater number of “races” throughout Latin America, where they were more fluidly constructed.

Saying “Race Is Culturally Constructed” Is Not Enough

• Racial groupings involve discrimination, exploitation, stigma, and privilege.
• “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 to justify social hierarchies.
• “Race” and “ethnicity” are sometimes used interchangeably but have different meanings.
• Ethnicity means having common descent. Members emphasize familial metaphors and shared “blood,” establishing group identity.

Class: Economic Hierarchy in Capitalist Society

• Hierarchical distinctions are based on wealth, occupation, and social standing.
• The socioeconomic “accident of birth” has consequences for education, occupation, class mobility, and residence.
• Historically, Americans equated lower socioeconomic status with biological inferiority.

Caste: Moral Purity and Pollution

• Westerners use the term “caste” to refer to the Indian system, split into varna and jati.
• Based on Hindu texts, varna is the hierarchy of Brahmans (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (traders), and Shudras (artisans and servants).
• Below these are the so-called untouchables.

Caste Change

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

8. Are Prejudice and Discrimination Inevitable?

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

Explicit and Disguised Discrimination

• Explicit discrimination is easier to identify because it makes no effort to hide and is an accepted norm in institutions and laws.
• 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

• Unearned privilege is the most disguised aspect of discrimination.
• Peggy McIntosh (1997) sees having light skin pigmentation as an unearned privilege.
• Fighting discrimination requires the recognition and efforts of both those who are discriminated against and those who aren’t.