Ch 3 - Culture

• Culture: language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviours, and even material objects that characterise a group and are passed down from generation to generation.

→ Material culture: material objects that distinguish a group of people. (art, weapons, artifacts)

→ Non-material culture: a group’s beliefs, way of thinking, assumptions of the world, and their actions. (language, behaviour) → Symbolic culture

→ Without culture, we would not know who we are. It determines what type of person we become. (sense of identity). %%Culture is the lens through which we perceive and evaluate what is going on around us.%% \n

• Culture shock: the disorientation that people experience when they come in contact with a fundamentally different group of people and can no longer depend on their granted assumptions about life.

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What is Ethnocentrism?

• A tendency to use one’s own culture as a measure for judging the ways of other individuals/societies

William Sumner (1906) developed this concept

→ positive effects (creates in group loyalties

→ negative effects: can lead to discrimination

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• Cultural Relativism: not judging but we can try to understand a culture on its own terms

→ looking at all parts of a culture without judgement

→ suspend your own beliefs to understand the perspective of others

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• Symbolic Culture: non-material culture

→ consists of all the symbols that people use.

• A Symbol is something which people attach meaning to + they use to communicate with each other.

→ gestures, language, values, norms. Language allows culture to exist

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Characteristics of culture:

1. Culture is shared: a group of people agree that a specific tradition represents their culture best, and it is followed by many generations. It is strongly kept in households as it connects people to their ancestors and heritage.
2. Culture is learned: As we grow up, the people we surround ourselves by teach us the many wonders of identity and culture. This can be direct, or indirect through observation of other family members
3. Culture is symbolic: the reason why people hold culture to such high standard is that it is personal to them. However, it can produce conflict between people who interpret them differently.
4. Culture varies across time and place: as humans develop, do does culture in order to adapt to the physical and social environment around them. It is not fixed to one place

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Elements of Culture:

• Values: standards by which people assign a label to. They are abstract standards in a society or group that define ideal principles.

  → values tend to decide what is desirable and morally correct

• Norms: rules of behaviour that develop out of a group’s value

  → are the specific cultural expectations of how to behave in a given situation

  → Norms can be implicit and unspoken, as they are a part of society’s customs

  → Can also be explicit when the rules governing behaviour are written down or formally communicated

• Social Sanctions: reactions people receive for following/breaking norms. Mechanisms of social control that enforce folkways, norms, and mores

→ Positive sanctions: approval for following a norm

→ Negative sanctions: disapproval for breaking a norm

• Folkways: norms that are not strictly enforced, are the general standards of behaviour adhered to by a group

• Mores: norms which are essential to our core values

  → strict norms that control moral and ethical behaviour, and can be upheld through laws. Laws can be described as formalised mores

• Taboo: a norm strongly ingrained that its violation is greeted with revulsion. These are behaviours that are bring the most serious sanctions

  → disobeying cultural rules is very frowned upon

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• Ethnomethodology: theoretical framework in sociology based on the idea that you can discover the normal social order through disrupting it.

  → this technique studies how people respond when social norms are deliberately disrupted, this revealing the ordinary social order

  → The ordinary social order can often be unspoken, but is understood by many people within a society.

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• Dominant culture: is the culture of the most powerful group in society

  → is done by social institutions in a society legitimizing a culture, while other cultures do not share the same degree of legitimacy

• Subculture: are culture groups whose values and norms of behaviour differ to some degree from those of the dominant culture

• Counterculture: are subcultures created as reaction against the values of the dominant culture

  → This stems when members of a society refuse to adhere to culture norms and follow society’s rules

• Global culture: diffusion of a single culture throughout the world

  → This occurs when members of a society share their culture with the world through capitalism, thus making their culture prominent in society

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• Mass media: channels of communication that are available to wide segments of the population

→ TV, Social media, film, video…

• Popular Culture: the beliefs, practices, and objects that are part of everyday traditions, which are mass-marketed and produced for the masses.

  → this has a huge impact on the nation’s culture

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