Sociology Chapter 3: Culture

LO8 How do the major sociological perspectives view society and culture?

A functionalist analysis of culture assumes that a common language and shared values help produce consensus and harmony. According to some conflict theorists, certain groups may use culture to maintain their privilege and exclude others from society's benefits. Symbolic interactionists suggest that people create, maintain, and modify culture as they go about their everyday activities. Postmodern thinkers believe that there are many cultures within the United States alone. In order to grasp a better understanding of how popular culture may simulate reality rather than be reality, postmodernists believe that we need a new way of conceptualizing culture and society.

LO6 How have technological changes affected the culture of a nation and the world?

All parts of culture do not change at the same pace. However, technological change widens a cultural lag between a technical development in a society and the society's moral and legal institutions. The pace of technology modifies people's daily lives, as evident in the spread of information via smart technologies, such as handheld electronic devices and automated jobs.

LO3 What are cultural universals?

Cultural universals are customs and practices that exist in all societies and include activities and institutions such as storytelling, families, and laws. However, specific forms of these universals vary from one cultural group to another.

Functionalist Perspective on Culture

Culture helps people meet their biological, instrumental, and expressive needs.

LO1 What is culture, and why is it important in helping people in their daily life?

Culture is the knowledge, language, values, customs, and material objects that are passed from person to person and from one generation to the next in a human group or society. Culture is essential for our individual survival and our communication with other people.

LO5 What are the differences among folkways, mores, and laws?

Folkways are norms that express the everyday customs of a group, whereas mores are norms with strong moral and ethical connotations and are essential to the stability of a culture. Laws are formal, standardized norms that are enforced by formal sanctions.

Conflict Perspective on Culture

Ideas are a cultural creation of society's most powerful members and can be used by the ruling class to affect the thoughts and actions of members of other classes.

LO2 What is material culture, and what are the four nonmaterial components of culture that are common to all societies?

Material culture consists of physical and tangible creations that members of society make, use, and share. Changes in technology continue to shape the material culture of society. Nonmaterial components of culture are symbols, language, values, and norms.

Postmodern Perspective on Culture

Much of culture today is based on simulation of reality (e.g., what we see on television) rather than reality itself.

Symbolic Interactionist Perspective on Culture

People create, maintain, and modify culture during their everyday activities; however, cultural creations can take on a life of their own and end up controlling people.

LO4 How do symbols and language reflect cultural values?

Symbols express shared meanings; through them, groups communicate cultural ideas and abstract concepts. Language is a set of symbols through which groups communicate. One of our most important human attributes is the ability to use language to share our experiences, feelings, and knowledge with others.

LO7 Explain the importance of culture shock, ethnocentrism, and cultural relativism.

These terms are important for studying culture and for gaining a better understanding of how we relate to other people, whether we may realize it or not. Culture shock refers to the anxiety that people experience when they encounter cultures radically different from their own. Ethnocentrism is the assumption that one's own culture is superior to other cultures. Cultural relativism views and analyzes another culture in terms of that culture's own values and standards. Depending on which of these approaches we use in our views of others and communications with others, we may have quite different outcomes in our social interactions.

cultural lag

William Ogburn's term for a gap between the technical development of a society (material culture) and its moral and legal institutions (nonmaterial culture).

subculture

a category of people who share distinguishing attributes, beliefs, values, and/or norms that set them apart in some significant manner from the dominant culture.

counterculture

a group that strongly rejects dominant societal values and norms and seeks alternative lifestyles.

language

a set of symbols that expresses ideas and enables people to think and communicate with one another.

popular culture

activities, products, and services that are assumed to appeal primarily to members of the middle and working classes.

symbol

anything that meaningfully represents something else.

Which central component of nonmaterial culture is the mental acceptance or conviction that certain things are true or real?

beliefs

Which statement about cultural universals is false? a. A list of over 70 cultural universals has been compiled. b. Cultural universals include appearance, activities, social institutions, and customary practices. c. Sociologists are in agreement that cultural universals are the result of functional necessity. d. Cultural universals may be present in all cultures, but their specific forms vary from one group to another.

c. Sociologists are in agreement that cultural universals are the result of functional necessity.

high culture

classical music, opera, ballet, live theater, and other activities usually patronized by elite audiences.

values

collective ideas about what is right or wrong, good or bad, and desirable or undesirable in a particular culture.

The gap between the technical development of a society and the development of its moral and legal institutions is known as

cultural lag.

Which term refers to the knowledge, language, values, customs, and material objects that are passed from person to person and from one generation to the next?

culture

cultural universals

customs and practices that occur across all societies.

Which statement about values is true? a. Values dictate which behaviors are appropriate and which are not. b. Values are typically stated in terms of what is positive or desirable. c. Values typically remain constant in a culture over time. d. Values are a source of criteria for evaluating people, events, and objects.

d. Values are a source of criteria for evaluating people, events, and objects.

norms

established rules of behavior or standards of conduct.

According to sociologists, _____ is the practice of judging all other cultures by one's own culture.

ethnocentrism.

Which norms may be violated without serious consequences and are often not enforced?

folkways

laws

formal, standardized norms that have been enacted by legislatures and are enforced by formal sanctions.

folkways

informal norms or everyday customs that may be violated without serious consequences within a particular culture.

The physical or tangible creations that members of a society make, use, and share are known as

material culture.

taboos

mores so strong that their violation is considered to be extremely offensive and even unmentionable.

Rock concerts, spectator sports, movies, television soap operas, and situation comedies are all examples of

popular culture.

sanctions

rewards for appropriate behavior or penalties for inappropriate behavior.

mores

strongly held norms with moral and ethical connotations that may not be violated without serious consequences in a particular culture.

According to the __________ perspective, people create, maintain, and modify culture as they go about their everyday activities, thereby continually negotiating their social realities.

symbolic interactionist

nonmaterial culture

the abstract or intangible human creations of society that influence people's behavior.

cultural relativism

the belief that the behaviors and customs of any culture must be viewed and analyzed by the culture's own standards.

culture shock

the disorientation that people feel when they encounter cultures radically different from their own and believe they cannot depend on their own taken-for-granted assumptions about life.

cultural imperialism

the extensive infusion of one nation's culture into other nations.

culture

the knowledge, language, values, customs, and material objects that are passed from person to person and from one generation to the next in a human group or society.

technology

the knowledge, techniques, and tools that allow people to transform resources into usable forms, and the knowledge and skills required to use them after they are developed.

beliefs

the mental acceptance or conviction that certain things are true or real.

material culture

the physical or tangible creations that members of a society make, use, and share.

ethnocentrism

the practice of judging all other cultures by one's own culture.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

the proposition that language shapes the view of reality of its speakers.

value contradictions

values that conflict with one another or are mutually exclusive.