module 3

Question 1

is culture singular? what does the dictionary show about culture?

Answer 1

• Culture is far from singular
  
  • Dictionary shows that the word culture encompasses a wide range of meanings, including bacterial culture within ecosystems, the process of developing oneself through higher education, and customary beliefs and practices shared by members of the same society

Question 2

define culture?

Answer 2

the sum total of the social environment in which we are raised and continue to be socialized”

Question 3

what is culture comprised of?

Answer 3

• Culture comprises the “stuff” that makes up human societies and includes aspects of nonmaterial culture, such as language, belief systems, and values, and aspects of material culture, such as clothing, food, and technology.

Question 4

define nonmaterial culture?

Answer 4

• nonmaterial culture as “intangibles that are the end product of intellectual and/or spiritual development, or the meanings that people attach to artefacts”

Question 5

what is material culture? is it exclusive?

Answer 5

• material culture as “all of the tangible or physical items that people have created for use”
  
  • material or nonmaterial culture shows that the two are not mutually exclusive.

Question 6

how are blue jeans symbolic?

Answer 6

blue jeans are an item of clothing that transect almost every social category—gender, sexuality, class, race, age, nation, religion, and education—and are therefore a good way to analyze the nuances of culture (p. 1). Following Fiske (1989), many cultural sociologists operate on the same premise—that any item of culture can reveal the workings of that culture.

Question 7

is culture static?

Answer 7

• is that there is no singular objective meaning of culture (in this case, denim) that is ever fully complete or static.

Question 8

3 sections of nonmaterial culture

Answer 8

symbols, language, norms

Question 9

what are symbols? are thet static?

Answer 9

anything that can meaningly represent something else
• Symbols are not static—they change depending on social location, country of origin, and one’s personal association with the symbol.
• Symbols will always change in relationship to the people who see them, and in order to understand the plurality of culture, we must also understand the plurality of meaning affixed to cultural symbols.

Question 10

how is nonmaterial culture valuable?

Answer 10

• material culture yields interesting analysis, sociologists also find value in the components of nonmaterial culture—symbols, language, and norms—for what they can tell us about human interactions and meaning-making activities.

Question 11

what is language? (definition + what its composed of?)

Answer 11

• language is a “shared system of communication that includes spoken, written, and signed forms of speech […] used to convey meaning”
  
  • language is a series of smaller symbols—a, b, c, and so on that come to represent something else

Question 12

3 key ideas about language?

Answer 12

(1) language is not static, (2) language carries power, and (3) language is constitutive (meaning it shapes how we come to think about things).

Question 13

5 ways language changes?

Answer 13

• Origins (English, Chinese, German, Hebrew)
  
  • Dialect (British English is different than Australian English)
  • Era (Old versus new English)
  • Slang (new meanings to old words, for example, “filthy” or “sick”)
  • Addition of new words (for example, “googled” is now considered a verb)

Question 14

how does language carry power?

Answer 14

• Language also carries power in both implicit and explicit ways. Words can have a long and profound impact on our sense of selves, and when these words are culturally sanctioned forms of hate, their effects can be especially detrimental.

Question 15

what is the sapir whorf hypothesis

Answer 15

• A common sense view of language is that it is simply representative—in other words, it simply describes an already-existing reality (for example, “the sun is shining and it is warm outside”). While to some degree this is true (language is used to express shared realities), it also actively shapes how we think about the world. This is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Question 16

what are norms?

Answer 16

• norms are “society’s expectations for how we are supposed to act, think, and look” (Symbaluk & Bereska, 2016, p. 4).

Question 17

what are folkways norms? ex?

Answer 17

Folkways

Informal norms based on accepted traditions (p. 53)

Politeness

Question 18

what are mores norms? ex?

Answer 18

Mores

Institutionalized norms embedded in laws (p. 55)

Distracted driving

Question 19

what are prescriptive norms? ex?

Answer 19

Prescriptive norm

Rules concerning behaviours we are expected to perform (p. 55)

Study for exams

Question 20

what are proscriptive norms? ex?

Answer 20

Proscriptive norm

Rules concerning behaviours we are expected to refrain from (p. 55)

Don’t cheat

Question 21

what is ideal culture?

Answer 21

• “ideal culture encompasses the cultural values that most people identify with, [and] real culture refers to the actual practices engaged in” (Symbaluk & Bereska, 2016, p. 59).

Question 22

what are subcultures?

Answer 22

subcultures as a “group that can be differentiated from mainstream culture by its divergent traits involving language, norms, beliefs and/or values”

Question 23

what is counterculture?

Answer 23

• Counterculture, in contrast, “is a type of subculture that strongly opposes core aspects of the mainstream culture” (Symbaluk & Bereska, 2016, p. 60). The Hells Angels are a good example of a counterculture because they’re centrally organized around criminal activities and lawlessness, values not generally upheld by most Canadians

Question 24

what is high culture? pop culture?

Answer 24

• High culture “refers to activities shared mainly by the social elite
  
  • Popular culture, in contrast, describes the “everyday cultural practices and products that are most desired by the masses”

Question 25

what is ethnocentrism?

Answer 25

• Ethnocentrism is an important sociological concept as it accounts for our own prejudice in judging others. Your text defines ethnocentrism as “the tendency to believe one’s cultural beliefs and practices are superior and should be used as a standard to which other cultures are compared” (Symbaluk & Bereska, 2016, p. 59).

Question 26

2 facets of ethnocentrism?

Answer 26

the first is the assumption that our own cultural practices are superior to others (and not just different), and the second is to assume that our own cultural practices should be the standard from which all other cultural practices are judged (hence the term “ethno” meaning culture, and “centrism” meaning centre).

Question 27

how can ethnocentrism be avoided?

Answer 27

• n order to avoid ethnocentrisms, many argue that we need to adopt cultural relativisms. As defined by your text, cultural relativism “is the perspective that a society’s customs and ideas should be described […] and understood in the context of that society” cultural relativism is the idea that we need to understand cultural practices from the vantage point of the culture in question and not from our own ethnocentric positions.