Week 3: CULTURE

1. Week 3: CULTURE

2. Culture is the ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together form a people's way of life. It includes what we think, how we act, and what we own • Culture refers to both thoughts (nonmaterial culture) and things (material culture) • Nonmaterial culture is the ideas created by members of a society, ideas that range from art to Zen. Material culture, by contrast, is the physical things created by members of a society, everything from armchairs to chopsticks • Culture shapes not only what we do but also what we think and how we feel • Culture shock is personal disorientation when experiencing an unfamiliar way of life (inability to read meaning in strange surroundings)

3. No way of life is 'natural' to humanity; humans create their own way of life • Only humans rely on culture rather than instinct to create a way of life and ensure our survival (Harris, 1987; Morell, 2008) • With homo sapiens, the biological forces we call instincts had mostly disappeared, replaced by a more efficient survival scheme: fashioning the natural environment for ourselves

4. Culture refers to a shared way of life; a nation is a political entity, a territory with designated borders; society is the organised interaction of people who typically live in a nation or some other specific territory The Elements of Culture • Symbols: anything that carries a particular meaning recognised by people who share a culture (they vary within a single society) • Language: the key to the world of culture, is a system of symbols that allows people to communicate with one another. It not only allows communication but is also the key to cultural transmission, the process by which one generation passes culture to the next

5. Values and beliefs:values are culturally defined standards that people use to decide what is desirable, good, and beautiful and that serve as broad guidelines for social living. Values are what people who share a culture use to make choices about how to live • Values are broad principles that support beliefs, specific thoughts or ideas that people hold to be true • Values are abstract standards of goodness, and beliefs are particular matters that individuals consider true or false • Values vary from culture to culture around the world • Lower-income nations develop cultures that value survival (physical safety, economic security) • People in higher-income countries develop cultures that value individualism and self-expression

6. Norms: rules and expectations by which a society guides the behaviour of its members • Norms operate as a system of social control, attempts by society to regulate people's thoughts and behaviour • High culture refers to cultural patterns that distinguish a society's elite and popular culture designates cultural patterns that are widespread among a society's population • Subculture refers to cultural patterns that set apart some segment of a society's population • Multiculturalism is a perspective recognising the cultural diversity and promoting equal standing for all cultural traditions • Eurocentrism is the dominance of European (especially English) cultural patterns

7. Counterculture refers to cultural patterns that strongly oppose those widely accepted within a society (May 1968, hippies, militant groups) • Cultural integration is the close relationships among various elements of a cultural system • Ethnocentrism is the practice of judging another culture by the standards of one's own culture • The logical alternative to ethnocentrism is cultural relativism, the practice of judging a culture by its own standards • The functionalist approach explains culture as a complex strategy for meeting human needs, it considers values the core of a culture • Criticism: by emphasising a society's dominant cultural patterns, this approach ignores the cultural diversity that exist in many societies, it downplays the importance of change

8. The social-conflict approach stresses the link between culture and inequality • Culture is shaped by a society's system of economic production • “It is not the consciousness that determines human beings; it is the the social being that determines the consciousness.” (Marx & Engels, 1978: 4) • Criticism: this approach understates the ways that cultural patterns integrate members of society • How the culture of society (if you have lived in another country) differs from the way of life here • Röyksopp - You don't have a cluehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0kDUXGkywk