Culture
•
•
•
•
Language:
is the entire way of life for a group of
people including all of their ideas, values,
knowledge, behaviors, and material
objects that they share.
It is a lens through which one views the
world and is passed from one generation
to the next.
It is what makes us human.
It is what shapes and guides people’s
perceptions of reality.
Material Culture
 includes all those things that humans make
or adapt from the raw stuff of nature:
houses, computers, jewelry, oil paintings,
etc (Stick from the forest might be a part of
material culture




Beliefs:
•
•
•
•
Non-Material Culture
•
includes ways of thinking (beliefs, values,
and assumptions) and ways of behaving
(norms, interactions, and communication).
Cultural Universals
•

Religion: system of shared beliefs about
the sacred
Shared ideas people hold collectively
within a culture.
Specific statements that people hold to be
true or false.
Beliefs are the basis for many of a culture’s
norms and values.
Beliefs orient people to the world by
providing answers to otherwise
imponderable questions about the
meaning of life.
Values:
•
Customs and practices that occur across all
societies
Religion:
“private” does not exist as a word in many
languages
Words which describe moral concepts can
be unique to countries or areas
Spoken language precision important in
low-context cultures
Context... more important than spoken
word in high context cultures
•
•
Culturally defined standards by which
people assess desirability, goodness, and
beauty and that serve as broad guidelines
for social living.
Values determine what is considered right
and wrong, beautiful and ugly, good and
bad.
Values can provide rules for behavior, but
can also be the source of conflict.
Education:




Medium through which people are
acculturated
Language, “myths,” values, norms taught
Teaches personal achievement and
competition
Critical to national competitive advantage
Norms:
• Specific cultural expectations for how to
behave in a given situation.
• Norms are expectations for behavior
• A society without norms would be in
chaos; with established norms, people
know how to act, and social interactions
are consistent, predictable, and learnable.
•
Social sanctions are mechanisms of social
control that enforce norms.
Folkways:
•
•
•
•
•
are norms governing everyday behavior
whose violation might cause a dirty look,
rolled eyes, or disapproving comment
Less important rules of society
Violation of rules hurts nobody except the
person breaking the rule
Usually a violation of etiquette or habits
not acceptable to society
Violators are usually ridiculed/made fun of
or people avoid them
Mores:
•
•
•
are norms that are essential to American
Values, close to legalistic.
Attitudes from the past, habituated, very
little deviation allowed
Duties, obligations, common to cultural
morality
Taboos:
 is a norm so strongly ingrained that to
violate it creates disgust, revulsion, horror
- the thought of it makes people sick
 people do not like to acknowledge that it
can occur in their society
 people are usually executed or given long
prison sentences for violations
Laws:

Norms which have been formalized
o written down by legislature or
courts
o punishment told before hand
o can be based on folkway or more
o can be code of law not based on
folkway or more
o folkways tough to enforce of all
laws
Sanctions:
 are positive or negative reactions to the
ways that people follow or disobey norms,
including rewards for conformity and
punishments for norm violators.
 Sanctions help to establish social control,
the formal and informal mechanisms used
to increase conformity to values and
norms and thus increase social cohesion.
Ethnocentrism:
• is a tendency to evaluate and judge the
customs and traditions of others according
to one’s own cultural tastes, beliefs, and
standards
• We learn that the ways of our own group
are good, right, proper, and superior to
other ways
• Ethnocentrism contributes to social
solidarity and a sense of value and
community.
• However, it also fuels conflict.