Chapter 3, Culture
Key Terms

material culture
All physical objects that people have borrowed,
discovered or invented and to which they have
attached meaning.

nonmaterial culture
Intagne creations or things that we cannot
identify directly thought seems.

beliefs
Conceptions that people accept as true,
concerning how the world operates and where
the individual fits in relationship to others.

values
General, shared conceptions of what is good,
right, appropriate, worthwhile and important
with regard to conduct, appearance and states
of being.

norms
Written and unwritten rules that specify
behaviors appropriate and inappropriate to a
particular social situation.

folkways
Norms that apply to the mundane aspects or
details of daily life.

mores
Norms that people define as essential to the
well-being of a group.

denotation
A literal definition.

connotation
The set of associations that a word evokes.

idiom
A group of words that when taken together,
have a meaning different from the internal
meaning of each word understood on its own.

social emotions
Internal bodily sensation that we experience in
relationships with other people.

feeling rules
Norms that specify appropriate ways to
express internal sensations.

diffusion
The process by which an idea, an invention, or
some other cultural item is borrowed from a
foreign source.

culture shock
The strain that people from one culture
experience when they must reorient
themselves to the ways of a new culture.

reentry shock
Culture shock in reverse; it is experienced
upon retiring home after living in another
culture.

ethnocentrism
A view point that uses one culture as the
standard for judging the worth of foreign ways.

cultural genocide
A form of ethnocentrism in which the people of
one society define the culture of another
society not as merely offensive, but as so
intolerable that they attempt to destroy it.

reverse ethnocentrism
A type of ethnocentrism in which the home
culture is regarded as inferior to a foreign
culture.

cultural relativism
The perspective that foreign culture should not
be judged by the standards of a home culture
and that a behavior or way of thinking must be
examined in its cultural context.

subcultures
Groups that share in some parts of the
dominant culture but have their own distinctive
values, norms, language or material culture.

institutionally complete
Subcultures whose members do not interact
with anyone outside their subculture to shop for
food, attend school, receive medical care, or
find companions because the subculture
satisfies those needs.