APHUG: Culture

• Cultural Relativism

  The practice of assessing a culture by its own standards rather than viewing it through the lens of another culture.
• Ethnocentrism

  The belief in the superiority of one's own culture, often accompanied by a disdain for other cultures.
• Cultural Landscape

  The visible imprint of human activity on the landscape, including buildings, roads, and other modifications.
• Sequent Occupancy

  The notion that successive societies leave their cultural imprints on a place, contributing to the cumulative cultural landscape.
• Ethnic neighborhood

  A neighborhood primarily inhabited by people of the same ethnicity.
• Indigenous community

  A group of people who are the original inhabitants of a region, maintaining their cultural practices and traditions.
• Centripetal force

  A force that tends to unify people and enhance support for a state.
• Centrifugal force

  A force that tends to divide a state and decrease support for a government.
• Relocation diffusion

  The spread of a cultural trait or innovation through the physical movement of people from one place to another.
• Expansion diffusion

  The spread of a cultural trait or innovation in a snowballing process, where it grows in area and influence.
• Hierarchical diffusion

  The spread of an idea or innovation from persons or nodes of authority to other persons or places.
• Stimulus diffusion

  The spread of an underlying principle, even though a specific characteristic is rejected.
• Creolization

  The process by which a new culture emerges from the blending of two or more different cultures.
• Lingua Franca

  A language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different.
• Neocolonialism

  The practice of using economic, political, and cultural pressures to control or influence other countries, especially former dependencies.
• Time-space convergence

  The process by which technological advancements reduce the time it takes to travel or communicate between places.
• Cultural convergence

  The tendency for cultures to become more alike as they increasingly share technology and organizational structures.
• Cultural divergence

  The process by which a culture separates or goes in different directions, often due to isolation or differing influences.
• Universalizing religion

  A religion that seeks to gain followers worldwide and is open to all individuals, regardless of culture or location.
• Acculturation

  The process of cultural change and adaptation that occurs when individuals from one culture come into contact with another culture.
• Assimilation

  The process by which individuals or groups of differing ethnic heritage are absorbed into the dominant culture of a society.
• Appropriation

  The act of taking or using elements from one culture by members of another culture, often without permission.
• Syncretism

  The blending of different beliefs and practices, often resulting in a new cultural expression.
• Language Family

  A group of languages that are related through descent from a common ancestor language.
• Language Branch

  A group of languages within a family that share a more recent common ancestor.
• Folk culture and popular culture have distinctive patterns of origin, diffusion, and distribution.
• Electronic communications and social media facilitate the diffusion of cultural elements.
• Regional variations in folk culture including food, clothing, shelter, arts, and leisure activities can derive from the physical environment as well as from religion and other cultural values.
• Popular culture diffuses primarily through electronic media.
• Many countries limit the ability of their citizens to access electronic media.
• Cyberattacks and other misuse of social media have distinctive distributions of origin and targets.
• Folk culture faces loss of traditional values in the face of rapid diffusion of popular culture.
• Popular culture can produce uniform landscapes, but some popular culture features display greater diversity.
• Languages are classified as institutional, developing, vigorous, in trouble, and dying.
• • Languages are organized into families and branches.
• Eighteen language families are used by at least 7 million people worldwide.
• The Indo-European family has four widely spoken branches.
• The origin and early diffusion of language families such as Indo-European is speculative because these language families existed before recorded history.
• Individual languages, such as English and languages of the Romance branch, have documented places of origin and patterns of diffusion.
• English has become the world’s most important lingua franca, especially in the Internet era.