topic 2

• Society - group of individuals that share common culture, geographic location, and government. inclined to establish societies to acquire survival skills, maximize potential, and share resources
• E.B. Taylor’s concept of society - “complex whole encompasses beliefs, practices, values, attitudes, laws, norms, artifacts, symbols, knowledge and everything that a person learns and shares as a member of society.”
• characterized by following:

  1. Social solidarity, members of community live together for mutual benefit
  2. Shared identity and culture among members that serves as basis for their patterns of action and behavior;
  3. Common language;
  4. Large population and the ability to sustain succeeding generations of members
  5. Definite geographical area
  6. Political, economic and social organization
• culture - define and influence a society, a set of beliefs, ideas, values, practices, knowledge, history, shared exp., attitudes, and material possessions through the generations
• Enculturation learning one’s own culture
• • Acculturation learning another’s culture
• components of culture:

  • Technology  - combination of objects and tules
  • Symbols - represents something else: basis of human culture
  • Language organization of written or spoken symbols into a standardized system 
  • Values shared beliefs, determines their character 
  • Norms shared rules of Conduct 
  • Folkways - norms that describe socially acceptable behavior but do not have any great moral significance attached to them
  • Mores - great norms that have moral significance attached to them that when violated endangers society (e.g dishonesty, killings)
• culture

  material - consists of tangible things

  non-material - intangible things
• Aspects of Culture

  1. Dynamic, flexible, and adaptive
  2. Shared and contested (social differentiation)
  3. Learned through socialization or enculturation
  4. Patterened social interactions
  5. Integrated and at times unstable
  6. Transmitted through socialization/enculturation
  7. Requires language and other forms of communication
• Culture is..

  • Varied, diverse and hold similarities
  • Cultural universals are common traits or elements among cultures
  • Cultural particulars are different ways to express universals
  • Subculture is part of dominant group that differs from it in different aspects
  • Counterculture is a subculture deliberately and consciously opposed to certain central beliefs of dominant culture
• Culture is learned through enculturation and socialization

  • Enculturation - process of acquiring and internalizing culture
  • Socialization - learning and accepting social behavior, beliefs, norms and language
• Society functions and maintains social order through social interaction
• Patterns of Social Interaction

  1. Exchange
  2. Cooperation
  3. Competition
  4. Coercion
  5. Conflict
• Ethnocentrism diminishes or invalidates other ways of life and creates a distorted view of one’s own. Affects individual behavior and relationships with other cultures.
• • William Howard Taft referred Filipinos as Americans’ “little brothers”
• • Cultural Relativism recognizes and accepts cultural differences between societies