UCSP Culture

• Culture - Is the language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and even material objects that are passed from one generation to the next (Henslin, 2006).
• Culture - Consists of the abstract values, beliefs, and perceptions of the world that lies behind people's behavior and that are reflected by their behavior (Haviland, 1999).
• Material Culture - Jewelries, arts, weapons, clothing and etc.
• Nonmaterial Culture - Beliefs, norms, values and etc.
• Symbolic Culture - Sociologists often refer to nonmaterial culture as symbolic culture, because it consists of the symbol that people use.
• Symbol - Something to which people attach meaning and that they use to communicate. It includes gestures, language, values, norms, sanctions, folkways and mores.
• Gestures - Movements of the body to communicate with others, are shorthand ways to convey messages without using words.
• True - A gesture's meaning may change completely from one culture to another.
• Values - The standards by which people define what is desirable or undesirable, good or bad, beautiful or ugly.
• Norms - expectations of "right" behavior.
• Sanctions - Either expressions of approval given to people for upholding norms or expressions of disapproval for violating them.
• Positive sanction - A reward or positive reaction for following norms, ranging from a smile to a material reward.
• Negative sanction - An expression of disapproval for breaking a norm, ranging from a mild, informal reaction such as a frown to a formal reaction such as a prize or prison sentence.
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - It indicates that rather than objects and events forcing themselves onto our consciousness, it is our language that determines our consciousness, and hence our perception of objects and events.
• Folkways - Norms that are not strictly enforced.
• Taboo - Refers to a norm so strongly ingrained that even the thought of its violation is greeted with revulsion.
• The Elements of Culture - Belief System, Cultural Values, Attitudes.
• Characteristics of Culture - Culture is Learned, Shared, Dynamic and Changing.
• Subculture - The values and related behaviors of a group that distinguish its members from the larger culture; a world within a world.
• Counterculture - A group whose values, beliefs, norms, and related behaviors place its members in opposition to the broader culture.
• Ideal Culture - The ideal values, norms and goals of a people.
• Real Culture - The norms and values that people actually follow.
• Cultural Diffusion - The spread of cultural characteristics from one group to another.
• Cultural Leveling - A process in which cultures become similar to one another.
• Culture Lag - Meant that not all parts of a culture change at the same pace.
• Culture Shock - the disorientation that people experience when they come in contact with fundamentally different culture and can no longer depend on their taken-for-granted assumptions about life.
• Popular Culture - Simply culture that is widely favored or well-liked by many people.
• High Culture - That is shared only by an elite group within the wealthy echelons of society.
• Cultural relativism - Not judging a culture but trying to understand it on its own terms.
• Ethnocentrism - A tendency to use our own group's ways of doing things as a yardstick for judging others.