Transcript Culture - Mohawk College

Culture
Chapter 3
What Is Culture?

Material Culture
 e.g., jewellery, art, buildings,
weapons, and machines

Nonmaterial Culture
 e.g., language, values, and
gestures
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Culture and Take-forGranted Orientations to Life

Ethnocentrism

Cultural Relativism
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Components of Symbolic
Culture
Symbol
 Gestures
 Cultural and national differences

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Gestures to Indicate Height,
Southern Mexico
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Components of Symbolic Culture

Language
 Allows human experience to be
cumulative
 Provides a social and shared past
and future
 Allows for complex, shared, and goaldirected behaviour
 The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
• Language determines our
consciousness, rather than the other
way around
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Values, Norms, & Sanctions

Values
 Ideas about what is desirable in
life

Norms
 Expectations, or rules of
behaviour that develop out of
group’s values
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Values, Norms, & Sanctions

Sanctions
 Reactions to the ways in which
people follow norms
 Positive Sanctions
 Negative Sanctions
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Folkways & Mores
Folkways
 Norms that are not strictly enforced
 Mores (more-rays)
 Norms that we consider essential to
our core values
 Taboo
 A norm so strongly engrained that the
thought of violating it causes
revulsion

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Parenting, Sex, and Teens
(Quebec vs. Rest of Canada)
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Subcultures and
Countercultures

Subcultures
 A world within the larger world of
the dominant culture

Countercultures
 A group whose values and norms
place them in opposition to
mainstream culture
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Values in Canadian Society

Pluralism/Pluralistic Society

Native Peoples in Canada

Value Contradictions and Social
Change
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Values in Canadian Society




Value Clusters: Sets of Values
Emerging Value Clusters in North America
 Leisure
 Self-fulfillment
 Fitness
 Youth
 Concern for the environment
When Values Clash
Americanization of Canadian Values?
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Values

Ideal Culture
 A group’s ideal values and norms
 A group’s goals as they define
them

Real Culture
 The values and norms that the
group actually follows
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Cultural Universals

Are there any cultural values (or other
traits) that are found everywhere?
 Yes. There are universal human
activities (storytelling, marriage,
disposing of the dead)
 No. There are no universal ways of
doing these activities.
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Animals & Culture

Do animals have culture?
 Do they learn, and then pass on
culture to others?
 Do they use tools?
• Modified objects for specific
purposes

Do animals have language?
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Technology in the Global
Village
New technology
 Technology establishes the
framework for nonmaterial culture
 Technological determinism
 Harold Innis
 Marshall McLuhan

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Cultural Lag & Cultural
Change

Nonmaterial culture and material
culture
 Keeping pace?
 e.g., Education and Economy
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Technology & Cultural Levelling
Cultural Diffusion
 Cultural Levelling

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