The Basics
The cultural patterns that differentiate a society's elite.
What is high culture?
The tendency to view one's own cultural or ethnic group as superior.
What is ethnocentrism?
The shared beliefs, or values, and the human behaviors that support these values within a given society
What are cultural norms?
Something that is not acceptable to talk about or do and is seen as excessively repulsive, offensive, sacred, or allowed only for certain people.
What is a taboo?
The set of practices, beliefs, and objects that embody the most broadly shared meanings of a social system. It includes media objects, entertainment, leisure, fashion, and trends.
What is popular culture?
Concepts, social constructs, traits, cultural elements, or patterns of behavior that are common to all known human cultures worldwide.
What are cultural universals?
A symbolic system through which people communicate and through which culture is transmitted.
What is language?
A set of rules and regulations based on cultural and social norms that are policed by the state.
What are laws?
A group within a society whose behaviors, norms, and values differ in some distinct ways from the dominant culture.
What is a subculture?
The theory of multiculturalism assumes that various immigrant groups will tend to “melt together,” abandoning their individual cultures and eventually becoming fully assimilated into the predominant society.
What is the melting pot theory?
The nonphysical ideas that people have about their culture, including beliefs, behaviors, values, rules, norms, morals, and language that contribute to a society's overall culture.
What is non-material culture?
Anything that stands for or represents something else.
What are symbols?
A set of moral norms or customs derived from generally accepted practices. These come from the established practices of a society rather than its written laws.
A culture within a larger culture that deliberately challenges or rejects the dominant culture's behaviors, beliefs, lifestyle, norms, and values.
What is a counter-culture?
The ways in which a society tries to regulate, enforce, and encourage conformity to norms.
What is social control?
A widely accepted pattern of behavior that is unique to a specific society, location, or time and followed by members of a particular culture, for example, shaking hands upon meeting someone.
What is a custom?
An ideal or principle that determines what is good and bad, right and wrong.
What are values?
Behaviors that are learned and shared by a social group that we often refer to as “customs” in a group that are not morally significant, but they can be important for social acceptance.
What are folkways?
The transmission or movement of ideas, attitudes, meanings, values, and cultural products around the world.
What is globalization?
The process by which a person's or group's culture come to resemble those of another group.
What is cultural assimilation?
The disorientation experienced when people come into contact with a fundamentally different culture.
What is culture shock?
The physical objects, resources, and spaces that people use to define their culture.
What is material culture?
A way to enforce rules through rewards for positive behavior and punishments for negative behavior.
What are sanctions?
The spread of cultural elements due to the interaction among people from different cultures.
What is cultural diffusion?
The idea that some aspects of culture change more slowly than others.
What is cultural lag?