Core Elements of Culture
the knowledge, language, values, customs, and material objects that are passed from person to person and from one generation to the next in a human group or society.
Culture
formal, standardized norms that have been enacted by legislatures and are enforced by formal sanctions.
Laws
activities, products, and services that are assumed to appeal primarily to members of the middle and working classes.
Popular Culture
the practice of judging all other cultures by one’s own culture.
Ethnocentrism
a set of symbols that expresses ideas and enables people to think and communicate with one another.
Language
the mental acceptance or conviction that certain things are true or real.
Beliefs
strongly held norms with moral and ethical connotations that may not be violated without serious consequences in a particular culture.
Mores
a category of people who share distinguishing attributes, beliefs, values, and/or norms that set them apart in some significant manner from the dominant culture.
Subculture
the extensive infusion of one nation’s culture into other nations.
Cultural Imperialism
anything that meaningfully represents something else.
Symbol
established rules of behavior or standards of conduct.
Norms
informal norms or everyday customs that may be violated without serious consequences within a particular culture.
Folkways
a group that strongly rejects dominant societal values and norms and seeks alternative lifestyles.
Counterculture
values that conflict with one another or are mutually exclusive.
Value Contradictions
the knowledge, techniques, and tools that allow people to transform resources into usable forms and the knowledge and skills required to use them after they are developed.
Technology
the physical or tangible creations that members of a society make, use, and share.
Material Culture
mores so strong that their violation is considered to be extremely offensive and even unmentionable.
Taboos
classical music, opera, ballet, live theater, and other activities usually patronized by elite audiences.
High Culture
the disorientation that people feel when they encounter cultures radically different from their own and believe they cannot depend on their own taken-for-granted assumptions about life.
Culture Shock
William Ogburn’s term for a gap between the technical development of a society and its moral and legal institutions.
Cultural Lag
the abstract or intangible human creations of society that influence people’s behavior.
Nonmaterial Culture
rewards for appropriate behavior or penalties for inappropriate behavior.
Sanctions
customs and practices that occur across all societies.
Cultural Universals
the belief that the behaviors and customs of any culture must be viewed and analyzed by the culture’s own standards.
Cultural Relativism
the proposition that language shapes the view of reality of its speakers.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis