Week 5
Culture
Instructor: Rabia
Kashif
Learning Objects.
✢ What is culture?
✢ The elements of culture.
✢ Discuss the dimension of cultural
difference and cultural change.
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Culture
Culture includes the ways of
thinking, the ways of acting,
and the material objects that
together form people’s way of
life.
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Culture
✢ Culture shapes not only what we
do but also what we think and
how we feel.
✢ To understand all that culture is,
we must consider both thoughts
and things.
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Culture
✢ Nonmaterial culture is the ideas created by
members of a society.
✢ Material culture is the physical things created by
members of a society.
✢ No particular way of life is “natural” to humanity,
even though most people around the world view
their own behavior that way.
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Cultural Shock
✢ Travelers often feel uneasy as they
enter an unfamiliar culture.
✢ This uneasiness is culture shock.
✢ Culture shock is personal
disorientation when experiencing an
unfamiliar way of life.
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Development of a Culture as a
Human Strategy for Survival.
✢ These are common elements of
culture:
• Symbols
• Language
• Values
• Norms
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Common Elements of
Culture
• Symbols
• Culture relies on symbols in the form of words gestures
and actions to express meaning.
• A symbol is anything that carries a particular meaning
recognized by people who share a culture.
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Symbols
• The fact that different meanings can come to be
associated with the same symbols.
✢ Example:( A wink of an eye) shows the human
capacity to create and manipulate symbols.
• Societies create new symbols all the time
✢ Example: (new computer technology has sparked
the creation of new cyber-symbols)
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Language
• Language is the symbolic system by which people
in a culture communicate with one another.
• People use language both spoken and written to
transmit culture from one generation to the next.
• Because every culture is different each language
has words or expressions not found in any other
language.
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Values
• Values, culturally defined standards that
people use to decide what is desirable, good
and beautiful and that serve as a broad
guidelines for social living.
• Beliefs, specific thoughts or ideas that
people hold to be true.
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Values
• Values: change over time.
• Values: social diversity.
• Values: often in hormone some time in
conflict.
• Values: A global perspective
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Norms
✢ Norms, rules and expectations by which a
society guides the behavior of its member. Rules
that guide human behavior, are two types:
1. Mores, norms that are widely observed and have
great moral significance.
2. Folkways, norms for routine or casual
interaction.
✢ Example: (greetings or dining etiquette).
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Ideal and Real Culture
• Values and norms do not describe
actual behavior so much as they
suggest how we should behave.
• Ideal culture always differs from real
culture, which is what actually occurs in
everyday life.
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Dimensions of
Cultural Differences
and Cultural Change
Subculture
✢ Subculture, cultural patterns that set apart
some segment of a society’s population.
✢ Subculture is based on differences in
interests and life experiences.
✢ Hip-hop fans and jocks are two examples of
youth subculture in the US
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Multiculturalism
✢ Multiculturalism is an effort to enhance
appreciation of cultural diversity.
✢ Multiculturalism developed as a reaction to the
earlier “melting pot” idea which was thought to
result in minorities losing their identity as they
adopted mainstream cultural patterns.
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Counterculture
✢ Counterculture , cultural patterns that
strongly oppose those widely accepted with
in a society.
✢ Counterculture is strongly at odds with
conventional ways of life.
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Cultural change
✢ Cultural change results from :
• Invention, produce new objects, ideas and social
patterns.( Examples include the telephone and
the computer).
• Discovery, occurs when people take notice of
existing elements of the world. ( For example the
recognition that woman are capable of political
leadership).
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Cultural change
✢ Diffusion, creates change as products,
people and information spread from
one society to another.
✢ ( For example the growing popularity of
various ethnic foods and musical
styles).
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Cultural Lag
✢ Cultural lag, results when some parts of a
cultural system change faster than others.
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Ethnocentrism
✢ Ethnocentrism, the practice of judging
another culture by the standards of
one’s own culture.
✢ Ethnocentrism links people to their
society but can cause
misunderstanding and conflict between
societies.
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Cultural Relativism
✢ The practice of judging a culture by its own
standards.
✢ Cultural relativism, is increasingly important
as people of the world come into more
contact with each other.
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