Characteristics of Culture - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 27
About This Presentation
Title:

Characteristics of Culture

Description:

Culture is Based on Symbols ... Three Kinds of Cultural Data ... The belief that one's own culture is superior to all others. ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:3738
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 28
Provided by: stacy140
Category:

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: Characteristics of Culture


1
Chapter 14
  • Characteristics of Culture

2
Chapter Outline
  • The Concept Of Culture
  • Characteristics of Culture
  • Studying Culture in the Field
  • Cross-cultural Comparisons
  • Culture and Adaptation
  • Culture, Society, and the Individual
  • Evaluation of CULTURE

3
Culture
  • A societys shared and socially transmitted
    ideas, values, and perceptions, which are used to
    make sense of experience and generate behavior
    and are reflected in that behavior.

4
Characteristics Of Culture
  • Every culture is
  • learned
  • shared
  • based on symbols
  • integrated
  • dynamic

5
Society
  • An organized group or groups of interdependent
    people who share a common territory, language,
    and culture and who act together for collective
    survival and well-being.

6
Enculturation
  • The process by which a societys culture is
    transmitted from one generation to the next and
    individuals become members of their society.

7
Culture is Shared
  • Although culture involves a groups shared
    values, ideas, and, behavior everything within a
    culture is not uniform.
  • In all cultures there is some difference between
    men and womens roles.
  • Anthropologists use the term gender to refer to
    the meanings cultures assign to the biological
    differences between men and women.

8
Gender
  • The cultural elaborations and meanings assigned
    to the biological differentiation between the
    sexes.

9
Subculture
  • A set of standards and behavior patterns by which
    a group within a larger society operates.

10
Ethnic Group
  • People who collectively and publicly identify
    themselves as a distinct group based on cultural
    features such as shared ancestry and common
    origin, language, customs, and traditional
    beliefs.

11
Some Ethnic Groups of the Russian Federation
12
Ethnicity
  • Term, rooted in the Greek word ethnikos
    (nation) and related to ethnos (custom) is
    the expression of the set of cultural ideas held
    by an ethnic group.

13
Pluralistic Society
  • A society in which two or more ethnic groups or
    nationalities are politically organized into one
    territorial state but maintain their cultural
    differences.

14
Culture is Based on Symbols
  • Symbols are signs, sounds, gestures, and other
    things that are arbitrarily linked to something
    else and represent it in a meaningful way.
  • The most important symbolic aspect of culture is
    languageusing words to represent objects and
    ideas.
  • Through language, humans transmit culture from
    one generation to another.

15
Culture is Integrated
  • Anthropologists customarily imagine a culture as
    a well-structured system made up of distinctive
    parts that function together as an organized
    whole.
  • While they distinguish each part as a clearly
    defined unit with its own features,
    anthropologists recognize that divisions between
    cultural units arent clear.
  • They view each unit in terms of its larger
    context and carefully examine its connections to
    related cultural features.

16
Societys Cultural Features
  • A societys cultural features fall within three
    categories
  • Social structure
  • Infrastructure
  • Superstructure

17
Culture is Integrated
18
Infrastructure
  • The economic foundation of a society, including
    its subsistence practices, and the tools and
    other material equipment used to make a living.

19
Social Structure
  • The rule-governed relationshipswith all their
    rights and obligationsthat hold members of a
    society together.
  • This includes households, families, associations,
    and power relations, including politics.

20
Social Structure
  • Rule-governed relationships that hold members of
    a society together, with all their rights and
    obligations.
  • Households, families, associations, and power
    relations, including politics, are all part of
    social structure.
  • It establishes group cohesion and enables people
    to consistently satisfy their basic needs,
    including food.

21
Superstructure
  • A societys shared sense of identity and
    worldview.
  • The collective body of ideas, beliefs, and values
    by which a group of people makes sense of the
    worldits shape, challenges,and opportunitiesand
    their place in it.

22
Culture Is Dynamic
  • Cultures are dynamic systems that respond to
    motions and actions within and around them.
  • To function adequately, a culture must be
    flexible enough to allow adjustments in the face
    of unstable or changing circumstances.
  • When a culture is too rigid and fails to provide
    its members with the means required for long-term
    survival under changing conditions, it is not
    likely to endure.

23
Functions of Culture
  • To survive, a culture must
  • satisfy the basic biological and psychological
    needs of its members
  • provide some structure for reproduction to ensure
    their continuity
  • maintain order among its members as well as
    between its members and outsiders.

24
Three Kinds of Cultural Data
  • Peoples own understanding of their culture and
    the rules they share.
  • The extent to which people believe they are
    observing those rules.
  • Behavior that can be directly observedwhat the
    anthropologist actually sees happening.

25
Culture Change
  • Culture change takes place in response to
    population growth, technological innovation,
    environmental crisis, intrusion of outsiders, or
    modification of values and behavior within the
    culture.
  • Although cultures must change to adapt to new
    circumstances, sometimes the consequences of
    change are disastrous for a society.

26
Ethnocentrism
  • The belief that ones own culture is superior to
    all others.
  • To avoid making ethnocentric judgments,
    anthropologists adopt the approach of cultural
    relativism, which requires that each culture be
    examined in its own terms, according to its own
    standards.

27
Evaluation of Culture
  • We can evaluate a culture based on how well it
    satisfies the needs of those whose behavior it
    guides according to the following factors
  • nutritional status and physical and mental health
  • incidence of violence
  • stability of domestic life
  • the groups relationship to its resource base.
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com