Culture can be summarized in 3 sentences: Culture is defined as the patterned way of life shared and learned by a group of people, including their beliefs, values, customs, and material objects. It is universal yet varies between groups, as it is influenced by the environment and changes over time through processes like cultural diffusion and lag. A group's culture is expressed through their symbolic systems like language and non-verbal communication which shape their worldview.

1. Define Culture
• The two basic elements of society:
Culture Social Structure
• Definition: a patterned way of life
a symbolic system
It includes the set of practices such as traditions,
customs, rituals, beliefs, values, rules for proper
conducts, and also material objects: all human
creations such as artifacts, building, music, dance,
technology etc.

2. The Characteristics of Culture
• Culture is universal,
learned,
shared,
cumulative,
paradoxical.
• Any behavior or set of behavior that are
biologically determined is NOT cultural
phenomena.

3. Questions for the Movie:
• How did the native Indians give name to a bird?
• Why did native Indians and Europeans build
buildings differently?
• Which place does the narrator call a “wilderness”?
• Why some could native Indians not understand the
concept of “time”
• Based on your understanding of the movie, answer
how cultures were developed,
• why human societies develop different cultures, And
• How cultures change.

4. Components of Culture
• Non material culture: ways of thinking
and acting
Symbolic culture: symbols, languages, gestures, non-verbal communication:
body language
Cognitive culture: values, belief, ideology,
Normative culture: socially expected behavior: norms and sanctions
• Material culture:items such as technology, arts,
clothing etc.
• Relationship between the two:
compatibility and cultural lag

5. Symbolic Culture
• Symbols: something to which people attach meaning
and then is used to communicate.
• Basis of nonmaterial culture
• Elements: Gestures: can facilitate and hinder
communication
• Language: primary means of communication, means
of transmission of experiences, allows culture to
develop, without, human culture could not progress
beyond that of lower primates.
• The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: One’s language
determines how reality is constructed. Also termed as
Linguistic-Relativity Hypothesis

6. Linguistic-Relativity
Hypothesis
• A culture’s language expresses how the
people of that culture perceive and
understand the world, and at the same
time, influence people’s perceptions and
understanding, and even mental process.

7. Normative Culture
• Norms and sanctions: rules for behavior and social response
• Positive sanction: approval for following a norm
• Negative sanction: disapproval for breaking a norm.
• Basic elements:
• Folkways:norms not strictly enforced
• mores: rules concerning the core value of society.
• laws: rules in the form of legal codes, enforced by
government agencies.
• taboos: a strongly ingrained norm, the violation of
which is repugnant (cannibalism)

8. Cognitive Culture: learned ideas
and knowledge
• Values: what is desirable in life
• Ideal value vs real value
• Value cluster: values are not mutually exclusive, some
bound as a “cluster”.
• Value contradiction: some values conflict with other
values. A source for social change.
• Ideologies: Beliefs that are used to justify social
arrangement, rationalize and support the existing
structure. Ideological hegemony
• cultural industry

9. Cultural changes
• Cultural diffusion: the spread of cultural
characteristics from one culture to another.
cultures.
• Cultural leveling: As one part of a culture
changes, the other parts has to follow, cultural
leveling refers to the process by which culture
becomes similar to one another.
• Cultural lag: William Ogburn’s term for a
situation in which nonmaterial culture lags behind
changes in the material culture.
• Cultural shock: the psychological and social
maladjustment many people suffer when they visit
or live in another society.

10. Cultural Variation
• Cultural universals: traits believed to exist in all
cultures
• Culture diversity: cultural elements differ in contents.
•
• Subculture: within one culture, subgroups may have
values, behavioral norms and lifestyles that are different from
the mainstream culture.
• Counterculture: a subculture whose members
consciously and often proudly reject some of the
most important cultural standards of the
mainstream society.
•

11. Ethnocentrism
• Using one’s own cultural standards to
judge other cultures, thinking their own
culture is superior and the only way of life.
• Functions: generate social cohesion,
promote patriotism
• Dysfunctions: cause discrimination,
segregation, conflict, hamper social change

12. Cultural Relativism
• Understanding and appreciating the
differences and understand others in
relation to their environment.
• A challenge to ordinary thinking.

13. Understand Cultures
• The cultural ecological perspective:
• Culture is the means by which people adapt
to their environment. It reflects people’s
perception of their environment.
• Herbert Spencer: human beings
evolved through cultural rather
than biological mutation
to survive.

14. Sociobiology on human social
behavior
• Studies how genetic factors affect
social behavior of human beings.
• Basic argument: certain behaviors
are genetically programmed.(e.g.
incest taboo, mother’s love)