Shared & human-created strategies for adapting & responding to one’s surroundings (people & creatures)
Can be as vast as US culture or smaller like a family or school
Blueprint that guides & determines behavior
Cultures are learned at birth & passed down from generation to generation.
Material culture –natural & human-created objects which people have assigned a name to & attached a meaning. iPods, cars, clothing, tattoos, trees, diamonds offers clues to how people relate to one another
Nonmaterial culture –intangible human-created actions
Values –shared ideas of right/wrong, good/bad, desirable/necessary
Beliefs – ideas that people accept as true in relation to the world
Norms –rules that specify behavior, thought, & appearance appropriate or inappropriate
Folkways –norms that apply details to everyday life
Mores –norms that people see as essential to well being of a group
Symbols –words, objects, sounds, gestures, or ideas which people assign a name & a meaning.
Language –a symbol system that assigns meaning to sounds, gestures, & specific combinations of letters
Cultural diversity –variety among people who share some physical or virtual space.
Includes cultural capital, objectified cultural capital, embodied cultural capital, institutionalized cultural capital, & cultural anchors.
Subcultures –groups that share in certain parts of the mainstream culture but have distinctive values, norms, beliefs, symbols, language, or material cultural that set them apart in some way
Countercultures –challenge the mainstream culture that surrounds them
Communitarian utopians, mystics, radical activists
Ethnocentrism –point of view which people use their home culture as the standard for judging the worth of another cultures ways.
Culture shock –a mental & physical strain that people experience as they adjust to a new culture.
Reentry shock
Global interdependence –situation where human relationships transcend