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)