androcentricism
A perspective in which male concerns, male attitudes, and male practices are presented as “normal” or define what is significant and valued in a culture.
Androcentricism is a perspective in which male concerns, male attitudes, and male practices are presented as “normal” or define what is significant and valued in a culture.
beliefs
Tenets or convictions that people hold to be true.
If culture refers to the beliefs, artifacts, and ways of life that a social group shares, a society is a group that interacts within a common bounded territory or region.
commodity
An object, service, or good that has been produced for sale on the market.
The commodity is simply an object, service, or a “good” that has been produced for sale on the market.
commodity fetishism
Regarding commodities as objects with inherent qualities independent of the labour that produced them or the needs they were designed to satisfy.
Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) called this phenomenon commodity fetishism (1867).
commodification
The process through which objects, services, or goods are turned into commodities.
Commodification is the process through which objects, services, or goods are increasingly turned into commodities.
consumerism
The tendency to define ourselves in terms of the commodities we purchase.
Two contemporary modes of culture as restriction can be seen in the processes of rationalization and consumerism.
counterculture
A group that rejects and opposes society’s widely accepted cultural patterns.
Sociologists distinguish subcultures from countercultures, which are a type of subculture that explicitly reject the larger culture’s norms and values.
cultural imperialism
The deliberate imposition of one’s own cultural values on another culture.
In reality, these travellers are guilty of cultural imperialism — the deliberate imposition of one’s own cultural values on another culture.
cultural relativism
The practice of assessing a culture by its own standards, and not in comparison to another culture.
During his time with the Inuit, Barger learned to engage in cultural relativism.
cultural universals
Patterns or traits that are globally common to all societies.
Cultural universals are patterns or traits that are globally common to all societies.
culture
Shared beliefs, values, and practices.
This example reflects a broader theme in the culture of food and diet.
culture lag
The gap of time between the introduction of material culture and nonmaterial culture’s acceptance of it.
Laws about online privacy still trail far behind smartphone technology, an example of culture lag.
culture shock
An experience of personal disorientation when confronted with an unfamiliar way of life.
Eventually, as people learn more about a culture, they recover from culture shock.
detournement
The conscious subversion of messages, signs, and symbols by altering them slightly.
Internet memes — images that spread from person to person through reposting — often adopt the tactics of detournement or misappropriation used by the French Situationists of the 1950s and 1960s.
diaspora
The dispersion of a people from their original homeland.
As cultural diasporas or emigrant communities begin to introduce their cultural traditions to new homelands and absorb the cultural traditions they find there, opportunities for new and unpredictable forms of hybrid culture emerge.
diffusion
The spread of material and nonmaterial culture from one culture to another.
The integration of world markets and technological advances of the last decades have allowed for greater exchange between cultures through the processes of globalization and diffusion.
discoveries
Things and ideas found from what already exists.
It might seem that science is about discoveries and chemical reactions or about proving hypotheses about elementary particles right or wrong rather than about exploring the nuances of human behaviour.
ethnocentrism
Evaluating another culture according to the standards of one’s own culture.
Such attitudes are an example of ethnocentrism, or evaluating and judging another culture based on how it compares to one’s own cultural norms.
folkways
Norms based on social preferences that direct appropriate behaviour in the day-to-day practices and expressions of a culture.
Norms may be further classified as mores, folkways, or taboos.
formal norms
Established, written rules.
Laws are formal norms, but so are employee manuals, college entrance exam requirements, and no running at swimming pools.
geneticism
A form of biological determinism that suggests the qualities of human life are caused by genes.
The claim that a single “gay gene” determines sexual orientation is an example of geneticism.
globalization
The integration of international trade and finance markets.
Local cultural forms have the capacity to restrain the changes produced by globalization.
high culture
Forms of cultural experience characterized by formal complexity, eternal values, or intrinsic authenticity.
People often associate high culture with intellectualism, aesthetic taste, elitism, wealth, and prestige.
hybridity
New forms of culture that arose from cross-cultural exchange in the aftermath of the colonial era.
Hybridity in cultures is one of the consequences of the increased global flows of capital, people, culture, and entertainment.
ideal culture
The standards a society would like to embrace and live up to.
Values portray an ideal culture, the standards society would like to embrace and live up to.
informal norms
Casual behaviours that are generally and widely conformed to.
There are plenty of formal norms, but the list of informal norms — casual behaviours that are generally and widely conformed to — is longer.
innovation
New objects or ideas introduced to a culture for the first time.
The significant point is that while diet is a response to the fundamental conditions of biological life, diet is also a tremendous site of innovation and diversity.
invention
Combining pieces of existing reality into new forms.
Through a multiplicity of cultural inventions, human societies have adapted to the environmental and biological conditions of human existence in many different ways.
iron cage
Max Weber’s metaphor for the modern condition of life circumscribed by the demand for maximum efficiency.
The modern subject in the iron cage is essentially a narrow specialist or bureaucrat, “only a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march” (Weber, 1922).
language
A symbolic system of communication.
As the philosopher Martin Heidegger put it, humans live in an “openness” granted by language and by their ability to respond to the meaningfulness of things in a way that other living beings do not.
material culture
The objects or belongings of a group of people.
As physical objects they belong to material culture, but because they function as symbols, they also convey nonmaterial cultural meanings.
mores
Norms based on social requirements which are based on the moral views and principles of a group.
Norms may be further classified as mores, folkways, or taboos.
nonmaterial culture
The ideas, attitudes, and beliefs of a society.
Nonmaterial culture, in contrast, consists of the knowledge and beliefs, forms of communication, and norms of behaviour of a society.
norms
The visible and invisible rules of conduct through which societies are structured.
(You would be doing what sociologists call a “breaching experiment” in ethnomethodology: deliberately disrupting social norms in order to learn about them.)
popular culture
Mainstream, widespread patterns among a society’s population.
Many misconceptions exist in popular culture about what a gene actually is or what it can do.
postmodern culture
The form of culture that comes after modern culture characterized by the playful mixture of forms and “incredulity towards metanarratives”.
Contemporary popular culture is frequently referred to as a postmodern culture.
real culture
The way society really is; based on what actually occurs and exists.
But ideal culture differs from real culture, the way society actually is, based on what occurs and exists.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
The idea that people understand the world based on their form of language.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is based on the idea that people experience their world through their language and that they, therefore, understand the world through the culture embedded in their language.
sanctions
A way to authorize or formally disapprove of certain behaviours.
Nor does it explain the universal tendencies of all societies to develop sanctions and norms to curtail violence.
social control
A way to encourage conformity to cultural norms.
Sanctions are a form of social control, a way to encourage conformity to cultural norms.
society
The structure of a social group of people who interact within a definable territory and who share a culture.
This raises the distinction between the terms “culture” and “society” and how sociologists conceptualize the relationship between them.
socioeconomic formation
The concrete set of social structures that form around a specific mode of production or economic system.
While cultural practices are in some respects always a response to biological givens or to the structure of the socioeconomic formation, they are not determined by these factors.
subculture
A group that shares a specific identity apart from a society’s majority, even as the members exist within a larger society.
A subculture is just as it sounds—a smaller cultural group within a larger culture.
symbol
Gestures or objects that have meanings associated with them that are recognized by people who share a culture.
Culture refers to the shared symbols that people create to solve real-life problems.
taboos
Strong prohibitions based on deeply held sacred or moral beliefs.
Norms may be further classified as mores, folkways, or taboos.
values
A culture’s standard for discerning desirable states in society (what is true, good, just, or beautiful).
In reality, these travellers are guilty of cultural imperialism — the deliberate imposition of one’s own cultural values on another culture.
These terms were extracted from Introduction to Sociology – 2nd Canadian Edition by William Little, eCampusOntario (originally published by BCcampus, 2016) which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Based on Introduction to Sociology by OpenStax (© 2013 Rice University), licensed under CC BY 3.0.