Sociology Key Words Chapter 2

Front 1

culture

Back 1

the way of life of a people. it includes the shared and human-created strategies for adapting and responding to one's surroundings. cannot exist without society

Front 2

society

Back 2

a group of interacting people who share, pass on, and create culture.

Front 3

what are some challenges of describing a culture?

Back 3

1.describing a culture
2.determining who belongs to a culture
3.identifying the distinguishing markers that set one culture apart from others

Front 4

cultural universals

Back 4

things that all cultures have in common

Front 5

culture as a blueprint

Back 5

culture shapes, guides, and determines behavior

Front 6

cultural particulars

Back 6

include the specific practices that distinguish cultures from one another

Front 7

social emotions

Back 7

feelings we experience as we relate to other people, such as empathy, grief, love, guilt, jealousy, and embarrassment

Front 8

material culture

Back 8

-all of the physical objects to which the people of a group have an assigned meaning. they can be natural or synthetic, invented, borrowed, discovered, practical or fanciful.

Front 9

non-material culture

Back 9

intangible human creations that include beliefs, values, and norms

Front 10

beliefs

Back 10

conceptions that people accept as true concerning how the world opperates and the place of the individual in relationship to others.

Front 11

values

Back 11

general, shared conceptions about what is good, right, desirable, or important.

Front 12

Norms

Back 12

written and unwritten rules that specify behaviors appropriate and inappropriate to a particular social situation

Front 13

folkways

Back 13

norms that apply to the mundane aspects or details of daily life. typically can be broken without much issue

Front 14

mores

Back 14

norms that people define as essential to the well-being of a group. they are serious behavioral contraints that are usually made into laws and usually affect more than 1 person. harmony among the society depends on them

Front 15

symbols

Back 15

anything to which people assign a name and a meaning

Front 16

language

Back 16

a symbol system that assigns meaning to particular sounds, gestures, pictures, or specific combination of letters

Front 17

linguistic relativity hypothesis

Back 17

sapir-whorf hypothesis. no two languages are similar enough to represent the same social reality

Front 18

cultural diversity

Back 18

the cultural variety that exists among people who find themselves sharing some physical or virtual space

Front 19

subcultures

Back 19

in every society there are groups that share in certain parts of mainstream culture but have distinctive values, norms, beliefs, symbols, language, and or material culture that sets them apart in someways

Front 20

countercultures

Back 20

subcultures that challenge, contradict, or reject those of the mainstream culture

Front 21

what are the three broad categories of countercultures?

Back 21

1. communitarian utopians
2. mystics
3. radical activists

Front 22

communitatran utopians

Back 22

withdraw into a separate community where they can live with minimum interference from the larger society (amish)

Front 23

mystics

Back 23

"search for truth in themselves" and in the process turn away from society and towards themselves (monks)

Front 24

radical activists

Back 24

preach, create, or demand a new order with new obligations to others

Front 25

ethnocentrism

Back 25

the opinion that your culture is the best culture

Front 26

reverse ethnocentrism

Back 26

the opinion that your culture isn't as good as other cultures. typical for cultures that idealize other cultures as utopias

Front 27

cultural relativism

Back 27

an antidote to ethnocentrism.
means that foreign culture should not be judged by the standard of the home culture, and that a behavior must be examined in its cultural context

Front 28

culture shock

Back 28

a mental and physical strain that people can experience as they adjust to the ways of a new culture

Front 29

reentry shock

Back 29

culture shock in reverse when you return home after living in a different culture

Front 30

cultural diffusion

Back 30

the way process by which an idea, an invention, or a way of behaving is borrowed from a foreign source and then adopted by the borrowing people

Front 31

direct diffusion

Back 31

when two cultural groups are close to each other, proximity, marriage, trade, and war bring intermingling cultures

Front 32

indirect diffusion

Back 32

cultural transmission mediated by a third culture

Front 33

forced diffusion

Back 33

conquest, subjugation, enslavement forces a culture upon another group

Front 34

adaptive culture

Back 34

the role that norms, values, and beliefs of the borrowing culture play in adjusting to a new product or innovation, specifically adjusting to the associated changes in society

Front 35

cultural lag

Back 35

a situation where an adaptive culture fails to adjust in necessary ways to a material innovation and its disruptive consequences

Front 36

global interdependence

Back 36

a situation in which human relationships and activities transcend national borders and in which social problems are experienced locally but are shaped by the events taking place outside the country

Front 37

globalization

Back 37

the increasing flow of goods, services, money, people, technology, information, and other cultural items across political borders.