Components of Culture

The Organization of Culture

Importance and Functions of Culture

Cultural Relativism

Components of Culture

Communication

Cognitive

Behavioral

Material

COMMUNICATION

• Language

– Defines what it means to be human. When people share a language, they share a condensed, very flexible set of symbols and meaning.

COMMUNICATION

• Symbols–Anything that carries a particular meaning recognized by people who share culture

–Vary within cultures, cross-culturally, and change over time.

COMMUNICATION

• Symbols–Anything that carries a particular meaning recognized by people who share culture

–Vary within cultures, cross-culturally, and change over time.

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COGNITIVE

• Ideas/ Knowledge/ Beliefs– Ideas are mental representations

used to organize stimulus; they are the basic units out of which knowledge is constructed and a world emerges.–When linked together and organized into larger sets, ideas become knowledge.

COGNITIVE

–Knowledge is the storehouse where we accumulate representations, information, facts, assumptions. Once stored, it can support learning and can be passed from one generation to the next.

COGNITIVE

–Beliefs accept a proposition, statement, description of fact, etc as true.

• Values–are defined as culturally defined standards of desirability, goodness and beauty, which serve as broad guidelines for social living.

COGNITIVE• Accounts–are how people use that

common language to explain, justify, rationalize, excuse, or legitimize our behavior to themselves and others.–Motives are another type of account. Culturally they are linguistic devices created after behavior happens. BACK

BEHAVIORAL(how we act)

• Norms–are rules and expectations by which a society guides the behavior of its members.

– are standards that define the obligatory and expected behaviors of people in various situations ( Neubeck and Glasberg 1996) .

TYPES OF NORMS

•Mores–Customary behavior patterns or folkways which have taken on a moralistic value. This includes respect for authority, marriage and sex behavior patterns, etc ( Light, Keller, and Calhoun, 1989) .

TYPES OF NORMS

•Mores–People who violate mores are unfit for society and punished as warning to others that such behavior will not be tolerated ( Light, Keller, and Calhoun, 1989) .

TYPES OF NORMS• Laws– The most formal and important

norms.– Are the mores deemed so vital to

dominant interests that they become translated into legal formalizations that even non-members of society are required to obey ( Neubek and Glasberg 1996) .

TYPES OF NORMS• Folkways–Behavior patterns of society which

are organized and repetitive.–Commonly known as customs.– Society folkways are the norms

which the members have come to accept as the proper way of living and interacting with each other( Hunt, et al., 1998) .

TYPES OF NORMS• Rituals–highly scripted ceremonies of interaction that follow a specific sequence of actions.

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MATERIAL–Humans make objects, sometimes for practical reasons and sometimes for artistic ones. –The form and function of these objects is an expression of culture and culturally- defined behavior often depends on the presence of specific objects.–Such objects are material culture (Javier et al, 2002)

–While the culture of a group is an integrated network of folkways, mores, systems of beliefs, and institutional patterns, it can be broken into simple units or elements called cultural traits.

The Organization of Culture

HOW IS CULTURE TRANSMITTED?

Enculturation-it is the process of learning culture of one’s own group.

Example. Learning the folkways, mores, social traditions, values and beliefs of one’s group.

HOW IS CULTURE TRANSMITTED?

Acculturation-it is the process of learning some new traits from another culture.

Example. The interaction of Filipinos with Americans in the Philippines.

HOW IS CULTURE TRANSMITTED?

Assimilation-it is a process in which an individual entirely loses any awareness of his/her previous group identity and takes on the culture and attitudes of another group..

1. Culture helps the individual fulfill his potential as a human being.

2. Man can overcome his physical disadvantages and allows him to provide himself with fire, clothing, food and shelter.

3. Culture provides rule of conduct for living in a society.

4. Culture provides the individual his concepts of family, nation, and class.

Importance and Functions of Culture

In Bolivia, 14-year-old girls can legally get married. In China, men have to wait until they're 22. Why is there such a variance in what's acceptable and what's not?

Here’s another…..

Filipino Muslims and some other cultural groups consider polygamy, however; Filipino Christians believed it’s a wrong to have many wives.

CULTURAL RELATIVISM

Cultural relativism explains why one society shouldn't try to impose its own beliefs onto another.

The world is a big place, full of many

different groups of people, each with a

unique perspective on how to survive and

thrive. Collectively, all of a group's core

beliefs, rituals, traditions, and other customs

make up its distinct culture.

Part of what makes the world interesting is that each human civilization has come up with a unique culture and value system, which leads to people viewing life and lifestyles differently. Cultural relativism explains why some things are perfectly acceptable in one society, but totally taboo in another.

The central point in

cultural relativism is that in a

particular cultural setting, certain

traits are right because they work

in that setting while other traits are

wrong because they are not

accepted in that culture.