Collect Top Ten
My Top Ten:
1. memes, extragenetic and extra-brain information (p9,12,18)
2. cultural hierarchies and ethnocentrism (p9-10, 19) and cultural relativism (p19)
watch Examined Life on Cosmopolitanism?
check out an 11-year old girl marrying a 40-year old man on CNN
3. work as key organizing condition (p10)
4. culture shock, alienation, anomie (p14)
5. culture teaches us when, where, and how to express our natural, biologial urges (p15)
(watch HSBC bank eels ad)
6. culture is an all-encompassing, integrated and coherent system... what does that mean? (p16) and how can it then also be contested, and a process rather than an entity (p17)?
7. agency and day-to-day action, and "practice theory" (p17)
8.
6:05 - Group 2 confers
6:15 - Discuss Chapter 2: Culture
Facilitators: Dalia, Ashley, Rebecca, Felicia, Jeyson, Hannah, Laura,
7:20 - Break
7:30 - Instructor-lead discussion...
Memes (p.9) & symbols (p15); linguistic relativity.
Humanity is the only species that relies on this external information storage to survive.
Legitimacy, hierarchy
No particular way of life is "natural" to humans (biologically speaking).
An isolated child will learn to walk, that is biologically determined. But it will not learn to talk in a cultural vacuum.
Enculturation and learning
Culture shock (p14) (HSBC commercial) and anomia
Culture and nature (Body Ritual among the Nacerima)
Cultural traits as integrated, connected, and interrelated
Norms & Sanctions
Ideal vs. Real culture
in sociology, we also talk about Material vs. Nonmaterial (i.e.ways of thinking and behavioral patterns vs. artifacts and actual stuff - "texts" p.24)
Agency
Practice theory: how do we create the world we inhabit?
-symbolic interactionism
-culture as achieved (a la Jersey Shore)
-reciprocal influence
Adaptive and maladaptive
-structural-functionalism
Ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, and cosmopolitanism. (See Kwame Appiah from Examined Life)
Universality, generality, particularity - cultural diffusion and adaptation (Indian McDonald's)
North America
United by a national government, we are culturally divided by race, class, gender, religion, political affiliation, etc...
Yet we have common exposure to schools, mass media, business institutions, and transportation, which creates the IDEA of common culture, and a kind of solidarity.
Cultural change:
- Diffusion
-
- direct
- forced
- indirect
- Acculturation (mutual influence)
- Independent invention (or discovery)
- Globalization
-
- technology
- economics
- politics
Uses of culture?
Corporate values
Demographic niches
Generation ñ
Mobilizing identity groups - African diaspora, women (feminism), the physically impaired, etc...
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