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Culture and Society

Culture and Society. Culture—the concept Components of culture Society Categorizing societies Premodern societies Industrialized societies Globalization . Culture—the concept.

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Culture and Society

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  1. Culture and Society • Culture—the concept • Components of culture • Society • Categorizing societies • Premodern societies • Industrialized societies • Globalization

  2. Culture—the concept • A shared set of norms, beliefs, and values that guide the social life of a group, and the material products of that group. • Becker: what is it that allows us to act together “without missteps and conflict”? • Redfield (in Becker): “conventional understandings made manifest in act and artifact” • A “way of life” • Where does it come from? Becker: imposed and invented, continuously

  3. Components of culture • Objects (material culture) • Symbols (non-material culture)

  4. The physical artifacts or objects made by humans in society Technology: the tools and techniques used in production the link between culture and nature Material culture

  5. Nonmaterial culture Intangible products of social life

  6. Values: Abstract ideals Ideas about what is right, good, preferred Examples? Norms Specific principles or rules of expected behavior; do’s & don’ts Types: Folkways Mores Taboos Laws Two important types of ideas that give culture the capacity to guide social life:

  7. What are these?

  8. $

  9. money

  10. What do they all have in common? They are symbols.

  11. symbol • An item that stands for or represents another item • Words are symbols • Language is a system of symbols that carry meanings, including abstract ideas

  12. What do all these have in common? They are signifiers.

  13. signifier • Any vehicle of meaning • Can be sound, gesture, image, object, or even a style • A symbol is a type of signifier (involving motivation-meaning)

  14. Semiotics: Analysis of nonverbal cultural meanings

  15. Example of semiotics: ritual buildings • Christian church with spire: male-centered, heaven-oriented • Hopi kiva: female-centered, earth-oriented • Old norm that spire was highest building • New urban norm of skyscraper

  16. Cultural identity • we take our own culture for granted, assume it as the norm; culture is an important part of our identity • this can also take the form of a subculture; examples? • judging other culture’s by one’s own cultural standards is ethnocentrism • social scientists strive for cultural relativism: understanding another culture by it’s own standards

  17. Society: A group of people who live in a specific place with its own political authority and are aware of their shared identity.

  18. society • System of interrelationships • A macro social structure • Industrialization and globalization are the main drift of this period of history

  19. Categorizing societies • Marx’s concept: mode of production • Non-Marxists: level of material culture (technology) taken as key indicator • Societies divided into “pre-capitalist/capitalist” by marxists, premodern/modern by non-marxists.

  20. Mode of production: forces of production (technology) and relations of production (classes) periods defined by key classes: “primitive” communism slavery Feudalism Capitalism socialism Material culture: complexity of technology and source of energy key sociocultural evolution assumed, but all “levels” still exist hunting and gathering agrarian pastoral traditional states or civilizations industrial Categorizing societies

  21. Marx’s Historical Materialism (“vulgar” version, based on statements in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) Communism (classless, stateless) “Class struggle is the motor of history” Socialism (dictatorship of the proletariat) Capitalism (capital vs. labor) Feudalism (lords vs. peasants Slavery (masters vs. slaves) Primitive Communism (classless)

  22. Premodern societies Review table 3.1

  23. Hunting and gathering +

  24. Eating Christmas in the Kalahari How is stratification minimized in a gift-based mode of exchange?

  25. Agrarian ( + )

  26. Pastoral +

  27. Traditional state or civilization

  28. Industrialized societies +

  29. Industrialized societies • Industrialization: emergence of machine production based on the use of inanimate power sources.

  30. Industrialized societies: characteristics • Rapid technological innovation (Marx sez capitalism causes this) • More non-agricultural workers than farmers • Urbanization • Nation-state

  31. Nation-state • Political community with clearly delimited borders • Distinguished from traditional states with fluctuating frontiers • All modern societies are nation-states

  32. Nation-states

  33. World system: globalization • Three worlds? • Product of colonialism: expansion of European, Japanese and American power (first world) • Second world product of state socialism (marxist model) • Third world: formerly colonized peoples; now either poor or “newly industrializing”

  34. globalization • Now clearly a World System in economic and political sense • Also cultural influences—both ways • Jihad vs. McWorld (Benjamin Barber)

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