Download Types of culture

Types of culture
Includes physical objects or artifacts – things that human beings create by
altering the natural environment. They are easy to observe and are often
impressive. Examples of these are buildings, tools, weapons and
implements, book, jet airplanes, and other elements of culture that can be
perceived as important parts or products of any behavior system of man,
past, present and future.
NON- MATERIAL CULTURE
Consists of words people use, habits they follow, ideas, customs, behavior,
of any society profess and to which they strive to conform. Laws,
techniques, lifestyle, and knowledge are included, too. The non-material
aspect of culture is the meaning and substance inherent in culture.
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MATERIAL CULTURE
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components of culture
NORMS and VALUES
• Guides or models of behavior which tell us what is proper and
what appropriate or inappropriate is, right or wrong. They set
limits within which individuals may seek alternatives or ways
to achieve their goals.
• Norms regulate people’s behavior in a given society. -usually in
the form of rules, standards, or prescriptions followed by
people who follow certain standards or roles.
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NORMS:
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components of culture
• FOLKWAYS
• MORES
• LAWS
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FORMS OF NORMS:
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components of culture
• MORES
are seen as extremely important and are considered vital for the
group’s welfare and survival.
While folkways specify correct and proper behavior, mores define
what morally right and morally wrong is
• LAWS
are norms that are enforced formally by a special political
organization. They are formalized social norms enacted by people
who have been vested through the machinery of the state
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• FOLKWAYS
are customary patterns of everyday life that specify what socially
correct and proper in everyday life is. They are the repetitive or
typical habits and patterns of expected behavior followed within
a group of community
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components of culture- values
VALUES, IDEAS, BELIEFS
• Beliefs refer to a person's conviction about a certain idea
• Values are abstract concepts of what important and worthwhile
is, they are general ideas that individuals share about what is
good or bad.
• For example:
scientific arguments must be respected , and we should not
believe in witchcraft
democracy should be considered, and shouldn’t be racism
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• Ideas are non-materials aspects of culture and embody man's
conception of his physical, social and cultural world.
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Types of culture
High culture is not better than popular culture. It has different functions.
Its purpose is to inform and to give fun to society rather than giving it a
upper value or ideas outside of popular culture, we can observe different
patterns of cultural groups. They are formed in opposition to popular
culture.
Subcultures are cultural patterns that distinguish some segments of
society
Counterculture refers to cultural patterns that strongly oppose those
widely accepted norms within a society. Countercultures reject a lot of
standards of a dominant culture
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High culture refers to cultural patterns that distinguish a society’s elite.
Popular culture sets cultural patterns that are common among society
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Multiple Cultures –One Society
Most notable are differences based on
• Race
• National/Ethnic Origin
• Religion
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When society is made up of multiple cultures that society
has to deal with and somehow reconcile cultural differences
and conflicts.
In addition to the types of cultural variations we’ve talked
about, there are other sources of cultural variations.
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Ways of dealing with multiple cultures
The most common, and the oldest way of dealing with multiple
cultures is probably forcing assimilation and/or wiping out minority
cultures.
More recently, we have seen the development of pluralistic cultures
in which the different cultures tolerate each other.
Multi-Culturalism is a more recent development that recognizes the
cultural diversity and promotes the equality of all cultural traditions.
The United States is the most multicultural of all industrial countries.
By contrast, Japan is the most monocultural of all industrial nations
Multiculturalism stands in opposition to Eurocentrism, the
dominance of European cultural patterns.
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We will deal with this issue more, focusing on Race and Ethnicity.
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Cultural Change
Becasue every cultural system strives for unity, it is not easy to
integrate new elements with the traditional ones, as it can destroy
the cultural system
we can distinguish three phenomena that promote cultural change:
• Inventions, the process of creating new cultural elements.
• Discovery, recognizing and understanding an idea not fully
understood before.
• Diffusion, the spread of cultural traits from one cultural system to
another
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If cultures goes through these different phases , then they have to
change
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Globalization
Three key factors are promoting this trend:
• Global economy: the flow of goods.
• Global communications: the flow of information.
• Global migration: the flow of people.
but we can also see some limitations of the global theory:
• global culture is much more advanced in some parts of the world than in
the others
• many people cannot afford to participate in the material aspects of a
global culture
• different people attribute different meanings to various aspects of the
global culture
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A lot of sociologists believe that today the global culture has become
increasingly important. Some evidence suggests that a global culture may
be emerging.
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Globalization
• It provides a set of concepts that both material and non material
culture needs to adapt to.
• It can stretch to the globe, but not all cultures will accept or
adopt to these technologies and the changes they cause at the
same rate.
• East and West have different bases and adopt these changes at
different rates
That is why today we can not answer the question if
globalization contributes to the creation of a one global culture
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New and emerging communications, computer, and other
technologies, affect cultural change without doubt
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