Notes

-Ethnomethodology - disrupting social norms in order to learn about them
-Society can not exist without culture and vice-versa
-Material culture - refers to the objects or belongings of a group of people. Metro passes and bus tokens are part of material culture, as are automobiles, stores, and the physical structures where people worship.
-Nonmaterial culture - consists of the ideas, attitudes, and beliefs of a society
-Cultural universe - patterns or traits that are common to all societies.
George Murdock found that cultural universe revolve around basic human survival or shared experiences.
-Ethnocentrism - evaluating or judging other cultures based on how it compares to one's own culture
-Cultural imperealism - the deliberate imposition of one’s own cultural values on another culture.
-Cultural relativist (Ken Barger) - the practice of assessing a culture by its own standards rather than viewing it through the lens of one’s own culture
-Adrocentricism- a perspective in which male concerns, male attitudes, and male practices are presented as “normal” or define what is significant and valued in a culture.
-Ideal culture/real culture
- Sanctions are a form of social control
- Norms - define how to behave in accordance with what a society has defined as good, right, and important.
- Formal norms - Laws are formal norms, but so are employee manuals, college entrance exam requirements, and “no running” signs at swimming pools.
- Informal norms - dictate appropriate behaviours without the need of written rules.
- Norms clasiffy in Mores and Folkways
Mores are norms that embody moral views and principles of a group, the mores are usually punished by laws or different istitutions.
Folkways are norms that don't have a big effect on the society it's more personal. It is the behaviour in day-to-day practice. People that expirience culture shock can find it more easily to adapt in a society by learning the folkways.
-Sapir-whorf hypothesis - people experience their world through the language and that they understand the world through the culture embed in the language.
-Counterculture - a type of subculture that rejects some of the larger culture’s norms and values.


There are 3 theories that can analyze culture : functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism.
-Functionalism (examine culture in terms of the general interests it supports) - society as a system in which all parts work—or function—together to create society as a whole. For example playing hockey , it might seem stupid to be a fan or a player of a sport that you need to chace a ruber disk , but if a group of people put passion in it , it evolves in a meaningfull matter.
- Symbolic interactionism (emphasize how people come to mutual understandings through cultural practices and interactions)- Interactionists see culture as being created and maintained by the ways people interact and how individuals interpret each other’s actions.
For example fashion , clothing represent a form of interpersonal communication , many times when we go shopping with friends we hear the question "Does it look good on me?"
-Conflict theory (how inequalities and power relationships are maintained by a culture’s value system.) - society being inherently unequal, based on power differentials related to issues like class, gender, race, and age. A key focus of cultural analysis in critical theory is the critique of ideology.

*To an extent, culture is a social comfort. After all, sharing a similar culture with others is precisely what defines societies. Nations would not exist if people did not coexist culturally. There could be no societies if people did not share heritage and language, and civilization would cease to function if people did not agree to similar values and systems of social control. Culture is preserved through transmission from one generation to the next, but it also evolves through processes of innovation, discovery, and cultural diffusion. We may be restricted by the confines of our own culture, but as humans we have the ability to question values and make conscious decisions. No better evidence of this freedom exists than the amount of cultural diversity within our own society and around the world. *