Week 5: Culture Flashcards
What are the two elements of culture?
Material (physical objects)
Non - Material (ideas) - practices learned via socialization
norms that are reproduced over time, can be formal (official codes of conduct) l or informal (implicit, expected ways of behaving)
What are sanctions?
Methods of punishment or reward, verbal or non-verbal, that teach informal norms
What is culture?
shared meaning created through interactions with two or more people - always contested, disagreement and conflict
How can you link language and culture? who are the thinkers?
what study supports this theory?
Sapir & Whorf
Does more than describe - how we understand the world and make sense of our experience in it
Culturally specific vehicle - categories of thought and forms of experience
Structure of language determined native speakers perception and catagorization of experience - language influenced and shapes our cultural reality by limiting our thought process
F. Fanon - Black skin, white masks
French colonialism in Martinique - language and colonialism, the language of colonizers shapes the consciousness of the colonized
Hierarchical values and meanings of blackness, whiteness
What is a subculture?
Smaller distinctive cultural groups within larger cultural groups
Share a specific identity - partly defined through what they are not in relation to mainstream and other subcultures
What is a counterculture?
Provide alternative models/ideas that challenge mainstream norms
Ex: collective vs individualistic forms of ownership and control OR nonhierarchical power/decision making structures
Opposes/in tension with mainstream ideals
What is post-modern culture?
the mixing of “law” and “high” culture/popular and elite culture
historically referential
What is a symbol?
Can be invested with meaning
Values can be symbolically communicated
Symbolic - using a symbol or making reference to something else
defined with regards to what they are not - changed through conflict
What does Durk have to say about symbols?
Collective representations are symbolic and necessarily abstract - ex: symbolic representations of nation-states
Symbols can become proxies for broader social issues and disputes - can contribute to boundary maintenance and enforcement, creating in-groups and out-group
Define cultural critique/analysis?
Knowledge of people/groups, places/what is good is partly gained through cultural representations
Enduring/pervasive cultural patterns (images, narratives)
Our social identities and personhood are partially defined to and by others through representation
What is detournement? What does it say about culture? who is the thinker?
People have capacity to resist and subvert cultural ideas in media
We live out lives in culture - we can also analyze and critique the cultural products of societies - producing critiques to the dominant culture
Detournement: to detour/subvert the meaning of a symbol
Subversive/alternative reading of cultural products
