Chapter 4 Definitions Rubenstein Flashcards
(56 cards)
Acculturation
Cultural modification or change that results when one culture group or individual adopts traits of a dominant or host society; cultural development or change through “borrowing.”
Artifact
Any physical object that a culture produces.
Barriers to diffusion
Things that slow or stop the spread of an idea, innovation, people or other things.
Cultural convergence
The process by which two cultures become similar.
Cultural diffusion
The movement of culture traits from one place to another.
Cultural landscape
The cultural impacts on an area, including buildings, agricultural patterns, roads, signs and nearly everything else that humans have created.
Culture
Shared patterns of learned behavior, attitudes and knowledge.
Culture complex
A group of interrelated culture traits.
Culture hearth
An area from which important culture traits, including ideas, technology, and social structures, originated. Ancient Mesopotamia is an example.
Culture realm
Culture regions grouped into larger areas.
Culture region
An area defined by a large number of common culture traits.
Culture trait
A single component of a culture; can be a thing, an idea or a social conversion.
Custom
The frequent repetition of an act, to the extent that it becomes characteristic of the group of people performing the act.
Folk Culture
Culture traditionally practiced by a small homogenous, rural group living in relative isolation from other groups.
Foodways
How a culture prepares and consumes food.
Habit
A repetitive act performed by a particular individual.
Hearth
A place of innovative origins or where something begins.
Ideological subsystem
The ideas, beliefs, values and knowledge of a culture.
Innovative diffusion
The movement of a phenomenon from one location to another.
Mentifacts
Individual culture traits of the ideological subsystem, such as an idea.
Popular culture
Culture found in a large, heterogeneous society that shares certain habits despite differences in other personal characteristics.
Reverse hierarchical diffusion
Diffusion up a hierarchy, such as from small towns to large cities.
Social construction of space
The idea that society shapes the spatial nature of our world.
Sociofact
The culture trait in the sociological subsystem.
