Learning Objectives

After studying this chapter you should be able to understand the following:

2 Anthropologist George Murdock has compiled a list of cultural universals, general practices found in every culture, including courtship, family, games, language, medicine, religion, and sexual restrictions.

3 Human culture is constantly expanding through innovation, including both discovery and invention.

4 Diffusion-the spread of cultural items from one place to another-also changes cultures. But societies resist ideas that seem too foreign as well as those that are perceived as threatening to their own values and beliefs.

5 Language, an important element of culture, includes speech, written characters, numerals, symbols, and gestures and other forms of nonverbal communication. Language both describes culture and shapes it for us.

6 Sociologists distinguish between norms in two ways. They are classified as either formal or informal norms and as mores or folkways.

7 The more cherished values of a culture will receive the heaviest sanctions; matters that are regarded as less critical, on the other hand, will carry light and informal sanctions.

8 The dominant ideology of a culture describes the set of cultural beliefs and practices that help to maintain powerful social, economic, and political interests.

9 In a sense, a subculture can be thought of as a culture existing within a larger, dominant culture. Countercultures are subcultures that deliberately oppose aspects of the larger culture.

10 People who measure other cultures by the standard of their own engage in ethnocentrism. Using cultural relativism allows us to view people from the perspective of their own culture.

11 The social policy of bilingualism calls for programs that use two or more languages, treating each as equally legitimate. It is supported by those who want to ease the transition of nonnative language speakers into a host society; it is opposed by those who adhere to a single cultural tradition in language.