Culture is the totality of learned, socially transmitted customs, knowledge, material objects, and behavior. This chapter examines the basic elements that make up a culture, social practices common to all cultures, and variations that distinguish one culture from another.

1. A shared culture helps to define the group or society to which we belong.

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

3. Human culture is constantly expanding through the process of innovation, which includes both discovery and invention.

4. Diffusion-the spread of cultural items from one place to another-has fostered globalization. But people resist ideas that seem too foreign, as well as those they perceive as threatening to their own values and beliefs.

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

6. Sociologists distinguish between norms in two ways, classifying them either as formal or informal or as mores or folkways.

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

8. The dominant ideology of a culture is 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 that exists 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. Cultural relativism is the practice of viewing people from the perspective of their own culture.

11. The social policy of bilingualism calls for the use of two or more languages, treating each as equally legitimate. It is supported by those who want to ease the transition of non-native language speakers into a host society, but opposed by those who adhere to a single cultural tradition and language.