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UCSP Notes Culture and Society Ethnocentrism Culture Relativism and Socialitization - Yiela Lim
UCSP Notes Culture and Society Ethnocentrism Culture Relativism and Socialitization - Yiela Lim
Understanding Culture,
Society, and Politics Notes
By: Yiela Lim (11 - Loyola)
Culture and Society undergo change
What is culture?
➢ The ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that
together form a people’s way of life (Macionis, 2018).
➢ The languages, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors and even material objects
are passed from one generation to the next (Henslin, 2017).
Culture becomes the lens through which we perceive and evaluate what’s going
on around us.
➢ Ethnocentrism
○ A tendency to use our own group’s ways of doing things as
yardsticks for judging others.
Material Culture
Nonmaterial Culture
Ethnocentrism is the term anthropologists use to describe the opinion that one's
own way of life is natural or correct. An example of ethnocentrism in culture is
the Asian cultures across all the countries of Asia. Throughout Asia, the way of
eating is to use chopsticks with every meal.
Cultural variation refers to the rich diversity in social practices that different
cultures exhibit around the world. Cuisine and art all change from one culture to
the next, but so do gender roles, economic systems, and social hierarchy among
any number of other humanly organised behaviours
Cultural Relativism
Cultural relativism maintains that man's opinion within a given culture defines
what is right and wrong. Cultural relativism is the mistaken idea that there are
no objective standards by which our society can be judged because each culture
is entitled to its own beliefs and accepted practices.
➢ Putting aside the cultural standards we have known all our lives
Cultural relativism refers to not judging a culture to our own standards of what
is right or wrong, strange or normal. Instead, we should try to understand the
cultural practices of other groups in their own cultural context. For example,
instead of thinking, “Fried crickets are disgusting!
The goal of this is to promote understanding of cultural practices that are not
typically part of one's own culture. Using the perspective of cultural relativism
leads to the view that no one culture is superior to another culture when
compared to systems of morality, law, politics, etc.
Cultural Universals
What is Socialization?
The process begins during childhood by which individuals acquire the values,
habits, and attitudes of a society. However, certainly dealing with shame and its
boundaries is soon a constant factor in the socialization of the child, because
standards and rules are everywhere
Aspects of Socialization