ASB 102 Study Guide Culture: A shared and negotiated system of meaning informed by knowledge that people learn

and put into practice by interpreting experience and generating behavior. Interdependent with society; (key words, behavior characteristics, artifacts.) Symbols: Anything that we can perceive with our senses that stands for something else, anything that contributes to the adoption of public policy and its enforcement. Ethnography: The task of discovering and describing a particular culture. (Typically a written account.) an objective, rounded, and richly-detailed account of the way of life of a particular group of people that will let members of another culture understand it better. Holism: a perspective emphasizing a whole rather than just the parts. Comparativism: the search for or study of similarities and differences between and among

human beings in all of their biological and cultural complexities. Ethnocentrism: the tendency to view the world, sometimes exclusively, from the basis of one s own experience. Nave Realism: Everyone sees things in the same eye as you and what you see is the right thing. (Rastafarian.) Cultural Relativity: the idea that each society must be understood on its own terms. Associated with Franz Boas. Three Properties of Human Language: displacement (human language can refer to past and future time and to other locations. ), arbitrariness (no natural connection between linguistic form and its meaning. Arbitrary relationships between linguistic signs and objects of the real world, a form of symbolism), productivity (a child learning a language is active in forming and producing utterances it has never heard before, a language user can manipulate his linguistic resources, open endedness.)

Phonemes: the minimal categories of speech sounds that serve to keep utterances apart. For example, speakers of English know that the words bat, bat, mat, hat, rat and fat are different utterances because they hear the wounds /b/, /c/, /m/, /h/, /r/, and /f/ as different categories of sounds. Allophones: sound variations in a single phoneme that do not affect the meaning. (e.g., /t/ is sounded differently in stick , tick , and little .) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: (Words did more than label things also shape people s perception of and actions towards them.) Tonal Language: words that appear to be spelled the same mean different things, depending on the tone with which they are voiced (with the tone being signaled in written language by a mark or diacritic ) Sociolinguistics: study of the actual speech performance, including both verbal and nonverbal communication, as these are influenced by gender, social class, ethnicity, social setting, and the like.

Code-switching: the practice of moving between variations of languages in different contexts. Switching word and language choice based on situation and setting. Genderlects : the term given to the study of the difference between male and female dialects. Women look for connection in conversation, men worry about status. Men report, they tell stories and try to top each other. Women rapport, they like to refer to or correspond one thing to another during conversation. Fieldwork: Participant observation: Ethnology: the comparative study of different cultures to establish how and why they are similar or dissimilar. comparative methods = the methods used to produce generalizations about cultural similarities and differences. Enthnographic description informs ethnology, which in turn generates new questions about culture, which leads to new ethnography fieldwork.

Key informants: Establishing rapport: Culture shock: Evolutionism: (Adapt, going from savage-> civilization. Cultural Change.) Historical particularism: Franz Boas; nw coast Indians, kwakuitl, Tlingit; explanatory focus on detailed descriptions of each culture s historical origins and eventual uniqueness, as these traits (often introduced from elsewhere) are reworked in each particular cultural setting (note similarity with istorical linguistics and with load words ) e.g., artistic traditions (baskets, blankets, totem poles), oral traditions (epic poetry, folklore) Functionalism: Bronislaw Malinowski; Trobriand Islands near New Guinea; Explanatory focus on how culture serves individual needs and ends. E.g., fishing magic (need- to address the uncertain and relieve anxiety); yam storage bins (end- love of display). Lassiter p. 73

Structural functionalism: A.R. Radcliffe-Brown; Andaman Islands, Bay of Bengal, India; Explanatory focus on how culture serves the needs of society (by preserving integration, order, and harmony) e.g., Weeping customs (need- to restore essential social relations broken by prolonged separation) Materialist approaches: most cultural differences can be explained by the way human populations relate to their natural and social environments Interpretive approaches: Focused on understanding and studying culture as a form of text, dialogue, and interpretation. E.B. Tylor: (defined culture relativity.) Franz Boas: historical particularism Bronislaw Malinowski: functionalism A.R. Radcliffe-Brown: structural-functionalism