1. Culture & Social Structure
Chapter 2

2. Culture and Social Structure: Discussion Outline
Components of Culture
Cultural Unity and Diversity
Social Structure

3. What is Culture? What identifies culture?
Society?

4. Culture and Society Culture
Learned patterns
Customs, meanings, interpretations
Society: group of people who live within the same territory and share a common culture
Networks of social relations

5. Types of Culture Material vs. Non-material?
What are the material and nonmaterial cultures of …?
Football

6. Components of Culture Norms: Social Rules Social Expectations
“Should”, “ought”, and “must” (Not?)=Social Control
Sex, Property, and Safety
Are norms subjective or objective features of society?

7. Components: Types of norms
Folkways
Mores
Laws
How are these types of norms enforced in society?

8. Components
Values: broad ideas regarding what is desirable, correct, and good that most members of a society share
How we evaluate and make important choices in the social world and culture in which we live
Can values change overtime?
What are some American values?
Beauty?

9. Components Symbols Language The linguistic relativity hypothesis
Different forms
Gestures
Language
The linguistic relativity hypothesis

10. Cultural Unity and Diversity
Are there aspects of life that appear in all known societies?
Can you think of any values, beliefs, and aspects of American culture that are contradictory?
I.e.: Historical example-A founding American belief in “human equality” and the practice of slavery

11. Cultural Unity and Diversity
Ethnocentrism
Is it functional?
Cultural Relativism
Value free and neutral
Which Founding father?

12. Cultural Unity and Diversity
Subcultures and Countercultures

13. Social Structure
Social structure: interweaving of people’s interactions and relationships in more or less recurrent, stable patterns
Provides organized and focused quality to group experiences and members to achieve collective purposes

14. Social Structure
Institutions: principal social structure that organizes, directs, and executes essential tasks of living
Established and enduring patterns of social relationships

15. Social Structure Status: a position within group or society
Ascribed status:
Achieved status:
Master status:

16. Social Structure Roles: sets of culturally defined rights and duties
Role performance: actual behavior of the person who occupies a status
Role set: multiple roles attached to a single status
Duties: actions others can legitimately insist we perform
Rights: actions we can legitimately insist others perform