Transcript Cultural Diversity Around the World

Cultural Diversity Around the World
© 2014, 2012, 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
What is culture?
• Culture: the language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors,
and material objects that are passed from one
generation to the next
• Material culture: the material objects that distinguish a
group of people (art, buildings, weapons, clothing,
jewelry, etc.)
• Nonmaterial culture: a group’s way of thinking (beliefs,
values, and assumptions about the world)
© 2014, 2012, 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Culture and Taken-for-Granted
Orientations to Life
• What is Normal, Natural, or Usual?
– We take our speech, our gestures, our beliefs, and
our customs for granted and assume they are normal
or natural, following them without question.
• The Culture Within Us (we acquire them as we develop)
• Our culture becomes the lens through which we perceive
and evaluate what is going on around us.
• Culture Shock: a disorientation that people experience
when they encounter a fundamentally different culture
• Ethnocentrism: the tendency to use our own group’s
ways of doing things as a yardstick for judging others
© 2014, 2012, 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
What a tremendous photo for sociologists! Seldom are we
treated to such cultural contrasts. Can you see how the
cultures of these women have given them not only different
orientations concerning the presentation of their bodies but
also of gender relations?
© 2014, 2012, 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Children make a fast adjustment to a new culture, although,
as with these Hmong children in elementary school in St. Paul,
Minnesota, they are caught between the old and the new.
© 2014, 2012, 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Practicing Cultural Relativism
• Cultural Relativism: Understanding
Cultures on Their Own Terms
• “Sick Cultures” − Robert Edgerton
• Confronting Contrasting Views of Reality
• Famadihana
• Would you eat it?
© 2014, 2012, 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Many Americans perceive bullfighting as a cruel activity that
should be illegal everywhere. To most Spaniards, bullfighting is a
sport that pits matador and bull in a unifying image of power,
courage, and glory. Cultural relativism requires that we suspend
our own perspectives in order to grasp the perspectives of
others, something easier described than attained.
© 2014, 2012, 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
In this photo, taken in Madagascar, the body, exhumed
and wrapped in a new shroud, is being paraded among
other celebrants of Famadihana.
© 2014, 2012, 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
What some consider food, even delicacies, can turn
the stomachs of others. These roasted grub worms
were for sale in Bangkok, Thailand.
© 2014, 2012, 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2014, 2012, 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.