Overview
This document lists and defines key no terms for Unit 2, providing concise explanations and examples relevant to course concepts.
Key Terms & Definitions
- Culture — All learned, shared, and transmitted knowledge, values, beliefs, attitudes, and norms guiding a group's behavior.
- Enculturation — The lifelong process where people learn a group's culture through experience, observation, and instruction.
- Ethnocentrism — Judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one's own culture.
- Cultural Relativism — The principle of understanding a culture on its own terms without judging it by one's own cultural standards.
- Subculture — A group within a larger culture that has different beliefs, values, or customs.
- Counterculture — A subculture that rejects and opposes significant elements of the dominant culture.
- Norms — Shared rules or guidelines defining appropriate and inappropriate behavior within a society.
- Folkways — Informal norms governing everyday behavior, violation is not severely punished.
- Mores — Strongly held norms with moral and ethical connotations; violation has serious consequences.
- Laws — Formal norms enacted by governments, violation is punishable by authorities.
- Sanctions — Rewards or punishments used to enforce norms.
- Symbols — Anything that carries a specific meaning recognized by people who share a culture.
- Language — A system of symbols used for communication.
- Values — Culturally defined standards for what is desirable, good, or proper.
- Beliefs — Specific ideas held to be true by members of a culture.
- Cultural Diffusion — The spread of cultural elements from one society to another.
- Cultural Lag — The period of adjustment when nonmaterial culture struggles to adapt to new material conditions.
- Cultural Integration — The process where different cultural aspects become closely interrelated.
Action Items / Next Steps
- Review and memorize definitions for all listed terms.
- Prepare examples for each key term as class discussion or exam preparation.
- Complete any related textbook readings assigned for Unit 2.