2.1: Culture
Defining Culture
· Culture: The way of life of people. Includes the shared and human-created strategies for adapting and responding to one's surroundings, including the people and other creatures that are apart of those surroundings.
· Human created strategies include, the invention of physican objects such as cars, and motor bikes to transport, values defining what is right and good, beliefs about the world & how things operate, a language to communicate, and rules guiding behavior in any situation.
· Sociologists face 3 challenges in defining a cultures boundaries: Describing a culture, determining who belongs to a culture, and identifying the distinguishing markers that set one culture apart from others.
· Once sociologists think that they …show more content…
· Sociologists do not get caught up in identifying distinct markers that set people apart of one culture from another. Instead, they are interested in how culture shapes human behavior and in how people create, share, pass on, resist, change, and even abandon culture.
2.2 Material and Nonmaterial Culture
Material Culture
· Material Culture: All of the natural, and human-created objects to which people have assigned a name and attatched meaning. (iPods, cars, clothing, tattoos, trees, diamonds, etc..)
· Sociologists work to understand the larger context in which an object exists, and to identify the meanings people assign to a certain & the ways it is used.
· Sociological POV: Material objects are windows into a cuture because they offer clues about how people relate to one another, and what is valued.
Nonmaterial Culture
· Nonmaterial Culture: Intangible human creations; things that cannon be touched with our hands. (Values, Believes, Norms, and