After reading Chapter Two, the student should be able to:
- Define culture and explain its material and nonmaterial components.
- Explain why ethnocentrism is a natural tendency and cite its positive and negative affects.
- Discuss cultural relativism, its virtues and limitations.
- Understand and apply the various concepts associated with symbolic culture including symbols, gestures, language, values, norms, sanctions, folkways, mores, and taboos.
- Explain the importance of gestures for communications, and discuss how gestures relate to culture.
- Identify the different ways in which language makes human life possible.
- Understand the use of emoticons and why they help personalize on-line communications.
- Discuss the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and how it influences culture.
- Compare and contrast subcultures and countercultures, their similarities and differences.
- List the core values in U.S. society as identified by Robin Williams and James Henslin.
- Explain what is meant by value clusters and value contradictions.
- Discuss how differences in core values can lead to culture wars providing an example of a culture war and its impact on society.
- Explain the difference between ideal and real culture.
- Discuss how technology affects material and nonmaterial culture and why cultural lag is commonly associated with technological innovations.
- Define cultural diffusion and cultural leveling and discuss how each concept may become more embraced or resisted in today's world.
