1. Culture

3. What Is Culture?
Culture: totality of learned, socially transmitted customs, knowledge, material objects, and behavior
Includes ideas, values, customs, and artifacts of groups of people

4. What is culture?

5. Culture is not ….

6. It includes….

7. Simple act of greeting

9. Culture is learnt and transmitted

10. Culture simplifies interaction

11. Cultural universals

12. Cultural Universals
Cultural universal: certain common practices and beliefs that all societies have developed
Many adaptations to meet essential human needs
Murdock listed cultural universals, but they are expressed differently from culture to culture

13. Cultural universals George Murdock – Family
Basic human survival (food and shelter) and shared human experiences, such as…
Birth, death, illness
Care of children/ elderly
Other cultural universals
Language
Personal Names
Humor

14. Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism: tendency to assume that one’s own culture and way of life represents the norm or is superior to others
Our view of the world is dramatically influenced by the society in which we were raised

15. Ethnocentrism & Cultural relativism
What do we eat ?
What do we eat?

16. Cultural relativism
Assessing a culture from its own standard rather than viewing it through the lens of ones own culture.
Understand the culture rather than dismiss it as “Strange” or “exotic”
Using the idea of “value neutrality”

17. When should one get married?