b (i) The Nature of Culture: Essential
Bias: a way of privileging one argument or interest over another based on personal
feeling rather than rational argument.
Cultural Practice: the things people do in everyday life – such as greeting ach other.
Cultural Product: the things that we encounter in our daily lives.
Elite Culture: the culture of those with power and influence.
High Culture: according to Arnold “the best that has been thought and said”: Art, Literature and Music.
Popular (Low) Culture: the products and practices of everyday life as practised and valued by ordinary people.
Youth Culture: the cultural products and practices of the young.
Ethnicity: a term which represents social groups with a shared history, sense of identity, geography and cultural roots which may occur despite racial difference. Ethnic character, background, or affiliation.
Gender: refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.
Meanings and Practices of Everyday Life (MPEL): the codes and conventions that govern the way we live our lives.
Prejudice: a pre-formed opinion, usually an unfavourable one, based on insufficient knowledge, irrational feelings, or inaccurate stereotypes.
Register: is used to describe variations in the use of language or other communication codes associated with a particular context such as a job, an area of technical expertise or social setting. As a student, part of the task is to learn the register of your subject so that you are able to write and speak as, say, a historian or a geographer or a biologist.
Ritual: the system of set procedures and actions of a group.
Social class: any category based on power, wealth or income.
Socialisation: all of the processes through which we are inducted into society.
Status: the relative position or standing of somebody or something in a society or other group.
Stereotype: a mould into which reality is poured, whatever its individual shape. A stereotype is a simplified and generalised image of a group of people, which is created out of the values, judgements and assumptions of its creators, in most cases society itself. A stereotype of men might suggest their machismo or manliness.
Style: a distinctive and identifiable form in an artistic medium such as music, architecture, or literature: a way of doing something, especially a way regarded as expressing a particular attitude or typifying a particular period.
Taboo: forbidden to be used, mentioned, or approached because of social or cultural rather than legal prohibitions.
b (ii) The Nature of Culture: Useful
Aesthetics (taste): is commonly known as the study of judgments of sentiment and taste. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on art, culture and nature." Aesthetics studies new ways of seeing and of perceiving the world and seeks to determine what is artistically valid or beautiful.
Cultural capital: the idea that knowledge of certain topics can confer similar benefits to monetary wealth. People who possess lots of money and wealth have economic capital. Those who are able to converse knowledgeably about (say) philosophy, music, art or literature have cultural capital. We could also extend the concept to the realm of expert knowledge in sub-cultural groups: sub-cultural capital.
Cultural transmission: the various ways in which culture is disseminated and discussed.
Divergence: moving personal communication style away from that of another person. Could be used to signal status difference or the desire to avoid intimacy.
Emblems: gestures with the specific cultural meanings attached, often used as direct substitutes for words.
Folk Culture: the localized lifestyle of a culture. It is usually handed down through oral tradition, relates to a sense of community, and demonstrates the "old ways" over novelty. Folk culture is quite often imbued with a sense of place. If its elements are copied by, or removed to, a foreign locale, they will still carry strong connotations of their original place of creation.
Mass Culture: literally culture made by and for the masses.
Enculturation: the ongoing process whereby we acquire ‘culture’.
Hegemony: the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci explained why the majority of people in a culture do not adopt the values and beliefs of their own class. He argued that the dominant minority within cultures present the values and beliefs of their own class as somehow ‘natural’ and thus universal. In this way people end up promoting the values and beliefs of the dominant or ruling class rather than of their own class.
Mediation: the process by which a media text represents an idea, issue or event to us.
Negotiation: this concept is at the very heart of the semiotic approach to the study of communication, implying as it does that texts do not have meaning except through the process of negotiation between text and reader.
Naturalisation: process by which you become the citizen of another country.
Norm: a rule or convention which is characteristic of particular culture or sub-culture.
Preferred reading: the reading a text’s producer would like receivers to make. The producer will compose the text in a way which ensures this occurs.
Subjectivity: the individual’s sense of self and identity.
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