SOC101Y1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Consumerism, Endangerment, Ethnocentrism
Document Summary
The sophisticated brains of humans 100 000 years ago allowed them to prosper and dominate: enabled them to make cultural survival kits, contained 3 main tools. Abstraction, cooperation, production: gave rise to a different element of culture. Abstraction: capacity to create ideas/ways of thinking. Cooperation: capacity to create a complex social life by establishing norms. Production: devising and using tools and techniques that improve our ability to take what we want from nature. Symbols: things that carry particular meaning: languages, mathematical notations, signs allow us to classify experience and generalize from it. People usually rewarded when they follow cultural guidelines and punished when they don t: sanctions or social control. Despite its importance in human life, it is often invisible to people who are immersed in it: take own culture for granted. People often startled when confronted by different cultures: seem odd, irrational, inferior, judging a culture by the standards of our own is ethnocentrism.
