SOC 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Ethnocentrism
Document Summary
Chapter 2: culture: symbols, ideas, and the stuff of life. Many early sociologists focused on structure and the way we arrange things. Culture has to do with the ideas that a group has and how that shapes the people. The way we construct reality within a social system, using ideas and symbols to assign meaning and it"s the way we habitually behave in relaionship to the meaning we have constructed. A set of ideas, symbols that go with these ideas, and the behavior we produce in response to those ideas. Ex (set of ideas): in ann arbor, we believe we can just walk into the the street and traic will stop. Ex (behavior in response to ideas): drivers actually stop when people walk into the street in. What"s considered high culture (literature, the arts, performance) are actually just expressions of culture. What a given group holds to be true.
