SOC 1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Consumerism, Cultural Relativism, Ethnocentrism

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 1101
• Professor: Greg Flynn

Document Summary

Abstraction: human capacity to create complex symbols in order to classify experience and generalize from it. Consumerism: involves defining ourselves in terms of the goods we purchase. Cooperation: the human capacity to create a complex social life by establishing norms. Countercultures: submerse subcultures that oppose dominant values and seek to replace them. Cultural relativism: idea that all cultures and all cultural practices have equal value. Culture: sum of socially transmitted practices, languages, symbols, beliefs, values, ideologies, and material objects that people create to deal with real-life problems. Enable people to adapt to and thrive in their environments. Ethnocentrism: tendency to judge other cultures exclusively by the standards of our own. Language: system of symbols strung together to communicate thought. Material culture: comprises the tools and techniques that improve our ability to take what we want from nature. Norms: standards of behaviour or generally accepted ways of doing things.