PSYC 2010U Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Paper Walls, Internment Of Japanese Americans, Symbolic Culture
Document Summary
Activities can be interconnected and organized over time, forming complex networks. Culture consists of material and symbolic tools that accumulate through time, are passed on through social processes, and provide resources for the developing child. These tools can organize the child"s activities and the ways that they relate to their environments. Imitation observing and copying the behaviours of others. Symbolic communication permits the expression of abstract ideas, desires, ambitions, and emotions. Symbols in the form of diagrams and stories, no less than video games and pencils, are cultural tools. Individuals modify their culture, as they become users of cultural tools in the course of ongoing interactions with the people in their communities. Cultures evolve because individuals produce variations in the material and symbolic cultural tools they use. Cumulative cultural evolution dynamic ongoing process of cultural change as a consequence of variation that individuals have produced in the cultural tools they use.
