SOCI 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Symbolic Culture, Heredity, Noam Chomsky

• School: UBC
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOCI 102
• Professor: Catherine Corrigall- Brown

Document Summary

Material culture: jewellery, art, buildings, clothing, weapons, machines, and even eating utensils, hairstyles. Nonmaterial cultures: ways of thinking beliefs, values, and other assumptions about the world and doing common patterns of behaviour, including language, gestures and other forms of interaction. Culture learning depends on the human capacity to use symbols that have no necessary connection to the things they signify. Symbol: anything to which people attach meaning and then use to communicate, can be gestures, language, values, norms, sanctions, folkways or more. Gestures: use of one"s body to communicate with others, useful shorthand ways of giving messages without using words. While people in ever culture use gestures, their meaning may change completely from one culture to another. They not only facilitate communication but can also lead to misunderstandings, embarrassment and more often than we care to admit, interpersonal conflict. To get along with a culture, t is important to learn that culture"s gestures.