Question: What is the difference between material culture and nonmaterial culture?

Answer: The difference between material culture and nonmaterial culture is that material culture includes the physical thing, and nonmaterial culture includes things you cannot see nor touch.

Question: In what sense does culture guide people’s interpersonal relationships?

Answer: In the sense that one role of culture is to help explain human social behavior. For example, what people do/don’t do, like/dislike, value/discount, and believe/don’t believe are all based off culture, and tie into things we do every day.

Question: A group of people lives in a certain place. What other factor must be true in order to call that group a society?

Answer: In order for that group to be called a society, they must live a defined territory, and participate in a common culture. For example, the society’s different elements of culture might include common knowledge, language, values, customs, and physical objects.

Question: Suppose that you eat a big breakfast each day. Are you acting according to instinct, or according to culture? Explain.

Answer: According to culture, because instincts are mainly patterns of behavior for survival. For example, you don’t NEED to eat breakfast to survive on a daily basis, it’s just a common thing that was learned in society as a sort of custom or routine we do each day.

Question: How does the “nature vs nurture” argument combine with a person’s culture to explain human behavior?

Answer:

Question: According to sociobiologists, where does the “best” behavior come from, and what makes certain behaviors “better” than others?

Answer: In the sense that some people believe that the importance placed on genetics could justify one race to be superior to the others. The “middle ground” that some sociobiologists believe is that genes work with culture to shape and limit human behavior and social life in a complex way.

Question: Summarize the main ideas of this lesson by answering the following question. How would you describe the mix of factors that influence behavior in a human society?

Answer:

Question: Culture must be _____ by each new generation; it is not inherited genetically.

Answer: learned

Question: _____ are objects, actions, and sensations that represent cultural ideas.

Answer: Symbols

Question: The _____ of a symbol is the meaning that a culture chooses to give; it is not based on the symbol’s physical _____.

Answer: definition, characteristics