Lesson 1

Defining Culture, and Society

Culture is all around us, an inherent part of our social life as well as our personality and sense of
subjectivity. Culture is a quality that some people have more than others: how “cultured” someone is
depends on social class, education, tastes in music or film, and speech habits. By attending symphonies,
plays, operas, and poetry readings, a few people show they “appreciate culture” more than most.
Sometimes we visit places such as museums or art galleries to increase our “cultural awareness.”
Perhaps you have heard someone in the “cultural elite” bemoan the deplorable “popular culture” of TV,
graphically violent computer games, mass-marked movies, pierced navels, tattoos, and rock or rap
music.

However, culture, as cultural studies researcher Raymond Williams noted, is one of the most complex
words in the English language. Culture is popularly used to denote a narrow sense that is usually related
to the arts and humanities in a broader sense, culture denotes the practices, beliefs and perceptions of a
given society. Culture is additionally often opposed with “savagery,” relating to something which is
“cultured” as a product of a certain evolvement from a natural state. In a theoretical sense, culture is
often related as a system of structures with power relations running through them.

In the social sciences, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, there is hardly a consensus regarding
the meaning of the term culture, and various definition of culture are in circulations. Researchers
Kroeber and Kluckhohn (Culture: A Critical Review of Literature, 1952) gathered an array of various
definition of culture and have divided them into six primary categories:

1. Descriptive Definition of culture which view culture as a total system of customs, beliefs,
knowledge, laws, means of expressions, and so forth.
2. Historical definition of culture which view culture as the continuation of generations.
3. Normative definition of culture which related to value system that construct social and personal
behaviour.
4. Psychological definition of culture which stress culture’s role in interpersonal relations.
5. Structural definition of culture that focus on relational aspects of cultural components through
abstraction.
6. Socio-genetic definitions of culture which focus on the genesis and continued existence of
culture.

A different, more contemporary. Way to distinguish definitions of culture is to note the way in which
culture is theoretically perceived as either something which is opposed to materiality, technology, and
social structures from which is culture is something different, or as a space of nonmaterial ideas which
are also, obviously, abstract.

This leads us to propose two fundamental understanding regarding definition of culture. First, culture is
an ensemble of practices, values and meanings common to a collective entity. Secondly, culture is the
totality of the activities and objects through which meaning is generated and circulated in a given
collective entity.

Anthropological Perspective of Culture and Society

 In anthropological discussions, the distinction between “elite culture’’ and “popular culture” is
largely irrelevant, and it is meaningless to say that one group of people “has more culture” than
another. All human groups possesss culture to the same degree. Anthropologists are concerned mainly
with differences between cultures, not whether some societies have more or less culture.

Anthropologists have defined the term culture in literally hundreds of ways. Virtually all
definition, however, share certain features. There is wide agreement that culture:

 Is learned from other people while growing up in a particular society or group;

 Is widely shared by the members of that society or group;
 So profoundly affects the thoughts, actions, and feelings of people in that group that
anthropologists say “individuals are a product of their culture” and “learning culture is
an essential part of human development; and
 In large part accounts for the diffrences between groups of people in how they act,
think, and feel

When we speak of Japanese culture, for example, we usually mean practically everything about how the
Japanese people live – their family, life, religion, values, government, and so forth. The word culture
often is intended to emphasize the unique or most distinctive aspects of a people’s customs and beliefs.
How the Japanese think and act differs in some ways from how the French, Iranians, Egyptians, and
Israelis think and act, and the phrase “Japanese culture” succinctly brings to mind the multitude of
differences between the Japanese and other peoples.

Of course the Japanese are not totally unique. They share many cultural features with other
people. The Japanese are distinctive only in some ways, for they have experienced centuries of contacts
with the Chinese and Koreans. Furthermore, beginning in the mid-1800s, European and American
powers profoundly affected Japan. The modern Japanese economy, education, political system, and
world view were affected by all those contacts.

Now, when anthropologists speak of Japanese culture, they do not mean that Japanese culture
is better or worse- higher or lower, more or less developed- than English or Iranian culture. They mean
only that Japanese, English and Iranians differ in certain ways. Finally, anthropologists assuredly do not
mean that Japanese culture is distinctive because the Japanese are biologically (genetically) distinctive.
Anthropologists see very well that Japanese children are exposed to different ways of thinking and
acting than are English or Saudi Arabian children. Children become English, Saudi Arabian, or Japanese
because of their exposure to different social settings and environments.

If culture is defined broadly, it includes all the things individuals learn while growing up among
particular group: attitudes standards of morality, rules of etiquette, perceptions of reality, language,
notions about the proper way to live, beliefs about how females and males should interact, ideas about
how the world works and so forth. We call this cultural knowledge. We all carry such knowledge in our
brains just as we carry the knowledge of our language. Much of it is so ingrained in us that we are hardly
aware that we have learned it or that not everyone in the world has learned it.

Sociological Perspective of Culture and Society

Culture is the perspective people come to share as they interact. Culture includes everything
tangible and intangible that a people of a society create, acquire from other societies and transmit to
subsequent generations. Culture comprises the things that people have, the things that they do and
what they think.

Sociologist distinguish between culture and society. A society is a group of people living in a
given territory who share a culture and who interact with people of that territory more than with people
of other territories. In this way culture and society are different but they are connected. Culture is what
people share with one another within a society. The fact that youth share a similar culture with others
helps to define the group of society to which you belong. A fairly large number of people are said to
constitute a society when they live in the same territory, are relatively independent of people outside it,
and participate in a common culture. A is the largest form of human group. It consists of people who can
share a common heritage and culture. Members of the society learn this culture and transmit it from
one generation to the next. They even preserve their distinctive culture through literature, art, video
recordings, and other means of expression.

In sociological term, culture does not refer solely to the fine arts and refines intellectual taste. It
consists of all objects and ideas within a society, including bagoong, k-pop songs, and taglish words.
Sociologists consider both a painting by Fernando Amorsolo and a signage that says “bili na kayo ng
penoy at balut” as both aspects of a culture. A tribe that cultivates soil by hand has just as much culture
as a people that relies on computer-operated machinery. Each people has a distinctive culture with its
own characteristic ways of gathering and preparing food, constructing hums, structuring the family, and
promoting standards of right and wrong.

Because the term culture includes everything that a group of people has, thinks, and does, we
should not be surprised to learn that social scientists do not agree on a specific dimension. Despite the
disagreements over definitions, they somewhat agree to the essential principles or aspects of culture
such as: (1)consists of tangible and intangible components; (2)biological, environmental, and historical
forces shape and change culture; and (3) that culture is a tool that people use to evaluate other societies
and to adapt to problems of living. The details of the discussion on these aspects will be further
discussed in the succeeding lessons.

Although sociologists, anthropologists and other social scintists tend to agree on the basic
aspects or principles of culture, they have quite different on how culture affects people’s lives. These
different views correspons to the three (3) major sociological perspective: functionalism, conflict theory
and symbolic interaction.

The Functionalist View of Culture

According to the functionalist perspective, societies can operate smoothly only if their members
are able to meet the demands and challenges of the environment in effective, coordinated ways.
Accordingly, it emphasizes that culture serves as a buffer between people and their environment.
Culture represents the solutions that people of a society have worked out over time to meet distinct
environmental and historical challenges and have passed onto the next generation so that each new
generation does not have to start out from scratch (Ferrante, 1995)
 For example, in a given society, language performs an important function such that it gives
people a sense of unity and to link them to one another so that cooperation will be possible. Conflicts,
miscommunication and chaos are prevented with the use of languages shared within groups.

This perspective on culture has at least one major imitation because it has the tendency to
ignore dysfunctions or the harmful and negative aspects of both material and nonmaterial culture. It
overemphasizes the integrative qualities of culture on the assumption that if something exists, it is by
definition useful to society. Conflict theorists on the other hand address this limitation.

Conflict View of Culture

From a conflict perspective, society is not held together because everyone learns and
shares common cultural values. Conflict theorists are concerned with how the groups that control the
means of material production impose their products, values and norms on other groups. A famous
conflict theorists is Karl Marx who believes that those “who have” own the means of production are
powerful enough to force, control and manipulate those who ‘have not”.

A major shortcoming of this perspective is that it seems the owner of production as imposing a
culture – their products, values and norms such as consumerism on other less powerful groups. It hardly
acknowledges that members of these less powerful groups often want to purchase what
industrialization has to offer, thus rejecting, consciously or unconsciously, aspects of their culture
(Ferrante, 1995).

Symbolic Interactionist view of Culture

Symbolic interactionists are not concerned with the functions of culture or with the question of
how a dominant culture is imposed on others. Instead, they are more concerned with the symbolic
properties of culture. They define symbols as essential to civilization because: (1) culture emerged and
are perpetuated as a results of symbols, (2) interaction between people cannot take place without
symbols, and (3) infants are transformed into human beings when they acquire symbols. A symbol
maybe defined as any kind of physical form – material object, a color, a sound, a word, an odor, a
movement, a taste – that receives its value or meaning from those who use it (Ferrante, 1995).

Colors, words, gestures become symbols because pople agreed upon their meaning over time.
Hence, symbolic interactionists conceive of culture as an elaborate and complex symbol system that has
been constructed and passed on from one generation to another. They are also interested in how
meanings are constructed and how they change over time and across culture. His perspective makes us
aware that the key in understanding and interacting with someone from another culture is to learn the
symbol system of that culture.

The symbolic interactionist perspective has at least two weaknesses. First, although it is
relatively easy to trace why a particular symbol is associated with a physical form after the fact, there is
no systematic framework for predicting what symbolic meanings will arise. Second, it is not clear as well
how people come to agree on meanings.
 LESSON 2

SOCIETY AND CULTURE AS A

COMPLEX WHOLE

“Culture…. Is that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, laws, customs,
and any other capabilities and habits acquired by [a human] as a member of society.” This is a quote
from Edward Tyler who was first to specify that culture is learned and acquired, as opposed to being a
biological trait. This was revolutionary against the backdrop of colonialism, racism and social
evolutionism – the dominant ideologies of the 19 th century. His definition is also one of the first
anthropological definitions of culture.

As mentioned in the previous lesson, the term culture includes everything that a group of
people has, thinks and does. It is precisely the reason why society and the culture they shared and
transmit within, are a complex whole.

Although each society is complex and dynamic in terms of what it has, what it thinks and does,
there are four important aspects that make it whole. In these lesson, we will discuss these four aspects,
namely: (1) beliefs, (2) values, (3) norms, and (4) symbols.

Beliefs

Beliefs are conception that people accept as true about how the world operates and where
individual fit in it. Beliefs can be rooted in blind faith, experience, tradition or the scientific method.
Whatever the origin, the belief can exert powerful influence on behaviour.

For instance, in child birth, Filipinos believe that there are certain types of food that should be
excluded from the prenatal diet: squid (because it might get tangled in the woman’s body and cause
that umbilical cord to wrap around the fetus’s neck, crabs (because it might cause clubbed finger and
toes), dark foods such as prunes and black coffee ( because they might result in a dark skinned baby),
and taro root ( because it is believed to cause the baby to have eczema or skin problems). It is also
believed that all of the pregnant women’s food cravings should be immediately satisfied or the baby
could be born prematurely or have a birthmark.

Other traditional practices during pregnancy include avoidance of explicit taboos such as sitting
on steps or standing in a doorway (this could cause the baby’s head to be bock during passage through
the birth canal), arguing with relatives (may cause with complications or miscarriage), and walkin over a
rope (which could result in a delayed expulsion of the placenta).

Values
 Values are general and shared perception of what is good, right, appropriate and worthwhile,
and important with regard to modes of conduct as in the case of self-reliance or obedience; and that
which concerns states of existence like freedom of choice or equal opportunity. While beliefs are
conceptions about the world and how the people in it operate, values are conception about the world
and how the people should be.

Filipino anthropologist, Dr. Filipe Landa Jocano, Professor Emeritus at the Asian Center of the
University of the Philippines, and an authority on the subject matter of Filipino society and culture
showed evidence that individualism is not part of traditional Filipino culture. His studies pointed to
elements of pakikitungo (smooth interpersonal relationship), pakikisama (to be sensitive, concerned and
supportive), and pakikiramay (to sympathize and share sufferings). Dr. Jocano explained that there are
three elements that constitute the Filipino value system:

1. Halaga – it is the evaluative aspect as to what Filipinos find most virtuous which constitutes
three dimensions: (1) pagkatao or self-worth, (2) pakikipagkapwa-tao or dignified
relationship with others, and (3) pagkamaka-tao or compassion.
2. Asal – it is the expression of the evaluative aspect of Filipino value system which constitute
three standards: (1) kapawa or relational, (2) damdamin or emotional, and (3) dangal or
honor.
3. Diwa – This refers to the kalooban or inner self which in essence is intertwined reason and
emotion.

According to Dr. Jocano, much of Filipino values are stirred with emotions and concerned of
their affective end-results, which maybe a reason why Filipinos tend to always put in their minds the
concept of hiya or sahme, amorpropio or self-esteem, delicadeza or circumspection, palabra de honor or
word of honor and utang na loob or debt of gratitude.

Filipino values lean towards an orientation of having a fatalistic outlook as manifested by

expressions bahala na (come what may), itinadhana ng Diyos (God has destined), iginuhit ng tadana
(destiny) or napasubo (forced by an uncontrollable circumstance).

There are observations that Filipinos also tend to have a greater attachment on personailities
and group affiliations. Evidence of whoch is shown through our loyalty and commitment to kamag-anak
(relatives), compadre (co-sponsor in wedding or baptism), kasamahan (colleague), kapatiran
(brotherhood in fraternity or religion). Such is manifested in personality-based politics, which often
leads to problems of magnitude impact to governance often rooted from this patronage politics.

Norms

All societies have guidelines that govern moral standards and even the most routine aspects of
life. Sociologists call the written and unwritten rules that specify the behaviours appropriate to specific
education as norms.

Some norms are considered more important than other norms. Accordingly, William Graham
Summer (1907), a classical liberal American social scientist distinguished between folkways and mores:
 (1) Folkways – these are norms that to routine matters like eating, sleeping, appearance,
posture, use of appliances and relations to various people, animals and the environment. For example,
let us consider the folkways that govern how a typical meal is eaten at Korean dinner tables. In Korea,
diners sit in tables with their legs crossed. They do not pass items to one another except to small
children. Instead, they reach and stretch across one another and use their chopsticks to lift small
portions from serving bowls to individual rice bowls or directly to their mouths. The Korean norm of
table etiquette- that is, reching instead of passing, having no clear space settings, and using the same
utensils to eat and to serve de-emphasize the individual and reinforce greater importance of the group.
Perhaps this is comparable to a normal, above average Filipino family where there is sharing of common
dishes among members of the family. We do not necessarily use utensils and the practice is called
kamayan. Although this practice is more common in rural areas or when Filipinos eat outdoors with
traditional local cuisines.

(2) Mores – are norms that people define as pivotal to the well being of the group. Obvious
examples of the mores are norms that prohibit cannibalism or the unjust and deliberate taking of
another person’s life. People who violate mores are usually punished through imprisonment,
institutionalized, or executed. Mores are considered final and unchangeable. In contrast, there is
considerable tolerance towards non-conformity to a folkway, and the consequences for violating
folkways are usually minor, like a disapproving stare, whispers behind one’s back, or laughter.

Symbols

Symbol is any kind of physical phenomenon- a word, an object, a color, a sound, a feeling, an
odor, a movement, a taste to which people assign a meaning or value (Ferrante, 1995). The meaning or
value is not evident from the physical phenomenon alone. This is a deceptively simple idea that suggests
that people decide what something means. In order to grasp this idea you might think about how young
children question the meaning of everything. As what we often hear from parents “hindi talaga sila
makaintinde, lahat dapat ituturo mo pa!” (They don’t understand anything everything is learned!).
before a child acquires meanings, he or she must evolve first through interactions with others.

Another example to point this is the meaning assigned to a suntan. In the US, a tan at various
times represented quite different ideas about social class. In the early 1900’s wealthy persons
purposefully avoid tanning to distinguish themselves from members of the working class such as
laborers and farmers. Pale complexion meant that they did not have to work outdoors to make a living.
Then, as the basis of the US economy changed from agriculture to manufacturing, a large portion of the
population moved indoors to work. The meaning attached to a pail complexion change accordingly to
represent unrelieved indoor while a tan came to symbolize abundant leisure time (Ferrante, 1995).
While American girls would labor to get a suntan skin, Filipino women on the other hand would buy
bleaching creams, products with glutathione and whitening lotion. Dark or tan is readily associated with
“the rest” and therefore not a sight to behold.
 LESSON 3

ASPECTS OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Society and culture is a complex whole. Accordingly, most modern social scientists prefer
broader understanding of culture. The danger is if we fall to the common temptation that like concepts
of family and religion, culture are so familiar that few think critically about its meaning or importance. In
this lesson we ponder on the broader understanding of culture focused on the three important aspects
(1) shared; (2) socially learned and; (3) patterns of behaviour.

Shared

Culture is collective- it is shared by some group of people. “Shared by some group of people” is
deliberately vague because the “group” that “shares” culture depends largely on particular interest. The
term that describes this aspect of culture is called diffusion. People borrow ideas, materials, products,
and other inventions from other societies. The process by which an idea, an invention, or some other
cultural item is borrowed from a foreign source is called diffusion (Ferrante, 1995).

The opportunity to borrow occurs every time two people from different cultures make contact,
whether it is by phone, travel, course of attending school, or because an inventor from one country files
a patent in another country. (Ferrante, 1995) Opportunities for cultural diffusion between Spain and the
Philippines occur as a result of more than three hundred years of Spanish colonization.

Most nations, and especially those with a history of colonialism, contain a lot of cultural
diversity within their legal boundaries. For example, the current national boundaries of most African and
South Asian countries are a product of their history as colonies, not of their indigenous cultural or ethnic
identities. More often than not, colonizing powers created boundaries between “their” colonies to
further their own interests rather than to reflect cultural distinction and ethnic divisions (Bailey, G., &
Peoples, J. 2014).

Even if a given country was ethnically homogenous in its past, few remain culturally “pure”
today. The Netherlands (Holland) once was almost entirely Dutch, but today it contains many
immigrants. Migrants from North Africa, Turkey, South Asia, and other regions where wages are low
now work in European countries like France, Germany, and Great Britain. The immigrants enrich their
host countries with their cuisines, festivals, music and other cultural practices. But they also take jobs,
and some native Europeans view immigrants as a political threat and a danger to their own way of life
and react negatively to the presence of foreigners (Bailey, G., & Peoples, J. 2014).

Socially Learned

Social learning is the process by which individuals acquire knowledge from others in the groups
to which they belong, as a normal part of childhood. The process by which infants and children socially
learn the culture of those around them is called enculturation or socialization.

Culture is not behaviour itself but the knowledge used to construct and understand behaviour. It
is learned as children grow up in society and discover how their parents and others around them,
interpret the world. In our society we learn to distinguish objects such as cars, windows, houses,
children and food; to recognize attributes like sharp, hot, beautiful and humid; to classify and perform
different kinds of acts; to evaluate what is good and bad and to judge when an unusual action is
appropriate or inappropriate (Spradley, J. P., & McCurdy, D. W. 1980).

The fact that culture is learned implies that culture is not transmitted to new generations
genetically or by biological reproduction. Culture is not part of a particular human group’s biological
makeup but is something the people born into that group acquire while growing up in their social
environment. Biological/ genetic differences (including “racial” differences) between human populations
such as African, East Asians, Europeans, and Native Americans do not differ in their culture because they
differ biologically. Any human infant is perfectly capable of learning the culture of any human group or
biological population, just as any child can learn the language of whatever group she or he happens to
have been born into. The main point is, cultural differences and biological differences are largely
independent of one another.

More than just learned, culture is socially learned. Humans do not learn culture primarily by trial
and error. The main way children learn culture is by observation, imitation, communication and
inference. One important way in which humans differ in degree, though not in kind, from other primates
is our ability to learn by imitating and communication with other humans.

Think about the enormous advantages of humans’ reliance on social learning rather than trial-
and-error learning. First, anything that one individual learns can be communicated to others in a group,
who can take advantage of someone else’s experience. A tasty or nourishing new food discovered by
someone can be incorporated into an entire group’s diet and potentially become part of their cuisine. A
new way of making an arrowhead that penetrates a deer’s hide more deeply can be adopted by other
group members and thus become part of their technology.

Second, the culture than any generation has acquired is passed down to the next generation,
which transmits it to the third generation, and so on. Thus, the knowledge and behaviour acquired by
one generation are available to future generations. By this process of social learning over many
generations knowledge accumulates. People who invent or discover new things often receive a lot of
social recognition and material rewards, but every invention grows out of countless others that make
each new possible. Therefore, people alive today live largely (not entirely) from knowledge acquired by
previous generations. Members of new generations socially learn such knowledge through enculturation
and, in modern societies, through formal education in school and colleges. Probably, all this seems
commonsensical and not all remarkable to you-until you try to imagine how your life and the entire
world would be different without social learning (Bailey, G., & Peoples, J. 2014).

Patterns of Behavior

Even within a single culture, the behavior of individuals is quite variable. In part, people act
differently because of the distinctions their cultures make between males and females, old and young,
rich and poor, nieces and uncles, plumbers and attorneys, and so forth. Actions inappropriate for
women may not be suitable for men, and vice versa. In addition to the distinctions a culture makes
between kinds of people are those it makes between kinds of situations or social context: a woman acts
differently depending on whether she is interacting with her husband, her daughter, her priest, her
employee, a clerk, and so forth. Added to this complexity is the fact that each person is unique: one
woman’s relationship with her husband is not exactly the same as that of another’s even within the
same culture.

Despite such complications, within a group that shares culture, there are usually behavioural
regularities or patterns of behaviour. These patterns often surprise other groups. For instance, if in the
1970s you had visited the Yanomamo-an Amazonian rain forest people, you would have been shocked
by some of the things they do. By most cultures’ standards of “normal,” the Yanomamo- called “The
Fierce People” by ethnographer Napoleon Chagnon- are unusually demanding and aggressive. Slight
insults often meet with violent responses. Quarrelling men may duel by engaging in a chest-pounding
contest, during which they often put rocks in their hands and take turn beating one another on the
chest. Serious quarrels call for clubs, with which men bash one another on the head. Fathers encourage
their sons to strike them (and anyone else) by teasing and goading, all the while praising the child for his
fierceness.

If, on the other hand, you had visited the Semai, a people of Malaysia, you might have been
surprised at their refusal to express anger and hostility. Indeed, according to the standards of most
cultures, they are too docile. One adult should never strike one another- “Suppose he hit you back?”
they ask. The Semai seldom physically punish their children- “How would you feel if he or she died?”
they ask. When children misbehave, the worst physical punishment they receive is a pinch on the cheek
or a pat on the hand.

The contrasting behavioral patterns of Yanomamo and Semai illustrate another important
characteristic of most human behaviour: its social nature. Humans are supremely social animals. We
seldom do anything alone, and even when we are by ourselves, we rely on our cultural upbringing to
provide us with the knowledge of how to act. Relationships between people are therefore enormously
important in all cultures.

Anthropologists pay special heed to the regularities and patterning of these social relationships,
including such things as how family members interact, how females and males relate to one another,
how political leaders deal with subordinates, what shamans and priests do.

The concept of role is useful to describe and analyse interactions and relationships. We
commonly say that individuals “have a role” in some group. Roles usually carry names or labels.
Examples are “mother” in a nuclear family, “student” in a classroom, “accountant” in a company, and
“headman” of a Yanomamo village. Attached to roles are the group’s expectations about what people
who hold the role should do. Learning to be a member of a group includes learning its expectations.
Expectations include rights and duties. The rights (or privileges) I have as someone who has a role
include the benefits and I and other group members agree I should receive as a member. My duties (or
obligations) as the holder of a role include what I am expected to do for other members or for the group
as a whole.

Rights and duties are usually reciprocal: my right over you is your duty to me, vice versa. My
duties to the group as a whole are the group’s rights over me, vice versa. If I adequately perform my
duties to the group as a whole, the other members reward me, just as I reward them for their own role
performance. By occupying and performing a role in a group, I get some of my own wants and needs
fulfilled, and I do so by behaving in ways that others find valuable and satisfying. Conversely, failure to
live up to the group’s expectations of role performance is likely to bring some sort of informal or formal
punishment. Among Yanomamo, young men who refuse to stand up for themselves by fighting are
ridiculed and may never amount to anything.

During enculturation into a particular culture, children learn the kinds of roles that exist and the
expectations people have about the rights and duties of those roles. Shared knowledge of roles and
expectations that people shares are partly responsible for pattern behaviour. (Bailey & Peoples, 2014)

Identify

Define the following terms:

1. Diffusion
2. Socialization
3. Culture as shared
4. Culture as socially learned
5. Culture as patterns of behaviour

Expound

1. Expound why culture is shared.

2. Discuss examples to prove that culture is socially learned
3. Discuss the patterns of behaviour in a typical Filipino practice called as “pamamanhikan.”

Accomplish

In a one whole sheet of paper, write a short essay about the enormous advantages of humans’
reliance on social learning rather than on trial-and-error learning based on your own experience and
those you observed from others.

Undertake

A. Let’s Go Online!

Interactive online activity:

1. Through the search engine of www.OurHappySchool.com, look for the article, “On Excision.”
 2. Read the article and other students’ comments.
3. Answer the question under ‘Let’s Discuss.’ Write your answer (2-3 sentences) on the FB
comment section below the page using the hash tags #JudgingOtherCultures and #Excision.
4. Ask at least two friends (preferably from other countries) to post comments on your answer.
5. Print screen your published comment and its thread. Submit it to your teacher.

B. Let’s Get Ready!

Read about sociologist George Ritzer and his concept called Mcdonaldization. What is it all about?