ERICSON NAVARRO

KEY TERMS HBV4 CHAPTER 4

Acculturation – the process of adjusting to the ways of a new society

Apartheid – South Africa’s government and forced policy of segregation from 1948 to 1990

Argot – a unique language of a subculture with specialized vocabulary and idioms

Artifacts – material possessions that are specific to a culture

Assimilation – a process of cultural accommodation in which one group is completely absorbed

by another

Civil rights – the rights of individuals to not be threatened as second class citizens , are
especially the right of freedom from servitude.

Cultural diffusion – the process by which culture elements spread from group to group within a
society, or from one society to another

Cultural lag – a process in which some areas of society do not change as quickly as the rest of
society

Cultural pluralism – the process of cultural accommodation in which one group is added to
another and retains much of its cultural heritage and practises

Cultural relativity – the idea that every cultural trait can only be fully understood and evaluated
by the standards of right and wrong of the society in which it originated

Cultural trait – the smallest unit of culture that can be identified

Culture – everything people think, everything people do, and everything people possess
because they belong to a particular society

Culture shock – a feeling of being bombarded by so many new stimuli (ideas, activities,
lifestyles, etc.,) that adjustment seems impossible

Culture-bound - meaningful within a cultural context and less meaningful when removed from
that context

Discrimination – any action that is taken on the basis of a prejudice

Ethnicity – a shared cultural heritage and a sense of peoplehood

Ethnocentrism – the evaluation of others in terms of one’s own cultural values and standards

Feminist – an advocate of the movement for women to have political, economic, and social
rights equal to those of men

Future shock – a feeling that society is changing so rapidly in technological terms and new
stimuli arise so quickly that is difficult or impossible to adapt to changes.

Ideology – a manner of thinking characteristic of a whole society or culture

Internalization – a norm learned so well it is thought of, not as culturally taught, but as part of
human nature

Jensenism – the prejudicial belief that one race is collectively more intelligent than another

Manifest destiny – the belief that white people were given dominion over North America as a
result of divine intervention and thus justified in removing the aboriginal nations

Melting pot – the process of cultural accommodation in which one group is almost completely
absorbed by another but contributes something distinctive to the whole

Minority group – a collection of people who share common traits and hold significantly less
power than society’s dominant groups

Multiculturalism – Government assisted cultural pluralism

Norms – standards of conduct and rules of behavior that tell us how we should and should not
behave

Prejudice – a preconceived idea that the behaviours and personality traits of an individual can
be predicted on the basis of the human categories which the individual belongs.

Race – a large category of people distinguished from others by inherited physiological

differences

Racism – a systematic prejudice and/or discrimination on the basis of physiological differences

Social distance – the point at which an individual thinks that another group should be
prohibited from any further integration into society
Stereotype – generalized an exaggerated picture of an entire category of people

Subculture – a small group within society that shares most of the ways of the main society but
has some distinctive values and ideas of its own
Symbol – anything that is taken to stand for something else

Tempocentrism – the belief that one era in time superior to all others and should be used as
the standard by which other periods of time are judged

Tokenism – The act of giving a person a position or an opportunity as a way of partially correct
in previous wrongs, but not as a way of rewarding the persons merits

Values – the generally accepted standards of desirability of a society