Culture

Reading: Chapter 3
 Culture
• Culture is a system of behaviours, beliefs,
knowledges, practices, values, concrete materials
including buildings, tools, and sacred items.
 Cultures are dynamic and change over time

– Culture and its elements are contested: there is little

agreement as to who and what belongs to a culture, even
by those who belong to a cultural group
– The problem of essentialism
– One of the points of contestation is authenticity or what is
true to a particular culture

© [Oxford University Press or author name], 2019 3

 What Kinds of Cultures
Are There?

• Types of cultures can be distinguished along two

central oppositions
– Dominant culture vs. subculture and counterculture
– High culture vs. popular and mass culture
 Dominant Culture versus Subculture and
Counterculture
• Dominant culture is the culture that, through its
political and economic power, is able to impose its
values, language, and ways of behaving and
interpreting behaviour on a given society
– Dominants refers to people who are closely linked with the
cultural mainstream
– Canada’s dominants are white, English-speaking,
heterosexual, male university graduates of European
background between the ages of 30 and 55, in good health,
who own homes in middle-class neighbourhoods of cities in
Ontario or Quebec.
 Minority Cultures: Subcultures, and
Countercultures
• Minority cultures are those that fall outside the
cultural mainstream
– There are two subcategories that falls under minority
cultures: countercultures and subcultures
 Countercultures

• Countercultures are minority cultures that feel the

power of the dominant culture and exist in
opposition to it. (e.g., clothing styles or sexual
norms)

© [Oxford University Press or author name], 2019 7

 Subcultures
• Subcultures are minority cultures that differ in some
way from the dominant culture but don’t directly
oppose it.
– E.g., groups organized around occupations or hobbies
 High Culture
• High culture: is the culture of the elite, a distinct minority. It is
associated with the arts
• High culture requires what Pierre Bourdieu called cultural
capital: a set of skills and knowledge needed to acquire the
sophisticated tastes that mark someone as a person of high
culture
 Popular Culture
• Popular culture: The culture of the majority,
especially those who do not have power (E.g. the
working class, the less educated, women, and
racialized minorities
 Mass Culture
• Mass culture: refers to people who have little or no agency in
the culture they consume (e.g., big companies dictate what
people watch, buy, value or believe)
• Created by those in power for the masses
– A crucial distinction exists between popular culture and
mass culture. The two differ in terms of agency, the ability
of “the people” to be creative or productive with materials
given to them by a dominant culture.
 Simulacra and Mass Culture
• Simulacra is a feature of Mass Culture:
– Simulacra are stereotypical cultural images produced and
reproduced like material goods or commodities by the
media and sometimes by scholars
– Simulcra are “hyperreal”, thus likely to be considered more
real than what actually exists

•
 Melting Pot versus Cultural Mosaic

• What are the distinctions between a melting pot

approach to diversity and a cultural mosaic approach.
Which model best describes Canadian society?
• What are the advantages of each approach?

© [Oxford University Press or author name], 2019 13