3-1 Define culture.

3-2 Identify the basic elements of culture, including values and norms.

3-3 Discuss diversity within cultures, including the concepts of ideal and real culture, subcultures and countercultures, culture wars, and assimilation.

3-4 Describe emerging issues in culture, such as global and consumer culture

Culture encompasses the ideas, values, norms, practices, and objects that allow a group of people, or even an entire society, to carry out their collective lives with a minimum of friction. Values are the general, abstract standards defining what a group or society as a whole considers good, desirable, right, or important. Norms are the rules that guide what people do and how they live. Culture also has material and symbolic elements. Material culture encompasses all the objects and technologies that are reflections or manifestations of a culture. Symbolic culture, the nonmaterial side of culture, is best represented by language.

We are immersed in a diversity of cultures. Subcultures include people who may accept much of the dominant culture but are set apart from it by one or more culturally significant char­acteristics. Countercultures are groups of people who differ in certain ways from the dominant culture and whose norms and values may be incompatible with it. Culture wars pit one subculture or counterculture against another or against the dominant culture.

Many cultures tend to be ethnocentric—that is, those enmeshed in them believe that their own culture’s norms, values, traditions, and the like are better than those of other cultures. Many times newcomers are expected to assimilate, or to replace elements of their own culture with elements of the dominant culture. A society that values multiculturalism accepts and even embraces the cultures of many different groups and encourages the reten­tion of cultural differences.

Some scholars argue that globalization has increasingly led to a global culture; others attribute the growing cultural similar­ity around the world to cultural imperialism. In consumer cul­ture, core ideas and material objects relate to consumption. An increasingly important cyberculture thrives on the Internet.