Cultural Universals

According to Dr. Dennis O'Neil, Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marcos, California


1. communicating with a verbal language consisting of a limited set of sounds and grammatical rules for constructing sentences
2. using age and gender to classify people (e.g., teenager, senior citizen, woman, man)
3. classifying people based on marriage and descent relationships and having kinship terms to refer tothem (e.g., wife, mother, uncle, cousin)
4. raising children in some sort of family setting
5. having a sexual division of labor (e.g., men's work versus women's work)
6. having a concept of privacy
7. having rules to regulate sexual behavior
8. distinguishing between good and bad behavior
9. having some sort of body ornamentation
10. making jokes and playing games
11. having art
12. having some sort of leadership roles for the implementation of community decisions

CREATE-A-CULTURE

Imagine a culture of intelligent beings (for ease of communication, we will refer to them as humans) from anywhere in the universe. Taking into consideration the physical environment and human history of this culture, describe how they live and what they are like, making sure to elucidate the 12 cultural universals as they apply to this culture.

This project will take approximately one month to complete.

For Friday, August 24 complete Step One:
Where does this culture come from? Where do they live now?

Palomar World Cultures

Read the first Page "What Is Culture?" including subtopics on that page "Layers of Culture," "Culture and Society," "Is Culture Limited to Humans?"

http://anthro.palomar.edu/culture/

We will do a quiz in class, based on the quiz on the website that follows the page "What Is Culture?"

Questions: August 17

Who proposed that the world is round?

What is Culture

Food
Holidays
Clothes
Transportation
Weddings
Biases
Funerals
Superstitions
Rituals
Music
Dwellings
Domesticated
Animals
Symbols
Language
Technology/Tools
Religion
Phrases/Colloquialisms/Slang
Thinking
Art
Sports
Gestures
Greetings
Physical Contact
Rites of Passage

Family Cultures

Words

culture
ethnicity
migration
mitochondrial DNA
agrarian
longitude
latitude
parallels
meridians
Prime Meridian
Equator
Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn
International Dateline

Acculturation - Assimilate or cause to assimilate a different culture, typically the dominant one; psychological and social counterpart of cultural diffusion; a modification of one culture as a result of contact with a different or more advanced culture; the process by which the culture of a society is instilled from infancy onward

Where do you live?

What is a culture? What is your culture? What are your cultures? What are the elements that comprise your culture?