Notes to Study for Partial Test

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Sociology First Partial Notes to Study for First Partial Test

The concept of culture is one of the most important notions in sociology. Culture refers to the ways of life of the members of a society, or of groups within a society. It includes art, literature and painting, but also ranges much more widely. Other cultural items, for example, are how people dress, their customs, their patterns of work and religious ceremonies.

Culture is a large part of what makes us human. A theory about us humans is that we evolved and that as a species we emerged as a result of a long process of biological evolution. However, this is still a theory and not a scientific law.

Forms of behavior found in all, or virtually all, cultures are called cultural universals. Language, the prohibition against incest, institutions of marriage, the family, religion and property are the main types of cultural universals – but within these general categories there are many variations in values and modes of behavior between different societies.

We learn the characteristics of our culture through the process of socialization. Socialization is the process whereby, through contact with other human beings, the helpless infant gradually becomes a self-aware, knowledgeable human being, skilled in the ways of the given culture.

The work of Sigmund Freud suggests that the young child learns to become an autonomous being only as she or he learns to balance the demands of the environment with pressing desires coming from the unconscious. Our ability to be self-aware is built, painfully, on the repression of unconscious drives.

Socialization continues throughout the life course. At each distinct phase of life there are transitions to be made or crises to be overcome. This includes facing up to death, as the termination of personal existence.

Course:

Childhood – babies, toddlers, infancy. Before all seemed as just infancy and then little adults who had to do adult things such as work and behave as such. History has shown child labor as young as 7 or 8 in coalmines. Children before had no rights in either labor or treatment. Societies are now more child-centered and now parenting and childhood have become more clearly distinct from other stages. A child-centered society emphasizes children experience love and care from parents or other adults. With this attention given to childhood it has become a commonplace feature of family life in present-day society the existence of physical and sexual abuse in children.

Adolescence – this concept of teenager is relatively recent. The distinctiveness of being a teenager in current times is related both to the general extension of child rights and to the process of formal education.

Young adult

Mature adulthood

Old age