Group+5

Group 5: Heather Thomas, Paula Lyssy, Amanda Flores

Notes on defining culture:
 * The first part of this definition suggests the outward forms that culture takes in the humanities: great novels and concertos, classical architecture and painting, Wagnerian opera and contemporary experimental poetry.
 * Sociologist view- A mode of living in the world as a social being
 * Represented by the practices, rituals, behaviors, activities, and artifacts that make up the experience of everyday life
 * 3 Properties of Culture
 * Richly symbolic
 * Socially constructed
 * Embodied

﻿Notes on mass culture & folk culture: **Folk Culture**- Folk Culture has come about because people in power wanted to retain their power so they supported the movement to celebrate different cultures and the histories of those cultures.
 * Refers to the lifestyle of a culture ([])
 * Handed down through oral tradition ([])
 * Tejano music/Tex-Mex music- various forms of folk & popular music originating among the Mexican-American populations of central & Southern Texas. Origin-Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) forced many Europeans to flee Mexico & into South Texas, their musical influence had a major impact on Tejanos. ([])

**Mass Culture**-
 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">Is mass produced and marketed[]
 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">Is transmitted to people by the media and other modern communications instead of through daily interactions with people[]

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">An example of the two cultures that we discussed were major holidays. <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">Most holidays started as a type of Folk Culture, but have turned into a Mass Culture in that we can purchase material items that have become associated with the holiday well in advance of the actual day.

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">**Pop Culture**- totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, images, and other phenomena that are felt to be important to a particular group of society.([])

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">Forms of Pop Culture include: music, film, television, advertising, sports, fashion, toys, magazines, and comic books. ([])


 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">"commercial" culture
 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">nearly all commodity available for purchase[]

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">"the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group"

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">Pop culture defined: Frequently encountered or widely accepted commonly liked or approved.
 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">Pop culture is media based.
 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">Pop culture is what the media makes us believe.
 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">Distributors & consumers make it "popular" ([]

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">pop culture is timed- the 70's were different from the 80's etc.

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">**Hegemony**- example- men have a rightful place in certain positions that women have to fight for.

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">**Functionalists Approach:** <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">**Reflection**-The band U2's song, Sunday Bloody Sunday. It was a reflection of the Bloody Sunday incident in Northern Ireland where the Britihsh troops shot & killed protestors and bystanders. <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">[]

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">**Solidarity**-College Fight Songs. Solidarity binds people in a group together and fosters a spirit of unity.

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">**Ritual of Rebellion**-In European age of monarchs, court jesters were permitted to tease and provoke kings and queens. <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">"These rituals represent a kind of institutionalized protest that allow subordinate group members to momentarily let off steam without actually granting them real power for any significant period of time." (page 38)

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">[]


 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">6/27/11 Post Modernism & Globalization **

<span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">**Moderism**- <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">**Postmodernism**- <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">**Major theorists of postmodernism**- <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">__Fredric Jameson__- describes postmodernism as the "dominant cultural logic of late capitalism ."
 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif;">in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. ( <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">[] <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif;">)
 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism.
 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">is a movement away from the viewpoint of moderism. More specifically it is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the problem of objective truth and inherent suspicion towards global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. ([])
 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">is used in critical theory to refer to a point of departure for works of literature, drama, architecture, cinema, journalism, and design, as well as in marketing and business and in the interpretation of law, culture, and religion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">is a loose alliance of intellectual perspectives which collectively pose a challenging critique of the most basic assumptions of the modern educational enterprise. ([])

**Interpretive Communities**-
Examples: Native Americans like western movies British rock band Smiths- attracted American fan base of shy, pale-skinned white teenager who identified with the band's melancholic view of life.
 * Consumers whose common social identities and cultural backgrounds (whether organized on the basis of nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, or age) inform there shared understandings of cultural in patterned ways.
 * When attributing meaning and significance to song, movies, and other kinds of media and popular culture, audiences not only draw on their personal memories or individual psyches but their social circumstances as well.
 * Intrepretive communities often share a specific intellectual, religious, or political worldview within a larger institutional context.
 * Interpretive communities materialize during public debates surrounding the value or potential harm of certain types of popular culture.

Movies changed from low culture to high culture with the introduction of the television.

**<span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">TERMS FOR STUDY: **
1**.Culture**: The Humanities sees it as "the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity." Examples would be great novels, classical architecture and paintings. Literature, music, philosophy, and art history are expressed as the most revered expressions of the human condition by culture. In social sciences culture refers to a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group or humanity in general. Sociologists see culture as a mode of living in the world as a social being, as represented by the practices, rituals, behaviors, activities, and artifacts that make up the experience of everday life. examples would be cooking styls, types of food. **2. Pop Culture:** ==<span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 21px;">3. **Mass Culture**- is how culture gets produced, whereas popular culture is how culture gets consumed. Mass Culture is a set of cultural values and ideas that arise from common exposure of a population to the same cultural activities, communications media, music and art, etc. == <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 110%;">4. **Folk Culture**- was initially a sort of "mythical" culture comprised of the lived practices of rural dwellers, "Common People." This culture was of great concern to those in positions of social and political power.
 * How we live in nature, past and present
 * It is an active process; it is the practice of making and communicating meanings. It is not an object, but the experience of the object.
 * It is made up of shared and conflicted networks of meanings.
 * 1) Culture that is "popular" is well liked, and in a market economy that popularity is often best demonstrated through commercial success as measured by Nielsen ratings, video rentals, album sales, or box-office revenue
 * 2) Refers to icons or media products that are globally ubiquitous and easily recognized the world over
 * 3) Refers to commercial media thought to be trivial, tacky, and pitched to the lowest denominator as mass culture intended for general consumption, like canned soup or chewing gum
 * 4) Associated with songs, dances, and other folk expressions belonging to the people under the guise of democratic populism and authenticity.

**5. Interpretative Communities** - consumers whose common social identities and cultural backgrounds (whether organized on the basis of nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, or age) inform their shared understandings of culture in patterned ways 6. **Collective Effervescence**-a shared feeling of identity in which the individual numers of a group experience waves of emotion, a sense of unity and togetherness. example would be a Catholic Mass Effervescent energy of crowds is considered so central to religions ceremonies that laws, customs, and traditions of faith all but demand that rituals be performed collectively.