Lesson 4: Culture

This statue is an example of our material culture. Society has deemed this statue to be an important piece of art and so it was placed into the Getty Museum.

Culture is partly made up of signs that are symbols of something else. These tags all have symbols on them that represent the brand. Our society can easily identify the flying bird as Hollister's logo even without the context.

Listening to the violin or classical music may be one form of high culture. High culture is not formed by the majority but by the elite.

Here we see Captain Jack Sparrow. One of the characters of the very popular Pirates of the Caribbean movies. These movies would be considered popular culture because of its extreme popularity.

Someone with an ethnocentric point of view may not see this as a tasty meal if their culture typically eats other kinds of food. Ethnocentrism is evaluating other cultures with the idea that their culture is normal and others is abnormal.