Question

Define ethnicity and cultural change for culture

Answer 1

Culture (/ˈkʌltʃər/) is the social behavior and norms found in human societies. Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Some aspects of human behavior, social practices such as culture, expressive forms such as art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies such as tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing are said to be cultural universals, found in all human societies. The concept of material culturecovers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization(including practices of political organizationand social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.[1]

In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been seen to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-baseddistinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the lower classes and create a false consciousness, and such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biologicaldispositions.

Answer 2

Answer:

Individuals who ascribe to a particular culture share an identity and a framework for understanding the world. Too often, culture is erroneously assumed to be synonymous with ethnicity.Like culture, one's ethnic identity may change due to changes in one's self-perception and the social context in which one lives.