Taken Directly from the instructions for take home final. There will be five short essay questions on the final. The questions will be as follows (taken directly from the course syllabus):
1. Using your own words, explain the culture concept and its influence in human social life. Give an example of a belief or practice in another culture that is different
2. Demonstrate how racism has, in both the past and the present, influenced our society and its members. from ours, and explain how it makes sense in the context of that culture.
3. Explain the principles whereby social order is ensured in the absence of government.
4. Explain how gender roles and family structure are shaped by economic and political forces.
5. Discuss at least one example of how art or religious belief is shaped by cultural context. Each answer should be at least 220 words and clearly written.
The key ideas I am looking for are as follows:
1. Culture is the ideas and practices that characterize human groups; different groups have different cultures. Much of what any human being does is strongly influenced by aspects of his or her culture such as traditions, language and religion. One implication of this is that in order to understand a person from another social group, we need to know something of that person’s culture.
2. Although any person’s appearance reflects aspects of their ancestry, no person’s appearance reliably tells you anything about their behavior or their physical characteristics beyond appearance. While some groups do indeed share certain behaviors, these similarities are cultural rather than racial in origin.
3. In the absence of government (that is, permanent political offices and a legal system) societies ensure order in many different ways. Among the most important and widespread of these institutions are systems of kinship and descent (patrilineal or matrilineal) and building political loyalty through reciprocity.
4. The way families are structured, and how family members relate to each other, depends on the broader cultural context of those families. One example is the form of marriage that existed among the Nayar (a Hindu caste) in the pre-colonial period. Other examples include the traditional agriculturally based families of China and Europe in earlier times.
5. One example of how religion is shaped by cultural context is that millenarian movements are especially likely to arise among people who are unable to find a place for themselves in their societies. Millenarian movements are centered around a prophet who predicts that the world as we know it is soon coming to an end, to be replaced by a paradise inhabited by his or her followers. The growth of these movements is very often associated with significant social and cultural disruption. Another example:
In contemporary American society the art we call entertainment is highly valued and for purposes of enjoyment we seek to become caught up in such experiences. When we become caught up in the romantically realistic worlds of entertainment, we feel that we have entered another world in which is different from our everyday reality, and we attribute this transformation to the power of whatever it is we are caught up in. One consequence of this is that we come to believe that certain aspects of our culture—such as celebrities or the idea of romance—have great and mysterious powers to transform our lives.
