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Chapter 14: Culture, :arrow_down:, :arrow_down: - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Whether you brush your hair 100 strokes a day or give yourself a pep talk in the mirror before a big date, virtually all of us practice private grooming rituals.
      - Grooming rituals express two kinds of binary opposition: private/public and work/leisure. Many beauty rituals reflect a transformation from a natural state to the social world or vice versa.
      - Grooming rituals help to inspire confidence before we face the world, and they “cleanse” us of impurities.
    - - In a gift-giving ritual, we procure the perfect object, meticulously remove the price tag, carefully wrap the object (where we symbolically change the item from a commodity to a unique good), and deliver it to the recipient.
      - The gift-giving ritual proceeds in three distinct stages
        
        During gestation the giver procures an item to mark some event.
        
        The second stage is presentation or the process of gift exchange. The recipient responds to the gift (either appropriately or not), and the donor evaluates this response.
        
        In the reformulation stage, the giver and receiver redefine the bond between them (either looser or tighter) to reflect their new relationship after the exchange. Negativity can arise if the recipient feels the gift is inappropriate or of inferior quality.
      - Researchers view gift-giving as a form of economic exchange in which the giver transfers an item of value to a recipient, who in turn must reciprocate. However, gift-giving also involves symbolic exchange.
    - - On holidays, we step back from our everyday lives and perform ritualistic behaviors unique to those occasions.
      - The authors identify five familiar classes of rituals:
        
        Showing affection
        
        Going out
        
        Exchanging gifts and cards
        
        Preparing and consuming food and drink
        
        Special attention to grooming and clothing
    - - Death also involves rites of passage. Funeral ceremonies help the living organize their relationships with the deceased.
      - Much like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, a rite of passage consists of three phases.
        
        In the first stage, separation, he detaches from his original group or status as a high school kid and leaves home for campus.
        
        Liminality is the middle stage, where he is in limbo between statuses. Think of those bewildered new first-year students who try to find their way around campus during orientation.
        
        In the aggregation stage, he returns to society with his new status. Our hero returns home for Thanksgiving break as a cocky college “veteran.”
      - Many types of people undergo rites of passage, including fraternity pledges, recruits at boot camp, or novitiates at a convent. We observe a similar transitional state when people prepare for occupational roles.
- - - - We idolize sacred people as we set them apart from the masses, and sometimes people come to believe that these individuals have “superhuman” abilities. Souvenirs, memorabilia, and even mundane items these celebrities have touched acquire special meanings (the celebrities “contaminate” the items).
    - - Tourism is another category of sacred experience. People occupy sacred time and space when they travel on vacation (though you may not think so if you get stuck sleeping on an airport floor because of a plane delay).
      - The desire of travelers to capture these sacred experiences in objects forms the bedrock of the souvenir industry, which really sells sacred memories.
      - The world of sports is sacred to many of us (recent doping and gambling scandals aside). We find the roots of modern sports events in ancient religious rites, such as fertility festivals (e.g., the original Olympics).
      - Sometimes public events resemble sacred, religious ceremonies.
    - - A society “sets apart” sacred places because they have religious
        or mystical significance (e.g., Bethlehem, Mecca, Stonehenge) or because they commemorate some aspect of a country’s heritage (e.g., the Kremlin, the Emperor’s Palace in Tokyo, the Statue of Liberty, or Ground Zero in Manhattan).
      - Still other places start out as profane, but we endow them with sacred qualities.
      - In many cultures, the home is a particularly sacred place. It’s a barrier between the harsh, external world and consumers’ “inner space.”
- - - - Some innovations present us with a new way to use an existing product. This may be more effective, but we still have to alter our habits to use it. A dynamically continuous innovation is a significant change to an existing product.
      - A discontinuous innovation creates really big changes in the way we live. Major inventions, such as the airplane, the car, the computer, and the television, radically changed modern lifestyles.
      - A continuous innovation is a modification of an existing product, such as when General Mills introduces a Honey Nut version of Cheerios or Levi’s promotes shrink to-fit jeans.
- - - - Embrace products and services that resonate with a culture’s priorities
      - Understand which products do get accepted to provide a window into the dominant cultural ideals
    - - Ecology
        
        The way a system adapts to its habitat
        
        The technology and distribute resources
      - Social structure
        
        The way people maintain an orderly social life
        
        Domestic and political groups
      - Ideology
        
        Worldview: ideas about principles of order and fairness
        
        Ethos, or a set of moral and aesthetic principles
        
        The mental characteristics of a people and the way they relate to their environment and social groups
    - - Mainstream culture modify symbols from “cutting-edge” subcultures for a larger audience => cooptation in which outsiders transform their original meanings
      - Countercultures develop strategies to reclaim their symbols and practices
      - Advertising and fashion industries link functional products with symbolic qualities
        
        These goods impart their meanings to us as we use these products to create and express our identities
    - - Cultural selection
        
        Many possibilities compete for adoption
        
        Most drop out of the mix: they make their way down the path from conception to consumption
        
        Select certain alternatives over others: the culmination of a complex filtration process that resembles a funnel
      - Many images mass media, observations of those around, desires to live in the fantasy worlds that marketers create in the ads drive choices
      - Options available represent a small fraction of the total set of possibilities
      - Culture production system (CPS): set of individuals and organizations that create and market a cultural product
        
        Number and diversity of competing systems and the amount of innovation versus conformity each influence the selection of products from which we choose
        
        Three major subsystems
        
        A creative subsystem: generate new symbols and products
        
        A managerial subsystem: select, make tangible, produce, and manage the distribution of new symbols and products
        
        A communications subsystem: give meaning to the new product and provide it with a symbolic set of attributes
        
        Determine the types of products it creates
      - Ebb and flow of popular culture and fashion influences different styles and possibilities
      - Cultural gatekeepers filter the overflow of information as it travels down the “funnel"
  - - - Possible class bias that drives such a distinction
      - Marketers invoke high-art imagery to promote products
      - Distinction is not as clear as it used to be
    - - Recycle images as they reach back through time for inspiration
      - Easy access to CD burners, digital cameras, and imaging software => anyone can “remix” the past
      - Familiar roles and props occur consistently
- - - - Myth
        
        Marketers adapt stories and pattern their messages along a mythic structure
        
        Reduces anxiety because provide consumers with guidelines about their world
        
        A story with symbolic elements that represents a culture’s ideals
        
        Four interrelated functions
        
        Metaphysical: explain the origins of existence
        
        Cosmological: all components of the universe are part of a single picture
        
        Sociological: maintain social order => authorize a social code for members of a culture to follow
        
        Psychological: provide models for personal conduct
        
        Involve binary opposition: represents two opposing ends of some dimension
        
        consumer fairy tales: tell stories that include magical agents, donors, and helpers to overcome villains and obstacles as thay seek out goods and services in their quest for happy ending
        
        Smart marketers are more than happy to help us live out these fairy tales
        
        Advertisements sometimes represent mythic themes
- - - - Variety seekers
      - Brand-loyal consumers
      - Price-sensitive consumers
      - Information seekers
      - A pattern of behaviors, attitudes, and opinions that influences all of a person’s consumption activities
    - - Masculinity
      - Uncertainty Avoidance
      - Individualism
      - Long-Term Orientation
      - Power Distance
      - Indulgence versus Restraint
  - - - Affluent people who are “global citizens”
      - Young people whose tastes in music and fashion are strongly influenced by MTV and other media
    - - Global dreamers
      - Antiglobals
      - Global citizens
      - Global agnostics
- - - - Many psychological factors help explain what motivates us to be fashionable
      - erogenous zones
    - - Economists approach fashion in terms of the model of supply and demand
      - Other factors also influence the demand curve for fashion-related products
      - a prestige–exclusivity effect
      - a snob effect
    - - This perspective focuses on a subculture’s adoption of a fashion
        (idea, style, etc.) and its
        subsequent diffusion into society as a whole
      - Trickle-down theory which the sociologist Georg Simmel first proposed in 1904
      - It states that two conflicting forces drive fashion change
      - Dominant styles thus originate with the upper classes and trickle down to those below
      - a trickle-across effect
      - trickle-up effect
    - - Meme theory explains this process with a medical metaphor
      - memes spread among consumers in a geometric progression
      - The memes that survive tend to be distinctive and memorable
      - tipping point
      - example, Sharp introduced the first low-priced fax machine in
        1984 and sold about 80,000 in that year.
- - - - a fashion with an extremely long acceptance cycle
        
        in a sense “anti-fashion” because it guarantees stability and low risk to the purchaser for a long period of time
    - - a short-lived fashion
      - The fad is nonutilitarian
      - The fad often spreads impulsively
      - The fad diffuses rapidly