cultural identity

Examples of cultural identity in the following topics:

• Identity Formation

  • An example of national identity is the way in which Americans are united on the Fourth of July.
  • Indeed, the holiday would make little sense if one did not possess a sense of national identity.
  • Individuals gain a social identity and group identity by their affiliations.
  • Cultural identity is one's feeling of identity affiliation to a group or culture.
  • Lastly, a religious identity is the set of beliefs and practices generally held by an individual, involving adherence to codified beliefs and rituals and study of ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as faith and mystic experience.

• Pluralism

  • The French government has a melting-pot or assimilationist view of cultural coexistence, believing that the identity of being French should take precedence over all other forms of identification, including, religion, gender, ethnicity, etc.
  • On the other hand, Canada is more closely associated with the "salad bowl," or multicultural, perspective, as they believe in preserving the distinct identity of various cultural groups within their nation.
  • The second centers on diversity and cultural uniqueness.
  • Cultural isolation can protect the uniqueness of the local culture of a nation or area and also contribute to global cultural diversity.
  • It is argued that nation states, which would previously have been synonymous with a distinctive cultural identity of their own, lose out to enforced multiculturalism and that this ultimately erodes the host nations' distinct culture.

• The Origins of Culture

  • Culture allows humans to more quickly adapt.
  • Culture (Latin: cultura, lit.
  • Language and culture then both emerged as a means of using symbols to construct social identity and maintain coherence within a social group too large to rely exclusively on pre-human ways of building community (for example, grooming).
  • Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one cultural group and difference from others.
  • Anthropologists rejected the idea that culture was unique to Western society and adopted a new definition of culture that applied to all societies, literate and non-literate, settled and nomadic.

• Experiments

  • For example, a scientist might have two identical bacterial cultures.
  • The other is the experimental culture and it will be subjected to a treatment, such as an antibiotic.
  • For a true experiment, she would need to find identical students and identical teachers, then put some in large classes and some in small classes.
  • But finding identical students and teachers would be impossible!
  • This is done through the introduction of an experimental control: two virtually identical experiments are run, in only one of which the factor being tested is varied.

• Gender Identity in Everyday Life

  • Gender identity is one's sense of one's own gender.
  • Gender identity is one's sense of being male, female, or a third gender.
  • Transsexuals, however, take drastic measures to assume their believed identity.
  • Gender identities, and the malleability of the gender binary, vary across cultures.
  • This extreme cultural variation in notions of gender indicate the socially constructed nature of gender identity.

• Culture and Biology

  • Culture relates to nature (our biology and genetics) and nurture (our environment and surroundings that also shape our identities).
  • According to early beliefs about biology and culture, biological difference led to necessary cultural differences among racial groups.
  • Culture is primarily an anthropological term.
  • Neither culture nor biology is solely responsible for the other.
  • Examine the ways culture and biology interact to form societies, norms, rituals and other representations of culture

• Culture

  • Nature was considered to be things like our biology and genetics, while nurture was considered to be learned behaviors and other environmental influences on our identities.
  • Culture can be difficult to pinpoint and individuals within a given culture might disagree over what their culture is.
  • Material culture consists of the goods used to exhibit particular cultural behaviors.
  • Cultural anthropologists and sociologists use material culture to understand a culture at large and archaeologists use digs to reveal the material culture of the past in order to learn more about life in that culture.
  • Symbolic culture consists of the belief systems that found and motivate life in a particular culture.

• High and Low Culture

  • High culture most commonly refers to the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture.
  • High culture became an important concept in political theory on nationalism for writers such as Ernest Renan and Ernest Gellner , who saw it as a necessary component of a healthy national identity.
  • Gellner's concept of a high culture extended beyond the arts; he used it to distinguish between different cultures (rather than within a culture), contrasting high cultures with simpler, agrarian low cultures.
  • A postmodernist approach to popular culture might argue that there is no longer a clear distinction between high culture and popular culture.
  • Discuss the roles of both high culture and popular culture within society

• Race and Ethnicity

  • An individual is usually externally classified (meaning someone else makes the classification) into a racial group rather than the individual choosing where they belong as part of their identity.
  • Conceptions of race, as well as specific racial groupings, are often controversial due to their impact on social identity and how those identities influence someone's position in social hierarchies (see identity politics).Ethnicity, while related to race, refers not to physical characteristics but social traits that are shared by a human population.
  • The term ethnicity focuses more upon a group's connection to a perceived shared past and culture.

• Subcultures & Countercultures

  • A subculture is a culture shared and actively participated in by a minority of people within a broader culture.
  • A culture often contains numerous subcultures.
  • Subcultures incorporate large parts of the broader cultures of which they are part, but in specifics they may differ radically.
  • Examples of subcultures could include: bikers, military culture, Bronies, and Star Trek fans (trekkers or trekkies).
  • Subcultures bring together like-minded individuals who feel neglected by societal standards and allow them to develop a sense of identity.