Methods of Cultural Reproduction
The method through which cultural reproduction is perpetuated varies by the socializing agent’s relative location, awareness, and intention to reproduce social or cultural norms.
Enculturation can be described as "a partly conscious and partly unconscious learning experience when the older generation invites, induces, and compels the younger generation to adopt traditional ways of thinking and behaving". Although, in many ways Enculturation duplicates the norms and traditions of previous generations. The degree of similarity between the cultures of each successive generation through enculturation may vary. This concept could be demonstrated by the tendency of each successive generation to follow cultural norms such as transportation right of way. These expectations are set forth and replicated by the prior generation. There may be little if any empirical evidence supporting a choice of driving in one lane or another, yet with each new generation, the accepted norm of that individual’s culture is reinforced and perpetuated. Parents and educators prove to be two of the most influential enculturating forces of cultural reproduction.
Comparatively, diffusion is the dispersion of cultural norms and behaviors between otherwise unrelated groups or individuals. The integration of Chinese food or French linguistics into American culture represents this concept.
Read more about this topic: Cultural Reproduction
Famous quotes containing the words methods of, methods, cultural and/or reproduction:
“A woman might claim to retain some of the child’s faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“I think it is a wise course for laborers to unite to defend their interests.... I think the employer who declines to deal with organized labor and to recognize it as a proper element in the settlement of wage controversies is behind the times.... Of course, when organized labor permits itself to sympathize with violent methods or undue duress, it is not entitled to our sympathy.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“An original is a creation
motivated by desire.
Any reproduction of an original
is motivated by necessity ...
It is marvelous that we are
the only species that creates
gratuitous forms.
To create is divine, to reproduce
is human.”
—Man Ray (1890–1976)