My Father Goes to Court

Culture is the characteristics of a particular group of people, defined by everything from language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts. Today, in the United States as in other countries populated largely by immigrants, the culture is influenced by the many groups of people that now make up the country. Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something, which can include facts, information, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.

It can be implicit (as with practical skill or expertise) or explicit (as with the theoretical understanding of a subject); it can be more or less formal or systematic. [1] In philosophy, the study of knowledge is called epistemology; the philosopher Plato famously defined knowledge as “justified true belief. ” However, no single agreed upon definition of knowledge exists, though there are numerous theories to explain it. Belief – a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing Social Norm Pattern of behavior in a particular group, community, orculture, accepted as normal and to which an individual is accepted to conform. folkway, the learned behaviour, shared by a social group, that provides a traditional mode of conduct. Mores-The accepted traditional customs and usages of a particular social group. Law is a term which does not have a universally accepted definition,[2] but one definition is that law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior.

Sanction- A penalty, specified or in the form of moral pressure, that acts to ensure compliance or conformity. Ethnocentrism is judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one’s own culture. [1][page needed] The ethnocentric individual will judge other groups relative to his or her own particular ethnic group or culture, especially with concern to language, behavior, customs andreligion. Cultural relativism is a principle that was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by his students.

Boas first articulated the idea in 1887: “… civilization is not something absolute, but … is relative, and … our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes. “[1] However, Boas did not coin the term. The first use of the term recorded in the Dictionary was by philosopher and social theorist Alain Locke in 1924 to describe Robert Lowie’s “extreme cultural relativism”, found in the latter’s 1917 book Culture and Ethnology. [2] The term became common among anthropologists after Boas’ death in 1942, to express their synthesis of a number of ideas Boas had developed.

Boas believed that the sweep of cultures, to be found in connection with any sub species, is so vast and pervasive that there cannot be a relationship between culture and race. [3] Cultural relativism involves specific epistemological and methodological claims. Whether or not these claims necessitate a specific ethical stance is a matter of debate. This principle should not be confused with moral relativism. Xenocentrism is the preference for the products, styles, or ideas of someone else’s culture rather than of one’s own. 1] The concept is considered a subjective view of cultural relativism. [2] One example is the romanticization of the noble savage in the 18th century primitivism movement in European art, philosophy and ethnography. [3] A cultural universal (also called an anthropological universal or human universal), as discussed by Emile Durkheim, George Murdock, Claude Levi-Strauss, Donald Brownand others, is an element, pattern, trait, or institution that is common to all human cultures worldwide.

Taken together, the whole body of cultural universals is known as the human condition. Evolutionary psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations. [1] Some anthropological and sociological theorists that take a cultural relativist perspective may deny the existence of cultural universals: the extent to which these universals are “cultural” in the narrow sense, or in fact biologically inherited behavior is an issue of “nature versus nurture”.