Blackwell Reference Online

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The more or less systematically related set of constructions that people share as members of an enduring, communicatively interacting social group. Culture is what people learn and use by virtue of participating in a social system and what links people together so as to constitute that social system. This means that culture includes the patterns of action, ideations, and things with which a group of people collectively generate, coordinate, understand, and evaluate their worlds.Culture encompasses everything socially constructed, as well as the uses and relations of these constructions (see social constructionism). Consider, for example, cultural constructions of sex, which encompass taboos, romantic myths (see intimacy and love), body ideals, gender definitions and norms, forms of prostitution and rape, clothing, plastic surgery, and contraception. Cultural patterns of action include sexual practices, forms of relationship, and techniques (see sexual behavior). Cultural ideations about sex include sets of symbols, meanings, concepts, prototypes, schemas, beliefs, and affects; all of these are connected to many cultural things, including objects, structures, modifications of the environment, and spatiotemporal arrangements. Cultural constructions of sex encompass features of action, thought, emotion, persons, other beings, relationships, and representations of “nature” (see social ... log in or subscribe to read full text