Response Paper: Part One Activity
Depicting Sociological Concepts: Writing Part One of the Vignette Paper
Task: This is a class activity to help you write part one of the paper. You aren’t required to stick with the topic you write about today; this is just a learning activity. Choose one of the concepts below that looks interesting to you (for the actual assignment, you are not limited to just this list; see instructions on Laulima). Then, write a story that depicts that concept’s definition. Your story’s reflection of the concept’s definition should be so accurate that when you read it out loud, people will be able to guess which concept your story depicts.
- folkways: informal norms or everyday customs that may be violated without serious consequences within a particular culture.
- mores: strongly held norms with moral and ethical connotations that may not be violated without serious consequences in a particular culture.
- cultural lag: a gap between the technical development of a society and its moral and legal institutions.
- subculture: a subculture is a category of people who share distinguishing attributes, beliefs, values, and/or norms that set them apart in some significant manner from the dominant culture.
- culture shock: the disorientation that people feel when they encounter cultures radically different from their own and believe they cannot depend on their own taken-for-granted assumptions about life.
- ethnocentrism: the practice of judging all other cultures by one’s own culture.
- cultural relativism: the belief that the behaviors and customs of any culture must be viewed and analyzed by the culture’s own standards.
- popular culture: consists of activities, products, and services that are assumed to appeal primarily to members of the middle and working classes.
- cultural imperialism: the extensive infusion of one nation’s culture into other nations.
- self-concept: the totality of our beliefs and feelings about ourselves.
- gender socialization: the aspect of socialization that contains specific messages and practices concerning the nature of being female or male in a specific group or society.
- racial socialization: the aspect of socialization that contains specific messages and practices concerning the nature of one’s racial or ethnic status as it relates to our identity, interpersonal relationships, and location in the social hierarchy.
- anticipatory socialization: the process by which knowledge and skills are learned for future roles.
- resocialization: the process of learning a new and different set of attitudes, values, and behaviors from those in one’s background and previous experience.
The definitions are from Kendall, Sociology in Our Times: The Essentials