Posting by Ji yeon Kim(김지연)-Week 3

Culture and Religion

A) Summary

Culture exists in any societies.

Culture forms our identity(who we are) and differentiate from other people.

In the beginning, people think of culture as civilization. They evaluate culture by using words 'high' culture. They only think 'cultured' and 'uncultured'. However, The concept of culture has changed. In romanctic era, scholars view culture has wide meanings and In late 19th century, anthropologists totally changed the concept of culture. They distinguish material culture and symbolic culture.
In a nutshell, culture entails various meanings such as norms,belifs,languages..etc
This chapter also explains about subculture and counterculture.
Subculture is culture which shared by minorities. Counterculture is the opposite concept of main culture. People see culture with various perspectives like ethnocentrism and cultural relativism.

Religion can be defined by three standards such as sacred and profane, existential questioning and supernatural. There are various theories about religion and each theory has different view about it. Above all, Structural-Functional theory see religion as maintaining and controlling society. It gives people meaning and purpose of human life. In Social-Conflict theory see religion as a tool to maintain the status quo.

B) My opinion and Interesting points

Interesting points in this chapter is religion part as I belive in Christianity. It is interesting that analyzing and explaining 'religion' in sociological vision.

C) Questions

- I wonder when and why people start to have religion.
- As I belive religion is something supernatural, It is quite weird to me that sociologists do research and make theories about it.
- We have to discuss about attitudes&perspectives of different culture.

Thanks :)