Chapter 5

Culture: Institutions that Transmit Culture

  • Most developed countries have a high literacy rate.
  • The main world religions are Christianity, Eastern Religions, Islam, Jewish Religions, and Tribal Religions
  • Political boundaries are a fundamental feature of culture maps because they mark the limit of a state’s authority of the lives of its people. They also divide the territory of one country from that of another.
  • When people within a state’s borders fight their own government, it is called a civil war.

Culture: Language

  • Culture refers not only to human society as a whole but also to the distinctive way of doing things that is easily recognizable and associated with definable regions or groups of people—a total way of life.
  • A culture region is a human society that shares the same basic culture. There are eight main culture regions.
  • Humanists believe that humans can solve their own problems and bring world peace by working together (without God).
  • Speech patterns within a single language are called a dialect.
  • Linguists recognize ten major language families, groups of languages that share many common characteristics. The most prominent is the Indo-European family.

Culture: History-Instrument of Cultural Change

  • Modern history begins around 1500. The two broad historical periods during this time are the Age of Exploration and the Age of Imperialism.
  • Imperialism is the acquiring of an empire.
  • The Enlightenment argued that the government’s power does not come from “the divine right of kings” but from the “will of the people.”
  • Nationalism is the emphasis on the right of a nation.
  • Cultural convergence is a growing similarity among cultures.

Demographics

  • The study of human populations and their characteristics is called demography.
  • Censuses are official government counts of the entire population within the nation’s boundaries.
  • The two basic vital statistics are the rate of natural increase and life expectancy.
  • Advances in technology and medicines have done much to increase life expectancy.

Demographics (continued)

  • The growth of urban areas at the expense of rural areas is called urbanization.
  • Arable land is land that can be used to plant crops
  • By comparing the total population to the arable land, demographers find the physiological density.

Politics: The Government of Society

  • Anarchy—no government
  • Monarchies are an authoritarian form of government. Monarchs, usually kings or queens, receive their authority by birth. An absolute monarch rules as he pleases.
  • The most extreme form of authoritarian government is a totalitarian government. These governments believe they should make decisions about every detail of their people’s lives for the good of the whole.
  • Democracy originally described a government in which the whole population ruled.
  • Today’s democracies are indirect or representative democracies.
  • Constitutional monarchy—the people have limited the power of the monarch by law
  • Republics elect their national leader who supervises the bureaucracy while the legislature writes laws.

Politics: The Government of Society (continued)

  • The best measurement of modern military strength is its yearly defense spending on military technology.
  • A third area of concern is the nations that oppose the role of the United States as a superpower and that reject democracy and capitalism. The most dangerous of these nations are rogue nations that ignore some of the most fundamental principles of international relations.
  • The two most common types of rogue nations are Communist countries and radical Muslim nations.
  • The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is the most powerful and successful alliance in history. It was created to stop Communism.
  • The United Nations is the other ambitious international organization formed in the wake of World War II.
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