Free VCE Sociology Flashcard Review

Culture is the whole way of life of a group of people — the shared values, beliefs, customs, knowledge, behaviours and objects that are learned and passed between members and across generations.

Material culture is the physical, tangible objects a group creates and uses (tools, art, clothing, buildings, technology). Non-material culture is the intangible elements — values, beliefs, norms, language, customs and knowledge.

The sociological imagination is the capacity to see the connection between an individual's private life and the wider society and history that shape it — linking 'personal troubles' to 'public issues'.

A personal trouble is a private difficulty experienced by an individual within their immediate setting; a public issue is a matter caused by wider social structures that affects many people. The sociological imagination reveals troubles as products of public issues.

Ethnocentrism is judging another culture by the standards and values of one's own culture, usually treating one's own culture as superior and the other as inferior, strange or wrong.

Cultural relativism is understanding and evaluating a culture on its own terms and within its own context, rather than judging it against the standards of another culture.

Terra nullius ('land belonging to no-one') was the false legal fiction that Australia was unowned before European arrival. It is a misconception because Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had occupied, owned and managed the land for tens of thousands of years; it was overturned by Mabo (1992).

That all Indigenous people share one single culture (in fact there are hundreds of distinct nations, languages and cultures), and that Indigenous people mainly live in remote/arid areas (in fact the majority live in urban and regional areas).

Awareness is the information and understanding a person or society actually knows about Indigenous cultures. Public views are the opinions, attitudes, biases and stereotypes people hold — which may persist even when accurate awareness exists.

Protection/segregation, then assimilation, then integration, and (more recently) the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER/'the Intervention'). Each restricted Indigenous self-determination and culture.

Assimilation aimed to absorb Aboriginal people into the dominant white society so that they would live like, and eventually become indistinguishable from, non-Indigenous Australians — abandoning their own languages, cultures and identities.

The Northern Territory Emergency Response was a Commonwealth package of measures imposed on remote NT Aboriginal communities (e.g. income management, alcohol restrictions, compulsory land leases), which required suspending the Racial Discrimination Act and is widely critiqued as a contemporary form of control over Indigenous people.

Symbolic reconciliation uses gestures and acknowledgement — apologies, speeches, truth-telling, campaigns (e.g. the 2008 National Apology). Practical reconciliation targets measurable socio-economic gaps through policy and funding (e.g. Closing the Gap).

Closing the Gap is an intergovernmental strategy of targets and funding aimed at reducing measurable disadvantage between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in areas such as life expectancy, health, education and employment — an example of practical reconciliation.

Because it depicts Indigenous people and practices through the assumptions and value standards of the dominant European culture — e.g. labelling them 'primitive', 'savage' or 'uncivilised' — treating the observer's culture as the benchmark of normality.

Race refers to a category of people grouped together on the basis of perceived shared physical or biological characteristics (such as skin colour). Sociologists treat race as a socially constructed idea, not a meaningful biological reality.

Ethnicity refers to a shared cultural heritage shared by a group — common ancestry, language, religion, customs, traditions and a sense of belonging — that members identify with and that distinguishes them from other groups.

Because race rests on discredited biological assumptions and has been used to justify discrimination, whereas ethnicity captures the cultural, learned and self-identified basis of group identity, which is a more accurate and less prejudicial way to understand difference.

Othering is the process of perceiving and treating an individual or group as fundamentally different from and inferior to one's own group ('us' versus 'them'), which marks them as outsiders and underpins prejudice and exclusion.

By dividing people into a superior in-group ('us') and an inferior out-group ('them'), othering dehumanises the out-group and justifies negative stereotypes, discrimination and unequal treatment toward them.