Credit Points 10

Legacy Code 102913

Coordinator George Morgan Opens in new window

Description Introduction to Culture and Society examines the ways culture - as both representation and practice - shapes individual and collective identities. It will focus on the rituals and routines of everyday life, and their connection to our wider social relationships. The unit will also explore inequality both in Australia and globally, the social structures that generate this inequality and the cultural processes by which we mark status and social distinction.

School Humanities & Comm Arts

Discipline Sociology

Student Contribution Band HECS Band 4 10cp

Check your HECS Band contribution amount via the Fees page.

Level Undergraduate Level 1 subject

Equivalent Subjects HUMN 1017 - Everyday Life
HUMN 1018 - Everyday Life (WSTC)

Learning Outcomes

After successful completion of this Unit, students will be able to:

1. Exercise sociological and cultural concepts and frameworks to make sense of human experience in ways that go beyond ‘common sense’ accounts of the world.
2. Recognise the role of symbolic creativity in everyday life and its connection to social relations and institutions.
3. Develop an ethnographic understanding of cultural practices, both familiar and distant, in order to make sense of their larger significance to social groups.
4. Research the dimensions of social inequality in Australia and globally
5. Identify both the ways social inequalities are marked in cultural terms, and the wider structures and institutions that serve to reproduce those inequalities.
6. Understand how globalisation and global inequalities shape everyday life in contemporary Australia. 

Subject Content

Section 1: Culture, Society and Everyday Life
 
Week 1: The Idea of Society
Week 2: Cultural Representation
Week 3: Cultural Practices of Everyday Life

Section 2: Practising Culture: Self, Community and Symbolic Creativity

Week 4: Presentation of Self - Getting Dressed
Week 5: Communal Rituals - Ethnographies of Gift Giving
Week 6: Food Consumption and Everyday Multiculturalism

Section 3: Economic Inequality, Boundary Marking and Social Distinction

Week 7 Dimensions of Inequality in Australia
Week 8 The Geographies of Inequality: Poverty and Prosperity in Sydney
Week 9 Parsing Poverty: From the Undeserving Poor to the Bogans

Section 4: The ‘Australian Way of Life’ and its Contradictions

Week 11: Divisions of Labour: Housework, Care Work, Gender and Race.
Week 12: The Backyard & the Bush: Culture & Nature in the Age of Climate Change
Week 13: Conclusion