5.1 Chapter Reading Guide
Now you are ready to dive into some of the specifics of family life: the routines, rituals, and traditions that all families have. In your family experiences or observations, have you been a part of any ritual or tradition related to birth, entry into adulthood, marriage, or death? Perhaps your family has a custom related to another important life event. You will look at culture and how it can be created within a family, as well as the ways that culture influences families. This chapter refinforces and gives specific examples related to the concepts in Chapter 3, which discussed community connections and belonging.
The reading is designed to help you meet the following chapter objectives. You may also want to preview the key terms that follow. These terms will be bolded the first time they appear in the chapter. You can read the definitions here and also in the hyperlinks.
Chapter Learning Objectives
- Describe the benefits that families derive from creating and maintaining routines and traditions.
- Distinguish between routine, traditions, and rituals.
- Identify rituals related to four major life transitions.
- Recognize how routines, traditions, and rituals in familial practices contribute to the production and maintenance of culture.
- Examine cultural identities from a theoretical perspective.
- Describe the importance of belonging and how anchoring practices can contribute to creating a sense of community and belonging.
- Recognize how communities can practice cultural persistence as resistance to assimilationist policies.
- Relate routines, traditions, and rituals to your own or your family’s observations and experiences.
Key Terms Preview
- Acculturation: the process of adapting to a new culture.
- Anchoring practices: the behaviors, efforts, and actions people carry out to seek, create, and maintain a sense of community and rootedness.
- Assimilation strategy: an acculturation strategy consisting of pursuing and adopting the cultural norms, values, and traditions of the new society or dominant culture.
- Biculturalism: when a person has been exposed to and has internalized elements from two or more cultures.
- Culture: the shared meanings and shared experiences passed down over time by individuals in a group, such as beliefs, values, symbols, means of communication, religion, logics, rituals, fashions, etiquette, foods, and art that unite a particular society.
- Cultural erasure: the practice of a dominant or hegemonic culture actively or passively contributing to the erasure, or disappearing, of a non-dominant or minoritized culture.
- Ethnic group: a subgroup of a population with a set of shared social, cultural, and historical experiences; relatively distinctive beliefs, values, and behaviors; and some sense of identity of belonging to the subgroup.
- Ethnic identity: a sense of self that is derived from a sense of belonging to a group, a culture, and a particular setting.
- Ethnicity: the shared social, cultural, and historical experiences, stemming from common national, ancestral, or regional backgrounds, that make subgroups of a population different from one another.
- Family ritual: behaviors with symbolic meanings that can be clearly described and serve to organize and affirm central family ideas.
- Family routine: the predictable, repeated, consistent patterns that characterize everyday home life.
- Heritage cultural orientation: the extent to which individuals are involved with their heritage, ethnic, or nondominant culture.
- Integration strategy: an acculturation strategy utilized by those who wish to maintain one’s original culture as a member of an ethnocultural group while also participating as an integral member of the larger social network.
- Marginalization strategy: an acculturation strategy where a person neither seeks relationships with aspects of the host culture nor maintains their heritage, culture, and identity.
- Pan-ethnicity: the grouping together of multiple ethnicities and nationalities under a single label.
- Rite of passage: a ritual or celebration that marks the passage when a person leaves one status, role, set of conditions, or group to enter another.
- Separation strategy: an acculturation strategy where a person places a high value on maintaining the integrity of their original cultural identity and avoids interaction with those of the new society.
Licenses and Attributions for Chapter Reading Guide
Open Content, Original
“Chapter Reading Guide” by Monica Olvera and Elizabeth B. Pearce. License: CC BY 4.0.