5.1 Chapter Reading Guide
Monica Olvera and Elizabeth B. Pearce
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 reinforces and gives specific examples related to the concepts in Chapter 3, which discusses 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.