Question

4. Describe the barrel model of culture and its major elements (infrastructure, social structure, and superstructure) and discuss how it was applied to the Kapauku culture. Following this example, apply the barrel model to the community that you currently reside in while citing specific examples. In reference to the concept of ethnocentrism, discuss whether or not this is present in your community. How can notions of cultural relativism help avoid ethnocentrism?

Answer 1

• Applying the BARREL MODEL OF CULTURE helps explain how and why other people view culture the way they do. By analyzing their world with this model, we can discover how their culture works for them as a natural,complex, and meaningful experience not something foreign, wrong or backwards. It may not make sense yet,but it will after doing your final project.
• This process must be experienced, not understood.This model can also help us explain why cultures change over time.Each level of the model changes:
• Environment & Economic Base (war time, peace time, natural disasters, famine, etc.)
• Superstructure (changing values about work, citizenship, immigration, or women's roles)
• Social Structure (from the intrusion forced or voluntary of outsiders/newcomers
• Infrastructure (new technologies, advances in medicine, people living longer, etc
• Barrel model of culture postulates every culture is an integrated and dynamic system of adaption that responds to a combination of internal factors (economic, social, ideological) and external factors (environmental, climatic). Within a cultural system, there are functional relationships among the economic base (infrastructure), the social organization (social structure), and the ideology (superstructure). A change in one leads to a change in the others.
• Superstructure – worldview: the perception of the self, society, and the world around us
• Social Structure – social organization: the patterned social arrangements of individuals within a society
• Infrastructure – economic base: the mode of subsistence;Environment – natural resources in a society’s habitat.
• Kapauku Culture is an integrated System. The integration of economic, social, and ideological aspects of a culture can be illustrated by the Kapauku Papua. The economy relies on plant cultivation,along with pig breeding,hunting and fishing. Through pig bredding,men achieve their political power and positions in legal authority.
• In order to avoid the problem of ethnocentrism, where our culture serves as the standard by which to evaluate other cultures, the behavior of other cultures and societies must be evaluated in terms of the total structure of its social and cultural forms and the sanctions that it prescribes. The importance of this lies in that the values every human group assigns to its conventions arise out of its own historical background, and can be understood only in the light of that background.