Sociology culture Essay Example for Free

Sociology culture Essay Question 1. What do chimpanzee and orangutan cultures have in common with human culture? Give examples of specific behaviors. Answer 1. These cultures are common because both have tool use, complex grooming and courtship. For example, young chimpanzees are taught how to crack nuts and when they run into technical problems the mother is always there to help them. This is quite like how humans would react. The parents teach the young how to complete and overcome certain task. Another example is the â€Å"leaf clipping† behavior. Just like how one set of humans might use one thing for a certain task, whereas another set might use the same thing for a completely different task is basically the same as how different sets of chimpanzees use the whole â€Å"leaf clipping† behavior. Question 2. Find the article on orca culture by Lisa Stiffler cited above. How do findings about orcas differ from those about chimpanzees? Answer 2. The findings about orcas differ from those of chimpanzees in many different ways. Even though they both have a complex culture, orcas communicate in a different ways, they move in groups led by females, they have different ways of pleasing themselves such as rubbing their bodies along rocks and they eat different things. Some orcas eat simple things like salmon others eat things like seals, sea lions and even sharks. One major difference is that instead of the mother Orca forcing/teaching the child how to obtain it’s own food like the chimpanzee learning how to crack nuts; the mother orca instead hunts the food, holds it in her mouth and allow her calves to chew on it. To top it all of orcas are also used for greeting ceremonies in some countries whereas Chimpanzees aren’t. Question 1. How does the culture of the Trobiand Islander affect their way of creating a calendar? Answer 1. Due to the fact that agriculture is the main focus of people’s lives within the Trobian Islanders, their calendar is based on the lunar cycles. Instead of having a fixed number of months, the number of months in a year for them could either be 12 or 13. This happens because they use the internal clock of a marine worm and basically decide how many months would be in a year based on this worm’s timing. If the worm does not show when they expect it to show, they would repeat the month hereby determining whether they’ll be 12 months or 13 months in the year. Question 2. What is another example of a calendar system that is not the same as that used by the majority of people in the United States? With what culture is it associated? Answer 2. Another example of a calendar system is the Mayan calendar. This calendar contains three different calendars; the Long Count, the Tzolkin and the Haab. These calendars in the Mayan system vary in the number of days as well as the number of months. It was used by most pre Columbian Central America cultures including the Maya around 2000 BC to the 16th century. However, the calendar got developed further by the Maya civilization and up to this day it is still in use by some of the Mayan communities.