Lowrider Culture

Lowrider Culture

Culture is the language, beliefs, values, behaviors, or material objects that characterizes a group and are passed down from each generation. People all around the world have all different types of cultures. Culture is a way for individuals to identify other individuals living within the society or a specific place. Material and non-material are two types of groups to describe the human culture. Material culture refers physical objects that are used to define a person's culture, such as clothing or jewelry. Non-material culture refers to non physical objects based on somebody’s way of thinking, such as beliefs, values, rules, and language.

Many components of culture can be categorized by either material or non-material culture. Material culture are objects that belong to actual people, they include anything that you can see, touch, or even feel. Buildings, technology, and art items that define material culture. Values, norms, sanctions, and language are the some of the components of the non-material culture. Values are a belief or an idea that a person can determine if it is desirable or undesirable. Values are able to guide a person if something is worthwhile or if it is useless. Norms are the rules that individuals are expected to follow. They let individuals know how they should behave and and act in any given society. Sanctions are the expressions of approval given to people for upholding norms or expressions of disapproval for violating them. Sanctions can be viewed as ways for society to regulate behavior.

Ethnocentrism can be defined as the use of one's own culture as a yardstick for judging the ways of other individuals or societies, generally leading to a negative evaluation of their values, norms, and behaviors. An example of ethnocentrism is the lowrider culture, lowriders are cars that express social and cultural identities. These cars have been used for cruising since the mid-twentieth centuries. Lowriders were mostly Latino men from Texas, the Southwest , and Southern California. Today, it is not only Latinos driving lowriders, there are many other cultures and nationalities out on the road cruising. Lowriding used to be viewed as an outsider of the normative culture because of how the vehicles were anti-social, but as time grew on, lowriders became respected for the cultural