Culture

A homeland is a place where a national or ethnic identity has formed. The definition can also mean simply one's country of birth. When used as a proper noun, the Homeland, as well as its equivalents in other languages, often has ethnic nationalist connotations. A homeland may also be referred to as a fatherland, a motherland, or a mother country, depending on the culture and language of the nationality in question.

Ethnocentrism in social science and anthropology—as well as in colloquial English discourse—is the application of one's own culture or ethnicity as a frame of reference to judge other cultures, practices, behaviors, beliefs, and people, instead of using the standards of the particular culture involved. Since this judgment is often negative, some people also use the term to refer to the belief that one's culture is superior to, or more correct or normal than, all others—especially regarding the distinctions that define each ethnicity's cultural identity, such as language, behavior, customs, and religion. In common usage, it can also simply mean any culturally biased judgment. For example, ethnocentrism can be seen in the common portrayals of the Global South and the Global North.

Ethnocentrism is sometimes related to racism, stereotyping, discrimination, or xenophobia. However, the term "ethnocentrism" does not necessarily involve a negative view of the others' race or indicate a negative connotation. The opposite of ethnocentrism is cultural relativism, a guiding philosophy stating that the best way to understand a different culture is through their perspective rather than judging them from the subjective viewpoints shaped by one's own cultural standards.

Art history is an academic discipline devoted to the study of artistic production and visual culture throughout human history. Art historians use a historical method or a philosophy, such as historical materialism or critical theory, to analyze artworks. Among other topics, they study art's impact on societies and cultures, the relationship between art and politics, and how artistic styles and formal characteristics of works of art have changed throughout history. As a discipline, art history is distinguished from art criticism, which is concerned with establishing a relative artistic value for critiquing individual works, and aesthetics, which is a branch of philosophy.

The study of art’s history emerged as a way to document and interpret artistic production. Early traditions of art-historical writing developed in several cultures, including Ancient Greece, Imperial China, and Renaissance Italy, each producing influential figures and approaches that shaped later scholarship. As an academic discipline, art history emerged in the 19th century and was a largely Eurocentric field, concentrating on Western definitions of the fine and decorative arts, particularly painting, drawing, sculpture, and architecture.

Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". Cultural evolution is the change of this information over time.

Cultural evolution, historically also known as sociocultural evolution, was originally developed in the 19th century by anthropologists stemming from Charles Darwin's research on evolution. Today, cultural evolution has become the basis for a growing field of scientific research in the social sciences, including anthropology, economics, psychology, and organizational studies. Previously, it was believed that social change resulted from biological adaptations; anthropologists now commonly accept that social changes arise in consequence of a combination of social, environmental, and biological influences (viewed from a nature vs nurture framework).

A cemetery, burial ground, gravesite, graveyard, or a green space called a memorial park or memorial garden, is a place where the remains of many dead people are buried or otherwise entombed. The word cemetery (from Greek κοιμητήριον 'sleeping place') implies that the land is specifically designated as a burial ground and originally applied to the Roman catacombs. The term graveyard is often used interchangeably with cemetery, but a graveyard primarily refers to a burial ground within a churchyard.

The intact or cremated remains of people may be interred in a grave, commonly referred to as burial, or in a tomb, an "above-ground grave" (resembling a sarcophagus), a mausoleum, a columbarium, a niche, or another edifice. In Western cultures, funeral ceremonies are often observed in cemeteries. These ceremonies or rites of passage differ according to cultural practices and religious beliefs. Modern cemeteries often include crematoria, and some grounds previously used for both continue as crematoria as a principal use long after the interment areas have been filled.

Social revolutions are sudden changes in the structure and nature of society. These revolutions are usually recognized as having transformed society, economy, culture, philosophy, and technology along with but more than just the political systems.

An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Attributes that ethnicities believe to share include language, culture, common sets of ancestry, traditions, society, religion, history, or social treatment. Ethnicities are maintained through long-term endogamy and may have a narrow or broad spectrum of genetic ancestry, with some groups having mixed genetic ancestry. Ethnicity is sometimes used interchangeably with nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism. It is also used interchangeably with race although not all ethnicities identify as racial groups.

By way of assimilation, acculturation, amalgamation, language shift, intermarriage, adoption and religious conversion, individuals or groups may over time shift from one ethnic group to another. Ethnic groups may be divided into subgroups or tribes, which over time may become separate ethnic groups themselves due to endogamy or physical isolation from the parent group. Conversely, formerly separate ethnicities can merge to form a panethnicity and may eventually merge into one single ethnicity. Whether through division or amalgamation, the formation of a separate ethnic identity is referred to as ethnogenesis.

Ukrainian nationalism (Ukrainian: Український націоналізм, romanized: Ukrainskyi natsionalizm, pronounced [ʊkrɐˈjinʲsʲkɪj nɐts⁽ʲ⁾ionɐˈl⁽ʲ⁾izm]) is the promotion of the unity of Ukrainians as a people and the promotion of the identity of Ukraine as a nation state. The origins of modern Ukrainian nationalism emerge during the Cossack uprising against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the mid-17th century. Ukrainian nationalism draws upon a single national identity of culture, ethnicity, geographic location, language, politics (or the government), religion, traditions and belief in a shared singular history.

Citizen participation or public participation in social science refers to different mechanisms for the public to express opinions—and ideally exert influence—regarding political, economic, management or other social decisions. Participatory decision-making can take place along any realm of human social activity, including economic (i.e. participatory economics), political (i.e. participatory democracy or parpolity), management (i.e. participatory management), cultural (i.e. polyculturalism) or familial (i.e. feminism).

For well-informed participation to occur, it is argued that some version of transparency, e.g. radical transparency, is necessary but not sufficient. It has also been argued that those most affected by a decision should have the most say while those that are least affected should have the least say in a topic.

The gender binary (also known as gender binarism) is the classification of gender into two distinct forms of masculine and feminine, whether by social system, cultural belief, or both simultaneously. Most cultures use a gender binary, having two genders (boys/men and girls/women).

In this binary model, gender and sexuality may be assumed by default to align with one's sex assigned at birth. This may include certain expectations of how one dresses themselves, one's behavior, sexual orientation, names or pronouns, which restroom one uses, and other qualities. For example, when a male is born, gender binarism may assume that the male will be masculine in appearance, have masculine character traits and behaviors, as well as having a heterosexual attraction to females. These expectations may reinforce negative attitudes, biases, and discrimination towards people who display expressions of gender variance or nonconformity or those whose gender identity is incongruent with their birth sex.