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What Starts Here Changes The World
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Do the characteristics defining the culture and acculturation of new members to the Texas football fan base create a subculture within a greater local culture? The fan base of the University of Texas football program displays the essential intangibles of a subculture, in its shared values, norms, culturally accepted behaviors, and material environment. Both the material and non-material aspects of the Texas football fan base create a unique and matchless subculture. These aspects range from the values, beliefs, and social norms constituting the non-material culture to the staples of its material culture: decorations, mascots, buildings, clothing, and symbols.
In order to recognize the UT fan base as a subculture, one must look objectively at the group as a whole and examine its familiar practices. Using the sociological imagination helps uncover what makes these practices strange and how they unite the fan base into an explicit subculture. The Longhorn football fans exhibit ethnocentrism in their convictions. With the belief that other programs fail to measure up to what the Texas football program and the collegiate community itself have to offer, this subculture sees itself as superior.
The socialization of those affiliated with the subculture is influenced by family, peers, and media, whom are already acculturated. With a deeper analysis of these aspects of socialization, we are able to pinpoint which of the influences impacts this subculture's members most. Is it the influence from parents during childhood, peers at school, or the media we see and read each day that impacts us most?
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