Culture: the language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and even material objects that characterize a group’s way of life and are passed from one generation to the next.
Sir Edward Burnett Taylor, founder of cultural anthropology, defined culture as “knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs, any other capabilities acquired by men as members of a society.”
Individuals are not self-sufficient so they live together and develop a culture.
Culture varies from group to group.
An example would be a young Pakistan girl who went to the US. Her culture will be different than the Americans. She’ll dress differently, think differently, eat differently, etc.
Characteristics of Culture
Learned
Culture does not occur naturally or biologically; it is learned from others whether it be your own group (family, friends, etc.) or an outside group like the US society.
Unlearned behavior such as closing your eyes to sleep isn’t considered part of culture.
Shared
Culture is shared between the group.
Even if you have a certain ideology but it is not acceptable to the culture of your group, then it is not a part of your culture.
An example would be that you consider drinking alcohol fine in a Muslim society; you may drink but it is still not a part of your culture.
Symbols
Every culture has certain symbols associated with it.
For example, flags, dresses, traffic lights, nodding for agreement are all symbols which are part of our culture.
Integrated
Culture integrates the individuals and unites them.
It provides them with an identity.
For example, there is a culture of barbeque on Eid holidays in Pakistan. This provides Pakistanis with an identity because in other non-Muslims countries, they don’t celebrate Eid or do barbeque on Eid - it is specific to Pakistani culture.
Dynamic
Another characteristic of culture is that it changes over time.
Cultural traits from other cultures may end up in your culture e.g. technology from the West has become a part of the Pakistani culture as well, the nuclear family structure is becoming increasingly common in Pakistan, etc.
Adaptive
Culture adapts to new things due to changing needs for survival.
For example, the Native Americans adapted their culture to include the use of horses when the Europeans introduced horses in the New World. They even started using guns for their hunting.
Social
Culture does not exist in isolation and a single individual can’t have a culture.
It is a product of social interaction between individuals; hence it is social.
Variable
No two cultures are the same. They may have similar traits but culture differs from society to society.
An example would be that the culture of US is quite different from the culture of the subcontinent.
Another example would be that Pakistani and Indian cultures are quite similar in many aspects but they are distinctly two different cultures because of their ideologies with respect to religion.
Transmissive
Culture is capable of being transmitted from one generation to the next or from one society to another.
Parents can pass culture to their children or a foreigner can come visit your country and pass their cultural traits to you if the traits seem acceptable and useful.
Continuous and Cumulative
Culture exists as a continuous process where it’s growth is cumulative.
Culture is a growing whole that includes itself, the past and the present achievements, and makes provision for the future.
Think of culture as an increasingly large stream flowing downwards from one generation to the next.
Types of Culture
Material Culture
Material Culture: the material objects that distinguish a group of people, such as their art, buildings, weapons, utensils, machines, hairstyles, clothing, and jewelry.
There is nothing “natural” about material culture. Arabs wear gowns on the street and feel that it is natural to do so. Americans do the same with jeans.
Non-material Culture
Non-material Culture: a group’s ways of thinking (including its beliefs, values, and other assumptions about the world) and doing (its common patterns of behavior, including language and other forms of interaction); also called symbolic culture.
There is nothing “natural” about nonmaterial culture. It is just as arbitrary to stand in line as to push and shove.
Functions/Impacts of Culture
Transfer of Knowledge and Values
Culture provides and preserves knowledge which is transmitted from one generation to the next.
Knowledge is essential for the physical, social and intellectual existence of man.
Defines Situations
Culture defines social situations for us.
For example, you do not wear colorful clothes and listen to music at a funeral. Your culture has defined the situation of a funeral. It is a gloomy event.
As a counter example, tribes in Madagascar actually dance with the dead as a celebration of this life and the afterlife.
Provides Behavior Patterns
Culture restricts the behavior patterns of individuals.
For example, the behavior of a teen in the US is quite different from a teen in the East. The teenager from the US may be more independent and free in their actions whereas a teen in the East is sheltered by their parents.
Molds Personality
Culture has a huge influence on our personalities and sets limits on our growths.
For example, we make proper lines at the airport in Pakistan but at the local bus station, pushing and shoving is the norm. This is a part of everyone’s personality here. A foreigner who has not experienced the pushing and shoving might feel uncomfortable as it is not a part of their personality.
Goals and Opportunities
Culture decides what our goals and opportunities are.
In USA, women are generally more independent financially so they have to pursue education to make a living for themselves. In Pakistan, the burden of finances is the goal of the man whereas the woman takes care of the household.
During the Cold War, there was a culture of space exploration and every child wanted to be an astronaut. Their culture shaped the goals they wanted to achieve in life. Nowadays, astronauts are cool but we don’t really see the appeal anymore.
Acceptance
Culture gives you acceptance in the society if a person takes active part in it.
In Muslim culture, praying at the mosque is considered a good thing. If you do at the mosque, your society will show more acceptance towards you.
Legends and Heroes
Cultural history provides legends and heroes to the group e.g. MM Alam for Pakistan, Abraham Lincoln for USA, etc.
Identity
Culture provides an identity to the group.
For example, Muslim women cover their head, Indian cuisine, etc.
Integration
As culture is shared between a group, there is a sense of integration and affiliation.
In Muslim culture, territorial boundaries are meaningless when it comes to the suffering of Kashmiris or Palestinians. Pakistan condemns Israeli acts even though it is not directly affected.
Organization of Culture
Cultural Pattern
When a large number of people follow a certain behavior, it becomes a rule of social life. This rule is a cultural pattern.
For example, charity is something that happens in Muslim countries and there is a clear pattern of it in our culture.
Cultural Trait
Cultural trait is the smallest unit of culture. It can be transmitted from one culture to another.
Cultural Complex
A cluster of related traits is called a cultural complex.
When a series of complexes unite together on a certain point, they make an institution e.g. marriage is an institution with complexes like nikkah, dowry, marriage ceremonies, etc.
Cultural Area
The geographical area in which a cultural trait is originated and spreads around by diffusion is called a cultural area.
Elements of Symbolic Culture
Sociologists often refer to nonmaterial culture as symbolic culture, because it consists of the symbols that people use.
A symbol is something to which people attach meaning and that they use to communicate with one another.
Symbols include gestures, language, beliefs, values, norms, customs and sanctions.
Gestures
Gestures: the ways in which people use their bodies to communicate with one another.
Gestures can lead to misunderstanding, embarrassment, or worse because they differ around the world e.g. handshaking is a greeting gesture in the US whereas bowing down is a greeting gesture in Japan. This may create confusion on how to greet the other person depending on their culture.
Although most gestures are learned, and therefore vary from culture to culture, some gestures that represent fundamental emotions such as sadness, anger, and fear appear to be inborn.
A crying child in India differs little from a crying child in China — or the United States or anywhere else on the globe. In a few years, however, the child will demonstrate a variety of gestures highly specific to his Hindu culture.
Language
Language: a system of symbols that can be combined in an infinite number of ways and can represent not only objects but also abstract thought.
Like gestures, in different cultures the same sound may mean something entirely different — or may have no meaning at all e.g. gift in English means poison in German. If you give chocolates to a German and say, “gift, eat..”, you’ll be telling a German person to eat poison.
Functions of Language
By means of language, we pass ideas, knowledge, and even attitudes on to the next generation.
By attaching words to an event and then using those words to recall it, we are able to discuss the event. In other words, no language means no memories.
Language enables us to agree on times, dates, and places. Concept of time would not exist without language.
Language allows shared perspectives by communication.
Language allows shared, goal-directed behavior.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf’s hypothesis that language creates ways of thinking and perceiving. Language isn’t just for expressing our thoughts, they claimed, but they also shaped our thoughts. In Urdu, you may call a club sandwich or a Subway sandwich as just a sandwich but for English speakers, subs and sandwiches are different. Jam and jelly is same for people who speak Urdu but quite different for native English speakers.
Beliefs
Beliefs: something that is supposed to be true.
It is your perception but it isn’t necessarily objective fact.
For example, Americans have a belief that democracy is the best political system because it gives a voice to every American. The Chinese political system may not give a voice to every Chinese, but it also results in a lot less poverty.
Religious beliefs are also included in this element of symbolic culture e.g. life after death in Islam is a religious belief. There is no way to prove that scientifically but Muslims still believe in it.
Values
Values: the standards by which people define what is desirable or undesirable, good or bad, beautiful or ugly.
Values aren’t something in writing, they are just generally agreed upon e.g. lying is consider bad but there isn’t necessarily a law to punish lying.
As an example, the US society has these core values: achievement, individualism, material comfort, hard work, equality, and group superiority (even though it is contradictory to equality).
Value Cluster: values that together form a larger whole. Values are not independent units; some cluster together to form a larger whole e.g. achievement, hard work and material comfort all come under the value of success in life which is a value cluster.
Value Contradictions: values that contradict one another; to follow the one means to come into conflict with the other e.g. equality and group superiority.
Norms
Norms: standards of behavior or expectations that develop out of a group’s values.
There are four different types of norms:
Folkways: norms that are not strictly enforced with no sanctions e.g. if a man goes outside without a shirt, he won’t be punished for it. The most people will do is give him a look.
Mores: norms that are rules or behavior that are enforced with sanctions e.g. if a woman goes outside without a shirt, she will be punished for it. People will do more than just give her a look.
Taboos: strongest norms that can NEVER be tolerated e.g. murder, cannibalism, incest, etc. The sanctions are extremely severe in this case e.g. prison, banishment or even death.
Laws: norms that are in written form e.g. laws for theft, bribery, extortion, etc.
Sanctions
Sanctions: reactions people receive for following or breaking a norm.
A positive sanction expresses approval for following a norm.
A negative sanction reflects disapproval for breaking a norm.
Sanctions can material and non-material e.g. a trophy is a material positive sanction, a hug is a non-material positive sanction, a fine ticket is a material negative sanction and harsh words are non-material negative sanctions.
Customs
Customs: traditions across the society.
They are mostly non-material e.g. the way wedding ceremonies work in Pakistan are a part of Pakistani customs.
Subcultures
Subculture: the values and related behaviors of a group that distinguish its members from the larger culture; a world within a world.
U.S. society contains thousands of subcultures. Some are as broad as the way of life we associate with teenagers, others as narrow as those we associate with bodybuilders — or with politicians.
Countercultures
The values and norms of most subcultures blend in with mainstream society.
In some cases, however, some of the group’s values and norms place it at odds with the dominant culture. Sociologists use the term counterculture to refer to such groups e.g. white supremacists, Nazis or confederates, etc.
As people who associate with the counterculture attack the values of the larger dominant culture, members of the mainstream culture may ridicule or even isolate members of the counterculture.
High Culture
High culture encompasses the cultural products of aesthetic value, which a society collectively esteem as exemplary art. At times, it is mostly mixed with aristocracy.
Examples are artistic architecture, films, music, art, etc.
Popular Culture
Culture based on the tastes of ordinary people rather than an educated elite.
Examples are videogames, politics, fashion, etc.
Multiculturalism
The definition of multicultural is something that incorporates ideas, beliefs or people from many different countries and cultural backgrounds.
When people of different cultures come together to celebrate and share their different traditions this is an example of a multicultural celebration.
Ideal versus Real Culture
Many of the norms that surround cultural values are followed only partially.
Ideal Culture: culture a people’s ideal values and norms; the goals held out for them e.g. we want to ideal Muslims by following Islamic principles to the tee.
Real Culture: the norms and values that people actually follow; as opposed to ideal culture e.g. what we actually practice as Muslims which may not be ideal such as crime even in Muslim societies.
Cultural Shock
Anthropologist Ralph Linton (1936) said, “the last thing a fish would ever notice would be water.” So also with people: Except in unusual circumstances, most characteristics of our own culture remain imperceptible to us.
We came into this life without a language; without values and morality; with no ideas about religion, war, money, love, use of space, and so on. Yet by this point in our lives, we all have acquired them—and take them for granted. Sociologists call this culture within us.
This taken for granted culture becomes the lens through which we perceive and evaluate what is going on around us.
The rare instances in which these assumptions are challenged, however, can be upsetting and may result in a culture shock.
Culture Shock: the disorientation that people experience when they come in contact with a fundamentally different culture and can no longer depend on their taken-for granted assumptions about life.
Ethnocentrism
Sociologist William Sumner (1906) said, “One’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it.”
An important consequence of culture within us is ethnocentrism.
Ethnocentrism: a tendency to use our own group’s ways of doing things as a yardstick for judging other individuals or societies, generally leading to a negative evaluation of their values, norms and beliefs.
Ethnocentrism has both positive and negative consequences:
Positive: it creates in-group loyalties. You may care more for a stranger that shares the same ethnicity as your own.
Negative: ethnocentrism can lead to discrimination against people whose ways differ from ours. Black people were regarded as savages by the civilized white Americans in the past.
Xenocentrism
Xenocentrism*: preference for the products, style, culture, people, significant others, and food of others, rather than of one’s own.
An exchange student who goes home after a semester abroad or a sociologist who returns from the field may find it difficult to associate with the values of their own culture after having experienced what they deem a more upright or nobler way of living.
Cultural Relativism
To counter this notion of ethnocentrism, we can practice cultural relativism.
Cultural Relativism: not judging a culture but trying to understand it on its own terms.
Examples:
Bullfighting is barbaric to Americans but to Spaniards, it is a display of courage, glory and competition between the bull and the matador.
Satti was an ancient Hindu practice where the wife was burned with the husband when he died. It may seem cruel and evil to the rest of the world, but to the Hindu community, Satti symbolized closure to a marriage. It was a voluntary act in which, as a sign of being a dutiful wife, a woman followed her husband to the afterlife. Ibn-I-Battuta had a cultural shock and almost fainted when he heard the screaming women.
Although cultural relativism helps us avoid cultural smugness, this view has come under attack. Anthropologist Robert Edgerton suggests that a scale should be developed to measure the “quality of life” of different cultures. Cultures that result in exploitation and violence (gang rape, wife beating, child prostitution, etc.) should not be acceptable even if viewed through the lens of cultural relativism.
Cultural Imperialism
People with the best intentions sometimes travel to a society to “help” its people, because they see them as uneducated or backward—essentially inferior. In reality, these travelers are guilty of cultural imperialism.
Cultural Imperialism: the deliberate imposition of one’s own cultural values on another culture.
European colonizers often viewed the people in the lands they colonized as uncultured savages who were in need of European governance, dress, religion, and other cultural practices.
Cultural Universalism
Although there are universal human activities (singing, playing games, storytelling, preparing food, marrying, child rearing, disposing of the dead, and so on), there is no universal way of doing any of them.
Cultural Universalism: a value, norm, or other cultural trait that is found in every group.
Culture vs. Biology
Edward Wilson set off a debate when he said that human behavior and their way of living isn’t determined by culture but by genetics. Competition, cooperation, altruism, envy - even religion, war and peace - could be explained by sociobiology, claimed Wilson.
Sociologists disagree with this claim by saying that although genetics does have an influence on our way of life but everything can’t be explained through genetics. Culture is just as important.
An example would be that people with the 9R/9R gene are less sexually active but if the subculture encourages sexual behaviors, then the gene could be overrode. Another example is the DRD2 gene which makes people abuse alcohol - what if a person has this gene in a Muslim country where alcohol is banned?
Culture and Technology
Technology: tools, skills or procedures necessary to make and use those tools.
Technology is central to a group’s material culture.
The New Technology
People make technology all the time but most of the time it has very little impact. Sometimes, however, it has a huge impact on human lives e.g. the printing press, factories, assembly line, microchips, etc.
This emerging technology is known as new technology.
However, this new technology sets the framework for a group’s non-material culture as well.
Cultural Lag and Cultural Change
William Ogburn (1922/1950) coined the term Cultural Lag.
Ogburn meant that not all parts of a culture change at the same pace.
When one part of a culture changes, other parts lag behind.
Ogburn pointed out that a group’s material culture usually changes first, with the nonmaterial culture lagging behind.
A good example is that the school year is just 9 months long with a huge summer break. Why does the summer break exist? In the 1800s, children had to help out in family farms during the summers so they had to take breaks. However, farming is mostly automated now so these summer breaks are not required but it is part of our nonmaterial culture. As a result, we are lagging behind when it comes to summer breaks.
Technology and Cultural Leveling
For most of human history, communication was limited and travel was slow. Consequently, people developed unique cultures according to their environment.
When people did contact one another, they learned from each other and adopted cultural traits they deemed desirable.
Cultural Diffusion: the spread of cultural traits from one group to another; includes both material and non-material cultural traits.
With today’s trade, travel, and communications, cultural diffusion is occurring rapidly. Travel and communication bridge time and space to such an extent that there is
almost no “other side of the world” anymore. As a result, cultural leveling is happening - basically all cultures are coming on the same level.
Cultural Leveling: the process by which cultures become similar to one another; refers especially to the process by which Western culture is being exported and diffused into other nations.
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