Culture - Sociology Notes

What Is Culture?

Culture: The entire way of life of a group of people, encompassing both material and symbolic elements, acting as a lens through which individuals view the world, passed down through generations. Includes language, beauty standards, gestures, dress styles, food, and music.
Culture is communicated, not genetic.

Ethnocentrism

Ethnocentrism: Using one's own culture as a standard to evaluate others, leading to the view that other cultures are abnormal or inferior.
Prevents understanding others.
Culture shock: Disorientation experienced when entering a radically new social or cultural environment.

Cultural Relativism

Cultural relativism: Understanding other cultures on their own terms, rather than judging by one's own culture.
Helps in placing values, beliefs, norms within their cultural context, fostering appreciation.
Important to employ cultural relativism for objective understanding.

Body Ritual of the Nacirema

The Nacirema have a pathological horror and fascination with the mouth, believing its condition has a supernatural influence on social relationships. They believe that without mouth rituals, their teeth would fall out, gums bleed, jaws shrink, friends desert them, and lovers reject them.
Daily body ritual includes a mouth-rite.

Components of Culture

Material vs. Nonmaterial Culture

Material culture: Objects associated with a cultural group (tools, machines, buildings, artwork). Any physical object with social meaning.
Nonmaterial culture: Ideas associated with a cultural group (beliefs, values, assumptions, norms, interactions, communication).

Types of Nonmaterial Culture

Symbolic culture allows communication through signs, gestures, and language.
Signs: Symbols that stand for or convey an idea.
Gestures: Use of bodies to communicate without words; actions with symbolic meaning.

Language

Language: Communication system using vocal sounds, gestures, or written symbols. Basis of nonmaterial culture, facilitates communication, and perpetuates culture.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: Language structures thought; ways of seeing the world are embedded in language.
Language shapes how people construct reality and categorize their surroundings.

Values and Norms

Values: Ideas about what is right or wrong, good or bad, desirable or worthy. Express what a group cherishes.
Values are contested and change over time.
Norms: Rules or guidelines on acceptable behavior within a culture, emanating from the group’s values.

Types of Norms

Laws: Formally codified norms with explicit statements about what is permissible or forbidden.
Folkways: Loosely enforced norms involving common customs and practices ensuring smooth social interaction.
Mores: Norms carrying great moral significance, closely related to core values, with severe repercussions for violators.
Taboo: A deeply ingrained norm; even thinking about violating it evokes strong negative feelings.

Moral Holiday

Norms are culture, time period, and situation-specific.
Specific norm violations can be acceptable in certain situations.
Moral holiday: A specified time period allowing some norm violations.

Sanctions

Sanctions: Positive or negative reactions to how people follow or disobey norms, including rewards and punishments.
Social control: Formal and informal mechanisms eliciting conformity to values and norms, promoting social cohesion.
Violating a norm results in a prescribed sanction.

In Relationships: Individual Values vs. University Culture

Universities have their own cultures with traditions, customs, beliefs, and values.
Many public colleges provide on-campus sexual health services like STI testing/treatment and contraception.
Private religious universities often do not provide contraception to students.

Covid and Culture

COVID-19's impact was immediately felt as new types of norms, material culture, and nonmaterial culture emerged.
Norms around mask-wearing and social distancing were often enforced with sanctions to maintain social control.
Disputes about values and norms during the pandemic reveal deep divides within American culture.
Some people complied with mask-wearing norms due to values such as respect for authority and belief in science.
Others felt that mask requirements were inconsistent with American values like individualism and personal freedom.
Many disagreements occurred along political party lines.

Variations in Culture

Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism: A policy valuing diverse racial, ethnic, national, and linguistic backgrounds, encouraging retention of cultural differences within the larger society.

Dominant Culture

Dominant culture: The values, norms, and practices of the most powerful group in society (wealth, prestige, status, influence).
Hegemony: Antonio Gramsci's term describing the cultural aspects of social control, where the dominant group’s ideas are accepted by all.
Dominant status of commercial radio and corporate interests in the music industry dictate limited mainstream success for artists.

Subcultures and Countercultures

Subculture: A group within society differentiated by its distinctive values, norms, and lifestyle.
Subcultures can be based on ethnicity, age, interests.
Counterculture: A group openly rejecting or actively opposing society’s values and norms.
Examples: 1960s anti-war protestors, far-right militia groups, hacktivists.

Culture Wars

Culture wars: Clashes within mainstream society over values and norms to be upheld.
Cultural conflict does not always come from extreme margins; it can emerge from within the mainstream.
Culture wars are mainly waged over values, morality, and solutions to social problems.

Ideal Culture vs. Real Culture

Ideal culture: Norms, values, and behavior patterns that members of a society believe should be observed in principle.
Real culture: Norms, values, and behavior patterns that actually exist within a society, which may or may not correspond to the society’s ideals.
The United States, with its history of slavery, Western expansion, oppression of women, discrimination against ethnic minorities, and the battle for LGBTQ rights, exemplifies the tension between ideal and real culture.

Cultural Change

Changes in Culture

Cultures change slowly and incrementally, but change can also happen rapidly.
Change is usually thought of as “progress”.
A subculture can influence the mainstream and become part of dominant culture, or something that is dominant can change to a counterculture.

Technological Changes

Technology: Material artifacts and the knowledge and techniques required to use them.
The Digital Age/Information Age is spurred by the computer microchip.
The Digital Revolution is shaping culture at an increasingly rapid pace.

Cultural Diffusion

Cultural diffusion: Dissemination of material and nonmaterial culture (tools, technology, beliefs, behavior) from one group to another.
Cultural diffusion often occurs from wealthier to more impoverished nations.
“Western” culture has spread rapidly, driven by capitalism, globalization, and new forms of transportation and communication.

Cultural Imperialism

Critics of cultural diffusion describe it as cultural imperialism.
Cultural imperialism: Imposition of one culture’s beliefs and practices on another via media and consumer products, rather than military force.

Cultural Leveling

Cultural leveling: The process by which cultures that were once unique become increasingly similar.
While Western culture is a dominant force, cultural diffusion and leveling do not have to occur in a one-way direction.

American Culture in Perspective

American culture is highly visible worldwide, so its moral and political values have equally high visibility.
Much of the resentment against the United States abroad emerges due to a perceived failure to live up to its own stated values or to apply them fairly.
Putting American culture in perspective means recognizing that because it is pervasive, it may be viewed with suspicion when its values clash with those of other cultures.