3 Culture

Almost every human behaviour, from gardening to marriage, is learned. In the France, marriage is generally seen as an individual choice, based on feelings of love and marked by a period of romantic exchange. In other countries, marriages have been arranged through an intricate process of interviews and negotiations between entire families. To people from France, arranged marriages may seem to risk incompatibility or the absence of romantic love. But many people from cultures where marriages find a great deal of marital happiness in their relationships, emphasizing that choices made throughout a marriage are likewise important to one’s satisfaction (Bowman and Dollahite, 2014).

How we understand the world is shaped by culture. Culture is akin to a matrix of symbols and meanings that we acquire through social interaction. Culture can be material and nonmaterial. Train tickets and bus tokens are part of material culture, as are the buses, subway cars, and the physical structures of the bus stop. Think of material culture as items you can touch-they are tangible. Nonmaterial culture, in contrast, consists of the ideas, attitudes, and beliefs of a society. These are things you cannot touch. They are intangible. You may believe that a line should be formed to enter the subway car or that other passengers should not stand so close to you. Those beliefs are intangible because they do not have physical properties and can be touched.

Material and nonmaterial aspects of culture are linked, and physical objects often symbolize cultural ideas. Clothing, hairstyles, and jewelry are part of material culture, but the appropriateness of wearing certain clothing for specific events reflects nonmaterial culture. A school building belongs to material culture symbolizing education, but the teaching methods and educational standards are part of education’s nonmaterial culture.

Although cultures vary, they also share common elements. Cultural universals are patterns or traits that are globally common to all societies. One example of a cultural universal is the family unit: every human society recognizes a family structure that regulates sexual reproduction and the care of children. Even so, how that family unit is defined and how it functions vary. In many Asian cultures, for example, family members from all generations commonly live together in one household. In these cultures, young adults continue to live in the extended household family structure until they marry and join their spouse’s household, or they may remain and raise their nuclear family within the extended family’s homestead. When someone says family, what do you think of? How has culture shaped this imagery for you?

Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism

Although human societies have much in common, cultural differences are far more prevalent than cultural universals. For example, while all cultures have language, analysis of conversational etiquette reveals tremendous differences. In some Middle Eastern cultures, it is common to stand close to others in conversation. While in Norway, people prefer that you stand at least an arm’s length away. The study of the way people use space (and defend their personal space) is called proxemics.

Because there are a lot of unwritten cultural rules, some people find travelling a bit disorienting. Some people pride themselves on their willingness to try unfamiliar foods, like the late celebrated food writer Anthony Bourdain (1956-2017). Often, however, people express disgust at another culture’s cuisine. They might think that it’s unappealing to eat raw meat or insects. In many parts of the world, cheese just tastes gross to people.

Such attitudes are examples of ethnocentrism, which means to evaluate and judge another culture based on one’s own cultural norms. Ethnocentrism is believing your group is the correct measuring standard and if other cultures do not measure up to it, they are wrong. As sociologist William Graham Sumner (1906) described the term, it is a belief or attitude that one’s own culture is better than all others. Almost everyone is a little bit ethnocentric, especially when it comes to taste. But ethnocentrism can also lead to disdain or dislike of other cultures and could cause misunderstanding, stereotyping, and conflict. Individuals, government, non-government, private, and religious institutions with the best intentions sometimes travel to a society to “help” its people, because they see them as uneducated, backward, or even inferior. Cultural imperialism is the deliberate imposition of one’s own cultural values on another culture.

Colonial expansion by Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, and England grew quickly in the fifteenth century was accompanied by severe cultural imperialism. European colonizers often viewed the people in these new lands as uncultured savages who needed to adopt Catholic governance, Christianity, European dress, and other cultural practices. A modern example of cultural imperialism may include the work of international aid agencies who introduce agricultural methods and plant species from developed countries into areas that are better served by indigenous varieties and agricultural approaches to the particular region. Another example would be the deforestation of the Amazon Basin as indigenous cultures lose land to timber corporations.

When people find themselves in a new culture, they may experience disorientation and frustration. In sociology, we call this culture shock. An exchange student from China studying in Brazil might be annoyed by the constant interruptions in class as other students ask questions—a practice that is considered rude in China but expected in a Brazilian classroom. Eventually, as people learn more about a culture, they adapt to the new culture for a variety of reasons.

Cultural relativism is the practice of assessing a culture by its own standards rather than viewing it through the lens of one’s own culture. Practicing cultural relativism requires an open mind and a willingness to consider, and even adapt to, new values, norms, and practices.

Indiscriminately embracing everything about a new culture, however, is not always possible or desirable. For example, many sociologists are critical of the practice of sex-selective abortions performed to favour male babies over female ones. Sociologists attempting to engage in cultural relativism, then, may struggle to reconcile aspects of their own culture with aspects of a culture that they are studying.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for sociologists studying different cultures is the matter of keeping a perspective. It is impossible for anyone to overcome all cultural biases. The best we can do is strive to be aware of them. Pride in one’s own culture doesn’t have to lead to imposing its values or ideas on others. And an appreciation for another culture shouldn’t preclude individuals from studying it with a critical eye. This practice is perhaps the most difficult for all social scientists.

Knowing the unwritten rules of culture is important when travelling. Take the case of going to work on public transportation. When boarding a bus in Thailand, passengers might board while the bus is moving, because buses sometimes do not come to a full stop to take on patrons. In Ireland, bus riders would be expected to extend an arm to indicate that they want the bus to stop for them. If you don’t know the practice, it can be difficult to get around.

We call the disorientation we feel while being in a new cultural milieu ‘culture shock.’ Culture shock is often associated with traveling abroad, although it can happen in one’s own country, state, or even hometown. Kalervo Oberg (1960) is credited with first coining the term “culture shock.” In his studies, Oberg found that most people are excited at first to encounter a new culture (the honeymoon stage). But bit by bit, they become stressed and develop a hostile attitude towards the country. People in this second stage also often retreat into the company of people from their home country, and sometimes depart early for home. In the third stage, though, people start to adapt. They learn more of the language and local places and begin to laugh more at the troubles they face. In the final stage, they adapt completely, and accepts the culture of the country as just another way of living.

Values and Norms

Value does not mean monetary worth when speaking about culture, but rather ideals, or principles and standards members of a culture hold in high regard. Values are deeply embedded and are critical for learning a culture’s beliefs, which are the tenets or convictions that people hold to be true.

One of the ways societies strive to maintain its values is through rewards and punishments. A boy who helps an elderly woman board a bus may receive a smile and a “thank you.” People sanction unwanted or inappropriate behaviours by withholding support, approval, or permission, or by implementing sanctions. If the same boy pushed his way past the woman, he might receive a scolding. We may think of ‘sanction’ as a negative term, but sanctions are necessary forms of social control, ways to encourage conformity to cultural norms or rules. Emile Durkheim observed that no society can do without norms and rules, even if each society imposes different norms and rules upon its members.

Norms are the visible and invisible rules of conduct through which societies are structured. Norms define how to behave in accordance with what a society has defined as good, right, and important, and most members of the society adhere to them because their violation invokes some degree of sanction. They define the rules that govern behaviour.

Formal norms are established, written rules existing in all societies. They support many social institutions, such as the criminal justice and healthcare systems and schools. Functionalists may question what purpose these norms serve; conflict theorists might be interested in who creates, benefits, and suffers under these formal norms; and symbolic interactionists wonder about how a group that benefits interacts. Laws are formal norms, but so are employee manuals, college entrance exam requirements, and “no running” signs at swimming pools.

There are plenty of formal norms, but the list of informal norms—casual behaviours that are generally and widely conformed to—is much longer. People learn informal norms by observation, imitation, and general socialization. Some informal norms are taught directly—“Clean up your room”—while others are learned by observation, including understanding consequences when someone else violates a norm. Informal norms dictate appropriate behaviours without the need of written rules, and so may be difficult to learn when you are new or not familiar with the culture.

Sociologist Harold Garfinkel studied people’s customs in order to find out how societal rules and norms not only influence behaviour but also shape social order. His resulting book, Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) discusses people’s assumptions about the social makeup of their communities.

One of Garfinkel’s research methods was known as a “breaching experiment,” in which the researcher behaves in a socially awkward manner in order to test the sociological concepts of social norms and conformity. The participants are not aware an experiment is in progress, but their response is recorded. For some breaches, the researcher directly engages with innocent bystanders. In a grocery store, an experimenter might take a food item out of another person’s grocery cart, saying, “That looks good! I think I’ll try it.” In those cases, the bystanders are pressured to respond, and their discomfort illustrates how much we depend on social norms. Breaching experiments uncover and explore the many unwritten social rules we live by.

Norms may be further classified as either mores or folkways. Mores (mor-ehs) are norms that embody the moral views and principles of a group. They often have a religious foundation. Violating them can have serious consequences. The strongest mores are protected with laws and other formal sanctions. In most societies, for instance, homicide is considered immoral, and it’s punishable by law (a formal norm). But more often, mores are judged and guarded by public sentiment (an informal norm). People who violate mores are seen as shameful. They can even be shunned or banned from some groups.

Unlike mores, folkways are norms without strong moral underpinnings. Rather, folkways direct appropriate behaviour in the day-to-day practices and expressions of a culture. We can think of them as traditions—things we do because we ‘always have done it that way.’ They indicate whether to shake hands or kiss on the cheek when greeting another person. They specify whether to wear a tie and blazer or a T-shirt and sandals to an event. In Australia, women can smile and say hello to men on the street. In Egypt, that is not always acceptable. The rules regarding these folkways may change from culture to culture. A folkway in one culture could be extremely rude in another.

Folkways are actions that people everywhere take for granted. People need to act without thinking in order to get seamlessly through daily routines. They can’t stop and analyze every action (Sumner, 1906). Folkways might be small actions, learned by observation and imitated, but they are by no means trivial. Ignoring a friend at a party may not be against the law, but you’ll feel the social effects the next day.

Symbols and Culture

Humans, consciously and subconsciously, are always striving to make sense of their surrounding world. Symbols—such as gestures, signs, objects, signals, and words—help people understand that world. They provide communication methods to understanding experiences by conveying recognizable meanings that are shared by societies.

The world is filled with symbols. Corporate logos and traffic signs are symbols. In some cultures, a gold ring is a symbol of marriage, in others, a beard. Some symbols are highly functional; stop signs, for instance, provide useful instruction. As physical objects, they belong to material culture, but because they function as symbols, they also convey nonmaterial cultural meanings.

Some symbols represent only one side of the story and elicit strong emotions, which can lead to social unrest. Their presence is a reminder of a nation’s worst times and not something to celebrate. Some of these symbols become targeted for. In 1989, crowds tore down the Berlin Wall, a decades-old symbol of the division between East and West Germany, communism and capitalism. In 2020, some Canadians tore down statues of the country’s first prime minister, John A. MacDonald, because of his connection to the residential school system.

While different cultures have varying systems of symbols, one system is common to all: language.

Language is a system that uses symbols with which people communicate and through which culture is transmitted. Letters, pictographs, and hand gestures are all symbols that create a language used for communication. Sign language, for example, requires an intimate knowledge not only of an alphabet but also of signs that represent entire words and the meaning indicated by certain facial expressions or postures. Its grammar differs from the spoken language. As spoken language is different across regions, nations and cultures, and can even differ by the age of the person, so too does sign language.

Language shapes our perception of reality and our behaviour. In the 1920s, linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf advanced this idea which became known as Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or linguistic relativity. It is based on the idea that people experience their world through their language, and therefore understand their world through the cultural meanings embedded in their language. The hypothesis suggests that language shapes thought and thus behavior (Swoyer, 2003).

In 2002, Lera Boroditsky and her colleagues conducted experiments on native German and Spanish speakers in English. Unlike English, these languages assign genders to nouns. The team chose a set of nouns with opposite genders in German and Spanish and asked participants to provide adjectives to describe them. They found that German speakers used more masculine adjectives than Spanish speakers when describing a noun that was grammatically masculine in German but feminine in Spanish. For example, the word for key is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful, while Spanish speakers used the adjectives golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny, and tiny. The team concluded that gender perceptions acquired in a person’s native language carry forward to how they see the world even when they switch to a language without grammatical genders (Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips, 2002).

In addition to using spoken language, people communicate without words. Nonverbal communication is symbolic, and, as in the case of language, is learned through one’s culture. Some gestures are nearly universal; some are not. A thumbs-up in Iran is an offensive gesture, basically “sit on it,” while in France it would be considered a positive sign (“Ok!”).

Culture and Capitalism

For Max Weber, culture helped explain why capitalism developed in Europe rather than some other part of the world. While capitalist-like activities could be found around the world, Weber believed that a culture of rationalization spread earlier on in Europe, all aspects of cultural life, from poetry to architecture. This involved moving away from tradition (“we do it because this is how it is done”) towards increasing standardization and efficiency (“we do this because it is cheaper and more effective”). Take music, for example. In the Middle Ages there was no standardized system of notation. Writing down music in a standardized way, with established scales, rationalized music so people could play it anywhere in the same manner. And people could also sell the music sheets for the first time ever.

Rationalization did not create capitalism, but the focus on the most efficient means to accomplish tasks provided the fertile soil for capitalism to develop, with its emphasis on cost-benefit analyses and double-entry bookkeeping. And rationalization continues to spread today. George Ritzer (1993) calls its modern form as McDonaldization in reference to the way things in our lives become increasingly delivered in a fast-food like fashion.

While Weber thought that rationalization was necessary to deliver goods and services to the millions of people who constitute modern states, and that bureaucracies were therefore an important form of social organization in the modern world. He also saw, however, that working and interacting with large bureaucracies can be a soul crushing experience. Rationalization can become like an iron cage in which a person becomes like a cog in a giant machine, whose main aspiration is to become a bigger cog in a bigger machine.

Another related cultural development that Weber felt contributed the development of capitalism in Europe (rather than, say, China, which was much richer at the time) was the rise of Protestant Christianity. He argued that Calvinism (a special type of Christianity preached by John Calvin) provided fertile ground for Christianity by offering would-be capitalists a new moral framework that stressed frugality and living an ascetic lifestyle, while continuing to make money. Weber noted that while people were involved in trade the world over, the non-capitalist rich typically ended up cashing in at some point, buying a fabulous palace or succumbing to social pressure to spend one’s wealth on the community. With Calvinism, however, there existed a community who rejected the idea of spending money on luxuries, while at the same time working hard at one’s ‘calling.’ This provided the cultural conditions necessary for capitalism to get going, as capitalism requires money be reinvested rather than consumed–at least insofar as the capitalist class is concerned (Weber, 1963).

Why do we like the products that we buy? Is there any sociological explanations for preferring a Starbucks coffee over one from McDonald’s?

Pierre Bourdieu (1984) provides us with a cultural model for how taste relates to our social status. He suggests that cultural “assets” such as education and taste are accumulated and passed down between generations in the same manner as financial capital or wealth. This marks individuals from an early age by such things as knowing how to wear a suit or having an educated manner of speaking. In a sense they are like experience points you gain as you participate.

Bourdieu grouped cultural capital into three categories: embodied (a regional dialect), objectified (possessions), and institutionalized (academic credentials). Cultural capital is like economic capital (money). Higher amounts of cultural capital translate into higher social positions.

Cultural capital is capital in the sense of an investment, as it is expensive and difficult to attain while providing access to better occupations. Bourdieu argued that the privilege accorded to those who hold cultural capital is one way of reproducing the power of the upper and middle classes. People with the ‘wrong’ cultural attributes have difficulty attaining the same status. They just don’t fit in.

Cultural capital connects with one’s habitus, which is the deeply seated schemas, habits, feelings, dispositions, and forms of know-how that people hold due to their specific social backgrounds (Bourdieu, 1990). In a sense, one’s habitus is like one’s social self, a self-formed of experience. It is what allows one to feel comfortable in some situations, like an art gallery opening or a ballet. Habitus is so deeply ingrained that we take its reality as natural rather than as a product of social circumstances. For Bourdieu, this helps legitimatize the privileged position of the middle and upper classes, as their tastes and habits come to be seen as natural dispositions of the person rather than acquired knowledge (e.g. “Of course so-and-so would be promoted to management, they have such refined taste–they just fit the role!”). But taste is not natural; everyone acquires their tastes, but the means of acquiring taste is not available to all equally.

Sociologists use the term high culture to describe the pattern of cultural experiences and attitudes that exist in the highest or elite class segments of a society. In North America and Europe, high culture also tends to be associated with wealth. Events considered high culture can be expensive, formal, and exclusive­: attending a ballet, listening to a live symphony performance, or attending a prestigious university. Similarly, low culture is associated with the pattern of cultural experiences and attitudes that exist in the lowest class segments of a society.

The term popular culture refers to the pattern of cultural experiences and attitudes that exist in mainstream society. Popular culture events might include a parade, a baseball game, or the season finale of a television show. Anime and cosplay are pieces of popular culture. Popular culture is accessible by most and is expressed and spread via commercial and social media outlets such as radio, television, movies, the music industry, publishers, and corporate-run websites. Although high culture may be considered by some as superior to popular culture, the lines between high culture and popular culture vary over time and place. Shakespearean plays, considered to be popular culture when they were written, are now part of our society’s high culture. Five hundred years from now, will people consider Eurovision Song Contest as high-performance art?

A subculture is a smaller cultural group within a larger culture. People of a subculture are part of the larger culture but also share a specific identity within a smaller group.

Thousands of subcultures exist across the world. Ethnic and racial groups share the language, food, and customs of their heritage. Other subcultures are formed through shared experiences. Biker culture revolves around an interest in motorcycles. Some subcultures are formed by people who possess traits or preferences that differ from the majority of a society’s population. The body modification community embraces aesthetic additions to the human body, such as tattoos, piercings, and certain forms of plastic surgery. But even as members of a subculture band together, they still identify with and participate in the larger society.

Sociologists distinguish subcultures from countercultures, which reject some of the larger culture’s norms and values. In contrast to subcultures, which operate relatively smoothly within the larger society, countercultures might actively defy larger society by developing their own set of rules and norms to live by, sometimes even creating communities that operate outside of greater society. Counterculture members are ‘against’ the dominant ruling culture and want to install their own values. Sub-culture members may want to change some things but established procedures are followed.

Innovation

An innovation refers to an object or concept’s initial appearance in society—it is innovative because it is new. In the early 1900s, electric appliances were invented at an astonishing pace. Innovations may shape a culture by replacing older ways of carrying out tasks, being integrated into current practices, or creating new activities. Their adoption reflects and shapes cultural values, and their use may introduce new norms and practices.

(Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)

In 1962, Sociologist Everett Rogers (2003) developed a model of the diffusion of innovations. As consumers gradually adopt a new innovation, the item grows toward 100 percent usage, or complete saturation within a society. This graph is frequently used in business, sales, technology, and cultural innovations. It can be used to describe how quickly different groups adopt (or begin using) a new technology or a new slang word, but note it is just a framework: not every innovation follows this exact pattern, but it provides a good foundation for discussion and prediction.

Diffusion and Globalization

Another way material and nonmaterial culture crosses borders is through diffusion. Like a gas in a laboratory experiment, the item or idea spreads throughout. Diffusion relates to the process of the integration of cultures into the mainstream while globalization refers to the promotion and increase of interactions between different regions and populations around the globe resulting in the integration of markets and interdependence of nations fostered through trade.

Ideas, concepts, or artifacts are often diffused, or spread, to individuals and groups, resulting in new social practices. People might develop a new appreciation of Thai noodles or Italian gelato. Twitter feeds from public demonstrations in one nation have encouraged political protesters in other countries. When this kind of diffusion occurs, ideas from one culture are introduced into another, often before the associated material objects.

Music, fashion, technology, and values—all are products of culture. But what do they mean? How do sociologists perceive and interpret culture based on these material and nonmaterial items? Let’s finish our analysis of culture by reviewing them in the context of three theoretical perspectives: functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism.

Functionalists view society as a system in which all parts work—or function—together to create society as a whole. They often use the human body as an analogy. Looking at life in this way, societies need culture to exist. Cultural norms function to support the fluid operation of society, and cultural values guide people in making choices. Just as members of a society work together to fulfill a society’s needs, culture exists to meet its members’ social and personal needs.

Conflict theorists view social structure as inherently unequal, based on power differentials related to issues like class, gender, race, and age. For a conflict theorist, established educational methods are seen as reinforcing the dominant societal culture and issues of privilege by conferring cultural capital. The historical experiences of certain groups— those based upon race, sex, or class, for instance, or those that portray a negative narrative about the dominant culture—are excluded from history books.

Conflict theorists, however, also recognize the creative force that social interactions produce, even under conditions of inequality. Writing in the early years of post-independence India, D.P. Mukerji (1894-1961) was critical of the idea that India’s cultural traditions would (or should) disappear in the wake of modernization. Instead, he argued that progress will come from a “dialectic between tradition and modernity” (Madan, 1977, p. 179), a synthesis of local and global cultural flows, but one rooted in the traditions of India. When we look around the world we see similar mixing of cultures, as the global is localized and local art forms find a global audience.

Symbolic interactionism is the perspective that is most concerned with the face-to-face interactions and cultural meanings between members of society. It is considered a micro-level analysis. Instead of looking how access is different between the rich and poor, interactionists see culture as being created and maintained by the ways people interact and in how individuals interpret each other’s actions. Every object and action have a symbolic meaning, and language serves as a means for people to represent and communicate interpretations of these meanings to others. Symbolic interactionists perceive culture as highly dynamic and fluid, as it is dependent on how meaning is interpreted and how individuals interact when conveying these meanings. Interactionists research changes in language. They study additions and deletions of words, the changing meaning of words, and the transmission of words in an original language into different ones.

We began this chapter by asking, “What is culture?” Culture is comprised of values, beliefs, norms, language, practices, and artifacts of a society. Because culture is learned, it includes how people think and express themselves. Culture can be both enabling and constraining. It gives us the freedom to express ourselves (through language), but also the norms that determine what is appropriate to say in a particular context.

Culture is preserved through transmission from one generation to the next, but it also evolves through processes of innovation, discovery, and cultural diffusion. As such, cultures are social constructions. The society approves or disapproves of items or ideas, which are therefore included or not in the culture. We may be restricted by the confines of our own culture, but as humans we have the ability to question values and make conscious decisions. No better evidence of this freedom exists than the amount of cultural diversity around the world. The more we study another culture, the better we become at understanding our own.

Conclusion

In this chapter we looked at how sociologists study culture. “Culture” is a big topic and there are many different ways sociologists think and write about the subject matter. Our three major paradigms (structural-functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism) provide us with important frameworks for understanding how we might approach this topic from a number of different angles, be it the glue that holds society together or the symbols that allow us to communicate with each other.

Study Questions

1. Examine the difference between material and nonmaterial culture in your world. Identify ten objects that are part of your regular cultural experience. For each, then identify what aspects of nonmaterial culture (values and beliefs) that these objects represent. What has this exercise revealed to you about your culture?
2. What do you think of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Do you agree or disagree with it? Cite examples or research to support your point of view.
3. Identify several examples of popular culture and describe how they inform larger culture. How prevalent is the effect of these examples in your everyday life?

References

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