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Culture
What
is Culture?
The Components of Culture
Cultural Diversity: Many Ways of
Life in One World
Theoretical Analysis of Culture
What is Culture?

Culture is the most important concept in the social
sciences. It includes the values, beliefs, behaviors,
and material objects that, together, form a people’s
way of life.
 Non-Material- The beliefs and ideas created by
the members in a certain society.
 Material- The tangible objects created by
members of a society. Includes the items a society
finds of value.
Culture, Nation, and Society

Culture is a shared way of life, a nation is a
political entity, and a society is the organized
interaction of people in a nation. Each one of
these concepts is important to sociologists.
Components of Culture

Culture is comprised of five different components:
symbols, language, values, beliefs, and norms.
Material culture now includes technology.
 Symbols- anything that stands for or represents
something else. This includes: symbolic words,
phrases, and images associated with social
movements and ideologies, which can evoke
powerful images and emotional reactions.
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Language- The key to the world of culture.
A system of symbols that allows people to
communicate with one another.
Cultural transmission- the process by which one
generation passes culture to the next.
Values- a collective conception of that which is
desirable. This conception usually has both
emotional and symbolic components. Values may
range from those that are subjectively meaningful
to a given individual to those that are shared
cultural norms.
Beliefs- specific statements that people hold to be
true.
Key Values of US Culture

Equal opportunity- Society should provide
everyone with the chance to get ahead according
to individual talents and efforts.
 Achievement and success- Our way of life
encourages competition to that each person’s
rewards should reflect personal merit.
 Material comfort- Success in the U.S. generally
means making money and enjoying what it will
buy.
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Activity and work- Our culture values action over
reflection and controlling events over passively
accepting one’s fate.
 Practicality and efficiency- People in the U.S.
value the practicality over the theoretical, or
“doing” over “dreaming.”
 Progress- The U.S. culture celebrates progress
equating the “very latest” with the “very best.”
 Science- The U.S. has a cultural tendency to
devalue emotion and intuition as sources of
knowledge.
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Democracy and enterprise- We believe that a just
political system is based on free elections in which
adults select their leaders and on as economy that
responds to the choices of individual consumers.
 Freedom- Our cultural value of freedom means
that we place a higher value on individual
initiative than on collective conformity.
 Racism and group superiority- Despite strong
notions about individualism and freedom, most
people in the U.S. still evaluate individuals
according to gender, race ethnicity, and social
class.
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Norms- rules and expectations by which a society
guides the behavior of its members.
Proscriptive: what should not be done.
Prescriptive: what should be done.
Mores- norms that are widely observed and have
great moral significance.
Folkways- norms that are routine and casual
interaction.
Social Control- various means by which members
of society encourage conformity to norms.
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“ideal” and “real” Culture- Values and norms tell
us how to behave, they don’t take into account all
the different variables in one’s life, rather they
inform us of how we should behave.
Cultural Diversity

High culture- refers to people who the socially
elite of society. Those going to the opera and
attending symposiums.
 Popular culture- is the cultural patterns that are
widespread among society’s population.
 Subculture- cultural patterns that set apart some
segment of society’s population.
 Example: Skateboarders, bowlers, Young people
who listen to rap music, people who like to go two
stepping, or sandcastle builders.
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Multiculturalism- an educational program
recognizing the cultural diversity of the U.S. and
promoting the equality of all cultural traditions.
Eurocentrism- the dominance of European
cultural patterns.
Afrocentrism- the dominance of African cultural
patterns.
Counterculture- cultural patterns that strongly
oppose those widely accepted within a society.
Cultural integration- the close relationships
among various elements of a cultural system.
Inventions of Today
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Invention- the process of creating new cultural
elements
telephone- 1876
airplane- 1903
computer- late 1940’s
Ethnocentrism- the practice of judging another
culture by the standards of one’s own culture.
Cultural relativism- the practice of evaluating a
culture by its own standards.
Global Culture

1. The Global Economy: the flow of goods.
 2. Global Communication: the flow of
information.
 3. Global Migration: the flow of people.
Theoretical Analysis of Culture
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Structural-Functional Analysis- The structuralfunctional paradigm depicts culture as a complex
strategy for meeting human needs. Culture values
give meaning to life and bind people together.
Other aspects of culture function in various ways
that support a way of life.
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Cultural Universals- traits that are part of every
known culture. In 1945 George Murdock
identified dozens of cultural universals: family
which control sexual reproduction and oversee the
care of children, funeral rites, every community
copes with death, jokes which are universal and
serve as a safe means to ease social tension.
 Social-Conflict Analysis- this paradigm stresses
the link between culture and inequality. From this
point of view, any culture trait benefits some
members of society at the expense of others. A
conflict analysis could begin by asking why
certain values dominate a society in the first place.
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Social-conflict theory- is rooted in the
philosophical doctrine of materialism, which holds
that a society’s system of material production
(such as our own industrial-capitalist economy)
has a powerful effect on the rest of a culture.
 Sociobiology- a theoretical paradigm that
explores ways in which human biology affects how
we create culture.
Culture and Human Freedom
Underlying the discussion in this chapter is an
important question: To what extent are cultural
creatures free?