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Culture
The values, beliefs, behavior, and material
objects that together form a people’s
way of life
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Terminology
• Nonmaterial culture
– The intangible world of ideas created by
members of a society
• Material culture
– The tangible things created by members of
a society
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Figure 3.1
Human Languages: A Variety of Symbols
Here the English word “read” is written in twelve of the hundreds of languages humans use to communicate with each other.
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Terminology
• Culture shock
– Disorientation due to the inability to
make sense out of one’s surroundings
• Domestic and foreign travel
• Ethnocentrism
– A biased “cultural yardstick”
• Cultural relativism
– More accurate understanding
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Symbols
• Anything that carries a particular
meaning recognized by people who
share a culture
• Societies create new symbols all the
time.
• Reality for humans is found in the
meaning things carry with them.
– The basis of culture; makes social life
possible
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Symbols
• People must be mindful that
meanings vary from culture to
culture.
• Meanings can even vary greatly
within the same groups of people.
– Fur coats, Confederate flags, etc.
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Global Map 3.1
Language in Global Perspective
Detail on next three slides
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Global Map 3.1a
Language in Global Perspective–Chinese
Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese, and dozens of other dialects) is the native tongue of one-fifth of the world’s people, almost all of
whom live in Asia. Although all Chinese people read and write with the same characters, they use several dozen dialects. The “official”
dialect, taught in schools throughout the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Taiwan, is Mandarin (the dialect of Beijing, China’s
historical capital city). Cantonese, the language of Canton, is the second most common Chinese dialect.
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Global Map 3.1b
Language in Global Perspective–English
English is the native tongue or official language in several world regions
(spoken by one-tenth of humanity) and has become the preferred second
language in most of the world.
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Global Map 3.1c
Language in Global Perspective–Spanish
The largest concentration of Spanish speakers is in Latin America and, or
course, Spain. Spanish is also the second most widely spoken language in the
United States.
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Language
• 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
• Sapir-Whorf thesis
– People perceive the world through the
cultural lens of language.
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Values and Beliefs
• Values
– Culturally defined standards of desirability,
goodness, and beauty, which serve as broad
guidelines for social living. Values support
beliefs.
• Beliefs
– Specific statements that people hold to be true.
– Particular matters that individuals consider to
be true or false.
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sociologist Robin Williams’ Ten Values
That Are Central to American Life
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Equal opportunity
Achievement and success
Material comfort
Activity and work
Practicality and efficiency
Progress
Science
Democracy and free
enterprise
9. Freedom
10. Racism and group superiority
Are some of these values inconsistent with one another?
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Values Sometimes Conflict
• Williams's list includes examples of value
clusters.
• Sometimes one key cultural value contradicts
another.
• Value conflict causes strain.
• Values change over time.
A Global Perspective
• Cultures have their own values.
• Lower-income nations have cultures that value
survival.
• Higher-income countries have cultures that
value individualism and self-expression.
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Norms
Rules and expectations by which society
guides its members’ behavior
• Types
– Proscriptive
• Should-nots, prohibited
– Prescriptive
• Shoulds, prescribed like medicine
• Mores and Folkways
– Mores (pronounced "more-rays")
• Widely observed and have great moral
significance
– Folkways
• Norms for routine and casual interaction
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Figure 3.2
Cultural Values of Selected Countries
Higher-income countries are secular-rational and favor selfexpression. The cultures of lower-income countries are more
traditional and concerned with economic survival.
Source: Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy by Ronald
Inglehart and Christian Weizel, New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2005.
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Social Control
Various means by which members of society
encourage conformity to norms
• Guilt
– A negative judgment we make about
ourselves
• Shame
– The painful sense that others
disapprove of our actions
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Ideal Versus Real Culture
• Ideal culture
– The way things should be
– Social patterns mandated by values
and norms
• Real culture
– They way things actually occur in
everyday life
– Social patterns that only approximate
cultural expectations
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Material Culture and
Technology
• Culture includes a wide range of physical
human creations or artifacts.
• A society's artifacts partly reflect
underlying cultural values.
• In addition to reflecting values, material
culture also reflects a society's
technology or knowledge that people use
to make a way of life in their
surroundings.
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cultural Diversity
• High culture–Cultural patterns that
distinguish a society’s elite.
• Popular culture–Cultural patterns that are
widespread among society’s population.
• Subculture–Cultural patterns that set apart
some segment of society’s population.
• Counterculture–Cultural patterns that
strongly oppose those widely accepted
within a society.
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
National Map 3.1
Language Diversity across the United States
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Multiculturalism
An educational program recognizing the cultural
diversity of the United States and promoting the
equality of all cultural traditions.
• Eurocentrism–The dominance of
European (especially English) cultural
patterns
• Afrocentrism–The dominance of African
cultural patterns
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Interdependence
• Culture integration
– The close relationships among various
elements of a cultural system
• Example: Computers and changes in our
language
• Culture lag
– The fact that some cultural elements
change more quickly than others,
which might disrupt a cultural system
• Example: Medical procedures and ethics
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Figure 3.3
Life Objectives of First-Year College
Students, 1969-2006
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Culture Changes
in Three Ways
• Invention–Creating new cultural elements
– Telephone or airplane
• Discovery–Recognizing and better
understanding of something already in
existence
– X-rays or DNA
• Diffusion–The spread of cultural traits
from one society to another
– Jazz music or much of the English language
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Ethnocentrism
and Cultural Relativism
• Ethnocentrism
– The practice of judging another culture
by the standards of one’s own culture
• Cultural relativism
– The practice of judging a culture by its
own standards
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Is There a Global Culture?
• The Basic Thesis
– The flow of goods–Material product trading has
never been as important.
– The flow of information–Few, if any, places are left
where worldwide communication isn’t possible.
– The flow of people–Knowledge means people
learn about places where they feel life might be
better.
• Limitations to the thesis
– All the flows have been uneven.
– Assumes affordability of goods
– People don’t attach the same meaning to material
goods.
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Theoretical Analysis of Culture
• Structural-functional
– Culture is a complex strategy for meeting
human needs.
– Cultural universals–Traits that are part of
every known culture; includes family,
funeral rites, and jokes
• Critical evaluation
– Ignores cultural diversity and downplays
importance of change
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Inequality and Culture
• Social-conflict
– Cultural traits benefit some members at the
expense of others.
– Approach rooted in Karl Marx and materialism;
society’s system of material production has a
powerful effect on the rest of a culture.
• Critical evaluation
– Understates the ways cultural patterns
integrate members into society
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Evolution and Culture
• Sociobiology
– A theoretical paradigm that explores ways in
which human biology affects how we create
culture.
– Approach rooted in Charles Darwin and evolution;
living organisms change over long periods of time
based on natural selection.
• Critical evaluation
– Might be used to support racism or sexism
– Little evidence to support theory; people learn
behavior within a cultural system
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Culture and Human Freedom
• Culture as constraint
– We only know our world in terms of our
culture.
• Culture as freedom
– Culture is changing and offers a variety of
opportunities.
– Sociologists share the goal of learning
more about cultural diversity.
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Applying Theory: Culture
Sociology, 13h Edition by John Macionis
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.