Culture Hierarchy, Interaction & Quick Review

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Culture

Culture is everything made, learned, or shared by the members of a society, including values, beliefs, behaviors, and material objects.

Culture is learned, and it varies tremendously from society to society. We begin learning our culture from the moment we’re born, as the people who raise us encourage certain behaviors and teach their version of right and wrong. Although cultures vary dramatically, they all consist of two parts: material culture and nonmaterial culture.

Material Culture

Material culture consists of the concrete, visible parts of a culture, such as food, clothing, cars, weapons, and buildings. Aspects of material culture differ from society to society. Here are a few features of modern material culture in the United States:

Soy lattes
CD burners
Running shoes
iPods
Lifestyle magazines
Organic vegetables
Sport utility vehicles

Example: One common form of material culture is jewelry that indicates a person’s status as married. In American culture, people wear a metal band on the ring finger of the left hand to show that they are married. In smaller, nonindustrialized societies, everyone knows everyone else, so no such sign is needed. In certain parts of India, women wear a necklace to indicate that they are married. In Northern Europe, married people wear wedding bands on the right hand.

Nonmaterial Culture

Nonmaterial culture consists of the intangible aspects of a culture, such as values and beliefs. Nonmaterial culture consists of concepts and ideas that shape who we are and make us different from members of other societies.

A value is a culturally approved concept about what is right or wrong, desirable or undesirable. Values are a culture’s principles about how things should be and differ greatly from society to society.

Example: In the United States today, many women value thinness as a standard of beauty. In Ghana, however, most people would consider American fashion models sickly and undesirable. In that culture and others, robustness is valued over skinniness as a marker of beauty.

Cult of the Car

Automobile ownership clearly illustrates the American value of material acquisition. Americans love cars, and society is constructed to accommodate them. We have a system of interstate roadways, convenient gas stations, and many car dealerships. Businesses consider where patrons will park, and architects design homes with spaces for one or more cars. A society that values the environment more than the material acquisition might refuse to build roadways because of the damage they might do to the local wildlife.

Beliefs are specific ideas that people feel to be true. Values support beliefs.

Example: Americans believe in freedom of speech, and they believe they should be able to say whatever they want without fear of reprisal from the government. Many Americans value freedom as the right of all people and believe that people should be left to pursue their lives the way they want with minimal interference from the government.

Hierarchy of Cultures

In societies where there are different kinds of people, one group is usually larger or more powerful than the others. Generally, societies consist of a dominant culture, subcultures, and countercultures.

Dominant Culture

The dominant culture in a society is the group whose members are in the majority or who wield more power than other groups. In the United States, the dominant culture is that of white, middle-class, Protestant people of northern European descent. There are more white people here than African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, or Native Americans, and there are more middle-class people than there are rich or poor people.

Subculture

A subculture is a group that lives differently from, but not opposed to, the dominant culture. A subculture is a culture within a culture. For example, Jews form a subculture in the largely Christian United States. Catholics also form a subculture, since the majority of Americans are Protestant. Members of these subcultures do belong to the dominant culture but also have a material and nonmaterial culture specific to their subcultures.

Religion is not the only defining aspect of a subculture. The following elements can also define a subculture:

Occupation
Financial status
Political ideals
Sexual orientation
Age
Geographical location
Hobbies

W. E. B. Du Bois

One important theorist of subcultures was W. E. B. Du Bois. The first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University, Du Bois was one of the most renowned sociologists of race relations in the United States. He described racism as the predominant problem that American culture faced in the twentieth century. He paid special attention to the effects of what he called the “color line” in America and studied the impact of racism on both whites and blacks.

Counterculture

A counterculture is a subculture that opposes the dominant culture. For example, the hippies of the 1960s were a counterculture, as they opposed the core values held by most citizens of the United States. Hippies eschewed material possessions and the accumulation of wealth, rejected the traditional marriage norm, and espoused what they called free love, which was basically the freedom to have sex outside of marriage. Though hippies were generally peaceful, they opposed almost everything the dominant culture stood for.

Not all countercultures are nonviolent. In 1995, the federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was blown up, killing 168 people and injuring many others. That horrific crime brought to light the existence of another counterculture in the United States: rural militias. While such groups go by several names, their members tend to be people who despise the U.S. government for what they see as its interference in the lives of citizens.

Counterculture and Politics

In many parts of the world, ethnic, political, or religious groups within larger nations struggle for independence or dominance. For generations, the Basque separatist group ETA (Freedom for the Basque Homeland) in northern Spain has violently pursued the goal of independence for the Basque regions. In Northern Ireland, which is governed by Great Britian, Sinn Fein is a violent political organization whose stated goal is the end of British rule in Ireland. ETA and Sinn Fein are examples of countercultures.

The Interaction of Cultures

When many different cultures live together in one society, misunderstandings, biases, and judgments are inevitable—but fair evaluations, relationships, and learning experiences are also possible. Cultures cannot remain entirely separate, no matter how different they are, and the resulting effects are varied and widespread.

Ethnocentrism

Ethnocentrism is the tendency to judge another culture by the standards of one’s own culture. Ethnocentrism usually entails the notion that one’s own culture is superior to everyone else’s.

Example: Americans tend to value technological advancement, industrialization, and the accumulation of wealth. An American, applying his or her own standards to a culture that does not value those things, may view that culture as “primitive” or “uncivilized.” Such labels are not just statements but judgments: they imply that it is better to be urbanized and industrialized than it is to carry on another kind of lifestyle.
People in other cultures, such as some European cultures, also see American culture through the lens of their own ethnocentrism. To members of other cultures, Americans may seem materialistic, brash, or arrogant, with little intellectual subtlety or spirituality. Many Americans would disagree with that assessment.

Cultural Relativism

The opposite of ethnocentrism is cultural relativism—the examination of a cultural trait within the context of that culture. Cultural relativists try to understand unfamiliar values and norms without judging them and without applying the standards of their own culture.

Example: In India, the concepts of dating, love, and marriage differ from those in the United States. Though love is important, parents choose their children’s spouses according to similarities in educational levels, religions, castes, and family backgrounds. The families trust that love will develop over time but believe that a wedding can take place without it. From an American ethnocentric perspective, arranging marriages appears to be a custom that limits individual freedom. On the other hand, a cultural relativist would acknowledge that arranged marriages serve an important function in India and other cultures.

Culture Shock

The practices of other cultures can be and often are jarring, and even the most adept cultural relativist is not immune to culture shock. Culture shock is the surprise, disorientation, and fear people can experience when they encounter a new culture.

Example: Visitors to Western Europe from Islamic countries often experience culture shock when they see women wearing what they consider to be revealing clothing and unmarried couples kissing or holding hands in public, because these behaviors are forbidden or frowned upon in their own cultures.

Culture Lag

In 1922, the sociologist William Ogburn coined the term culture lag. Culture lag refers to the tendency for changes in material and nonmaterial culture to occur at different rates. Ogburn proposed that, in general, changes in nonmaterial culture tend to lag behind changes in material culture, including technological advances.

Technology progresses at a rapid rate, but our feelings and beliefs about it, part of our nonmaterial culture, lag behind our knowledge of how to enact technological change.

Example: Though the technology that allows people to meet online has existed for years, an understanding of what the proper conduct is in an online “dating” situation lags behind the knowledge of how to use the technology. No definite answers exist to many important questions: How long should people talk over the internet before meeting in person? What is the right interval of response time between emails? New technology has brought with it new questions and uncertainties.

Cultural Diffusion

Cultural diffusion is the process whereby an aspect of culture spreads throughout a culture or from one culture to another.

Example: In the United States in the early 1990s, only people who needed to be available in emergencies, such as doctors, carried cell phones. Today, every member of a family may have his or her own cell phone. In some developing nations, where standard telephone lines and other communications infrastructures are unreliable or nonexistent, cell phones have been welcomed enthusiastically, as they provide people with an effective communication tool.

Global Diffusion

Many aspects of American culture, such as McDonald’s hamburgers and Coca-Cola, have been diffused to other countries, and food items from other countries have become diffused throughout the United States. Sushi, for example, is now available in grocery stores in many parts of the country, and pizza can be found almost everywhere in the United States.

Quick Review

What Is a Society?

A society is a group of people with shared territory, interaction, and culture. Some societies are made up of people who are united by friendship or common interests. Some societies are merely social groups, two or more people who interact and identify with one another.
Every society must have territory, or an area to call its own.
Members of a society must interact with one another on a regular basis.
Culture is a defining element of a society.
Some societies are pluralistic societies composed of many different kinds of people, some of whom belonged to other societies. The United States is a pluralistic society.
In a pluralistic society, members retain some ethnic traditions and beliefs from their old society. In order to fit into their new society, however, members must give up some of these original traditions. This process is called assimilation.
In a truly pluralistic society, no one group is officially considered more influential than another.

Types of Societies

Societies have evolved over many millennia. The different types of societies include hunting and gathering, horticultural, pastoral, agricultural or agrarian, industrial, and postindustrial.
In hunting and gathering societies, members survive by gathering plants and hunting for food.
Members of horticultural societies use hand tools to raise crops.
Members of pastoral societies rely on domestication and breeding of animals for food.
Members of agricultural or agrarian societies raise crops by harnessing an animal to a plow.
In industrial societies, members use machinery to replace human labor in the production of goods. As fewer people are needed for agriculture, societies become urbanized, which means that the majority of the population lives within commuting distance of a major city.
Postindustrial societies feature an economy based on services and technology rather than production.
A mass society is a large, impersonal society that values individual achievement over kinship ties.

Norms

Norms are guidelines, standards of behavior that change depending on context and location. The four types of norms are folkways, mores, laws, and taboos.
Deviance is the violation of a norm, whether for good or bad.
Societies discourage deviance with social controls, such as positive sanctions (rewards for approved behavior) and negative sanctions (punishments for disapproved behavior).

Status and Roles

We all occupy several statuses, or positions in particular settings, and play roles based on them.
A role is a set of norms, values, and behaviors attached to a status.
When we are expected to fulfill more than one role at the same time, we can experience role conflict.

Culture

Culture is everything made, learned, or shared by the members of a society.
Although cultures vary dramatically, they all are composed of material culture (physical things) and nonmaterial culture (intangible aspects such as beliefs and values).
A dominant culture is the culture held by the majority or the most powerful. It usually maintains economic, political, and cultural power.
A subculture is a culture within the dominant culture. The subculture does not oppose the dominant culture but does have its own material and nonmaterial cultures that the dominant culture does not share.
A counterculture actively opposes the dominant culture.
Ethnocentrism is the tendency to view other cultures by the standards of one’s own culture. Ethnocentrists often consider their cultures superior to other cultures.
The opposite of ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, means interpreting other cultures based on one’s own standards.
We experience culture shock when the practices of other cultures seem unfamiliar, scary, or shocking.
William Ogburn coined the term culture lag, which occurs when material and nonmaterial culture develop at different rates. For example, culture lag sometimes leaves us with technology we’re not yet sure how to use.
Cultural diffusion occurs when an item of culture spreads throughout a culture or from one culture to another.

Sociology Society and Culture Hierarchy, Interaction & Quick Review

Culture Hierarchy, Interaction & Quick Review