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What is Culture?

To understand human beings’ role as social beings, we must understand “culture”. To understand

culture and its key role in social science, it is helpful to consider an analogy to physics.

When we studied physics in high school, we were taught that there are electrons, protons, and

neutrons. Together, these made up atoms, atoms made up elements, and elements made up matter.

Since that time, learning physics has become much more difficult/sophisticated. Physicists have

discovered smaller and smaller particles, which they tell us, are the building-blocks of all matter.

These building blocks include quarks, leptons, and ghostly particles called gluons, whose existence

is assumed by physicists because something has to hold matter together? Quarks and leptons make

up matter; gluons hold matter together.

Why are quarks and leptons and gluons relevant to social science? It is because just as the physicist

needs to assume the existence of gluons to hold matter together, social scientist must assume a

“force” that holds society together. Without gluons, guarks and leptons would fall apart and the world

as we know it would not exist.

Society has a similar force holding it together. The answer is culture, and the social science

equivalent to the gluon is culture, embodied in social institutions, mores, conventions, and laws.

Culture

A. Culture is the total pattern of human behavior and its products, embodied in thought, speech,

action and artifacts. It is the way of thinking and doing that is passed on from adults to children

in their upbringing and can be thought of as the shared language, norms, and values of a

society.

B. Culture is the way of life that the people of a society follow. In short, culture is the total pattern

of human behavior and its products embodied in thought, speech, action and artifacts. Culture

is also dependent on the capacity for learning through the use of tools, language, and systems

of abstract thought.

Culture Evolution: A term associated with culture’s gradual accumulative process. Any modern

culture is largely the product of the originality and imitative talent/capacity of great numbers of

individuals in times past, though in most cases the contribution of any one person has been so small

that it cannot even be identified or isolated.

Multiculturalism: The United States does not have a single culture. Instead, it has a blend of

overlapping cultures. For example, urban Black culture is different from Hispanic culture, which is

different from Jewish culture, which is different from rural Midwestern culture, and so on.

Multiculturalism emphasizes the differences in culture among subcultures. However, the term

multiculturalism has developed a somewhat different meaning. Specifically, the term was used in the

1980s as a way to emphasize that most university curricula reflected a Eurocentric bias at the

expense of other U.S. subcultures.

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The Shared Beliefs in Culture: Culture is an enormously vague concept that is difficult to grasp.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand culture is to (attempt to) answer a few questions:

1. Should children, age eleven to fifteen, sleep in the same beds as their parents?

2. Should women be allowed to drive?

3. Should Females be circumcised?

4. Should people wear swimsuits in public beaches or even on the streets?

Note that Mali and Somali women are repulsed by the idea of not circumcising women, and in Saudi

Arabia some women see it as simply inappropriate for a woman to drive.

Culture and the Nature of Society: Society is a body of individuals living as members of a

community. The characteristics of every society are gradually shaped and changed over succeeding

generations by innovations introduced by the people who belong to it.

The basis of any society is a group of individuals, equally important to its establishment is the

continued existence of the group over a period of time. A crowd brought together for a football game

is an aggregate, but it is not a society.

What are the elements of Culture?: Culture creates societies and societies depend on culture. In

short, culture is a social mechanism influencing all aspects of society including social norms (its

conventions, mores, and laws), institutions, and the concepts that motivate them, together with a

society’s technology, its material products and its values.

THE ELEMENTS OF CULTURE:

Social Norms: Conventions, Mores, and Laws

1. Conventions: Are the simple, everyday customs of a group that represent the unusual way of

behaving. Conventions change slowly, and many of them are very persistent. In our society,

it is customary or conventional to sleep on a bed; to eat at a table; to handle our food with

knives, forks, and spoons; and to greet an acquaintance on the street. All these are

conventions. Conventions are established customs to which we attach little moral significance.

2. Mores: Mores are conventions that would have serious consequences if they were violated.

They include those customs that must generally be observed by all members of a society for

the culture to survive. People who disregard mores are usually seen more than slightly odd or

eccentric. An example of Mores is a student coming to class with a bathing suit.

3. Laws: Laws are the principles and regulations established in a community by some authority

and applicable to its people, whether in the form of legislation or of policies recognized and

enforced by judicial decision

Social Institutions: A social institution is an established complex pattern of behavior in which a

number of persons participate in order to further important group interest. Institutions are usually

organized around some central interest or need. The church, temple, mosque, shrine, and synagogue

are examples of the institutions that enable people to express their religious beliefs by joining others

in worshipping a deity or deities via established rituals.

Social Values: Social Values are the motivating power that makes institutions function effectively.

They are the things that a given society considers desirable because they are believed to contribute

to the good life and the general welfare. In our cultural environment, honesty, courage, justice, and

respect for the law and for the rights of others are highly regarded as social values. So also, on a

somewhat different level are financial success, health, and education. Social values are relative

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rather than absolute. They often vary widely from one culture to another, and each individual acquires

from his or her own culture idea what is desirable or undesirable, good or bad, right or wrong.

Cultural Integration: Cultural integration is the degree to which a culture is internally consistent and

homogenous.

A cultural universal is an aspect of culture that is found in all culture(s). For example, Religion is a

cultural universal, as it is the existence of some form of government, family life, and national ideal.

Cultural alternatives are those cultural characteristics that are not necessarily shared by other

cultures. For example some cultures might place the elderly in a subordinate role, whereas others

might place them in an exalted role.

Factors Causing Cultural change:

Technological development begins with discovery and inventions. A discovery is learning something

about the physical or social environment that was not known before. In the past, explorers have

discovered new islands and continents, astronomers have discovered laws that regulate the motion of

the heavenly bodies, and anthropologists have discovered many interesting differences between the

cultures of preliterate peoples.

Inventions: An invention is really a special kind of discovery, and hence no sharp line can be drawn

between the two. Inventions bring about change in technology, and in modern societies technological

change has been a powerful force behind social change. A good example is the computer, which is

changing our lifestyle and culture in many ways. The internet is changing the way we shop and

communicate with others.

Cultural Diffusion: Once a new cultural element is well established in one society, it may spread to

others. Cultural diffusion is the name given to the spread of cultural traits from one social group to

another in other words, not all the elements found in the culture of a given group were invented or

developed within that group. In most cases, the greater part of the content of any culture has been

borrowed from other cultures.

Ideas and Ideologies: Social change may also be initiated by new ideas. Relatively simple,

particular ideas may result in invention(s) that are soon (ultimately) accepted and become a

recognized part of the cultural pattern.

Ideologies: Is an organized system of ideas for remodeling society so as to bring it “nearer to the

heart’s desire?” We may regard it as a composite of ideas, values, and emotions. Those who believe

in an ideology often support it with religious fervor. Fascism, Communism, Socialism, Democracy,

and Free-Market Capitalism, are all ideologies.

Factors Stabilizing Culture:

The human mind and personality are so constituted that once people acquire certain beliefs,

attitudes, and patterns of behavior, they have difficulty changing them. This is especially true of the

basic elements in our culture, which we acquire unconsciously in the impressionable years of early

childhood. Our beliefs and attitudes may include some ‘approval’ of, or tolerance for, change.

Habit: Habits are ways of behaving that have been learned so that they can be carried on without

conscious attention. A chief reason for the persistence of conventions, mores, and social institutions

is that they become largely habitual for all members of the social group.

Value Attachment: Another reason for the persistence of convention, mores and institutions is that

we and our group attach values to them. When we believe that established patterns of behavior have

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high moral value and when, in addition, they arouse in us strong emotions, these patterns become

resistant to change.

Vested Interest: It is a privilege or advantage that an individual enjoys because of the status quo,

which is the existing state of affairs. Various trade unions in the building industry, in order to protect

the jobs of their members, have fought against prefabricated housing and have insisted on retention

of slower, more expensive, on-the-spot building methods.

Social Problem: It is a situation that has been recognized as adversely affecting the welfare of large

number of people and for which it is believed a solution exists. To admit the existence of a social

problem clearly implies the possibility of change, for no matter how undesirable a situation may be, it

is not a problem unless we believe there is a way to change it.

Cultural Relativism: Cultural relativism asserts that all cultures are for the most part equally valid.

That is, cultures develop in a way that best suits the population’s needs, and the cultural traits within

a culture have a specific purpose. Cultures are not as a whole good, bad, right, or wrong; they simply

exist and must be judged relative to their own value system

Ethnocentrism: It is the tendency to judge other cultures by a person’s own culture and its

standards, the belief of a group that its people and its way of life are superior to all others.

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